I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book!

How To Build A Dinosaur

2009-07-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Extinction Doesn't Have To Be Forever
Jack Horner and James Gorman

The title and especially the subtitle of this book are somewhat, deliberately, misleading. Paleontologist Jack Horner was a consultant on the movie Jurassic Park, however, he is quick to point out that he does not propose, or have any idea how, to produce living examples of Tyrannosaurus Rex or the much touted Velociraptor. He wrote this book, with the help of New York Times science editor, James Gorman, to propose the idea of modifying the development of a chicken, to express the dinosaur like traits of a long tail, teeth and forelimbs with clawed fingers.

This book is written in the realm of science popularization. Like Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan, Horner chose to write a book explaining his idea to the general public. Why? Most popular science books are written about advances in science that are already accomplished. This one is a proposal for experiments that scientists do not yet know how to perform. By doing this he has made the reader a part of the process, the way science is really done. Here is a thought experiment that may or may not ever be tried in the laboratory.

What the book does is show how ideas are bandied about in scientific circles, how new experiments are proposed and argued for and against, how they are not necessarily ever given the chance to see the light of day. The work needed to produce this chickeasaurus would cost many millions of dollars.

There would be a lot that could be learned from the effort, according to Horner, about the development of embryos, which could be applied to medical science, possibly preventing birth defects in human children. Or possibly producing embryologically modified, designer ubermenschen. Producing a dangerous invasive species that would have to be fought and destroyed by the air force is an impossibility, however. Science fiction fans will have to live with the disappointment.

Horner says that the traits that he wants to produce, a tail, teeth and clawed forelimbs, are already present in the genes of the domestic chicken, which is a descendant of an upright walking dinosaur. Horner insists that birds ARE dinosaurs and not just their descendants. His proposal is to learn how to trigger, and to stop, certain traits that appear during the development of the chicken embryo, in order to make the tail, teeth and forelimbs appear in the hatched adult chicken. His would not be a genetically modified creature, just one that had been coached along the way to be more dinosaur like than bird like.

I rather like dinosaurs. The chapters in which he discusses the latest discoveries and theories in paleontology were, to me, the most intriguing of the book. Although I can see that there would be spin offs, like those from the Apollo space program, from his chickenasaurus proposal, I was have not really bought in to the idea. Maybe you will think differently. Horner says that he would like to be able to bring a chickenasaurus out on a leash, when giving a lecture. King Kong anyone?

Book Review Blog Carnival XXI

2009-07-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the twenty first Book Review Blog Carnival. This carnival is published every other Sunday on a different blog. You my submit a book review post from your own blog, for the next carnival here.

We have a wide selection of book reviews this week, starting with:

Fiction:

On his blog The Truth About Lies, Jim Murdoch reviews Australian writer Gerald Murnane's new novel, The Plains, a dense story about a filmmaker who spends years researching a film on the seemingly featureless Australian outback and its people. In place of the salt-of-the-earth sheep farmers one might expect to inhabit central Australia the narrator encounters an idealised world filled with aesthetics and intellectuals; wealthy landowners divided into factions idly speculating on metaphysics; I don't believe there's a sheep in the whole book.

Jim Murdoch also wrote a review of The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison. Jim says it's a story about love, but not a love story. Jim doesn't read love stories.

Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All has read the oldest book in this edition of the carnival, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, first published in 1764, a trailblazing work that practically makes itself its own parody .

Joy, writing in This Girl's Bookshelf compares the movie version of Chocolat the the book by Joanne Harris.

Nymeth reviewed Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai on her blog Things Mean A Lot. It is a coming of age story set in Sri Lanka.

Sandra read Doris Lessing's 1988 novel The Fifth Child for her blog Fresh Ink Books.

Sandra also reviewed Doris Lessings Ben In The World and Becoming Abagail by Nigerian writer Chris Abani. People who have time to read annoy me.

Science Fiction:

Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, says that she has changed her mind about Joan Slonczewsk"s Daugher of Elysium, which she now sees as a far less optimistic than she thought when she read it after it's debut in 1993. Children will do that to you.

Romance:

Guest blogger Zarabeth writes about Miranda’s Big Mistake by Jill Mansell on Love Romance Passion.

Normal Girl's Guide to Great Books reviews Summer Blowout by Claire Cook., a summer read by the Author of Must Love Dogs.

Mystieries:

KerrieS reviews a Norwegian mystery novel, The Redeemer. by Jo Nesbo, on her blog, Mysteries In Paradise. I guess the existence of Norwegian mystery novels should not be a surprise to me or to Garrison Keillor.

KerrieS also read and wrote a review of Peril and End House by Agatha Christie. Poirot's 6th novel, and his biggest challenge yet. Even the great Hercule Poirot can be swayed by sentiment.

KerrieS must be on vacation, because she had time to read and write a third review, of Shadow by Karin Alvtegen. This one is a Swedish mystery novel.

Children' Books:

Nathan at Inkweaver Review
has written a review of Penny from Heaven, by Jennifer L. Holm, a Newbery Honor Award book about a young girl living in the 1950’s.

Non Fiction:

Global Implications begins a series of weekly book reviews on the subject of Iran with The Devil We Know by Robert Baer.

Serena Trowbridge enjoyed The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, despite herself, and tells us why at Culture and Anarchy.

GrrlScientist wrote, in Living The Scientific Life, a review of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh. This book describes one of the greatest hoaxes of all time as the author follows the path of several ancient biblical artifacts from illegal archaeological digs in Israel through shady antiquities markets and even into the display cases of several famous museums around the world.

GrrlScientist also reviewed Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days by Vanessa Farquharson. Wow, I've been saving the environment all my life and didn't even know it.

Stephen Martile writes about Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker, in his blog Freedom Education.. Steve bought this book in 2006. He must be well on is way to a huge fortune by now, don't you think?

Grant McCreary, of The Birdir's Library, reviews Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience
by Jeremy Mynott., a book that asks why and how people look at, and watch, birds.

Bruno Vigneault, of How To Make A Miracle Happen, watched the video version of What the Bleep Do We Know again. Those miracles are harder to make than it seemed at first.

In Science On Tap Arj has a few quibbles with astronomer/blogger Phil Plai's Death From The Skies, starting from it's cover design. I immediately recognized the cover as a parody of a 1950's science fiction movie poster. Arj calls it ""National Enquirer-like."

I submitted a review of my own, which is located just below this post, Street Gang is a history of Children's Television Workshop and Sesame Street.

Travel:

Thursday Bram will give away one copy of Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo by Beth Whitman, to a lucky person who leaves a comment on her review at Working Your Way Around The World.

The Development

2009-06-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

John Barth

Fresh out of college, with my shiny new BA in English in hand, I discovered John Barth. His early books, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and particularly The Sot Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy, were wondrous to me, and fresh, pushing the cutting edge of 20th century literature.

His middle works began to seem formulaic, or I had learned the extent of Barth's bag of literary tricks. I knew that he would move his characters in and out of time, put them in the middle of ancient folk tales, bring them back to the Chesapeake, just because he could. They still held my interest, particularly as I had migrated to the scene of his writing. I was sailing the same wine dark sea -er- Bay, as Simon Behler, in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor and Peter Sagamore of Tidewater Tales. I was eating the same steamed crabs, drinking the same National Bohemian beer and watching the same sunsets.

Barth's later books became one trick ponies, the point of which seemed to be to remind the reader that Barth is the Author and he can do whatever he wants with his books, which brings us to this latest short work of fiction. It's not a novel. It's not a collection of short stories. It doesn't have a plot structure, the way I learned in school that stories are supposed to. It starts and stops at will, changes direction, changes narrative point of view ambiguously, stops in the middle of a chapter and refuses to finish it. This would be self indulgent in a younger author. For Barth in 2008, when The Development was published, it just seems exhausted.

The characters in The Development are pencil sketches at best. Residents of a fictional gated community "Heron Bay Estates," they do remind me of the denizens of Heron Point, a gateless retirement community, located at the edge of town. Barth does not give any of them the time to develop. He does kill several of them off and, in one case, Barth simply refuses to continue writing about a couple, prematurely ending the chapter without reaching any point whatsoever - the omnipotent Author rearing his ugly head.

He makes several changes of narrative point of view, which is OK, but at one point he interrupts the narrative to ask the reader to guess who is writing now. No, I know yo aren't Dean Potter Simpsonof Stratford College, or George Newett, who you tried out as a narrator earlier, or Carol Walsh or Amanda Todd or . . . It's old John Barth down there on Broad Neck, pecking away at his old typewriter or his new Mackintosh. Give me a break, John.

What held my interest, again, was the local connection. Barth changed the name of our little town, calling it Stratford, dubbed our little liberal arts college, Stratford College, gave it a,similar overly large and cursed, Shakespeare prize in literature to replace the one named after Sophie Kerr, and re-named our county after an inflatable dinghy. I kept hoping to recognize some of the people in town, however he seems to have made all of his characters up out of whole cloth and not just changed the names to protect the innocent. Or perhaps he runs in different circles than I. We never meet at dinner parties, although I sometimes spot him on the street or at the supermarket.

All in all, I would have to say that The Development would probably be a crashing bore to anyone not familiar with Chestertown and it's environs. To me it was like reading my own name in the Kent County News.

Street Gang

2009-06-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

The Complete History of Sesame Street
Michael Davis

Where did Kermit the Frog come from and why did Jim Henson carry a purse? At least one of these questions is answered in Michael Davis' new book Street Gang, as he gives a blow by blow account of the growth and development of this children's television icon. I took this book out hoping that I would find a reference in it to a drama teacher that I had in college who was also a puppeteer and had reputedly worked with Henson. No, he wasn't mentioned. The guy only lasted a year, so maybe his story wasn't completely legit, I dunno.

Davis concentrates on the Sesame Street cast and crew, of course, but does mention some of the other projects of Children's Television Workshop and Jim Henson Productions The Electric Company, Fraggle Rock, and my favorite, The Muppet Show. A couple programs Square One TV and 3-2-1 Contact, I had never heard of. It was interesting to hear the back story on many of the actors and puppeteers that made Sesame Street and of it's real creator, CTW's first CEO and Sesame Street producer, Joan Ganz Cooney.

There is also discussion Sesame Street's nemesis, the dreaded Barney, evil champion of saccharine programming for preschoolers and the inspiration, through eroding ratings, for such successful characters as Prairie Dawn, Zoe and, gasp, Elmo. I can take everything but Elmo, which, naturally, has become the shining star of Sesame Street. Two and three year-olds actually do like saccharine, as I observed with my own purple dinosaur watching children back in the early nineties.

This review was brought to you by the letter Q and the numbers 5 and 9.

The Last Witchfinder

2009-06-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

James Morrow

This is my second attempt at a book by James Morrow. I reviewed his newest The Philosopher's Apprentice just a couple of weeks ago. I may become a tiresome bore, writing review after review of Morrow's books, nine so far, although he seems to take a long time working on each one, so my binge can't go on too long. The Last Witchfinder was a seven year long project for him.

The Last Witchfinder is a kind of historical fantasy, set in late 17th and early 18th century England and America and involving figures such as Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Montesquieu in the adventures of a fictional character, Jennet Stearne, a woman who has been given the task, by her aunt, a natural philosopher accused of witchcraft, of disproving the existence of demons, witchcraft and magic. Superficially, the book reminded me of John Barth's The Sot Weed Factor, because of the place and time, the elements of a voyage to the new world and the adventures of an unlikely cast of characters, moving through a semi-realistic and somewhat absurd 17th century world.

The central theme of the book, set in a time of transition, like our own, is the conflict between the rising of the coming age of reason with the irrational medieval superstition still prevalent during the renaissance. The Salem witch trials figure highly in the book. It becomes somewhat gruesome in it's depiction of the torture and execution of supposed witches. Parallels with current conflicts between reason and irrationality can be drawn, yet the novel treads on that ground very lightly, never becoming didactic.

There is an element of magical realism to the book, even as it tries to show the superiority of reason over superstition. The book's narrator, and purported author is Isaak Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. There are interludes throughout the book in which Newton's magnum opus addresses the reader directly and discusses the lives, loves and literary accomplishments of other books and sometimes plays. You may be surprised to hear that Waiting for Godot is responsible for writing Microsoft's application documentation - or maybe not.

Life Sentences

2009-06-01T03:47:00.000-07:00

Laura Lippman

If you look through this blog you might deduce that I have become a Laura Lippman fan. I've enjoyed tracking down her early work and filling in the history of her detective character, Tess Monaghan and reading her occasional forays into other branches of fiction.

Life Sentences is her newest book and now I am all caught up and will have to wait for her to finish the tedious process of writing another book before I can gobble it up in a weekend.

This is not a Tess Monaghan story. Lippman has created a new central character, Cassandra Fallows, a writer, successful with her first two books, both memoirs, who has tried writing fiction for her third book and met with severe criticism from the critics. She has returned to Baltimore for a visit, making a few stops on her book tour and checking in on her aging parents. She runs across a decades old crime story which, mirable dictu, involves one of her elementary school classmates and decides that her next book will be about this person, her school days and her old friends.

Life Sentences deviates from the crime novel pattern just a bit. Cassandra wants to answer some of the unanswered questions about the mysterious disappearance of her schoolmate's child, as related in a short TV news piece she caught on a local Baltimore station, watching in her hotel room, but nobody ever gets arrested. There are no murders, no criminals are brought to justice. Eventually, no book is written about it. Cassandra Fallows is welcomed back to her home town when she declines to profit from it's dark secret.

Lippman has always made Baltimore the core of her writing. I am not from the city, I live on the Eastern Shore and mostly see Baltimore on the local TV news, yet I find her use of the city and it's environs to be one of the most attractive parts of her writing. In this case the Eastern Shore plays a larger than usual role. I've been to Bridegville Delaware, know Denton fairly well and have traveled the back roads of Kent Island, all of which are ground covered by the characters in Life Sentences.

Being a writer, doing a book tour, getting panned by the critics and mining your home town, your friends and family for material are what this book is about - keeping in mind that this is fiction. The title is a reference to the central character's Sisyphean task of writing endlessly about her past. Perhaps Lippman is feeling a bit Sisyphean herself after writing fifteen books set in her lifelong home.

The Philosopher's Apprentice

2009-05-17T15:16:00.000-07:00

James Morrow

At first I thought that The Philosopher's Apprentice would be a remake of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance combined with Pygmalion, set on a lovely topical island. However, it soon morphed into a new take on The Island of Dr. Moreau, with a touch of it's most recent tribute, Jurassic Park. The novel then had a brief affair with I Robot before veering off into Stranger In A Strange Land and Night of the Living Dead, then suddenly became Juggernaut, taking a few cues from The Metamorphosis, making a short visit to Elie Wiesel's Night, returning to Heinlein's Stranger theme and ending, predictably, with a baby in a bookstore. There are a few plot twists to follow.

The book also give me a chance to expound my sophomore spiel about science fiction. A science fiction story must ask "What if?" "What if we colonize Mars." "What if a horrible disease kills all but a few people in the world?" What if something. Something, whatever question a story asks, should be non-trivial and the way it is asked and answered should not offend the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. A good science fiction story will be carefully constructed so as not to trip on internal self contradiction.

Morrow asks "Is a conscience innate or is it learned, and if learned, can it be taught to a postadolescent that never had the opportunity to be a child." He uses cloning, forced feeding of learning with mysterious projectors, and other, not well developed science fiction apparatus as tools to bring the novel to the point where that question can be asked. It is OK to be a bit sketchy about the science if, as in this case, the book is asking a non-technical question. A little pixie dust never hurt anyone without an engineering degree.

The plot twists take over the story, bringing in so many surprising developments that the fundamental ethical question is somewhat obscured. It does make for a page turner, though, and the book does return to that question again, sometimes answering yes and sometimes no and gives the philosophers favorite answer, "On the one hand - but on the other hand."

I became involved enough with the characters, particularly his version of Eliza Doolittle/Valentine Michael Smith, that I became somewhat upset with Morrow over some of the things that he had her, and her disciples doing. I also had a hard time believing that the authorities would ignore a conspiracy to create an army of zombies and send them to burn down a city in the middle of Maryland. I live in Maryland for cripes sake! You couldn't even do that in Louisiana, without raising a few eyebrows, even if you were the Governor's delinquent son in law.

Baltimore Blues

2009-05-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Laura Lippman

Baltimore Blues is Laura Lippman's first novel, originally published in mass market paperback in 1997. I guess that the publisher was unsure about the staying power of a crime novel set in the dowdy city of Baltimore, Maryland. The edition that I read is a hardback reprint from 2007. To say that this doesn't often happen in an understatement.

Tess Monaghan, Lippman's Irish Jewish Baltimore native female detective main character, is introduced in this novel. She is already a well rounded character with a family, a history, habits and the ability to engage the reader in her fictional life. Monaghan as a character, and Lippman as an author seem to rise fully formed, like Venus rising from the sea on a shell.

It was a pleasure for me, as an affectionado of all things Lippman, to finally read this first novel and see where Crow, the young musician boyfriend, Kitty the sexy maiden aunt, Tyner the wheelchair bound lawyer, Whitney, the wealthy college roommate and lifelong BFF and many of the other characters, that float in and out of the Tess Monaghan books, came from. I started reading the series in hardback before the reprints of the original paperbacks came out. If you are new to Laura Lippman you might do well to start at the beginning, or maybe not. Working backwards in time to this first novel was a novel experience.

I have a theory about how a mystery novel should be constructed. The author must leave clues scattered throughout the book that the reader will remember as the mystery is solved. Readers are supposed to have an aha moment when the killer is revealed. "Why didn't I see that in chapter four?" you are supposed to ask. Lippman's books don't follow my theory. Nothing is ever neat. In fact there is likely to be more than one killer, as there is likely to be more than one victim. Nothing is neat or orderly. Lippman's books are more like real life. Some obscure character from chapter four that isn't mentioned for pages and pages might show up, very angry, with a gun during the denouement. Yet it always works. I guess that's why "crime novel" and not "mystery story" is the best description of Lippman's work.

Some time I'll tell you about my science fiction theory. Authors often seem to ignore it, too.

Plain Honest Men

2009-04-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

The Making of the American Constitution
Richard Beeman

The constitutional convention of 1787 was shrouded in secrecy. The delegates all agreed to talk to and write to no one about the proceedings. Noes taken during the convention were sparse, incomplete an unpublished. Somehow Richard Beenam has been able to piece together not just a book, but a thick tome, on the day by day proceedings at the Pennsylvania State House that resulted in the Constitution that the United States still operates under today.

America, under the articles of confederation, was a loose alliance of thirteen independent states that all agreed to be friends. The Congress, with an equal vote for each state, was responsible for paying off the debts incurred during the revolutionary war, but had no power to collect taxes and was dependent on the voluntary donation of funds from the states. The Congress was the only federal government there was. It comes as no surprise to us that this arrangement didn't work.

A convention was authorized by the Congress to discuss amendments to the Articles of Confederation that would make for a more workable federal government. That convention, astoundingly, devised a plan that dissolved the confederation government, created a three branch system, including a two branched legislature, a judiciary and an executive, none of which bore any resemblance to the confederation Congress.

Beeman's book follows the proceedings of the convention in detail. He talks about the individuals who had the most influence over it's progress, George Washington, returned from retirement at his estate at Mount Vernon after leading the continental army to an improbable victory over the British, was elected president, or chairman of the convention. Benjamin Franklin, internationally renowned as a "naturalist," which is what scientists were called and as a statesman, James Madison, who came prepared with a plan for a new government, the "Virginia Plan," which became the foundation of the new constitution, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Pinkney, Eldredge Gerry, to whom we owe the word Gerrymander, Gouverneur Morris, James McHenry, the person fort McHenry is named after . . .

Beeman does a pretty good job of explaining how the convention dealt with, and failed to deal with the most controversial issue addressed by the constitution - slavery. The delegates from South Carolina and Georgia were adamant that slavery be protected by the constitution. At the time it was just beginning to become an issue. Franklin was president of an abolitionist society in Pennsylvania. Slavery was practiced in most of the states, including Massachusetts and New York. Pennsylvania did not abolish slavery until 1847. But in South Carolina and Georgia, slavery was the only way to acquire to kind of labor needed to work the expanding rice and indigo which were making the landowners rich. There was almost no objection to slavery on moral grounds at the convention but much wrangling over the attempt to count slaves in determining representation in Congress. In the end slaves were counted as 2/3 of a person each for the purpose of assigning Congressional representation. It is difficult to understand this compromise, which led eventually to the Civil War, from a 21st century perspective. I take it as proof of the inevitability, like it or not, of moral relativism. You can not make moral choices outside of your cultural context, even if you think you can and think you are.

2009-04-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

The fifteenth Book Review Blog Carnival was posted this morning at Mysteries in Paradise. Kerrie did a marvelous job, which included weeding out a large number of spam post submissions, Editing all of our submissions and posting them in a coherent fashion. She also saved and sent me a list of every email address of ever person who submitted a post.

Which leads to the procedural change. I have been trying, with limited success, to keep a list of all participants in the carnival and their email addresses, in order to send news, calls for submissions and carnival posting notices out to you. I have decided that I will instead post those only on the Book Review Blog Carnival blog. I simply don't have the time to keep a mailing list in order.

What this means: If you are a participant in the Book Review Blog Carnival and want to know what is happening, please subscribe to the RSS feed, or at least stop by once and a while and take a look-see.

Participating bloggers are encouraged to post a link to the carnival at Mysteries in Paradise in their own blogs. Please help to spread the word and share your readers.

The sixteenth Book Review Blog Carnival will be hosted by Literary Menagerie on April 26th. Please submit your book review posts at the usual place, http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_5161.html.

Another Book Review Blog Carnival

2009-03-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

Stop by at book:thirty and take a gander at the fourteenth Book Review Blog Carnival. There is something for everyone, as Zero would say.

Charm City

2009-03-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

Laura Lippman

This is the second book in Lippman's Tess Monaghan series. It was originally published in a mass market paperback. My eyes don't do well with mass market paperbacks anymore, so I'm happy to see that Lippman's early efforts are swimming against the tide and coming out in hardcover, years after their mass market releases. I have become a big fan of charm city's own murder mystery writer.

Writing a review of a mystery novel without spoiling the plot is always difficult. I will attempt to be very vague on the details and leave you with no idea what is going on.

Charm City features the first appearance of Esskay, the hungry greyhound. The dog's sudden appearance in Tess' life begins one thread in the story, a thread that involves greyhound racing, oddly enough, since there is no dog racing in Baltimore. The other thread involves the famous Beacon Light, the fictional newspaper, which Lippman points out in a disclaimer bears no resemblance to the Baltimore Sun, where she still worked in 1997, when the book was first published.

Crow, the younger hipper, musician boyfriend is already present. I am going to need to track down Tess story #1, Baltimore Blues to see where he actually comes from. There is a bit of difficulty between Tess and Crow which is unresolved at the end of the book, a great teaser for book #3, Butcher's Hill. From reading later Tess stories I know that Tess and Crow resolve their differences. A sign of a good mystery series is that the reader gets sucked in and starts to care about the lives and relationships of the stock characters. Lippman's Tess Monaghan books qualify on this count, big time, Hon.

Lippman's books meet the other two criteria, which I just made up, for a better than average mystery series. Local color: Lippman uses Baltimore and the rest of Maryland in a totally authentic, charming and attractive way. She makes gentle fun of the way Bawlmurruns speak. Real locations, real local food and real sounding local situations are all through the book(s). Most importantly, for mysteries, as opposed to mere crime novels, you won't figure out who did it until the very end. I'm not even going to tell you what they did, but of course, people are killed.

Lucky Thirteen: The Book Review Blog Carnival

2009-03-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

The thirteenth edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival can now be found at Bookish Ruth. Don't miss this big collection of well written reviews of books of every kind.

The photo above, of Basil Rathbone appearing as the Evil Duke in Jame's Thurber's Thirteen Clocks, appears courtesy of the LIFE Magazine photo archive at Google.

The Wordy Shipmates

2009-03-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

Sarah Vowell
Let me start by saying that is is not true that, if her great grandfather had not been processed through Ellis Island by a wiseacre, Sarah Vowell would be know today as Sara Aeiou. Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor the NPR weekend magazine show "This American Life," which is best known for bringing us such fine pieces of journalism as The Santaland Diaries. Her book does not disappoint.

The Wordy Shipmates is a short, concise, not at all wordy history of some of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts Bay colony. Starting with John Winthrop, who wrote and preached the sermon about "a city on a hill" that has been used and abused by John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to such good effect. We also have John Cotton, ancestor of the more well known Cotton Mather, Roger Williams, psychotically enthusiastic proponent of religious freedom and theological purity, who helped found Rhode Island, Anne Hutchinson, the voice of God on earth and co-founder of Providence and even Mary Dyer, follower of Hutchinson until she becomes a Quaker and martyr to religious freedom at the hand of Winthrop and his fellow Boston magistrates. It is quite a merry crew of brawling Calvinists which Vowell gives us with tongue firmly implanted in cheek.

The gist of the book is that these people are responsible for giving us the great city of Boston. They are the ones who let a cow loose to lay out the city's streets. I'm sure that the blame for the Big Dig can be laid at their feet as well. I can't find my way around Boston with a GPS. Thanks a lot, guys.

They are also responsible in large part for our tradition of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. That concept is one of Roger Williams' crazy ideas, which got him banished from Massachusetts and is written into the charter of Rhode Island. It eventually found itself written into the First Amendment. Way to go Roger!

I can't tell you (actually I am trying to do that) how much I enjoyed reading Sarah Vowell's tale of trial and error, murder, war, bigotry, more murder, mass murder and other fun stuff, which became the foundation of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the fine precedent they set for the founding of the United States. The Wordy Shipmates should be required reading for all American middle school students. It should be included in the lovingly crafted high stakes testing that will determine their future lives. It belongs right up there with the Thanksgiving episode of Happy Days.

Supreme Courtship

2009-03-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley turns out novels even faster than William F. did. In fact, since I read what I thought was his latest, Little Green Men, he has published five more. Perhaps I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have.

Generally Buckley's books revolve around the sordid side of life in Washington, DC. Usually they are funny. Mostly they hang together pretty well. This book, published in 2008, revolves around an unpopular President, (not that one) an ambitious Senator and a TV judge, appointed to the Supreme Court.

The TV judge is a wise cracking, colorful lady from Texas. She is highly entertaining until the President's handlers get a hold of her and manage to get her through the confirmation hearings. As a confirmation candidate and a Supreme Court justice she becomes a boor, not to mention a poor judge. I was hoping to hear her speak up and use some of those borrowed Ratherisms in the Senate and during oral arguments. No, she is as polite and as quiet as a church mouse.

The plot takes a bunch of twists and turns, there is (shocking!) sex, alcohol consumption and a bit of intrigue. The Senator gets his own TV show. The President wins reelection, mostly because he tells the country that he doesn't want it. Naturally the election goes all the way to the Supreme Court and our TV judge must cast the deciding vote. Everything comes out right in the end.

Buckley's use of language is superb. He fills the book with clever plays on words. Don't worry, ecxept for some Latin, thrown in (with bogus translations) for legal color, he does not go in for his dad's polysyllables.

I was a bit disappointed. I liked the idea of a Judge Judy stirring things up among the Supremes. Still, although no Thank You For Smoking, it was an entertaining quick read. Give it about a 73.

The War Within

2009-03-07T04:52:00.000-08:00

A Secret White House History 2006-2008
Bob Woodward

This is the forth book about the Bush White House by the Washington Post's most famous reporter. I think by now the secret is out. His 2002 book Bush At War was very complimentary toward the President and his white house team, dealing with the events of 9/11/01, the invasion of Afghanistan and the preparations to invade Iraq. Woodward was convinced, as most of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found and destroyed. When no WMDs were discovered Woodward's coverage toward the Bush team turned increasingly negative.

In The War Within Woodward portrays the Bush administration as a dysfunctional family. Each of his senior advisers is shown to be playing a separate game, the enemy is found in the other branches of government and not on the battlefield of Iraq. There is little mention of Afghanistan at all in the book.

Woodward portrays Bush as a man who is unable to grasp the implications of his own decisions, going with "his gut" and ignoring contradictory facts, having unshakable faith in his generals, until they are replaced, then having unshakable faith in his new generals. Donald Rumsfeld is shown to be so wedded to his small lean military concept that he is unable to concede the value of increasing troop strength in Iraq even as the sectarian violence grows exponentially. Condoleeza Rice is portrayed as being excluded from the decision making process.

How the "surge" came about is the central focus of the book. Woodward shows that this was an amorphous concept, basically just "lets throw a bunch more soldiers and Marines into Iraq and see what happens." It was not until after the "surge" was decided upon, when it was decided that a new commander and a new Secretary of Defense would be needed, or it wouldn't happen, that David Petraeus was chosen to lead in Iraq. Petraeus' tactic of moving US troops, with their Iraqi counterparts, into the neighborhoods of Baghdad and his willingness to accept the assistance of both Sunni and Shia militias into the defense structure were key to the success of the "surge" in reducing the level of violence in Iraq.

One has to wonder how President Obama will fare in Iraq. Can he successfully reduce the numbers of US troops to 35,000 by August 2010? The political situation in Iraq remains unsettled. The Maliki government is laughably weak. There has been no reconciliation between Sunni and Shia factions. The Kurds remain a part but apart. Iran continues to stir up trouble. Will the violence return or will the Iraqi's begin to build a civil coalition to address their own governance?

I'm Pedaling as Fast As I Can

2009-03-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

Really, I know it's a long time between books on here, but I only have so much time for reading and then my poor eyesight gets in the way and the next thing you know I'm asleep. Well, in the meantime, why not peruse the twelfth Book Review Blog Carnival which is being hosted by Age 30+_A Lifetime With Books. Heather has organized the carnival very well and written a short original blurb for each of about 47 submissions.

Something for everyone, a carnival tonight!

Roads to Quoz

2009-02-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

An American Mosey
William Least Heat Moon

William Least Heat Moon is best known for his travel journals Blue Highways and River Horse. This newest book, which came out in 2008, is sewn together from his notes from years of visits to various places in the United States. It lacks the coherence of the others, because it is not the narrative of a single purposeful, or even purposeless journey. Nevertheless it is an enjoyable read from the millennial era's answer to Charles Kuralt. It is perfect for inducing Spring fever.

Quoz is a made-up word which Heat Moon defines as: Anything, anywhere. living or otherwise, connecting a human to existence and bringing an individual into the cosmos and integrating one with the immemorial, thereby making each life belong to creation, and so preventing the divorce of one from the all which brought it into being.

Heat Moon is blowing smoke up out collective skirts with this fancy definition of his fancy word. Suffice it to say that he likes odd and interesting stuff, especially if it's old. He is able to tease a story out of each discovery.

If I have any criticism of Roads to Quoz beyond it's scattershot nature it would be Heat Moon's attempt to make much out of the letter Q. His wife is known in the book as Q, rather than her name, and he makes up more than a few words which start with that letter and showers the reader with them and other Q words more grounded in the English language. By the end of chapter one this rhetorical flurry settles down to a drizzle however and it didn't kill my enjoyment of the book.

Heat Moon and Q meet many interesting people in Arkansas, Northern Louisiana, Northeast Pennsylvania, the Florida Panhandle, New Hampshire and I've probably left out a few more places. oh yes, the intercoastal waterway starting in Baltimore and going all the way down to Florida. I think that the intercoastal could have made a book by itself if he had done it in River Horse and not as a passenger on a commercial vessel. Next time, maybe.

Book Review Blog Carnival #10

2009-02-02T04:09:00.000-08:00

The tenth edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival has been posted at Inkweaver Review. You will find reviews of books old and new in many genres from 22 different reviewers in this edition.

Book reviewers, you can participate in the Book Review Blog Carnival by submitting a link to you review at our Blogcarnival.com page.

Butchers Hill

2009-01-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

A Tess Monaghan Novel
Laura Lippman

I have become a Laura Lippman addict. I first heard Laura Lippman being interviewed on the Marc Steiner Show on what was then Baltimore's WJHU radio station, at John's Hopkins University. (It's called WYPR now and is no longer owned by the University) I found her to be engaging and was motivated to go read the new novel she was hawking and then every Laura Lippman book I could lay my hands on ever since.

Butchers Hill is an early Lippman novel that was published in paperback only, in 1998. It has recently been released in hard cover, reversing the usual procedure. One might expect an early attempt to be less well written, more tentative, not as good as an author's later work, especially if that early book was a paperback only potboiler. This is not the case. The character of Tess Monaghan is fully rounded already, and easily recognizable. The plot has twists and turns of great complexity, yet complete, after the fact, logic. Other characters are believable. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Baltimore is a city that I know mostly from the local TV news. I live in another world, across the Chesapeake Bay from there. But I love to see places and even people from that news appearing in print. If there is a writer who lives and sets novels in your area you may be able to enjoy the same experience. Of course, I also enjoy reading the late Tony Hillerman's New Mexico based novels for their setting, even though my exposure to New Mexico was only a two week vacation almost twenty years ago. Go figure.

You will never in a million years guess who done it, which makes this a real mystery and not just a "crime novel." In fact, it's not at all clear what the real crime that is being solved is until the denouement, but not in a bad plot kind of way.

Since starting to write fiction, with her Tess Monaghan mysteries, Laura Lippman has written novels that are not in the mystery genre. She has shown that she can develop complex characters and hold a reader's interest without having the plot device of a detective with a crime to solve. Yet, her Tess stories, even this early one, already stand up as complete novels on their own.

Fine Just The Way It Is

2009-01-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

Wyoming Stories 3
Annie Proulx

This is the first work I've read by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Shipping News. I suppose now I'll have to go ahead and read everything she's written. Not all at once, though.

Fine Just The Way It Is is a collection of short stories, mostly set in Wyoming, although there are two set in Hell, with the Devil as the central character. Maybe that's Proulx's real opinion of Wyoming? She visits 19th century homesteaders, an old cowboy in a nursing home, 21st century ranchers, back country hikers. Each has a story to tell and in each story the place is an important element.

Most of the characters seem to end up in a condition best described by the title of one of the stories Tits Up In A Ditch. They die in childbirth, catch pneumonia, get trapped by a falling rock high on a mountainside. Or old and tired in a nursing home, like Mr. Forkenbrock in the opening story, who would rather die of exposure, sitting with his back aginst a fence post, like an old man he remembers from his youth. Sitting comfortable on my sofa I can enjoy sympathizing with all these characters, knowing that they are fictional and I won't suffer brain damage from a roadside bomb in Iraq and be sent home to my unprepared parents on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

I have the same objection to this book as I do with any well written collection of short stories. About the time that I really start to get involved with a group of characters, that story is over and I have to start over with a whole new set.

The title of the book comes from something said repeatedly by one of the characters, "Wyoming is fine just the way it is." Every story, although each reveals something beautiful about the state, show how very difficult it is to live there. It should be depressing, but it isn't.

The Seventh Book Review Blog Carnival Is Up

2008-12-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

Natasha at Maw Books Blog has worked from dawn till dark to produce today's Book Review Blog Carnival. No matter how hard I tried I lost count every time, but there are more than 80 posts in this issue. The range of subjects is, not surprisingly the biggest ever. There is something for every book lover on your Christmas list.

The eighth edition will be hosted by Bloody-Kisses.org on January 4th. You may submit a book review post from your blog at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_5161.html. Everybody is welcome to participate.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

2008-12-19T20:35:00.000-08:00

David Wroblewski

This is another book that I learned about by listening to the Diane Rehm Show on the radio. The author was on for an interview and aroused my interest because Diane, David Wroblewski and I are all dog people. Wroblewski has written a novel set in an unusual dog breeding kennel which produces unusual dogs and the dogs are central to the story he tells. The founder of this kennel, the grandfather of it's central character, had the idea to breed dogs based on behavior instead of conformation. He took dogs of many, and sometimes no breed, that had performed unusual and sometimes heroic acts, dogs that got written about in the newspaper, and he created his own breed of dogs. He clearly researched both breeding methods and obedience and service dog training for the book, although the results achieved by this fictional kennel are probably not possible.

The book is written from many points of view, sometimes even that of one of the dogs, but never sinks to a level of cuteness or anthropomorphism while doing so.

The difference between us and our animal companions is one of degree and not of kind, Descartes notwithstanding.
The idea of creating these dogs that are intelligent and loyal but able to to make moral choices is a fascinating one. It gives the book a kind of Sci Fi speculative edge. What if you bred and trained dogs for intelligence and judgment? How far could you take them? What part of their behavior is learned and what effect does inheritance have? This question is played out in the dags and in the humans in this story.

This is a coming of age novel, as many first novels are. A young man, Edgar, grows up on this farm, where his parents are engaged in breeding and training these amazing dogs. Edgar is unable to speak, although he hears normally, and communicates with a half made up sign language, to everyone, including the dogs. Edgar is destined to take over the kennel and continue breeding and training these amazing dogs.

But this coming of age novel takes a wrong turn when Edgar's uncle Claude comes home after a long absence. In fact, not until Edgar's father suddenly dies and Claude starts paying unwanted attention to Edgar's mother, does the reader realize the Wroblewski is re-telling the story of Hamlet on a dog breeding farm.

Like the play, the novel ends tragically. I won't spoil it by telling you how. It is a satisfyingly thick book, a good long read, and I highly recommend it.

Note: revised 12/22/08

Making Lemonade

2008-12-19T03:55:00.000-08:00

Kindelicious has given me the Lemonade Award for showing great attitude and gratitude. Now I'm supposed to pass this award on to at least ten other blogs who show similar attitude and gratitude.

On the other hand, I just kicked Entrecard off my blog. My attitude may be a bit sour just at this moment. I have met some outstanding bloggers through my association with Entrecard, but the burden or working their system has also interfered with my ability to effectively manage and post to my blogs.

When the world hands you lemons, make lemonade, the old saying goes.

I want to give this award to the best lemonade maker I know, JohnC of Life Onwards.

Shinade of The Painted Veil deserves this award. She has been a good friend and now she needs her friends' support to help her through a rough spot. She has good music on her blog, too.

Silvie Dixie of A Glimpse of La Rochelle has been a steadfast friend to a whole community of bloggers at FuelMyBlog.

Scott at My Thermos gets an award for occasionally making me stop and think.

Carol at Bass-ically Speaking gets the lemonade stand, too. Solidarity forever, sister.

A special mention to Turnip at Turnip of Power, a blog that gives real, good advice to aspiring bloggers, rather than warmed over gruel and hype.

Mudge at Left Handed Compliment seems to need a nudge. Bro, don't forget your blog!

Sugar Queen, we're praying for you, gal. Get well and post when you can.

That's eight, not "at least ten" blogs. I'm not good at following directions.