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11 June 2015

Book Review: A God in Ruins

A God in RuinsA God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my first Kate Atkinson so her style of non-linear chronology is new to me. I liked the way her structure allowed me to discover characters almost as if I was getting to know them in real life; when you meet someone, they don't just lay out their lives from day one in concise chronological order. The problem with memory is that chronology is the first thing to go so how we tell our stories to others often has the wandering, disjunct feel that this book has.

Disjunct is not a fair adjective, though, as I made the leap fairly easily from one time to another. I raised my eyebrow every time the omniscient narrator mentioned the future while telling the story of an earlier version of a person but, again, like when you tell a story, sometimes you throw in what will happen.

Fans of "Life After Life will recognize Teddy and Ursula (which version of Ursula this might be could be great fodder for conversation) but I won't delve into plot. Plot isn't what makes this book readable for me. It was the writing. The observations. The cogent asides.  All of which created moments of clarity about life and human nature. Finding clarity in a pull quote is one of the main reasons I read and Atkinson gave me that in abundance.

Things like:

"Good manners, the armour that one must don anew every morning."

"Teddy's idea of Utopia would not have included the Kibbo Kift. What would it have included? A dog, certainly. Preferably more than one. Nancy and his sisters would be there--his mother too, he supposed--and they would all live in a lovely house set in the green countryside of the Home Counties and eat cake every day. His real life, in fact."

"'Like' was hardly the word Teddy would have used for a time in his life when every day was fragile and seemed as if it might be his last on earth and the only tense was the present one because the future had ceased to exist even though they were fighting so desperately for it."

"It was true, in the last year or two he had begun to lose the thrifty habits he had once had, growing tired of the relentless culling and resolution that the material world demanded. Easier to let it pile up, waiting for the great winnowing of goods that his death would bring."

"A whole life could be contained in a dinner-service pattern."

"She was always looking to be given things, a cuckoo rather than a predator."

"He was currently living in a sordidly unruly flat with several members of his peer group, all too self-centered to qualify as friends."

"Every cloud has a silver lining. Conversely, every silver lining was in a cloud."

"Love had always seemed to Teddy to be a practical act as much as anything--school concerts, clean clothes, regular mealtimes."

Of course, later in the book, the good pull quotes were often roaming through the head of Viola, the writer, and her aside would be "A good phrase. She tucked it away," which pointed out the trite surfaceness of finding meaning in a pull quote. Almost as if Kate Atkinson is making fun of me. Which maybe she is. And rightly so.

I could have chosen to get angry about that. Just like I could have chosen to get angry about "THE LAST 15 PAGES."  But I didn't.

And don't keep reading if you don't want spoilers. But...
















The title "A God in Ruins comes from an Emerson quote; ""A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be ... as gently as we awake from dreams."

That, and the first pull quote on the front cover flap, "He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future," was a clue, if a clue in hindsight to what Atkinson was going to do to me as a reader. Trickery, Ms. Atkinson. Pure trickery! How dare you?

Teddy couldn't exist because the war devoured his innocence. It's as simple as that.

Atkinson says in her Author's Note, that if you asked her what this book was about, she'd say that "it's about fiction (and how we must imagine what we cannot know) and the Fall (of Man. From grace.)"

And there you are.

In the end, I have to admit that it's kind of silly to get mad about an author of fiction pulling a blind like this. After all, I was mad that these characters, who aren't real, aren't real. What sense does that make?

Fiction is always a lie that hints at a truth we have trouble finding by looking at our own lives. This book simply slaps you in the face with that.

And that's why it will be memorable. Good trickery, Ms. Atkinson.









08 June 2015

Book Review - One Summer

One Summer: America, 1927One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love proletariat hodge-podge histories; an interesting point in time treated to an exploration that goes just deep enough to intrigue but not so deep that the reader becomes mired.  Histories that are like reading an extended New Yorker profile because they feel less like histories and more like current event feature stories.

One Summer is one of those histories. Bill Bryson wanders his reader through the summer of 1927. Though Bryson divides his book into five sections, each named for a month and titled with a major happening or person of that month, he doesn't stick to his construct, but rather ambles from subject to subject and back again, almost as if he is living it without the benefit of hindsight.

1927 was a big year; Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, the Mississippi flood, Prohibition, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jack Dempsey...

Bryson peppers us with details like, "The statistics of the great flood were recorded with chilling precision: 16,570,627 acres flooded; 203,504 buildings lost or ruined; 637,476 people made homeless. The quantities of livestock lost were logged with similar exactitude: 50,490 cattle, 25,325 horses and mules, 148,110 hogs, 1,276,570 chickens and other poultry. The one thing that wasn't carefully recorded, oddly, was the number of human lives lost, but it was certainly more than a thousand and perhaps several times that. The tallies weren't more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black. It is a shocking fact that a closer count was kept of livestock losses than of human ones. It is perhaps only slightly less shocking to note that outside the affected areas the flood received less coverage on most days than the murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray."

This shows Bryson at his best and worst. The details that a closer count was made of lost cows than lost people and that a trial that is now lost to history was bigger news are enlightening. But Bryson's use of words like "oddly" and "alas" and his almost judgmental "shocking" and "slightly less shocking" gets a bit heavy-handed. I'd like it better if he presented the facts and let me reach my own conclusions.

Bryson also tends to repeat himself and has an annoying habit of presenting something and giving you a sense of timeline by referring back to something he's already presented. His most used point of reference is the attempted Atlantic crossing of the French pilots Nungesser and Coli, which was frustrating because I could never remember when they tried to cross so knowing something else was happening at that time was not terribly helpful to me. I wished for a timeline, rather than constant editorial finger-wagging about what I should have already learned.

But let's overlook my occasional quarrel with Bryson's editorial presence because it was more like a tiny pebble stuck in my shoe than a large rock; I could usually wiggle my foot around a little to move it and keep enjoying my walk.

And I'm glad I did. So much of what I read was instructive about the time he was writing as it was about our current time.

Take Herbert Hoover, the hero of the Mississippi flood. Why did we think he was a hero? Because he told us he was. "He traveled through the South in a private train, which included a car exclusively devoted to press operations. From this issued a stream of press releases mostly devoted to Hoover's vision and hard work. He also made sure that every Republican senator received a copy of a magazine article praising him. To any newspaper, however small, that questioned or criticized his efforts, he wrote a personal letter of rebuke." Hoover made himself into a very public hero. Imagine what he could have done with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Or the fact that the government of the United States poisoned alcohol so that the random deaths would inspire the rest of America to stay sober. See, alcohol was still necessary for many things besides drinking and because it still had to be produced for those purposes, the government "denatured" it to prevent it from being diverted into the bootleg trade. Denaturing alcohol simply means putting strychnine and/or mercury in it. According to Bryson, "Figures vary wildly on just how many people died wretchedly from drinking denatured alcohol," and then quotes a source at 11,700 (though some people claim many less). He then goes on, heavy-handedly but accurately, to say, "However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world, and was patently harmless in moderation."

Bryson suggests that the labels we have for the 1920s, the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, do not tell the whole story. He suggests that the 1920s might be labeled the Age of Loathing. "There may never have been another time in the nation's history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason. Bigotry was casual, reflexive, and well nigh universal. At The New Yorker, Harold Ross forbade the use of the term toilet paper on the grounds of taste (it made him queasy), but he had nothing at all against nigger or darkie." This is the era that created the Ku Klux Klan. "The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere." Sadly, I see shades of this type of savvy, organized bigotry happening right now, in our enlightened 21st century.

The whole book is full of interesting tidbits of history, some fleshed out beautifully, some only a passing mention that sparks an interest to read further.

For example, who knew that Time magazine used to have an odd habit of clunky, almost Germanic word-order? "As Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind."

Or that "flapper" was a word that originated in late 19th century England, an offshoot of the term "bird," still in use to describe females, and originally signified a prostitute?

Or that Lindbergh was one of the first individuals to use a transatlantic phone line, so he not only flew across the Atlantic, he spoke across it, too?

Or that the King of England was extraordinarily interested in how Lindbergh peed during his solo flight?

Or that Henry Ford thought the American Revolution was fought around 1812 and claimed that he had voted only once, for James Garfield, who had in fact died three years before Ford was old enough to vote? (This evidence of ignorance came out during the proceedings when Ford sued the Chicago Tribune for libel; he won but the jury awarded him only 6 cents in damages, which the Tribune never paid).

Or that Jerome Kern was supposed to be on the Lusitania but he overslept so he survived to change the course of musical theater with the most successful and influential show ever written, Showboat?

Then there's Philo T. Farnsworth and Mabel Walker Willebrandt. I want to read whole books about them. If you've never heard of them, look them up.


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28 March 2015

Book Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire HunterAbraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If I liked vampires and gore, this would have been good fun. As it is, I don't like vampires and gore, so I struggled with it. "Why did you read it?" you might ask, gentle reader.  "Did not the title and the graphic cover art give you ample clues as to what you were in for?" Well, yes. Yes they did. But my 11 year old kid wanted to read it, so, like all good parents, I sacrificed myself to a pre-read of something I would never have picked up to read on my own.

And I'm kind of glad I did.  Kind of.

I am always intrigued when people create alternate realities with our standing history. I remember seeing Capricorn One as a child and wondering how much of our history might have been staged. Conspiracy theories. What ifs.  They are interesting to consider and I'm always in awe of someone who can imagine the sliding doors. Who can imagine the alternatives. Who can think of a story I never thought of. Or ever dreamed of thinking of.

This is one of those stories. And the reviews that get all up in arms about playing fast and loose with history, shhhhhhhh.  It's like taking The Onion seriously. All good satire is based in fact and reality.

I did wish for an afterword, or annotations, that tracked what was real and what wasn't. I have read a lot of history of Lincoln and the Civil War, so I was somewhat able to look at a speech or a journal entry and guess. But I would have liked to know for sure.

My three stars is for my distaste for the gore but also for some missed opportunities. The introduction inserts the author but never explains why it was so important to tell the story. The book actually stops before I wanted it to. I wanted it to go past 1963, up to the day the author was brought in. I wanted a clear vision of the reasons ..."reasons" ... the book needed to be written. Are we in danger now? Why come clean with our vampiric-infested history now? Are they back? Have they always been here? I wanted more depth. From my fake history. Hmmm.

"Without death. Life is meaningless. It is a story that can never be told. A song that can never be sung. For how would one finish it?"


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08 March 2015

Book Review: The One and Only Ivan

The One and Only IvanThe One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My kid's 5th grade English teacher sent him home with this.  He read it in about 30 minutes.  It took me slightly longer. ;)

Somewhat in the vein of "Love That Dog" where fewer words manage to tell a powerful story (as Ivan, the silverback says, "Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot. Everyone knows banana peels are the best part" and "Humans speak too much. They chatter like chimps, crowding the world with their noise even when they have nothing to say.")

A heartbreaking story well-told with wonderful bite-sized nuggets of wise philosophy scattered throughout:

"I always tell the truth. Although I sometimes confuse the facts."

"When I'm drawing a picture, I feel...quiet inside."

And in the reproduction of the author's Newberry acceptance speech, this quote from Madeline L'Engle captures so beautifully why I often abandon books written for adults and return to young adult fiction;

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

Amen.


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07 March 2015

Book Review: Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little RockElizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock by David Margolick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My son and I went to the Brown vs. the Board of Education National Park site in Topeka last year.  Writ large on a wall was a copy of the Johnny Jenkins version of the picture of Elizabeth and Hazel. Elizabeth, eyes hidden by sunglasses, in a perfectly pressed skirt and shirt, grasping a notebook in her thin, dark-skinned arm. Hazel behind her, her white face contorted, her mouth agape with hate.  I knew nothing about the two women. I didn't know their names. I didn't even, at that point, know that the picture depicted part of the story of the Little Rock Nine.  But the picture captivated me.  I took a picture of my son, grasping his Junior Ranger packet in his thin, white arm, staring at the picture. What my photo didn't capture was what he said as he gazed; "Mom, people were pretty ignorant back then, huh?"

Fast forward several months later. We were traveling through Arkansas and stopped at the Little Rock Central High School historic site.  There was the picture again; a different version (and, I later discovered, a more famous version by Will Counts, though I confess I find much more drama and emotion in the Jenkins snap)  Then, in the bookshop, I saw a poster of two older ladies, one black, one white, standing in front of Central High School. "Reconciliation," it was called. I did not recognize those aged ladies as the two from the picture that had captured my imagination. But then, browsing further, I came across this book.

I was thrilled. I expected to be captivated by the story of these two women. About the world they lived in then. About the world they live in now. And about the world they traveled in between.

I was disappointed. Perhaps my expectations were way too high. But this book disappoints at almost every level. It spends time telling the story of how the picture(s) came to be.  It tells the story of how America reacted to the picture (including a famous anecdote about how Louis Armstrong was finally inspired to speak out against racism based on the anger he felt at being confronted with that picture). It tells the story of life inside that high school for the Little Rock Nine (only the Japanese students, left over from the WWII internment camps, were more isolated). It tells the story about the larger issue of race relations in America.

But then it falls into tabloid territory when it starts to try to capture the lives of the two women; it feels more like material for afternoon television than material for The New Yorker.  Sentences like "It is here that I step into the story" are illustrative of the heavy hand of the author.

But, despite its weaknesses, I am glad I read the book.  At some point, Hazel (the white girl) says "Life is more than a moment." But these two women might never overcome their moment because we, as a nation, can't really let them. It's almost as if we need them to be nameless iconoclasts instead of real humans who moved forward and continued living after the shutter snapped.


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15 February 2015

Book Review -- The Unwinding - An Inner History of the New America

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New AmericaThe Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

George Packer writes for The New Yorker and this book reads like an extended version of one of his profiles.  Or five of his profiles.  There's almost no big-picture analysis of forces which are unwinding America (deindustrialisation, recessions, real estate bubbles) but the astute reader can analyze on his own. Packer wanders back and forth between the profiles, interrupting periodically with collages of news headlines and brief biographies of public figures (Packer acknowledges the influence of John Dos Passos in his afterword).

The unorthodox structure takes some getting used to but the overall impact of the book is powerful because of it.  Ordinary people, not caricatures. Isolated, failed by our institutions, battered by our financial systems, made impotent by our political circus.

In the biographical section about author Raymond Carver, Packer captures the overall mood of the book when he writes, "Ray wanted to write a novel.  But a man who was trying to wash six loads of clothes at the Laundromat while his wife was serving food somewhere and the kids were waiting for him to come pick them up somewhere else and it was getting late and the woman ahead of him kept putting more dimes in the dryer--that man could never write a novel.  To do that, he would need to be living in a world that made sense..."

Packer hits on themes that have gotten under my skin for years, highlighted in books like The Geography of Nowhere and Cheap: The High Price of Discount Culture.  Dean Price, one of Packer's subjects, synopsizes the trouble with big-box retailers brilliantly, "And if you think about it, the people that ran the hardware store, the shoe store, the little restaurant that was here, they were the fabric of the community. They were the leaders.  They were the Little League baseball coaches, the were the town council members, they were the people everybody looked up to.  We lost that."

Later, Packer puts this stream-of-consciousness in Dean Price's head, "Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses--always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking--chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk--and he thought how these same chickens might return from their destination as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles' up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens."

Boom.

In another section, profiling a unionized millworker in Youngstown named Tammy, outlines a specific struggle the area had to tackle after the closing of the steel mills and highlights one of the biggest problems America seems to have; standing in the way of a good idea because by supporting it, you might inadvertently support something you are supposed to be against. "Youngstown was a food desert--there were hardly any decent stores in the whole city.  From certain parts of the east side, it took a four-hour round trip on the bus to buy fresh groceries...The food campaign put Tammy in touch with a white evangelical church south of Youngstown, where the minister, Steve Fortenberry, had started a cooperative farm on thirty-one acres.  His congregation had some older and more conservative members who were skeptical of anything having to do with environmentalism, so he pitched the project as feeding the hungry, which was easier to sell."

And progress. What is progress?  Are you reading this on your phone?  Is THAT progress?  "At Cafe Venetia in downtown Palo Alto--the spot where Thiel and Elon Musk had decided over coffee in 2001 to take PayPal public, five blocks up University Avenue from the original offices of PayPal, which were across the street from the original offices of Facebook and the current offices of Palantir, six miles from the Google campus in Mountain View, less than a mile in one direction and half a block in the other direction from that secular temple of the new economy known as an Apple Store, in the heart of the heart of Silicon Valley, surrounded by tables full of trim, healthy, downwardly dressed people using Apple devices while discussing idea creation and angel investments--Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and said, 'I don't consider this to be a technological breakthrough.'  Compared to the Apollo space program or the supersonic jet, a smartphone looked small.  In the forty years leading up to 1973, there had been huge technological advances, and wages had increased sixfold.  Since then, Americans beguiled by mere gadgetry had forgotten how expansive progress could be."


Oliver Burkeman, reviewing this book for The Guardian wrote "On finishing the book, the reader might be forgiven for feeling the urge to follow the example of Connaughton, who, after leaving his last job in DC, flew straight to Costa Rica, went on an eight-hour hike, then returned to his hotel and 'turned on the shower and got in without taking off his clothes, standing under the stream and letting it soak him and soak him until he felt clean.'"

Yes.


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01 July 2014

Book Review: An Abundance of Katherines


An Abundance of KatherinesAn Abundance of Katherines by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had never heard of John Green until Rainbow Rowell, who is a friend, was excited that he, like she, was coming to an author panel that was being set up by another friend who runs a great independent bookstore.  "John Green is a MONSTER get!" she proclaimed.

So I read The Fault in our Stars.  I laughed.  I cried.  It was good.  Well-written, not typical, etc.  I realize writing this review that I never wrote a review, so I sure need to do that, but my problem with Fault was the contrivance of the Dutch author and how that all fit into the story.  I found it not real in a book that was extraordinarily real.

Fast forward to An Abundance of Katherine.  Contrived story line but one that felt real regardless, perhaps because I have a bright kid who some consider to be a prodigy and Colin's concern that prodigies only learn but geniuses do is something I can already see my kid contemplating.  And the question of how to "matter" is one that still echoes in my own life.

But beyond all of that, I enjoyed this book more than Fault.  Maybe it's because it didn't make me cry.  Maybe it's because I love stories that are compartmentalized to give you a sense of place (Gutshot).  Maybe it's because the set-up was so unreal, yet real, that there was nothing jarring in it that pulled me out of the story to question the contrivance.  Or maybe it was the ideas floating around in these kids' heads;

"I think mattering is a piss-poor idea.  I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that's when you get shot down.  The bigger deal you are, the worse your life is.  Look at, like, the miserable lives of famous people...there's a word in German for it...Schadenfreude."

"Son, if there's one thing I know it's that there's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what."

"You're so goddamned scared of the idea that someone might dump you that your whole fugging life is built around not getting left behind.  Well, it doesn't work, kafir.  It's just--it's not just dumb, it's ineffective.  Because then you're not being a good friend or a good boyfriend or whatever, because you're only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what?  When you act like that, no one likes you."

"Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you?  If people could see me the way I see myself--if they could live in my memories--would anyone, anyone love me?"

"I'm full of shit.  I'm never myself.  I've got a Southern accent around the oldsters; I'm a nerd for graphs and deep thoughts around you; I'm Miss Bubbly Pretty Princess with Colin.  I'm nothing.  The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real...the only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit.

"The past is a logical story.  It's the sense of what happened.  But sense it is not remembered, the future need not make any fugging sense at all."

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."


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