lyzadanger's reviews from LibraryThing

Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:25:22 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " Ambrose, like many biographers before him, is a man enamored of his subject. To him, Meriwether Lewis is the paramount, curious, bootstrapped Renaissance man of the early 19th century; this bosom buddy of Thomas Jefferson is the bold Yin to William Clark's relevant but slightly duller Yang. His biographic sweep of Lewis primarily concerns the exhilarating rawness of the journey of the Corps of Discovery during 1804-1806, but it is at its core a story about the man, not merely the events for which he is yet championed. At its core, this is not a new story. As a child of the Pacific Northwest—I in fact grew up within walking distance of the explorers' eponymous college—I'm steeped in this history, which around here almost has a mythic ring to it. I've read the journals (Penguin Classics; ed. Frank Bergon) and the crib-like compressed edition, The Essential Lewis and Clark (ed. Landon Y. Jones). Our close family friend cum former history professor wrote a book on the lasting cultural impact of the duo and the passing of the 200 year mark since they put their white feet on Northwest soil. Without being able to re-invent history, what Ambrose does here is two-fold. One, though the account he gives is necessarily in line with what's in the journals, he gives a modern-edited rollicking flick to the narrative, lending it a momentum that landed the book at the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Two, he bookends the story with early- and (tragic) late-life vignettes of his hero, aiming to round out what we know about Lewis, thus stretching the story of his life larger than solely the adventurer's journey. Ambrose takes time to introduce us to young Lewis, his firebrand mother, his rustic rearing, his capacity for and interest in intellectual self-improvement. We get to watch him establish himself with Jefferson and make Smart Youthful Choices that put him in line to lead the long-shot expedition to the Pacific coast. It's the later-life pieces that still feel fragmentary. Lewis, robust and stalwart on the expedition, makes a sudden turn for the melancholy and incompetent. His post as governor of the Louisiana Territory goes sloppy from the get-go, as Lewis falls into debt, likely into heavy opiate and alcohol abuse, and what seems to our modern eyes like some deep mental health grief. We don't have the luxury of understanding exactly how this happened. Lewis is mum on the situation for the most part—one of the symptoms of his decline is that he stops writing people back, or writing at all. Ambrose puts together the pieces where he can, he looks for hints in fragmentary documentation, but the chips are stacked against him: There just isn't much existing material to dig through. Colleagues comment on Lewis' "madness"; government officials refuse to back his spending; he is heaped in shame—this we know. But the end story is far less fleshed out than the early story, and leaves us with a shroud of mystery that is likely eternal. That Ambrose paints Lewis' portrait with an occasionally starry-eyed luster is not surprising. It's almost as if he's a tiny bit in love with Lewis. One can feel Ambrose's sadness as Lewis' behavior becomes more erratic, his confusion and shock at Lewis' eventual awful suicide. Through the bracing days of the expedition, Ambrose's admiration is palpable—here is a biographer who maintains a steady commitment to the man he has brought to life."
Simon & Schuster (1997), Edition: 1st, Paperback, 521 pages

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:20:56 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Crockford, the irreverent guru, takes us on a whirlwind tour de force through the parts of JavaScript that matter. Condensed and pithy, this is a must-read guidebook for even seasoned web devs. Finally. I understand closures. Finally."
Yahoo Press (2008), Edition: 1, Paperback, 176 pages

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:14:06 -0500

lyzadanger's review: " I read Nabokov's fourth novel this past weekend (and quite quickly—it's a novella) and the connective tissue bonding his Russian works is starting to become manifest. In Mary we were introduced to the Russian emigré crowd; in King, Queen, Knave: grotesque love and the faulty sense of self-worth; in The Luzhin Defense the obsessive swapping of reality with dream-state. The Eye pulls in pieces of all these themes and toys around with a few more, not the least of which is the nature of our existence and a personality as refractive of the perceptions of those around it. That is, can we ever know ourselves—can we ever exist?—as, really, all we are all, as Luzhin contemplates in The Defense: "...as in two mirrors reflecting a candle...only a vista of converging lights..." Luzhin here, too, realizes to some degree that we may all just be the incomplete sum of all of our own reflections off of others' beliefs of us. Oh, there is also a story here, nominally a metaphysical detective plot. Heady stuff for a mere 100 pages. I'm starting to doubt I exist. In The Eye we continue our acquaintance with the generally jovial, mostly borgeois and slightly boorish collection of Russian emigrés. We feel how Nabokov was once part of this motley culture, at once an echo of the Motherland and an aspiring intelligentsia with (sometimes silly) cosmopolitan goals. We first get introduced to this community in Mary. Its importance was less central in King, Queen, Knave (a more German feel) and The Luzhin Defense (slightly more Russian). But it's back perforce in The Eye and will continue on into his next novel chronologically: Glory (at least, based on what I've read of the back flap). Our narrator is a peevish young man in Berlin, a recent Russian immigrant who is serving as the tutor to some snotnosed young boys. He hates it. Despite the lack of anything morally substantial in his life, he seems a preening, over-confident dandy. He takes up with a slightly sloppy mistress, whose husband wises to the liaison and gives the protagonist a summary beating—in front of his pupils. Mortified, he shoots himself. Now ostensibly dead, he spends the following three-quarters of the story living a dream-like extension of the same life. He becomes obsessed with the identity of a young man named Smurov. We're told that Smurov is a fair, wonderful, temperature man who is impeccably well-spoken and generally sensitive. Almost immediately, Smurov's actions belie this and we're left with the duty of deciding what is really happening, or what it means for something to really happen, or, anyway, to peel through the conceit of the narrator's own life and identity. In the narrator's opinion, Smurov only exists as others see him to exist, through their own keyhole perspective into his existence. Each person has their own Smurov-image: pompous fool, liar, latent homosexual, weird, would-be suitor. The narrator explains: We think of ourselves as a knowable collection of things, but, really, we're unbounded, there is no snapshot of knowing that anyone can bundle up. We're all fragmentary refractions of others' glimpses of us (or even unglimpsed shards we will never know about?), unknowable, reduced to the anecdotes and opinions of our observers, which disperse like steam after our corporeal existence ends. As the narrator unfolds Smurov from different angles, he wrangles with other human conditions, stumbling through the agony and ecstasy of unrequited love along the way. We don't care, alas, because his character is so repellant as to make him laughable, not pitiable. Or is it just that we think we understand the narrator's smug shallowness because we've seen 100 pages of its description? Maybe the reader, just like any of the individual watchers of Smurov (or the watcher of the watchers of Smurov) think we know the entirety of him, but merely know one fragment in time, from one specific perch."
Vintage (1990), Paperback, 128 pages

The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:36:29 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Unlovable, flabby Luzhin has lost his mind, unfortunately right in the middle of a paramount chess match against another reigning international champion. Leaving the game at a cliffhanger, the forename-less Russian prodigy waddles off into the Berlin night, where he will ultimately collapse on a curb in an emotional fugue and, for some time, cease to exist. Following this, imprisoned in the banalities of pleasantries, doilies and dinner parties, Luzhin for some time occupies an infantile dream state, cared for by his equally nameless wife (she doesn't even get a surname until she share his, post wedding)...until the momentum of Luzhin's original impetus—chess, chess, chess—comes pounding back at him in a furious tyrannical inevitability, and all is lost. Nabokov's third novel, a Russian-German mash of European humanity between the wars, is a heavy tale of fate and obsession. Here Nabokov sheds most of the charming, naive elements of his earlier books, instead giving glimpses of the headstrong and flawlessly self-confident literary powerhouse that he would continue to display for the next half century. The novel's cornerstone is one of Nabokov's hallmark character themes: the social outcast. Where the novelist's genius blazes is in his unflinching ability to flaunt the grievous shortcomings and depravities of his protagonists, whether lecherous Humbert Humbert in Lolita or possibly sociopathic Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire). And yet, as the reader, you grind your teeth and wonder why you don't hate these people. But you don't, exactly. Only Dostoevsky leaps to mind as someone with comparable facility to make the anti-hero into, if not the hero, the acceptable protagonist. We start in Luzhin's childhood. Luzhin, poor Luzhin, who only warrants a surname, as he isn't so much an extant child as an extension of his literary father, a container of vague aspirations for those around him. He slouches, he avoids contact. He's not good in school or with people. As we watch Luzhin remain, mostly, an uncompelling null, Nabokov takes some time to throw literary daggers at those assholes we all had to deal with in our adolescent school years, those ruddy youngsters who never seem to be beset by angst or awkwardness, who assign nonsensical, retroactive depth to schoolyard friendships and look back on the regimented, conformist years in bleak classrooms with a wistful smile. Those idiots. We identify, ever so briefly, with Luzhin here. But it's difficult to gain footing with Luzhin. He is a tight shell within a tight shell of a novel, and I lost some fingernails trying to prise into his psyche. He sulks until one day he discovers chess, which he learns in secret from his father (a friendly, philandering and vapid writer whom Luzhin thoroughly rejects by the age of ten), building up a world-class skill and single-mindedness in the game that launch him into the international spotlight. Time meanders on, we imagine, but we don't see Luzhin again until he's 40; his father has died; an unmoved Luzhin is puttering around a spa hotel in Germany, re-living teenage chess tournament highlights, preparing for a significant showdown with the Italian master, Turati, in Berlin. It is here that he meets the young, graceful girl who, perplexingly, falls for him and marries him against the wishes of her dull, Russian emigré parents. By this time, Luzhin has suffered his mental collapse. He swears off chess. But it's a mere, futile pause—the shadow of the 8-squared grid, the strategic metaphors of the game keep leaking into his life. Elaborate constructs, in particular his failed defensive strategy with Turati, swap out of abstract existence and become, to Luzhin, concrete inevitabilities. Consummately selfish, diabolical Valentinov—erstwhile chaperone/"chess father" to Luzhin's teenage European chess career—reappears, now Luzhin's arch-nemesis. There is no hope here, see, except to make a move so bold as to break the fated game's outcome, once and for all."
Vintage (1990), Paperback, 272 pages

C by Tom McCarthy

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 01:02:30 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " This book is too good for me and I think I'm okay with that. I'm going through a phase of admitting, even flaunting personal weakness, such that I can, with any luck, recognize patterns of things in myself that aren't lame. To that effect, yeah, Tom McCarthy is probably a little bit more smarty pants than I am capable of internalizing, at least in terms of post-modernist literature that reads like a light delirium. Still, it's bound to make a person huffy at times, when they feel nose-thumbed at. I can at least use the excuse that I've never read Joyce's Ulysses (many reviewers hold it up as a comparison point), that maybe I'm missing some vital key to the code because of that particular reading list omission. But that's not going to cut it because I've read a lot of Nabokov, in particular "Ada" (also cited in multiple reviews), and there are striking tonal similarities. Like Nabokov in "Ada", McCarthy builds in weird incestual innuendo and obscure technology. You can spend some time searching for echoes of the book's eponymous letter, C, to the point of missing the point*. Is the letter C the entire shooting match or a blasted red herring? And how far should we take C, beyond cocaine, caul, Cairo, Carrefax... What about the sibilant variant that the Latin letter can represent? Sssss... Sister (both Serge's Sister Sophie and as a slang term for heroin), signal, silk, scarab. Or taking it further, the harder, Germanic sounds--K--while Serge is on the continent fighting/watching/getting turned on by WWI. Klodebrady, the eastern European farcical spa town where a teen Serge goes to see a quack doctor about a sort of fecal blockage (the dislodging of which seems to also send Europe off into its nationalistic-frenzy fighting). "Kennscht mi noch?"--"Do you recognize me now?"--taunts American GIs from the bottom of a Luftwaffe plane. Serge spends his life trying to channel or untangle some of these hidden meanings and signals. Or maybe he's just a channel himself, emotionally mute, something not alive unless current is running through it on its way somewhere else. He's hopeless, spineless, oddly disassociated: his slightly disappointment at the Armistice devolves into debauched opiate abuse in rowdy, vapid London. Eventually he decamps to Egypt to help site radio towers, rattling around in the shards of a dying empire (the nation has just gained its independence). He never really finds what he's looking for. It's likely he wasn't looking for anything. I don't exactly know what happened. Nothing happened. * Wait, what's the point?"
Knopf (2010), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 320 pages

Blood Harvest by S. J. Bolton

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:34:55 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "You know what the best thing about this book is? The editors and publishers left it alone. Instead of a neutered, American English variant (ahem, Harry Potter, ugh), the bucolic Britishness of Blood Harvest's weird (fictional) town of Heptonclough, Lancashire, has been left intact, and it is that very slight cultural shift that makes S.J. Bolton's novel stand out in a crowded genre of quasi-paranormal suspense stories. Pair that with the near-brilliant portrayal of young, Geordie vicar Harry Laycock and you've got a combination that is just skewed enough to make the compelling-but-not-earthshattering plot feel memorable. Laycock is a man of the cloth, but he's a modern one: He pines after smarty-pants psychiatrist Evi Oliver, whose own character is appealingly flawed. Oliver can only walk with a cane and suffers chronic nerve pain that pushes her nearly to madness at times. Heptonclough's assortment of inbreds and recluses is reminiscent of the town in Simon Pegg's movie "Hot Fuzz." There's something endearingly dark and twisted about certain British farm towns. Bolton maximizes on that. Her story involves the mysterious disappearances of a suspiciously high number of very small girls from Heptonclough. A grieving young mother of one of these children seems a bit too aggrieved; the town's oligarchy seems a bit too powerful and hush-hush; the local seasonal traditions uncomfortably pagan and violent. Oh, and the family at the center of this just built a large, slightly offensive house in the middle of the town's medieval graveyard. Yeah. Romping and gripping for most of its course, Bolton's novel suffers from a couple of plot turns that stretch one's credulity and an absolutely dreadful ending. Does this mean this will be a series? I admit, I'd read more."
Minotaur Books (2010), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 432 pages

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 02:32:06 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " A totally consumable rampage through millennia of cryptographic techniques, nicely synthesized with historical vignettes and biographies of interesting folks. Especially compelling for the layperson is the linguistic/logical puzzle of secret writing before about WWI, when codebreaking coups involved graspable, but brilliant breakthroughs. The same technology that revolutionized life in the early 20th century also changed cryptography forever: now the problems have more of a mathematical (theory) and engineering (implementation) bent, though the true game-changers are still concepts that anyone can understand (and Singh almost flawlessly explains). The only downside here is not the fault of the book--it was published in 1999 and is feeling dated. I found myself skimming the last 1/3 or so of the book, which focuses on computer encryption, concerned that I'd confuse myself (I'm a Web developer by trade) with respect to the encryption technologies I use now. I would pay Singh cold hard cash to release an updated version of this sui generis survey of this fascinating subject. I'd love to keep reading the story from where he left off."
Anchor (2000), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 432 pages

American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields by Rowan Jacobsen

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:59:18 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Preacher, meet choir. I live in Portland, Ore., self-congratulatory hub of social Epicureanism. I am a former owner of urban chickens (1-2 eggs per day, yard-to-plate), married to a fermentation hobbyist; our friends buy meat not by the pound but by the animal, taking delivery on a quarter of a local cow here or half of a pig there. In yonder hill, dale, copse and valley are vines, berries, porcinis and salad greens, respectively, smugly delivered in weekly CSA boxes to rain-dampened porches. Farmers markets are de rigeur. It is not the done thing to buy one's produce at Safeway. In the building where I work is Oregon's first USDA-approved meat curing facility, where my husband's climbing buddy concocts brilliant salumi from possibly magical European recipes. I am already--do not misread this term--what Rowan Jacobsen calls a "terroirist". Jacobsen's "American Terroir" is a book that extols the concept of terroir, the specific complexities of edibles produced in a very specific place. Historically the term has been associated with winemaking, but Jacobsen urges Americans to wrest it from the hoity-toity grasp of wine snobs. It applies, he argues, vastly beyond vines and winemaking. Part travelogue, part wine journal, part economic-environmental manifesto, "American Terroir" delivers vignettes, little episodes in Jacobsen's vision of North American terroirism. Each chapter is an essay about a product--cheese, wine, maple syrup, oysters--profoundly influenced by its immediate environment. The gritty, salt-of-the-earth farmers and artisans who are portrayed here are the inverse of generalists. Focused and quirky, they are devoted to the specificities of their product: breathing, sleeping and working in tune with the land and its moods. It is, romantically, quite appealing. These men and women toil within a larger framework of markets and consumerism. Jacobsen shows us the vagaries of coffee and chocolate prices, the difficulties of establishing profitable cheesemaking facilities in Vermont. Predictably, living-wage co-ops and yeoman farmers are consistently the good guys, multi-nationals that pump out the bland, homogenous--albeit affordable--drek are the bad guys. In claiming that respect for land and locale, nuanced farming techniques, passion and responsible business practices are Good Ideas, Jacobsen isn't doing anything new. Where American Terroir shines is in Jacobsen's real talent for nearly erotic sensory description and journalistic travel writing. He's at his best when he gets so excited about the chaos of flavors in a particular Puget Sound oyster that he puts the anti-Walmart dogma stick down for a bit. Then it gets, frankly, interesting. I learned something. Several things. About how apples become redder the more they sunbathe, about the evolution of flavors during the maple syrup season in New England. Jacobsen peppers his food porn with facts and anecdotes that at times make the book hard to put down."
Bloomsbury USA (2010), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 288 pages

Great House: A Novel by Nicole Krauss

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:38:44 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Squirreled around the bedside and my library desk, scraps of paper--some crumpled upon subsequent realization of their inaccuracies--are covered with lines and arrows, webs and dates, as I attempted to flowchart the real, temporal lives of the emotionally-related characters in Krauss' new novel, "Great House." Krauss gives her psychological all here, with characters so resonating with loneliness, misery and guilt that reading it almost hurts the reader back. It leaves one with a residual psychical hangover not unlike that groggy confusion after waking from a lossful dream. She leaves it to you--a compelling task, if you are caught up in the aura of the book--to search for clues, to unwind the complexity of the ways these sad lives touch each other: reality is your job, meaning is hers. At the center of Krauss' dreamy network of multi-generational yearning is an desk, a heavy and many-drawered behemoth that characters pursue, sometimes for a lifetime, striving for a piece of representational furniture that, for more than one of them, brings with it destruction, death. We first hear of the desk in reference to a romantic and slightly mythical Chilean writer who falls fatally afoul of the Pinochet regime. Well, not exactly, chronologically, first according to my notes and arrows. But I'll leave it as a repeat exercise for future readers to uncoil this chain. It's a fun knot to untie. Also in the peripheral running for the desk is an obsessed Israeli antique furniture dealer (that he lost his parents and their belongings to Nazi horror is continually relevant). His reclusive and sexually-charged son and daughter--someone said "Nabokov" in reference to this book, and in these housebound, profligate, slightly incestual waifs it seems most evident--gain the obsession of (young) female literary person Izzy. Also in the mix is the slightly overlapping (older) female literary person Nadia and (yet older, and more interesting) female literary person Lotte Berg, her adorable (if typical) doddering old British husband; further afield, a wistful and senescing father, his successful but damaged aloof son: they don't touch the desk, but drawing indirect connections between them and its impact can be engrossing. Kruass gives us this desk, and the direct implication that it is carries heavy meaning. She also gives us her shattered characters and their gaping souls. Though the vignettes of humanity-dense interactions between her characters are vivid and, on occasion, cathartic, we never know this desk well except for the dent it leaves. It goes as far as to make some of the characters outwardly, presciently nervous: "This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers." Despite the human foibles the desk elicits, and the dark destruction it metaphorically wreaks, it is, still, furniture. We're given the literary instruction to envision it as laden with symbolism, as dense enough to serve as a point of orbit for the disparate experiences of her characters. Made of earthly, wooden stuff, though, it seems at times too blatant, too extant, too physical to carry out its existential task. The core of the novel carries with it an ethereal, spiritual sense of connection, grief, love that seems too light, fleeting and internal for something so blunt and, well, real, to carry."
W. W. Norton & Company (2010), Hardcover, 289 pages

The Plague by Albert Camus

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:36:40 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " Having gulped "The Stranger" in a single, weird sitting, I was well-disposed toward the idea of reading "The Plague", more so even because many people I hold in high esteem in turn hold this philosophical allegory in high esteem. It started out wrenching enough, with creepy prognostications foreshadowing a grim fate for the dull denizens of the dull town of Oran on the Algerian coast. Plot counterbalanced reflection comfortably in the first half of the book. As the narrative advanced, however, it turned in on itself more and more, until it became barely a narrative at all, and more of a slightly didactic fable about the meaning of freedom and death. The Good Doctor Rieux toils against the immensity of Plague as bio-threat, but also against Plague as oppression, forced occupation, prison guard, persecution. Some citizens blandly accept the isolating quarantine of the town; some are agitated. Many avoid hope in fear of what it will feel like and how it will be disappointed. Bodies are thrown into lime-lined pits as the death rate outpaces the possibility of real funerals, coffins. An assortment of characters--all exceedingly male and French--perform as archetypes: shady Cottard who, once suicidal, thrives under plague conditions; sweet-hearted Tarrou who refuses to give in to even overwhelming iniquity; Father Paneloux, dead set that God has a handle on everything. Unfortunately, I am a blockhead. Especially when it comes to philosophy and abstract explorations of the human experience. I found myself disengaged, and finishing the book was a struggle. It did, however, ring out on a much more optimistic note than I would have expected."
Vintage (1991), Paperback, 320 pages

Adam & Eve: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:10:39 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " Lucy Bergmann has a problem. Her astrophysicist husband has just been killed, crushed to death by a grand piano while walking around in Amsterdam. His Wile E Coyote-inspired exit leaves Lucy in possession of of his just-clinched proof of extraterrestrial life (as evidenced by pulsing red dots in a computer program, apparently) on a flash drive (no backups, but of course). Lucy adopts the weird obsession of wearing this 'memory stick' like a talismanic necklace. Ah. And this is just the first chapter. Then, in whirlwind jags, we're suddenly in Egypt, and Lucy is in the thick of some sort of intrigue that involves a purported ancient manuscript which brings into dispute the authorship of the Book of Genesis. The codex is sealed inside of a French horn case, and Lucy, who can of course pilot aircraft, is roped in to smuggle the thing to France; then there's something about the caves at Lascaux and--wait, what? Lucy is now crashing in flames into a Mesopotamian paradise where she gallivants around naked for several months with an insane man named, sigh, Adam. The book is a mishmash farce of a thriller, replete with cringe-inducing, quasi-religious meditations and incredible coincidences. Naslund, whose 'Ahab's Wife' is not only tolerable but is often held up as a rather good book, here blithely stumbles into a theological minefield and staggers around in it with all the grace of a newspaper tabloid. Meanwhile, the plot fragments bombard the reader like broken glass. Naslund's distracted paragraphs carom off of the halfhearted plot arcs and scatter away, never to resolve themselves. Where did the lurking 'brown man' in the turban, with 'eyes...as dark as dates, but menacing' from chapter five go? Don't know, don't care. The only partial respite from the onslaught is the slightly languorous middle part of the book, where Lucy is discovering a slightly magical Eden with Adam. Problem is, Naslund's stylized neo-Adam isn't cute crazy, he's just crazy crazy. Creepy, loose-cannon crazy. Lucy, who--get this--is nominally an art therapist in a mental institution, sort of seems to forget about this after a while. By the end of the story I think we're supposed to think he's just a bit eccentric. Naslund tries to cram cliched theme after hackneyed symbolism into the space of one novel, as if she's worried she'll never get another chance to write again. As such, everything is treated with the barest of attention before we're barreling on again to something else trite. Men's dominance over and violence toward women. The dangers of rigid literalism in religion. Imperialism. Fidelity and widowhood. Cave art as transcendent expression. The evils of endless war. It's exhausting. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the hastily pasted-in bit about the international religious conspiracy. And all of this happens in a near future that Naslund utterly fails to take creative advantage of: Flash drives are slightly smaller and the wars in the Middle East are still burning brightly; that's about it. It's not even laughably bad. In fact, it's not entertaining at all, save for a brief moment of hope here and there. It has all the hallmarks of a really bad book without being enjoyably bad. Problem is, Naslund can actually turn a nice phrase. And does. Which makes the ham-fisted, inattentive plotting just that much more jarring."
William Morrow (2010), Hardcover, 352 pages

The Rebellion of Jane Clarke: A Novel by Sally Gunning

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:19:42 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " In this quiet and personal historical coming of age tale, Sally Gunning shows us New England on the brink of revolution through the eyes of a young and slightly rebellious woman. Protagonist Jane Clarke's domestic issues of justice and truth mirror those making a loud entrance onto the international stage. Jane, a teenager bred of the bubbling-brook, sea-breeze, sedge-and-sand Massachusetts village of Sawtucket, has a sudden epiphany that her approved betrothed, Phinnie Paine, is not her soulmate. Rejecting his offer of marriage sends Jane's father into a sputtering rage--Jane is dispatched to mind a crotchety and elderly aunt in Boston, and endures this and the silent treatment from Dad as punishment for her eponymous Rebellion. Once in the Big City, Jane has all sorts of learning moments and daily encounters with an increasingly incredible number of Real-Life Patriots (John Adams, Henry Knox, et cetera), and unsurprisingly stumbles into witnessing the Boston Massacre. Granted, the Boston population in the early 1770s was not immense, making such coincidences possible if not plausible. Though the shocking double-cross Jane suffers about two-thirds through the story is a bit hard to swallow, and Jane's placid femininity borders on the milquetoast at times, there is something to be nice to be had in the details: the informal realities of coupling and marriage; the specifics of domestic routine; the brow-beating and seemingly unlovable father figure. The book feels as if it is told in a hushed tone, and we never exactly see Jane's face in full. Instead, we see her sidelit profile as she is dazzled by the immensity of the impending American Revolution."
William Morrow (2010), Hardcover, 288 pages

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:07:01 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "I'll be blunt. I didn't want to read this book at all. My book club occasionally picks YA titles, and I have been universally underwhelmed. A lot of this is because I am a hopeless and snobbish curmudgeon, with special wariness around exceedingly popular books, but there you go. I was prepared to hate everything about The Hunger Games. Except. This is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. The female protagonist, Katniss, is exquisite. She's bad-ass, but not in the roll-your-eyes way. Collins doesn't waste paper extolling how gorgeous she is, or how noble. She just gives us humanity in the first person. I am a sucker for the post-apocalyptic genre (heck, I read Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' in a single sitting), so that part was not so hard to learn to love. The 'Running Man'-like fight-to-the-death societal nightmare that is the central focus of the story plays out in a breathless adrenaline rush; most of the middle of the book is so taught with psychological suspense that it is nearly impossible to stop reading it. Plot eventualities usually visible a mile off in YA fiction are here kept beautifully ever-changing and twisting through the entire story. Up until the very last gasps, we still don't necessarily know who the good guys are. The book's sole weakness is in its self-awareness that it is part of a trilogy. Ends are not sewn up neatly, but, hey, the ruse is working--I sure as hell will read the next installment."
Scholastic Press (2008), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 384 pages

The Piano Teacher: A Novel by Janice Y. K. Lee

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:20:59 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " I don't think I was supposed to think this book was great, but as a slightly elevated beach or travel read, it was superb. Sultry Hong Kong, the benighted English, the idyll before WWII, the shock after it; betrayals, abused servants, open-air markets, sweating, affairs--what fantastic intrigue! Of course, some of the characters are banal (Claire...oh, Claire...ye heroine/protagonist/sort of...you are so boring), some are implausibly edgy (aherm, Trudy, I'm talking about you here), but golly, what a barnstormer. Had a few late nights at the beach house (or whatever) with this one; proverbially couldn't put it down."
Penguin (Non-Classics) (2009), Paperback, 352 pages

Work Song by Ivan Doig

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:18:23 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "The third in a series of novels following the adventures and misadventures of Morrie Morris, Ivan Doig's newest yarn maintains his hallmark breezy, historically-rich Western style, even if the payoff isn't terribly memorable. Morris stumbles into Butte, Montana, in its post-WWI heyday, trying to escape the shadows of his past. He lodges in a boarding house run by the smart-talking, tough, and handsome widow Grace Faraday. Her perspective, like those of nearly all of Butte's residents, is framed by a singular, larger-than-life corporate hydra: the Anaconda Company, which spearheaded the mining operations on the 'world's richest hill' of copper. The mining men and miner's wives, the cafes and mouthpiece newspaper--it's like the town of Butte exists as a support network for the the juggernaut mining company. Morris' first employment attempt in Butte results in a farcical stint working for a local mortuary. This translates into surreal whisky-fueled all-nighters at wakes in the Irish part of town and provides Doig a good opportunity to introduce us to some foreshadowing in the shapes of several hardened but goodhearted union organizers. The whole funerary thing mercifully over, Morris moves on to a more plausible employment: at the library, under the blazing eye of Sam Sandison, who is, according to some local residents, possibly the devil. Cue some blasts from the past. This is, recall, the third book in a series. There's the chipper former student who provides spunk and, well, that's about it, though she is conveniently married to the (darkening clouds of uh-oh!) head union agitator. There's also Morris' inability to escape his weird, gambling fraud past--they always seem to find him, even if this is the 1910s in rural Montana. But never mind that. That feels like necessary housekeeping. What's fun are the new ideas and people. 'Work Song' feels comfortable in its own skin. Doig is inventive (but not too inventive), his characters quirky (but not exasperatingly quirky). Combine Doig's training as a historian and his command of the anecdotal, and it can be occasionally uncanny just how lolling and self-confident the narrative can be. Sometimes the story wanders too far into a mineshaft, sometimes it holds a singular note about workers' rights just a bit too long. Sometimes Doig's earnest attention to tying into the previous novels wears thin. Where Doig shines in 'Work Song' is in illuminating new ideas and folks: the real-life empire of the Anaconda mining company, the mercurial eruptions of Sam Sandison, a wiggly youth they call Russian Famine, a quick look into early 20th-century slang. It almost seems like he needs to set himself free of the shackles of a continuing series, and give us what he does best: gorgeous glimpses into the landscapes and humanity of the American West."
Riverhead Hardcover (2010), Hardcover, 288 pages

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel by David Mitchell

Mon, 03 May 2010 23:57:00 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, author David Mitchell seems like he's telling us a secret. A long secret. A long, human secret about a secret land in a time shrouded by history and isolation. His latest novel leaves behind the clever tricks of structure of his earlier works in favor of a purer, undistracted treatise on the human condition, nestled into a very unique historical setting. At the dawn of the 19th century, a group of ragtag, conniving Dutchmen working for the East India Company make up the only westerners that can even steal glimpses of the forbidden Japanese Empire. From a tiny, walled island called Dejima outside of Nagasaki, the handful of Europeans trade and cheat, maximizing profits from copper, camphor and other Japanese goods while occasionally inadvertently enriching the East India Company as well. Jacob de Zoet, a straight-laced, naive and hopelessly optimistic young clerk, arrives, charged with visions of making honest men out of the smugglers, clockwork clarity out of a mess of cooked books. This of course is an immediate recipe for farce; de Zoet is about as popular as a fart. What he does accomplish, almost immediately, is falling for Orito Abigawa, the winsome (if facially scarred) daughter of a local gentleman. Orito is graceful, elusive, and somewhat implausibly educated in the nascent medical arts. Her studies of early anatomical texts and medical tomes, guided in part by a riotous, crotchety doctor stationed at Dejima, serve as an excuse for her passable knowledge of Dutch. de Zoet and Orito can, at least, converse. Things start going (predictably) badly. de Zoet makes inevitable enemies, Orito disappears. An earthquake. The East India Company men while away the non-trading season ominously, drunkenly, hurling various abuses at their motley group of slaves. The shogun starts clamping down on trading and tributes. Interactions on Dejima, whiz-bang linguistic mashups of formal Japanese from inflexible state translators; rough-and-tumble, sea-salted Dutch vernacular; Indonesian pidgins;—these seem convoluted, yet they're so plausible that for a while we forget this is fiction. The man-made island reverberates with drama, feels like a stage set, even comes with a sketched, maplike overview nominally penned by de Zoet himself. On Dejima, there is a slight surreal quality to the tininess of the space, the prison-like existence. But the story is solid and present, with none of Mitchell's hallmark, Murakami-evoking magical twists. The Thousand Autumns is not as dreamy-sweet as his novel Black Swan Green but does have its woozy moments. And then there is the dark mountaintop fortress-abbey where ninjas lurk on crags, a supernatural cat wanders around, and some Very Bad Things are going on. It's there that things start getting peculiar. Mitchell's past creativity with structure, like the nested, folded-in-on-itself triumph, Cloud Atlas, has left him open to accusations that he avoids serious writing by using the literary equivalent of smoke and mirrors. Lest you think that Mitchell is hiding behind novelty, The Thousand Autumns is stripped clean; it is a novel so true to form that it evokes a certain 19th-century nostalgia. Maybe we are reading Tolstoy. That is how it seems sometimes, with its straightforward, non-fidgety energy. Sometimes this energy wanes just a notch. The novel doesn't gallop; it has self confidence and doesn't cut its scenes short. Think of it as the director's cut, with specific pride around the dialogue's subtleties. But neither does it thrash or go frantic. It has a gentle texture that beckons the reader on, even if the pace isn't entirely on fire. There's the weirdness of the walled garden trading island of Nejima, the even deeper weirdness of the mountaintop abbey, the odd juxtaposition of Dutch and Japanese cultures. But all that is strictly irrelevant; the novel would stand on its own just for the nuanced relationship between de Zoet and Ogawa, de Zoet's rival for Orito's affection. Or the internal monologue of the gout-plagued. conflicted English captain who arrives to impose the distant English triumph over the Dutch. Or the wicked Abbot Enomoto's tireless machinations. This is Mitchell coming into his prime, still able to wield the weird, but comfortable enough in his milieu to start framing up some serious, timeless literature."
Random House (2010), Hardcover, 496 pages

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Vintage Departures) by David Grann

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:22:00 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "It's an addictive genre and it is hugely popular these days: adventure meets multidisciplinary pop-sci meets biography. The survey style of writing that's hard to resist and, when well executed, provides a page-turning synthesis of a given topic. Epitomized by Simon Winchester in his bestsellers Krakatoa and The Crack in the Edge of the World, the approachable, storytelling approach to nonfiction tends to lend itself well to journalists and generalists: here breadth works better than depth. The Lost City of Z tells of Percy Fawcett, Victorian explorer extraordinaire, Royal Geographic Society hotshot and generally immortal geographer of the Amazonian basin. Fawcett represented the last romantic gasps of the centuries-long quest to find something like the mythical golden city of El Dorado. His life's obsession to be the first to discover proof of an enlightened and materially affluent civilization in the unexplored jungle ended with his mysterious disappearance and the spawning of a new obsession, a shared obsession for all those who sought to uncover what happened to him during the following decades. It is these two twin obsessions—that of a Victorian egomaniac hellbent on an almost religious treasure hunt and that of the ill-fated expeditions in pursuit of his fate—that David Grann is concerned with in his account. Fawcett is portrayed as an inflexible, stubborn and constitutionally-fortunate leader. His curious ability to avoid the various plagues of the jungle left him unsympathetic to the misery of those less physically blessed. He made enemies easily, but he also had a talent to collect sworn devotees. He was just, simply, single-minded in his pursuit, swatting aside those who impeded him impatiently. Desperate to be the first to make the big-break discovery, he denigrated the successes of other explorers and scientists. I don't think I'd like the guy. Still, there's something about Fawcett that fascinates people. In 1925 he went into the jungle with his son and his son's friend, and they never came out again. Did they find Z, the code name Fawcett gave to the city he sought? Were they kidnapped by local tribes? Or did they simply die a typical, ignominious death? Many of the curious have died trying to find answers. This is the type of book I'd love to write. Well, except for the part where author David Grann drags himself through the Amazon wilderness for a long while. There's a lot of stomach ailments involved that I'd like to avoid. Call me a weakling (it's true, totally true) but I have to agree with James Murray, veteran of the Shackleton expedition who (haplessly) accompanies The Lost City of Z protagonist Percy Fawcett on a Bolivian mapping expedition in 1911: I'd rather hang out in the Antarctic, thanks. Grann describes, in detail, the insect situation, the malarial swoons, gangrene, the general rotting of humans in the damp environment. Toward the end of the book, the momentum dips a bit, and Grann's own, somewhat predictable personal journey into the heart of the Amazon wilderness doesn't differentiate itself much from, well, the typical journalist-gets-personally-obsessed-with-material-he-is-covering-and-learns-something-about-himself kind of stuff we see a lot of these days. There really is no denouement. Lots of fun, lots of adventure. By the way, I'd like to point out that my paragraph above about 'twin obsessions' was not stolen from the New York Times review of the book, which reads in part: 'Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells two stories: of the explorer chasing his mirage, and of the reporter chasing the explorer chasing his mirage — twin obsessions spun together like strands on a helix.' I looked up that review after I wrote the above. But, hey, maybe it means I got the 'right answer.'"
Vintage (2010), Edition: 1 Reprint, Paperback, 448 pages

The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel by Brady Udall

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:36:11 -0400

lyzadanger's review: " Brady Udall is trying to stay out of the way. His new novel is about a Fundamentalist paterfamilias with 28 kids and 4 wives, naively blundering into motley hijinx and hatching adolescent longings for the boss' wife, backing himself into a web of lies and an imminent family showdown that builds up for most of the book's nearly 600 pages. In a world with so many characters and so much potential for emotional damage, Udall steers the narrative ship by removing himself from the thread: the momentum of the whirling plot creates its own little galaxy and he remains predominantly hands-off with his three main narrators (Golden, the patriarch; Rusty, the uncharismatic and totally sympathetic, ignored kid; Trish, the youngest and most, frankly, dull of the wives). Of course, this is fiction, so beyond noting the naturalistic style of writing, claiming that Udall is not present is fallacious. But what he bends backwards to do, with eerie success, is the avoidance of even the literary equivalent of an subtle eyebrow raising: never once does the remotest sense of moral judgment leak into the book that isn't a product of a specific character's outlook. Thus, the jostlings of the 28 offspring and the drama of the competition between the four wives just unfolds, without much intrusive commentary. The parts of the story that draw one in, though, are the parts where Udall is present. The juxtaposition of the family's formation in Utah--the bulk of the action takes place in the 1970s, but has tentacles reaching back earlier--against the nearby atomic bomb tests is surreal and vivid, even if the ultimate outcome is a bit heavy-handed. There are some nice passages about grief and duty, and Udall keeps enough plotty curveballs zinging to keep things moving. The plight of Rusty, middling and forgotten child, is borderline heartrending in the chapters where Udall lets himself get involved. Here's a kid whose father barely knows his name, who is weird and lonely, starting to self-destruct at the age of 11. The other siblings, who get a rather distant treatment (then again, there are 27 of them, and giving them all a solid dose of humanity might be an impossibility), seem infuriatingly average and well-adjusted, even given their various infirmities. And then there's Golden, the hub of all of this, whose main characteristic is his lack of much personality and physical heft. He's left grappling with various crises that tend to come to a head at rather deus ex machina moments (perhaps purposeful in their divine intervention feel). It feels more like things are happening to Golden than anything, he doesn't seem like an active force as much as a passive one. 'How lovely to sit under the lowering sky, the dead grass whisking his ankles, with springtime coming on and a feeling in his heart of imminent disaster.' It is this sense of dread and a forthcoming battle that ties much of the book together. Raymond, a neighbor's insane ostrich, watches over the family trysts and tragedies. In dire straits, Golden fights the bird in an absurd desperation, not unlike Jacob wrestling the angel. Children die and radioactive fallout sears lives. Golden's construction business atrophies; his job site is a brothel, not the old folks' home he claims to his sundry wives and associates. It's an organic, glorious mess that has nowhere to go but woe. The climax is a wallop. Perhaps it had to happen this way: something massive had to give for there to be redemption for so many lives. The Lonely Polygamist is a long, sinuous trip through the valley of death and back again. With a (possibly) supernatural ostrich to boot."
W. W. Norton & Company (2010), Hardcover, 608 pages

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:42:33 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "If you can shake off the burdens of its serious themes—gender, sexism, totalitarian political regimes—The Left Hand of Darkness is actually an interesting story, one that, as Le Guin's own Introduction explains, pushes the envelope of the science fiction genre. The critics seemed pleased with Le Guin: the 1969 novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But does the story age well? Its treatment of feminism, as well as the thinly-veiled parallels between the planet Winter's fantasy politics and our own earthbound nations keep peg it squarely in its origins: the late 1960s. To get it out of the way: I think Ursula K. Le Guin is a outrageously talented writer. The book's introduction, which has a retrospective feel to it, is such a stellar breakdown of the meanings of science fiction and the onus of writers that I read parts of it out loud to my husband. The nuances of the planet Winter (Gethen in the indigenous language), its glacial, cold-sleet climate and its androgynous inhabitants, make me wish that Le Guin could do away with the interstellar stuff entirely and just tell the story, in her superior style, without distraction. On Winter, we follow Genly Ai, who is generally human and probably black, as he serves as an early emissary from the pan-galactic Ekumen, a loose and somewhat Utopian alliance of various planets and peoples. Ai comes to offer the beings of Winter an alliance with the Ekumen, which is portrayed as a harmonious, win-win situation (but remember: Ai is our narrator). Ai's job is to convince the slow-evolving Gethenians that the Ekumen is the way of the future. The Gethenians, meanwhile, are plodding on through their own existence. On one part of the planet is a rustic kingdom, with a doddering king; rough-hewn stone buildings and vast fireplaces. The other big political power is a quasi-Eastern-bloc nation with various ministries, 'voluntary farm' communities, and secret police forces. Worldwide the Gethenians are neither male nor female. They exhibit male or female characteristics only once a month, during a few-day long period of fertility called 'kemmer.' Thus each Gethenian is as likely to be a father as a mother, and the entire notion of gender is discarded, culturally. This sounds interesting, but the English language's lack of a neuter pronoun is detrimental—though perhaps this is Le Guin playing with us via her narrator. Ai, who comes from a human, sexually-differentiated background, refers to Gethenians as 'he' consistently, and tends to point out the characteristics that deviate from masculinity rather than the other way around. This is tricksy: it's difficult to tell if Le Guin is tweaking our own notions of character identity or if it is unintentional. Either way, I came out the other side of my adventure on Winter feeling like its inhabitants were all generally male. The book starts out on a leisurely pace, with some doldrums surrounding political intrigue (slight yawn), but gallops off at about half or two-thirds through into full-fledged adventure and page-turning stuff. Her rendition of a very cold planet, its wicked geography, and its phlegmatic populace is the most engrossing facet of this worthwhile novel; give it an extra half or full star if you are particularly keen on reading feminist literature."
Ace Trade (2000), Paperback, 320 pages

The Best American Science Writing 2009 by Natalie Angier

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:31:13 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Houghton Mifflin's annual 'Best American' series is getting far-flung. In 1915, the first Best American Short Stories anthology was published. These days, you can get a yearly dose of Best Comics, Best Crime Reporting, Best Medical Writing, Best Short Plays, et cetera. Last year I read The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 and was pleased. This year, I just finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2009. This is not to be confused with The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. What the difference actually is between the two (Science versus Science and Nature) is not clear to me. The Science collection I just finished included articles on biology and animal behavior, two topics I'd say slot firmly in the nature camp. But, all right, I'm not one to deny Houghton Mifflin its god-given right to publish a lot of things. As in all of the Best American books, this year's science compendium includes a couple dozen short pieces in the indicated genre. These collections make for quick reading; the diversity of the selections usually keeps things interesting, by dint of variety if nothing else. This book starts off deeply grim. It opens with a horrifying New Yorker article about a woman whose pathological, endless itching causes her to scratch right through her skull into her brain. You're not done being totally freaked out about that when you're hit with a follow-up sucker punch of oncology nurse/extreme anxiety/dental procedures, and then the coup de grace: a piece from The New York Times Magazine that not only postulates about fetuses experiencing extreme pain but reminds us that, just a couple of decades ago, emergency surgery on premature newborns was routinely executed without any anesthesia. The good news is, if you've made it this far, you have smoother sailing ahead. There's Jennifer Khan's brilliant article about the death of a 9/11 first responder that leaves a gorgeous ambivalence about relative truths and the meaning of heroism. Alex Kotlowitz's story about the treatment of violence in Chicago like a virus—quarantining it and soothing would-be assailants with palliative, panacea counseling from peers—is intriguing, and an offbeat piece from Wired about an eccentric, slightly misanthropic Polish entrepreneur obsessed with systematically remembering everything he learns is, well, offbeat. Be warned though, because you're about to get blindsided again. The penultimate chapter is an essay, again from an oncology nurse. 'My patient died looking like one of the flesh-eating zombies from 28 Weeks Later,' writes Theresa Brown, right after describing the causal traumatic scene in spurting, nightmarish detail. I made the mistake of reading this at night. I recommend against it. Like any anthology, this one has its ups and downs. It made for a quick read and a couple of ah-ha moments, but if you miss out on it, you won't be hopelessly left behind."
Ecco (2009), Paperback, 368 pages