Books Are Pretty

2010-01-19T16:37:00.000-06:00

Lolita.

The last time I read Lolita I was sixteen and a senior in high school. It was probably Sting's fault I read it in the first place - I was a huge Police fan in high school, a fact that was driven solidly home to me last summer when my mother sent me my high school scrapbook. It was filled with four years of photographs of the band. Not friends, not artwork, not stories, just hundreds of pages yanked out of whatever flavor of Tiger Beat I could get my hands on and pressed lovingly in my memory book, the ridiculousness of which would then be saved for over twenty five years. Sting wrote the song; ergo, I will read the book. I still love the band, really, really love the band, but I am forever grateful that I am 1.) too young to have been attending their concerts when they were in their heyday, because it is a fact I would have slept with all three of them (too much information? Surely not.) and 2.) too old to have followed Sting into the world of Tantric Sex, because for god's sake who has the time?

So: Lolita. I was impressed enough with the book to have had it inspire me to base an AP English assignment on it. We were supposed to write a poem in a certain format, and I wrote about Lolita in the form of Humbert Humbert. The copy of the poem itself is long gone, but I still remember the first two lines of it:

Lovely Lolita, light of my life
Barefoot, you tango with Pan.*

Anyway, I worked for hours on that poem, followed the assignment perfectly, and received a Peppermint Patty-esque D minus for my efforts, because my Jesus-y English teacher apparently did not like the subject material.

Even back in 1986 Lolita was considered one of the best novels ever written, so with all due respect, Jesus-y English teacher, suck it.

Too many years have passed, and I remembered the injustice of the D minus more than I remembered the novel that inspired it, so I took the book off my shelf, the same book I had in high school, the second run of a Crest paperback from 1959 (fifty cents new!) and read it again.

Yep, it's still pretty much perfect, from the gorgeousness of the language, starting with the very first sentence, whose spirit I brazenly stole and put in my stupid little poem, to the wit which makes you feel like a creep for laughing out loud (when, for example, Humbert jealously describes two high school boys flirting with 14-year-old Dolly as being "all muscles and gonorrhea.")

Lolita is such a straightforward narrative with such a stomach-turning subject matter: A pedophile kidnaps and rapes a little girl for two whole years. It was unnerving me to see how "Lolita" is now synonymous with an underage, savvy, your-honor-I-swear-I-thought-she-was-18 Siren, cruelly luring men to dash helplessly up against the jagged rocks of our legal system. I thought I had remembered Humbert as being the classic Unreliable Narrator. Had I been misinterpreting Nabokov all these years?

Nope. Nabokov, through Humbert's twisted prism of reality, makes it very clear that Dolly Haze is a little girl. While Lolita's mother, Charlotte, described by Humbert as a grotesque, blowsy, overripe piece of the female gender, a monster who has swallowed whole the nymphet she once was, chats with him on the porch, Humbert is trying to jockey himself in position to surreptitiously molest Lolita while she sits and plays with dolls. She doesn't like baths and runs around with dirty fingernails and tangled hair, she is obsessed with whoever passed for the 1940's version of the cast of Twilight, and she is prone to temper tantrums. He admits to imagining scenarios with her in which she responds in a way that doesn't correspond with reality, and he openly muses about how he's going to get rid of her when she begins menstruating, despite his exaggerated expressions of "love."

He's a clear psychopath, in other words, a rapist, a kidnapper, a torturer, and just, you know, a real shit head. What happened to Lolita wasn't her fault. She wasn't asking for it, she didn't want it, and when all is said and done she flat out tells him "I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me." So, yech, please quit calling her and other underaged girls "temptresses." It doesn't speak well of you, and it's not what Nabokov would have wanted.

And all that being said, I would give a kidney to have written this book myself, word for word.

_______________________________
*Here I have to note that I once wrote a blog post about walking down Clark Street in Wrigleyville to my old store, the Honeysuckle Shop, with half a dozen buttplugs under one arm and a twelve-pack of toilet paper in the other. I couldn't care less about being seen with the butt plugs, but was slightly embarrassed about the toilet paper. Similarly, I don't care at all about confessing that given the opportunity I would have slept with an entire band, but horrified by my confession that I actually wrote the above two lines of juvenalia. Such is the horror of teenage poetry.

2009-10-24T08:54:00.003-05:00

Time to Brush the Dust Off the Blog.

It's time to brush the dust off the blog and get things rolling again.

Welcome to Books Are Pretty! I'm your host, flea. Nice to see you again.

After a somewhat turbulent spring and summer, things are starting to finally settle down. Everyone is employed again, the kids are back in school, and at last I have a second to sit down and read something. Even better, the Books Are Pretty staff has recently doubled! I am now a We, and We have a new reviewer, FanTam, who will be splitting the load with me. Please give her a round of applause and make her feel welcome.

We're starting up again, in fact, with a brand new review written by our new reviewer. FanTam has chosen to start things off with a review of Living With a Gamer.

As a result, I think you'll find that Books Are Pretty will now be even better than before.

With no further ado, please enjoy FanTam's review of Living with a Gamer.

__________________________________________________________

Living With a Gamer.

For those of you out there who have never felt the smooth, cool, soothing texture of a wireless PS3 remote; or have never allowed yourself the fantasy of stepping into a world full of excitement, passion, espionage, and possibly dragon slaying all at the literal control of your fingertips; or at the very least, have never felt the thrill of crossing the finish line of Mushroom Gorge in first place, while pounding your chest like only Donkey Kong can do; do not read Living With a Gamer. For those of you who know exactly what I’m talking about, do not read Living With a Gamer.

If you are one of the former types of non-gaming people, this book will do nothing more than perpetuate a stereotype that is so far off base, it isn’t even funny. It isn’t even funny. If you are the latter, even a casual “gamer,” this book will do nothing but offend. Personally, I am a 40-year-old mother, who loves nothing more than to relax in front of my television, and dive into the wonderful land of Hyrule in constant search of my beloved princess. My husband calls me a vid-ee-it. I call myself a gamer. Yet somehow, I am still capable enough to work full-time, take care of my children and run a household.

Living With a Gamer explains nothing about what it is really like to live with someone who, like myself, realizes the extent of intelligence, dedication, and dexterity it takes to play the modern video game. Living With a Gamer paints the picture of a 14-year-old boy who is stupid, geeky, ugly, has poor hygiene, no friends, and dresses badly. The Living With a Gamer-Gamer knows nothing of the “real” world because his “real” world is two-dimensional. Living With a Gamer gives no practical advice on how to live with someone like this, it only offers unconventional and unrealistic ways of accepting or eradicating his unacceptable non-behavior. However, there is a small section on the female Gamer who, unlike her male counterpart, is highly intelligent, independent, super-cool, and does not base her self worth on the latest fashion mag. So the book does have its upside.

If you live with a Living With a Gamer-Gamer and feel that you need guidance, try talking to him – although if he is a true Living With a Gamer-Gamer, he won’t listen unless you forcibly remove the remote from his permanently-twitching thumbs, at which time he will explode like a atom bomb. Maybe that isn’t the best advice. Okay, try offering him some incentives to listen to you like buying him a new game if he gives you a few minutes of attention. Well, that won’t work either, because you would be perpetuating the problem and continuing to be the enabler that you already are.

Of course, the entire book is written in a moderately humorous manner, and is obviously not intended as anything but a comedic view of the awkward pubescent video game player. Living With a Gamer may be the perfect gag gift for that parent who likes to read while in the crapper, scheming up ways to poke fun at his kids while sitting in the fog of his own fecal fumes (because that’s normal).

Do yourself a favor, before you read this book, try picking up a Wii remote and throwing a few virtual bowling balls. You may actually realize the reason video games are so popular, and your 14-year-old is not.
_________________________

Living With a Gamer
By Charlie Mills with Daniel Kleinman
June, 2009 by Red Rock Press
Hardcover, 96pp
ISBN: 978-193317626-0

2009-03-31T09:54:00.008-05:00

This Is Not a Book.

...but it's as simple to operate as one.

Last month I got an email from someone named Jeremy, offering to send me a gadget called "Peek," which enables you to access your email account while you're out and about. Peek, he wrote, was Peek is "really, truly, sincerely made for moms."

Really, truly, and sincerely made for moms? What does it do, in addition to letting you send and receive email that would make it a device made for moms? Does it change diapers? Does it watch the kids so we can get out of the house for an hour? Does it have sex with our significant others for us when we're too tired from staying up all night with a crying baby?

The answer is no, it does none of these things. In fact, sending and receiving email is the only thing that it does. The device itself is fifty bucks, and then you pay twenty bucks a month for unlimited use. There are no contracts to sign, which is nice, so you can cancel the service at any time. So sure, I said, send me one.

It arrived one day around Valentine's Day, right after I'd picked up Chris from Kindergarten, and together we sat down to figure out how to set it up. It didn't take a whole lot of thought - Chris set it up for me, and he's just learning how to read. While he was tinkering around, I split my time between watching him and looking over Peek's website to see how the device was marketed to other people. Non-moms, if you will, because I still couldn't figure out why this was really, truly, sincerely created for me.

I can only conclude, after looking at various other pitches, is that Peek thinks mothers are really, really stupid, and can't handle big scary technology like Blackberries or iPhones, which can text, email, and provide internet access. Or Peek thinks mothers really miss the good old days of 1998. Which I do, but only because in 1998 I was a size four.

All the pitches were about how easy and simple the Peek is, how frills-free and basic, for people who get rattled by a device that can be both a phone and a camera. Even more weirdly, in their "about Peek" section, it says the device was created by a man whose wife liked to take long walks when she was pregnant and came back all worried about emails piling up in her inbox. Just how long were these walks? How important are these emails? Is someone's life hanging in the balance while she's away from her Gmail account? Why couldn't she just take her Blackberry with her?

The whole thing seemed implausible to me, and while I was mulling it over, Christopher and I ran into trouble setting it up. While Christopher was tinkering, I was overseeing him using the booklet that came with it, and even though we had followed the instructions precisely, no email was forthcoming. Maybe it takes a minute, I thought. After three hours, however, I thought maybe this was too long. Maybe this was targeted at the right audience after all, I thought.

I called customer service and spoke with Sean. So far, Sean was the biggest asset to Peek I'd encountered so far, and this is not to speak ill of Peek but to commend the truly excellent customer service he provided. I think we're all familiar with the horrow show AT&T provides as their version of customer service. Not so with Peek. Sean listened to my problem, gave me several suggestions, and when none of them worked, he told me he would have to work on the problem with a supervisor and get back to me. During that time, he must have fixed whatever had gone wrong, because the next morning, all the emails had come in. He then called me again to make sure the problem had been corrected, and called a week later for follow-up, to make sure everything was still running smoothly.

Really, truly, sincerely excellent customer service.

Now that all the bugs had been worked out, I spent a few weeks playing around with it.

I sent several emails to Steve to make sure it was working.

__________________________________________________

Email me something. I want to see if it is still working.

Sent on the go from my Peek
__________________________________________________

Several hours passed, and then, a response finally came in:

__________________________________________________

No. I knew you'd be using it and I've been avoiding my email all day
because of it. I will not email you. I think it's a stupid product.

So there.
__________________________________________________

Peek: Clearly not made for dads.

Here's how using it actually works. You press a button at the top to turn it on. It vibrates at you a couple of times, then the screen says "Hello." After that, takes you right to your inbox, which it would, because that's all there is. It has a full, stiff little QWERTY keyboard with the period, quotation marks, and the comma in odd places, and an equally stiff little wheel on the side for scrolling up and down. To reply to someone, scroll down until the email in question is highlighted, then push in the wheel. It opens that email, and you can then select "Reply," type in your message, and click "Send." It vibrates again when you receive incoming mail, and a little envelope at the top left corner flashes blue.

That's it.

It's not bad, and I especially benefitted from it by sneaking personal, untraceable emails at work. The company I work for can and does monitor all email correspondence from our work computer. They let you get away with some personal stuff on a regular basis, but it probably wouldn't be a smart idea to complain about the job, or, say, carry on a conversation with a local union rep. It does not ring, chirp, or otherwise betray you like a cell phone can. In other words, the Peek is a willing accomplice in helping you hide from The Man.

The only thing I really, really hate about the Peek, slightly condescending marketing aside, is how to get rid of email you don't want. In order to delete the zillion emails I get from Bluefly every day, I have to use that stiff little wheel to scroll down to the offending email, push wheel in, scroll down again until I get to the "delete" option, and push in the wheel again. Scroll, push, scroll, push. There is no option to select a slew of emails for deletion at once. Plus, if you go into your gmail account on your computer and do a mass deletion, the deleted emails don't get deleted on the Peek, so there's no getting around it that way. I didn't check the Peek for about three days, then spent several annoying minutes on the sofa, scrolling and pushing. Instead of making me stay more on top of it, instead I began avoiding the Peek. Every time I'd think about using it, the thought of having to delete the emails made me cringe, and I just put off the inevitable by letting it ride around in my purse, turned off, letting the problem snowball into a virtual avalanche of email, just waiting to give me carpal tunnel syndrome. I have it charging up next to me right now as I'm writing this review, and the blue envelope is flashing like crazy and there must be at least fifty unwanted emails in there right now, and that's only an accumulation of 2 days. I had the Peek turned off for three weeks, people, and quite frankly, if I'm too busy of a mom to learn new technology, I'm surely too busy of a mom to have to spend time deleting emails.

Since I was sent the Peek, they've rolled out a new model. For eighty dollars, you can get the Peek Pronto, which is supposedly quicker and more efficient. I don't know if it's easier to wipe out an inbox full of spam, though. If it is, it would be well worth the extra thirty bucks to not have to deal with that. The Peek may be simpler to set up and use, but simpler isn't always the most user friendly option.

2009-03-07T11:21:00.003-06:00

Know It All and The Chemist.

We've all had this problem: You're at a cocktail party, and much to your dismay, you find yourself unable to mingle. Finding yourself completely without a conversational ice breaker, there's nothing for it but to stand against the wall, hiding behind a cocktail until a quiet opening is revealed through which you can sneak out the door. Luckily for the world, with the publication of Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge, this problem has now been solved.

A reference book that covers everything that ever was, Know It All devotes two pages to each subject. Two pages on the Big Bang, two pages on mathematics in its entirety, two pages on World War II. Now, this little book was brought to us by our friends at Reader's Digest, so expecting anything but a condensed version of everything completely misses the point. Miraculously, they made it all the way through the book without a single joke about Humor in Uniform, so forget about breaking the ice by telling jokes that will be greeted with a strained, polite smile. Instead, they provide you with "Conversation Starters" that are peppered throughout.

Here's one: "Insects might be tiny, but there are so many of them that ants and termites alone are believed by some scientists to account for as much as twenty percent of the world's combined mass of all creatures, known as the animal biomass."

I actually think that's interesting, but I have no idea how to continue with this educational tidbit as a way of making conversation, because in that one sentence I've completely exhausted my knowledge of insect census-taking.

ME: Insects might be tiny, but there are so many of them that ants and termites alone are believed by some scientists to account for as much as twenty percent of the world's combined mass of all creatures, known as the animal biomass.

Possible reactions:

HIM: Really? What is the total percentage of all insects in the animal biomass?

ME: ....

or

HIM: What?

ME: Never mind.

or

HIM: says nothing, slowly edges away.

I'm sorry to say, outside an insect-lovers convention, that milkshake ain't gonna bring any boys to the yard.

My very favorite conversation starter was one I found in the section called "Conflicts of the Modern Age," regarding the current war in Iraq:

"The United States rained 'Shock and Awe" on Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2003. Was the attack 'preemptive,' defined in military usage as based on incontrovertible evidence of imminent attack? Or was it 'preventive,' based on possible future threats?"

Oh. My. GOOOOODDDDDDDDDD.

Oh my god

Oh my god

Oh my god

Oh my god.

Oh, Reader's Digest.

I searched through the rest of the book, but did not find Conversation Starter: Was George Walker Bush a great president? Or was he the greatest president? Nor, in the "Story of Life" section, did I find any reference to "Intelligent Design" or "teaching the controversy," so I suppose the conservative bent could have been a lot worse. I have to say, I think it is irresponsible of the writers not to have included a footnote for that conversation starter that read Caution! If you are in Berkeley, this Conversation Starter could get you pelted with Miniature Organic Soy Pigs in a Blanket.

But I kid! I kid! The book is really quite interesting and entertaining, and I mean that in a good way, even if, in their 2 pages on World War II, they neglected to mention the Holocaust. (I'm serious. They do bring it up in another section later on, but when I got to this section and found there was no mention of it, I almost choked on my own kidney, which abruptly got lodged in my throat.)

What this book is good for, truth be told, is getting six-year-olds interested in the way the world works, and expanding from this starting point with different books. This is, objectively speaking, a Good Thing. Used for this specific purpose, the Conversation Starters are excellent. Except for the one on the Iraq War, which would get you pelted with tiny soy pigs in a blanket by my kids.

ME: Insects might be tiny, but there are so many of them that ants and termites alone are believed by some scientists to account for as much as twenty percent of the world's combined mass of all creatures, known as the animal biomass.

THEM: Gross! How many insects are there in the world?

ME: Let's go look on the internet and find out!

THEM: Okay!

or

ME: The United States rained 'Shock and Awe" on Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2003. Was the attack 'preemptive,' defined in military usage as based on incontrovertible evidence of imminent attack? Or was it 'preventive,' based on possible future threats?

THEM: Neither one, Mom. "Shock and Awe" was an illegal attack on a country who did nothing to us and had no plans to harm us, resulting in the mass murder of millions of innocent Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers, causing the country to disintegrate into Civil War, thereby creating the terrorist environment we claimed we were trying to prevent.

ME: Oh, right.

THEM: Hold still while we pelt you with these little hot dogs.

Oh, for Pete's sake. I've done nothing but make fun of this book, and honestly, shame on me. It's not bad AT ALL. In fact, it taught me several things I didn't know, such as the existence of the jerboa, a member of the rodent family that looks like a mouse/kangaroo blend with ginormous ears. The jerboa is well worth a Google search, because it is hands down awesome.

Plus, the whole section about astronomy is interesting. I know next to nothing about it, and, let's face it, am not smart enough to ever be able to understand it, so two pages per topic, distilling everything down to its simplest essence, is perfect.

So, I am a jerk who clearly has never forgiven Reader's Digest for butchering My Friend Flicka in their condensed books series my parents bought and put in the living room as bookshelf filler. Little did they know they'd raise a book maniac who actually devoured these books and got pissed later when it was revealed how much was left out. And now I cannot help but poking relentless fun at all things Reader's Digest, even when it is not deserved.

I did start a book that deserves a lot of abuse, The Chemist, written by a doctor dabbling in literature. I couldn't get past the prologue, because it was 100% torture porn, and I've had more than enough torture porn in American pop culture. Not to mention that it was made pointedly clear that the 3 murderers had faces as "dark as the night," and the murder victim had "long blonde hair." Look, I spent way too many years looking at interracial porn for my Honeysuckle customers, trying to find something that wasn't filmed for the express purpose for white men to jerk off to white women being sexually degraded by black men. The difficulty of finding egalitarian interracial sex scenes based on respect and fun - a problem that even temporarily stumped Nina Hartley, for god's sake - makes it impossible for me to find this anything but really, really racist. I know we just elected a black man to the highest office in the land, while that is a great leap forward, we just haven't shed our racial baggage to be able to accept this situation with no titillating sexually-based racially degrading subtext. Not to mention that the scene was written to have a titillating sexually-based racially degrading subtext that involves torturing a naked woman. To death.

Fuck this book, and fuck the guy who wrote it.

I will make it up to the writers of Know It All, who worked very hard to compile all that information and present it in a clear, easy-to-understand way, by recommending that you buy it as an elementary starting point for you and your kids to develop an interest in science (did I mention the end of each section has multiple choice quizzes? I have no intention of ever doing them, but if your kids are bored and you're desperate, well there you go), and to use the other book to balance an uneven table. Or, better yet, to refuse to have it in your home all together.

_______________________________

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge
by Susan Aldridge, Elizabeth King Humphrey, and Julie Whitaker
October, 2008 by The Reader's Digest Association
Hardcover, 256pp
ISBN: 978-0-7621-0933-3

2009-02-22T08:41:00.003-06:00

In Memory of Central Park 1853-2022.

The years of the Bush administration must have been such a bittersweet time for artists. On one hand, there was such a plethora of craziness to write about. On the other hand, you’ve really got to put yourself out there in order to get ahead of the dystopic ball they started rolling.

Queenelle Minet places her novel just slightly ahead of this giant mess we’re all in, allowing herself to imagine a world fifty years in the future, where, evidently, we’ve kept electing more of the same kind of government and have at last gotten the world we deserve.

In Memory of Central Park looks at life in New York City in the mid 21st century, where city dwellers have finally let terror get the best of them and have literally pulled a giant dome over their heads and retreated, turtle-like, into a fear-based shell. After the complete economic collapse of the United States (please Barack Hussein Jesus Obama, please fix everything), New York secedes from the union and hides, filling the inside of the shell with wall to wall buildings, eliminating cars and roads. New York has become an anthill, and life continues to team in a series of fluorescent-lit corridors. There is a one-party government, the Liberty Party, whose corrupt cronyism is enforced by wandering groups of thugs called the Patriots, similar to Saudi Arabia’s Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who wander the streets beating everyone who seems insufficiently patriotic.

Free speech, while not illegal, is still discouraged by the mysterious murders of those who oppose the government. Citizens, on grounds of preventing terrorist attacks, are no longer allowed to leave the city or communicate with the outside world. All information from the rest of the world is filtered through the fear-mongering government and tolerated by a population who values safety over freedom. Amidst all this, in one small section of the ant farm, a therapist named Noah dysfunctionally falls in love with his sister-in-law, Margaret. His love for Margaret awakes him to the realization that he has been numb to the realities around him, and for the first time begins to pay attention to the writing on the wall that spells out doom for their corrupt, claustrophobic way of life.

Joined in his burgeoning awareness are his professional colleague and friend, Phillipe, Margaret, and Appoppa, the boyfriend of his favorite client, Amy. Noah is drawn to the tough Amy, one of many New Yorkers falling deathly ill to a mysterious disease that seems to strike only those who live outside the walled-off neighborhood of the Party elite, who live in tall buildings erected on the place where Central Park used to be. In their quest to uncover the source of the illness, Noah, Margaret, Phillipe, and Appoppa inch closer to what will be either their salvation or their doom. Either way, there is no turning back.

In Memory of Central Parkwas based on a rough draft and series of ideas by Minet’s late husband Aron Spilken. According to the book’s prologue, Minet felt that “picking up where he left off with In Memory of Central Park allowed [her] to continue collaborating with him despite his death.” She seems to have blended their voices quite well, because the narrative flows fairly smoothly. In Memory of Central Park has a ring of truth to it, not because of her ability to exploit liberal fears but because of the strength of character she builds in everyman, Noah. His reluctance to take a stand is a small flame that burns in many of us; the urge to just keep your head down and take whatever happiness and contentment you can find. Life without sunshine, plants, animals, or trees isn’t that unbearable, after all, he’s got a room to sleep in, friends, food, and a good job. Best not to rock the boat and risk it all. Of course, rock the boat is what he must do, because there is also a small flame that burns in all of us that is not happy living in a world without liberty, and we all must choose which flame burns hotter and brighter.

_______________________________________

In Memory of Central Park 1863-2002
By Queenelle Minet
September, 2008 by Synergy Books
Paperback, 251pp
ISBN: 978-1934454251

2009-02-15T14:52:00.005-06:00

Walking the Rainbow.

Initially I thought this was a self-published manuscript, due to the horrible title and book cover, and the fact that all the promotional blurbs were written by his friends, not to mention the cheap font and myriad typos. Then I thought it was an uncorrected galley proof, but it didn't say that it was, and the publicists who sent it to me usually only send final copies. But no, it seems it's an actual final copy from an actual publishing house out of Pittsburgh, Whitmore Publishing Co. Shame about the cover. It looks like it was designed at the very last possible second by someone who didn't give a damn about making it look good. You know how I feel about cover art. If only author Richard René Silvin had insisted Olga Grlic design it. It would have sold a lot more copies, I tell you what.

It's not like he couldn't afford her. One of the first things you learn in Silvin's memoir is that he's a really wealthy man. (In fact, I think he may have paid for the publicists himself, because this is not the kind of book they usually send me.)

A product of Swiss boarding schools* and top universities, Silvin went on to become a leader in hospital operations, rising to head up the international division of American Medical International, Inc., which oversaw a hundred hospitals in ten countries. While he touches quite a bit on the business end of things, Walking the Rainbow is primarily the story of his struggle living with the HIV virus. Already a successful businessman in an unsuccessful marriage, Silvin came out in the late 70's, probably the worst time in history for a gay man to say to himself, "Hey, let's see what I've been missing after all these years in the closet!"

Walking the Rainbow is not really so much a tale of his business or sexual exploits as it is a love story, detailing his relationships with Tim, the love of his libido, and, later, Bob, the love of his life.

All three men were diagnosed with HIV in the early-mid 80s, during the Reagan years when AIDS was an acceptable disease as long as it was killing off homosexuals. Silvin used his vast financial resources to travel first with Tim, then Bob, to Europe for cutting-edge treatment. Unfortunately, in the 80s and early 90s, cutting-edge treatment for HIV management is not what it is today, and Silvin and his partners ended up having a patient-eye view of life in some of his own hospitals.

During these difficult times, Silvin's money managed to keep a great deal of horror away from himself and his partners. Unfortunately, homophobia has quite a bit of clout as well, and after weeks of pain and sickness I wouldn't wish on anyone, Silvin still had to endure the insult of not having his relationships recognized and receiving substandard nursing care from ignorant staff.

While Walking the Rainbow is no Angels in America** or And the Band Played On, as long as fully half the population of the United States refuses to believe that the relationships of gay men and lesbians are "real," that it's okay to deny them hospital visiting rights and property rights and insurance benefits for their partners, if they are denied the ability to make life-or-death decisions for their partners or follow through with their partners funeral arrangements, if their children can be taken from them and if they can lose their jobs and receive a dishonorable discharge from the military solely due to their sexual orientation, every single one of their stories should be heard.

____________________________

*Silvin attended La Clarière and Le Rosey. La Clarière was shut down due to substandard conditions, and Silvin was sent there WHEN HE WAS SIX. Who the hell sends a six-year-old to a boarding school? A boarding school ON ANOTHER CONTINENT? My six-year-old still sleeps with a stuffed dog and is afraid of monsters. According to Silvin, after the age of six he only saw his parents on holidays. He said they were like strangers to him. How do you put your baby boy on a plane and say goodbye to him forever? That being said, I've been threatening Christopher with Swiss boarding school ever since I read that. He doesn't seem to be taking me too seriously, though, only briefly looking up from the computer, where he was playing Homestar Runner, to say, "You can't afford it."

Burn!

**Thinking of Angels in America made me want to watch the scene where Roy Cohn, played magnificently by Al Pacino, is diagnosed with AIDS by James Cromwell. Cohn tells Cromwell that he can't have AIDS, because AIDS is something that only homosexuals get, and since he is a powerful man, he can't be a powerless homosexual, therefore, he does not have AIDS. It's one of the greatest monologues ever written, I think, because it describes this particular mindset so very, very well. Let's watch it again!

_______________________________

Walking the Rainbow
by Richard René Silvin
February, 2008 by Whitmore Publishing
Paperback, 226pp
ISBN: 0874260736

2009-02-15T14:15:00.003-06:00

Citizen Alpha.

Yeah. Okay. Hm.

I've got to be honest, here. I couldn't get past chapter six of this book, because quite frankly, it made me grumpy.

The synopsis of Citizen Alpha on the back of the book says it's about a study group of graduate students versus a gang of warlords and terrorists, and the graduate students have to somehow rescue America from the threat of a nuclear holocaust.

A good idea, I suppose, but the story reads like Cliff's Notes, or a 9th grade book report, and ultimately I just couldn't hack it.

Each of the first few chapters are devoted to a different character, and their entire biographies are given in a terse, just-the-facts-ma'am style that didn't draw me in at all. Every single one of them read like this:

The warlords used their wealth to buy children from the less fortunate. Parents were often forced to sell their children in order to eat for the next year or two. Musad's parents, having nothing with which to raise their child, felt that they had no choice but to sell him to one of the local warlords. By doing so, they would also be though of much more higly at the mosque they attended as is was controlled by the warlord. Like all children taken by the warlords, Musad was trained to be a talibay child. Talibay children are considered property of the purchasing warlord, and they esist to enrich the warlord by begging for money. His parents were sad but thought he would have a better life as a talibay child.

A sad life, to be sure, but this is not character development. This is a series of facts about the character that does nothing to show the reader the soul inside.

And seriously, "his parents were sad?" They were sad? Sad? That's it?

These chapters seem almost dismissive, like the writer can't be bothered to give the reader any extra humanizing details, so we're left with nothing but plain, blunt sentences that gloss over an entire life of pain. There's a lack of care in the book that seems very disrespectful to both the characters as well as the reader.

Imagine if Charlotte Brontë had written like this.

Think of the opening scene in Jane Eyre where little Jane is banished from the sitting room.

Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarreling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, "She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavoring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner- something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were - she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children."

"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.

"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent."

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and , having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

Now imagine Jane Eyre as Citizen Alpha:

Jane's aunt was cruel to her. Jane was sad and left the room to read a book.

Fan fucking tastic.

However, it must be said that I read excerpts of Citizen Alpha to Steve, who saw nothing wrong with it. He does not like to read, because he thinks most books take too long to get to the point. If you feel as he does, this may be the book for you.

___________________________

Citizen Alpha
by Patrick E. Peterson
August, 2008 by Synergy Books
Paperback, 305pp
ISBN: 1934454206

2009-02-09T22:00:00.010-06:00

Mars Life.

When I first started getting books for review, it was 99% mommy book offers, which I accepted and was happy to review and didn't actually hate all of them, but I have to be honest: I don't accept very many of them any more, and mercifully I don't get many offers to review them. In fact, the progression of the genres over the years has gone something like this: Mommy book, Chick Lit, Chick Lit, Chick Lit, Historical Fiction, Mystery/Suspense, Chick Lit, and finally, I have arrived at science fiction. I can only assume publicists have either forgotten about my vagina or are choosing to ignore it. They wouldn't be the first.

Anyway, while we're on the subject, my vagina would like to address the portrayal of women in science fiction.

There's this:

and this:

I mean, I don't even know what's going on with that. Is she being canned? Is she going to meet the same fate as the girls behind her? Did they run out of girl-sized cans and had to make do with a chihuahua can? I don't understand.

I won't even discuss L. Ron Fucking Hubbard's views on women, and even Heinlein, who was apparently ahead of his day as far as women went, still drew these narrow images of women: busty, very young, like the Denise Richards-as-neuroscientist role in that James Bond movie, and of course they were slavishly devoted to some old fart that smelled vaguely of Heinlein himself (See Land, Stranger in a Strange. Sorry. I know it's a classic and one of the Greatest Ever, but still.)

Or, they'll try this trick where the best female character is beautifully thin, doe-eyed, has a job but it's well below the pay grade of the male protagonist, so she can better appreciate his genius, she's 25 and just can't help but love Captain Geritol, because of his brilliant mind, you see. But it isn't sexist, because they'll make references to the female President of the United States/Mars Colony/spaceship, or the genius' boss will be female, but we'll never get to know those women.

But one can't stay buried in the loving arms of Octavia Butler and James Tiptree, Jr forever, as much as one would like to, so I began Mars Life and wondered what Ben Bova, one of science fiction's big dogs, was going to give the ladies in the house.

Female president mentioned in passing? Check. Female Chief of the Navaho tribe, mentioned more than in passing but not much more? Check. And Miss Doreen McManus, a junior technician, who is described as having "lovely, thickly curled auburn hair, but it was cropped close in a strictly utilitarian style. Her face was oval, with the large, shy eyes of a waif. She was...so thin and bony that [the male protagonist] wondered if she were bulimic."

Gah! So Doreen approaches the protagonist, Dr. Carleton Carter, who was sent to the Mars colony in exile, after losing his job at the university after being falsely accused of rape. Gah! Doreen asks Carter if she can join him for breakfast. The two are joined moments later by a women of the same professional status as Carter.

"Twenty bucks says she's old and a total bitch," I thought, and turned the page. Gah! I was right!

So Carter the Unjustly Accused but Brilliant starts an affair with Doreen, which squicks out exactly no one, and the book putters along with this story line until Doreen informs Carter she's going back home, to the colony on the Moon.

Then the following happens: Carter gets pissy and forbids her to go, and Doreen up and tells him to go fuck himself, saying that he's a narcissistic jerk who's only sleeping with her so everyone will be impressed that he can bang a girl over half his age. Further, he only wants her around so she can tell him how brilliant he is all the time, plus, he's a sexist jerk who totally sucks. And then she leaves.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Then he hits on a married woman closer to his own age, who also thinks he sucks and also thinks that rape charge may have some merit. This is the best science fiction book ever.

Sorry for the spoilers, but it was just too awesome not to share. Be comforted by the fact that this was a minor plot point, and I promise I won't spoil the major ones.

Mars Life is a continuation of books by Ben Bova about the colonization of Mars. By the time we check in with these recurring characters, things aren't going so well. The United States, major funder of Mars exploration, is firmly controlled by anti-science religious whackadoos, who cut government funding to Mars. The fundies are upset because fossils have been discovered at last, indicating the remains of an ancient civilization. They feel, correctly, that if this knowledge were made known, it would decrease the power of the Magical Sky Fairy who created the Earth in 6,000 years, and this would also decrease their political and social power, which by this time is pretty all-consuming. They've already had total success in eliminating the theory of evolution from public schools, and are successfully banning discussion of Mars discoveries from the classroom as well. Dr Carleton Carter, who claims he was run out of the university by the extreme right wing who manufactured a rape charge against him, is there to dig around in the Martian village, and other characters, in particular Jamie Waterman and his awesome wife Vijay, who are there to save the program by finding alternate funding. The colony gets screwed by the fundies at every turn, and you can feel the frustration steaming off the pages in little wavy lines of heat.

This seems to me to have been written with a lot of passion by Bova during a time where this fear of religious zealots destroying science and preventing kids from learning seemed eminent, you know, way back in 2007.

It's my wish, and probably Bova's, too, truth be told, that this book seem ridiculous and histrionic ten years from now. At the moment, it seems sadly plausible.

_________________________

Mars Life
by Ben Bova
August, 2008 by Tor Books
Hardcover, 432 pp
ISBN: 0765317877

2009-01-30T12:25:00.006-06:00

Confessions of a Contractor.

The first thing a woman needs to know about renovating a house or apartment is simple: do not, under any circumstance, sleep with your contractor, no matter what your husband or boyfriend is doing to you or not doing to you.

So begins Richard Murphy's first novel Confessions of a Contractor. Naturally, this advice is promptly ignored, but it seems like it's not the women who need the warning, it's the contractor, or rather, one contractor in particular, Henry Sullivan.

Henry has spent quite awhile in Los Angeles, building up a business renovating houses with his team, Hector and Miguel. Over the years, he has developed a personal set of ethics to keep his business successful and his nose clean. He ends up breaking these rules one fateful summer, when he begins renovating houses for two wealthy women, the gorgeous and single Sally Stein, and the unhappily married Rebecca Paulson.

He begins an affair with Sally, and wants to move the relationship closer, but as he is drawn to sad Rebecca, he begins to realize he has feelings for her, too. Henry does a little investigating to see where the source of her marital troubles are, and they begin and end with her husband Derrick, a gigantic tool who speaks to people by asking questions then answering them.

Have you exceeded my expectations? You better believe it. Would I recommend you to other people? In a heartbeat.

About ten years ago producer Robert Evans wrote his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and he recorded the audio book himself. This is exactly, exactly what he sounds like. It is beyond hilarious, and for awhile everybody in L.A. was going around imitating him. If you haven't heard it yet, I highly recommend it. Anyway, it's impossible by this point to have a character speak like this in a book and not relate it immediately to Bob Evans.

So Henry is trying to figure out why Rebecca won't leave Bob Evans, and also trying to figure out the source of discord between Sally and Rebecca, who used to be friends but aren't anymore, and in between all this he's dropping tidbits of information about the contracting industry and what you should know about home repair, sort of like a blue-collar Devil Wears Prada, and wow, this is a chick-litty book. Murphy is lucky he didn't get the legs-and-feet treatment. Maybe the cover could have been a pair of work boots perched perkily on the Hollywood sign.

I can't believe what a girly book this is, seriously. The lead character falls in love with a 41-year-old woman but may prefer another woman who is not as pretty, he sides with the women over their husbands in matters of design, he's not homophobic, he's way too interested in their friendships and fights, he likes kids, hell, he likes cats for god's sake. Although he claims to have a problem with relationships, he mostly just wants to love.

He's pushing the boundaries of the suspension of disbelief, but I'm letting him get away with it because on the subject of men who write material that caters to What Women Want, my low bar is set at Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Kimberly Elise is cruelly dumped by her cold-hearted husband and finds love with Shemar Moore, the most perfect man who ever lived.

He's intelligent, gorgeous, respectful, has the same religious values the main character has, and very much wants a permanent commitment to Elise, whose twenty year marriage has crumbled around her. In short, he is specifically written to be every woman's ultimate fantasy, and he would have been, had Perry not overplayed his hand by having Moore whisper to Elise at the end of their first date, "I just want to hold you."

I don't know about you, but give me Shemar Moore as my perfect fantasy man, and he's going to be working a little harder than that.

Mercifully, Murphy doesn't go for that "I just want to hold you" crap and has Sally Stein give him a handjob underneath the table at a dinner party. Whew!

There's really not that much more to say about Confessions of a Contractor that hasn't been covered in other chick lit books, and anyway I have the flu so I'm not totally on top of my game here, but suffice to say it follows the formula with enough insider information to spice things up. The end.
____________________________

Confessions of a Contractor
by Richard Murphy
August 2008 by Putnam
Paperback, 288 pp
ISBN: 0399155074

2009-01-22T14:20:00.014-06:00

Silver.

Yo ho ho!

Is there anything Americans love more than pirates? Zombies, maybe? Why isn't there a movie about zombie pirates? It would make a killing. Oh, look!

Now, I know piracy is having a resurgence and is becoming a bit of a problem to freight ships, especially off the coast of Somalia, but these pirates are difficult to acknowledge, and frankly, I don't care for them.

No.

No!

Maybe.

Everyone knows we want our pirates ever thus:

Yes!

Even better.

Absolutely!

God, yes.

If you are the kind of salty dog who likes her pirates running away from an alligator with a clock in its belly, have I got a book for you!

It is Edward Chupack's first novel Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder.

Yarrr!

For the past two Saturday nights at work, when it's just three of us on the closing shift and no supervisor, I have been entertaining my coworkers by reading them excerpts of this book in full Piratese.

I'm telling you, it's impossible not to enjoy this book, largely due to the fact that it's written in pirate dialect. I don't have to reach for the accent. I'm just picking up what Chupack's putting down. Awesome.

Of course, there's more to it than just the hilarious pirate accent. If that weren't the case, you could enjoy any book ever written just by throwing in some sea shanties and a parrot.

In Silver, Chupack expands on the life of the iconic Long John Silver, bad boy of the classic adventure story Treasure Island.

The plot and characters of Treasure Island, Bones, Pew, Jim Hawkins, the search for the treasure, etc., are touched on briefly, because they kind of have to be to stay true to the character as originally developed by Robert Louis Stevenson, but Chupack draws the reader in to the making of Long John Silver, from a literally nameless orphan boy to the murderous swashbuckler he grew up to be.

Chupack puts young Silver in Bristol, England, working as a dogsbody for a pub owner. The pub owner sells him to the pirate Black John to work as his cabin boy. Black John gives him his name - John, after himself, Silver, after the boy's keen interest in riches, and threw in the Long part due to his being tall for a boy his age, and teaches him the ways of piracy.

Silver obviously takes to life on the high seas, and becomes skilled at the arts of sailing, thievery, and murder. Chupack is careful not to make Silver a hero. Emotionally stunted and mistrustful of everyone due to his loveless upbringing, Silver cannot fathom of a relationship without betrayal, and as a result cannot fully develop into a real human being. Living on the seas is ideal for him, where he can always view humanity from a distance, never getting close enough to understand the misery he inflicts on others.

The novel begins at Silver's end. Gripped by fever and captured in his own ship's quarters to be taken back to Londontown for his execution, Silver pens his last testament and gives it in excerpts to Mullet, the cabin boy charged with bringing him the meals he refuses to eat, assuming they are poisoned. Mullet, a growing boy whose stomach is never full, sits outside the locked cabin, eating Silver's lunch and avidly listening to his tales of derring-do, and his lifelong quest to solve the ciphers found in a black Bible that promise, if solved, to lead him to a conquest of riches beyond measure.

Silver mulls over the clues with Mullet, drawing them out for the boy over and again, and slowly feeding him tidbits toward the riddle's solution. His speech is simultaneously flowery and coarse, and peppered with humor and wit, but for all his self-satisfied braggadocio, underneath it all is a lifetime of loneliness and no idea of what to do with the things he loves.

He falls in love with Mary, a highwayman's widow who lives with her sister Evangeline in South Carolina's low country, but treats her the exact same way he does his treasure: after gathering her, he abandons her and sails away, never to return, and merely guards her in his heart always as his.

Silver is not a prequel to Treasure Island, nor does it really attempt to elaborate on or explain anything additional. The two stories intersect at one small part, then sail away from each other, alone on the high seas again.

_______________________

Silver
by Edward Chupack
February 2008 by St Martin's Press
Hardcover, 288pp
ISBN: 0-312037365-1

2009-01-15T10:36:00.008-06:00

Moscow Rules.

Have you ever been reading along in a book, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you come across something that snaps you out of it and you think, "So that's the way it's going to be, is it?"

For me, that happened at the end of Chapter 26 in Daniel Silva's Moscow Rules, when two international spies, an American and an Israeli are talking about their latest assignment. The American says:

We went to war in Iraq, in part, because we feared that Saddam might be willing to supply the terrorists with sophisticated weaponry or even weapons of mass destruction.

Ah, so this book is aimed at people who get shivers every time they think of someone shouting "Wolverines!!!!!!!!!!"

Or who think torturing political prisoners is justified because Jack Bauer does it.

But just as it wouldn't be fair to say 24 isn't entertaining, it wouldn't be fair to say that Moscow Rules isn't entertaining despite its obvious right-wing, 2003-era politics. Just turn the part of your brain off that winces when you read the following interrogation between a Russian police officer and an undercover Israeli spy, and you'll get through it all right:

I take it you've killed before, Mr. Golani?

Like all Israeli men, I had to serve in the IDF. I fought in Sinai in 'severnty-three and in Lebanon in 'eighty-two.

So you've killed many innocent Arabs?

Yes, many.

You are a Zionist oppressor of innocent Palestinians?

An unrepentant one.

Yikes. Bad timing to have read this right now.*

Anyway, evidently this is the eighth installment of the Gabriel Allon, Israeli James Bond series. Allon is pulled away from his secret honeymoon in an Italian Villa to meet with a Russian journalist who has a big scoop of global importance. After a long series of everybody getting killed off before the information can be revealed, we finally find out that there's this Russian arms dealer, Ivan Kharkov, who has just put through a large sale of something to some super-evil somebody, which obviously will not do, so it is up to Allon to infiltrate Kharkov's lair, bring him down, find out what is being delivered to who, and stop it before it can bring down the entire Western world.

Very gripping stuff.

Moscow Rules trots all over the globe, Europe mostly, following Kharkov and trying to uncover what is going on before Kharkov and the Russian government, who isn't the KGB anymore but under Putin now acts just like them, can kill everyone who gets close to uncovering the truth. And as we all know, the Russians are very good at information-gathering and intrigue, and they always seem to be two steps ahead of everybody else in this international chess game.

Moscow Rules is written in the potato-chip style that is common to modern adventure/thriller-type best sellers. The chapters are short - there are seventy-two of them, in fact, and many end in a cliff-hanger that makes you keep turning the pages until you reach the end. You can't read just one chapter, you've got to read great big handfulls until the entire bag is empty. Also like potato chips, the nutritional content isn't very high and after you've eaten the bag you feel kind of greasy and sleepy and hungry an hour later, and now I think I've officially worn out that metaphor and need to stop.

All these kinds of books seem to have the same style these days, which is why I suppose Tana French is currently stomping the competition in the thriller/crime/mystery department.

The difference in style is virtually identical to Eddie Izzard's comparison of British and American movies.

Moscow Rules is a perfect book to check out of the library. You get to read it for free, and it zips by so fast you can return it long before it's due.

*This post sums up pretty concisely what I'm thinking about the current Israel/Palestine situation.

___________________________

Moscow Rules
by Daniel Silva
July, 2008 by Putnam
Hardcover, 433 pages
ISBN: 0399155015

2009-01-08T21:50:00.004-06:00

The Likeness.

Is it too early to say that Tana French is becoming to modern mysteries what Kate DiCamillo is to children's literature?

I was blown away by how good DiCamillo's Despereaux was, and I thought it was reasonable to assume that most good writers have one book in them where they surpass themselves and really shine, and Despereaux was hers. Then I read Edward Tulane and had to revise my theory.

French's debut novel, In the Woods was eerily impressive for a first novel. It was polished and smooth as a skipping stone at the bottom of a clear lake. French seemed to be more interested in character development than cliff-hanging suspense. She she cocooned Detectives Rob Ryan, Cassie Maddox, and Sam O'Neill around the reader, immersing the pages in the details of their lives, personalities and moods, until all of a sudden all that silky character development has become a iron trap, and the reader is locked inside their psyches as they confront the terrifying climax.

Sneaky!

But there's no way she could do it again so soon, right? Her second novel is surely going to fall victim to the sophomore slump. Wrong! The Likeness is awesome, too!

Just for fun, read Janet Maslin's review of The Likeness and come back here.

Hee! Maslin clearly didn't read French's first book, and assumed that when Cassie mentions a previous case where she went undercover as college student Lexie Madison, and ended up on the wrong end of a knife, she must have been referring back to In the Woods, and in most serial detective novels that would have been a safe bet, because they almost always do that. But French is not so cheap. The Lexie Madison persona is only mentioned in passing at the beginning of the book, to explain how she got transferred to the Murder squad in Dublin. Cassie Maddox wasn't working undercover at all.

It's not until The Likeness that her life as an undercover officer returns.

After the events of In the Woods, Maddox is no longer working in Murder, but has transferred to Domestic Violence, which is stable but holds little excitement for her, detective-wise. She plods along in her business suit, taking statements and filing reports, until she gets a phone call from Sam O'Neill, who is freaked out six ways to Sunday, and begs her to drive immediately to the little village of Glenskehy. She does, and to her surprise finds her former boss in undercover, Frank Mackey, is also there, in an abandoned house with Sam, standing over the body of a woman.

The dead woman could be Cassie's identical twin, and even creepier, when they remove her ID from her pocket, the name on her ID card is Lexie Madison.

Frank is turning cartwheels of joy over the whole thing, because he has the idea to pretend like the woman didn't die, and Cassie can pretend to be the dead woman to find out who killed her.

Cassie and Sam think this is a terrible idea, and so do I, because let's face it: this could never happen, and even if it could, you can't fake being someone else for very long without getting busted under close scrutiny. I don't care how good you are.

But let's suspend disbelief, because if you don't, you'll miss all the fun. Of course, Cassie agrees to do it, and moves in to a gorgeous old home with the dead girls' housemates, all Ph.D. candidates - Daniel, the paternal leader of the group whose wealthy noble uncle willed him the house; Abby, the smart and warm best friend; Rafe, the moody English hottie, and Justin, the sweet, more naive member of the group.

At first Cassie tries to get her bearings in the house, trying to seem like she's always been there while quietly gathering information. But soon the dynamics of the house begin to suck her in for real, and Cassie, an orphan and a loner, realizes this group is a family, and fills a need in her she never knew was so strong.

As with In the Woods, French spends a lot of time developing the characters, as well as peppering the novel with lots of suspects, lots of motive, and lots of frustrating dead leads, because the more she learns about this Lexie Madison, the more reasons Cassie finds for her murder. What is missing this time is the aloof tone of Rob Ryan, replaced with the zippier voice of Cassie. Where Rob made me have to put the novel down and take breaks before coming back to it, I essentially ate The Likeness, finishing it in less than two days.

I'm wondering what French has up her sleeve for her third book. Surely it can't be as good as the first two, right?

____________________________

The Likeness
by Tana French
July, 2008 by Viking
Hardcover, 480pp
ISBN: 0670018864

2009-01-04T19:21:00.004-06:00

The Amnesiac.

First: that cover.

The cover art for Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac was illustrated by Julie Morstad, a Vancouver artist who had to have cut her teeth on a copy of The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Its tone is perfectly suited for the novel, ethereal yet drawn with plain black ink, creepy but hard to put a finger on exactly why.

Protagonist James Purdew breaks his ankle running up the stairs to his Amsterdam apartment to catch the telephone. Later, leg in a cast and his sweet girlfriend Ingrid nursing him back to health, James has plenty of time to remember his past, and it comes as a shock to him to realize he doesn't really remember very much at all. Specifically, three years of university in the town of H have totally vanished, leaving nothing behind but a locked box underneath his bed that contain his diaries of that period. Having lost the key and with no ability to break the box open, James becomes both listless and restless in turns, and when Ingrid tells him she has been offered a wonderful job in her hometown that will enable them to buy a home and have children and live happily ever after, James takes the opportunity to split with her and travel back to H to uncover his past.

Once in H, James accepts a job repairing an old Victorian house for a mysterious employer. He is drawn to the house in dreams, and parts of the house keep dropping hints to his past, the first chapter of a story entitled "Confessions of a Killer" covered up in the wallpaper, letters that arrive via post containing nothing but a few individual letters of the alphabet, and a ringing phone he is forbidden to answer. Names keep turning up, too, Anna, Malcolm Trewvey, Tomas Ryan, and while he uses search engines to research these people, one wonders why he didn't use The Google to do some research on himself.

Part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and part gothic mystery, The Amnesiac's disconnected sensibility is partly due to James' self-imposed isolation and partly due to the style of the novel, where stories weave inside stories and reality fades seamlessly into dreams and back again, and neither the reader nor James knows what's real and what isn't. As he draws nearer to uncovering the truth of his missing years, instead of the walls crumbling, they instead begin to close in on him, and James begins to lose faith in his own mental stability.

The Amnesiac keeps the reader at arm's length, its detached personality never really allowing the reader to get fully attached to James and what becomes of him. Nevertheless, it is gripping enough to keep you turning pages until the last secret is unlocked.

_________________________________

The Amnesiac
by Sam Taylor
June, 2008 by Penguin
Paperback, 381pp
ISBN: 978-0-14-311340-9

2009-01-03T09:55:00.004-06:00

Every Secret Crime.

Do not be intimidated by the 429 pages of Doug M. Cummings' latest detective novel, Every Secret Crime. Unlike Nixonland, whose 800-plus pages took me six weeks to slog through, I read Every Secret Crime in two days. It was like swallowing a glass of milk after eating a peanut butter sandwich. The chapters are short, mostly ending in cliff hangers, it doesn't bother too much with character development or internal angst, it's just action action action the end.

The beginning of Every Secret Crime, the second installment in the Reno McCarthy novels, opens with the murder of a wealthy seventeen-year-old high school student in his home. His best friend Lucas is arrested for the crime, mostly on suspicion of being a dumbass. Enter Reno McCarthy, the world's toughest television talking head. He and his TV crew, Jody, the producer, and Al, the cameraman, along with his pal Sunny DeAngelis (Yes. Sunny D.) the bail bondsman, do some investigative reporting and begin unraveling this remarkably complex crime involving a .38 used in an extremely cold murder case, the Chicago mob, a wealthy CEO of a technology corporation, the corrupt Wihego County police department and governing board, and this incredibly weird, mentally challenged sexual assailant named Duane.

The book avoids the inevitably boring denouement that comes after the murderer is revealed and brought to justice by a series of A-ha! moments where the characters run around tying up loose ends and getting shot at, and that pretty much continues to the last page.

I cannot even begin to start describing how all these characters relate to one another and tie into the original crime, and even if I did, that would take all the fun out of the book. Every Secret Crime isn't Great Literature and doesn't try to be, but it's fun, and that's a perfectly fine thing for a book to be.

____________________________

Every Secret Crime
by Doug M. Cummings
June 2008 by Five Star Publishing
Hardcover, 429pp
ISBN: 1594146659

2008-12-30T15:43:00.003-06:00

Dead In Desemboque.

If Gilbert Shelton and Jose Guadalupe Posada conceived a baby while the Grateful Dead's "Friend of the Devil" was playing in the background, that baby would be Eddy Arellano's Dead In Desemboque.

I so badly want the above paragraph to be the entire review. In the four years I've been book blogging, the above description is the most accurate I've ever done, and probably will ever do.

Eddy, a drifter who literally has death in his eyes - they're drawn as skulls - and his dogs amble through the desert, looking for love and trouble and finding both. Done in the style of a Mexican pulp comic, Dead in Desemboque is told in three episodes, each drawn by a different artist.

Episode 1, "Dogs Aren't For Trading," Eddy meets the powerful Lupe, who seduces him in order to steal his dog, Argonaut, away. This part, illustrated by William Schaff, is the Posada part. Episode 2, "The Road to Desemboque," is the Gilbert Shelton part, drawn by Richard Schuler. After fleeing from Lupe, Eddy travels to be with his ladyfriend Juanita, who plays the part of the girl who is always home to warmly greet you after you've been out whoring all over the place with women who want to turn your dog into a gladiator, is never busy, and never actually has a boyfriend at the moment and can't really see you right now, but thanks for stopping by. He somehow pisses everybody off, not sure how because a lot of it is in Spanish and I studied French, but he has to flee again to Episode 3, "Dead In Desemboque." This part is drawn by Alec Thibodeau, and I would love to tell you that it's drawn like a Grateful Dead cover, but I've ridden the metaphor as far as it will go and it's fallen apart now. After careful consideration, I have to say it actually looks more like Lynda Barry has taken over.

By this time, our hero's options are narrowing, and he turns to some clever old women to help bail him out.

Dead In Desemboque is published by my favorite publishing house, Soft Skull, which never puts out crap. The artwork, particularly William Schiff's, is gorgeously creepy and would look nice either hanging on a wall or tattooed onto your back, and the storyline ambles along nicely enough to keep you occupied for a little while. Arellano captures the spirit of Mexican comics quite well, and the blends aimless lust and dusty death under the Arizona sky together in a gothy, inky swirl.

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Dead In Desemboque
by Eddy Arellano
Illustrated by William Schaff, Richard Schuler, and Alec Thibodeau
June 2008 by Soft Skull Press
Paperback, 108pp
ISBN: 0979663644

2008-12-29T11:02:00.006-06:00

The Betrayal.

"For many of you," warn authors Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, "this will be a controversial book."

There runs a small but sturdy thread of defensiveness in the introduction, the footnotes, and the afterword in The Betrayal, a novel that seeks to humanize Jesus and to portray his last days on Earth with historical accuracy. Repeatedly, they mention that they use early Christian texts, the etymology of ancient Greek and Hebrew words, Roman records, and Jewish laws to come up with a series of events that best reflect the reality of the life of Jesus and his followers.

What that means, although they don't come right out and say it, is that much of the Gospels of the New Testament is filled with great steaming piles of horseshit.

I can see how that would be controversial.

Back in the day, my college roommate and I went to see The Last Temptation of Christ, which featured a scene where Jesus imagines his life differently, had he chosen a different path. In this imagining, he sees himself marrying Mary Magdalene and living a quiet and peaceful life, happy in its anonymity. He of course turned away from the temptation, but from the way people carried on you'd think he was filmed in a g-string on a Pride parade float. We had our purses searched by police in line to buy tickets, because of the number of bomb threats called in to the theater.

So redonk. Anyway. Given a certain number of reactionaries that want their Jesus white and virginal and their Mary Magdalene a whore, it isn't surprising how careful the Gears are to let the reader know how thoroughly they've done their research. There are four pages of footnotes in what is supposedly a work of fiction.

The novel intertwines two stories, one of the last days of Jesus before the Crucifixion, and the other the story of three monks and a Pagan washerwoman on the lam.

In 325 c.e., under the ruler of the Emperor Constantine, the Council of Nicea met to determine which texts would be the official story of Jesus. These texts became the Biblical New Testament, and all other texts were ordered destroyed. To be caught reading or copying these heretical texts was a capital offense, punishable by death. Constantine sent squads out to the monasteries on a search and destroy mission to burn any existing books with an alternate version of Jesus' life. One of these monasteries was in Egypt, and housed Barnabas, an older monk who valued and believed these now illicit documents. This much is true.

From this launching point, the Gears build an action-adventure story that is somewhat da Vinci Code-ish, with its secret maps and clues and a search for The Pearl, a mysterious treasure of unknown value. Barnabus and his colleagues, sixteen-year-old novice monk Zarathan, who exists only to whine, Cyrus, the 34-year-old former Roman soldier turned Christian monk, who is incidentally incredibly smart, kind, courageous and totally hot, and Kalay, the Pagan who washes the Brothers' clothing. Kalay, just so you know, is a bone thrown to women who are interested in the Bible but find all the woman-hating tough to take. Kalay is also totally hot, skilled with a knife, illiterate but somehow well-versed in Hebrew language and culture to be invaluable at translating Barnabus' secret map. She is also extremely saucy and interrupts a lot, and, with the exception of Zarathan, who ineffectually whines at her to shut up, the men not only don't mind her but enjoy her and treat her as an equal.

In a novel that insists that it is striving for historical accuracy, the character of Kalay is asking quite a lot as far as suspension of disbelief goes, but I appreciated her all the same.

The adventure part of the story is kind of silly and goes on for a bit too long, the obvious storyline of the growing attraction between the two characters you want to see getting it on played out to an unsatisfactory end, and the ending of the novel abruptly dove into an overly dramatic series of events that could have been accompanied by dramatic hamster music. But the plot's not what you want to read it for. The Gears are archaeologists, well versed in ancient languages and the laws and culture of the time in which Jesus lived, and The Betrayal is a way of showcasing that knowledge. For the uninitiated, it's a fascinating ride. The Gears essentially tell you that everything you know about the Jesus narrative is mostly untrue, and they show you the research to back up their assertions.

This hit home with me to a certain extent, and will to anybody who dislikes religion, seriously doubts the existence of God, but loves Jesus. That may be just me, I don't know. We're probably a pretty small group. In contrast with those who believe the Bible is the exact word of God, I find the modern interpretation of Jesus to be cartoonish and grossly disrespectful, shaped mostly by politics and woman-hating, two things Jesus abhorred. I really appreciated the more realistic version of him as portrayed in The Betrayal, and I think, to the uninitiated searching for a deeper understanding of Jesus, the Gears have a lot of knowledge to offer.
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The Betrayal
by Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
June, 2008 by Forge Books
Hardcover, 400pp
ISBN: 0-7653-1546-7

2008-12-27T16:53:00.002-06:00

Church of the Dog.

The basic plot of Church of the Dog is solid enough – free spirit Mara O’Shaugnessey dumps a crap boyfriend so cheap he charged her gas money for driving her to the hospital when she became seriously ill, and takes a job as an art teacher in rural Oregon. She rents a little shack on the property of Edith and Earl, ranchers who have been married for 60 years, and fixes up the shack with stained glass windows and crazy artwork, and it is re-christened the Church of the Dog. As Mara gets to know the couple, helping them out in the house and on the ranch, she grows close to them, as well as their drifter grandson Dan, who comes home from his seasonal job as an Alaskan fisherman, and the four of them learn to overcome personal tragedy and redefine happiness and the meaning of family.

What undid it for me was the somewhat syrupy, New Age coating author Kaya McLaren saddled Mara with. Mara is one of those poseur-hippies that see auras and shrink tumors by the power of sending energy beams of pure light at people. Plus, she travels around in her dreams and horns in on other people’s dreams and everybody wakes up and don’t seem particularly thrown by the fact that an entire group of people dreaming the same dream NEVER EVER HAPPENS AND IS THEREFORE ALARMINGLY WEIRD.

If this talent that Mara has is deliberately supernatural, and an interview with the author in the back of the book indicates that it is, why are the rest of the characters treating it like it is no more unusual than being double-jointed or having an extra finger?

I have known many, many people who describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious,” and this talk of auras and surrounding yourself with protective colors is stuff I have heard from them practically verbatim, so Mara struck me more as typical than supernatural, and those who don't buy into the New Age lifestyle quickly tune those who do, at least when they begin going on and on about curing cancer with healing vibes.

Granted, Mara is likeable, and McLaren wisely gives her a youthful playfulness and loyalty that are appealing to the aging Earl and Edith, who never fully recovered from the loss of their son in a car accident, leaving behind a baby they had to raise. However, I could have done without the myriad discussions between the characters about The Meaning of Womanhood, which focused largely around the opinion that women were happier when their choices were fewer, and the Ethics of Vegetarian Ranching.

The ranching aspect of the book, which is grounded firmly in reality and no calves were medically assisted by angels or healing light of any kind, still troubled me in spots. For example, rancher Earl mentions that his cows “get good feed…corn and barley silage supplemented with vitamins, minerals, and protein.”

Er. That’s not good feed. Corn is an economically sound decision, but eventually it throws off the balance in the cows’ rumen, making it more acidic and burning a hole in their stomach lining. The corn fed cows that go to slaughter are going to die from the corn ingestion if they aren’t slaughtered first. What's best for cows is actually grass, although I wouldn't expect the cows to be fed grass on Earl's farm or any other.

The author interviewed a rancher to get the details of life on a ranch, and I have no doubt this is the information she was given, and that it is accurate information about what cattle are fed. Virtually all beef in the United States is corn fed. Corn is good in that it makes the cows get fatter faster and it’s cheaper, but bad in that it sickens the cow, causing it to need all those controversial antibiotics. (Aha? I’m a flaky, hippie vegetarian, too! Now you know too much about me, and I have no choice but to smite you with my angry aura.)

It's little tidbits like this, and in another spot where she mentions that dreadlocks grow mold if you live in a wet climate. I asked one of my dread-wearing work colleagues about this, and was told this is not true. If dreads are always damp, then yes, but most Americans live indoors, even those in wet climates, and even wet climate dreads dry out.

This sort of thing was slightly confusing, because I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to take this information as fact, or if the narrator was unreliable and I should assume the characters had their own specific agenda in relating this information that didn't fit with truth.

By the end of the book, I was left with the impression that what was supposed to be supernatural was actually not so supernatural, but a fairly accurate portrayal of a real person, and what was supposed to be down to earth and factual seemed to be untrue.

Picky, picky, picky, okay. All pickiness aside, there are things McLaren writes about incredibly well, such as love and loss. You would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by her deft, tender handling of the last days of the elderly Edith and Earl’s lifelong love story, and during this part of the book the pages flew by. So if New Age mysticism is okay by you, Church of the Dog will be a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. Burn some sage and get on with it. If it isn’t, you may be better off looking elsewhere.

_________________________

Church of the Dog
by Kaya McLaren
May, 2008 by Penguin
Paperback, 240pp
ISBN: 0143113429

2008-12-15T21:57:00.007-06:00

Nixonland.

"You're still reading that book?"

I heard this a lot over the past six weeks. I was reading Rick Perlstein's 881 page analysis of the political climate in the United States that lead to the election, and re-election, of Richard Nixon immediately after a liberal Johnson landslide and the apparent disintegration of the Republican party.

I don't have a lot of free time for reading anymore. When I'm not at work or taking care of the kids, I have 2 hours twice a week, and Sunday afternoons. That's it. And much of that "free time" is spent doing laundry, grocery shopping, repainting the dining room, cleaning the house, and blogging about my six-year-old farting on my hand. So mostly, I read this book in the car on my way to work, while stopped at traffic lights. So yes, I'm still reading it. I could have given up on it for the time being, and maybe I should have, but I really didn't want to, because Nixonland was fascinating.

After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson was overwhelmingly elected over the ultra conservative Barry Goldwater, winning 44 out of 50 states. Goldwater's nomination split the Republican party. His supporters happily subscribed to the ideology that "calamitous Liberal nonsense - ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro "civil disobedience;' the doctrine of 'containing' the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten ... was symbol and substance of America's moral rot." The other half of the Republican party, the progressive party of Lincoln, thought they were nuts, that this sort of ideological, anti-intellectual, reactionary politics had no place in the Republican party.

A few well-placed ads later, and Johnson was ready to lead a Liberal America toward a bright, shining future.

Armed with a Liberal Congress, Johnson enacted sweeping progressive legislation - The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the "war on poverty," the "Great Society" of prosperity - and it seemed as though Liberalism had a lock on things.

"These are the most hopeful days since Bethlehem," said Johnson while lighting the White House Christmas tree.

And the media loved it, printing stories of the Great Society and often omitting certain details such as our dubious, then disastrous entry into Vietnam, and a small problem with the Civil Rights Act, which was that nobody enforced it, or had any intention of enforcing it. Segregation was now officially illegal, but since there wasn't an Open Housing law, barring homeowners from refusing to sell their homes to families whose skin color rendered them untrustworthy, it didn't matter whether the Civil Rights bill was passed or not. People of color couldn't leave Watts, couldn't leave Cabrini Green. In fact, claims Perlstein, if you took a map of Chicago and put an X on each spot where an African-American was attacked by Whites, when you were done you'd have rings of Xs, and inside those rings would be the housing projects. And yet the Great Society mythology chugged along for over a year, until 1965, when Watts exploded in fiery riots.

The White middle class freaked out, as the White middle class is wont to do, a backlash ensued, and Richard Nixon sailed in on the crest of it, successfully exploiting white fears and anchoring himself firmly into the White House by 1968. In four short years, the United States had gone from being overwhelmingly Democratic to being overwhelmingly Republican.

How could this have happened so quickly? Could it really have been just White panic? Nixonland is a massive investigation into the fracturing of America into two deeply divided camps, and the answer Perlstein comes up with is: Not really. In actuality, it was dozens of incidents striking terror into the heart of middle America, and Nixon juggled them all expertly. The narrative of Richard Nixon, his dogged determination to win out over the fancy, slick pretty boys who always won everything, is in fact a metaphor for the remaking of the Republican party from being viewed as dispassionate intellectuals into a group of people that voted for George W. Bush. Twice.

A crop of politicians sprung up alongside Nixon, touting a call for Law and Order, which, after the destruction of Watts and other projects in American cities that were inexplicable to White people (we gave them the Civil Rights Act, why are they still complaining?) and promising a return to a time when the streets were safe. California Governor Ronald Reagan, who somehow took Goldwater's fringe extremism and made it look jolly, and George Wallace, the psychotic Alabama governor who, along with Southern Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, and Georgia governor Lester Maddox, a restaurateur elected solely because he refused to serve African-Americans, chasing them out of his restaurant with a pick axe handle, were among the most prominent and popular Law and Order backlashers. Nixon gingerly handled Reagan, the largest threat, simultaneously applauding and undermining him, and with the Southerners, he put his head together with Strom Thurmond's and created what is known as the Southern Strategy. Essentially, Nixon promised that he would not press the South to integrate if they would support his presidency against Johnson, who obviously they had some issues with.

The South switched sides, Dixiecrats became Republicans, and the party that was once racially progressive ceased to be so.

As the yearning for law and order became stronger, the opposition to the war and Jim Crow ramped up. Black kids were turning into Panthers, and white kids were turning into Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Girls were cursing and having sex while turning their backs on marriage and motherhood, and God was dead. The police began systematically brutalizing the opposition, from the horrible riots in Newark to the slaying of students at Kent State to the cold-blooded murder by the police of Black Panther Fred Hampton, and the silent majority finally spoke up - in approval of these acts.

This, as Nixon carefully pointed out, was the Democrats' fault, and it kind of was. Their conventions were disasters. Where once the Republicans had been divided, now it was the Democrats. Torn between old school racists and young progressives, the party spiraled down into incessant bickering and really just looked awful. The Republicans, led by square Nixon, were in control. (The scheming done by Nixon to ensure that said bickering occurred is cataloged in detail as well.)

Speaking of awful, Nixonland really solidified my dislike of Yippies. Their extreme obnoxiousness, from Jerry Rubin telling students the first step in the revolution would be to kill their parents, to Abbie Hoffman just never shutting up, did way more good for the opposition than for their own team, and the idea that they managed to change anyone's mind is difficult to believe.

As long as people like Spiro Agnew didn't look like the Yippies, they were in. Which is how we got people like Spiro Agnew in government in the first place; a man who publicly called a Hawaiian reporter a "fat Jap," and, when asked why he didn't campaign among the poor, said, "if you've seen one slum, you've seen them all."

Americans would vote for anyone, as long as he bathed and promised to quell the Negro problem. In reality, none of the politicians had any principals at all. Even crazy Wallace referred to his own constituents as "nuts."

As long as you pretended to be reasonable, it didn't matter that you weren't, an appeal, says Perlstein, that continues today. After Nixon's election, America was divided into two camps, each passionately believing that the other would destroy the very foundation of America. Instead of today's "Guns, God, and Gays," it was "Bombs, Blacks, and Bohemians," and then, as now, only the Republicans can keep you safe.

Nixonland satisfies any cravings you may have for detailed political history. One of the reasons history and politics has started to have such appeal for me as I grow older, is finally getting all the old pop culture references that used to go over my head.

While I was in the middle of the book, I watched the Katherine Hepburn/Sidney Poitier classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? In the beginning of the movie, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's daughter announces her upcoming marriage to Dr. John Prentiss (Poitier). She's going to marry him, and she would do it even if, she says, looking at Spencer Tracy, "you were the Governor of Alabama."

"I mean," she then says, catching herself, "if Mom were."

Had I not been reading Nixonland, I would not have known that after George Wallace was no longer allowed to run for Governor, he forced his cancer-riddled wife Lurleen to run in his place, openly announcing that she would just be a figurehead and he would actually be running the state. She won, so Katherine Hepburn gets to be the racist Alabama governor.

I love stuff like that, and if you do, too, then you'll be happy to know that Nixonland is full of all kinds of anecdotes that loop you in on 40 year old jokes, as well as cutting-edge celebrity gossip about Dr. Spock, Tom Hayden, and "Hanoi" Jane Fonda. I began Googling everything: Spiro Agnew wristwatches, his hilarious, William Safire-written speeches - wouldn't you love to hear a politician use the phrases "pusillanimous pussyfooting" or "nattering nabobs of negativism" again? Sure you would. And by the way, did Jerry Rubin have kids? Did they kill him? If not, why not?

Although Perlstein is obviously left-leaning, he does not shy away from the flaws of the Democrats, showcasing how out of touch they had become with examples such as actress Shirley McClaine, while campaigning for George McGovern, telling a room full of poor Black women that they knew better than anyone that money wasn't important, that America valued the wrong things. She was met with "a stony silence," and, baffled, had to be told by a young black man that being lectured by a rich White woman about the meaninglessness of money was a bit too much, particularly when money was what these women needed more than anything else. When he shows how Nixon appealed to what later became known as "values voters," not Hollywood elites, the idea of the "silent majority" clicks into place and you can clearly see how a generation of working class began to identify with Pat Nixon and her "Republican cloth coat," a phrase delivered by Nixon in his famous "Checkers" speech, as he fought to keep his place on the 1960 Presidential ticket by downplaying his wealth, and mistakenly viewed the Republicans as being the party for the everyday Joe, kicked around and laughed at by the snobs.

Was Nixon the central feature in the split of modern America? Maybe, maybe not, but the idea of such a deeply paranoid, ruthless man managing to unite the majority of America by tapping into our own paranoia and ruthlessness is both fascinating and unnerving, and well worth six weeks of sitting at the traffic light.

_____________________________

Nixonland
by Rick Perlstein
May, 2008 by Scribner
Hardcover, 881pp
ISBN: 0-7432-4302-1

2008-10-28T09:56:00.005-05:00

In the Woods.

It was such a pleasure to read this book. Written for people with longer attention spans, In the Woods starts off with powerful, frightening imagery - a terrified little boy is found in the woods near his home, clinging to a tree, his two best friends missing, his shoes filled with someone else's blood - then burns along slowly, building up to yet another shocking image at the end.

The meat of the story is solid, methodical police work. One of my former employees was married to a police officer. I asked her if he was able to watch police shows. My sister, an emergency room nurse, doesn't watch Grey's Anatomy or ER, because she doesn't want to be reminded of work when she isn't there. My employee said no, he doesn't, but mostly it's because in TV land, the police are "the luckiest cops in the whole wide world."

In Tana French's debut novel, this is not the case.

After the beginning, when we are introduced to that frightened little boy, we jump twenty years into the future. That little boy has grown up to be Rob Ryan, a police detective. Due to the trauma, Ryan has no memory of the incident, and barely remembers his life before it. When a little girl is found murdered on the same spot where he was found and his two schoolmates mysteriously disappeared, he and his partner Cassie think he'll be able to go home again to Knocknaree, a picturesque little town a few miles from Dublin, and work the case.

Of course, as Thomas Wolfe told us, you can't go home again. Most of the woods has been turned into an archeological site, and the entire woods, including the dig, are slated to be razed and replaced with a major highway. Rob, Cassie, and fellow detective Sam carefully compile various leads - the murdered little girl is the daughter of the man leading a protest against the highway's development: was it political? The family of the girl is hiding something very weird: was there abuse in the home? There was a mysterious, twenty-year old patch of blood found on the rock that served as a murder weapon, and an elastic ponytail holder that belonged to Rob's missing schoolmate was found near the crime scene: are the crimes related?

Rob, Cassie, and Sam carefully investigate each lead and all the directions the leads take them. Unlike the detectives on Law & Order, they become frustrated by leads that peter out, information they are unable to obtain, and false clues sprinkled throughout the case. Adding to this is the stress Rob has put on himself by surrounding himself with his own trauma, and his personality slowly begins to disintegrate, leaving Cassie and Sam to cover for him. And, as it turns out, Cassie and Sam have traumas of their own that the case has dredged up and all three come to a fork in the road: Do they let their past destroy them, or make them stronger?

In the Woods is so carefully detailed that I would have to put the book down as soon as I felt my attention wander. The book demands you bring your A game, because the scraps of clues presented in the beginning tie together in the end, and if you aren't paying attention, you'll miss it. In this regard, French is able to make the reader feel like a real detective, demanding the same level of commitment and concentration from the reader that a detective must give to an increasingly complicated case.

As the pieces begin adding up, a frightening picture begins to emerge, and French builds the tension up to its terrible conclusion. And just like life, several ends remain untied, and what is lost is as much as what is gained.

Rob Ryan is a character that is so well-developed it's almost impossible to believe he isn't real. Lonely and disconnected in a way that often seems callous, it becomes clear that the essential part of Ryan never left the woods. His refusal to acknowledge this simple truth causes him to detach from the world, watching it pass him by as he still clings to the tree, unable to run, unable to cry for help. The child he used to be has been deeply buried inside Ryan, along with much of his memory and his soul. He lives with an ex-girlfriend in a cordial, but strained relationship. Although he views her with contempt, he makes no effort to improve his living situation. He has no friends, no girlfriend, and parents he rarely speaks to, but makes no effort to alleviate his loneliness. Cassie, his partner, is his whole world, and when the stress of the case begins to take its toll on him, he reacts by picking away at his one real, solid anchor, Cassie's loyalty, instead of reaching for the love he is sure to receive.

His partner, Cassie, is glorious. A brilliant detective often hamstrung by the relentless sexism in her department, Cassie's strength and resilience seems bottomless. Her detective work is flawless, and, unlike Ryan, she draws strength from her mistakes and uses her awful, secret past to her advantage later in life. She is the girl everyone wants to be, and every moment spent with Cassie shines.

In the Woods is an impressive debut novel. It traps you in its world and keeps you there for several days after the last page is read, musing over what was, and what might have been. And that is a book of the very best kind.
_______________________

In the Woods
by Tana French
May 2008 by Penguin
Paperback, 464pp
ISBN: 0-14311-349-6

2008-10-16T10:48:00.012-05:00

Lovehampton.

As you may know, I have been consistently running about three months behind on putting up reviews for about two years. What you may not know, however, is that now I am four months behind. I rationalize this by telling myself that I will be the second wind, either encouraging you to go out and buy a book you may have missed when it first came out, or making you glad you didn't buy it when everyone else had their reviews out the first week of its release.

Unfortunately, with some books this excuse doesn't work as well as I would like it to. Some books like Sherri Rifkin's Lovehampton. Lovehampton is a book written to be read at the beach. Even more specifically, it is a book written to be read at the beach during the summer of 2008. Even more specifically, it is a book written to be read by upper middle class women in their late twenties-early thirties at the beach during the summer of 2008.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Here's your summer beach read review!

LoveHampton is yet another chick lit book about a woman, Tori Miller, who is supposed to represent you, the late-twenties/early thirties upper middle class white female reader, who can totally relate to Tori's struggle against...whatever it is she's struggling against. Tori is depressed from being dumped by Peter, who she thought was The One (And by one, I do not mean Barack Obama, but Mr. Right. Who you may also think is Barack Obama, but I can't help you. Please try to think of something other than the election. It's summer!) She is pulled back from the ledge by her friends Alice, Jerry, and Jimmy, who rope her into getting a reality-show makeover and shuttle her off to a summer in the Hamptons, where she will be spending the summer with a handful of total strangers.

All the stock characters are represented: Leah, the Mean Girl/Queen Bee who is in charge of the house and keeps referring to Tori by the wrong name, a British man who I keep wanting to call "Nigel" who is dry and reserved and has a stiff upper lip and generally keeps going all English on your ass, Cassie, the beauty editor from Elle who is cooler than you but totally nice, Stacy, the younger bubbly one who is in love with Michael, the loud New Yorker, and Andrew who is The! One!

But Tori doesn't realize at first that Andrew is The! One! because he seems like such a player. But it's only to disguise his broken heart, and so she dates this very rich man, George, instead, but he's a cad, and so on and so on, and I know you can probably write this book yourselves by now.

The only really good news I can report is that we seem to be winning the war against the legs-and-feet covers that we've been plagued with for so long. See the cover? The nice attractive beach and brightly colored beach towels draped over the driftwood fence? Much, much better. Well, done, cover artist Ralph Fowler.

Even though I found the book somewhat annoying - frequent references are made to the characters' "crackberries" - I still feel that I should have rolled this review out at the beginning of the summer. There are a million and one pop culture references in the book that became dated 3 months ago, so the shelf life here is pretty short.

Then I remembered: the Summer of 2008 is just starting in Australia and New Zealand. I'm not too late! I'm right on time! Fly! Fly, Aussies and Kiwis! Buy a copy now! Summer of '08 has just begun!

________________________

Lovehampton
by Sherri Rifkin
May, 2008 by St. Martin's Griffin
310pp, Paperback
ISBN: 0-31238021-6

2008-10-11T18:44:00.005-05:00

The Host.

That's how we realized you were here, you know, she said, thinking of the sickening news headlines again. When the evening news was nothing but inspiring human-interest stories, when pedophiles and junkies were lining up at the hospitals to turn themselves in, when everything morphed into Mayberry, that's when you tipped your hand.

"Argh!" Jared and Jamie groaned together.

Jared lounges on the leather sofa and Jamie sprawls on the carpet in front of him. They're watching a basketball game on the big-screen TV. The parasites who live in this house are at work, and we've already filled the jeep with all it can hold. We have hours to rest before we need to disappear again.

On the TV, two players are disagreeing politely on the sideline. The cameraman is close; we can hear what they are saying.

"I believe I was the last one to touch it - it's your ball."

"I'm not sure about that. I wouldn't want to take any unfair advantage. We'd better have the refs review the tape."

The players shake hands, pat each other's shoulders.

"This is ridiculous," Jared grumbles.

What if the Earth's population was wiped out and replaced by the residents of Pleasantville?

Global genocide is devastating; global genocide at the hands of Donny and Marie is humiliating.

Although that's not precisely the premise of Stephenie Meyer's The Host, it's the question that keeps coming to mind throughout the gigantic novel.

Melanie Stryder, one of the remaining "wild humans," is in Chicago, searching for her cousin Sharon, who she believes has not yet been overtaken by the body snatchers. She is spotted by the Seekers, the parasite's version of the Police, in an abandoned building in Chicago, and throws herself down an elevator shaft rather than be captured and have her body used to house an alien life form. Unsuccessful, she is revived by the alien doctors, who cut a slit into her neck and insert The Wanderer, a new arrival to Earth.

However, Melanie's soul refuses to leave the body, and, much to Wanderer's dismay, makes her rage fill the spaces not inhabited by the alien.

An uneasy truce between the two forms, and The Wanderer comes to realize the horror of what her people are doing, and Melanie in turn begins to appreciate the kindness of the alien race, and that they are colonizing not out of hate, but because of what they are. The Wanderer abandons society, walking into the desert in search of Melanie's little brother Jamie, and her boyfriend Jared, not to turn them over to the seekers, but to help the resistance.

Her decision is made, in part, by the constant harassment of a particularly obnoxious female Seeker, who suspects something is not quite right with the Wanderer, but does not know that Melanie is still inside the body. The Seeker has an unusually enthusiastic taste for hunting down and killing unpossessed humans, a trait which shocks Melanie and the Wanderer both, drawing them together in a the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way.

This is when the book really began to fly for me, in no small part because this tense interaction between the three of them passes the Mo Movie Measure in a way I haven't experienced since, well, since the last time I read a Dykes to Watch Out for cartoon.

The book goes on forever with women engaging in dialogue that is almost always written to be spoken by men. It is teh awesome. It's like having Angela Basset replacing Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, grumbling, "I'm too old for this shit," while reaching for her gun. And, I don't know, Ellen Degeneres can pop up beside her, imitating the Three Stooges or something.

But I digress.

Stephenie Meyer seems to have a large following for her young adult Vampire novels. The Host is her first adult novel, and she really knows how to tell a story. I read the 624 page book in two days, something I haven't been able to do in a long time. She's been playing in the kid leagues for quite awhile it seems, because the sex is non-existent, and the violence and swearing are minimal. A precocious twelve-year-old would find the novel enjoyable and not particularly challenging. That's not meant to be insulting, J.K. Rowling's books weren't read just by kids.

By reversing the roles, with the body snatcher being the protagonist and the wild humans the dangerous savages, Meyer employs one of my favorite ways of story-telling, the unreliable narrator.

The Wanderer, or Wanda, as she comes to be called, is in turns horrified and disgusted by the violence and rage she sees in humans.

There was a stack of newspapers inside [the cupboard], covered with dust. I pulled one out, curious shaking the dirt to the floor, and read the date.

From human times, I noted. Not that I needed a date to tell me that.

"Man Burns Three-Year-Old Daughter to Death," the headline screamed at me, accompanied by a picture of an angelic blond child. This wasn't the front page. The horror detailed here was not so hideous as to rate priority coverage. Beneath this was the face of a man wanted for the murders of his wife and two children two years before the print date; the story was about a possible sighting of the man in Mexico. Two people killed and three injured in a drunk--driving accident. A fraud and murder investigation into the alleged suicide of a prominent local banker. A suppressed confession setting an admitted child molester free. House pets found slaughtered in a trash bin.

I cringed, shoving the paper away from me, back into the dark cupboard.

Those were the exceptions, not the norm, Melanie thought quietly, trying to keep the fresh horror of my reaction from seeping into her memories of those years and recoloring them.

Can you see how we thought we might be able to do better, though? How we could have supposed that maybe you didn't deserve all the excellent things of this world?

Wanda, convinced of her people's goodness and the evil nature of human beings, does not realize that the honest, kind worlds her race creates are not possible without the wholesale slaughter of human beings, that, even worse, human beings are created for the sole purpose of being harvested to make more Souls, as the parasites call themselves. She can't understand why the humans are all so angry.

I just love that.

As the novel progresses, Wanda and Melanie become a team, and navigate the narrow line they walk between human and Soul, sharing an aching love for Jared, who is devastated by Melanie's alien possession and has become Wanda's enemy as a result, and their unconditional love for Melanie's little brother Jamie.

As the two of them marched along towards the book's somewhat satisfying conclusion - as satisfying as it can be when the human race is wiped out - I found myself staying up later and later to finish it.

It was worth every minute of lost sleep.

_________________________

The Host
by Stephenie Meyer
May, 2008 by Little, Brown
Hardcover 624pp
ISBN: 978-0316068048

2008-10-07T09:51:00.005-05:00

The Lazarus Project.

"The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908, Chicago. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge."

From that precise date The Lazarus Project begins, immediately splitting into a dual storyline where, in the first, fact is bound by fiction, and in the second, fiction is bound by fact.

Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon has somehow created a post-modernist historical meta-novel. I'm not exactly sure that's even possible, but I read the damn thing, and he did it, so there you go.

The story opens with the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish Russian immigrant gunned down in 1908 by Chicago's chief of police, Chief Shippy, who tries to justify the murder by fabricating a history of anarchy and terrorism, fueled by anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant paranoia. Just look at young Lazarus, Shippy and the papers say, obviously he was a murderous anarchist.

Moving forward to 2008, Vladimir Brik, a Chicago writer, becomes interested in the ancient crime and is moved to write a fictionalized account. After securing a research grant, Brik, a Sarajevo native, takes off with his childhood friend Rora to eastern Europe. Brik and Rora, now a war photographer, make the trek from the Ukraine to Sarajevo, loosely researching the life of young Lazarus Averbuch and his older sister, Olga.

The novel moves back and forth between story lines, touchingly filling in the gaps surrounding Lazarus and Olga, who survived the pogroms in Russia, only to escape to even greater tragedy in the United States. In an interview Hemon gave to Powell's, he claimed to have found writing from a woman's point of view to be challenging. In his cringe-inducing description of Olga's treatment by the police and the press in the aftermath of the murder, he more than adequately met that challenge. Hemon re-creates the scene where Olga is taken to the morgue to identify the body of her brother. No one has bothered to tell her he is dead; her shock and grief are to be their entertainment for the duration of the novel:

Men are gathered around the chair where Lazarus sits, and she is relieved to see he is alive. She sighs and grips Fitzpatrick's forearm. But one of the men is holding Lazarus's head; her brother's eyes are closed, his face ashen; her heart stops, frozen. Fitzgerald urges her on. Fitzpatrick says, as if delivering a punch line: "Happy to see him? Give him a kiss.." The crowd titters, transfixed by Olga steeping toward Lazarus, as if she were mounted on cothurni: a short, reluctant step back, then two awkward steps forward to touch his lifeless cheek, whereupon she collapses, unconscious. The crowd gasps. The Fitzes carry her to the side door opening into the alley, where they unbutton her dress and allow her to breathe the cold air. The detectives smoke, while Miller monitors Olga's feelings, as well as her chest. "That must've been a big surprise for you, girlie," Fitzpatrick says. They hear the booms of the photographer's flash inside.

Lazarus has been dehumanized as a young Jewish man, but Olga has been dehumanized twice, once as a Jew and again as a woman. The leering commentary, lifted from old Tribune articles about the murder, has been inserted into the novel, almost as if it had to be, or we would never believe such taunting cruelty would be possible.

As for the morgue scene itself, that was real, too. Before each chapter is a photo of Chicago in 1908 or Eastern Europe in 2008, and the death photo of Averbuch is there.

In the other story, Brik and Rora bumble around Eastern Europe, spending the grant money on terrifying cab rides and wretched hotels that double as brothels. Brik, despite his detached, ironic tone, is somewhat of a naïf, constantly surprised by the often squalid conditions of human life but trying very hard not to be. Rora is the true cynic, photographing everything but impressed by nothing. Throughout the journey he tells a third tale of his life as a war photographer in Sarajevo during the genocide, and his involvement with a psychopathic war criminal named Rambo, who, he convinces Brik, will kill him if he is spotted back in Bosnia. Rora spins this tale, interspersed with shaggy dog jokes, throughout the journey, telling Brik everything and nothing all at once, while Brik, who is much quieter, gives himself away to everyone he meets.

As the centuries-apart stories progress, the parallels of genocide, racism, immigration, and dispossession bind the tales to each other, and characters from one story begin to bleed into another. Even the tale of Rora and Brik wavers between fact and fiction. Hemon and a photographer friend made the same journey as Rora and Brik while researching the novel, and the photographs taken by Rora that dot the novel were taken by Velibor Božović, Hemon's travelling companion.

Simultaneously aloof and compelling, true and fictitious, The Lazarus Project is an ambitious novel, inviting the reader to examine the many angles of love and cruelty, and the meaning of home.

______________________

The Lazarus Project
by Aleksandar Hemon
May, 2008 by Riverhead
Hardcover, 304pp
ISBN: 978-1594489884

2008-10-06T18:33:00.004-05:00

The Wordy Shipmates.

I’d never heard of Sarah Vowell until about 4 years ago, when someone wrote me and told me my writing style and hers were similar. I thought Sarah Vowell was an 18th-century actress, so I was a little confused, but recognized it as a compliment, so I thanked her, then Googled “Sarah Vowell” to make sure. It turns out I was confusing her with Sarah Siddons, the 18th century Meryl Streep of Drury Lane. After listening to Vowell read some of her essays on NPR, I was properly schooled, but had to admit two things: 1.) I want her job, and 2.) she deserves it because she’s a far better writer than I am.

Vowell’s books are history books, told in a personable, irreverent style that makes history seem like it happened yesterday, like somebody telling you something they read on Perez. Old fights turn into juicy gossip, old injustices sting and cry out for retribution. Her research takes her to a myriad places, and it seems like an endless road trip, pulling over by the side of the road to soak in every mossy historical plaque or crumbling statue.

But how much fun it must be to toodle around the country, blowing up stuff with her dad in Montana or visiting Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Illinois or, more recently, holing up in a library in Boston, reading a Puritan’s ancient diary. Okay, maybe fun for just a few, but to me it sounds like a dream job.

The latest results of Vowell's awesome job, The Wordy Shipmates, is an in-depth look at the laugh-a-minute world of the Puritans.

“God, why?” people would groan when she was researching the book. “Why Puritans?”

At which point, depending on my mood, I would either mumble something about my fondness for sermons as literature or mention taking my nephew to the Mayflower replica waterslide in a hotel pool in Plymouth. I would never answer with the honest truth. Namely, that in the weeks after two planes crashed into two skyscrapers here on the worst day of our lives, I found comfort in the words of [Massachusetts’s first governor John] Winthrop. When we were mourning together, when we were suffering together, I often thought of what he said and finally understood what he meant.

Vowell is referring to Winthrop’s essay, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it, Winthrop delivers the line that has become a favorite of politicians nationwide, comparing New England to a “shining city on a hill.” Revived by Ronald Reagan, this metaphor has stuck with Americans. We strongly identify with being the gatekeepers of that shining city, where the rest of the world wants to live.

I don’t know whether or not the Puritans thought everybody was eager to dress in black and slap silver buckles on their shoes, but they sure thought that’s what everybody should want.

This attitude, that American’s are God’s own little rays of sunshine, was conceived by John Cotton and hammered into our national consciousness by John Winthrop. The anti-sex prude reputation the Puritans have is not actually the reputation they deserve. Instead, it’s the far more modest idea that we are God’s favorite that is the point of view that continues on to this day.

Vowell, while spinning out an amazingly detailed history of Puritan leaders such as Cotton, Winthrop, and rabble-rouser and Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, also paints an intricate painting of Puritan daily life, while constantly drawing parallels to modern times.

Referring to our view of ourselves as God’s chosen, Vowell writes, “The most ironic and entertaining example of that mindset is the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal. The seal, which the Wintrhop fleet brought with them from England, pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Words are coming out of his mouth. The Indian says, ‘Come over and help us.’ That is really what it says.”

Want to do something funny? Imagine instead of an Indian asking for help, it’s an Iraqi. Hilarious!

The Wordy Shipmates, moreso than her previous books, rambles on a little bit. Themes and chronology overlap, and it sometimes becomes difficult to tell which Puritan did what. There are theological differences between them, so nitpicky it’s unbelievable, yet, as Vowell points out, no more nitpicky than the differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and look at how well they’re getting along!

Once the Puritan lifestyle is closely examined – and it doesn’t get much closer than this, folks – you can see there’s not much truth in any of the Puritan stereotypes. For example, there’s a lot less witch-burning than one would think. Aside from the grisly interactions with the Indians (Roger Williams being the sole exception to this, being of the mindset to respect them rather than “help” them), the Puritans fought mainly by banishment from the community, or, if things got really exciting, a pamphlet war would break out.

If this had been a work of fiction, I may have demanded less pamphlets, more toasted witches.

As it is, I’ll just breathe a sigh of relief that there are no pamphlet wars today. That would get in the way of all that blog-feuding.

p.s. to Sarah Vowell: 1 firkin = 9 gallons

_____________________________

The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
October, 2008 by Riverhead
Hardcover, 272pp
ISBN: 978-1594489990

2008-09-17T09:29:00.007-05:00

Still Life With Husband.

You could sum this book up accurately just from the title (Still Life With Husband) and the cover (a woman, photographed from the back, in the act of removing her wedding ring.) Bored housewife. Suburbs. Husband, dull but kind. Sassy best friend as confidant. Too many sweets eaten to compensate for lack of adventure. Finds romance. Must choose.

And you'd be exactly right. In Lauren Fox's debut novel, Emily, the protagonist who describes herself as having a "mop of shoulder-length brown hair that is often more frizz than ringlets, dark brown eyes, and a large nose with a bump on the bridge." (In other words, Emily is a dead ringer for the author.) She is married to Kevin, a technical writer in love with his job. If you know any technical writers, you'd know how rare that is - inside every writer who carefully crafts the wording of stereo instructions beats the heart of Salman Rushdie, after all. Kevin, we are to assume, is a very sweet, very boring man who wants nothing more than to spirit Emily away to the boring burbs to buy a boring house and have 2.3 boring children. Emily, who has made it clear she does not want to live in the burbs or have children, has been resisting for awhile, but is starting to crack under the pressure of what she feels she should want.

Enter David, the sexy distraction, and the affair Emily plunges into with him signals the death toll of her marriage.

Affairs, as the experts will tell you, are not the cause of a marriage's end, they are but a symptom. Emily is under no illusion about the fact that she's deliberately trying to torch her marriage, but the guilt she feels is at times overwhelming.

Still Life With Husband is a prime example of why the Chicklit genre is so overwhelmingly successful. Emily's story is a blueprint of the soul of the Western woman, and the tender places Fox touches gives off painful twinges of recognition.

Emily is a woman who has a loving family and friends. She is well-educated but underemployed as an editor for a medical magazine about male reproduction. She is not confident about her physical appearance.

Let's stop right there and break that down.

1.) Emily is a woman who has a loving family and friends. Parents that she does not want to disappoint, who have made their hopes and expectations clear: It would make us very happy if our daughter were to get married and have children and that her husband take care of her so we do not have to worry about what will happen to her after we die.

Very rarely is the hope of the middle class parent I hope my daughter has a blazing career so she will always be financially independent. The end. It's great if that happens, but that's just gravy. Countless women absorb that primary directive of finding a good man who will take care of them, and countless more women internalize that if this is done, then happiness will follow. Because 1.) is the primary directive, that often leads to

2.) Well-educated but underemployed. Because 1.) is the ultimate goal, careers are often relegated to the backseat. They're never taken as seriously as what He does, because He's going to be the one working while She stays home, at least while the kids are little.

And then there's 3.)

She is not confident about her physical appearance. Of course she isn't. None of us are. We live in a world where the most beautiful women in the world are considered unsuitable for magazine covers unless they're photoshopped beyond recognition, where Richard Roeper publishes an essay expressing how offended he was at the sight of a size 8 woman in her underwear on a billboard. Not because she was in her underwear per se, but because he feels he should be entitled to only be presented with hawt, size 2 women at all times.

And there she is. She married a man that essentially, her parents chose; the man she feels she should want. Kevin: stable, kind, uneventful. She tells herself she loves him, because she feels that she should, and if she doesn't, then something is wrong with her, because a man who can take care of her is what she has been told will make her happy. Not his creativity, not his goals or ambitions, not his interest in her as a person. Had she held him to those standards, he would have failed on all accounts, because Kevin, despite all evidence to the contrary, ain't no prize pig.

It took me two days to finally conclude, with a satisfying jolt of insight, that not only was I not ready to have a baby, but that I didn't want to move out of our little apartment in the city, either - our bustling corner of the city where the sidewalks are crowded with people, and the movie theater, the bookstore and our favorite restaurants are all within a few blocks. Phew, I thought. Good thing I've figured this out before it's too late. I'll just go explain it to Kevin.

But my revelation was a mosquito in his ear; he flicked it away. Since then, Kevin has pressed on in his quest of suburban migration, alternating between ignoring me and thinking he can change my mind by sheer persistence.

Kevin, too, is a product of a society that tells young women that what they want is not really what they want, and this causes him to completely dismiss her feelings on such an important issue. And Emily isn't so sure that he isn't correct to dismiss her - after all, she is lucky. Lucky that she has found a man who fits the bill, a man who, despite her less-than-perfect looks, is willing to have her. How could she not be grateful? How could she not be happy? How could she reject his offer of a house and children? Something Must Be Wrong With Her!

Because of this, when a good-looking young man, David, catches her eye at a coffee shop while she is spending the morning with her BFF, the saucy, fertility-challenged Meg, and expresses interest in her, her world is completely rocked. David is, to Emily, a vision of what could be, and the part of her soul that still values her individuality, that tells her that mummifying herself in other people's expectations is wrong.

Despite her guilt and apprehension, Emily embarks on the affair with him. Had she not been so convinced that the person that she is is not the person she should be, she may have been able to muster up the confidence to end the badly-matched relationship with Kevin. Or, at best, to have rejected his proposal in the first place.

Lauren Fox has unerringly placed Emily on the sweetspot of the modern straight woman's internal battleground. She is all of us, but with snappier dialogue. And as long as girls are told who to look for, rather than who to be, Fox's books, and the myriad others like hers, will keep flying off the shelves.

____________________________

Still Life With Husband
by Lauren Fox
April, 2008 by Vintage
Paperback, 308pp
ISBN: 978-0307277374

2008-09-06T23:50:00.006-05:00

Months and Seasons.

The cover of Christopher Meeks’ collection of short stories sparked some interest in my household. The kids are so accustomed to seeing me with my nose in a book, they don’t pay any attention to what it is unless the cover is particularly compelling. In fact, the last book that caught their eye was What Do You Do All Day?, with the orange popsicle on the cover, and that was 3 years ago.

Months and Seasons, with its seductive cover of baby chicks, really got them going, and why not? One of my earliest memories is going to a pet store with my mother when I was three or so. It was around Easter, and the front of the store had a large pen filled with baby chicks, dyed in pastel purples, pinks, and blues. It was the most awesome thing in the history of ever, as far as I was concerned, and I joined the gaggle of small children pleading with their mothers to buy one – just one!

Unfortunately, our mothers were farsighted enough to see three weeks into the future, and the idea of a flock of grown chickens running amok in the suburbs was a bit too much to bear. I don’t think this is done anymore, and a good thing, too, because talk about an idea that looks good on paper but turns into a disaster in reality. I can only assume this trend was created by other live-in-the-moment three-year-olds.*

Back to the book, I’ve never seen a black baby chicken** before, but would you look at that attitude? Clearly, it has things on its mind it would like to have addressed.

Much to the disappointment of the kids, Months and Seasons does not dwell on the innermost thoughts of wee disgruntled fowl. Instead, the stories in the collection revolve around boring old grown-up stuff; relationships, mostly, with an L.A. flavor.

In the title story, a Best Boy looks for love at a movie wrap party, banking on superstition to bring him success with women, and meets a woman who seems just too good to be true.

In “Breaking Water,” a former swimsuit model is abandoned by her husband after she undergoes open heart surgery, and she must begin her life anew.

In other stories, such as “Dracula Slinks Into the Night,” and “The Farms at 93rd and Broadway,” Meeks deftly dissects the art of marriage, creating flawed, all-too-human characters that find happiness by choosing to trust each other in uncertain times.

In “Dracula,” analytical Hugh reluctantly attends a costume party with his cheerful, spontaneous wife Kathleen, and it takes a near-fatal accident to make him realize that in order for him to keep the woman he loves, he must learn to meet her in the middle.

In “The Farms,” and in “A Shoe Falls,” men contemplate the age old Ann Landers question, “Am I better off with her or without her?” In one story, the answer seems to be yes, in the other, it seems to be no, but Meeks lets the reader draw her own conclusions.

In his strongest story, “The Sun Is a Billiard Ball,” the lives of two separate families play out, crossing only briefly at the end. Meeks lets their lives slowly unfold around the reader, creating a world so real you can drop right inside.

“The Wind Just Right,” the sweetest story of the bunch, delves into the life of Tutti, a teenage girl who parallels “Dracula’s” Hugh by learning of the rewards that can come from flexibility, when she teaches a little girl how to swim.

Each story in Months and Seasons seems carefully written, each individual drawn in full and set in all the places you know by heart. Although no new ground is broken, it’s still pleasurable to spend some time on pleasant, familiar ground.

_______________________________

*Did you ever wonder how they dyed those chicks? A 2004 article from the BBC claims that dye is injected into the albumen of the egg, and the dye covers the outside of the developing chick, but doesn’t affect the inside. So when the chicks hatch, they are perfectly normal except they’re, you know, pink. I don’t know how they did it in 1973, but I assume it was done the same way.

**Originally, I had written “black chick,” but changed it to something more awkwardly phrased to avoid mockery and bad jokes.

________________________________

Months and Seasons
by Christopher Meeks
April, 2008 by White Whisker Books
Paperback, 172pp
ISBN: 978-0-6151-8870-6

2008-09-02T09:41:00.005-05:00

Armageddon In Retrospect.

When Kurt Vonnegut died last April, at the age of 84, America lost one of its greatest living writers, leaving Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, and Toni Morrison to carry on without him. His body of work - Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Man Without a Country, and most memorably, Slaughterhouse Five - all mastered the seemingly impossible task of combining human tragedy with light-hearted optimism and humor, and his words glue themselves to the mind.

Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut's masterpiece, touched the closest to his memories as a young prisoner of war in WWII, where he survived the controversial firebombing of Dresden, a U.S. and British air raid that is estimated to have killed between 25,000-40,000 people, mostly female civilians and children. Vonnegut's unit was held in captivity in an underground meat locker in a former slaughterhouse, Schlachthof-Fünf. This turned out to be one of the safest places in town. Slaughterhouse Five is a loosely structured science fiction novel whose protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, becomes unstuck in time and travels to various points in his life as a way of dealing with the emotional impact of having survived the bombs dropped by his own allies. The novel was also the way Vonnegut himself dealt with the emotional fallout of being a survivor.

Armageddon In Retrospect is Vonnegut's last, posthumous work, and features previously unpublished essays, stories, letters, and his last speech given at the age of eighty-two.

In these essays and letters, Vonnegut was able to put Billy Pilgrim aside and delve more deeply into the bombing of Dresden and the impact it had on him.

Vonnegut's son Mark, a pediatrician and novelist, wrote in the introduction that the war in Iraq broke his heart, and in one of his essays angrily remarks, "When does all the hate end? Never."

The pieces in Armageddon In Retrospect revolve mostly around war and peace, and his direct experience as a young soldier in Dresden.

The collection begins with a letter written by a 23-year-old Vonnegut to his father on May 29th, 1945. He had been listed as "missing in action," and this was the first word his parents had received either from or about him for 6 months.

I've been a prisoner of war since December 19th, 1944, when our division was cut to ribbons by Hitler's last desperate thrust through Luxembourg and Belgium. Seven Fanatical Panzer Divisions hit us and cut us off from the rest of Hodges' First Army. The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight - so we gave up.

He goes on to describe being marched 60 miles with no food or water, to be crammed into a cattle car and taken to prison in Dresden. They were released from the cattle car after 12 days. As for the bombing, Vonnegut merely says,

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me.

In his following essay Wailing in the Streets, Vonnegut digs in a little deeper, writing about his forced labor in the aftermath, dragging the charred corpses of women, old men, and children out of the remains of the buildings, and about the American planes that flew overhead the next day, raining leaflets down on the survivors that read, "To the people of Dresden: We were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying."

The railroads were repaired and running at full speed ahead within 48 hours.

The carnage of the once beautiful city, a city "so anti-Nazi Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign," and his forced work as damage repair, solidified his views against war.

Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.

The short stories in Armageddon come at the follies of war from different angles. In "Great Day," Vonnegut satirizes the tendency of man to wage war, regardless of truth or reason. In "Happy Birthday, 1951," the same approach is told from a different angle, as an old man tries to instill in a little boy a love for peace, with disappointing results. Others, such as "Brighten Up," and "Spoils," observe the behavior of American prisoners, in particular the ones who manage to turn a profit in the labor camp at the expense of their fellow man.

In other stories, the narrative is not war per se, but the stories certainly make a strong analogies for it. "Unicorn Trap" explores the abuse of power and how the poor are forced into making soul-crushing choices in order to survive, and "Unknown Soldier," where a grieving father tells of the loss of his infant daughter, born at midnight on New Year's Eve. Her birth is hyped and she is showered with gifts and scholarships, only to be neglected and forgotten upon her death by the same press that adored her.

Between the essays are sketches drawn by Vonnegut, little doodles serving as dividers.

Taken as a whole, this posthumous collection eloquently explains why George and Dick's Excellent Iraq Adventure broke Vonnegut's heart. Having had to clean up the bomb-strewn bodies in an Allied-destroyed city, during a war in which our service were needed to stop a monster, it must have hit Vonnegut particularly hard to imagine cleaning up bits and pieces of children torn apart in the name of a cheap lie.

For any Vonnegut fan, Armageddon In Retrospect
, rounds out the man's life and clarifies many of his views and his spirit. For those who have not read his work, it is a decent enough introduction. But for Pete's sake, go out right now and pick up Slaughterhouse Five.

You don't want to be caught dead not having read it.

___________________

Armageddon In Retrospect
by Kurt Vonnegut
April 2008 by Putnam
Hardcover, 240pp
ISBN: 0399155082

2008-08-30T13:39:00.004-05:00

When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot.

"Wow," said my friend Char, as she slouched on my sofa, flipping idly through the pages of this book, "this is a really offensive story. Have you read it? It's about having sex with a fat woman."

"Oh, god. I haven't read it yet," I said, "it's next on my list of books to review."

"Huh," she said, putting the book face down on the floor, where I picked it up later and read the story in question, "Peggy."

If I was the cynical type, I thought, I'd think this was going to be a string of sentences all run together, all unified by the same centuries-old joke, "FAT WOMEN! BWAAA HA HA HA HA! SEX WITH FAT WOMEN IS HILARIOUS!" and feeling that that was enough to make the story funny and brilliant.

At her hotel, to which we necessarily took separate cabs, the first thing Peggie did was crack open, and inhale, the complete contents of a package of Mallomars. Then, from a utility-kitchen refrigerator, she retrieved and devoured (in exactly what order I don't recall) a container of chicken wings, a combo plate of tacos and an economy-size tub of Velveeta.)

Sigh. This is why cynics insist that they're not really cynics, they're just realists. It's less the subject matter that annoys me, although it's casual cruelty definitely does, and more the fact that I'm supposed to find the punchline hilarious even after I've heard it a million times. It's like The Aristocrats joke - the punchline isn't funny, so the set-up better be unique. It isn't. "Peggy," reads like a blog entry that's good enough to attract a decent amount of d00ds, but not good enough to be in book form. Think of Levin as a senior citizen version of Tucker Max, and that's pretty much what you get.

The title story is another womanizer who capitalizes on his vague resemblance to Dustin Hoffman and/or Al Pacino in order to pick up women. A short, dark haired guy with that nebulous ethnic look, he acquires a girlfriend with an IQ that hovers around room temperature who adores him. The girlfriend, who is saddled with the unfortunate name of Roger, speaks almost entirely in malapropisms.

Her father, she said, had been a profligator of languigistics at a presticated universalment but had quit his tender position and dissipated.

And so on.

Judging from other reviews I've read, men find these short stories side-splitting, but the sancimonious women's studies set has always been a tougher crowd, so what can I tell you? Other reviewers also found the story "Spinning on the Meat Wheel of Conception" - great title, by the way - to be one of the weaker entries, but I'm going to disagree again, because I think it was pretty strong. "Spinning" focuses on male anxiety regarding conception, again asking the age-old questions both men and women ask themselves, "Am I ready?", "Is this really what I want?", "Is my sex life going to be ruined?" These questions grow heavier in the nebbish-y Steve's mind, and at last his nerves are shot, resulting in a total ability to perform. This continues unabated until his wife, Connie, creatively solves the problem by making the night of contraception a night to remember by being unspeakably filthy. The yin and yang between the two, her strength when his is lost, his caution when she is reckless, form a perfect circle on which new life can begin.

And that's how you write a story. Having a fat woman eat Velveeta isn't enough.

"Spinning" made for a good lead-in to Levin's essays, which made up the second half of the book.

The essays raise the caliber of the book considerably. His theories regarding the ways religion and politics are used to ward off the fear of death have a strong ring of originality and genuine passion, making them more interesting by far. Others, in particular "Recycle This!" where he describes his aggravation with recycling and the absurdity of washing one's garbage, is a must-read. Also essential reading is Levin's 2003 essay "Redefining Insurance Fraud," where Levin battles insurance companies.

...most of the 45 million-plus Americans who go without insurance because they can't afford the premiums oppose the alternative of a not-for-profit system. It apparently hasn't occurred to them that there'd be no significant risk to capitalism in this solution. We've already got "socialized" institutions in this country - fire departments, for example - that hardly infringe on our freedom to take advantage of one another. A few more would still leave us with plenty of opportunities to exploit our fellow man.

(And speaking of a not-for-profit health care system, does anyone seriously think that dealing with a government bureaucracy would somehow be more brutal than dealing with Aetna, Prudential, or Oxford?)

Well, yeah. That's pretty much it.

When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot is a somewhat erratic collection, lending some truth to the title. When Levin's Hot, He's Hot. But when he's not, he's not.

__________________________

by Robert Levin
January, 2008 by Drill Press LLC
Paperback, 109pp
ISBN: 061518765X

2008-08-17T11:03:00.000-05:00

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.

Once, in a house on Egypt Street, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement.
His ears were made of real rabbit fur, and beneath the fur, there were strong, bendable wires, which allowed the ears to be arranged into poses that reflected the rabbit’s mood — jaunty, tired, full of ennui. His tail, too, was made of real rabbit fur and was fluffy and soft and well shaped.
The rabbit’s name was Edward Tulane, and he was tall. He measured almost three feet from the tip of his ears to the tip of his feet; his eyes were painted a penetrating and intelligent blue.
In all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be), but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially — what unsavory animal — was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not. He preferred, as a rule, not to think unpleasant thoughts.
Edward’s mistress was a ten-year-old, dark-haired girl named Abilene Tulane, who thought almost as highly of Edward as Edward thought of himself.

Reader, did you know that The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is the newest book by Kate DiCamillo, author of Because of Winn Dixie and the 2004 Newbery Award winner Despereaux?*

I’m starting to think this Kate person has a knack for writing children’s books or something.

I didn’t think she would be able to top Despereaux, and maybe Edward Tulane is better and maybe it isn’t, but Despereaux, for whatever reason, didn’t kick my ass as hard as Edward Tulane did.

Edward Tulane, as you may have surmised from the above excerpt, is a large china rabbit, a toy handcrafted especially for a wealthy little girl, Abilene. Abilene is very proud of Edward, and loves him with all her heart. Edward, however, does not feel the same way about her. In fact, he considers her expressions of love to be pointless and annoying, as it gets in the way of his narcissism. However, Abilene’s grandmother, Pelligrina, is onto him, and does not like the way he takes her granddaughter’s love for granted.

On the night before the Tulane family takes a voyage on the Queen Mary, Pelligrina tells Abilene and Edward a bedtime story about a princess who cannot love. The princess encounters a witch, who, after speaking with the princess for awhile, remarks, “You disappoint me.”

At the story’s conclusion, Pelligrina tucks Edward into bed, and whispers ominously into his large floppy ear, “You disappoint me.”

“I think that Grandma’s up to something,” remarked Christopher last night, and indeed she was. Edward ends up flying overboard the Queen Mary on the second day of their ocean voyage, and sinks to the bottom of the sea, where he remains for almost a year.

I usually read about three chapters of a book a night to Christopher, depending on the length of the chapters. One chapter for the Harry Potter books, as many as five for Captain Underpants or Junie B. Jones. That night, we read ten chapters of Edward Tulane. Christopher fell asleep in the middle of chapter ten, but I left the light on and kept reading. Reader, I have never done this before.

After Christopher fell asleep, a storm stirred up the bottom of the ocean floor, and lifted Edward to the surface, where he was caught in a fisherman’s net. The fisherman takes the rabbit home and gives him to his wife, Nellie. Although Nellie mistakes Edward for a girl, renaming him Susannah, and sews him several pretty pink dresses, Edward surprises himself by not caring. Anything is better than being at the bottom of the ocean, he thinks. He stays with the elderly couple for a long time, sitting in a wooden high chair at the dinner table, looking up at the night sky with the fisherman, sitting on the kitchen counter with Nellie while she bakes, and begins to feel affection for them in his little china heart. But this idyllic time cannot last, and one day their brassy daughter Lolly comes to visit. Lolly is angered by the affection her parents are showing Edward, and throws him in the garbage.

He is taken to the city dump, and lies under a pile of garbage for 40 days, thinking about love, and repeating the names of the people who have loved him: Abilene, Nellie, Lawrence, Abilene, Nellie, Lawrence. Finally, he is dug up by a dog, Lucy, and dropped at the feet of her owner, a homeless man named Bull. Bull keeps Edward and renames him Malone, and soon Edward learns to ride the rails with the pair. When Bull and Lucy first show up at the hobo camps with Edward, the other hoboes make fun of Bull and his “dolly,” but when Bull doesn’t seem to mind the teasing, the hoboes begin to feel drawn to Edward.

Finally, one of the hoboes, Jack, asks if he can hold Edward. When Bull passes Edward over to Jack’s lap, Jack leans forward and whispers into Edward’s ear: “Helen...and Jack Junior and Taffy - she's the baby. Those are my kids' names. They are all in North Carolina. You ever been to North Carolina? It's a pretty state. That's where the are. Helen. Jack Junior. Taffy. You remember their names, okay, Malone?"

Soon all the hoboes are whispering the names of their children into his ears, and Edward understands, because he knows what it is like to repeat the names of the people in your life who have loved you and whom you have loved. Edward has become a very different sort of rabbit from the haughty and vain creature who once lived in the house on Egypt Street.

Here is where I started to cry, and I cried through every chapter and every new situation Edward found himself in. By the end, I was choking back sobs so loud I can’t believe I didn’t wake Christopher up. I have to tell you I’m sitting here at my desk at work typing this and I have big fat tears rolling down my cheeks right now! It’s horrible! I can’t help it! This book is killing me!

I finally turned off the light and tiptoed out of his room and downstairs. When I walked into the family room, Steve looked over at me and said with concern, “What’s wrong?!”

When I told him, he gave me the look you give people who have suddenly announced that they’re Napolean Bonaparte, and “What’s wrong?” became “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to get through this story with the boys,” I sobbed, “I think you’re going to have to take over. We’re on Chapter 10.”

“I can’t believe,” he said, after I’d tearfully recapped the story for him, choking up so badly at parts I couldn’t even get the words out, “that after all the books you’ve read, you’re getting this upset about such a straightforward, old-fashioned story.”

He’s right, it is old-fashioned and straightforward. It's an old-fashioned book with beautifully old-fashioned illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline, that are laid out in an old-fashioned way. It's just an old tale of a heartless little prince who goes on a grand journey and learns the importance of love. But as the poet says, it’s not the tale; it’s the way it’s told, and Kate DiCamillo told it in a way that broke my little china heart.
____________________________

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
By Kate DiCamillo
December, 2007 by Candlewick Press
228 pages, paperback
ISBN: 0763639877

2008-08-17T09:36:00.002-05:00

Sephora: The Ultimate Guide to Makeup, Skin, and Hair from the Beauty Authority

I don’t know what got into me. I begged the publicist to send me this book. It was like I was possessed by the spirit of some makeup obsessed teenager. Sephora!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!! Many emoticons of joy!!!!!! LOL!!!!

I don’t even wear makeup, really, and here I was doing backflips over this book like Santa Claus was going to bring me a giant box full of Sephora Products.

And then I finally got it, and I was all, Huh? What am I supposed to do with this?

It’s a giant ad for items sold by Sephora, with “tips from the pros” inserted between lovingly photographed bottles of tanning bronzer (a section to which the book devotes quite a bit of time.)

I’ve been taking it back and forth to work with me, staring at it and trying to come up with something to say about it that has any sort of meaning whatsoever, and I just can’t do it. However, the 25-year-old who sits in the cubicle next to me has been panting hot breath down the back of my neck for two weeks now, because she knows I bring duplicate copies of books I’ve been sent, or unsolicited books I’ve received that I know I won’t review, and I give them away.

I have the book sitting on my desk right now, with a Post-It with her name on it stuck to the cover. I’m going to put it on her desk before I leave and put us both out of our respective miseries. At least now the book can be with someone who will be all “Sephora!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!! Many emoticons of joy!!!!!! LOL!!!!” and really mean it.
_____________________________

Sephora: The Ultimate Guide to Makeup, Skin, and Hair from the Beauty Authority
By Melissa Schweiger
April, 2008 by Collins Living
Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-06-146640-3

2008-07-30T23:32:00.000-05:00

Note to Self.

Christopher and I swung by the post office a couple of weeks ago to check the box. Christopher has taken over this job, of course, because let's face it: an open PO box is pretty cool. You put a big brass key into the lock of a tiny door, and when you open it up, there's a whole 'nother world in there. Sometimes with crabby government employees in it, who respond to your pleadings for mail with, "No! We already put the mail out today! There is no more. Now get your face out the mailbox before I cram my sensible shoe in there and kick you!"

But that day we did have something, a yellow note that said we had a package that was too big for the box, and we had to go see the clerk and pick it up. Our post office has a side door that allows you to bypass all the grubby people sweating it out in line, sort of like having the special pass at Disneyworld, and you can slip around to the dutch door and ring the doorbell and an employee will open the top part of the door and give you your package. Also, very cool.*

We got the package, and this book was in it. I recognized the author as someone whose similarly-covered first book I reviewed in September, and I assumed because of that review I got this one as well, in a "If you loved that, you'll really love this!" kind of way.

I don't know if other people do this, but unsolicited books go straight to the bottom of the pile, and it is an ugly, mountainous pile indeed. I have been running three solid months behind for two years, and there doesn't seem to be a time when I'll get caught up. I'll read the unsolicited ones eventually, but if I've spoken with an author or a publicist about a book, I give it priority. You'll see a review of your unsolicited book in about 10 months. Thanks for sending it!

Inside the book was a green envelope, addressed to "To Whom It May Concern." It was a letter from the author, who told me she sent me the book because she mentioned me in it, on page 103. She had come across the review I wrote of her first book, Love of Letters, and thought it was funny, she said.

Because I'm in it, I don't think I can critique the book honestly, but I sure as hell am willing to critique page 103. And here it is, in all its glory:

I recently found one of the more amusing blogs I've read about myself. It was written a few months ago, but I only just found it because - okay, we're all adults here, I'll say it - I was Googling myself. I came across a review of my first book at [Books Are Pretty.] Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of book-review blogs. Keep up the good work, guys! The reviewer didn't like my title(I appreciate the honesty) but liked the book, and made many kind comments. The reviewer was not a fan, however, of my letter-writing service. She (or he, the blogger is anonymous) wrote, "However, if it's a love letter you're wanting to write, please don't hire her. Do it yourself, or don't do it at all." The person goes on to state the reason: "To be perfectly blunt, O'Shea doesn't want to blow your boyfriend. You do. And no matter how skilled the writer, that passion is very, very hard to fake." Long live bluntness! I loved this, but I can't make any promises - I haven't met your boyfriend."

Boy, you make one blowjob joke**, and it gets preserved like an insect in amber, forever labeling Books Are Pretty as the go-to place for the book review/blowjob combo.

I stood there, laughing loudly, with Christopher begging me to tell him what's so funny. Nothing! Nothing at all. I also had an awkward time explaining it to my mother.

"Guess what? Someone mentioned me in her book!"

"Wow! What did it say?"

"Oh, she liked a review I wrote about her last book."

"What did you say about it?"

"That she doesn't want to blow your boyfriend."

"Well, if it's Samara O'Shea, watch out. She totally would."

Actually, I probably shouldn't have even brought it up.

But here's two things about page 103: I did not say I didn't like the title. I said she should have picked a different title, because at the time, when "For the Love of Letters" was typed into the Amazon search box, it turned up Letters to Penthouse. I just thought that was important to note. Secondly, I also didn't say I didn't like her letter-writing service. If it's a letter of resignation you need, or a letter of introduction, or a letter of recommendation, and you suck at those things, then go for it. I just don't think you should outsource your love letters.

So yes: Note to Self is a book about journaling, and it covers the hows, whats and whys of diaries, journals, blogging, and what to write about after you've shot the president. She includes a lot of juicy excerpts from her own diary as well as Anais Nin, Lewis Carroll, and many others. So buy the book, don't buy the book, whatever. Just make sure you keep Samara O'Shea away from your boyfriend.

_________________________
*Point of unpleasant fact: This is still a government building, and when the posted sign says you can pick up mail until 5:45, what it actually means is Go Fuck Yourself. They are long gone at 5:30.

**One? Yeah, yeah. Shut up.

____________________

Note to Self
by Samara O'Shea
July, 2008 by HarperCollins
Hardcover, 192pp
ISBN: 0061494151

2008-07-27T12:06:00.008-05:00

The Pocket Guide to Mischief

The product details on Amazon.com indicate that this book was published on February 1st; however, let me tell you that my copy arrived on April Fool’s Day, complete with a whoopee cushion.*

Christopher accepted the gift like it was a stone tablet found on the mountain, and when Steve came home from work he was beside himself trying to get Steve to sit down in one of the dining room chairs.

“Please,” he urged, “please Daddy! Please sit in the chair.”

Steve decided to torment him for a little bit, saying he wasn’t tired and didn’t feel like sitting, but thank you very much.

“Oh, Daddy, please,” he begged, and by this time his desire had nearly doubled him over.

With much sighing and exasperated sounds, Steve finally sat down, an action that was heralded by the trumpeting of the cushion.

Tears squirted out of Christopher's eyes as he fell over, completely helpless with laughter. His unbridled joy was infectious, and if you have never had the opportunity to introduce the concept of a whoopee cushion to someone, well, I heartily recommend it. He took the whoopee cushion to school the next day, where it met an untimely death at the hands of one of his classmates, but for 24 glorious hours he was in possession of the greatest invention ever made.

So I’m not sure I’m going to give him the book that came along with it. He may have a stroke.

The Pocket Guide to Mischief was written by a junior high school teacher, a revelation that should surprise no one, as the book is filled with anecdotes and snappy comebacks that an eleven year old would most certainly run around and use on all who have the misfortune of crossing his path.

I am married to a mischief-maker myself, by the way, a man who repaid an office debt of twenty dollars by sending his nemesis a quarter every day through inter-office mail. A man who took all the pencils of the same (very short) nemesis and stuck them in the porous office ceiling so they tauntingly hovered over his head all day. A man who, when in the army, surreptitiously booby-trapped a training area that his COs had already booby-trapped, causing his superior officers to set off all kinds of unexpected, startling explosions. So I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur.

This is a book for beginning mischief makers, and true to his junior high school teacher roots, King has to first urge his readers not to get carried away and do stupid things, like hurt someone or themselves.

Then he delves into the nuts and bolts of mischief-making, the first rule of which is to acquire a nemesis to bear the brunt of out all these new-found skills, some of which include wedgies and tp-ing someone’s house, which is apparently illegal in some areas of the country, so watch out. The Pocket Guide to Mischief also pays homage to mischief makers of the past, like the Yale students who conned the Harvard students into holding up placards that said “We Suck” at a football game.

Mostly, though, the book just teaches you how to be goofy, and I’m not sure junior high school boys need lessons on that.

____________________

*I thought it was spelled “whoopie,” but spellcheck corrected me. Wikipedia votes with spellcheck, but the NY Times book section agrees with me. Controversy! Controversy! Fight!

The Pocket Guide to Mischief
by Bart King
February, 2008 by Gibbs Smith
Paperback, 272pp
ISBN: 1-4236-0366-4

2008-07-20T11:51:00.014-05:00

The Stone Gods.

Oooh, check it! One of the publicists at Harcourt sent me a book written by one of the big dogs! As you may have noticed, the books I'm usually sent are books by lesser known (although not necessarily less talented, she hastens to add) authors, sometimes by publicists and sometimes by the authors themselves, which is always nice. This means they're almost sure to read it, and if I offer any sort of criticism the author will zero in on it and either write me a note telling me how I got it all wrong, or, in the case of one particular writer, exact her revenge, which you will find out more about in an upcoming review.

Jeanette Winterson, however, is one of the U.K.'s more prominent writers, so she gets reviewed by the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, etc. The downside is that nobody will pay attention to my pea-sized blog and what I have to say about this book. The upside, however, is that nobody will pay attention to my pea-sized blog and what I have to say about this book, so I can say whatever I want.

I sure wish I hated the book, then. This would have been a perfect opportunity to rip something to shreds, but not for nothing is Winterson a prize-winning writer.

I'm not going to go so far as to emulate some of the blurbs on the back of it, such as the one written by The Daily Telegraph that said, "...If she keeps on like this there may be a glimmer of hope for the future after all."

I want to have my own book published and get someone to blurb, "This book totally cured my cancer!"

I mean, that is an awesome blurb. I wanted to find the Telegraph review and read that quote in context, because it's possible the reviewer was referring to Winterson's personal career, considered by many to be somewhat erratic. However, I like the idea that Winterson has the ability to save the world through her fiction. Why didn't she write this book back in 2000 when Bush was busy stealing the election? Think of all the damage she could have prevented! Why would she have the ability to produce such life-saving miracles, yet mysteriously withhold them? We already have God for that; we don't need Winterson horning in on his gig.

But Winterson didn't write The Stone Gods to play God, even when she takes the opportunity to smite some very specific targets. Dipping back in to her commonly used theme of love and the search for a place to call home, her latest novel speculates on a future where humankind has reached the inevitable end of consumer culture. Orbus, the planet the human race evacuated to when Earth was finally used up and uninhabitable, has also been used up and is now uninhabitable. The world is run by a corporation, MORE, which monitors the activities of all citizens. The citizens, in the meantime, have put their brains and free will completely in MORE's hands. They are no longer literate, and spend their time spending their money. Plastic surgery has evolved to the point where men and women can "fix" their DNA, keeping them perpetually looking like hot 20-year-olds (which cramps the style of celebrities, who had previously used their money to look much better than the rest of us.) All actual work is done by robots, made by the MORE corporation, including a type of robot called Robo sapiens, that was created to govern the world.

The protagonist, a scientist named Billie Crusoe, is considered a trouble maker, because even though she works for the MORE corporation, she is a lone voice of sanity, begging her species to give a damn about the planet they are so carelessly destroying, through pollution, through war, through the wasteful use of resources. The more loudly she agitates, the more the corporation wants to get rid of her, and finally she is given a choice: be arrested or be on the next spaceship out of town, to colonize a newly discovered, pristine planet that the rich can evacuate to when Orbus is finally dead.

Billie travels to the planet with Spike, an impossibly beautiful and perfectly pleasant Robo sapiens, whose quest for humanity leads to what is either a inter-...species?...love affair between Billie and Spike, or the discovery of the best masturbation tool ever. (And in case all the ecological pleading doesn't persuade you to read the book, maybe some of the hot Robo lingus will.)

The Stone Gods is broken into four parts, initially seeming as dissimilar as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The second part features the Billie character as a teenage boy, Billy, stranded on the Easter Islands in 1774, abandoned by his shipmates and left to fend alone on an island where the inhabitants have utterly destroyed it in order to build useless stone gods. The second two books return to Spike and Billie, this time on planet Earth, right after Iran has launched a nuclear attack on the United States. As Billie and Spike wander through their world, from the cleaned-up suburbs where the MORE employees live, to Wreck City, a lawless land sort of like Blade Runner to Ground Zero, where the soil and air are utterly toxic.

Over and over again, Winterson's characters refuse to learn from their mistakes and continue their path of destruction. On the way to Planet Blue, the ship's captain tells a theme-encapsulating story, which he of course misses the point and continues in his quest to conquer and consume.

There was a young man with a hot temper. He was not all bad, but he was reckless, and he drank more than he should, and spent more than he could, and gave a ring to more women than one, and gambled himself into a corner so tight an ant couldn't turn round in it. Once night, in despair, and desperate with worry, he got into a fight outside a bar, and killed a man.

Mad with fear and remorse, for he was more hot-tempered than wicked, and stupid when he could have been wise, he locked himself into his filthy bare attic room and took the revolver that had killed his enemy, loaded it, cocked it and prepared to blast himself to pieces.

In the few moments before he pulled the trigger, he said, "If I had known that all that I have done would bring me to this, I would have led a very different life. If I could live my life again, I would not be here, with the trigger in my hand and the barrel at my head."

His good angel was sitting by him and, felling pity for the young, man, the angel flew to Heaven and interceded on his behalf.

The in all his six-winged glory, the angel appeared before the terrified boy, and granted him his wish. "In full knowledge of what you have become, go back and begin again."

And suddenly, the young man had another chance.

For a time, all went well. He was sober, upright, true, thrifty. Then one night he passed a bar, and it seemed familiar to him, and he went in and gambled all he had, and he met a woman and told her he had no wife, and he stole from his employer, and spent all he could.

And his debts mounted with his despair, and he decided to gamble everything on one last throw of the dice. This time, as the wheel spun and slowed, his chance would be on the black, not the red. This time, he would win.

The ball fell in the fateful place, as it must.

The young man had lost.

He ran outside, but the men followed him, and in a brawl with the bar owner, he shot him dead, and found himself alone and hunted in a filthy attic room.

He took out his revolver. He primed it. He said, "If I'd known that I could do such a thing again, I would never have risked it. I would have lived a different life. If I had known where my actions would lead me..."

And his angel came, and sat by him, and took pity on him once again, and interceded for him, and...

And years passed, and the young man was doing well until he came to a bar that seemed familiar to him...

Bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again. Bar, bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again...angel, bar, ball, bullets...

Like the lonesome (and deliberately named) Crusoe, Winterson issues an outsider's plaintive cry to love and to rescue our planet from ourselves before it is too late. On her website, Winterson writes, "I heard Stephen Hawking on the radio talking about how humans must colonise space to have any chance of survival, and I thought what a depressing prognosis of our condition that is. Maybe it’s a boy-thing, this infatuation with rocket ships and rocky worlds. I would prefer to stay here and honour the earth."

_______________________________

The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson
April, 2008 by Harcourt
Hardcover, 206pp.
ISBN: 978-0-15-101491-0

2008-07-12T12:56:00.010-05:00

Leonardo's Shadow.

So here I am, back in the Renaissance. In March, I reviewed Traci Slatton's Immortal, a look at the Italian Renaissance through the eyes of an young orphan boy who developed a strong relationship with the ultimate Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci.

Guess what Leonardo's Shadow, the debut novel by Christopher Grey, is about? The exact same thing. Fortunately for me, there's more than one way to tell a story, and although the backdrop is the same and so is the age and gender of the protagonist, the personalities and experiences are wildly different.

Immortal's unlucky little protagonist, a child who seemingly does not age, spends twenty years of his life enslaved as a child prostitute in Florence's most sadistic brothel. Giacomo, the plucky little servant of one of history's greatest painters, fares much better, although he complains more than the child prostitute does. This improvement in the quality of life is a very good thing, because unlike Immortal, the intended audience for Leonardo's Shadow are young teens. Although my 14-year-old self probably would have greedily sucked up every last sordid scene in Slatton's excellent novel and sniffed contemptuously at any adult trying to stand between me and a book, as an adult myself it's nothing I would recommend for readers under sixteen. (Although I did buy my nephew a copy of Maus when he was 13. For Christmas. Ho ho ho.)

Based on da Vinci's Notebooks,* Leonardo's Shadow centers on da Vinci's servant Giacomo, who is mentioned sporadically in the Notebook by da Vinci, usually in a tone of exasperation. Grey presents Giacomo as a boy who is constantly striving to be useful and loyal to his Master, but is constantly given nothing but (somewhat) good-natured grief.

Grey introduces us to Giacomo when he is eight and very ill. Pursued by villagers for suspected thievery, he is rescued by da Vinci and brought home with him to be pressed into service. Due to a high fever, Giacomo has no memory of his life prior to living with the artist, and the only possessions he owns are a ring, a medallion, and a necklace with a cross dangling from it, and he doesn't even know where they came from. Seven years later, Giacomo is still with da Vinci, and in between his duties to the Master, he attempts to discover his roots and find his missing parents. Not that he has much time to indulge himself, because da Vinci keeps him on his toes. Commissioned by Milan's Duke Sforza to paint a scene of the last supper at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, da Vinci stresses everyone out by procrastinating for two years. Giacomo's duties mostly involve begging the local merchants not to cut them off even though da Vinci hasn't paid them in ages, and nagging at the artist to hurry up and paint already. As Giacomo slowly begins to piece together his past, his loyalties to his Master begin to waiver, and he is pulled into a chain of events that lead to revenge, murder plots, and that old Renaissance standby, alchemy.

Since I don't have any teenagers at home, and even if I did, their cooperation would probably be dubious at best, I gathered my more agreeable peanuts around me, ages 5 and 8. When Alex was three, Steve taught him to answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with "A Renaissance Man." Five years later, Alex still thinks this is a legitimate profession, and that's how he answers the question still. So I figured he'd be interested in a story by the world's most famous Renaissance Man. I read them the first chapter, where we are introduced to Giacomo, on the lam and running for his life.

Ten paces behind, a great crowd was chasing me, waving sticks and fists, cursing and shouting. Some of them were old, but that didn't stop them. There were women, too. All had sour faces.

They thought I was a thief.

If I was caught I would be strung up by the neck from the nearest doorway and left there to swing, for the dogs to bark at.

So I ran and I ran, skipping in between the market stalls, knocking down barrels of salt fish and baskets of red plums, always keeping a tight hold on my ragbag. Each time someone new saw me running, they took up the alarm -

"Stop, thief!"

"Somebody take him!"

"The boy must be stopped!"

But I would never let them- even though I felt sick almost to death. I had the fever, I knew that. There was a mist in front of my eyes and I was buring up inside.

But to stop now was to stop forever.

Never! They would never take me while I lived.

The boys definitely enjoyed the first chapter, but I'll probably hold off on reading the part where Giacomo meets da Vinci's father and finds out about his Master's sodomy arrest.

Besides, we're in book six of the Harry Potter series at the moment, and once you get pulled into that tractor beam, there's no escape.

If your young teen is able to escape from Hogwarts, Leonardo's Shadow is a very good choice for what to read next.

When I was in high school, I was assigned to read The Good Earth, Ayn Rand's Anthem, A Separate Peace, and Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities. I enjoyed Anthem (and thought I was so totally cool for knowing that Rush's 2112 album was based on it. Between my teacher and Neal Peart, I was surrounded by Randroids), and A Separate Peace I remember thinking was fair, although I can't tell you anything about it today. The Good Earth and Tale of Two Cities, however, I found excruciatingly boring, in no small part because of the formality of the language and, in the case of Dickens, the raging amounts of unnecessary exposition**.

Why can't American educators throw some exciting new fiction into the mix? Leonardo's Shadow isn't totally accurate, of course, because it can't be. Grey created a breathing, living character from a few flat asides in the notebook where da Vinci complains about the hired help. There's a lot of gaps there. However, it gives a very reasonable look into how life was lived during the Italian Renaissance, every bit as good as Dickens showed us 19th century England, and a progressive high school English teacher might want to think about incorporating the fast-paced Leonardo's Shadow into the curriculum between Lord of the Flies and Huckleberry Finn.

But if not, there's always that summer reading program, where it can be read, then traded in for a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut.

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*Before you click on that link, be advised that it takes you to a page on the British Library's website where you can look at da Vinci's actual notebook, not a copy. The link is near the bottom of a list of many books you can look at, including the original Alice In Wonderland, handwritten and illustrated for Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll. You can click on the pages and turn them one by one, and before you know it, you've spent two hours there.

**Wouldn't it be nice if classes could read Dickens in the way it was written to be read, one chapter a month? Too much more Dickens than that drowns the 10th grade brain.
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Leonardo's Shadow
by Christopher Grey
March, 2008 by Simon & Schuster
400 pp, Paperback
ISBN: 1416905448

2008-07-03T17:39:00.003-05:00

The Solitary Vice.

Hey, lookit everybody! It's a legs-and-feet cover on a book written by a woman! And I don't hate it! In fact I kind of like it, which made me wonder briefly if my girl Olga designed it, but I dismissed the idea pretty quickly, as it didn't really seem to be her style. It was, in fact, designed by David Barnett, and he did a great job, shooting a photo of a woman from above, a book covering her pelvic area. Does this mean I love Olga Grlic any less, and will start waving my giant foam finger for David Barnett now? Of course not. It's just that there's more than one way to be clever, and getting me to not throw the book across the room when I saw the legs and feet is an accomplishment that deserves recognition.*

I almost chose not to read it anyway, because the subtitle, Against Reading, basically dared me to. I have exactly nineteen other books from people who want me to read their books, and any excuse to cut the list short is fine by me.

The premise of Brottman's book, in case you haven't figured it out from the title, is a rebuttal to the push for literacy that takes place mostly in the form of ad campaigns urging people to read more. If reading is so good for you and so much fun, she argues, why do we have to be browbeaten into it? Perhaps reading is a solitary act akin to masturbation, fun in small doses, but do it too much and people stop wanting to shake your hand. Too much time hiding behind a book causes the bookworm to lose the ability to relate to one's peers, and causes a somewhat antisocial personality to develop. Brottman relates her own childhood spent in the attic in her home, voraciously devouring her town library's collection. As a result, she was "ill-looking and white, etiolated, like a plant without sunlight...[her] hair was a veil of grease hiding a sour, miserable expression."

I don't dispute that there are kids who use books to avoid interacting socially; I was one of them. I was never, ever without a book, because I learned quickly that when I was reading, adults left me alone, and other kids, kids who might have bullied me (or might not have, I never wanted to risk finding out), left me alone, too. I read at the dinner table, in the car, and during recess. Where I part from Brottman is that I don't think it was the books that made me antisocial; I think I was that way to begin with, and I still am. After decades of failed attempts at forcing myself to be a social butterfly, I've reconciled myself to the fact that not liking to spend a lot of time around other people is just the way I was made, and it isn't the fault of books. Books were what made me happy, for crying out loud.

Brottman has a slight tendency to think her experiences with reading are universal. In subsequent chapters, she makes the point that literature isn't the end-all, be all of what we "should" be reading, and that the benefits of reading classic literature are blown out of proportion. It's just as good to read true crime stories, Hollywood gossip stories, or psychoanalytic case studies, even better in some ways, because it teaches you real world lessons. She gives a gentle knock to "the plain girl's Bible**," Jane Eyre, for teaching us ugly chicks to have unrealistic expectations at finding romance.

Again, we differ, because this wasn't the lesson my little-girl self took from Jane Eyre at all. I learned from Jane not to let the judgment of others get you down, that self-respect and self-reliance were preferable to twisting yourself into knots to meet the demands of others, and, from the part in the book where Jane walks away from true love, that no man is worth selling your soul to. I still think those are pretty good life lessons that you can't get from reading Hollywood Animal (although Joe Eszterhas is such a hilarious douche, it's worth reading at least the article I linked to) or Valley of the Dolls.***

Although Brottman's voice is both personable and engaging, with juicy little tidbits such as Art Garfunkel's weird, obsessive online cataloging of every single book he's read since the early sixties, The Solitary Vice is a bit disjointed. I kept forgetting, when I was reading her very long chapter about her love for true crime novels, what her point was supposed to be. Why does a love for In Cold Blood make the case against reading? Is it just literature that's like masturbation and the John Douglas behavioral science books don't blur the line of reality and lead to bad lifestyle choices? If that's true, why did Brottman develop a pen-pal relationship with a prisoner who was jailed for killing his pregnant girlfriend?**** I'm confused now.

The main thing that I agreed with Brottman on was that life's too short to spend on a book you hate. There are too many good ones out there, and what those "good ones" are is entirely up to you. I decided last year that I'm probably never going to be in the mood to read James Joyce's Ulysses, while my friend Funnie did read it and enjoyed it very much.

At any rate, The Solitary Vice didn't really make much of a case against reading, or even reading too much, in fact, it actually made me want to read The Cask of Amontillado again, and I can't figure out if Brottman would think that was a good thing, or not.

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*If a book was written about a female protagonist who was a double amputee, would they still put legs and feet on the cover? I think they would. It would be a drawing of disembodied legs and feet in stiletto heels, maybe lying in the grass somewhere, or just a pair of legs in a beauty chair, getting a pedicure.

**Heh.

***A book which produced the single most hilarious line in all of fiction, when Neely O'Hara slurs, "There's nothing better than a wop in the kip!" So completely crass, yet so completely old-fashioned at the same time. Oh, Neely, you brassy broad, you!

****Some things are really best kept to oneself. This is one of those things.
________________________

The Solitary Vice
by Mikita Brottman
April, 2008 by Counterpoint Press
Paperback, 224 pages
ISBN: 1-59376-187-2

2008-06-25T11:30:00.003-05:00

Rowdy In Paris.

If Lamb and Dog of the South had a baby, it would be Rowdy in Paris.

The tone of Tim Sandlin's latest novel has the nonchalant, go-where-the-day-takes-you style of Christopher Moore's satirical biography of a teenaged Jesus, but the set-up is pure Portis.

In Dog of the South, the Arkansas-based protagonist takes off to Mexico, looking for the car his ex-wife has taken, and along the way he teams up with a bumbling, ineffectual companion to share his madcap adventures with. In Rowdy In Paris, title character Rowdy, a Wyoming-based almost-was championship bull rider, takes off to Paris, looking for his first and only championship belt buckle two French girls have taken, and along the way he teams up with a bumbling, ineffectual companion to share his madcap adventures with.

Dog of the South's Ray Midge is more grumpy and laconic than Rowdy In Paris' bullriding hero, but perhaps that's because the action is sparked by a slightly implausible menage à trois between Rowdy and the two French girls who absconded with his trophy, which Rowdy had meant to present to his estranged 7-year-old son as a way to begin repairing their relationship.

Knowing only their first names, sweet Odette and sullen Giselle, and their university, the University of Paris, Rowdy impulsively takes off after them, to become a fish out of water at the airport, in Paris, and everywhere he goes that isn't in a bullpen.

Once in Paris, he teams up with Pinto Whiteside, who claims to be an ex-CIA agent now working as a spy for Starbucks to uncover a group of radicals determined to stop the coffee bar franchise from opening any stores in France. Whiteside's mission somehow gets tangled up with Rowdy's mission, and both ends need to be sorted out, all the while battling the culture barrier and, by the way, a delicately blooming romance needs to be handled as well.

Although this seems like a lot of action to be stuffed into 288 pages, Sandlin's concise prose clips away all the extraneous bits, leaving behind a streamlined plot composed of strings of humorous dialog.

Rowdy in Paris is not the masterpiece that Dog of the South is, nor the cult classic Lamb has become, but it's a perfectly enjoyable book that puts the reader in a good mood afterward, and frankly, that's worth quite a bit.
________________________

Rowdy In Paris
by Tim Sandlin
January, 2008 by Riverhead Press
Hardcover, 288pp
ISBN: 1594489742

2008-06-19T11:51:00.003-05:00

Hungry Hill.

Hungry Hill, Carole O'Malley's memoir of growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, takes its name from her old neighborhood, which either took its name from all the Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine, or from the Irish cops who wanted to make a statement about the lack of restaurants on their beat.

Although neither theory can be proven, the first seems like a testament to Irish suffering and hardship, while the other seems like a testament to Irish humor. Both of these theories are sifted finely together in O'Malley's remembrances of the four years of her life after her mother's painful death from lymphatic cancer in 1959.

Carole's father, a charming alcoholic as careless looking after his kids as he is careful looking after the bottle, places squarely on her shoulders the emotional burden of caring for herself, her father, and her seven brothers.

"You're the tough one," he tells 13-year-old Carole, and then leaves to go have a drink, leaving Carole alone with her dying mother to wait for the neighborhood parish priest to stop by and give Mrs. O'Malley her last rites.

She spends the next four years being the classic child of an alcoholic, carrying the burden of the house and refereeing fights between all the brothers, who seem to have thoroughly absorbed the misogyny of their times at a very early age, taking it completely for granted that she will pack all their suitcases for family vacations and buy all their clothes, then criticizing her for not doing it correctly. All her high achievements - because Carole is, of course, an overachiever - are belittled by the entire family.

When Carole looks to her father for approval when she makes the honor roll, he shrugs and tells her she'll just end up a housewife, and when she is elected Class Treasurer and her brother elected Class President, he is praised and compared to the Kennedys while she is completely ignored. When she protests, she is told Class Treasurer is useless. As a girl in her Catholic high school, she is not allowed to run for either President or Vice President.

And when Carole begins to express her concern that their father is in the last stages of alcoholism and is seriously endangering his life, her brothers berate her for her overly-emotional stupidity right up to the time their father falls into a coma.

When his father marries Mary (an event Carole finds out about from her family doctor, who has been drafted into giving the news by Carole's father), things go from bad to worse.

The family doctor shames Carole, now fifteen, by telling her he drove past her house and saw three-year-old Tommy sleeping in the driveway, that her father must get married because Carole cannot handle things by herself. Carole is wracked with guilt and failure, and at no point does anyone ever think that her burden is grossly unfair. In fact, it's treated as a given that a female child become the wife and mother substitute. It does not even seem to occur to Mary, when she appears on the scene, that this never should have been Carole's lot in life. Instead, she sees her as competition that must be smacked down (often literally) at any cost.

The result of all this is a detached sort of loneliness inherent in the book. Carole is the loneliest child in the world, surrounded by people clamoring for her attention. She clings to as many small memories as she can to surround herself with normalcy, such as the friend who convinced her older brother to teach her how to disconnect the odometer on the family car so their father wouldn't guess she was putting hundreds of miles on it every Friday night.

Both the sorrow and the joy are written with a matter-of-factness that removes the writer so far from the events that the portrait of this disfunctional middle-class American family seems like it is being viewed from very far away, as if it is a tale about someone else's life that she is telling not because she wants to, but because she was asked to.

This, more than anything else, shows the lifetime consequences being the child of an alcoholic can bring.
_______________________

Hungry Hill
by Carole O'Malley Gaunt
June 2007 by University of Massachusetts Press
Paperback, 284 pp
ISBN: 1-55849-589-4

2008-06-12T21:52:00.007-05:00

An Incomplete Revenge.

Quick! Close your eyes and tell me the title of this book!

Did you remember it?

If so, you did better than I did at that little test, because I absolutely could not remember the title of this book. At one point, I closed the book to check the title on the cover, opened the book back up, and realized I'd forgotten it already.

I kept calling it An Inconvenient Truth, An Impossible Act, An Indescribable Something, An Unstoppable Force, An Immovable Object, anything but the actual title.

The completely forgettable title is the harshest criticism I have of it, and that's really not that bad, except that if you go to Barnes & Noble to buy it and can only tell the clerk that it's a mystery and there's a woman wearing a hat on the cover, then said clerk has the right to hit you over the head with it when he finds it.*

At the moment, my eight-year-old and I are beginning Book 6 of the Harry Potter series. Obviously, we have just finished my favorite Harry Potter book, book five: Harry Potter and the War on Bureaucracy. I have sometimes wondered how well the book would hold up if I was a space alien and had never heard of the series, and was given book five by Condaleeza Rice when I visited the White House to inform the administration of my imminent takeover. Would I be able to pick up the story and enjoy it for what it is, without any knowledge of the backstory and character relationships that have built up so far? Is it just a good story in and of itself? I think so, but it's really impossible for me to know for sure.

An Insurmountable Obstacle is book five of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. I've never heard of the books, don't know the backstory, and had to figure out the characters' relationships to each other on my own, and I have to say it held up pretty well. It's obvious where the broken threads are, characters whose previous relationships may have made their interactions more moving to me had I known them better, most notably a death that I assume would have had me all teary-eyed had I known the guy at all, but even without the knowledge of those relationships anchoring me firmly into Maisie's world of post World War I England, I still found it a pleasant, if slightly predictable, read.

Private investigator Maisie Dobbs, former downstairs resident turned almost-upstairs girl, is hired by James Compton, son of her former noble employers, Lord Julian and Lady Rowan Compton, to look into some accidents at a brick factory in rural Heronsdene that Compton's company wants to purchase. Of course, the simple straightforward investigation becomes more complicated, because, you know, it's a book, and Maisie and her assistant Billy find that the accidents, a series of fires that occur every year during hop-picking season as well as the theft of some silver at the manor estate, are impossible to investigate because the entire town seems to be keeping some massive secret and nobody's talking.

The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, and author Jacqueline Winspear pays as much attention to the details of the region and time period as she does to the plot points. This paints a rich backdrop against which Winspear can run the threads of the plot along, starting them at separate points, then slowly weaving them together the way mysteries do.

Maisie Dobbs' style is very much like that of Frances MacDormand's wonderful Marge Gunderson in Fargo. No fancy car chases, no hail of gunfire, just solid police work and a little luck. While An Impossible Dream isn't going to tingle any spines, the pages do start turning more quickly toward the end as all the pieces begin falling into place.

Even though I figured out two of the mysteries, there were still enough questions up in the air to keep it interesting. Mystery fans could do far worse than to settle down with a book in Maisie Dobbs series, if An Incontinentia Buttocks is any indicator.

_____________________

*That being said, most bookstore clerks are incredibly good at figuring out which book you're looking for when given marginal information. I have had a clerk at Women & Children First find a copy of World War Z when I told her I was looking for a science fiction book that was reviewed in last week's Reader (it was a zombie book, featured in Time Out Chicago) and a Borders clerk who found The World Without Us by my description of "that book on The Daily Show about what would happen to the world if everybody disappeared." He had not seen that episode of The Daily Show, but found the book anyway. Kudos to your hardworking neighborhood bookstore clerk!

_______________________

An Incomplete Revenge
by Jacqueline Winspear
February, 2008 by Henry Holt & Co
Paperback, 320pp
ISBN: 0805082158

2008-06-01T21:51:00.004-05:00

Innovation Nation.

On bad days I think the U.S. is hellbent on making Mike Judge's Idiocracy
a reality.

Judge, a master at creating blisteringly accurate portrayals of a side of American life that makes us squirm with uncomfortable recognition, took America's current devotion to anti-intellectualism and thrust it 500 years into the future, where stupidity reigns supreme. The U.S. has become a crumbling has-been, too absorbed in entertainment of the lowest common denominator, and the slow, malevolent thuggishness of the completely closed mind.

Joe, a U.S. Army Private selected to take part in a secret military experiment involving time travel, based on his utterly average intellect and apathetic personality. Joe is rocketed forward 500 years into the belly of a dystopic beast, and realizes the dire consequences America's apathy toward learning and innovation has wraught.

Former Harvard business professor John Kao sees the same (okay, not quite the same) potential for the United States to lose its position as a major player on the world stage, and in his book Innovation Nation lays out a blueprint for how to get America back on track.

It begins, as almost all societal problem-solving does, with education. Today's educational environment, writes Kao, is a disastrous clash of competing interests, with many underqualified and countless underpaid teachers, bogged down in paperwork and red tape, hopelessly out-of-date textbooks purchased by political ideologues on school board (Hello, Texas!), and the relentless glorification of athletics over academics (Texas. We meet again.) This lack of ability to lure in the best talent, coupled with the focus on standardized testing to keep federal funding puts us behind academically strong countries like Singapore and Ireland. As a result we don't have enough well-educated, ambitious youth who can juice up a struggling economy or stimulate a city with culture and creativity.

From this, Kao moves on to corporations and their top-down organizational system and rigidly controlled work places that inhibit innovative thinking, and the government's refusal to put money into research and development, and in fact restricting some areas of study to such a repressive extent (think stem-cell research) that the best scientists are taking their talent to countries were they have the freedom to realize their potential.

This will not happen in a country that elects a president on whether they'd want him as a drinking buddy.

I could watch clips from this movie all day long.

Anyway, Kao suggests, essentially, that the government fund research and development, and then leave the teams mostly alone to encourage the kind of free-thinking that enabled Oppenheimer's team to succeed.

The pervasive problems hampering creativity and innovation can be solved, but we must begin to make changes right away. Kao believes we still have the ability to progress and excel, using Jeff Bezos' Amazon as an excellent example of radical, yet highly profitable, corporate restructuring. Giving employees the autonomy to brainstorm without time constraints and involving the public to capitalize on a free influx of innovative ideas helped Bezos lead the way to the competitive thinking required to compete in the global race for innovative supremacy.

It is essential, Kao writes, that the 2008 presidential nominee begin to implement an intensive restructuring of America's innovative infrastructure before it is too late, and we're left with an Idiocratic government who advises us to water our crops with Gatorade and we're getting our law degrees from Costco.

____________________

Innovation Nation
by John Kao
published October, 2007 by Free Press
Hardcover, 267pp
ISBN: 1-4165-3268-4

2008-05-28T08:03:00.000-05:00

W00t!

My dear "booksarepretty"

it was brought to my attention that you have liked a book or two I've done
and I wanted to thank you for the kind words said.
It is truly a pleasure to have someone appreciate the final cover
after all the loops it has to go through to get published.

Finish your book so we can do a cover for it!

again, thank you!

sincerely,

Olga Grlic

Some girls get excited over getting an autograph from Orlando Bloom, but book nerds get excited to receive emails from their favorite book jacket designers.

Do you think she has a head shot she can sign and mail out?

2008-05-15T10:17:00.010-05:00

The God Delusion.

This is a shiny, shiny book.

I know it looks gray here, but if you actually hold the book in your hand, you will see that it has the reflective property of unwrinkled aluminum foil. If you're walking around outside with it, I recommend you hold it topside-down, or you'll find yourself temporarily blinded when the sun bounces off it right into your eyes. Dawkins says in the book that he is sure his main audience will be other atheists, but I think maybe, for whatever reason, he secretly also wanted to appeal to crows.

Soon atheism will sweep through the avian world, and the next thing you know there will be billions of the godless soaring over our heads. Atheism's master plan is revealed! You read it here first.

Richard Dawkins holds the rather unwieldy title of the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and, if The God Delusion is to be viewed as an extension of that job, he's very good at what he does. Dawkins seems to have stepped into the sensible shoes of the late Madelyn Murray O'Hair as the world's most infuriating atheist, sort of an Atheist 2.0. He is a much better upgrade, actually, because Dawkins seems to be a decent person who brings more to the table than merely being an obnoxious big mouth. No, it seems Dawkins angers people by being able to back up his seemingly inflammatory statements with fact and reason instead.

The reactions to The God Delusion often make his case vis a vis the danger of religion. Dawkins says that our reticence to challenge religious belief, even when it is violent, bigoted, offensive or just flat out wrong, does a tremendous disservice to progressivism. This really seems to piss people off.

A fantastic example of defensive religious apolegetics is in Jim Holt's review of The God Delusion in the New York Times.

In a particularly low blow, [Dawkins]accuses Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God.

Low blow? Really? Why don't we see for ourselves what Swinburne actually said? When Dawkins was on a television panel with Swinburne and fellow Oxford professor Peter Atkins, Swinburne attempted to justify the Holocaust "on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble."

That's some struggling! It reminds me of the time I was working at Barnes & Noble, and one of my coworkers got married and changed his last name because he and his wife wanted to create a new name to represent their new lives together. Another one of our coworkers was extremely offended by this, saying that anyone who changed his last name didn't really love his father. I said, "Hm. I changed my name when I got married. Does that mean I don't love my father?" Confronted with the notion that his theory was not only intrusive and wrong-headed, but also so sexist it completely forgot about over half of the world's population, who are under immense cultural, and sometimes legal, coercion to change their names upon marriage, he struggled with the question for a moment, then, even though he knew it was wrong, stubbornly replied, "Yes."

He was then completely humiliated by the raucous, derisive laughter of the rest of his coworkers. If only the world would respond this way to religious absurdities!

It is exactly statements like Swinburne's, and the subsequent finger-wagging at Dawkins for being appalled by the profound heartlessness in the name of God by Swinburne, that proves Dawkins' point.*

The God Delusion is part biology lesson, part atheist rebuttal to common arguments for the existence of God, and part internet nerdery. Even though Dawkins is British, where religion is not running amok on the political stage to quite the extent that it is in the United States, it is still a minority belief, and, like furries, atheists tend to get together on the net to socialize. So a lot of The God Delusion consists of references to blogs (homeboy PZ Myers is namechecked at least three times), internet jokes made by atheists, atheist websites, and of course, his own website. I found this endearingly nerdy. Says the blogger.**

Anyway, you could edit out almost all the internet references and examples of religious harm and just leave in Dawkins' scientific explanations for what is commonly seen as evidence of God - the Irreducible Complexity theory and the Moral Guidance theory - and the book would be worth reading. When Dawkins lays out his scientific reasoning for kindness as an important evolutionary trait, it really shows how he earns his money - he's very, very good at explaining science to the general public. He makes the absence of God and the presence of scientific fact look miraculous and indescribably beautiful, and he really doesn't need atheism to sell atheism, if you know what I mean. His talent as a scientist and a teacher is vast enough that just his explanations of How Things Work are enough to make you want to leave Creationism behind.

For example, the bacterial flagellar motor is often cited by Creationists as proof of God. It is the only example in nature of a freely rotating axle, and what Creationists use as an example of "Irreducible Complexity," a complex creation that, if any part is removed, does not work.

The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of nature. It drives the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle. Wheels for big animals would, I suspect, be genuine examples of irreducible complexity, and this is probably why they don't exist. How would the nerves and blood vessels get across the bearing? The flagellum is a thread-like propeller, with which the bacterium burrows its way through th water. I say 'burrows' rather than 'swims' because, on the bacterial scale of existence, a liquid such as water would not feel as a liquid feels to us. It would feel more like treacle, or jelly , or even sand, and the bacterium would seem to burrow or screw its way though the water rather than swim. Unlike the so-called flagellum of larger organisms like protozoans, the bacterial flagellum doesn't just wave about like a whip, or row like an oar. It has a true, freely rotating axle which turns continously inside a bearing, driven by a remarkable little molecular motor. At the molecular level, the motor uses essentially the same principle as muscle, but in free rotation rather than in intermittent contraction. It has been happily described as a tiny outboard motor (although by engineering standards- and unusually for a biological mechanism - it is a spectacularly inefficient one.)

Without a word of justification, explanation or amplification, [Creationist Michael] Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favor of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness of behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose "intelligent design" creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of "breathtaking inanity", to quote Judge Jones - phrase and man surely destined for lasting fame. In fact, the key to demonstrating irreducible complexity is to show that none of the parts could have been useful on its own. They all needed to be in place before any of them could do any good (Behe's favorite analogy is a mousetrap.) In face, molecular biologists have no difficulty in finding parts functioning outside the whole, both for the flagellar motor and for Behe's other alleged examples if irriducible complexity. The point is well put by Kenneth Miller of Brown University, for my money the most persuasive nemesis of "intelligent design", not least because he is a devout Christian...In the case of the bacterial rotary engine, Miller calls our attention to a mechanism called the Type Three Secretory System or TTSS. The TTSS is not used for rotatory movement. It is one of several systems used by parasitic bacteria for pumping toxic substances through their cell walls to poison their host organism. On our human scale, we might think of pouring or squirting a liquid through a hole; but, once again, on the bacterial scale things look different. Each molecule of secrete substance is a large protein with a definite, three dimensiaonl structure of the same scale as the TTSS's own: more like a solid sculpture than a liquid. Each molecule is individually propelled through a carefully shaped mechanism, like an automated slot machine dispensing, say, toys or bottles, rather than a simple hole through which a substance might 'flow'. The goods-dipenser itself is made of a rather small number or protein molecules, each one comparable in size and complexity to the molecules being dispensed through it. Interestingly, these bacterial slot machines are often similar across bacteria that are not closely related. The genes for making them have probably been 'copied and pasted' from other bacteria: something that bacteria are remarkably adept at doing, and a fascinating topic in its own right...The protein molecules that form the structure of the TTSS are very similar to components of the flagellar motor. To the evolutionist it is clear that TTSS components were commandeered for a new, but not wholly unrelated, function when the flagellar motor evolved. Given that the TTSS is tugging molecules through itself, it is not surprising that it uses a rudimentary version of the principle used by the flagellar motor, which tugs the molecules of the axle round and round. Evidently, crucial components of the flagellar motor were already in place and working before the flagellar motor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable.

Okay, that was really long, I know, but it's so much more interesting than "God did it." When you really begin to seriously study something in nature as unique and fascinating as the bacterial flagellar motor, the more creationism begins to sound like "stop learning, stop thinking." And once you've started learning, it's an awful thing to be told to stop because God wants you to be stupid. Or, to be less inflammatory my own self: A thorough understanding of biology - who has considered the fact that bacteria don't swim through water, but rather push their way around water molecules? It really changes your perception of what's really going on - makes you realize that Creationists are not only fighting blind, but insisting that you do the same. To scientists such as Dawkins, who find such joy in finding out why things are the way they are, to be told not to probe further is infuriating. (Not to mention that if scientific puzzles are proof of God, what does it mean when those puzzles are solved? Is that the basis of the fear of "Darwinism?") One can hardly blame him for finding it difficult to keep a combative tone out of his writing in reaction to intelligent design proponents.

But that yearning for truth is the real danger of Dawkins to religious fundamentalists. The God Delusion makes that apple on the tree of knowledge look so damned delicious.

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*The entire review is so full of the fear of offending the religious, coupled with an astonishing lack of understanding of evolution and science, that it's worth reading for its WTF? value alone.

**It's such a shame the paperback came out before one of the greatest internet nerd wars ever, the Expelled controversy, which sucked in both Dawkins and PZ Myers and gave joy to atheist internet nerds for weeks. I'll bet you a silver dollar as shiny as the book's cover that it will be inserted into subsequent reprintings.

_____________________

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
January, 2008 by Mariner Books
1st edition paperback, 464pp
ISBN: 0618918248

2008-05-07T14:45:00.003-05:00

Four Wives.

Awwwwww yeah!

Look at the cover of this book.

It's Wendy Walker's first book, Four Wives, a Desperate Housewives-like view of super rich women in an uber-tony Connecticut suburb. You know exactly what the book's about just by looking at it, and it was done without an illustration of legs and feet. And no pink. Even though there isn't a topless swimming pool scene in the book, it captures the entire tone of the novel with one image. It's actually thoughtful, intelligent, witty, and creative, and that can only mean one thing: it was designed by my girl Olga Grlic.

If I ever get my book published, I don't care what goes on the cover, but by God, Grlic's designing it.

As for the book itself, it covers the lives of four women: Doctor's wife Love Welsh, attorney Marie Passeti, heiress Gayle Beck, and plastic Stepford Wife Janie Kirk, who travel in the same social circles in the overly-monied suburb of Hunting Ridge. They have beautiful homes, beautiful children, and everything they could ever want. So naturally they're all different shades of miserable.

Do you ever wonder why it's always women in groups of four? I suppose if there are any more women we'll lose track of who's squabbling with who and who has a secret eating disorder and who wears Prada and who has a closet full of Manolo Blahniks. Or maybe there are only four different types of women in the world, so pick which one you identify with. Go on. Pick.

Anyway, each woman, when not working on this big benefit for a women's public health center, are trying to reconnect with the women they used to be. Love is struggling with trying to reconcile her current quiet life with her past as a child prodigy, Marie is trying to reconnect with her increasingly distant husband while working on a child custody case that's taking a very odd turn, Janie's sneaking around on her boring husband, and Gayle's trying to keep it together with the help of prescription medication while dealing with an abusive husband.

As the story goes on, the women become more entangled with each other's lives, and ultimately things are resolved, more or less satisfactorily. Not a lot of new ground is covered in this book, so, Olga Grlic aside, there isn't a lot to say, but the story is told skillfully enough to keep the reader's attention until the last Prada shoe is finally kicked off at the end of the day.

_____________________________

Four Wives
By Wendy Walker
February, 2008 by St. Martin's Press
Hardcover, 368 pp.
ISBN-10: 0312367716

2008-04-27T16:43:00.002-05:00

Waterbaby.

When I was in high school, I butted my way through (I think) every book Stephen King had written at that time. From this informal education on Maine geography, I learned that it is populated with crazed religious fanatics, serial killers, vampires, and killer clowns dwelling in sewers. Its principal exports are rabid dogs and haunted cars. Principal imports are out-of-towners that stumble into the state, only to meet a grisly fate.

When I began Cris Mazza's Waterbaby, I thought, oh, this will be a nice change of pace. A middle aged woman comes to the Maine coast to investigate her roots and learn more about the generations of lighthouse keepers she descended from. Turns out this novel is based on the weaving together of two Maine legends; the ghost of a woman who drowned off the Maine coast, and a shipwrecked baby, kept alive by floating on top of the frigid, choppy water sandwiched between two feather mattresses, and rescued by a lighthouse keeper.

Oh, Maine, Maine. If you don't want tourists to visit, why don't you just say so? I am certain Disneyworld will take us.

Protagonist Tam Marr-Burgess is somewhat of a tourist herself. Haunted by the past losses that shaped her life, Tam leaves a messy breakup with her dog trainer roommate and impulsively hops the train to Maine, ostensibly to help her genealogist sister Martha obtain documents linking the branches in the family tree she is building. When she sets foot in the Maine harbor town of Hendrick's Head, instead of shedding the ghosts of the past, she picks up two more: Seaborne, the shipwrecked baby, and her adoptive sister Mary Catherine. As she pieces together the lives of the two girls, who grew up and staved off sorrow together, their newly fleshed-out lives help illuminate hers.

Waterbaby is a novel of baptism, of rebirth and resurrection, and of babies lost, abandoned, dead. Tam, a former champion swimmer, ended a promising Olympic career before it even began when she had her first epileptic seizure while racing her now-estranged brother Gary. Despite refusing ever again to wet a toe, Tam nevertheless fills her life to the brim with water, from dating a swim coach to living in the Hendrick's Head lighthouse, flirting around with the idea of plunging back and an reclaiming what she had lost, but never quite being able to do so. When she rescues an abandoned baby in a laundromat toilet, she begins to tentatively take the first steps toward reconciling herself, with the help of the spirit of Mary Katherine and the baby Seaborne left in her care, to healing from the loss of her own baby decades ago.

Waterbaby is a languid novel, lacking the intensity and drama of a novel propelled by a younger woman would have. Tam, in her late-forties and retired from her life as a successful stockbroker, has the patience and wisdom of someone older, someone with the ability to let events unfold when they may. For the most part this suits the novel very well, but I would be remiss if I did not admit that I found the pages where Tam's surroundings are described a bit tough to take. Early in the book, Tam enters a convenience store upon her arrival to Hendrick's Head, and we are treated to at least two pages cataloging the store down to the smallest detail. I know what a 7-11 looks like. I know you do, too. We do not need a thorough description of every hot dog slowly revolving around in their heated glass case. We do not need to be told there is fluorescent lighting and a take-a-penny bowl at the register. We are with you. We are already there.

Sure, I read these pages. But I don't think you have to. Like the chapters dedicated to whaling in Moby Dick, you won't miss anything by skipping them and moving on to more interesting things, like tracking down the mother of the toilet baby.

On the whole, Mazza's thoroughness pays off, and she paints Hendrick's Head with a stunning realism, and you feel like you're right there with Tam as she comes to terms with her life and her tumultuous relationship with her family.

______________________________

Waterbaby
by Cris Mazza
October, 2007 by Soft Skull Press
Paperback, 305 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-933368-84-9

2008-03-30T22:27:00.002-05:00

Daring Book for Girls.

Unlike The Dangerous Book for Boys, the predecessor to Miriam Peskowitz and Andrea Buchanan’s Daring Book for Girls, I have no guinea pigs at home to work with. I have absolutely no evidence to bring to the table about actual girls enjoying this book. I, however, along with several of my coworkers, enjoyed making the cootie catchers quite a bit. Making the little paper fortune teller blasted me back to fifth grade so fast I could even remember where in the room my friend Iwalani sat playing with it between classes. We used them to find out which boy we were going to marry, using the boys in our class. This guaranteed that every fortune was a massive letdown, because, you know, they’re called “cootie catchers” for a good reason.

This time we used them to tell our fortunes, like “You will suffer a massive breakdown and change all the locks on the doors and windows when the rest of your family is out” and “you will spend most of next year fused to a toilet seat."

The cootie catcher: Still a good way to waste time.

The rest of the book maps out most of girl territory, such as making a lemonade stand and a tree swing, telling ghost stories, learning how to paint with watercolors, and whistling between two fingers. Peskowitz and Buchanan, while not shying away from the traditional feminine – you can learn how to sew and press flowers – are adamant about including lots of information that appeals to both genders, such as the rules for basketball, canoeing, and karate. The Daring Book for Girls is resolutely committed to female empowerment, sometimes boringly so, with their talk of stocks and bonds and Robert’s Rules of Order.

Still, you have to hand it to them for putting that stuff in there, anyway, knowing those pages will get skipped over in favor of learning how to spy on people and make friendship bracelets.

While very similar to its masculine predecessor, The Daring Book for Girls takes into consideration the fact that girls come from many different cultures. This puts The Dangerous Book for Boys to shame, because a more accurate title for the boys’ book would be The Dangerous Book for White Boys. While I understand Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, authors of the Dangerous Book, wanted the book to have an old-fashioned retro feel, Peskowitz and Buchanan prove that you don’t have to sacrifice the retro feel in order to make all girls feel included and important.

While the boys are busy learning bupkis about cultural diversity, the girls learn Spanish phrases and a section is devoted to “Daring Spanish girls,” Japanese T-shirt folding, how to tie a Sari, and double-dutch jump roping, a mainstay of African-American girlhood, is taught. The illustrations in the book feature girls of different races as well.

When the book for boys was first published in the U.S., a certain amount of criticism was lobbed at the book for segregating activities by gender. While I am a fan of the book for boys, as are my kids, this point was brought squarely home while looking through the girls’ version, which has a very small section on making stitches. Sewing, as we know, is an extremely feminine activity, so this womanly art isn’t mentioned in The Dangerous Book for Boys. Sewing is nothing that a boy will ever, ever need to know, because there will always be a woman around to mend his clothes and sew on buttons. Unless, of course, there isn’t. In February’s issue of Vanity Fair, a journalist reports from the front lines in Afghanistan, and interviews several of the soldiers in a unit that is constantly under fire. The first introduction to the soldiers features one of them sitting on a small seat. Guess what he is doing? Sewing! His pants have ripped open right around the fly, and there is no time to mail the pants home for Mom to take care of, so he’s sewing his clothes all by himself. While fighting in a war, that most traditional of feminine activities.

This is exactly why, to have a well-rounded childhood, both boys and girls need the books for both boys and girls. To have anything less would be doing them a disservice.

_______________________________

The Dangerous Book for Girls
By Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz
January, 2008 by Harper Collins
Hardcover, 279 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-06-147257-2

2008-03-16T22:06:00.002-05:00

Immortal.

n 1944, Kathleen Windsor, inspired by her husband’s work as a history professor, published her first novel, Forever Amber, the sprawling saga of Amber, a poor peasant girl who claws her way to the top with nothing more than a pair of gorgeous amber colored eyes and an antipathy toward celibacy. It was roundly condemned by the Catholic Church, banned in 14 states, and the film the book inspired was condemned by the Hays Office. All this smiting managed to accomplish was to ensure that my teenage mother and all her fellow filthy-minded high school friends couldn’t wait to get their hands on a copy.

This year, Traci L. Slatton, inspired by her husband’s interest in Renaissance Florence, published her first novel, Immortal, the sprawling saga of Luca, a poor street urchin who claws his way to the top with nothing more than a head full of gorgeous reddish-blond hair and the ability to live forever. Immortal is full of forced prostitution, looting, pillaging, and sodomy. Plus,it makes the Catholic Church looks like it’s packed with a pile of crooked assholes, and so far the book hasn’t raised a single eyebrow. Damn these modern times!

I suppose it doesn’t hurt that Forever Amber is the bodice-ripper to end all bodice-rippers. Immortal is much more intellectual and restrained, making it ultimately a much better book, or at least one you don’t have to tape a brown paper bag book cover over the original cover so nobody can tell what you’re reading.

The book spans nearly two centuries, from 1324 to the end of the 15th century, covering the long and lonely life of Luca Bastardo, who seemingly originated on the streets of Florence, unable to remember his life before the age of nine. Sold into slavery by his best friend, Luca finds himself trapped for twenty years and at the mercy of brothel owner Bernardo Silvano, a sadist sociopath who almost whimsically tortures kills the numerous children held there for any number of infractions. Luca’s soul is kept intact by his love of the great artwork that was happening in Florence at the time, and pushes away the horrors of his life by focusing on his beloved paintings. At last, Luca escapes, and by doing so makes an enemy of the Silvano clan, who pursue him relentlessly for generations to exact their revenge.

As the world ages around him, Luca begins to search for his origins, to see if his parents are ageless like he is. He begins to hear scraps of tales of a race protected by the mystical Cathars, a sect of Christianity persecuted by the Catholic Church for heresy. His search is difficult and frustrating, because the people who have information – Bernardo Silvano, who has a mysterious paper regarding Luca’s origins that he taunts the boy with but will not let him see, and a man known only as the Wanderer, who is friends with the Jewish family that takes in Luca after his escape from the brothel. The Wanderer and his temperamental donkey seem similarly ageless, but both the Wanderer and his friend, Geber the Alchemist, seem more intent on answering his questions with inscrutable questions of their own.

After seeing a vision in the philosopher’s stone given to him by Geber and the Wanderer, Luca begins a new quest – to find love, even though he is told by the vision that finding his true love will also hasten his death.

Immortal, at its heart, has an almost Zen-like flavor. Luca spends the better part of his long life seeking enlightenment, and grows frustrated by his inability to control his gifts, both as a physico, a profession taught to him by his father-figure Moshe Sforno, the kind Jewish doctor who takes him in, and as an alchemist, where the ability to turn lead into gold eludes him. Isolated and lonely, Luca’s heart is as fragmented as his religious beliefs – his view of a good God who works through his protégé Leonardo da Vinci to create masterful works of art, and an evil God who laughs at his misfortune. Rather than find the path to enlightenment through a series of successive reincarnations, Luca has just this one long life to figure out the key to happiness.

Slatton takes this period of history that is seen now mostly in dusty history books, raises it to its feet, and fleshes it out to create one man’s compelling life, peppering ancient social mores and belief systems with just a bit of modern language (one character refers to another as a “good drinking buddy,”) and adding just enough magic to make the whole thing seem real.

I really love a good book of historical fiction, and Immortal was a very pleasurable book to read, one that I looked forward to picking up. After slogging through science books which were too hard, and humorous compilations of essays revolving around the dating scene, which were too soft, it was nice to find a book that was just right.

____________________________

Immortal
by Traci L. Slatton
February, 2008 by Delta
513 pp, Paperback
ISBN: 0385339747

2008-02-26T15:29:00.006-06:00

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.

Judging from all the pre-release publicity I got in my inbox about this book, I can only conclude that the publicist for this humor anthology from Ben Karlin, Emmy winning producer of The Daily Show and former editor of The Onion, was completely beside herself with excitement about its release. Most of the email correspondence I receive from publicists go something like:

Them: Do you want to read this?

Me: Okay.

Them: Cool.

But this fanfare was second only to the publicist getting her hot little hands on a new Salinger manuscript. I'd like very much to say cool it, it's not even close to being worth all that excitement, but now I know the object was to whip me up into a blind frenzy so I would quickly churn out a frothing review. And evidently it worked, too, because rather than publishing my review three months after the book has come out, which is my usual style, here is my review only three weeks late.

Let's all pretend it's right before Valentine's Day, then, and think of what would be most pleasing to read during that time period. If you said, "A collection of humorous, yet slightly sour reminisces from men who got dumped by the women in their lives," then by golly, are you in luck!

Karlin assembled a collection of essays from a wide-ish variety of men, from high school age to retirement age, of different races and religions who still seem to fit neatly into a tiny, tiny circle of guys connected in some way to McSweeney’s or The Onion.

With a title like this and connections like that, page after page of self-deprecating humor with a bite of bitterness is exactly what you'd expect. And you would be right, to a certain extent. However, a good many of the writers reached a little deeper and pulled up some genuinely creative stuff.

In “Nine Years Is the Exact Amount of Time to Be In A Bad Relationship,” Bob Odenkirk presents his essay as a seminar, selling the public on letting a relationship dwindle down into a long, lingering death spiral, and in “She Wasn’t the One,” Academy-Award nominee Bruce Jay Friedman, the oldest contributor, offers up a hard-boiled, if slightly dated, work of fiction, where a successful screenwriter is contacted by an old flame, who meets up with him in a bar and is “all furs and pearls and white skin and fragrance” - she’s clearly turned out to be one classy broad indeed.*

Other writers took the more traditional path, dutifully calling up the ghosts of girlfriends past. Comedian Patton Oswalt knocks it out of the park, as usual, with his essay, “Dating a Stripper Is An Exercise In Perspective,” contrasting and comparing the worst behavior of his wife against the best behavior of his stripper ex-girlfriend, Chivas. SNL cast member Will Forte contributes “Beware of Math Tutors Who Ride Motorcycles,” a look back on a college girlfriend who left him for another man.

And still others focus on less traditional experiences with relationships gone sour. Larry Wilmore writes of his rocky relationship with his new baby, Lauren, in “Women Are Never Too Young to Mess With Your Head,“ while Neal Pollack has a hilarious essay** regarding an unwholesome incident with a pet, the obliquely titled “Don‘t Come on Your Cat.”

The vast majority of the contributions are generous and lighthearted, even when recalling incidents, such as Forte’s, that must have been painful at the time. Forte comes across particularly well, both chivalrous and charming, and focusing more on his ability to grow from the experience.

This can’t really be said for some of the others, who use the opportunity to grind their axes and end up looking less like someone who’s learned a thing of two and more like someone doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again. In “A Grudge Can Be Art,” Andy Selsberg painstakingly recounts the weekend-long relationship with a teenager eleven years his junior, who told him upfront that she wasn’t faithful. He then proceeds to glowingly recount his efforts to hurt her feelings when she cheats on him with his roommates, and continues to insult her in the essay, years after the relationship*** ended.

Equally classy is Jason Nash, who wonders, in “Don’t Enter a Karaoke Contest Near Smith College; You Will Lose to Lesbians,” why his ex-model girlfriend never really liked him and continues to avoid his company to this day. It could be because of his insistence on referring to her as “fine pussy,” but maybe she likes having boyfriends that don’t view her as a human being, who knows?

And still others insult the reader rather than the woman, such as Rodney Rothman, who lazily transcribed a phone conversation with an ex-girlfriend, and, I’m very sorry to say, every thinking girl’s fantasy boyfriend Stephen Colbert, who wrote an essay called “The Heart Is a Choking Hazard,” and then blacked out most of it, CIA-style.

For the most part, Karlin has managed to pull together an enjoyable, funny collection that both men and women will enjoy. The only real thing missing from the book is a contribution by a lesbian. There’s even an amusing contribution by Dan Savage called “I Am A Gay Man,” but no corresponding tale of hearts broken at a summer womyn’s music festival. A lesbian did make it into the book, it is true, but since it is an introduction written by Karlin’s mother, who begins with “My son is a real catch and shame on any girl who’s ever thought otherwise,” I think we can all agree she may be working a different angle here.

__________________________________

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me
By Ben Karlin
Hardcover, 240 pp
Published February, 2008 by Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446580694

*That was a really long run-on sentence, even for me.

**Disclosure: Although it is true that Neal’s essay and Patton Oswalt’s essay were the only two in the anthology that made me laugh out loud, I do need to mention that I write a blog for Neal at his parenting website, Offsprung. I will freely admit this in my review of this book, unlike the writers over at Jezebel, who slagged on Neal for things in the essay that simply aren’t there, while neglecting to mention that Jezebel is a blog owned by Gawker, and all Gawker employees must sign a contract requiring them to unfairly dump on Neal at least once every six weeks or so.

***for lack of a better word.

2008-02-20T22:43:00.002-06:00

To Follow The Water.

In To Follow the Water, Dallas Murphy sets about explaining how the ocean controls climate. Which seems straightforward enough, until you start to unpack it and realize it's sort of an infinitely deep, Mary Poppins kind of suitcase, where you start pulling out pajamas and toothbrushes and medicine, and then keep reaching in and out comes floor lamps and aardvarks and five members of the WuTang Clan and you think, shit, now I have to explain how all this got in here.

Which he does, very patiently and methodically. To Follow the Water begins by doing exactly that, allowing the reader to examine small South American beans as they travel on the Gulf Stream, floating along from Costa Rica to the Irish coast, like little Kerouaks in a nautical On the Road. Once currants, the major players in patterns of global climate, are introduced, he backs up to include a brief history of how the ocean was studied* and takes it right up to the present day, which is where all the aardvarks and defunct hip hop groups start popping out of the suitcase. There are an endless number of variables that effect the ocean currents, and these all have to be factored in before any one current can be tracked, measured, and thoroughly studied.

In order to do this, you have to start with an empty suitcase, a perfectly shaped, symmetrical ocean, with no landmasses to disrupt, no variation in the depth of the water, no organisms, no revolving planet, no wind, no sun. And then these variables are slowly added, bit by bit by bit, noting on the way how patterns and currents and eddys emerge until at last, Murphy tells us well, the suitcase is still filled with things we haven't pulled out yet.

The study of oceans is suitably deep and complex as the ocean itself, if, ironically, a bit dry in spots. But what Murphy does so very well in this book, particularly in the last chapter, is explain the importance of science in helping to protect the environment, in particular, of course, oceanography, because if the ocean goes, so goes the climate, and so goes us.

To Follow the Ocean, while not a book that can be read while keeping one eye on the kids, is a great layman's book for understanding the ocean, a book that makes the reader feel slightly smarter for having read it.

__________________
*And includes, in Chapter 2, what Julia Sweeney refers to as a "red herring story," a humorous look on her mother's habit of dropping incredibly interesting tidbits into an otherwise ordinary story ("Julie, I took your car to the grocery store to buy potatoes for potato salad, and, well, I had a bit of trouble getting out because there was a man lying in your driveway, but when I got there I couldn't decide if you wanted Yukon potatoes or red potatoes." "Wait, what? There was a man lying in my driveway?" "Yes, yes, but which potatoes do you want?)

Murphy does the same thing when talking about explorers. "In 1513...a conquistador psychopath named Vasco Balboa had sighted [the Pacific Ocean] from a peak on the Isthmus of Panama. Like everyone at the time, he asssumed it was a sound or a big bay. Magellan sailed confidently northwest..."

Wait! Psychopath? I'm not in fifth grade anymore, I don't remember my explorers very well! Tell me why he was a psychopath! Was he the one lying in Julia Sweeney's driveway?! Tell me!**

**That was a really long footnote for just one word.

______________________

To Follow the Water
by Dallas Murphy
2007 by Basic Books
Hardcover, 256pp
ISBN: 1-58243-350-x

2008-01-15T12:28:00.000-06:00

Jamestown.

One of my coworkers, in a level of idiocy I believe to be unparalleled in the history of our workplace, recently received a jaw-droppingly racist anti-Obama screed in her inbox. Instead of deleting the comment, or, at most, responding to the sender with a "How dare you?" her instinct was instead to forward it without comment to everyone in our department, including all the managers, supervisors, and even the department head.

Predictably, there was the explosion of shock and anger that bursts from individuals who were quietly working one moment, then reading a raging torrent of hatred towards atheists, blacks, and Muslims the next. (In case you're curious, the full text of the email is here.) Everyone found something in the letter to be offended by, and the department was in an uproar. Shockingly, she was not fired for this astonishing error in judgment, and was ordered only to write another department wide email, this second one sent to apologize for the first.

"I just sent that email to show everyone what people were saying about him," she wrote. "Everyone who knows me knows I'm an open-minded person, and I don't think those things."

Okay, then. Both her actions and her excuse were inexplicable, and the only moment worth redeeming from the entire debacle was a conversation I had about it with an African-American coworker, who expressed gratitude that at least she lived in an era where such sentiments were met with strong opposition from the majority. "But," she said, "I'm well aware that this is a racial world. Now instead of just hating blacks, it seems whites hate everybody."

"What I can't believe," I said, "is that we seem to have learned nothing from the tragedy of slavery and the terrible consequences of dehumanizing other human beings. We seem to have learned absolutely nothing from Jim Crow - we're starting up the rhetoric and stirring up the negative sentiment all over again, just now with Muslims. This persistent refusal to empathize with Others is what causes history to repeat itself in countless horrible ways."

In Jamestown, Matthew Sharpe's post-Apocalyptic (Sharpe prefers the term "post-annihilation," because "apocalyptic" implies a revelation, and he does not think anything like that has occurred to his characters prior to the novel's beginning.) version of the original nightmare of the Jamestown settlers, portrays humanity at its bleakest and basest, as the characters ignore the lessons of history, abandoning the opportunity to save each other by working together to build a better world, choosing instead to scheme, betray, and oppress.

Set in the near future, civilization has suffered a cataclysmic disaster, leaving the water filled with hydrochloric acid, the ozone layer destroyed, the food poisoned, and the survivors dirty, tired, and in a constant haze of misery. A heavily-armored vehicle trundles from the ruin of Manhattan down I-95 by the flickering light from the burning remains of the Chrysler Building. Filled with men who share the names of the original Jamestown settlers, they drive toward Virginia to seek out oil and exploit the people who live there.

After days of wretched journeying spent infighting, with too little food and water and too many power struggles, the men find themselves surrounded by a tribe of alarming young men wielding arrows, with severed hands woven into their long black hair and skin reddened by pigmented sunblock. They attempt to form a working relationship with the tribe's leader, Chief Powhatan, and his consigliere, Sidney Feingold. Relations break down due to dishonesty on both sides. The settlers temporarily retreat and attempt to settle down in the swamps by creating a town of their own, Jamestown, so named after James Ratcliffe, CEO of Manhattan and the father of their nepotism-appointed leader, John. Ill-equipped to sustain themselves in such a hostile climate, the settlers, already sick and weak from their long journey, begin to die.

The Pocahantas-John Rolfe romance springs up, and the teenage princess naively does her best to assist the settlers and repair relations between her townspeople and her boyfriend's group.

Using the blackest of humor, Sharpe manages to tell an entirely new story without betraying the bloody details of the old. Like the original legend, Jamestown is a tale of ghastly violence with a dainty thread of love woven throughout. Unlike the original, Sharpe manages to end the novel with such a spectacular example of Manifest Destiny that it makes the reader realize that as good as the novel was, it's in fact even better, and the best idea would be to go back and read it again, just to catch all the details missed during the first go-round.

______________________

Jamestown
by Matthew Sharpe
2007 by Soft Skull Press
Paperback, 322 pp
ISBN: 978-1-933368-60-3

2007-12-20T19:49:00.000-06:00

The Terror Dream.

I read Susan Faludi’s latest book, The Terror Dream, when everybody else was putting up reviews about it, and then was for some reason unable to come up with anything to say about it. This is the problem have with Faludi – I love her books, but most of them have the effect of making me feel angry and helpless, and then my teeth start grinding and I start picking fights, only to splutter about what’s making me mad, and this does no one any good.

In The Terror Dream, Faludi places the events of 9/11 directly into the classic American mythology of larger than life male heroes rescuing helpless, hysterical females, even when the reality does not suit. Faludi, after thoroughly describing the destruction of the World Trade Centers and the subsequent media coverage that cast this as an attack on women and children, when in fact most of the victims were men, goes on to set the record straight on our entire American history, taking the piss out of legendary folk heroes such as Daniel Boone, and correcting the utter fabrications surrounding injured soldier Jessica Lynch. Faludi points out, time and time again, how the doings of men throughout history are elevated into breathless hero worship, while the confirmed heroism of the women, such as flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw, who boiled water on Flight 93 to use in her attack on the terrorists, was ignored in favor of stories such as that of Todd Beamer, whose last words “Let’s Roll” were spun out into a tale of derring-do that was completely conjured by the media from the reminiscences of his wife, Lisa, and other family members.

The story of Lisa Beamer shows Faludi at her most conflicted. Faludi accurately recalls Beamer as perfectly fitting the mold of the pregnant grieving hero’s widow, never once deviating from the script in the years that followed her husband’s death. In one of many interviews with Larry King, Ms. Beamer exemplifies the only approved role for female survivors of tragedy.

Larry King: What do you want to do with your life? Do you want to go to work?

Lisa Beamer: Right now, I want to take care of my kids. That’s what I wanted to do before September 11, and it is certainly a bigger job now than it ever was before.

LK: What do you make of all that’s happened since: Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, war, airport security, people in Guantanamo?

LB: I need to really use all of my strength and energy on just my little world and my little family. And certainly I have confidence that the powers in our country that can effect change, the government and corporate America in the case of the airlines, are going to do the right things.

LK: Did you not at all, Lisa, question your faith when this happened?

LB: I do just trust that God was in control that day and that he is, you know, taking care of me and loving me through this right now.

As Faludi writes, satisfying media fantasies “became her seemingly full time duty.”

Beamer indulged every whim of the press, including remaining quiet when they printed gross inaccuracies about her devotion to home and hearth (one press report falsely stated that Todd’s phone call “made her life worth living again,” a statement she later claimed she never made or even thought.)

All this compliance, however, did not deter the press from turning on her for the same willingness to indulge them.

Even Larry King, on whose show she had appeared at least eight times, began grilling her about her long stint in the media spotlight.

In the retelling of these events, Faludi seems to struggle somewhat between contempt for Beamer and defense of her, and as a result she sounds like she’s fallen into the same sticky situation that strikes many feminists find themselves in - trying not to woman-hate on women they hate.

Faludi comes into full stride when showing how this myth advances Manifest Destiny. Pioneer women were constantly being kidnapped and raped by savage Indian tribes and rescued by the daring pioneer men, despite the fact that most of the women who were taken to live in the tribes were very well treated, rape was virtually unheard of, and almost 60% of the women preferred their new homes within the tribes and refused to return to White civilization. Yet the image of the brutal savage was constantly trotted out in the popular culture of the day, and fueled the White man’s war on the Native Americans.

The invoking of Manifest Destiny opens the door to Faludi’s overarching point, which is that this pervasive insistence on erasing some voices and distorting others does American culture no favors; in fact, it can be deadly. The most famous example, which Faludi recaptures in nauseating detail, was the deaths of the New York City firefighters who, due to faulty radios, did not hear the warnings that the towers were about to collapse and died in the wreckage. Their story, much to the anger and dismay of their relatives, was spun into a courageous tale of the men putting their own safety last in order to rescue, well, those fictional, screaming women, most likely. This spin covered up the reality, that the firefighters had been urging the mayor’s office for new equipment for eight years, since the last attack on the Towers, that the people on the top floors were beyond help, that the men, had they known of their impending doom, would certainly have evacuated the burning buildings. This glossing over of reality in favor of a fairy tale absolves those who would not provide proper equipment to the men of their grisly deaths, and covers up the need for assistance to future firefighters as well.

The Terror Dream is a well researched trip through the history of American myth-making, and should be a wake up call to the media to focus on reality in favor of a delusional sexism that hurts men and women both.

If Faludi really wanted her voice to be heard and taken seriously, however, she should have written her book under the pseudonym Norman Mailer.

____________________
The Terror Dream
by Susan Faludi
2007 by Metropolitan Books
Hardcover, 296 pp.
ISBN: 0-8050-8692-7

2007-11-23T22:31:00.000-06:00

Hooked.

I don't really know what happened here. All I know is that around page 50 or so, just when I'd reached the part about the magical talking fish, it suddenly occurred to me that Hooked was sending me through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief and tragedy. While my reactions to the book weren't perfectly lined up with each stage - I transposed steps one and two, it seems, I did touch all the bases, starting with anger, touched off by the first couple of sentences in the prologue.

Once upon a time in a faraway kingdom bursting with strip malls, luxury high-rises and enough bling to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean and back, Raymond Prince prepared to anoint a royal consort in the backseat of a cobalt blue Mercedes sedan. With a full moon as his guide, Raymond unhooked the front-loading brassiere of his target market and chuckled to himself. Damn, if those tan-lined double Ds didn't remind him of the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler!

I finished the prologue - he's a crass, unattractive used car salesman implausibly having sex in the back seat of one of the cars on the lot with an attractive young woman, and he's caught by his wife - put it down, and seethed over it for a couple of days. When I began to feel obligated to pick it back up, I shifted quickly into denial, and pretended like the book wasn't in my office at all. Instead, I buzzed through Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream and Max Brooks definitive record of global zombie war journalism, World War Z. Then I read December's issue of Vanity Fair.

Denial gave way to bargaining, where I promised myself that if I just finished it, I could put it quickly behind me and begin Matthew Sharp's Jamestown, the newest book from my book boyfriend Richard Nash.

Chapter One leaves Raymond Prince behind for the time being and introduces us to the principal characters, Woody, the assistant manager of the Trade Winds Yacht Club in South Florida, Todd Hollings, the rich boy, and Madalina, the Romanian waitress. The three form the points of a love triangle, Woody is in love with Madalina who is in love with Todd. Bad dialogue between cardboard characters bogs down several pages until Woody goes fishing at the request/order of the Overbearing New Jersey burgeois character and catches Raymond Prince, who has been turned into a fish, and the book takes a Fairy Tale turn. I have nothing against having to suspend disbelief in novels - I wouldn't read them at all if I did. It's just that my credulity had already been strained by the poorly drawn characters and the crass, leaden dialogue. It wasn't that I didn't find the talking fish somewhat surprising, it's just that, by this point, I didn't care. I already know Woody's going to chase after Madalina, she of the ridiculous Count Dracula accent, until he realizes he really loves the girl he met at his aunt's house that he wasn't initially impressed with. Plus I was starting to find all the male characters so repulsive that I started to shudder every time they started talking about their erections, which was way more frequently than necessary.

Depression set in when I realized that I had 200 pages to go before the two lovebirds finally sailed off into the sunset on the second hand boat Woody is constantly fixing up. My husband quickly ushered in the acceptance phase when he said, "You know, you don't have to finish it if you don't want to."

And you know? I don't.

So I didn't.

_________________

Hooked
by Jane May
2007 by Kensington Books
Paperback, 245 pp.
ISBN: 0-7582-1362-X

2007-11-02T18:09:00.000-05:00

The Spanish Bow.

One of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of parenthood is being able to watch the excitement of children during the holidays, and knowing the source of that pure joy comes from hard parental work and careful planning.

What we also know is that, as parents, we give an untold number of gifts to our children every day, often without even realizing it. We give our political leanings and religious convictions, we pass on quirky facial expressions and the occasional salty word, we sometimes even pass on fear, such as a squeamishness about spiders or anxiety over thunderstorms.

And then there's the things we never gave them that they absorbed and took for their own anyway, like my own love of The Eagles and their Hotel California album, which I associate with my father listening to their music in our family room. I remember vividly my father's filing system, and could probably pick it out of the hundreds of albums in his cabinet while blindfolded.

These gifts have such a major impact on the shape of our children's personalities and lives it's a wonder we don't crack from the pressure.

Andromeda Romano-Lax's debut novel The Spanish Bow begins with such a gift. At the time of his birth, the mother of Feliu Delargo tells her older son Enrique to make sure the baby is named Feliz, or Happy. "Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope."

Due to a clerical error, his name is misspelled, and for the rest of his life, he was Almost Happy.

Shortly after his birth in 1892, Feliu is given a second gift, an object from a random pile of items sent home from his father, a soldier serving in the Spanish-American war. First to choose, Feliu pores over each item, a compass, a toy tiger, a glossy stick, a blue bottle, and a diary. Paralyzed by the thought of selecting the wrong gift, Feliu selects the one that makes no immediate sense, the glossy stick. His mother tells him it is a bow for a cello, and sends him for music lessons with the local master, an instructor with a piano and a violin. Feliu selects the violin in order to use the bow from his father, and saws away dutifully at it until a musical trio, led by the flamboyant child prodigy, pianist Justo Al-Cerraz, and his accompanists at the violin and the cello. When Feliu hears the cello, his world clicks into place, and it is behind the large instrument that he finds his destiny.

The Spanish Bow spans fifty years of the life of famous musician Feliu Delargo, loosely based on the life of the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, and his tempestuous relationship with Al-Cerraz and, eventually, with ethereal beauty Aviva, a Jewish Italian violinist whose obsession with something she has lost threatens to destroy her.

True to his name, Feliu is almost, but never quite, happy. After his mother flees a dangerous relationship with a local Don, she and Feliu take up residence in Barcelona, where he hones his craft, pushing himself mercilessly, first with an aging cellist whose career was destroyed by his politics, then on the Barcelona streets, and later Madrid, where his talent propels him into the royal court.

As political tensions mount and Spanish fascist Franco rises to power, Feliu anguishes over whether to remain politically neutral like Al-Cerraz, or if he should, as his former teacher urged, to use his talent for good.

Romano-Lax has created a rich and lively novel, steeped in early 20th century Spanish history and culture. As Feliu passes through the years, he finds himself more and more unable to lose himself in music, and becomes no longer sure if he should. The complexities of his life and the onslaught of fascism bring his passion for music, Aviva, and politics to a head, creating a grand, sweeping novel the reader can immerse herself into.

P.S. - and on the Real Life front, I was given an advance copy as well as the finished product, one of which I gave to one of my coworkers. She approached me this week and told me her husband had taken the book away from her and had locked himself in the bathroom to read it. "He won't give it back to me until he's done," she complained.

Sometimes I think I should quit spending the time to write reviews and just copy down other people's reactions to the books in question. I think that may make the reviews more compelling.

_______________________
The Spanish Bow
by Andromeda Romano-Lax
September 2007 by Harcourt
Hardcover, 580 pp
ISBN: 978-0-15-101542-9

2007-10-14T23:46:00.000-05:00

Sword & Blossom.

In 1982, a retired Tokyo schoolteacher, Tetsuko Suzuki, was sorting through her late mother-in-law's possessions that had been gathering dust in a storeroom. In a long wooden box, Suzuki found over 800 letters written to her late husband's mother, carefully preserved. The letters, dating back to 1904, were all from one person, British general Arthur Hart-Synott. From the letters, a love story between the Japanese working-class girl and the British officer began to emerge, one that was to span decades.

Hart-Synnot, a career soldier whose family owned an Irish estate, was sent to study Japanese to solidify the bond between England and Japan, who had joined together to fight against Russia. While there, Hart-Synnot met 25-year-old Masa Suzuki, a barber's daughter. Suzuki, who had recently been divorced by her husband, was condemned to a life of servitude and contemptuous treatment by her relatives who had been forced to take her back in. Hart-Synnot offered her a job as his housekeeper, which was a thinly-veiled code for "temporary wife," an arrangement that, while not uncommon, was officially frowned upon by the British military. With her family's permission, Suzuki moved in with Hart-Synnott, then a Captain, and began to teach him Japanese. Their relationship became so strong that Hart-Synnot, when his assignment was up and he was transferred, could not bear to be parted with her. Ulike his military comrades who casually discarded the Japanese women they'd formed relationships with, he spent the rest of his military career trying to return to her and their young son.

British journalists Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams spent years piecing together their lives, painstakingly researching the career of Hart-Synott and translating the letters written in his stumbling, archaic Japanese. As Pagnamenta and Williams began to breathe life back into Suzuki and Hart-Synnot, a fairy tale began to emerge, the old familiar story of Cinderella, scorned and hated, doomed to a life of drudgery but saved by the dashing Prince.

In a short amount of time, however, it becomes clear that the powerless rescued by the powerful isn't what it's cracked up to be. Japan in the early 20th century is no place to be a woman.

According to the Ministry of Education the object of female education was to make "good wives, and wise mothers." Women had no political rights, and no vote, and to keep them from any newfangled distraction, the Police Security Regulations of 1900 specifically prevented them from joining political organizations or attending political meetings. Once married a woman could not buy or sell property, enter into debts, or start legal proceedings without her husband's consent. Masa was known as a local beauty, and when she was twenty Kakujiro Suzuki contracted for her to marry a paper wholesaler from the commercial district of Nihonbashi...but within a couple of years her husband decided he wanted a divorce. Separation was easily achieved for men, who could cite grounds that included "not respecting the mother-in-law" or "talking too much." The rule was that in all settlements children were automatically allotted to the father. The paper merchant took their small daughter into his family to be looked after by his new wife. Masa was dumped and discarded. Because she now carried the stigma of divorce, and was past the usual age for marriage, the chances of her family's being able to arrrange another husband for her were slim. ..all Masa Suzuki would now have been able to expect was a life of domestic drudgery, more dependent on her family than ever..."

Overwhelmingly, Western men found this arrangement to be fantastic, and criticized Western women for not being as charmingly submissive as their Eastern sisters. Nevertheless, when Hart-Synott was invited to dinner at the home of a Japanese officer and witnessed his wife crawling across the floor to serve the men dinner, even he had admit this was too much.

In this crushing climate of oppression, Suzuki was being asked to choose between slavishly serving dinner either on her hands and knees or on her feet. Given that, and the fact that she had absolutely nothing to lose, the choice was easy.

The letters written back to Arthur by Masa have never been found, but given her total dependence of the whim of whichever man lived with her, it is hard to believe they would tell us much about how she really felt about him, even though his gushed with love for her. Her survival depended on how well she could perform the role of the doting submissive, and if she was ever angry or even disinterested in him, she could never openly express it.

This is what the old school feminists were talking about when they said a woman's consent to sex could never be truly given in an oppressive society. Given how much she had to lose for failing to please Hart-Synott, how could anyone really be sure what she really thought?

Although Hart-Synott's integrity was miles higher than that of his military colleagues, Suzuki never fully trusted him to keep his word that he would return to Japan and continue to provide for her. She repeatedly rejected his pleas to marry him and follow him across the globe, for not only would she have to endure sexism, but racism and classicism as well. She would never receive the respect due a General's wife, and, as difficult as it is to imagine, if she left her home and traveled two thousand miles to be with him, away from her family and friends, she would have even less power than she did on her home turf.

Aiding her decision to remain in Japan was fueled in no small part by Hart-Synott himself, was so far removed from her feelings that, despite the hundreds of gushing love letters he wrote her, it seemed that "he was totally devoted to Masa as an ideal, [but] did not seem to be able to put himself in her shoes or to see how the world might look from her point of view."

This caused him to act in ways that were occasionally jaw-droppingly insensitive, and Masa felt she had no choice but to accept it, at first for her sake and later for the sake of their son Kiyoshi, who Arthur saw less than five times in his entire life.

Sword & Blossom, while occasionally dry and does venture into being tedious when Arthur's 200th letter, remarkably similar to the previous 199, is quoted. However, Pagnamenta and Williams have done a remarkable job bringing turn of the century Japan alive, as well as the battles in the trenches during World War I. It is to their credit that they did not gloss over the often painful reality of Suzuki's life in favor of portraying the doomed lovers as paragons of romance.

A study came out years ago that said it was found that little girls who loved the passive Princess stories of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were more likely to grow up to be abused than girls weaned on stories where girls took an active role in their own destinies, such as The Paper Bag Princess.

If there is better evidence that there is no power in being powerless, that the passive Princess stories are nothing but dangerous hogwash, I have yet to see it.
___________________
Sword & Blossom
by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams
June 2007 by Penguin Press
368 pp., Paperback
ISBN: 0143112147

2007-09-22T10:55:00.000-05:00

Baby Proof.

103 book reviews later, and I'm still not sure I've gotten the hang of doing it. I started out reviewing books I read to my kids and books I myself was reading, and then, over time, I started reviewing almost exclusively review copies sent to me by publishers. Most of the books have been either Mommy books or chick lit, neither of which are genres I particularly care for. Early on I knew I had to view the books differently, asking myself which audience is the book written for, and is it well-written for that audience. This is something you just never really know, so I softball a lot of my opinions. The books that I feel are aimed toward readers like me, I actually tend to be more stringent with my criticism. Truthfully, I think I should be stricter than I am with all the books, although the two books that I didn't care for got me blistering hate mail from the fans of one book and the author of another.

The reason for my new mode of thinking is the fault of Emily Giffin's Baby Proof, a chick lit book of such high quality that I feel that now I can only inadequately describe how engaging it is.

Claudia Parr, a senior editor at a publishing firm in Manhattan, is spending her thirties happily childfree and married to her soulmate and best friend, Ben. Before marriage, Claudia and Ben both agreed they did not want children. Then, unexpectedly, Ben's biological clock begins to tick and he changes his mind with a vengeance, incessantly dropping annoying hints about motherhood to Claudia. This leads to resentment, which leads to fights, which leads to irreconcilable differences, which leads to divorce.

Claudia moves out of the apartment she shares with Ben and moves back in with her best friend Jess, a gorgeous high-rolling Wall Street whiz whose taste in men is as bad as her taste in fashion is good.

The majority of the novel focuses on Claudia's post-divorce life, and her steamy new relationship with her colleague Richard, a charming but louche older man who entertains Claudia and distracts her from her broken heart and her growing suspicion that perhaps she's made a horrible mistake, sacrificing her soul mate for her freedom.

And being a Chick Lit novel, it also deals with Claudia's frustrating but mostly lovable family; a sister dealing with infertility, another sister dealing with an unfaithful husband, and a flamboyant, untrustworthy mother.

This is all standard Chick Lit fare, but where it differs from the other genre books is high quality of Giffin's skillful writing and the care she takes with each character. Edie Bloom's Immaculate Conception had a million busy, zany things going on to distract the reader from the fact that it had a completely unmemorable plot. In fact, without going back and rereading the review, I honestly can't remember what it was. Baby Proof has a very simple, traditional plot: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, etc., and far fewer moments of excitement. What it does have, however, is care and time. Claudia's budding relationship with Richard is allowed to slowly unfold and develop into a clear, three-dimensional picture. Giffin has taken time to get to know these characters so well that she doesn't make a single false step, and although the reader may be rooting for Claudia and Ben to get back together, she'll enjoy every single bit of witty banter and hot sex between Claudia and Richard.

She'll also enjoy every bit of the book as a whole, with an ending that manages to be satisfying without wrapping everything up in a tidy bow or betraying the spirit of the characters.

For those readers who don't care for Chick Lit, this is the one book you'll want to read on an airplane. And for those readers who care very much for Chick Lit, Baby Proof should be an essential part of your library.
_________________
Baby Proof
by Emily Giffin
June 2007 by St. Martin's
ISBN: 0312348657

2007-09-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

Totally Wired.

The cover of Anastasia Goodstein's Totally Wired, a guide to help parents unravel the tangle of iPods, cellphones, and laptops their children are planted squarely in the middle of, has a picture of a pretty teen in a white knitted cap sitting in a red leather chair, talking animatedly on the phone. Which is fine enough to let the reader know what's on the inside, but if you wanted to boil the book down to its very essence and put said essence on the cover instead, the book would look exactly like a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a plain, unassuming book with only the words DON'T PANIC on the cover.

Today's teens, Goodstein argues, are really no different from the hippies or the kids screaming over Elvis' dance moves on Ed Sullivan or kids listening to Michael Jackson on their Walkman. They're just doing what teens always do, but with more modern technology than their parents had.

Goodstein, who has worked extensively with teens, runs a website called Ypulse, a blog for teens in media and adult marketing pros. It provides news, entertainment, commentary, and resources that teens may find valuable and/or fun. Through her work, Goodstein concludes that the hype over out of control teens going wild on the web is mostly just that - hype. Most teens, she argues, don't want the whole world to watch their web activity. Their LiveJournals are mostly friends-only, where they discuss their days and make plans with their peers, and strangers are not welcome. Further, being connected to the web through IMs, blogs, and virtual games like Teen Second Life gives shy teens a chance to express themselves in a positive way.

Goodstein does caution parents, however, that teens often do not fully realize the public nature of the internet, and are often genuinely surprised when the photos and video they take or the things they write end up being seen by thousands of people. She gives several cautionary tales about teen girls videotaping themselves in sexually explicit situations (a subject about the hypersexualized climate in pop culture is also addressed) as well as humiliation of teen boys, the sad story of the "Star Wars kid," Ghyslain Raza, being the most notorious. Cyberbullying is also addressed, as well as steps taken to curb it.

Goodstein presents the various applications of technology teens use in a matter of fact, encouraging way, and by doing so illuminates the actual problems today's technology presents, once the overhyped fear of predators is minimized. Plagiarism and cheating techniques are a lot more sophisticated than they used to be, and bullying can be a lot more undercover. Making the internet accessible to all teens, even those without computers at home is a challenge for teachers as well (apart from not being as savvy as their students). Downloading illegal music is also a challenge for many parents, not only because it's difficult to stop, but because parents vividly remember their days of taping music off the radio and transferring their friends' albums onto cassette tapes, and have a difficult time explaining to their kids why downloading music is a totally different thing (it really isn't, the music just sounds a lot better). Goodstein suggests ways parents and teachers can get connected with today's teens, and interviews several parents with varying parenting styles about their kids' use of the internet and parental restrictions they place on its use.

On the whole, Totally Wired is an upbeat, enthusiastic look at the way teens use technology, and encourages parents to get involved with their kids' online lives. This, Goodstein believes, can translate into making strong connections with them in their offline lives as well.

_________________________________
Totally Wired
by Anastasia Goodstein
March, 2007 by St. Martin's Press
Paperback, 187pp
ISBN: 0312360126

2007-09-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club.

Oh God.

Oh no.

Look at the cover. Legs and feet. Again. They won't stop. They will not stop with the legs and feet on chick lit book covers. This must be stopped. How can we stop them? What legislation can we pass? I can't take it anymore. Please, I implore you to rise up and strike a blow to publishers everywhere: No more legs and feet, or so help us, we'll start reading only the Russian greats! Try and put legs and feet on those covers, I dare you.

It seems that not even sixty year old chicks are immune from the dreaded cliché. And they even gave her a cat and a glass of wine!

Poor Virginia Ironside. Afforded no dignity, even in her senior years. Not that she or her heroine Marie Sharp want any crumbs thrown their way, thank you.

No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club is the droll diary of one Marie Sharp, who celebrates her 60th birthday by starting a journal. Unlike most seniors, who find it important to keep their brains and bodies active and as youthful as possible, Marie decides old age is an excellent opportunity to let it all go. No more will she feel pressured to learn Italian, or see China, and she'll never, ever join a book club! No silly, clichéd rubbish for her!

The novel focuses a lot on Marie's cantankerous observations on the less-than-glamorous aspects of aging. I was using it as a sort of guide, a window as it were to my future in twenty five years, when one of the chapters begins with her best friend Penny calling her to state in a panic, "I can't seem to find my clioris."

Then I screamed in terror and ran away. I don't want to know anymore!

When Marie's son Jack becomes a father to baby Gene, Marie's dry wit and stiff upper lip melts and novel goes from being a Bridget-Jones-As-Silver-Fox chronicling the live and loves of aging Boomers to a sentimental love story that flawlessly articulates the love grandparents feel for their grandchildren. According to Marie, it's unconditional love without the fear and crushing responsibility of motherhood. Who wouldn't love that?

In between the bits of myopic love and worry Marie lavishes on baby Gene, she also manages, despite her insistence that it's all over, to attend parties, attend to her dying close friend Hughie and his grieving partner James, mentor her housemate, a pretty French teenager, and, possibly, fall in love again.

No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club is a chick lit book with a decidedly different pace, while it may not be for twenty-somethings, older readers with no desire to grow old gracefully will definitely identify with Marie. Like the woman who wrote this Amazon review:

I am recommending it to our book club of older women; sure can identify with the subject matter.

Marie would just die.

____________________
No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club
by Virginia Ironside
April 2007 by Viking
Hardcover, 240pp.
ISBN: 0670038180

2007-09-04T08:52:00.000-05:00

The Immaculate Complexion.

Here's the deal with my reviews, mostly: I try to review books not for what they are, but for what they're supposed to be. I'm not going to take this book, another lighter-than-air look at the fashion industry, and compare it to Dostoevsky or Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker, and I don't think I should.

Immaculate Complexion is supposed to the the kind of book you read when you're sitting under a tree in the backyard with one eye on the book and the other on three small children playing in the sprinkler. It's a book you want to bring to the beach, because it's one of those mass market paperbacks, the books that have an advertisement for something right in the middle of it* (the ad in this book is an offer to get 4 books free if you join the Romance Book Club.), and it's small enough to jam into your beach bag under the sunblock and the towels. It's the kind of book you want to read if, as one Amazon reviewer** said of the book, "Normally, it takes me weeks, even months to get through a book. My mind wanders, I fall asleep, I count the pages to see how long it is till the next chapter begins."

But if you're Jessa Crispin, you won't even open it.

So, with that categorization, how does it hold up? Not too bad.

Immaculate Complexion, a book packed with so many right-this-very-second pop trends that you'd better read it right now before it dates itself, was written by two former publicists for a cosmetic company*** under the pseudonym Edie Bloom, a true grit take on the makeup industry seen through the eyes of plucky young heroine Marnie Mann, a temp sent to float around in an Estée Lauder-like company. What unfolds is exactly what you think is going to unfold, if you've read The Devil Wears Prada or Miss Understanding or any of the hundreds of tell-all chick lit books about the fashion industry.

*Fat (5'7", 140lbs. i.e. - not fat)fish out of water gets hired.

*She has her feelings continually hurt by anorexic fish.

*However, fish has brains and pluck, and therefore

*lands a fabulous boyfriend, and

*becomes a success.

The writers cover the basic plot structure with a lot, and I mean A LOT, of stuff, so much stuff I feel overwhelmed even thinking about recapping it: A Power Lesbian boss forcing Marnie to plan her A-List wedding, a batch of bad Botox that causes paralysis and comas, the mysterious disappearance of Hattie LeVigne, the company's 90-year-old founder, and even murder. And that's just during the 9-to-5. During her off hours, Marnie is given a new romance with Paul, the head of the Cheese Department at the neighborhood Dean & Deluca, and a vegan, animal-rights activist of a best friend, Holly, with whom Marnie is trying to start her own all-natural cosmetics line.

Any one of these plot points could have been its own book. It was as if the writers had a lot of grievances to get out of their system and poured it all out on the page at once. Maybe they shouldn't have done this, because they could have written (and collected paychecks for) at least five books with the same zany recurring cast of characters.

The work stories aren't written too badly - if there's one thing girls usually knock out of the park, it's writing about the skinny, pretty bullies that tormented us in high school and made us feel suicidally fat and ugly. However, the book really shines during Marnie's off hours, where her romance with the sweet and gentle Paul really rings true and sets off a powerful spark. The writers manage to add a great dollop of love with almost no sex, so if you're looking for that one dog-eared page to read over and over again, quit looking. You won't find it here.

The only thing about the book that I found somewhat alarming were some careless racial references that quite frankly need to be left out of future editions.

When describing the privileged childhood of Summer and Rebecca LeVigne, Hattie's grandchildren and heiresses to the family fortune, they are mentioned as being photographed at their thirteenth birthday party with "a big black mammy holding an enormous cake in the background."

While I understand the writers were trying to make a point about class privilege, I think there must be a better way to do it than that. Like wearing blackface, I think there's just no real way to make that okay, regardless of intent.

The other comment was when Marnie looks at a photo of a young Hattie applying cream to the face of Mao Tse Tung, and it reminds her of her Asian boyfriend. What? Why? How could this possibly be true?

While I in no way think the writers were being deliberately racially insensitive or cruel, I feel obligated to give a heads-up about it to blog readers who may be sensitive to racially dubious remarks.

Those two sentences out of 326 pages aside, Immaculate Complexion is a book you can buzz through easily without taxing too many brain cells, which is perfect for these last few days of warm summer weather.

_______________________
Footnote Tangents:

*I really hate it when books have commercials right there in the middle. One of the major advantages of books is that they're commercial-free. This practice needs to be stopped, by force if necessary.

**The Amazon review section is sort of like the blank pages in someone's high school yearbook now. So many of the writer's friends and relations line up with their "U Rule" and "BFF 4-evar!" that they're completely untrustworthy for getting a legitimate opinion. And sadly, I'm just as guilty. One of my BFFs from high school got a book published a few years ago, and who was right there to give him five stars? Me, that's who. It was a book on computer programming. I hadn't even read the damn thing.

***Whose names I will not reveal in case they're still getting free swag.

________________________

The Immaculate Complexion
by Edie Bloom
May, 2007 by Dorchester
Mass Market Paperback, 326pp
ISBN: 0-8439-5856-1

2007-09-03T12:09:00.001-05:00

For The Love Of Letters.

I have to get this out of the way first and foremost: this book needs a different title. It seems fine at first; it's simple, direct, and tells the reader exactly what to expect. However, when I went to Amazon to find a photo of the book to put at the top of the review, Letters to Penthouse popped up instead, even when I typed the title word for word into the search box. You can't compete with Letters to Penthouse. It's just too distracting. Although - ALTHOUGH! - you can't argue with the fact that the men who Couldn't Believe Something Like This Would Ever Happen To Them could benefit from a professional letter-writer who could avoid some of the many, many clichéd phrases that hack their way between all those threeways.

Samara O'Shea's guide to the forgotten art of letter-writing valiantly attempts to revive the fading art of written communication. Like many of us word nerds, O'Shea is concerned with the current trend of the devolving English language, thanks in no small part to the technology boom of Blackberries, text-messaging cell phones, and instant messaging. Internet speak has become the written equivalent of fast food - it may sate the appetite, but does very little for the soul.

For The Love of Letters: A 21st-Century Guide to the Art of Letter Writing is broken up into seven chapters, each addressing a different situation that would call for an abandonment of email and a reliance on a postage stamp. Love letters, business letters, Dear John letters, thank you letters, and letters of apology are all carefully addressed, with several subsections devoted to everything from the erotic letter to the best way to write a letter refusing to write a letter (of recommendation).

O'Shea gives several juicy examples for the reader to enjoy. She includes her humbling letter of apology that she wrote after she was fired from her job at O Magazine, one of the hot and nasty letters James Joyce wrote to his wife, and makes reference to the adamant refusal from Joyce's grandson Steven to reprint any more of those heated missives. (O'Shea opted to reprint Junior Joyce's crabbily-worded response on her website rather than in the book, for fear of receiving more unwanted correspondence from the notoriously litigious Joyce.)

Reading For the Love of Letters caused me to think back to when I'd last written an actual handwritten letter. It had to have been years ago, when I reached out to a long lost friend in hopes of catching up. It was a tremendous success. I received a handwritten letter of my own from her almost right away, and her opening sentences were, "It made my whole day to find a letter, an actual letter in my mailbox! I haven't gotten a real letter in years, and it made me so happy to sit down at the kitchen table to read it."

Neither O'Shea nor I mean any disrespect to email correspondence, I'm sure. I personally am a big fan of email. With two children and a full time job, it's an invaluable tool to keep up with the doings of both friends and business. But it cannot be denied that letter-writing is indeed a lost art form, and receiving one can be like an unexpected and appreciated gift, depending, of course, on the content.

Admirably, O'Shea has managed to dovetail her love of craft with love of money by starting an online (where else?) professional letter-writing business, Letter Lover, where, for fifty bucks, she'll say anything to anybody.

Everybody has spent what seems like hours in front of the computer, with a necessary letter hanging overhead, with no idea how or where to begin. It's somewhat of a relief to know you now have the opportunity to shove this unwelcome task off onto somebody else, and O'Shea does write excellent letters, no two ways about it.

However, if it's a love letter you're wanting to write, please don't hire her. Do it yourself, or don't do it at all. Even O'Shea states right up front on her website that her love letters are not going to sound like the person they'll ostensibly be from. After all, the handsome lunkhead who used Cyrano de Bergerac's passionate words to woo the lovely Roxane worked for only one reason: Roxane didn't know either Cyrano or the lunkhead. But Cyrano knew Roxane. Therefore he was able to draw from both passion and the context of her life, which is what made his words to her so irresistible. To be perfectly blunt, O'Shea doesn't want to blow your boyfriend. You do. And no matter how skilled the writer, that kind of passion is very, very hard to fake. Better to get a passionate letter written all in internet acronyms than a bloodless love letter with no grammatical errors and well-set margins.

But her weaknesses in writing love letters are her strengths in just about every other letter she writes, where courtesy, integrity, and intelligence are valued far above passion, and this is where both The Love of Letters and O'Shea's website are an asset to anyone who must put pen to paper.

_________________
For The Love Of Letters
by Samara O'Shea
2007 by Harper Collins
Hardcover, 163pp
ISBN: 978-0-06-121530-8

2007-08-25T18:24:00.000-05:00

Mademoiselle Victorine.

Victorine Laurent, the title character in Debra Finerman's debut novel Mademoiselle Victorine, is a gorgeous young ingénue who, armed only with her ambition, manipulative feminine wiles, and perky boobs, rises from obscurity to the height of success in a world-class city, only to be brought low by a scandal created by jealous rivals before rising back up again, determined never to give up.

Two other characters spring to mind that fit this description - Kathleen Windsor's Amber St. Clair in Forever Amber, and the ne plus ultra of literature's scheming females, Scarlett O'Hara. It's perhaps unfair to compare Victorine to a literary icon like Scarlett, but when the parallels are so similar, it can't be helped.

Mademoiselle Victorine bears a bit more resemblance to Forever Amber than it does to Gone With the Wind. Both Windsor and Finerman had a strong desire to paint an accurate picture of a particular time and place, Amber in 17th century England, Victorine in the art world of 19th century Paris. And both novels paint an incredibly vivid picture, with Victorine coming off a bit heavy-handed at first. In addition to countless references to cafés and Salons, it was like somebody had a yard sale in Finerman's neighborhood, where they were selling accent aigus for a nickel a bag. Not to mention Victorine floats through the entire novel bumping up against every single historical French figure of the 19th century - Monet, Manet, Cézanne, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Pasteur - they were all there, seen mingling at a cocktail party or sitting one table over at a restaurant. Victorine was like Forest Gump without the military service.

This novel takes place in Paris. Paris, France. Do not forget it. The orphan Victorine is spotted by artist Edouard Manet as she performs as a Junior Ballerina at the Paris Opera and becomes his muse, scandalously posing naked in many of his portraits. She becomes a pop culture sensation; a 19th century Kate Moss whose antics and romantic hookups rival her nude portraits for gossip fodder. She then spends the novel trading up sugar daddies until she meets total dickhead Duke Phillipe de Lyon, the power behind the throne of Louis-Napoléon. I'd call him a 19th-century Karl Rove if I didn't think the thought of him being portrayed in a sexual context would nauseate you. Everybody warns her that he's completely evil, but she thinks she can get a big house and really cool wheels out of him, so off she goes. He turns out to be more evil than expected, and Victorine is faced with total disaster.

And here comes the major difference between Victorine and Scarlett O'Hara. Rather than relying on the kindness of men who, with the exception of Victorine's gay boyfriend André, just aren't that helpful, Scarlett comes up with ideas beyond offering up sex to powerful men (although she's not above it, i.e. the green velvet curtain scene) and makes her own luck.

Unfortunately, Victorine is not Scarlett. When the chips were down, the Southern beauty not only saved herself, but saved every man and woman around her that she loved. And she even saved some people she didn't love. And she would stop at nothing to fight for herself and her family. I mean, she shot a Yankee point blank in the face for stealing her mother's little rosewood sewing box. Then she stole his wallet and buried him in a shallow grave in the backyard. Scarlett is totally, totally awesome.

Like Scarlett, Victorine despises and distrusts other women, in spite of the fact that her biggest betrayers are men who have stripped her of all legal rights and freedoms and forced her into a narrow range of miserable choices. They both have one female frenemy, Victorine's Julia Stanhope-Morgan, and Scarlett's Melanie Wilkes, and they're both bound up in the same drama - both Julia and Melanie get the man the protagonist wants for herself.

There's quite a difference in sidekicks, too. While Julia is, like Melanie, a good, honest, kind woman, it's Melanie who appears at the top of the stairs after hearing the gunshot, gazes down at the dead Yankee, smoke rising from the destroyed ruin of what was once his face, looks at Scarlett leaning up against the wall, gray-faced and holding the pistol, and says, "We'll both take a leg and drag him outside."

See, that's the kind of friend you want.

Julia Stanhope-Morgan, due to her constant activity, is hands-down the more interesting female character. She follows her passion halfway around the world and makes her own fortune. Based on the life of artist Mary Cassat, Julia leaves Boston, defying her family's direct orders, and comes to Paris to seek out Edouard Manet to beg him to take her on as his protégée.

In one scene, Victorine spies on Manet and Stanhope-Morgan at work.

Edouard indicated for Julia to move aside and took a seat on her stool. He dipped a rag in linseed oil, then smeared it across one section of the canvas to erase the paint. "Stop!" She jerked the cloth out of his hand. "You'll ruin it!"
"Too much ego, not enough humility," he said.
Julia crossed the room and dropped onto the divan. She said that she had never hated anyone as much as she despised him.

Then they make up and she makes a pass at him.

Plus, Julia volunteers at an insane asylum! Why didn't we get to read more about that? 19th-century loony bin? Come on! That's got to be good. This is, to me, just a more interesting story than sleeping your way to the top. The sidekick should never be more interesting than the main character. Melanie Wilkes may know where the bodies are buried, but it was Scarlett that pulled the trigger.

After all this criticism, it appears that I didn't like the book. And I guess I didn't. I've given better reviews to worse books, so what gives? It seems historically accurate, it's quite readable, it has enough sex and violence to keep things rolling along. I really don't understand my final reaction to the book. I think it's because I didn't care for any of the characters. Victorine herself was extremely inaccessible and frankly not very likeable, the men were jerks, and Julia and André, the most amiable characters, weren't fleshed out enough to carry the novel.

I can easily believe that another reader may not have the issues with it that I did at all. Mademoiselle Victorine is a novel that can be fiercely loved; I can see that. It may also be that my expectations may have been too high, because, like Finerman, I love the art that was happening all over 19th century Paris.

There's a painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day, and I can stare at it for hours. It seems like if I just watch it long enough, I'll be able to fall into it and it will start to move. The couple in the foreground will sweep past me, and I'll be able to feel the patter of rain on my arms and hear the clatter of hooves on the cobblestones. As much as I would have liked it to, Mademoiselle Victorine never let me come close enough to it to fall inside.

_______________________

Mademoiselle Victorine
by Debra Finerman
July, 2007 by Three Rivers Press
Softcover, 289pp
ISBN: 0307352838

2007-08-18T00:31:00.000-05:00

African Psycho.

One of my favorite bits in the The Spy Who Shagged Me was Dr. Evil's creation of Starbucks to achieve world domination. Mike Myers got the idea from old superhero TV shows where the villain's side job, the day job that paid for his elaborate costumes and Evilmobiles was much more successful and effective than anything the villain could have achieved by dedicating himself to a life of crime alone.

So is the same with Grégoire Nakobomayo, a destitute, homeless orphan on the booze-heavy border town of Celui-Qui-Bôit-de-l'eau-Est-un-Idiot(He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot.) Managing to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to become a successful auto mechanic who owns both his own business and home in Africa's Congo-Brazzaville, Grégoire is obsessed with his own perceived failures and limitations. Like all B movie supervillains, however, he pursues a goal that he is certain will give him the greatest satisfaction: he will become Africa's greatest serial killer. As a true master criminal, he will at last have the attention he so desperately needed as a child, while simultaneously punishing society for its neglect.

The novel begins with Grégoire's stated desire to kill his girlfriend, Germaine. From the first sentence we fall into Grégoire's compelling stream-of-conscious monologue, reminiscent of the endless rants in the notebooks of Kevin Spacey's John Doe character in Se7en. Although the title is a riff of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, author Alain Mabanckou draws his protagonist as the polar opposite of the completely vapid 80's killer - his Grégoire does nothing but think.

While Ellis' Patrick Pateman was glib and successful, Grégoire is comically frustrated and ineffectual as a serial killer, or a criminal of any kind, really, drawing a brilliant parallel between the opulence of the United States to the struggles of those in the Congo. The obstacles Mabanckou places in front of Grégoire serve to wickedly poke fun at the social and political quirks of his home country, seamlessly blending humorous social satire with brutal suspense.

Most memorable is Mabanckou's mockery of the Congolese press, whose newspapers seem more reminiscent of The National Inquirer than The New York Times. A radio call-in show takes the form of what Mabanckou calls, "Et Alors? Croyez-moi!" (Well then? Trust me!) where the interviewer swallows whole the enormous whoppers spun by his interview subject regarding Grégoire's idol, the late Angoualima, Africa's most famous serial killer. Unable to bear it anymore, Grégoire calls the station to give the studio his version of Woody Allen's Marshall McLuen moment.

In between botched, would-be acts of depravity, Grégoire seeks refuge in the cemetery of The-Dead-Who-Are-Not-Allowed-To-Sleep, to confide in his idol Upheld to god-like status by Grégoire, Angoualima comes to life for Grégoire and berates him, confirming the loser status that dogs him.

While utterly psychotic, his relentless ranting monologues proclaiming his eagerness to mutilate and kill, to rid He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot of the riff-raff - the thieves, pimps, and prostitutes - it seems more like his insistence in his own evil is an endless sales pitch for something he himself is not quite buying.

As his plans to murder Germaine draw closer, Mabanckou weaves the comic elements with such excruciating suspense that the pages can't be turned quickly enough. Like Grégoire himself, when the day finally arrives and all the pieces start falling into place, the readers have no idea whether he'll go through with it or not.

_____________________
African Psycho
by Alain Mabanckou
translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley
2007 by Soft Skull Press
Softcover, 145 pp.
ISBN: 1-933368-50-0

2007-07-29T19:02:00.001-05:00

Under My Roof.

It’s really difficult to write a good speculative fiction novel. For every Dune that gets published, there are forty Battlefield Earths out there. (I don’t even like typing the title of that book. It sucks so hard it almost pulled my eyes out of my head when I tried to read it. Now it’s being used to cover up an open sewage pipe in a spare bathroom in my house until the plumber can come out and install a new toilet. Seriously. It’s not often that I hate a book so much I harbor a grudge, but when I do, watch out.)

As much as I hate B*** E***, I love Dune, because Frank Herbert could do what Scientology guy and so many others can’t, which is to create an entirely new world on a different planet with different beings, technology, religion, and economics and do it so well that you feel like you’ve learned something about politics, culture, and economics, when really all you’ve learned is that you can’t write as well as Frank Herbert.

Not to mention how exhausting it is to play God and create a whole new planet. Why bother when you can write a perfectly nifty little speculative fiction book just taking some crappy aspect of the world today and taking it to its next logical step?

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace got rid of the numerical system of naming years, 2004, 2005, 2006, etc., and replaced it a system subsidized by corporations, turning 2004 into the Year of the Whopper, 2005 the Year of the Tuck’s Medicated Pad, and so on.

In H2O, Mark Swartz got rid of all the water, and in Nick Mamatas’ Under My Roof, Daniel Weinberg cracks under the relentless pressure of phony patriotism and the growing “us against the world” philosophy that our current administration is embracing. (In the book, the entirety of Latin America is considered an enemy, and Canada is referred to as the White Menace.*) His solution is to arm himself with a homemade nuclear bomb stuffed into a garden gnome and secede from the United States.

The aftermath of his declaration is chronicled by Weinberg’s telepathic twelve-year-old son, Herbert, who Daniel crowns the Prince of Weinbergia. Herbert, who loves his Dad but isn’t too wild about the turn of events, chronicles the secession, starting with giving the reader a specific recipe for constructing a nuclear weapon to his dismay at seeing his home fill up with refugees, mostly flaky, disgruntled hippies looking for a miracle in the more literal sense.

During the upheaval, Herbert’s mother leaves Weinbergia and goes on a publicity tour, enthusiastically telling of her love for Herbert and her victimization by Daniel, who did not even discuss the secession with her before pulling it off. With the help of the police, she manages to kidnap Herbert, only to find his actual presence isn’t as fulfilling as missing him. For the remainder of the novel, Herbert tries to go back home, while his father busies himself forging alliances with the country of Palau, and the Islamic Republic of the Qool Mart Store No. 351, a convenience store whose employees have also decided to secede. Musad, the leader of the Qool Mart, creates a treaty pledging eternal peace between Weinbergia and the entire Muslim world.

Five years…peace between Weinbergia and the entire Muslim world, as vouchsafed and guaranteed by the Islamic Republic of Qool Mart,” Dad read aloud.

“Wait a minute,” said Whiting, “these people don’t speak for the entire Muslim world.”

“Hyah,” said Barry. “He’s got a point there.” Barry hoped making friends with Whiting would get him out of here alive, maybe even without a prison sentence.

Musad said, “Of course I speak for the entire Muslim world. You, man,” he continued, pointing his chin at Barry. “You made it so.”

“We have video,” Richard said.

Musad reached up to the security monitor and punched a button. The real-time footage on the screen went black and then a moment later was replaced with the same scene, but daylight, with Musad and Barry, only the latter in other clothes, chatting.

Video Barry waved a copy of Newsday in Musad’s face and, his voice tinny as a thought from both the mic and the fact that the playback was on the small security speakers, said, “Why did your people go crazy this time? Bombing our soldiers just for trying to protect your freedom to sell me this newspaper!”

“So, you don’t want the newspaper?” Musad-on-tape asked.

Hee!

Mamatas deftly satirizes both public and private life, with the fetishizing and commercialization of 9/11 and eternal war, as well as skewering parents who become so wrapped up in their own agenda their kid gets pushed by the wayside.

Under My Roof is a funny, biting young adult novel about rebellion in a country populated with people who would like to rebel, provided the revolution doesn’t wipe out what they’ve Tivo’d.
_________________________

*Slogan: We will become your overlords, but we’ll be very polite and charmingly self-deprecating about the whole thing.

___________________________

Under My Roof
By Nick Mamatas
2007 by Soft Skull Press
Softcover, 151 pp
ISBN: 1-933368-43-8

2007-07-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

Punk Rock Dad.

"I cannot wait, I cannot wait," says my husband, "until the last Baby Boomer is dead."

After almost fifteen years of living with him, I've racked up a lot of hours listening to anti-Baby Boomer rants, always predicated on him hearing some wide-eyed discovery by some former hippie that, wow! they're aging! and who'da thunk it?

"I took my first Geritol today," one newspaper article that I read breathlessly began, and that was as far as I got before I quit reading.

Typical Gen Xers that we are, we spent our twenties mostly wishing the hippies would just shut the fuck up so we can curl up in a ball and listen to our own particular brand of anti-authoritarian music, peacefully contemplating our comforting nihilism.

And then in this decade we all started turning forty, and as it turns out, there's one area where we're mopping the floor with the Boomers in the self-absorbtion department. We can call this category Wow! We're parents! Who'da thunk it!

The requirement of aging Gen Xers in the '00s seems to be to write a book about Our Parenting Experience, where we ponder the same things: 1.) We don't know what the hell we're doing, but 2.) It seems to be working out. Or we can write a thinly veiled work of fiction about parenting, a Mommy book, that covers the following ground: 1.) She doesn't know what she's doing, but 2.) It seems to be working out.

To be fair, when writing a parenting book from an autobiographical point of view, a certain amount of self-effacing charm is necessary, as well as the reassurance that despite all the war stories the writer has just told (and war stories are a must, too, the messier the better), parenting is such a worthy endeavor - the best decision they've ever made, in fact - that s/he wouldn't trade places with anybody else in the world.

Otherwise the writer comes across as either an egocentric asshole, one of those know-it-all parents the rest of us love to hate, or a monster that publicly admits s/he doesn't love the children they created.

When writing a book with criteria so narrowly defined, then, its readability comes down to the charm and talent of the author. It doesn't matter if the writer is a born-again Christian, like Anne Lamott, an arty hippie-wannabe like Ayun Halliday, or a completely insane rightwing lunatic like G. Gordon Liddy, all that matters in the end is whether the writer has the ability to make the reader want to spend time with them, regardless of how many times the reader has heard this particular tale.

Which brings us to Jim Lindberg, lead singer of the veteran hardcore punk band, Pennywise,* and his parenting memoir Punk Rock Dad.

I was given this book for review, but if it was something I'd browsed through in a book store I wouldn't have made it past the blurb on the inside jacket.

When he drives his kids to school in the morning, they only listen to the Ramones, the Clash or the Descendents. This is family time; the girls can listen to Brittney and Justin on their own time. He goes to all the soccer games, dance rehearsals and piano recitals like all the other dads, but when he feels the need, he also goes to punk shows and runs into the slam pit and comes home bruised and beaten, but somehow feeling strangely better. While the other dad's dye their hair brown to cover the gray, Jim occasionally dyes his blue or green.

And so on, making him sound like he's less of a father and more like some dude with a high sperm count that doesn't let his kids get in the way of his life.

Despite the fact that this is an excerpt from the book's introduction, the message of the book as a whole is almost completely the opposite, as he instead portrays himself in a utterly charming way, as a kind of old-fashioned father who surprised himself by forging a career as a punk rock star.

Of course, this isn't true, either. Lindberg was a musician long before he got married and had children. The first part of the book describes his own disaffected, lonely childhood and his feeling that he wasn't accepted by his peers. Punk music gave him a creative outlet for his anger and frustration, and provided the social comfort he'd been looking for.

Even so, Lindberg seemed to understand at a young age that it was better to grow up to be Howard Cunningham than GG Allin, because there comes a point when sleeping under a blanket of your own puke loses its appeal.

His memoir then settles into the normal adjustment from single guy to married guy to father, and his eventual acceptance of the uncool homebody marriage and fatherhood has forced him to become.

In one of his more humorous anecdotes, Lindberg describes being recognized by the cashier at an all-night drugstore. The fan initially gushes enthusiastically about the band as he rings up Lindberg's purchases, then, $95 dollars later, finds he doesn't have that much to say to him, after all.

[He] wants me to sign something for him, and then says his friend Paul loves us and he won't believe this, and asks another few questions before he remembers he's actually working and starts to scan my items through. With each item, he and I are both let down further and further. Children's anal suppository. Child rectal thermometer. Breast pads. Just for Men Extra Gray Coverage Brown Hair Dye. Metamucil. Nair for Men. Mylanta. With each swipe across the scanner I go from being punk rock, superstar, Warped Tour legend, to rapidly aging, grayhaired father of a constipated child, with a nipple-dripping wife. I'm not a radical, punk-scene voice of a generation, I'm a pathetic middle-aged loser having problems with heartburn, irregularity, and back hair.

In a single anecdote, Lindberg drops the main lesson of parenting: It doesn't matter who you once were, once you become a parent the playing field has been leveled and you are no longer cool.

And wisely, Lindberg knows fighting against it just makes things worse, so he goes the opposite route and embraces it, even devoting the last section of the book to marital and parenting advice that honestly, could have come from Dear Abby, with a more liberal use of the word "asshole."

And while we're on the subject of the Death of Cool, Lindberg addresses one more thing about his life as a punk rock star that, somewhat surprisingly, has lost its appeal for him: bad manners. This seems to be somewhat hypocritical of someone who makes his living off giving the finger to others, but he has a point:

I usually get to a show about five minutes before we play and don't hang around any longer than I have to. I'm not complaining, and certain people are going to read this and think I'm an asshole, but the whole preshow center of attention thing has become kind of a drag for me. Sounds stupid, I know, becaase why would you be in a band if you don't want attention, but I'm jaded and lame now and that's just how it is. There are parts of the whole show night interaction that I like a lot...[but] there's a dark side as well.

When you're a singer, or actor, or radio host, or even the guy announcing the local little league game, basically anyone who puts themselves out into the public eye, you unknowingly open yourself up to pointed criticism from everyone from your best friend to complete strangers. Someone with horrible beer breath will come up to you and say they love your band but they like the old stuff better and didn't really care for the last few albums, and "what's with the third song on the new album, that song sucks, and why don't you guys play more like (insert stupid band here) and what time are you guys on tonight, and can I get a backstage pass for my girlfriend's cousin, and are there any more beers in your dressing room, because I looked and someone already drank them all, and bro, could you get me a shirt for my little brother? He really loves you guys, but like I said, he wasn't really that into your last record, either, and by the way, who did your last video? That thing was so gay! What was it even supposed to be about anyway? You guys should go back to playing superfast like you did on your first album, and write more songs with works like 'fight' and 'fuck' in them 'cause that's cool, like 'fuck authority,' that's awesome. Yeah, dude, and don't forget, backstage pass for my cousin and a shirt for my brother. Oh, and a hat for me, too. Thanks, bro. You rule."

I'll meet ten people exactly like this on the way into the club, there will be twenty more in the dressing room drinking all our beers and eating our deli tray, and thirty more on stage drunk when we play. Some of them, and this is no lie, will come out onto the stage in the middle of a song while I'm singing and yell in my ear, "Dude, are there any more beers left? Hey, and play song four off the second album, I forget what it's called."

If you're physically unable to give them five extra laminates and a wristband for their girlfriend's cousin, a shirt for their little brother, and a few dozen beers, and if you won't party with them until dawn, well, then you're an asshole and your last album sucked.

Although there's just something inherently funny about a hardcore punk rocker complaining that the new music the kids today are playing is too loud and just sounds like a bunch of noise (which he does), this rant makes him sound like the quintessential grumpy old man. Until you stumble across an internet punk forum where they're discussing his book, and the conversation can be summed up with, "Jim Lindberg is a fag. Having sex with women is so gay."

(While we all know how I love my hyperbole, I'm actually not exaggerating. Verbatim quote from the message board: "Jim Lindbergh has three kids? What a fag.")

Can you blame the man for preferring to spend his evening with a sick child, scrubbing partially digested hot dogs and cottage cheese off his bathroom floor?** The company of his daughter alone raises the average IQ in the room by about 20 points.

And although Punk Rock Dad doesn't deviate from the Mommy book format in any meaningful way, Lindberg infuses his particular story with intelligence, wit, and a competent writing style that makes the reader enjoy spending time with him, watching him scrub away.

_______________
*The link takes you to the band's official website, where you can click the little Play button at the top of the page to hear one of their more recent songs.

**There's that war story!
__________________________
Punk Rock Dad
by Jim Lindberg
HarperCollins, 2007
Hardcover, 212pp.
ISBN: 006114875X

2007-07-21T21:25:00.000-05:00

The Tale of Despereaux.

The last time the boys and I went to Women & Children First to stock up on books, I picked Despereaux out for Alex, hoping that if he wasn't ready for chapter books yet, he would be soon.

"Look, Alex," I said, pulling out the hard sell, "it has a gold medal on it. It won a prize."

"Okay, okay," he said, but I gushed on.

"It won a prize for best book of the year!"

And so it had. I'd been wanting to read Despereaux ever since 2004, when the Newbery award was slapped on it. I didn't even know anything about it, but it was one of those books that just emit the feeling that there's a great story inside.

And Reader, there is.

Kate DiCamillo has written a classic children's book; one that I am sorry was not published when I was Alex's age, because it would have blown my kid self away. So every night the 37-year-old child would ask the seven-year-old child, begging hopefully, "Despereaux? Tonight?"

And every night the little sadist would say, "No, not tonight." And he'd hand me some crappy Junie B. Jones book that we'd already read a thousand times. He knew, Reader. He knew how badly I wanted to read it, and he reveled in his cruelty.

Finally, though, after literally months of abusing me, he relented, and permitted me to read him Despereaux as a bedtime tale.

The chapters are short, and we read four a night. Each night, he begged me for five. I'd like to say I wreaked my revenge on him and refused, but sometimes I did read five, because I also wanted to know What Happened Next.

Born to a French mother in a castle in an unnamed land, Despereaux grows up to be an undersized mouse with oversized dreams. While his brothers and sisters are scrambling for crumbs dropped on the castle floor, Despereaux is in the library, staring at the four words in an opened book that ignite his passions and drive his life forward - "Once upon a time."

Like the title character in Beverly Cleary's Runaway Ralph, Despereaux is a mouse who strives to take more from life than what is expected of him.

One day, Despereaux hears the king play a bedtime song for his daughter, the Princess Pea. Despereaux is so engrossed in the melody that he is lured out of his hiding place, and sees the princess for the first time. He falls into an instant, courtly love.

This rush of emotion sets into play a series of events that entwine Despereaux's life with the lives of two other creatures with similarly oversized dreams: Chiaroscuro, the vicious dungeon rat with a passion to live in light, and Miggery Sow, a tragically abused servant girl whose strongest desire is to be a princess.

DiCamillo slowly braids the three stories together - the tales of Despereaux, Chiaroscuro, and Miggery Sow - tightly and artfully, drawing the suspense out almost painfully as all three creatures reach toward their respective dreams, fall into deep disgrace, and develop methods of pulling themselves out that puts them at odds with each other. Toward the climax, Alex began bouncing up and down in bed, saying, "This is really freaking me out! This is freaking me out now!"

And to tell the truth, it was freaking me out a little, too, because we had reached the fifth and last chapter of the night, and, like Alex, I was dying to know What Happened Next.

_____________________
The Tale of Despereaux
by Kate DiCamillo
2004 by Candlewick Press
Paperback, 269 pp
ISBN: 0-76-36252-9

2007-07-19T12:34:00.001-05:00

Over the weekend, Christopher and I picked Green Eggs and Ham for one of his bedtime stories.

"I would not like them
here or there.

I would not like them
anywhere.

I do not like
Green Eggs and Ham.

I do not like them,
Sam-I-am," I read. "Would you like them in a house?"

"Why is he doing that?" asked Christopher.

"Why is who doing what?"

"Why does he want the other guy to eat Green Eggs and Ham?"

"I guess because he thinks the other guy will like it if he tries it."

"But he said no," said Christopher.

"Yes, he did," I said, "but the point is, uh, if he just keeps after the other guy, he'll finally say yes."

"But he said no," repeated Christopher.

"Yes, he did say no. But it supposed to be funny, see, because the other guy is grumpy, and...well, I guess if someone kept trying to make me do something I didn't want to do, even after I'd said No, even after I left the room and tried to get away from him, if he kept following me and insisting, I suppose I'd be grumpy, too."

"What does he keep following him for, even though he said no?"

"...uh, well, it's...Actually, it's called harassment," I said. "And actually, in real life, it would be against the law to continue to pester someone like this after this many refusals."

"Why does he finally say Yes?" asked Christopher.

"Because he got tired of fighting and just gave in," I said, "which um...actually, he probably shouldn't have done that, because the only thing he taught Sam-I-am was that if he hears "No" twenty times and then on the twenty first time he hears "Yes," he knows next time he'll just have to make sure he asks twenty times. Probably the guy in the black had should have filed a restraining order with the police."

This conversation was starting to get out of hand. But Christopher kept persisting.

"This book is bad. Why did they do that?"

"It's supposed to be funny."

"I don't think it's funny."

"No, I...I suppose it isn't, when you look at it that way. Do you want me to keep reading it?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Okay.

Would you like them
in a house?

Would you like them
with a mouse?"

I didn't begin the evening with the intention of turning the fourth best-selling children's book in the world from a story of a plucky little creature with a never give up attitude to a grim tale of stalking and harassment, but for some reason the conversation got away from me and was pulled inexorably to the dark, seamy underbelly of the Seuss world.

I'm afraid to read him other Seuss stories, like perhaps The Cat in the Hat. Breaking and entering, vandalism, Contributing to the deliquency of minor children - who knows what joy I'll bring to it?

To make amends, I present you with this classic rendition of Green Eggs and Ham, as read by the Rev. Jesse Jackson:

___________________________
Green Eggs and Ham
by Dr. Seuss
1960 by Random House
Hardcover, 72pp
ISBN: 0-39-480016-8

2007-07-17T21:42:00.000-05:00

Vaccinated

Do you know who invented the vaccine for mumps? Measles? Rubella? Hepatitis A and B? Chicken Pox? How about your annual flu vaccine?

Yeah, I didn't know, either. Which is really weird, since it's clear that these vaccine have changed the world and saved millions of lives. As it turns out, all the above vaccines were made by a single man - Maurice Hilleman.

Dr. Paul A. Offit's latest book, Vaccinated, is in part a biography of Hilleman, but is also a science history lesson covering the lives and careers of the scientists who made the big discoveries in modern disease prevention, and a little Biology 101 about viruses and bacteria for the layman, too.

Born in rural Montana, Hilleman spent his childhood working the family farm and chafing under his father's strict religious fundamentalism. Finding solace in science, and, in particular, Darwin's Origin of the Species, Hilleman left the farm for the University of Chicago, and from there he bucked tradition, choosing to work for pharmaceutical giant Merck rather than a career in academia.

Given a fairly free rein at the company, Hilleman was able to research and develop 9 life saving vaccines that benefit the world over, eradicating many diseases completely in some areas and drastically cutting down on premature deaths and disease induced birth defects.

Offit takes a short detour to explain the nature of viruses, and their discovery and the scientists who studied them, as well as how vaccines are created so Hilleman's work could better be understood by people who only went to Biology 101 four times the entire semester.

Now, either you like biology nerd stuff or you don't. I do, so I found Offit's book very interesting and cornered coworkers with talk of the severed heads of chicken embryos and such. If science isn't your bag, or you oppose vaccinations for for religious or hippie reasons, this is not the book for you.

Offit isn't afraid to dive into the middle of the problems caused by religious fundamentalists, either, lamenting the religious right's constant stream of deception and misinformation regarding the vaccine for cervical cancer, and, most shockingly, opposition to the vaccination for rubella, a disease that causes severe birth defects, and, often infant and fetal death if a pregnant woman becomes infected.

Why? Because the vaccine was created back in 1962 using the cells of an aborted fetus. Offit tries very hard to maintain a neutral tone when rebutting the ignorance of a group so ridiculous in their willingness to kill millions of babies to avoid using cells from a single 45-year-old donated fetus that even the Vatican flatly told them their anti-abortion stance went too far. However, after explaining why all their ideas of how to create a vaccine using alternate methods would not be possible, he laments the group's spreading of misinformation:

It's unlikely that vaccine makers are going to remake routine children's vaccines - such as those for rubella, hepatitis A, and chickenpox - at great cost for no financial benefit. And inflammatory, incorrect statements regarding vaccines in current use don't help.

Indeed.

Unfortunately, the chapter on vaccines made from human blood has quite a large error of its own. While I'm confident Dr. Offit can be trusted with regard to the science part of the book, he is way off the mark on gay history.

In this chapter, of course the AIDS virus is covered. Offit writes about a French-Canadian flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas.

The first forty people diagnosed in the United States with AIDS were gay men living in California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. To figure out how the AIDS virus...spread, investigators constructed a diagram showing who had had sex with whom. In the center of the diagram was one man. All forty AIDS victims had had sex with this man or with someone who had had sex with him. They called him Patient Zero...Dugas was 28 when a biopsy of an enlarging purple spot below his right ear revealed Kaposi's sarcoma - "gay cancer." At the time, Dugas estimated that he had slept with two hundred and fifty men a year for ten years - twenty-five hundred sexual partners in all. Knowing that AIDS was contagious didn't stop Dugas from continuing to satisfy his sexual appetites. "Rumors began on Castro Street about a strange guy at the Eighth and Howard bathhouse, a blond with a French accent,"noted [Randy] Shilts, [author of And the Band Played on] "He would have sex with you, turn up the lights in the cubicle, and point out his Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. 'I've got cancer,' he said. 'I'm going to die. [And now] so are you.'"

This was quite a sensational story. I did some Googling for "Gaetan Dugas," curious about the person who went down in history as the biggest disease-carrying whore the world has ever known.

Turns out this story? Not true.

Much was made in the early years of the epidemic of a so-called 'Patient Zero' who was the basis of a complex "transmission scenario" compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centre for Disease Control in the US. This epidemiological study showed how 'Patient O' (mistakenly identified in the press as 'Patient Zero') had given HIV to multiple partners, who then in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus to locations all over the world. A journalist, Randy Shilts, subsequently wrote an book based on Darrow's findings, which named Patient Zero as a gay Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas. For several years, Dugas was vilified as a 'mass spreader' of HIV and the original source of the HIV epidemic among gay men. However, four years after the publication of Shilts' article, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts' had misrepresented its conclusions.

While Gaetan Dugas was a real person who did eventually die of AIDS, the Patient Zero story was not much more than myth and scaremongering. HIV in the US was to a large degree initially spread by gay men, but this occurred on a huge scale over many years, probably a long time before Dugas even began to travel.

This is a substantial error, not to mention unfair to Dugas' family to continue to vilify him based on what is mostly scaremongering and myth, and I hope that in subsequent publishings this misinformation is removed.

If this small section is corrected, I would whole-heartedly recommend Vaccinated. Until it is, though, wait for the paperback.

____________________________
Vaccinated
by Paul A. Offit, MD
June 2007 by Harper Collins
Hardcover, 272pp
ISBN: 978-0-06-122795-0