Andrea's BookBrowse

Midnight Rising

2012-01-21T09:02:00.000-08:00

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz is an account of the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry by a group of some twenty badly equipped, badly trained, badly provisioned, but more or less committed abolitionists led by a zealous firebrand. This is a quintessential American story of an individual changing the course of the entire nation through his determination. It is a moving story, well written and ably told.

The Cut

2012-01-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

George Pelecanos is back with The Cut, a tight, yet not really satisfying urban thriller about an Iraq vet trying to make a living by "finding things" for unsavory characters and ending up delivering justice. The main character, Spero Lucas, is, I think, a reflection of what the author - on some level - would like to be, or at least admires: a former Marine who, when not retrieving other people's property, spends his days working out, hanging out in his bachelor pad, having sex with unaccountably willing young women, and riding his bike around DC. I understand that the local color is supposed to be part of what Pelecanos does best, but I was irked by numerous passages such as this one:

"He drove out to Hyattsville, Maryland, via Queens Chapel Road and Hamilton Street, and stopped in the lot of the 38th Street Park, through which ran the paved Northwest Branch trail. He got onto his bike and pedaled southeast...across Rhode Island Avenue, and finally across Alternate Route One, navigating through fast vehicular traffic. He dipped down onto Tanglewood Drive, entered the industrial district of Edmondston, and cruised at a steady pace."

Oh, please. There is only so much literary GPS a reader can take. If you are not from D.C., all this means nothing to you. And there are only so many crime-fighting Greeks you can pack into the nation's capital. After a while, all the malakas, kota me manestras, peeshenaws, and entaxis get to be a bit cloying. And now that I'm on it, while he does try to inject some moral or other kind ambivalence into the book (Lucas ends his adventures craving a beer, reflecting, I guess, his unresolved veteran-related problems), somehow all the good guys are good looking, clean, and smart, and the bad guys are ugly, stupid, bad dressers, and have bad hygiene.

I was not a fan of this book.

The Road to Jerusalem

2011-12-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

The Road to Jerusalem by Jan Guillou was apparently a big international hit. Ah, those Scandinavian medieval sagas! This first part of a trilogy follows a young Swedish nobleman from his childhood, through his education in a monastery, to his adulthood. It looks like Arn is destined for great things (he's noble, honest, pure, a great archer, swordsman, horseman, etc.), but he really does not get to do anything great in this book (stay tuned for later great adventures). There are many subplots dealing with the various Swedish and Goth clans fighting for power in the Kingdom of Western Gothaland (for instance, King Karl Sverkerson vs. the pretender Knut Eriksson, son of the slain Saint Erik, etc.), but they are not easy to follow unless you are steeped in the medieval history of Sweden and Norway. One can hope things pick up in part two.

The Testament

2011-12-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

The Testament, the latest offering by John Grisham, is really well done: starting with a good premise, fast paced and engrossing. An innocent man is about to be executed when the actual perpetrator of the crime steps forward, albeit in the eleventh hour. This is good Grisham stuff. It would be even better if it read less as a primer on death penalty. There is definitely an agenda here, but I guess even writers are entitled to openly espousing their opinions.

City of Veils

2011-12-17T10:38:00.001-08:00

Sometimes the locale will carry the book. This is the case with City of Veils: A Novel by Zoe Ferraris, a mystery set in Jeddah. The chosen locale, Saudi Arabia, is remote and exotic enough for the Western readers that its strangeness in Western eyes absorbs the reader and greatly helps support the plot. In Ferraris's book, Saudi police, including a female forensic expert, investigates - in their own way - the death of a young woman which is somehow connected with a disappearance of a Western security expert. Ferraris excels at scenes which reflect the claustrophobia of the segregated Saudi society, such as when the wife of the missing expert finds herself alone in their apartment which she is not allowed to leave without a male escort.

The Partner

2011-12-17T10:28:00.001-08:00

The Partner by John Grisham doesn't have much to recommend it, other than the author's skill to tell a far-fetched way which is well paced rather than believable. The eponymous partner, Patrick Lanigan, is on the run after stealing millions of dollars from his corrupt law firm. There are, admittedly, better ways to tackle a midlife crisis than the one Lanigan has chosen when he found out that his partners were plotting against him, that his wife was cheating on him and his kid was not really his, but those ways - divorce, a new job, etc. - would not have been much fun in a legal thriller and probably would not have earned Grisham a ton of money.

Blood and Thunder

2011-12-17T10:20:00.001-08:00

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American Westby Hampton Sides is hands down one of the most readable and fun book I've read this year. This is a work of history, but it is written by a born story-teller, and on a fascinating topic: the American annexation of New Mexico and the final campaign against the Navajo. All this is told through the prism of the life of Kit Carson, the mountain man and Western pioneer/explorer extraordinaire.
Sides has an eye for a telling detail (for instance, the fondness of mountain men for strong coffee) and a fluid style which propels the story forward while constantly making you wonder what will come next. This book is well founded in historical research, but it is not academic or dry.
And, a brief note on the title: the blood and thunder was a sub-genre of the 19-century Westerns based on the exploits of scouts, trappers, pioneer, and other similar characters populating the "last frontier".

Bloodmoney

2011-12-17T10:07:00.001-08:00

Bloodmoney by the Washington Post journalist David Ignatius is, as the subtitle says, a novel of espionage. Even though I personally think espionage as an occupation is just one step above games grown-up boys play, this book works very well for its genre. The plot - a rogue CIA operation under attack by a disillusioned Pakistani math wonder - it tight and moves at a fast clip. The characters are not wonders of deep psychological insights, but that's to be expected in this kind of a book. True to his journalistic background, Ignatius did a required amount of research to get the locales - the tribal world of Waziristan and the world of high finance in London - right to the smallest detail. To that effect, all of his Pakistani protagonists talk like oracles, with their most trite utterances sprinkled with Pashtun and Urdu proverbs, all saying things like "your friends are your enemies, your enemies are snakes, and your friends are snakes, and you have be beware of snakes...". (We Must give the author two thumbs up for the enthusiastic use of folklore here.) All in all, not a bad book. Makes you wonder if spies are really like people in Ignatius's book. Because if they are... well, make your own conclusions.

The Pregnant Widow

2011-10-22T09:39:00.001-07:00

Here is a candidate for the dumbest book of the year: The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. I'm not quite sure if this is supposed to be a comedy or a fond look back at Amis' youth, but this just does not work. Here's the plot so you can judge for yourself: in the summer of 1970, a group of young people spend their vacations together in a castle in Italy. Hormones overflow and sexual peccadilloes ensue. Later, most of them settle into fairly normal lives and get old. Yawn. Amis can certainly be funny when he wants to, just not in this book.

The Rainmaker

2011-10-22T09:27:00.001-07:00

The Rainmaker by John Grisham is a perfect book. Well, not really, but it is perfect for what it wants to be: a bit of great entertainment based on the workings of our legal system.To be sure, the genre has been exploited to death, but this is one of Grisham's earlier works and that's what makes it so much fun: The story of a young lawyer straight out of law school taking on a major insurance firm - and winning - is just right for a quick read on the beach, which is exactly where I read it and enjoyed it.

Return to (Norwegian) Family Values

2011-10-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

Reading Trygve Gulbranssen's Bjorndal Trilogy (consisting of three novels published in English under the title The Wind from the Mountains) is a strangely comforting experience. Here is a story of rural life in the turn-of-the-century Norway, when, well, men were men, women were women and everybody knew their place in the world. The trilogy follows a prosperous family of rural farmers turned merchants who evolve beyond financial success to find compassion, probity and courage. The book somehow feels both historical and contemporary, almost a reflection of our need to shed the stresses of the modern age for a more simple and somehow a more heroic existence.

No One Would Listen

2011-10-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

If you want to make your blood boil, take No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos and read it in one sitting. By the time you are done, you will be very, very mad. Markopolos is the whistleblower who first drew the government's attention to Bernie Madoff's criminal enterprise which defrauded investors worldwide of some $60 billion. As the title says, no one in the SEC paid any serious attention to no less than five submissions Markopolos made on the largest Ponzi scheme in history. While the government looked the other way, Madoff was building a fraudulent financial empire without ever making a single trade in the stock market. And nobody cared.

Markopolos has some choice words for government bureaucrats: "At that moment I still did not have the slightest idea of how truly incompetent the SEC was. On Wall Street the real fear about the SEC was not that it would uncover hidden crimes, but rather that it would bury you beneath an avalanche of paperwork....Firms hated these audits because they were distracting and time-consuming and rarely resulted in anything more than a deficiency notice or even a small fine for some minor compliance issue.

Nobody I know had a lot of respect for the exam teams. Most of these teams consisted of bright young accountants whose primary objective was to learn the industry at the taxpayer's expense, then take that knowledge into the private sector where they could earn a substantial salary. ...In fact, after Madoff was arrested, his secretary revealed that the few times SEC investigators had come to the firm most of them had asked for employment applications."

And the book goes on in this vein for some three hundred pages. Mostly, it's engrossing, but Markopolos occasionally can't resist a bit of self-aggrandizing, like when he decides to buy a gun to protect himself from unspecified criminal investors of Madoff's (presumably the Russian mafia) who might come after him if he brings Madoff down. Oh, please.

Three Sisters

2011-10-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu is another contemporary look at the mean, miserable time of the Cultural Revolution in China. This is also, I think, the selling point of this book: show the reader yet again how people's lives, and characters, were corrupted by Communist ideology. The three sisters from the title are daughters of a philandering village official, whose wandering eye almost brings the family to ruin. The sisters are pretty much left to fend for themselves in an unforgiving system which rewards conformism and cruelty. There is a lot of emphasis on sex and sexual manipulation, maybe as a way to deal with a topic that was taboo at the time. The book feels quite authentic mainly due to the translation which kept a lot of Chinese sayings and phrases, such as "A knife is not sharp on both edges; sugarcane is not sweet at both ends."

A Stolen Tongue

2011-08-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

Summer is a perfect time to read a book like A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman. This Middle Ages mystery follows a group of pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land to visit the monastery of Saint Katherine of Alexandria. The main protagonist, Friar Felix Fabri of the Dominican Preaching Order in Ulm, is actually a historical figure. The friar, who lived in the 15th century, did go on several pilgrimages to the Holy Land and left behind two accounts of his (which I think must be fascinating to read).

Holman started with his writings to create an interesting murder mystery centered about some missing relics of Saint Katherine. All well and good. The characters are interesting, the story moves at a fast clip, the historical details are fascinating. And then you come to the denouement. Oy vey. Unfortunately, like many of her modern colleagues, Holman thinks that the final pages of the books are a kind of the kitchen sink where you can dump whatever you like (for instance, a very graphic death by dismemberment). Had she exercised more narrative discipline, this would have been a much better book, but she has more books in her and plenty of time to redeem herself.

A Firing Offense

2011-08-18T03:15:00.000-07:00

Journalists are a rarefied breed who live by their own arcane ethical rules well above us the unwashed masses. For instance, a journalist shouldn't be a spy. Or be in bed with the CIA. This, apparently, is a firing offense, at least according to David Ignatius. I'm inclined to take his word for it as he used to be a Washington Post reporter (and is now an editor there).

His novel, A Firing Offense, is a (here goes blur jargon) fast-paced, suspense-filled thriller about a young, ambitious journalist who, in the course of investigating corruption in international trade, gets a little too cozy with the "Agency". This, apparently, is a grave breach of the journalist's credo. Who knew?

A Firing Offense is a good book if you can get past the whole spying plot (I personally have a hard time seeing spying as anything more than a silly game for adult males). There are some fine ruminations on the future of journalism, especially the print, but they feel almost quaint as the book was written in 1997, before the onslaught of bloggers, content-providers, multimedia producers and other sources of mostly insignificant noise. Here's one for the old-fashioned journalism values as celebrated in Ignatius' book.

What Does Technology Want?

2011-08-18T02:55:00.000-07:00

To be more like us. Don't believe me? Go read Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Most of us, including me right now clicking happily away on my laptop, don't really think much about the future of all the gadgets that surround us. We have come to naturally assume that computers will keep getting cheaper, faster, and smarter, but we don't really think much beyond that. Well, Kevin Kelly is one of those who do.

Computers are, says Kelly, an extension of all the technologies that have preceded it over the course of time, from multicell organisms to, say, paper. (Kelly uses the word "technology" in a very wide range of contexts to denote natural and technological developments.) All these technologies, including the modern computer technology, have combined to form the "technium", a vast technological membrane or net, if you will, that surrounds our world. This technium is beginning to develop independently of us, following the laws of evolution (from simplicity to complexity, from inanimate to living, from generalized to specialized, etc.).

Where is all this going? Fear not. The age of the Terminator is not quite upon us yet. Kelly thinks the development of our powerful technium, which faciliates and speeds up innovation, is actually a great thing for us. Humankind is, says Kelly, on the verge of a splendid new future where our innate strengths of creativity and intelligence will combine with the powers of technology to create, well, a brave new world (there is some mention of world peace through unlocking the realm of possibilities for the masses, but this is towards the end of the book).

Whether you agree with the conclusion or not, this stuff is food for thought. Go read the book and see for yourself.

Going King

2011-08-18T02:29:00.000-07:00

Second books are, I admit, a curious phenomenon: mostly eagerly awaited, but often deeply unsatisfying. Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist is a case in point: after his middle-school vampire hit Let the Right One In, I fully expected that his next book (though nottechnically his second) would be equally satisfying. Boy, was I wrong. Lindquist has gone Stephen King on us. And not in a good way.

The Undead is what we would call today a hot mess: one day all the people who have been dead for less than two weeks in Stockholm come back to life. Authorities are soon overwhelmed trying to
corral them and get them something resembling health care (alert: no real political implications here). In the meanwhile, an elderly journalist tries to resuscitate his recently departed grandson; an older widow is getting ready for the end of times, and a comedian and his young son grieve for the mom who was killed in a car crash, but came back to...not life exactly. All this is a pretty regular set-up a la Stephen King: a gallery of characters assembled to face a common threat. Unfortunately, the end is also a la King: instead of doing something worthwhile with a good premise, Lindquist dissolves it into nothing really remarkable. The undead (or the "reliving" as the authorities call them to show their political correctness) die again, or go back to their graves, or death comes to the living in the form of their greatest fear, or zombies don't really eat people, or something equally trite.

All this is not to say that I'm not looking forward to Lindquist's next book. This is a genre writer of considerable skill and/or talent, as long as he doesn't let it go to waste (a la Stephen King).

Dreams of Joy

2011-07-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Dreams of Joy, the latest offering by Lisa See, is a good example of a decent writer gone lazy. This book is nothing like her Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which I enjoyed quite a bit. See should use her substantial knowledge of the Chinese history and culture to write something better than the saga of two sisters caught in the Communist Revolution, then in World War Two, then again in the Great Leap Forward, and so on and so on. Blah, blah. I have to mention here that this book is a sequel, and very obviously so. Maybe I did not care much for the characters as I have not read the original book, Shanghai Girls. And, honestly, I have no intention of reading it now.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

2011-07-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See is both an intimate and panoramic look into lives of women in 19th century China. Two young girls become "old sames", something like friends for life, but more than that. They enter into this arranged emotional relationship to further their marriage prospects. One marries well, the other one not, but they remain close friends for life, thanks to the Chinese secret women's writing, nu shu. This now mostly forgotten art made it possible for largely illiterate Chinese women to communicate by exchanging messages written in a simplified script on their fans or embroidered on pieces of cloth.

The protagonists of the novel live their mostly pre-determined lives in the "inner realm" of their respective households, the women's zone of submission, modesty and chastity. This world, as one can imagine, feels oppressive and claustrophobic to the modern reader, especially if the reader is a woman. This, however, does not make this novel any less compelling. A note: the book contains a fairly graphic description of the ancient - and thoroughly repulsive - Chinese custom of foot binding, which was practiced for a thousand years before it was abolished by the Communists in the 1940s.

Let the Right One In

2011-07-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist is the kind of a vampire novel Stephen King would write were he not so undisciplined: the action is tight (and not too gory), the writing precise, and it even has a coherent ending. I don't understand why the book is set in 1981 (it was written in 2005), except that maybe the author has a particular fondness for Metallica and other such "historical" details. You can tell this book was written by a European: most vampires in it seem to have a developed social conscience, with one even going so far to kill herself rather than kill clueless humans.

The Penelopiad

2011-07-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Even when she is annoying, Margaret Atwood is good. Case in point: her Penelopiad. Who wants to read another classic told from a woman's perspective? In this case, Atwood tackles the Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseus's faithful wife Penelope. What did she do all those long years he was trying to find his way home from Troy, battling monsters and an occasional temptress? Atwood tells us "herstory" in an imaginative and witty manner.

Tally's Corner

2011-07-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men by Elliot Liebow is a classic of urban ethnography. It is hard to believe that this book was written as a doctoral thesis, because the writing is so good. I find the whole field of urban ethnography somewhat bizarre, because it often feels like urban safari, but it does give us outsiders glimpses into worlds we would normally never even come close to, let alone experience.

The Dress Lodger

2011-07-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

For a different kind of historical fiction, try Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger. This historical thriller, as they describe it, just does everything right on all fronts: tight action, good writing, great eye for detail, believable characters. The eponymous dress lodger is a young prostitute with a deformed baby who seeks help from a doctor disgraced for being a body snatcher (the prostitute rents an evening gown from her pimp landlord in order to attract a better sort of a customer). All this happens in the middle of a cholera outbreak in the 1830s Sunderland. There is a lot of historical detail here: urban pollution, pre-industrial industrial age, horrific slums and first tentative advances in modern medicine secured through furtive biopsies on bodies of the poor stolen from their graves.

Historical Fiction

2011-07-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you ever wonder how much women's rights have progressed in the past fifty years or so, don't waste your time with feminist screeds. Just read, or reread, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. This book was written in 1966, but, if you are a woman, it feels like it was written in the Paleolithic. Women work as secretaries, try to snare men into marriage, and rely on sleeping pills to cure depression. Ick. Never mind the meh writing and the so-so story line: what makes this book so memorable is how dated it is.

Favorite nugget: (October 1947) "...Dresses were getting longer and everyone was fascinated with an eight-inch screen called television. You couldn't see much except wrestling matches, ball games and roller derbies on it, but everyone went around saying it would kill radio."

In the Still of the Night

2011-07-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

Another real-life crime from the queen of real-life crime Ann Rule. Or is it? The subtitle, The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for Truth, gives it away. This book actually deals with a case which has been ruled a suicide so officially no crime has taken place. In a case of author activism, Rule has teamed up with a grieving mother who wants to find out how her daughter could have killed herself with her husband sleeping only a few feet away and never waking up. Interesting subject matter, but as the case is still open, no satisfying conclusion here.

The Missing Class

2011-06-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

On the opposite side of the spectrum from all the books on Wall Street I'd just finished, I found The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. This is a topic that not many people write about and even fewer want to read about: 57 million people living in the gray space between poverty and the middle class. No wild rides to riches here, just a steady grind of needs and desires rarely met and fulfilled.

The Zeroes

2011-06-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Continuing my financial reads binge, I opted for a different look at Wall Street, but ended up with same result: it made my blood boil. The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane by Randall Lane is ostensibly a memoir of an honest to God media entrepreneur. Back at the height of the real estate craze, Lane co-founded Trader Monthly, a magazine exclusively for Wall Street traders. Trader Monthly was apparently a great success, but, predictably, it folded when the market crashed. What is left behind is a mesmerizing read: by hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, Lane got a very close look at their almost unimaginable lifestyles. There is some score-settling in the book, and many protestations of poverty by the author, but this is still an absorbing book (not in the least because of the many descriptions of the opulence in which many of the book's protagonists live). Vodka filtered over diamonds and enriched with flecks of gold-leaf, anyone?

Liar's Poker

2011-06-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently, back in the 1980s - which don't look to have been much different than the zeroes - a young Wall Street bond salesman Michael Lewis wrote a tremendously popular book exposing the greed, recklessness and sometimes sheer corruption that dominated the financial circles some three decades ago. The book in question, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, is almost a quaint read today. Apparently, in the intervening years, all these things, that presumably caused consternation back when the book was first published, have become accepted - if not really acceptable - in the meanwhile. This is a sad state of affairs.

Down the Nile

2011-06-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

Those who have been to Egypt know what a bewildering place it is. Those who haven't can get a whiff of Egypt's confusing nature by reading Rosemary Mahoney's Down the Nile: Alone in A Fisherman's Skiff. Her account of her improbable adventure - rowing alone down the Nile from Aswan to Qena - is spot-on. Her descriptions of the river and the people living on it - the impossibly poor farmers, the ingratiating felucca captains, the begging children - are perceptive, honest and sensitive. It takes major gumption to try what Mahoney did: go to a Muslim country as an unaccompanied woman, buy a boat from a local fisherman and navigate it down the Nile while evading curious boaters, aggressive males, potential criminals and local "bolice". Luckily, she went through with her plan and the result is a thoroughly enjoyable book.

On Beauty

2011-06-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

Having read, but not quite finished, Zadie Smith's zany novel White Teeth, I decided to try his next, On Beauty. I'm sorry I wasted my time. This is a bad book written by a thoroughly gifted writer. Nothing works here: neither the plot, whatever it is, nor the characters, mostly academics from both sides of the pond and their spoiled, whiny children. Smith pretends to tackle racial issues, but not really, unless making his characters caricatures with exaggerated racial mannerisms really counts.

Them

2011-06-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

More zany exploits by Jon Ronson in his very funny Them: Adventures with Extremists. Ronson definitely has a gift not only for finding the truly bizarre, but also for making them come alive in his writing, be it Omar the terrorist, or David Icke, a former sportscaster gone off the deep end. Some of the chapters were a bit obscure out as they feature major or minor British public figures not generally known in the US, and the book, on the whole, does read like a series of very loosely connected and previously published articles, but it is still hilarious.

Making Haste from Babylon

2011-06-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

Making Haste from Babylon: the Mayflower Pilgrims and their world: a new history by Nick Bunker is everything a good history book should be: thoroughly researched, interesting, and bringing a fresh perspective to a well-trodden topic. Perfect for a long, hot summer.

Life and Death in Shanghai

2011-06-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng is an engrossing read: the author was jailed for seven years during the Cultural Revolution in China just for having worked for a foreign company. And while Nien Cheng was in prison, her daughter was either killed or forced to commit suicide. How does one live through something like this? Nien Cheng comes across as an extraordinary courageous (and privileged) woman fighting a truly scary system, which was, however, sometimes inept to the point of absurdity.

The Panic Virus

2011-06-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Do vaccinations cause autism? Well, depends on who you ask. Pharma says no, parents of many autistic children say yes. Who's right? To find out, read Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear. According to Mnookin, activist parents, united via the Internet and aided by a bevy of unscrupulous fringe scientist (or, to be more precise, charlatans), have hijacked the process whereby vaccines are developed, tested and administered by letting their emotions override their reason. Let's just say that this is not a new phenomenon, but it does reach new proportions in an age where you just need to go online to be instantly connected to others of the same convictions, even if those convictions are not exactly reality-based. I have never really followed closely the debate over the safety of vaccines containing mercury, but have found Mnookin's book to be worth my time.

The Big Short

2011-06-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

If you have a mortgage, and especially if you got it in the heyday of mortgage lending right before the great recession (not sure if that's the official name for the big hurt we are all feeling these days), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis will most certainly stir up feelings in you, and not good feelings at all. In this character-driven account of how Wall Street took a big gamble on sub-prime mortgages, suffered stunning losses and went to the government for a bail-out, but managed to enrich a select few beyond imagination, you find out that, if you live on Main Street, you really don't matter (and nobody will be coming to bail you out or recoup your losses).

Not being an expert in finance, I had an interesting experience reading this book: as I was reading, I could follow the sequence of events, but once I closed the book, all the explanations of "triple-B tranches of subprime mortgage bonds", "event-driven investing", ISDAs, CDOs, etc. soon blurred into a grey fog of finance. Who can understand this stuff? It's almost as if finance is modern-day magic. Money comes into Wall Street, some hocus-pocus happens, out come the above mentioned ISDAs, CDOs, and a few instant billionaires.

Cleopatra

2011-06-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

Cleopatra was beautiful. Cleopatra was extremely well educated, a great diplomat, a shrewd ruler, and fabulously rich too. Now, if you were not aware of just how awesome Cleopatra was, it is because history is written by men. Especially, ancient historians could not see past their gender blinkers and thus did not treat Cleopatra as they would have a male ruler. Or so Stacy Schiff, the author of a new biography of the Egyptian queen titled Cleopatra: A Life, would want us to believe. However well researched and written her book is, I have just a bit of trouble with her premise. After all, you can get pretty much the same interpretation of Cleopatra if you watch Elizabeth Taylor preen around in her ill-matched ancient Egyptian finery in the classic movie of the same title.

The Wreath

2011-06-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

The first installment in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Wreath by Sigrid Undset is a lovely piece of historical fiction set in fourteenth century Norway. The story of a young woman who defies her family and the Church to marry a somewhat unsuitable suitor is told in clear and precise prose and is a pleasure to read. Undset, a Nobel prize winner, is a master of historical detail Now that Kristin has married her scoundrel, I can't wait to see what happens to her in the second part of the trilogy.

The Restless Sleep

2011-05-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn is a compilation of several cold cases that the eponymous squad revisited, solved, or sometimes, had to abandon in defeat. Mixed in is a dose of departmental politics, which makes this book an uneven, although initially intriguing, read.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2011-05-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson easily qualifies as the most bizarre book I've read in a while. Ronson, a British journalist, actually unearthed some really strange - and really hard to believe - efforts by the U.S. military to ...umm... train soldiers to walk through walls, be invisible, stop the heart of the enemy (or a goat) by staring at them, control the mind and alter the mood of a detainee by playing music at them, and the list goes on. I am certainly hoping that most of this stuff is not true, but I have a queasy feeling it might be.

Be it entirely believable or not, this book is, while disturbing, also very funny. Here's an excerpt describing how U.S. forces tried to apply Sticky Foam, one of the new non-lethal weapons discussed in the book, to quell food riots in Somalia:

"Use the Sticky Foam!" ordered the commanding officer. And the Marines did. They sprayed the foam not into the crowd, but in front of it so that it would harden and produce an instant wall between the rioters and the food. The Somali crowd paused, looked at the bubbling, expanding, hardening, custardlike substance, waited for it to solidify, climbed over it, and carried on rioting. All this occurred in front of the TV cameras. That night, news broadcasts across America ran the footage alongside a clip from Ghostbusters in which Bill Murray was slimed."

Kaboom

2011-05-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War by Matt Gallagher is not great literature, nor great reporting and does not contain any great writing, but we owe it to ourselves to read books like this one. Gallagher spent some time in Iraq during the counterinsurgency phase and apparently ran a popular blog while he was there. This book is, I assume, a compendium of his blog wisdom. It is a first-hand account of the reality U.S. troops face in Iraq every day. There are some exasperating operations described here, as well as some of Gallagher's philosophical musings and rantings against "Higher". There is also a bit of alphabet soup not easy to penetrate for a civilian: JSS, TF, JAM, CAB, MNF-1, OPSEC, et. But underneath it all is an honest young man documenting the fog of war while, endearingly, waiting for his Mom to send him cookies and connecting with friends on MySpace.

The Image

2011-05-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how well The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin has stood the test of time. This volume, describing how our reality has been replaced by a pseudo-reality manufactured primarily by the world of advertising and the media, is as topical today as it was when it was written. Who knew they had a 24/7 news cycle back in 1961? Boorstin's analysis of the way the media function today is spot on, as is his analysis of modern advertising, travel, etc.

The Kitchen Sink Approach to Murder Mystery

2011-05-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

In his second novel, The Secret Speech, Tom Rob Smith falls into a trap many first-time best-selling writers fall into: replicate the successful formula, but make it even better. The result is usually a mess, and this is the case with Smith's book too. Even though he evokes the Stalin Soviet Union with a good eye for detail, he goes way overboard with the plot: after Stalin's death, Khruschev delivers a secret speech denouncing Stalin's excesses. Former agents of state-sponsored terror are all of a sudden in precarious position - and they start dying in troublesome numbers, and not of natural causes. The premise would have worked well if Smith hadn't decided that this is not enough. Consequently, he threw in everything he could think of: kidnappings, fomenting revolutions, the main character smuggling himself INTO a gulag to spring his former victim out (it's complicated), criminal gangs, etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but I can't say I'm sorry. Smith is not a bad writer and I hope that in his third book he goes back to what he did so well in his first one.

Angelica

2011-05-08T08:12:00.001-07:00

By the author of The Egyptologist, Arthur Philips, another reading pleasure: Angelica, a ghost story cum period mystery. Set in the 19th century London, a story of strange goings-on in the household of a vivisectionist whose overwrought wife is morbidly attached to their four-year-old daughter is well constructed and well told. The end is not exactly conclusive, but it works within the constraints of the story. There is some emphasis on woman's condition, but this is to be expected as the story is told by a female narrator, albeit from several perspectives.

A Very Private Gentleman

2011-05-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth: a rare case when a movie based on a book is actually better than the book. The story of Mr. Farfalla, an expert gun maker, and a sometimes killer, working on his last commission before retirement, for some reason works much better on the big screen than it does on the page. Maybe because Mr. Farfalla is played by George Clooney, or maybe because the story told in the film is more poignant (Farfalla dies in the end), or maybe because Farfalla is given to some strange ruminations in the book (for instance, how contract killings make the world better by changing the course of history). There is something missing here - I think in the character development. On the other hand, descriptions of Italian landscape in the book are wonderful, and so is the town that serves as Farfalla's temporary sanctuary in the movie.

A Portrait of an Artist as ....ummm.. Many Things

2011-04-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

At first blush, The Barrens by Joyce Carol Oates (writing, God knows why as Rosamond Smith) is a classic crime novel centered around the search for a serial killer. Well, turns out that the serial killer in question - a handyman of sorts who calls himself Name Unknown - is an artist. And so is his pursuer, a real-estate agent who is an accomplished photographer. And so are the killers last two victims: a starving artist and her friend, also an artist and a gallery owner. Artfully arranged, no? This is by no means Oates's most annoying novel (the main female character is thankfully dead from page one, so we are spared from the oversensitive, hyperventilating, morbid femaleness that is Oates's trademark). You will probably enjoy this book even more if you are - gasp - an artist, or think of yourself as one.

Bright-Sided

2011-04-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

If you are in a curmudgeonly mood, spend a little time with Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. You won't need much time for Bright-Sided: at around 200 pages, this is a quick read. As in her other books, Ehrenreich approaches her topic - the widespread acceptance of optimism as a cure-all - not without an agenda, but, even if you don't agree with her, you can enjoy her criticism of such ridiculous social phenomena as self-help books and positive psychology. As she rightly points out, our ancestors did not make it up the food chain because they trusted that everything will be OK in the end, but because they were faster, stronger and more worried about their survival than other critters vying for supremacy.

Darkness at Dawn

2011-04-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter is a scary book about a disintegration of the Soviet Union into a deeply corrupt, crime-drive and nearly failed state. This is a story that gets mentioned in passing. It isn't really front-page news, especially against the backdrop of the turmoil in the Middle East, but it is actually deeply troubling. Satter, a former journalist, does a good job of illustrating the most salient point of his book - the absolute expendability of the individual to the State - through personal stories, such as the story of a mother whose child got boiled alive in a huge hot-water sinkhole due to poor construction of underground water pipes. The book was published in 2005, and one can hope that Russia has turned a corner in the meanwhile, but I am not aware of any indication that this is the case.

The Polar Star

2011-04-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

The Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith was written some years ago, but it evokes the last days of the Soviet Union so well it's worth reading (again). The adventures of former Inspector Arkady Renko on a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea are fun in themselves, but so are the details of Soviet life at the time, such as an endless fascination with Western consumer electronics described in the episode that takes the Soviet crew to an American port.

The Burning Time

2011-04-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Burning Time by Robin Morgan is a fictional account of the beginning of the Inquisition in Ireland. It is based on the real-life case of Lady Alyce Kyteler, the first person in Ireland prosecuted for practicing witchcraft. This is an interesting story, but it's written like a feminist manifesto, which makes it less than it could be.

The Murder Room

2011-04-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there is a semi-secret society of retired, semi-retired and active law and order professionals who meet regularly in Philadelphia to solve unsolved crimes. No, this is not a set-up of a new mystery. This is real. Michael Capuzzo's The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases is an account of how this club, known as Vidocq Society came to be and what it does. Included in the account are some of the chilling, bizarre, horrifying cases that the Society has worked to solve. An engrossing, if sometimes depressing read.

The Chinese Are Coming

2011-04-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

Or haven't you heard? There was some China bashing and fear-mongering in the last mid-term elections, but should there have been more? If you want to form an informed opinion on China's influence in the world, spend some time on Joshua Kurlantzick's Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World.

It turns out that China has started to take diplomacy very seriously and has invested considerable resources into spreading its soft power, including pouring billions of dollars into its international broadcasting. Kurlantzick's book is a quick and informative read. In some two hundred pages or so, you will find many examples of China trying to win hearts and minds by extending economic help to third-world countries, hosting foreign students and diplomats, and even contributing humanitarian aid to countries hit by natural disasters. These methods are nothing new, but we are surprised that China would be using them maybe because many of us still think of China as a country that is still going through its growing pains. An outdated view, for sure. Here are some examples: according to Kurlantzick, "China's Export-Import Bank has become the largest source of loans to Africa, surpassing the World Bank", and China is developing its own USAID.

However, not all is lost yet. At least we can have a few laughs while Beijing creates its soft power empire (if it ever does). Another example from Kurlantzick:

"In February 2005 I arrived in Mozambique. Walking among pink and green Mediterranean-style buildings of Maputo's oceanfront, signs of its Portuguese colonial heritage, I noticed one structure that stood out - an enormous, blocky building with an Asian pagoda roof nothing like the surrounding architecture. It was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - built with Chinese aid, which is why it wound up looking like a giant slab of concrete topped with a pagoda."

Serpico

2011-04-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

Before I knew there was a book, I saw the movie Serpico many years ago. Not that I remember much of it so the book by Peter Maas is a new start for me, so to speak. Serpico, an expose of pervasive corruption in the New York Police Department in the sixties, makes you wonder how much things have changed and how much they have stayed the same. Not in NYPD, mind you, but in society in general.

How many Serpicos are there today and how do they fare when they take on corrupt powerful institutions? Of course, today we have all those whistle-blower protections, but do they really work? Personally, I have a queasy feeling that crusaders and agitators for justice come and go, and things don't change as much as we would like to believe. I hope I'm wrong, but recent Wall Street shenanigans, Jack Abramoff and other similar things come to mind.

The Egyptologist

2011-04-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

If you are not a lover of audio books, the audio version of The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips will change your mind. I enjoyed this book not so much for the plot or the writing but for the excellent reading, especially by the reader who voices the part of the dogged Australian detective Ferrell. That said, this book was written by someone who's good at comic writing.

The Egyptologist in question is a young British archeologist trying to locate the tomb of Atum-hadu, a purported Egyptian king, roughly about the same time Howard Carter is getting ready to excavate Tutankhamun's fabulous treasures. While Ralph Trilipush is digging for Atum-hadu's tomb guided by a fragment of Atum-hadu's raunchy "admonitions", Ferrell is looking for an Australian private, a possible heir to a fortune, gone missing in Egypt at the end of World War One. Madcap adventures, mix-ups, and murders ensue - all to the benefit of the amused reader.

I understand Arthur Phillips actually came to prominence with an entirely different book so now I'll have to find that one and see if he is really as good as The Egyptologist indicates.

Portrait of a Republic as a Beautiful Woman

2011-03-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in her book Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Victoria Clark you can find the following sentence fragment:

... the average Yemeni remained in the dark as to what the Arabic word for republic, jumhouriya, actually meant - there are tales of tribesmen assuming from the word's feminine gender that it must be a woman, and descending in their hordes on Sanaa for a glimpse of a ravishing beauty

I just love this nugget. It tells you more about the country and its part of the world than a 500-page study. However, Clark uses her nuggest sparingly, which makes her book at least dry, if not outright boring. The first section has to deal with Yemen's past (a complicated affair, as one might assume), and the second with its present, together with a wily president, powerful tribal chiefs, illiterate members of the legislature and al-Qaida (and even rehab camps for former jihadis). It is all very fascinating, but I wish Clark had been more of a journalist and less of a writer when working on this book. For the uninitiated such as myself, less history and more "local color" would have worked much better.

And, if you are wondering about the title, it comes from a quote by President Salih who once said, "Ruling Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes." By the way, he might just be done dancing as he has just today offered to hand power to "safe hands".

The Most Dangerous Place

2011-03-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier by Imtiaz Gul is a very detailed (read: hard to follow) account of ummm.. Pakistan's lawless frontier. I had a hard time following this book, partly because of the profusion of Jamma-Al-Somethings and Islam-Ul-Something Elses, and partly because I listened to the audio version of it. The author is a Pakistani journalist covering a well-known territory for him, but something very remote and alien to most of us. I wish his approach was less detail-oriented and more descriptive, but it did work in one aspect: conveying to the reader that Pakistan's tribal lands apparently teeming with extremists are truly a scary place.

Boys Will Be Boys

2011-03-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

...even if they grow up to be bank robbers, as is the case in The Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. This book is ostensibly a thriller about a group of bank robbers from Charlestown in Boston who decide to go for the big one, and their leader who is trying to leave the life behind. However, there is a nostalgic feel to the story, almost like it was a Buildungsroman of the criminal class.

The Terror

2011-03-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

Dan Simmons is like Stephen King, but better. A good example is The Terror: A Novel, an account of a lost British expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The book is based on historical facts: there was indeed an expedition led by the British explorer Sir John Franklin whose two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, disappeared in 1847. Simmons's book recounts the trials and tribulations of the doomed expedition, but adds a supernatural element to it. (This is the kind of book King would write were he less lazy.)

It is easy to see that a lot of research has gone into Terror. Honestly, Simmons's mastery of historical detail is so great that he really does not need the "thing on the ice" to make this book work. This is not an easy read if you aren't into unremittingly bleak and desperate narratives (of the kind that include murder, sodomy, mutilation and cannibalism), but it's done so well that by the time you are finished you feel like you've lived through the adventure with the ill-fated Captain Crozier and his men of the British Navy.

Origins of the Specious

2011-02-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

If you are a word purist, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language by Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman is a book for you. Even if you are not a word purist, this book might still be a book for you. It is full of factoids (for example, did you know that George Washington gave us such words as "off-duty" and "bakery"?), good points on good English usage, and it is just fun to read. And, if you are worried if your English conforms to all the rules of grammar, the authors remind you that we, the people, write the rules.

The Life of Elizabeth I

2011-02-19T11:58:00.000-08:00

Having just finished an Alison Weir novel, I was intrigued to find a work of non-fiction by her on the shelf in the library. I'm glad I did. The Life of Elizabeth I is eminently readable, all the five hundred pages of it. The book is well researched, rich in historical detail and just plain intriguing, thanks in no small measure to the formidable main character. In the spirit of the times, Weir does sometimes present Elizabeth I as a competent manager, who knew her business and did it well. So what if she had three thousand dresses? She knew the importance of ostentatious public displays. She could not decide on a husband? She was doing it for the benefit of the country. The view from her court in this book is a little narrow and I would have preferred more detail on the everyday life in Elizabethan England, but that is probably best left for another hefty tome.

United States of Loco

2011-02-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in the current state of psychology (and I am using the term loosely here) beyond our shores, grab Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters for a quick read. You'll be interested to know that anorexia is rapidly spreading in Hong Kong, and that the Japanese are now, for the first time in their long history, happily gobbling Prozac in record numbers. This book is not without an agenda; for instance, Watters condemns Western organizations which flocked to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami to treat the locals for PTSD, even though PTSD had not even been previously recognized as a possible diagnosis in that country. It turns out, according to Watters, that, along with out superior consumer Western goodies, we also export our Western mental ailments to populations that have been doing just fine without them, thank you very much. For instance, in the case of Sri Lanka, well-meaning Western mental health workers did some good, but mostly unintentionally. "..relief workers, with their strange behavior, their puppet shows and handcrafts and interactive games, often did liven the mood of the camps they visited. "In many cases these sessions, in which whole communities participated, offered comic relief for the survivors even though it was probably not intended as such..."

An interesting book, an engaging read and a really big question it tries to answer.

To the Not So Bitter End

2011-02-19T11:27:00.000-08:00

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith is a competently written thriller about a serial killer on the loose in the Stalin Soviet Union. If totalitarian systems give you claustrophobia, this book is not for you. When the main character, Inspector Leo Stepanovich Damidov, goes from the hunter to the quarry, he soon finds out that there is no place to hide in the place where everything is under control. While searching for a brutal killer of dozens of young children, Leo, a former security officer just short of a torturer, undergoes a somewhat unlikely transformation into the champion of truth and justice. Even more unlikely is the end, when everything is forgiven for Leo and his wife Raisa, one-time enemies of the states and fugitives from justice. Still, everything in this book eventually works; even the graphic descriptions of camphor oil torture and the post-war famine in Russia have their place in the well designed and executed plot.

Empty Promises

2011-01-30T11:02:00.000-08:00

Ah, there's nothing like the moral clarity, the basic writing and the flowing narrative of Ann Rule's volumes on true crime. Empty Promises and Other True Cases: Ann Rule's Crime Files Volume 7 follows the basic formula of other files: an almost book-length cases supplemented by several others, much shorter ones, held together by a tenuous premise such as: this volume is about "all manner of victims [who] were betrayed by killers". Once you've accepted the premise, relax and enjoy.

A Portrait of a Queen as a Young Woman

2011-01-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

The Lady Elizabeth: A Novel by Alison Weir is a "what-if" fictional reconstruction of the early years of Elizabeth I, and as such it works just fine. Weir, an accomplished historian, has added a twist to the legend of the Virgin Queen: she has young Elizabeth fall in love, get pregnant and have a miscarriage, all without scandal erupting. Weir has based this part of the book on historical documents left behind by sources not exactly sympathetic with Elizabeth so the their veracity is suspect, but they do leave open an interesting possibility. We'll never know, but we can always imagine.

American Taboo

2011-01-30T10:17:00.001-08:00

In his American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps Philip Weiss has undertaken to investigate and bring to public attention a murder that happened in Tonga a quarter of a century ago. This is by all means a moral undertaking. The murder, of a Peace Corps volunteer by another volunteer, was hushed up and the murderer was tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Then he was quietly shipped back to the U.S., where he resumed his life as if nothing had happened on the remote island in the Pacific. Weiss's book shows the obsession of someone who cannot stop picking at a scab until it bleeds again. He picked up the forgotten narrative, talked to all the actors in it, flew all over the world all for the case that has been closed for many years. He even went to confront the murderer in an anti-climactic scene towards the end of the book. I can think of only one reason why (except to publish a book): because it was the right thing to do.

Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

2011-01-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

So, OK, it looks like I'm still working on honing my inner moral sense. Or I'm just on another Ann Rule kick. This time it's Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases: Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 12. This time it's all about women (maybe that's why there are mirrors in the title): there is a deputy's wife, a chemist's wife, a minister's wife, a painter wife, and so on, including even a truck driver's wife as a case of spontaneous human combustion. Yes, it's all there in its shocking criminal glory, and it's addictive.

No Regrets

2011-01-17T10:55:00.000-08:00

Trying to hone my inner moral sense in the new year, I returned to the undisputed queen of true crime fiction, Ann Rule, for another foray into the dark world of human passions and crimes. No Regrets and Other True Cases: Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 11 served me well for a lazy January afternoon with several of the cases just creepy or sad enough to linger with me. Alert to readers: if you are retired and have some income and/or property, keep a wary eye on your spouse, even if you've been together for decades.

The Secret Keeper

2011-01-17T10:41:00.000-08:00

The Secret Keeper by the first-time author Paul Harris is a competently written mystery set in the post-conflict Sierra Leone where "nobody is what they seem to be". Harris has chosen his setting well: his own experience as a war correspondent in Sierra Leone serves him well in his book. The main hero, a war correspondent himself, returns to Sierra Leone to investigate the murder of his former girlfriend, an NGO worker who was, to all appearances, killed in an ambush. But again, nothing is what is seems to be.

The plot is believable and moves swiftly, and yet again, a journalist proves himself to be a readable fiction writers. All expected and checked. Except for one small detail. Hidden deep between the pages of his well-crafted book there is a magnificent mechanically challenged paragraph:

"...the car stuttered to a halt. Its engine died.
"Shit!" Maria said. Danny looked at her as she quickly clambered out of the pickup.
"What is it?"
She did not reply and he could no longer see her. Without the headlights, the darkness crowded into the SUV."

After you have done deciphering the kind of vehicle the characters are traveling in, you might want be curious to know just what kind of a problem got them stranded in the first place. Here goes Harris again:

"What is it?" he repeated...
"Hey," she said, "it's fine. Just a loose connection. It must have jangled free. I need you to go back and get the repair kit."

Harris might be a fine war correspondent, but let me guess: he ain't no born car mechanic.

The Inimitable Jeeves

2010-12-22T04:26:00.000-08:00

In The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse continues the series of hi-jinks and scrapes in which the gentleman's gentleman Jeeves saves the neck of his hapless employer Wooster. In focus this time: betting on various and sundry events, such as school races and vicar's sermons.

Dodsworth

2010-12-22T03:51:00.000-08:00

I don't think anyone has ever accused Sinclair Lewis of being too subtle in his writing, but I think that in Dodsworth he came as close to being subtle as he ever did. And not so much in term of writing, but more in terms of character development.

Samuel Dodsworth is wealthy executive in his fifties who decides to go into semi-retirement to visit Europe with his spoiled wife Fran. If you've ever been idle, you know Dodsworth's plan is eminently not a good idea. Needless to say, they make it to Europe; the wife immerses herself in sightseeing and shopping, and Dodsworth gets bored. As he plods behind his wife from London to Paris to Berlin, she develops quite a following of idlers, hangers-on and assorter paramours. Unsurprisingly, the marriage falls apart. By the time it does, you are actually cheering for Dodsworth and congratulating him on the good riddance.

In Dodsworth, Lewis spends a lot of time on Europe vs. America, but most of his musings on this subject feel dated today and have been done to death in the meanwhile. What is more interesting is his main character who turns out to be more than an uncivilized nouveau riche trying to develop a veneer of culture.

The Net Delusion

2010-12-22T03:15:00.000-08:00

We all use the Internet all the time without really thinking about what it is, what it does or how it is and can be used. If you are an average user, you use the Internet to access your four or five favorite sites, to communicate with your many friends via Facebook, and to look up information on Google. But, wait, there is more, much more to the Internet, and not all of it is good.

For an in-depth look, read Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Did you know that, for instance, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is one of the most popular personalities on Twitter with over 500,000 followers, or that Iran has the Bureau for Development of Religious Web Logs? Or that, for that matter, the Chinese have found a way to crowdsource censorship by paying ordinary users small sums of money to write pro-government posts on various web sites? This is, by the way, called the Fifty Cent Army?

Morozov is a former Belorussian blogger now living and working in the U.S. I can't help stereotyping here, but Morozov's background makes him just sceptical enough to tackle the topic of Internet freedom without falling for some of the general Western delusions about the Internet as this wide-open space for absolutely free exchanges of (mostly high-fallutin) ideas. Another assumption is that this free exchange of ideas will somehow lead to democratization of authoritarian states. Not so, says Morozov, using as an example the well-publicized "Green Revolution" in Iran which was profusely tweeted on, but which sputtered out in the end without producing any substantive changes in the lives of Iranians. No change, that is, except for those Iranians whose were later arrested when the authorities tracked them down based on their anti-government tweets.

Rather than use to expand freedom for its citizens, authoritarian governments, as well as an increasing number of Western governments, are now trying to restrict the Internet and its uses in order, as they say, to protect the public. Some, for instance, are working on censorship engines powered by recommendations similar used to those on Amazon. Soon, says Morozov, companies will either follow or follow suit. If you have followed the Wikileak saga, the following quote will also sound familiar (and chilling): "Being able to force companies to police the web accroding to a set of some broad guidelines is a dream come true for any government."

Toto, we are not in Kansas any more.

Our Town

2010-12-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

Cynthia Carr's Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America is an account of the infamous "last lynching in the North" which happened in Marion, Indiana on August 7, 1930. If, like me, you are surprised at how recent this event actually is, you have plenty to learn from Carr's book. Carr, a journalist based in NY, actually grew up in Marion, and went back to explore the history behind the lynching after she had found out that her own grandfather used to be a KKK members.

Our Town is a sprawling book with a wealth of detail on the modern KKK. Unfortunately, most of what Carr has unearthed in the course of her thorough investigation (the better part of which seems to have been conducted in retirement homes where she interviewed the last remaining participats of the 1930 lynching) is not exactly particularly surprising: the KKK still exists, but the members of its modern day reincarnation are mostly....uh, to put it mildly....pathetic losers, and the truth about the lynching cannot really be uncovered any more (due to an understandable reticence and even more understandable memory lapses of all those afore-mentioned octogenarian witness).

It's Cultural

2010-12-12T12:47:00.000-08:00

The Mao Case by Qiu Xiaolong is the latest in the series of adventurous investigations by the ancient-Chinese-proverb-quoting and smoked-carp-eyeball-popping Chief Inspector Chen. This time he has to tiptoe around his case, which involves an object that Chairman Mao allegedly gave to one of his mistresses. Never mind the rest of the plot.

The Chen novels are fun to read not because of great plotting, but because they feature an authentic Chinese detective working in an authentic Chinese environment. Chen has to be mindful of the political implications of his actions; he is deferential to his supervisors and to his elders; he moves under the radar. Apparently, it is not easy being a detective in the communist system. And not just any kind of a detective. Chen is also a poet and a literary translator so he goes around quoting Tang poetry such as this "Ode to the Plum Blossom":

Outside the posthouse, beside the broken bridge / a lone plum blossom stands deserted, / against the worries of the solitary dusk, / against the wind and rain. / Not anxious to claim spring for herself, / she endures the envy of other flowers. / Her petals fallen, in dust, in mud, / in spite of a remaining fragrance.

When not quoting poetry, Chen is given to quoting provers, resulting in pronouncements such as this one: "It's easy to throw rocks at one already fallen to the bottom of a well."

And when not quoting poetry or old proverbs, Chen is often found in restaurants for such exotic fare as crab digestive glands (one gets the impression that the author, who now lives in the U.S, gets mighty homesick every once in a while). And the reader gets a real urge to go visit China.

Dracula Variations

2010-11-28T12:10:00.000-08:00

Just re-read Bram Stoker's Dracula and had a great time doing it. This book is certainly a classic (with all that entails): great descriptions of Transylvanian scenery (which Stoker had never seen with his own eyes); a great plot (no need to elaborate here); a great villain (noble, yet ignoble; centuries old, yet with a child-mind; a count, yet a criminal, etc.); and an assorted number of great minor characters (the innocent Lucy, the pragmatic Mina, the vampire-killer extraordinaire Van Helsing). No matter that there are holes and inconsistencies throughout. The forward motion of the plot just sweeps you along.

Two observations: the Slovaks get the short end of the stick as Dracula's murderous helpers ("The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass rails."), and the Americans, of whom there is a representative one among the minor characters, get a vote of confidence ("What a fine fellow is Quicey! I believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy's death as any of us; but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in thew world indeed"). Can we safely assume that Stoker was eying the U.S. as a potentially lucrative market for his Old World East European mystique?

The Woman in White

2010-11-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is a novel very much of its time: it was written in 1860 by a growingly popular protege of Charles Dickens. At the time when Dickens was giving us grim accounts of exploited orphans and London's demi-monde, Collins was launching in a different direction: he was developing a brand new genre of the mystery thriller.

And thrills do abound in this story of a trusting heiress who becomes the victim of an unscrupulous husband and his evil coterie of crooks. In some ways, the whole novel is about being trapped in a bad marriage in the Victorian Britain. Many of Collins's techniques, such as multiple narrators telling their parts of the story, are now commonplace, but, luckily, some of the sentiments and customs of the period are not. For instance, here is a heart-warming contemplation of the nature of women:

"Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto discovered only two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her down - a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but, in the end, not less certain), is never to accept a provocation at a woman's hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality of the animals, the children, and the women all fail in."

Blonde

2010-11-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

In Blonde, a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, Joyce Carol Oates has found her ideal character. As I have mentioned before, I am not a great fan of Oates' overwrought fiction, but in this book her style fits her subject to a "T". What was the inner life of the most famous sex idol of all times? What could it have been? What was the woman behind it all really like?

In Blonde, Oates pays Norma Jeane a wonderful tribute. This is a hefty book,but it is well-researched and thought-through or, better to say, well-imagined. Monroe was in many ways a personification of many of the themes that haunt Oates' fiction: violence against women, sexual exploitation, etc. The writer and the subject are perfectly matched here, and the result is a pleasure to read.

Evil

2010-11-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty is an eminently readable and very pragmatic study of something we all think of as somehow beyond the bounds of ordinary humans. The author, Roy F. Baumeister, sets us to demonstrate that evil is not something mythical, but is nothing more than what we would call reprehensible actions aimed at hurting others. Baumeister explores common myths about evil, such as the assumption that "evil is driven primarily by the wish to inflict harm merely for the pleasure of doing so", or that "the victim is innocent and good" to give us a broader perspective and a deeper understanding of evil. This is an interesting study well worth reading.

Very Good, Jeeves

2010-11-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

There is probably nothing that can be said about P.G.Wodehouse's Wooster and Jeeves series that has not been said before. Very Good, Jeeves is a prime example of Wodehouse's typically British humor. It is definitely of a time and place (just try to understand the lingo), but it works precisely because of its Britishness.

Good Omens

2010-11-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

Hilarity and hijinks abound in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. I understand this book is a cult classic. Probably among the younger set who will appreciate the madcap adventures of an angel, a demon, the Four Riders of the Apocalypse, a group of kids, a putative Antichrist, and assorted other characters who try to either stop or speed up the coming End of the World.

Incidentally, what is really funny in this book is the Them, the youthful foursome which includes Adam, the young Antichrist, and their musings on the state of the world:

"Adam, who seemed to have a weight on his mind, took a deep breath.

"You don't have to be so litt'ral about everything," he said. "That's the trouble these days. Grass materialism. 'S people like you who go round choppin' down rainforests and makin' holes in the ozone layer. There's a great big hole in the ozone layer 'cos of gras materialism people like you."

"I can't do anythin' about it," said Bryan automatically. "I'm still paying off on a stupid cucumber frame."

"It's in the magazine," said Adam. "It takes millions of acres of rain forest to make one beefburger. And all this ozone is leakin's away because of ..." he hesitated.

"An' there's whales," said Wensleydale. "We've got to save them."

Adam looked blank. His plunder of New Aquarian's back issues hadn't included anything about whales.

China's Megatrends

2010-11-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

Apparently, once upon a time a very successful book titled Megatrends was written. The author, one John Naisbitt, knew a good thing when he saw it and went on to write more megatrend-themed books, the most recent being China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society.

This book is, according to the blurb on the cover, " a groundbreaking look at a new social-political model on the rise." In my opinion, this book is...um..drivel. I came to this conclusion as soon as I plunged into the first chapter on "emancipation of the mind". Really? In China? According to Naisbitt, the West does not really understand what is happening in China, a country which is building a "vertical democracy" and where freedom does not mean the same thing as in the West. Granted, Chinese culture is fundamentally different from Western cultures, but a "vertical democracy"?

Judging by this book, Naisbitt is a rank apologist for China and has written a book that will sell well in Beijing. Nothing wrong with that, but he goes so overboard it is hard to take anything he says seriously. Take this statement for example: "The Tibetan language is beautiful, but more suited for expressing spiritual enlightenment than for making a living in the material world." Racist much?

Burmese Days

2010-11-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

For a snapshot of British expat life in the colonial Burma look no further than George Orwell's Burmese Days. This book based on Orwell's police service in Burma is in some ways not like Orwell, and in others very much like Orwell. It's a very lush melodrama, but also a stinging indictment of colonialism. Here's an example of Orwell not mincing words:

"The Indian Empire is a despotism - benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object...It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself."

We need more voices like Orwell's.

Miracles Great and Small

2010-11-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

If you want to feel better about the world in general, read Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. Mortenson is a former climber who has devoted his life to building schools for poor villagers in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. This book is an account of his first efforts and the growth of his charitable empire (not sure if this is the right word). It is a lovely book with a big-hearted and somewhat kooky character at the center of it.
ps. The book was co-written with David Oliver Relin.

Down and Out in Paris and London

2010-11-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

It was interesting to read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris in London, a semi-biographical account of a young writer's days in the slums, for two reasons: this is a lesser-known work by a major author, and books like this one are not really being written any more. Who writes about poverty today? Pretty much nobody. It has never been a popular subject, but Orwell deals with it in a straightforward, direct, clear-eyed manner. And, surprisingly enough, he does it with humor.

Mansfield Park

2010-10-31T12:12:00.000-07:00

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: a group of who-cares characters going through the motions in a who-cares plot. Wait, there's a plot? There wouldn't be one if all was left to the main character: Fanny Price, a poor relative raised by a rich family to become a lady beyond reproach, but of little consequence. Fanny pretty much does nothing throughout the book, but manages to marry reasonably well just by being not as bad as her more audacious and enterprising cousins (both of whom end badly). Yawn!

The Fever

2010-10-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Revisiting the Third World and one of its signature diseases, Sonia Shah's Malaria: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years shows the uniformed reader that the next superbug might not be Ebola-like at all. Rather, it can be something like the malaria parasite, incredibly resilient, flexible, and ancient.

Before you run to the story to buy some mosquito netting, let me tell you that not all is lost quite yet. Malaria is, it turns out, still manageable in its present form, not quite the voracious killer that the global charity circles make it to be. Although the author spends considerable ink on the history and the physiology (?) of malaria, she also looks - with a somewhat jaundiced eye - a the current efforts of Bono and his ilk to save poor Africans from malaria by for instance, distributing netting treated with mosquito repellant. As it turns out, in a classic case of the clash of civilizations, the poor recipients of this misguided largesse end up using the netting to catch fish, thus opting for a full stomach over malaria-free existence.

Even if the activist, or to be less drastic, the engaged nature of this book is not really your cup of tea, The Fever is still worth reading as a bit of Medicine 101 for your average reader.

Constant Gardener Part Two

2010-10-02T10:53:00.000-07:00

No, there is no such book. But if there were one, a close contender for the title is Sonia Shah's The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients. No wonder the foreword was written by John le Carre.

To the point and informative, this book will probably leave you with a somewhat bitter taste in your mouth, especially if you are reading it in the First World, where, as it turns out, medical advances are often bought for a horrendous price in the Third World. We are all better off not knowing some things, like some of the things highlighted in this book. The question is whether we have the right not to know, to stay willingly uninformed.

Graving Dock

2010-10-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

On the opposite end of the scale from the below-mentioned Swedish oeuvre is Gabriel Cohen's Graving Dock, a bland police procedural about a coffin containing a child's body that washes ashore in Brooklyn.

Apparently, the distinguishing characteristic of Cohen's series featuring the whiny Detective Jack Leightner is the fact that it takes place in a part of Brooklyn called Red Hook. How this particular neighborhood differs from others in Brooklyn is not readily apparent in Cohen's fiction which does not have much to recommend it anyway. Any author using pronouncements such as "love is a worm" is skating on thin ice, indeed.

Volvo Crime Fiction

2010-10-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

Ake Edwardson's Frozen Tracks is as solid as another Swedish brand, Volvo. And I don't mean frozen solid, no pun intended.

I generally enjoy ethno thrillers, and this one doesn't dissapoint. It has just enough local color so that it is easily digestible internationally, but it also makes you want to move to Gothenburg and eat Basque omelettes (oft-mentioned local delicacy?). Ah, those Swedes.

Ruminations on Content

2010-10-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

I just read the most boring book ever. And it even starts with a serial killer. But, wait, how can such a book be boring, you ask. Well, it was written by a scholar.

While the issues tackled by Kathleen M. Fallon in Democracy and the Rise of Women's Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa are actually very pertinent (especially for a woman), it is very hard to plow through the 125 pages of the book without occasionally nodding off. Mainly because of the scholarly jargon which she deploys mercilessly against the helpless leader. For instance, "Using informal political systems and existing women's associations, women are drawing on known gendered structures to negotiate new democratic institutions." Huh? Gendered structures? In plain English: women organize informally to gain political influence.

Actually, none of this is the author's fault. It is understood that if you work in academia, you need to show your credentials by using the densest jargon possible which no ordinary human can understand or cares to understand. Which brings me to content. Even though it's interesting, it's hidden under the weight of the lingo. What a shame.

Tokyo Year Zero

2010-09-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

It is rare to find a crime novel that reads like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero is just such a rara avis. The story of a real-life Japanese serial killer set in the first year after the Japanese surrender in World War Two as told by Peace is so nightmarish and hallucinatory it is hard not to think of it as more serious literature.

Peace certainly has a unique style for a crime writer, and if get past Page 5 or so, you will really get sucked into the story. That is, if you do not get tired of his favorite stylistic tool: constant repetition. Once you have read "I itch and I scratch. Gari-Gari." for the 705th time, you might be just a bit tempted to start skipping certain words, phrases or paragraphs. Even so, this is a good book, actually really good for its genre. So good I'm almost developing an itch for more Peace. Gari-gari.

Crude

2010-09-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

It is only to be expected that a book about oil will have a definite point of view. Sonia Shah's Crude: The Story of Oil certainly meets the expectations. It is also not particularly hard to discern the leanings of an author who puts the words "Orwellian" and "the Bush Administration" in the same sentence (the book was written in 2004).

Setting all that aside, Shah's book is full of fascinating oil-related details and anecdotes. All of which leave you with a queasy fealing about your own oil consumption: where does all this stuff go and what will all this do to us?

The Golden Calf

2010-09-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

Nothing ages so badly as humor despite the timelessness of the human condition. Chances are you know about Shakespeare, but can you remember a single Elizabethan humorist?

Case in point: The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evegeny Petrov. Their story of a con man after a millionaire trying to hide his wealth in the Soviet Union certainly shows its age. To be fair, this might have more to do with the book being an artifact of a system that has long since disintegrated than the writing ability of the authors, once famous Soviet journalists and satirists. Setting aside the signs of age, such as clunky Soviet abbreviations, the book does have its share of truly hilarious moments. Reading it on the plane I actually laughed so hard that a person across the isle from me wanted to know what I was reading.

Teenage Rebellion in China

2010-09-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

Beijing Doll by the youthful Chun Sue (she wrote the book when she was like seventeen) is an interesting glimpse into the life of your stereotypical disaffected youth, except that the youth in this case is not your stereotypical Western teen. The stereotype-busting heroine of this book is a rebellious high school girl from Beijing, who hangs out with underground rock bands (There is an underground rock scene in Beijing? Who knew?) and gets thrown out of school. Everything about this book reveals the age of the author: it reads exactly like a diary of a teenager. Ah, those fond days of just-discovered angst!

This book is worth reading only because it's one of the precious few of its kind: a first-person glimpse into the lives of an entirely new and not so well understood generation in the transforming China.

Fathers and Sons

2010-09-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

...or what happens when two nihilist students go home for the summer vacation in the 19th century Russia.

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev's brief novel of the rural life and generational change in Russia of the 1850s is a pleasure to read.

Boys Gone Wild

2010-08-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

I have really nothing to add to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, except to wonder if grown-ups would behave any better if stranded on a desert island (full disclosure: I do not consider the TV show Lost a modern day equivalent to Golding's classic). Or what would it have been like if there had been a Ms. Piggy on the island alongside Ralph, Jack and the others.

Bitter Fruit

2010-08-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

If you think that the history of the post-apartheid South Africa is fascinating, here is a book for you: Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor, a South African human rights activist and novelist. After you are through with your dose of vitamins B and W, you will wonder how that country ever made it through the transition from apartheid to a post-racial democracy of sorts.

In Dangor's novel a family is crushed after the father encounters a man who had raped his wife some twenty years ago. The encounter itself will have almost no tangible immediate consequences, but the family will unravel fast and in some very strange ways. As rape is the central point of the plot, I guess it is to be expected that there will be some emphasis on sexual tensions and undercurrents, but Dangor takes it a step further: there is rape, incestual thoughts, incest, sleeping around, inter-generational sex, one-night stands, and all of this galore. Maybe I'm missing something about sex being a metaphor here, but boy, it is used in some bizzare ways. Actually, so much that it detracts from the main thrust (excuse the pun) of the action. Somehow I just did not get this one.

A Guy You'd Like to Have a Beer With

2010-08-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

Reading Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: an American Life the reader gets a distinct feeling that the author would have very much liked to have been the subject.

Other than that this a extensive and competent biography of a fascinating man. Also somebody normal enough you'd want to share a beer with.

A Strange Life of a Strange Man

2010-08-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you need to step out of the ordinary and activate infrequently used neural passages. Reading a biography of one the the most notorious people ever is a good way to do that. Proceed at your own peril.

Well, in this case is not really that bad. Neil Schaeffer's The Marquis de Sade: A Life deals more with de Sade dysfunctional life than with this dysfunctional sexual practices (even though the latter are covered in sufficient detail so as to make it uncomfortable if you want to read this book, say, in public transportation).

It turns out that the Marquis, apart from being a sexual deviant even by the most liberal standards, was also a hapless aristocrat, a minor criminal and pretty much a life-long prisoner thanks to a very unforgiving mother-in-law. Mostly what landed him in trouble were incidents that threatened scandal and aroused the ire of the formidable Mme de Montreuill. Trying to talk a prostitute into getting whipped? Check. Trying to poison prostitutes with Spanish fly? Check. Trying to debauch young servants? Check. Getting caught? Really bad idea.

The arc of the Marquis de Sade's life was actually quite pathetic, a never-ending cycle of financial and legal problems mainly caused by the Marquis himself. Of note: one relatively bizzare period after the French Revolution when de Sade decided to become a model citizen to survive the purges of the old aristocracy.

In the end, he died a failed husband, failed father, failed aristocrat and failed citizen, He left behind some minor plays and some scandalous writings. Was he a provocateur by nature or just plain crazy? Who knows. According to the author, "the myth of Sade is ... far more extreme than the truth of Sade." The scary thing is, as Scaeffer notes, "As bad as he was, ther are people in the city or even the town or the street where the reader lives who are much, much worse."

Paradise Beneath Her Feet

2010-08-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East by Isobel Coleman is a worthwile effort, but, in my estimation, not a very compelling book. The author traveled around the Middle East to see how women are faring today in that part of the world. Admittedly, most of us don't have a very profound knowledge of this. Heck, most of us think women in the Middle East live lives of quiet desperation covered in burqas or their local equivalents. Although this is not that far from the truth, it is also not the whole thruth as we can find out from Ms. Coleman's book. She does a fine job describing the changing situation of women in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran.

However, she cannot help but lapse into the typical DC lingo, which I found really irksome. For instance, she describes an Iranian women's rights activist as an "Islamic power mom". Or how's this for fine writing: "I began to get the sense that the future of Saudi Arabia might just rest on the black-shrouded shoulders of these Islamic feminists." I found the clunky-cutesy writing too distracting and, as a result, could not really enjoy this book as much I could or should have.

Awww...

2010-07-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

Alexander McCall Smith is the most comforting author alive. If his books were dishes, they would be meatloaf, mac and chese, and apple pie. Or something like that.
His latest, The Double Comfort Safari Club, would certainly qualify as comfort food. Furter adventures of Mma Ramotswe cannot but comfort the reader (have I used that word a bit too often by now). Here is why: in this book Mme Ramotswe brings an inheritance to a poor man, gets rid of the meddling aunt of her assistant's fiance, and deals gently with a case of marital infidelity. All of this under the sun of Botswana, one of the best countries in the world, according to the characters in this book.

The characters, by the way, all manage to sound like oracles even when engaging in exchanges such as this one:

"This is a very beautiful place," said Mma Ramotswe.
"This is why people come here," said the deputy manager. "They come because they want to find a beautiful place. That is what people want."
"There are many beautiful places," said Mma Makutsi.
The deputy manager looked at her appreciatively, impressed by the wisdom of her observation. "I think that you are right," he said.

If this doesn't do it for you in your basic wisdom category, McCall Smith spells it out at the end of the book:

Mma Ramotswe thought about this. Having the right approach to life was a great gift in this life. ...Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find for yourself.

Told you. Mashed potatoes, anyone? They might clog your arteries, but oh boy are they tasty.

Shinjo

2010-07-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

If you are trying to make it through a horribly hot summer alive and with your sanity intact, you could do worse than grab Laura Joh Rowland's Shinju. The title refers to a traditional Japanese ritual double-suicide committed by a pair of lovers. Except that the drowned lovers weren't lovers, and did not exactly commit suicide. Enter the bumbling yoriki Sano Ichiro, Edo's newest senior police commander. An inept investigation ensues, in which the hapless Sano loses his job, his honor, and almost his life.

This mystery set in the Tokugawa Japan is full of historic details, such as the royal ban on killing dogs, because the shogun has not produced an heir. The Way of the Warrior, the samurai code, is mentioned pretty much on every page, and it is obvious that the author just loves this period of Japan's history. Nothing wrong with that, especially for lovers of period mysteries.