Book Review: Words from the Myths

Words from the Myths by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book.

It's mannered.  It's old-fashioned.   The back-flap "about the author" blurb is charmingly cheeky.

But it is chock full of interesting tidbits about the parts of our language that originate in myth.  Chock.  Full.

We all know why the Achilles tendon is called that but who knew that the word "stentorian" comes from a minor character in Homer, Stentor, who was a herald who was able to rally the army effectively because he had a voice as loud as fifty men?  And who knew that there is a one-celled creature called "stentor" because it is shaped like a megaphone?

Why do we sometimes swear "By Jiminy?"  Well, because of Castor and Pollux, of course, the twins of Gemini.  The Romans respected them and often swore by them.  Apparently we still do, too.

This book is 220 pages of "Oh!  Really?  Wow!"  And it only makes it more readable that the style is so proper and mannered yet intimate, like a face-to-face conversation.

This is a book I should read again.  And again.  And then again once more.


View all my reviews

Book Review: Death and the Dancing Footman

Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ah, Ngaio Marsh.  What is it about you that I don't really care about whodunit?

I figured this one out.  Easily.  The mystery was thin and rather transparent.

But who cares?  Especially when one gets to relish in her characterizations and her way with words.  Descriptions like these make these cozies worth reading, even if you aren't a mystery buff;

"A popinjay," he muttered, "a stock figure of dubious gallantry."  And he pronounced the noise usually associated with the word "Pshaw."

"... [he's] bone from the eyes up if you try to talk about anything that's not quite his language."  

After a good deal of demurring, Jonathan finally rang the bell.  Caper answered it and accepted the news of sudden death and homicide with an aplomb which Mandrake had imagined to be at the command only of family servants in somewhat dated comedies."  


View all my reviews

Book Review: Peter and the Starcatchers

Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent many moments while reading this book wondering how two people, who live in different cities and possess remarkably different writing styles, could possibly write a book together.

By the time I was finished, I decided they did it kind of like that parlour game where one person in the room starts a potboiler, spins it to a cliffhanger and then hands it to another person, who then continues the potboiler and spins it to yet another cliffhanger.  And so on.  The parlour-game-potboiler becomes, by design, overly long with too many needless cliffhangers.

Which kind of describes this book.  Not that it wasn't a fun read.  But I could have done without about half of the obstacles and cliffhangers.

Clever by half in explaining the genesis of Peter Pan, the Lost Boys and Captain Hook.  Oh, and Tinkerbell in the last two pages.

A tad too violent for my now almost seven year old but a good book for the "read-when-older" shelf.  An adventure he'll most likely enjoy.


View all my reviews

Book Review: The 39 Clues

The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Da Vinci Code for kids.  A longer version of the Westing Game.  It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in book form with slightly less slapstick.  Fiction infused with history presented in a meaningful way that might stick.  Heroine loves to read.  Hero good at math.  Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay about the possibility of  doing research that could result improving the odor of human flatulence and invented Sudoku.


Yeah, I'll read the whole set.  And my kid is going to love them.


View all my reviews

Book Review: Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gopnik's thesis is not proven in this short collection of long essays.  Not in the slightest.  But that doesn't mean this book isn't worth reading.  Rather than a sensible step-by-step building of connective tissue, an evolution of an idea, you might say, Gopnik wanders about and repeats himself and never really makes anything concise or clear.  I did not leave this book thinking, "Yes!  Darwin and Lincoln WERE midwives to the spirit of a new world! They DID reshape our understanding of what life is and how it attains meaning!"  That Darwin and Lincoln were amazing harbingers of the next is a given but Gopnik doesn't really till new ground in demonstrating the idea.   He does, however, bring up some interesting tidbits for deep thought and these, alone, make the book worth reading.   For example;

"We can find plenty of astonishing ideas in that day, just as we will find traces of the astonishing ideas of the next century somewhere on the fringes of our own time."

"...these styles [the writing styles of Darwin and Lincoln] have in common the writer's faith in plain English, his hope that people's minds and hearts can be altered by the slow crawl of fact as much as by the long reach of revelation."

"The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties; liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle.  Imperfect effort at being just is no different than perfect indifference to it ... a good man who plays footsie for an evening under the table with a single bad idea becomes the equal of a man who spends a lifetime sharing a slovenly bed with an evil ideology."

For Kazin [a Lincoln biographer], Lincoln's God is neither the God of confident Christendom nor the punishing God of the Calvinist imagination but the God of both Job and John Donne, the God who is the stenographic name for the absolute mystery of being alive and watching men suffer while still holding in mind ideals that ennoble the suffering and in some strange way make sense of it."

"[On the Origin of Species] is both an explanation of evolution, an old idea, and a theory of natural selection, a new one.  If you concentrated on the evolutionary part, which is, as Darwin knew, an old and long-present idea, one of Granddad's tall tales, then you could make it into a kind of progressivism--an explanation of eternal change and social improvement with a vitalist charge.  If you concentrated on the natural selection part, the struggle for survival, you could make it into an endorsement of free markets or imperialism ..."

"People are different, in Darwin's view--he thought there were savages, primitives, at one end and civilized people at another--but what knit them all together was the habit of sympathy, which could be extended wherever, and as far as, we chose to place it."

"We should not judge the past by the standards of the present.  Darwin wrote about "savages";  we wouldn't.  (But then, we use words that our great-grandchildren will be shocked by, too--though which ones:  wife?  veal chops?)"

"...we are allowed only a tiny glimpse, in our hummingbird lives, of what duration and endurance and repetition can actually achieve.  We have a moral and scientific duty to seek out those places--coral reefs and earthworm-plowed fields as well as fossil pits and mussel-moved mountains--where we can get at least a sense of how an earthworm can do a farmer's work, if you give him time."

"The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much.  There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows."

"The pacifists are not always right.  But the warmongers are almost always wrong."

"Science lets us think big but we still feel small.  No cosmologist has ever felt more serenely about his tenure case by contemplating the vastness of the universe.  We get the big picture, but it's not where we live."

Just using these ideas as jumping off points for thought and further reading make Gopnik's book more than a worthwhile way to spend a few hours' time.


View all my reviews

Too Soon

I woke up this morning while it was still dark.  I lay in bed for a while, willing the fleeting muse of sleep to return but, when it didn't, I sat up.   I don't keep a clock near my bed and, since I was thirsty, I got up and wandered downstairs to see what time it was and to sit on the couch while sipping on a glass of ice water.

My husband's computer was open and, wanting company in my sleeplessness, I woke it from its peaceful slumber by deftly touching the mousepad as I passed.  It grunted that electronic grunt of MacBooks lurching out of hibernation but brightened considerably in the next few moments and presented my husband's Facebook page for my perusal.

I scrolled through the updates of his Facebook connections, logged out, then logged into my Facebook account.

And what I saw there guaranteed that I would not sleep again easily.

So let me back up.

When my son was two years old we enrolled him in a Parent's Day Out program two days a week.  His classroom was supervised by a stern hispanic woman named Helen who strenuously discouraged any whiff of mollycoddling and lectured me numerous times on the ridiculousness of my insistence that I pick my son up at noon and take him home for his afternoon nap.

Then one day another parent was there at noon to pick up his son, a new kid in class.  We chatted a bit and I warned this dad that Helen would shake her finger at him for not allowing his child to stay with the other kids until late afternoon.  He smiled and revealed that he'd already been on the receiving end of the lecture.  We laughed then I asked what his son's name was.  He told me.  Same name as my son.  We smiled again.  Then we discovered that we both had the same last initial, which would certainly confuse things as they tried to label clothing and art work.  We laughed  again and predicted that Helen would insist that one of us change our last names or the name of our child.

Helen didn't, of course, though she probably wanted to.  And, in the meantime, we had formed a cursory acquaintance with this family;  I knew the mother slightly, I found out later, through music circles and we would always chat in passing about the difficulties and joys of child rearing.

Then we went our separate ways to different preschool choices.  I would think of this family once in a while when I told Helen stories, but their child, who shared a name with mine, was a part of my past.  I never ran into either the mom or the dad and they faded to the back of my mind.

Until about a year ago when I found out their son had leukemia.  I felt the wind leave my lungs as a mutual acquaintance told me that this six year old kid was fighting the fight of his life.  I shook my head in disbelief but then defaulted to "He's young, he's strong, he'll beat it."

And the periodic updates I got through mutual friends proved me right.  For a while.

Then this weekend, a mutual friend told me the family had signed a DNR.

And then this morning, another mutual friend posted on Facebook that this young seven year-old had lost his brave fight.

I sat devastated.  My first instinct was to try to DO something, though I knew not what.  My second instinct was to feel guilty that I had not paid more attention, been more help, done something more while he was sick.  Though, again, I knew not what.  What could I have done?  I am basically a stranger to this family.

But I feel a kinship.  A connection.  Because their son could be my son.

They shared a name.

They were the same age.

It could have been us.

And why wasn't it us?  Why did my family roll the dice with more luck than his family?  How was he chosen for suffering while my son wiles away his days, blissfully unaware of sorrow, pain and personal tragedy?

I am lost today.  I want to apologize for having a healthy child and at the same time I want to shout on the rooftops about how amazingly lucky I am.  I want to hug my kid hard and impress upon him how favored and fortunate we are.  I want to bellow importantly at everyone I see to tell them that it is paramount that they take time to appreciate those closest to them.  And I want this young boy's family to somehow find peace.

My husband and I are relative secularists when it comes to ideas of the afterlife;  neither of us buy into the Swedenborg idea of heaven as a more glorious suburb of one's present life but we don't really have a replacement myth, either, so our stock phrase when someone dies is, "Well, they had a good run."  When I told my husband about this lost child this morning, he said, "Seven years is not a good run."

Damn straight it's not.

And though it is selfish and self-centered to realize,  the tragedy of this family has served to embed my vast fortune into the depths of my psyche.  I am lucky.  I may not be lucky forever, but I am lucky right now and damn if I'm not going to spend the rest of the day, the rest of my life, appreciating it.

And then, in the midst of all these emotions, my sister-in-law called to tell me she was in labor.  One life begins.  Another ends.

But too soon.  Too damned soon.

Book Review: Igraine the Brave

Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice little romp with no scary, questionable material but still enough excitement and intrigue and magic to keep a young kid occupied.  Lovely intermittent illustrations, too.  Not great literature but a wonderful diverson and a really good read-aloud for younger kids.


View all my reviews