Book Review : Straphanger

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A combination of a manifesto against the automobile and an ode to trains.  With a coda grudgingly giving credit where credit is due to the bus.

One thesis is a worn one;  we're running out of oil to power our personal automobiles and even if we go electric, most electricity comes from coal.  So it's lose lose.

But Grescoe approaches his ode not from an environmental standpoint, but from a social standpoint.  And a community structure standpoint.  And a health standpoint.  The automobile has isolated us.  Dallas-Fort Worth is as large as Israel.  People have skin cancer on the left side of their bodies more often than the do on the right.  We're fat.


We are like this by choice;  we have chosen the freeway over the light rail. We have endowed personal ownership of a car as a symbolic representation of liberty, freedom and prosperity.  We've paved everything in sight and called it progress.  We have laws that require a minimum number parking spaces per development that guarantees that transit won't have a chance.  Developers operate with a formula that people won't walk more than 600 feet to get to a parked car and build with that in mind.

But if it's hard to drive, people take transit and transit improves and more people take transit and transit keeps improving.  But if you make it hard to drive, you are ousted from office.  So how do we invoke change?

Grescoe looks at 12 cities all over the world; paragons of transit and paragons of the car.

And the history is interesting.  The first suburbs were built within easy distance of the city and connected by commuter trains.  But then the car came hiccuping off the assembly line and made the possibilities endless.

Then in the 1950s, Eisenhower built up our concrete infrastructure, not to help us go on Kerouac-esque odysseys of discovery but to make sure we could get the military where we might need them in case of an invasion and evacuate our cities in case of nuclear war.  No invasion, no nuclear war and lots of highway infrastructure = suburban sprawl and big box stores.

And that's the American way.  Public transit is for poor people.  Public transit is communist.  Socialist.  I am an American.  I work hard.  I buy my own car.  I pay my own way.  Somehow I forget how much public money is used to keep the roads upon which I'm exerting my libertarian independence in useable form.

Public transit is also dangerous.  A target for terrorists.  A killer.  Of course, in Japan, you are more likely to die from your pajamas catching fire than you are in a train crash.

I live in Kansas City.  A city completely enamored with the automobile.  Though my neighborhood is an early suburb, built with trolley and streetcar access to downtown, all of those tracks are gone.  One is now a well-loved jogging path.  A MAX bus runs on the street next to the jogging path but there is no rail.  And those who advocate rail are immediately labeled as crackpot sociopaths.

But Kansas City doesn't have gridlock.  So there's no reason to change.  So we won't change.

In Bogota (my favorite chapter of the book) the mayor championed public good over private interest.  He restructured Bogota to "show that a cyclist on a thirty-dollar bike was equally as important as a citizen in a thirty-thousand dollar car.  We were saying, 'You, with your big cars and fancy jewels, we think you are stupid, we think you are animals.  What we respect is music and sports and libraries.  For us, the neighborhood hero was the young man who played sports and read books and rode around on an old bike.'"

And it worked.  For the most part.  Until he was ousted from office.  But he plans to run again and continue molding the trend.

I wish we had a visionary like that in Kansas City.  I don't take transit.  I could take a bus.  But it's so much easier to get in my car and drive.  So I do.  And until transit becomes more than an indicator of poverty or hipster moral superiority, nothing will change.

"Every time you choose to drive you are, in a tiny way, opting out of, and thus diminishing, the public realm.  And that, finally, is the problem with suburbs and freeways.  In order to gain spurious freedom, which is in fact just increased mobility, millions of people turn their backs on civility--not just politeness, but also the process of civilization building, in which cities play such a crucial role.  Sprawl may end in cul-de-sacs and foreclosures, but it begins every time you slam a car door on the world."


View all my reviews

Book Review: The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty And The Sorrow by Peter Englund


The whole concept of this book intrigues me;  take twenty regular people and tell the story of the war through their eyes.  Englund has done his homework; I expected swaths of pull-quotes from their letters.  Instead, he takes source material to sketch a scene and uses direct quotes from their letters sparingly.  Mostly, this works beautifully.  But sometimes, Englund's prose is obtuse and clunky and one wishes for the original voice.  For example;

"He is a keen churchgoer and the eldest of six brothers and sisters, the two youngest of whom--the twin girls Zelma and Vida--he is particularly fond of and pays a lot of attention."

I spent too many minutes trying to rewrite that sentence in my head.  I couldn't do it so then I had to back up and rewrite the whole paragraph.  One could argue that I got distracted by a minor element of poor grammar, which I should have glossed over for the sake of the beautiful story Englund was telling.  But this exact exercise happened to me often enough that I fear the depth of its ability to enlighten me was compromised.

But despite its tedious moments and the difficulty I had as a reader keeping track of who was who, Englund's concept, for the most part, worked.  Making the war real.  "The war for them is less an event to be followed than a condition to be endured."

This war made people into statistics.  This war took away basic human dignity.  This war devalued human life.  When the German seaman uses his offshore leave to go see Lohengrin he writes, "It's a pity I can't get to more occasions like this.  They make you feel like a human being rather than just a worthless beast of burden."

"And the savage in you makes you adore it with its squalor and wastefulness and danger and strife and glorious noise.  You feel that, after all, this is what men were intended for rather than to sit in easy chairs with a cigarette and whiskey, the evening paper or the best-seller, and to pretend that such a veneer means civilization and that there is no barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front."  American Army field surgeon Harvey Cushing after witnessing shells land at the front.

Englund writes, "An ancient truth is making itself manifest again--the truth that sooner or later wars become uncontrollable and counter-productive because men and societies will tend to sacrifice everything in their blind drive to be victorious."  Peace becomes a dirty word.  Anything less than victory would mean that "all the sufferings and losses have been in vain."  So the war grinds on, causing more suffering, more loss.

"For about a fortnight they have watched battalion after battalion dispatched towards the top of Monte Ortigara and each time they have also watched the result;  first to come are the stretcher-beares with the wounded and the mules with the dead, then--after a few hours or a few days--what remains of the battalion trudges past.  That is how it works, such are the mechanics of it.  Battalions are sent into the mill of artillery fire and remain there being ground mercilessly down until they have lost the majority of their men.  Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men.  Then they are replaced by new battalions, which stay until they have lost the majority of their men.  And so on."

This war sent humans into a roiling vortex of violence that functionally achieved nothing at all.

One of the people Englund follows reads as voraciously as he can throughout the war, "...in the slightly touching way of bookish people, who always try to read their way to an understanding of the great and incomprehensible events that are affecting them..."

The inherent and never-ending conflicts--social democracy, constitutional monarchy, individual freedoms, the class system--all of this is crystallized during the war.

"The war has developed into something that few people foresaw and even fewer desired, and the class system is one of the things that has been unmasked: where decades of socialist and anarchist propaganda failed to lay bare the lies, hypocrisy and paradoxes of the old order, a couple of years of war have succeeded in doing so."


The war to end all wars, followed by the peace to end all peace.  Followed by the rise of the Nazis.

Englund ends his book with a quote from another regular person; a German footsoldier during the war; the young man is frustrated by the terms of the peace and the fall of German power and might.  He writes, "One would have had to be a simpleton--or a liar and criminal--to hope for mercy from the enemy.  My hatred grew during these nights, my hatred for those responsible for this evil deed.  During the days that followed, I recognised what my mission was to be.  I decided to become a politician."

The soldier's name was Adolf Hitler.


Other random thoughts: Paolo Monelli is a poet with a sense of language and beauty that tells the war's story in a most effective and heart-wrenching way.

Best Random Trivia Item Learned:  Tsingtao, in China, used to be a German colony.  No wonder they make great beer.


View all my reviews

Book Review: Thieves of Manhattan

The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, hmmm.  Hip, sly, outrageous, ridiculous, meta, snarky, fake memoir which lampoons memoirs professing to be real, the publishing industry, authors, liars, truth-tellers, the creation of literature and truth itself.

For the first 60 pages or so, I kept dogearing pages with words that made no sense to me;  "she'd been smoking vonneguts" "pedestrians clutching black poppinses" "wearing a gatsby" "covering my portnoy"

Then, while the narrator, Ian, is reading the book A Thief in Manhattan, he says "What I liked most were Roth's knowing literary references ... Throughout, Roth employed a literary sort of slang; he called an overcoat a "gogol," a smile a "cheshire," and an umbrella a "poppins."  He called trains "highsmiths," because they appeared so often in Patricia Highsmith's thrillers, and referred to money as "daisies," since in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan's voice as being "full of money."  At the end of Roth's manuscript, he included a glossary of literary terms ..."

On a whim, I turned to the back of Langer's book.  Glossary of terms.

And at some point, Ian's manuscript is too long.  He must cut it down to 250 pages.  The Thieves of Manhattan, in it's paperback published form, runs 253 pages.

And while it got a little too Da Vinci Code in the end (perhaps purposefully so?) I enjoyed it immensely and read it in one night.



View all my reviews

Book Review: The News Where You Are

The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The whole point of the book can be summed up in the following paragraph;

"He thought of Michael Church growing more and more isolated, occupying a progressively smaller space in the universe until he finally vanished altogether.  It reminded him of the TV set they'd had at home when he was growing up.  When you turned it off, the image would rapidly shrink down to a small white dot and then, after an unguessable interval of time, disappear.  He knew, though, that the programs were carrying on somewhere;  he could just no longer see them."

Our society is ageist; our old buildings, our old people.  We dismiss them.  We allow them to become irrelevant.  We make them irrelevant.  The end.


View all my reviews

Book Review: Unbroken

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I think back to the fact that the bulk of the book took place in the middle of the ocean and the rest of the book catalogued torture in a Japanese prison camp, it's amazing I liked this book at all.

But how reliable are these details?  How true is this story?  HIllenbrand wrote this book some 50 years after the story happened.  I cannot remember, with detail, what happened last week.  I suppose largely important, fully negative memories tend to stick but as an accurate story, I questioned much of this book.  As a fable-esque recollection of the horrors of war, I was all in.  And what is history and autobiography, really, but fable and myth?  It's much like taking Anne Frank's diary as the definitive tome of the Holocaust.  I was in a meeting with a Holocaust education professional once who said, "Anne Frank had it easy."  What?  But, yes.  Yes.  Perhaps she did.  Certainly in comparison to the folks who were living in holes with rats, Anne was pampered.  But compared to our higher expectations of the order of human society...well, she didn't.  And besides that, the people in the holes with the rats didn't have pen and paper and didn't leave a primary source.  Anne's story is the story we have; edited and managed but still mostly true.  And it's a story that gives us a jumping off point to explore the rest of history through documents that may, or may not, be more reliable.  Who knows?  There is no truth.  But there are lessons to learn from partial truths, exaggerated stories or migrating memories.  Fable and myth.  Designed to teach us how to be better contributors to the human race.

As a side note, Zamperini's redemption through the preaching of Billy Graham put a bad taste in my mouth. We, as a society, train men to be killing machines and then we plug them back into polite society, cuff them on the shoulder and say, "Thanks.  And good luck."  PTSD wasn't even a term until the last 20 years or so.  To portray, accurately or not, Zamperini's "cure" through the words of a godly sage, has the unintended effect of making the answer seem easy.  For many the answer was not that easy.  For many, the answer remains elusive.

But, in all, eminently readable.  But take with a grain of salt.



View all my reviews

Book Review - The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hmmm.

Now this is a book that baffles me.

I often felt much like I did when reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I just wanted the characters to shake themselves out of their delusional selfishness and behave like decent, upright folks.

At other times, particularly in the final stages of the blue notebook, I felt as if I was coming untethered from the plinths of sanity I have so carefully built and maintained throughout my life.  It's been a long time since a book has affected me so deeply; caused me to question my own tenuous mental health and gaze in wonderment at my own constructs designed to keep me moored.

And still at other times, I felt a complete disconnect with these creatures of another time, another social more, another political viewpoint.

And then, at the end, the whammy hit me.  Free Women, the short novel, says nothing about the turmoil of the life Anna Wulf lived.  It can only intimate it; draw a sketch, an outline.  And perhaps that's the point of this oddly formed book; any order that comes life's chaos cannot possibly be fully true.

And maybe that's why this book unnerved me so.  I'm comfortable with believing that order can be manufactured.  It's the construct that keeps me sane.  It's the plinth to which I've tethered myself.

Boy Howdy.

But this book also unnerved me because of its obtuse and seemingly pointless wandering.  I wanted to take an editing pen to each notebook but, if I had, I would have created order out of chaos.  Well played, Lessing.  Well played.

Even without the big themes and lessons, there are nuggets of wisdom, thoughtful ideas and downright original thought peppered throughout the web of chaos.  But these are oddly hard to use as pull-quotes.  Most of them scream for context.  I dog-eared over 50 pages and the only pulls I can really face including are below.

1.
In Lessing's 1971 Introduction to the book she laments the loss of the isolated artist; "The young...have created a culture of their own in which hundreds of thousands of people make films, assist in making films, make newspapers of all sorts, make music, paint pictures, write books, take photographs.  They have abolished that isolated, creative, sensitive figure -- by copying him in hundreds of thousands."  What, praytell, does she say about our current world where every denizen of the internet is a blogger, photographer, critic, graphic artist?

2.
"There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in.  In fact, I'm sure any any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it's just a mass of scar tissue."

3.
The gap between what we believe and what we do ...

4.
"It seems to me something like this--every so often, perhaps once in a century, there's a sort of--act of faith.  A well of faith fills up, and there's an enormous heave forward in one country or another, and that's a forward movement for the whole world.  Because it's an act of imagination--of what is possible for the whole world...Then the well runs dry, because, as you say, the cruelty and the ugliness are too strong.  Then the well slowly fills again.  And then there's another painful lurch forward.  Yes--because every time the dream gets stronger.   If people can imagine something, there'll come a time when they'll achieve it.  Imagine goodness.  Kindness.  The end of being animals.  And for us now, what is there?  Keeping the dream alive.  Because there'll always be new people without--paralysis of the will."

5.
"There's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right."

6.
"Do you realize how many generations it takes to make a society where buses run on time?"

7.
"He was the man who performed actions, played roles, that he believed to be necessary for the good of others, even while he preserved an ironic doubt about the results of his actions."

8.
"There's a great black mountain.  It's human stupidity.  There are a group of people who push a boulder up the mountain.  When they've got a few feet up, there's a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and the boulder rolls down--not to the bottom, it always managers to end a few inches higher than when it started.  So the group of people put their shoulders to the boulder and start pushing again.  Meanwhile, at the top of the mountain stand a few great men.  Sometimes they look down and nod and say: Good, the boulder-pushers are still on duty."

Here's to being a boulder-pusher.



View all my reviews

Book Review - The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

The Detective Wore Silk Drawers by Peter Lovesey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Bare-fisted pugilism was apparently illegal in Victorian England, so what better setting than the circle of law-breakers who prepared the fighters and ran the fights?  Except the execution left much to be desired.  This one rather turned me off reading the rest of the Sergeant Crabb books.  Giving them a break for a while before I dig in again.


View all my reviews