”Indiana Jones and the White Witch,” by Martin CaidinBantam Books (paperback, 1994, 329 pages).Those of you who saw my review (which you can see HERE) of a previous installment in this series of adventures based on the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg movies may remember that my standards aren’t very high.
I don’t ask for much.
Just don’t bore me.
This one failed on that score.
Btw, these paperbacks were reissued this spring to capitalize on the latest movie.
There are two common laments that average folks have about history: (1) They’re trying to rewrite it, and (2) they never taught me that in class.
While there are multiple reasons for both statements, one that they have in common is the limited amount of time that can be devoted to history in high school or college survey courses. If an educator only touches upon the basics of the American colonial period and then tries to get within the life experiences of his students, he faces the daunting task of cover at least 250 years worth of information in nine months or less. Thus there’s little time for that piece of the past between Columbus and the Declaration, an comparable amount of time.
It’s not uncommon, then, for most Americans to know little of the colonial era other than some thin understanding of the Pilgrims. Thus a nasty massacre of French Huguenots in Florida by the Spanish a half century earlier never gets mentioned. The story of how a Massachusetts woman carrying a hatchet — no, not Carrie Nation — and a handful of scalps became a hero is not one that gets celebrated at Thanksgiving. And perhaps as relevant to American history as the turkey were Queen Isabella’s pigs.
It’s not that you were absent the day these things were covered in class. Hardly anyone else heard of them either. Fortunately, Kenneth C. Davis, author of the bestselling “Don’t Know Much About History,” did stumble across these stories and ably wrote recorded them in his “America’s Hidden History, Untold Tales Of The First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, And Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.” Davis continues on this theme, telling of George Washington’s culpability in a massacre that happened years before the American Revolution, how an egg-toss and a founding father in a toga figured into events in revolutionary Boston and some details about a group of little-known farmers who almost derailed the American experiment before the Constitution was even written.
“The Great Derangement:
A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)
This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.
Check this one out, for example:
“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)
Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.
Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.
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The First Monday Book Club took a bit of a hiatus this summer. We decided not to read specific books and skipped our June meeting, but a group of us got together recently to sip wine at Davis-Kidd and catch up on what’s on everyone’s nightstand.
We thought we’d choose the best books from the summer as the basis of our book list when we officially get back together next month; each person chooses their favorite book and leads the discussion when the time comes.
In the past, we’ve mostly looked at a few summaries from online sources and tried to agree on something that sounded good. We’ve mixed in a classic (need to do more of those), some books that were getting a lot of buzz, and several books I’d already read so I could keep participating during an especially demanding grad class. It was time to change it up a bit.
I’ve heard all kinds of ways in which book clubs choose their titles: drawing titles out of hat, taking turns, voting. My co-blogger Bill Frazier (read his posts on American history here) recently gave me a few copies of Bookmarks magazine. In one, a club describes choosing books by “walking the plank” — walking down a book aisle, closing your eyes, reaching out to touch a spine and reading the book you touched. Might be a good way to find a hidden or forgotten gem.
How does your book club choose its selections?
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A small pink paperback book arrived recently, with a cover drawing of a lady (in the old-fashioned sense of that word) sitting up in bed in a pink dressing gown with fur trim and holding a martini glass. Title: “Live Alone and Like It” (Hatchette Book Group, $14). Subtitle: “The Classic Guide for the Single Woman.” Original publication date: 1936. It was written by then-Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971) and has a new introduction by Laurie Graff, whose contributions to contempo chick-lit include “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs.”
I leafed through “Live Alone” expecting to find admonitions and advice that were dated and possibly offensive, therefore hilarious, and there was some of that. (Frank Crowninshield’s original intro advises the single lady to concentrate on “not talking about things she doesn’t understand to people who do, or about things she does to people who don’t” — yeah, good thing guys don’t ever do that — and “not wearing a backless gown when she has an over-vertebrate back” — words to live by.)
Read the rest of this entry »
So, I was dawdling in the book aisle at Target this weekend while my kids were salivating in Electronics, and I noticed that every other book cover in the Bestsellers section had a photograph of a woman or child with her (I think they were all of the female persuasion) back to camera.
Is this some new trend? Do people identify more with a character in a novel if they can’t see her face? Just wondering.
And now, like an annoying song your co-worker sings that you can’t get out of your head, you’re going to be noticing this trend every time you look at a display of popular books…
Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” has won the Best of the Booker.
The 1981 winner of the Man Booker Prize was the front-runner going into this one-off competition celebrating 40 years of the award. It had won the Booker of Bookers during the 25th anniversary celebration.
This time, though, the readers had a choice, kind of. A panel of literary-minded folks chosen by the Booker people narrowed the field to six books deemed worthy of the big prize and allowed the masses to choose the ultimate winner. Before the six were announced, reader polls showed Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” in first place. It didn’t make the short list.
The also-rans are: “The Ghost Road” by Pat Barker, “Oscar and Lucinda” by Peter Carey, “Disgrace” by J.M. Coetzee, “The Siege of Krishnapur” by J.G. Farrell and “The Conservationist” by Nadine Gordimer.
David Sedaris has made his life’s work by writing about the random stuff that happens to him. Most reviews of his books will laud the way in which he makes the mundane so hilarious. This blows my mind, because there is rarely anything mundane that happens in a David Sedaris book. Working as one of Santa’s elves? Having OCD? Trying to quit smoking by vacationing in Japan? Moving to France and trying to learn the language? Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room in nothing but underwear? Hitchhiking and being asked by a trucker perform sexual favors? Dealing with the death of a darkly hilarious, chain-smoking mother? 
Maybe I lead an exceptionally boring life, but none of that stuff sounds the slightest bit mundane to me.
And yet, I see where that particular bit of praise originates from. The events in Sedaris’ books are themselves quite fantastical and off the wall. But his delivery is so deadpan that the reader is, in effect, duped into thinking of them as mundane, everyday occurrences, viewed through a particularly sharp and witty lens. And maybe it’s just me, but that lens is so sharp that it results in books that make me laugh out loud. That’s pretty rare.
Sedaris’ latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames ($26, Little, Brown and Company) follows the same basic formula as his past collections: Several essays of varying weight that self-deprecatingly chronicle his life and the people around him, spanning his entire lifetime. It’s a great read, and a quick one, especially if you skip the bits you might have already read (the story about his being on a plane seated next to a Polish man who wouldn’t stop crying ran in The New Yorker earlier this year) or heard (the bit about the Stadium Pal and shopping with his sister Amy were included on a recording of him reading at Carnegie Hall several years ago). Read the rest of this entry »
It’s difficult to make a serial killer boring, but Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi managed to do just that in their new book, “The Monster of Florence.”
The book purports to be a nonfiction narrative detailing at least a dozen unsolved killings in Italy over the past few decades.
Note my use of the word purported, because it’s difficult to tell just how truthful this book is, particularly in our “lie-as-memoir” times.
For example, Preston constantly uses dialogue, in quote marks, from more than two decades ago. He wasn’t there. Spezi, an Italian journalist, was sometimes there, but it’s unlikely he has exact recreations of dialogue from back then. And when you read the overly dramatic quotes, it makes them even more suspect.
Back to the serial killer. It seems that such a Monster would dominate the book, yet the authors dispense with his crimes before the book is even half-finished. At that point, they concentrate more on their roles in the search for the Monster.
Pardon me for saying so, but I’d much rather know more about the crimes — their retelling reads more like a novel instead of a factual account — than whatever trouble the authors encountered during their investigation.
The book originally started as a magazine article, but was then expanded. At times, this makes some of it seem like filler. Preston, for example, uses an entire paragraph to describe the menu at a dinner.
Oh, and one more quibble: there are more than two dozen references to smoking in the book, as if Preston thinks describing such a scene builds a noirish ambience that his prose simply can’t create. Once noticed, those moments become especially annoying.
Within about twelve hours last week, I had seen the latest Pixar masterpiece Wall E as well as read the bulk of Jeanette Winterson’s newest tome, The Stone Gods (Harcourt, $24).
That’s a lot of heavy, bleak post-apocalyptic themes to process on a lazy Sunday. I was a bit surprised how similar the animated tale’s vision of the future is to Winterson’s, though maybe I shouldn’t have been; both stories concern themselves with some pretty typical sci-fi themes: isolation, loneliness, over-consumption, a dying/dead planet, space travel, robots. And both, of course, are about love.
I’ve been a big Winterson fan for a while, so I was looking forward to digging into her latest book. And sure enough, it’s every bit as Wintersonian as I could have expected — visceral, descriptive, nearly poetic narration; crackling banter; stream-of-consciousness observations on the nature of existential things; one story told in many different stories. And so on.
So why did I get to the end and feel disappointed by the whole thing?
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