Jokes My Father Never Taught Me by Rain Pryor
Category: Memoir Grade: D
Rain Pryor is the half-black, half-Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor. You'd think that'd be interesting ground to cover. Unfortunately, it isn't. There's almost nothing here that isn't well known about Pryor and, frankly, Rain isn't terribly interesting. In addition, she's a pretty run-of-the-mill writer. Skip this one.
Friday, March 23, 2007
You Suck - A Love Story
You Suck - A Love Story byt Christopher Moore
Category: Comic Novel Grade: B+
Just a brief review of this since, if you're not a Christopher Moore fan, you probably won't be interested. This is actually a sequel to his previous comic vampire novel, Bloodsucking Fiends. I know the titles are terrible, but the books are really funny. This continues the story of Thomas C. Flood, the former leader of the vampire-hunting night crew from the grocery store where he used to work. Since the last book, Thomas's girlfriend, Jody has turned Thomas in to a vampire and the two of them are now out to find some minion's since somebody has to do the day time work.
I know it sounds really stupid and, basically, it is. But its a short easy read that'll have you laughing out loud. Not Moore's best (that's position still held by The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove), but good for a laugh.
Category: Comic Novel Grade: B+
Just a brief review of this since, if you're not a Christopher Moore fan, you probably won't be interested. This is actually a sequel to his previous comic vampire novel, Bloodsucking Fiends. I know the titles are terrible, but the books are really funny. This continues the story of Thomas C. Flood, the former leader of the vampire-hunting night crew from the grocery store where he used to work. Since the last book, Thomas's girlfriend, Jody has turned Thomas in to a vampire and the two of them are now out to find some minion's since somebody has to do the day time work.
I know it sounds really stupid and, basically, it is. But its a short easy read that'll have you laughing out loud. Not Moore's best (that's position still held by The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove), but good for a laugh.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Exile
Exile by Richard North Patterson
Category: Novel Grade: A
When I was in junior high, we studied Texas history. I've read a lot since then about the early days in Texas and about the Alamo, San Jacinto, William Travis, Sam Houston, Davey Crockett and the other heroes of the War of Independence from Mexico. Back to junior high, I remember coming home one day and Mom asked me what we had studied that day. I was excited about the stories of the revolution. Mom got kind of a funny look on her face. You see, she grew up in Mexico and, to her, having received her early education in Mexico, the revolution I was so proud of was a rebellion; the heroes I thought were so cool were criminals, even terrorists. This was my first introduction to perspective as a major part of history. Usually, only the winner's perspective survives to become history, but widely different perspectives can create huge difficulties in trying to solve the world's problems.
And so, we come to Exile, Patterson's latest book. Let's dispose of the easy part first. Patterson is a great writer of what I'd call political thrillers. I've enjoyed every one of his books and this one is no exception. As a storyteller, he's terrific. This book is well paced, covers a lot of ground and has enough twists to keep you glued. Purely as a novel, I'd recommend this book.
A brief plot summary - the primary character in the book is David Wolfe, a well connected, Harvard-educated lawyer in San Francisco who is on track to enter politics within a few years and who, before ever running for anything, is already being talked about as possibly the first Jewish President. He's engaged to Carole, the socialite and politically active daughter of a Holocaust survivor with whom David has also become close. The skeleton in David's closet is a law-school affair with a beautiful Palestinian woman, but that's been over for almost 15 years. Carole and David host a small dinner for the visiting Israeli Prime Minister - a man who is the main backer behind striking a "land-for-peace" deal with the Palestinians. The day after the dinner, the PM is assassinated in a suicide bombing in the streets of San Francisco. A few days later, Hana, David's law-school paramour, is charged with complicity and David ends up representing her, effectively ending his political career. All of this takes place in the first 10% of this book so I haven't given away much that you couldn't get from the jacket cover.
To this point, it looks like Patterson has a good shot at bringing home another of his interesting, but not terribly important books. It'll sell well and everybody will love it. However, Patterson is looking for more this time. He's done painstaking research on the issues of the Middle East, traveling throughout the region and, obviously, listening closely to everybody who would talk to him. And here we get back to my junior high lesson on perspective -- we learn pretty definitively that common perspective is something that just doesn't exist there. The obvious variances are between the Israelis and the rest of the region, but what we see here is also the wide differences within the communities that make achieving a lasting peace so difficult. Both sides have groups that see the need to accommodate each other -- among the Palestinians there are those who are willing, supposedly, to leave Israel in peace if granted a country of their own; in Israel there are those who are, supposedly, willing to accommodate a dual state solution in order to secure Israel's borders. However, both sides also have the "God's will" groups - in Palestine, groups like Hamas, whose goals are built around the destruction of Israel, while in Israel, the right-wing groups that believe that God granted "Greater Israel" to the Jewish people and the needs of the Palestinians are irrelevant to that right.
What makes Patterson's book so affecting is that, rather than preach at the reader, Patterson sends his protagonist to listen and let's the reader overhear. By doing so, he personalizes all of the various perspectives. He listens to Israeli's who have lost loved ones to suicide bombers. He listens to Palestinians who have known no life outside of a refugee camp. He listens to settlers who will fight before they will abandon homes they believe are gifts from God. He listens to terrorists who believe they are fighting an occupying army. Frankly, it leaves the reader with very little hope of seeing a Middle East peace in our lifetimes.
I almost never use quotes from the books I talk about, but I'm going to here. Fairly late in the book, David is meeting with one of his Israeli contacts and summarizes what he's learned:
Category: Novel Grade: A
When I was in junior high, we studied Texas history. I've read a lot since then about the early days in Texas and about the Alamo, San Jacinto, William Travis, Sam Houston, Davey Crockett and the other heroes of the War of Independence from Mexico. Back to junior high, I remember coming home one day and Mom asked me what we had studied that day. I was excited about the stories of the revolution. Mom got kind of a funny look on her face. You see, she grew up in Mexico and, to her, having received her early education in Mexico, the revolution I was so proud of was a rebellion; the heroes I thought were so cool were criminals, even terrorists. This was my first introduction to perspective as a major part of history. Usually, only the winner's perspective survives to become history, but widely different perspectives can create huge difficulties in trying to solve the world's problems.
And so, we come to Exile, Patterson's latest book. Let's dispose of the easy part first. Patterson is a great writer of what I'd call political thrillers. I've enjoyed every one of his books and this one is no exception. As a storyteller, he's terrific. This book is well paced, covers a lot of ground and has enough twists to keep you glued. Purely as a novel, I'd recommend this book.
A brief plot summary - the primary character in the book is David Wolfe, a well connected, Harvard-educated lawyer in San Francisco who is on track to enter politics within a few years and who, before ever running for anything, is already being talked about as possibly the first Jewish President. He's engaged to Carole, the socialite and politically active daughter of a Holocaust survivor with whom David has also become close. The skeleton in David's closet is a law-school affair with a beautiful Palestinian woman, but that's been over for almost 15 years. Carole and David host a small dinner for the visiting Israeli Prime Minister - a man who is the main backer behind striking a "land-for-peace" deal with the Palestinians. The day after the dinner, the PM is assassinated in a suicide bombing in the streets of San Francisco. A few days later, Hana, David's law-school paramour, is charged with complicity and David ends up representing her, effectively ending his political career. All of this takes place in the first 10% of this book so I haven't given away much that you couldn't get from the jacket cover.
To this point, it looks like Patterson has a good shot at bringing home another of his interesting, but not terribly important books. It'll sell well and everybody will love it. However, Patterson is looking for more this time. He's done painstaking research on the issues of the Middle East, traveling throughout the region and, obviously, listening closely to everybody who would talk to him. And here we get back to my junior high lesson on perspective -- we learn pretty definitively that common perspective is something that just doesn't exist there. The obvious variances are between the Israelis and the rest of the region, but what we see here is also the wide differences within the communities that make achieving a lasting peace so difficult. Both sides have groups that see the need to accommodate each other -- among the Palestinians there are those who are willing, supposedly, to leave Israel in peace if granted a country of their own; in Israel there are those who are, supposedly, willing to accommodate a dual state solution in order to secure Israel's borders. However, both sides also have the "God's will" groups - in Palestine, groups like Hamas, whose goals are built around the destruction of Israel, while in Israel, the right-wing groups that believe that God granted "Greater Israel" to the Jewish people and the needs of the Palestinians are irrelevant to that right.
What makes Patterson's book so affecting is that, rather than preach at the reader, Patterson sends his protagonist to listen and let's the reader overhear. By doing so, he personalizes all of the various perspectives. He listens to Israeli's who have lost loved ones to suicide bombers. He listens to Palestinians who have known no life outside of a refugee camp. He listens to settlers who will fight before they will abandon homes they believe are gifts from God. He listens to terrorists who believe they are fighting an occupying army. Frankly, it leaves the reader with very little hope of seeing a Middle East peace in our lifetimes.
I almost never use quotes from the books I talk about, but I'm going to here. Fairly late in the book, David is meeting with one of his Israeli contacts and summarizes what he's learned:
- "You know what amazes me, Zev? It's that so many Jews and Palestinians don't give a damn about one another's stories. Too many Palestinians don't grasp why three thousand years of death and persecution makes Jews want their own homeland, or how suicide bombings alienate Jews and extend the occupation. Too many Jews refuse to acknowledge their role in the misery of Palestinians since 1948, or that the daily toll of occupation helps fuel more hatred and violence. So both become cliches: Jews are victims and oppressors; Palestinians are victims and terrorists. And the cycle of death rolls on."
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty
Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty by Tim Sandlin
Category: Novel Grade: C+
Great premise for a book. The year is 2022 and the action takes place in Mission Pescadero, a retirement home. If you do the math, you'll see that the residents are, well, me and my fellow baby boomers. Since its California, there's a real mix of people all divided up by what they were up to the 60s. There's the Haight-Ashbury table (peace and love), the Haight-Ashbury table (drugs and revolution), the Berkeley table, the mid-West table, ... You get the drift. Even though the folks are "getting on in years", there's still lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
And, of course, there's "the man" - in this case, Alexandra, the director, who wants to keep everything quiet and controlled and will send any unruly resident, "through the tunnel" to the Nursing Care wing, where they are drugged in to oblivion. And there's "the pig" - in the case, Cyrus Monk, a local police lieutenant who believe his Vietnam vet father was driven to suicide by the hippies, represented in force by the residents of Pescadero. There's the inevitable revolution and takeover, the inevitable LSD spiked punch, the inevitable...
You get the picture -- pretty predictable. I had high hopes for this and it wasn't terrible. Just wasn't particularly good either.
Category: Novel Grade: C+
Great premise for a book. The year is 2022 and the action takes place in Mission Pescadero, a retirement home. If you do the math, you'll see that the residents are, well, me and my fellow baby boomers. Since its California, there's a real mix of people all divided up by what they were up to the 60s. There's the Haight-Ashbury table (peace and love), the Haight-Ashbury table (drugs and revolution), the Berkeley table, the mid-West table, ... You get the drift. Even though the folks are "getting on in years", there's still lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
And, of course, there's "the man" - in this case, Alexandra, the director, who wants to keep everything quiet and controlled and will send any unruly resident, "through the tunnel" to the Nursing Care wing, where they are drugged in to oblivion. And there's "the pig" - in the case, Cyrus Monk, a local police lieutenant who believe his Vietnam vet father was driven to suicide by the hippies, represented in force by the residents of Pescadero. There's the inevitable revolution and takeover, the inevitable LSD spiked punch, the inevitable...
You get the picture -- pretty predictable. I had high hopes for this and it wasn't terrible. Just wasn't particularly good either.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
House of Rain
House of Rain by Craig Childs
Category: History (sort of) Grade: A-
Childs has really written three different books in putting House of Rain together. Two of them are implied in the book's subtitle - "Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest" - while the third is sort of a side effect.
The first book - the one that caused me to buy the biij - is about the Anasazi. For those of you who aren't up on your Native American history, the Anasazi were a civilization of cliff dwellers in the southwest -- southern Colorado and northern New Mexico/Arizona. Legend has it that, one day in the 15th century, the entire people just disappeared. Its been a major area of research by archaeologists in that part of the world. Its hard not to be stunned when you seen these incredible constructs. Probably the most well known is in Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, but these amazing little cities, or at least their ruins, appear all over the place. Its not completely clear what the cliff dwellings were used for - living space, defensive installations, religious sites or, most likely, a combination of all the above. Childs, in this book, ends up talking to lots of prominent archaeologists, and gets many theories on the table of what happened. What comes out is a picture of a migratory people who moved back and forth across the landscape and, seemingly, ended up heading further and further south, mostly as a result of drought. It remains a mystery, but probably not the cut-and-dried "disappearance" that is the popular story.
The second book - the side-effect book - tells the story of the methods that the archaeologists use to do their research. In a lot of ways, this was the most interesting of the three books. Its amazing what can be gleaned (guessed?) by looking at the design and decoration of pottery. Practical stuff carries a very different message than ornamental (and, therefore, probably religious). By tracking, where pieces of pottery show up and when, archaeologists can get a pretty good picture of migration patterns of various peoples. Other techniques that I found especially interesting:
If you have any interest in Native history, archeology, early civilizations or just good writing, this is a book you might enjoy.
Category: History (sort of) Grade: A-
Childs has really written three different books in putting House of Rain together. Two of them are implied in the book's subtitle - "Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest" - while the third is sort of a side effect.
The first book - the one that caused me to buy the biij - is about the Anasazi. For those of you who aren't up on your Native American history, the Anasazi were a civilization of cliff dwellers in the southwest -- southern Colorado and northern New Mexico/Arizona. Legend has it that, one day in the 15th century, the entire people just disappeared. Its been a major area of research by archaeologists in that part of the world. Its hard not to be stunned when you seen these incredible constructs. Probably the most well known is in Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, but these amazing little cities, or at least their ruins, appear all over the place. Its not completely clear what the cliff dwellings were used for - living space, defensive installations, religious sites or, most likely, a combination of all the above. Childs, in this book, ends up talking to lots of prominent archaeologists, and gets many theories on the table of what happened. What comes out is a picture of a migratory people who moved back and forth across the landscape and, seemingly, ended up heading further and further south, mostly as a result of drought. It remains a mystery, but probably not the cut-and-dried "disappearance" that is the popular story.
The second book - the side-effect book - tells the story of the methods that the archaeologists use to do their research. In a lot of ways, this was the most interesting of the three books. Its amazing what can be gleaned (guessed?) by looking at the design and decoration of pottery. Practical stuff carries a very different message than ornamental (and, therefore, probably religious). By tracking, where pieces of pottery show up and when, archaeologists can get a pretty good picture of migration patterns of various peoples. Other techniques that I found especially interesting:
- by taking a core sample of wooden pillars and beams, scientists can analyze the rings from the source trees and use them to provide pretty good accuracy as to when the construction took place.
- in one of my favorites, scientists take advantage of the fact that isotopes in teeth are deposited as the teeth are created, but isotopes in bones turn over about once a decade. By using the teeth and bones found in ruins, scientists can identify where people were born (teeth) and where they migrated to (bones) - again providing a method for tracking migration
If you have any interest in Native history, archeology, early civilizations or just good writing, this is a book you might enjoy.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
The Looking Glass Wars
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Category: KidLit Grade: B+
I tend to be a sucker for books like this. Beddor has taken the story everybody knows of Alice in Wonderland and written a fantasy (aimed at teens) that purports to tell the "real" story. It turns out, according to Beddor, that Lewis Carroll actually mangled the story told to him by Alyss Heart (even misspelling her name). Alyss ended up in Victorian London after escaping from Wonderland during a the battle in which her Aunt Redd forcefully took the crown of the Queen of Hearts from her sister, Alyss's mother. Carroll's silly version does, however, turn out to be just enough of a clue for the head of Heart Security, Hatter Madigan (get it?), to find Alyss and help her get back to Wonderland to reclaim her crown.
OK, I grant you it sounds silly, but its actually a lot of fun. Beddor has used the characters of Carroll's book as a a starting point to create some great characters and a really amazing world in which people travel by looking glass, card soldiers are real and the main aristocratic families of the world are the Hearts, the Spades, the Clubs and the Diamonds. The story is engaging, especially when it has characters from Wonderland trying to make their way in "our" world. Beddor gets a little carried away when he's over describing some of the weapons in the world and that kept him from getting an A, but he's definitely got my attention and I eagerly await volume two of this trilogy.
Category: KidLit Grade: B+
I tend to be a sucker for books like this. Beddor has taken the story everybody knows of Alice in Wonderland and written a fantasy (aimed at teens) that purports to tell the "real" story. It turns out, according to Beddor, that Lewis Carroll actually mangled the story told to him by Alyss Heart (even misspelling her name). Alyss ended up in Victorian London after escaping from Wonderland during a the battle in which her Aunt Redd forcefully took the crown of the Queen of Hearts from her sister, Alyss's mother. Carroll's silly version does, however, turn out to be just enough of a clue for the head of Heart Security, Hatter Madigan (get it?), to find Alyss and help her get back to Wonderland to reclaim her crown.
OK, I grant you it sounds silly, but its actually a lot of fun. Beddor has used the characters of Carroll's book as a a starting point to create some great characters and a really amazing world in which people travel by looking glass, card soldiers are real and the main aristocratic families of the world are the Hearts, the Spades, the Clubs and the Diamonds. The story is engaging, especially when it has characters from Wonderland trying to make their way in "our" world. Beddor gets a little carried away when he's over describing some of the weapons in the world and that kept him from getting an A, but he's definitely got my attention and I eagerly await volume two of this trilogy.
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