After Dark

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Category: Novel Grade: B+

I should have known to expect a philosophical novel that isn't quite what it seems to be. Murakami is a very popular Japanese author whose novels have been translated into 38 languages. He recently received the Kafka Prize. On top of that, our friend at the bookstore saw me pick this one up and commented -- "That's a good one of his to start with -- it's short!". So I can't say I wasn't warned.

Anyway, I did end up enjoying the book. It's a little stilted as is pretty common for books written in a foreign language and translated to English. (There is a lot of music mentioned in to the book - I wonder if the translator replaces Japanese jazz titles with American ones for the translation?). The book is about two sisters in Tokyo. Mari, the one we meet first in the middle of the night in a Denny's, is the focal point of the realistic part of the novel. Her sister, Eri, on the other hand, has been asleep for the last two months and we see her, in her sleep, moving between her bedroom and another room reflected in the TV in her room. Nothing much really happens, but it's actually kind of cool the way Murakami weaves what's essential a magical realist novel. Not sure I know what he was trying to say, but he said it really well.

The Book of Air and Shadows

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber

Category: Novel Grade: B-

I picked this one up because I had read a kidlit book that Gruber wrote last year and it was decent - not great, but decent. This is one of his adult novels and it falls in the same category. This is one of the many "son of DaVinci Code" books that I usually avoid. You know, modern day people discovery some ancient secret launching an across-the-ages thriller. In general in this category, you never really know whether what you're reading about is an actual ancient mystery or a modern day scam. Same with Gruber's book. It's got a very been there/done that feel to it.

In this case, the "discovery" revolves around a set of 17th century letters that talk about a plot to spy on Shakespeare and, ultimately, talks about an undiscovered play that is supposedly buried somewhere in England. An unknown Shakespeare play, especially one written in his own hand would, as you might imagine, be worth millions, if not hundreds of millions. Gangsters get involved - in fact rival groups of gangsters; a professor gets tortured and murdered; a lawyer and a wannabe fill maker get involved; there are a couple of mystery women; an ex-wife; an OCD kid... Gruber tries to jam so many different plot lines in to the novel, that, after a while, it just gets too confusing. He never gets the reader to the point where you really care much about these people and their complicated lives.

Silas Marner

Silas Marner by George Elliot

Category: Novel Grade: A-

And so another touchstone of my teenage years falls. In my memory, the two worst books ever written, both required reading in high school, were The Red Badge of Courage and Silas Marner. Last summer, I discovered that Crane's novel was actually really good. Earlier this summer, if you remember, I made some snide comment about Silas Marner in one of my other book reviews. Almost immediately, Christian challenged me, saying it was actually one of his favorites. He's got degrees from Duke and Yale so I, of course, figured he was being elitist and trying to show off his knowledge and sophistication and so, I accepted his challenge and agreed to read the book. I asked our friend who owns the little book store that we use to order it for me. She laughed and said she remembered it to as the worst book she ever read.

What a surprise! This is actually a beautiful little book. The prose, being 150 years old, is a little dense for my taste with paragraphs that can run three or four pages. Given that, however, it was a much more complex story than I expected with incredibly well drawn characters. There are only two things that I can come up with to blame my past feelings about the book. The one I believe is true is that this is just a terrible book to give to 16 or 17 year old kids. Jason even said he had to read the book in middle school! Kids that age just aren't prepared for a book like this and I stick with my belief that, at that age, this is a good book to kill any interest in literature that a kid might have. The other, and probably true theory, given that parts of the story weren't familiar to me at all, was that I actually dodged the assignment in high school and only read parts of the book (or, more likely, read the Cliffs Notes).

This is only a couple of hundred pages long and is a pretty quick read. If you want to challenge your memories of those horrible books from high school, give it a try. You may be surprised.

Roll the Bones

Roll the Bones, The History of Gambling by David G. Schwartz

Category: History Grade: B-

My first surprise with this book was that there is such a thing as a professor of gambling! The author is Director of the Center for Gaming Studies at UNLV. Who knew.

The next surprise was that you could write a textbook about gambling history. The book is very comprehensive - spanning gambling from the folks who starting gaming with the astragalus, foot bones from a variety of animals right through to the explosion of online gambling in the last decade. Like a textbook, this was interesting, but, for the most part pretty dry. You wouldn't think it was possible to write a dry book about gambling but it is.

There are some high points -- the early stages of the creation of Vegas; the rise of horse racing around the world - but over 100 pages about the development of lotteries can get pretty boring.

You're not likely to enjoy this book unless you're a big fan of gambling, so don't bother. The summary you're led to is that gambling is absolutely basic to human nature and that virtually all attempts to ban or severely restrict gambling have crumbled in a relatively short period of time. So, if you have to drive too far to get to a casino, just hang on.

Empire

Empire by Orson Scott Card

Category: SciFi Grade: C+

Card is actually a pretty good writer. His two series - the Ender SciFi series and the Alvin Marker fantasy series are both classics. I'm still waiting for him to hit a home run (or even a solid double) outside of these two series. This book definitely isn't the one.

The premise here is that, in the very near future, the Red State/Blue State divisions in the United States actually lead to civil war. The underlying warning -- that today's polarization leads to an openness to manipulation by a smart, silent group of hidden powerful people - is as old as literature. It wasn't until I got to the end that I realized that what Card had been chartered to do in this book is write a novelization of an upcoming video game and, boy, does it feel like that. You get the impression, at times, that the action has been plotted by a committee of 14 year old boys. There's all kinds of video-game-oriented weapons and lots of shoot-em-up action. The plot is also very disjointed -- you sometimes feel like you're watching a Die Hard movie that's had 5 minute chunks snipped out every once in a while.

I do, though, have to throw out one interesting thing about Card. He was really one of the first to believe in the value of an online presence for a popular author. His current online community, www.hatrack.com, started out as a dedicated forum on AOL close to twenty years ago. I still remember the day that he came to headquarters to discuss how the forum would be set up. Since most of us, back then, were certifiable nerds, that was a very well attended meeting. He was a strange guy -- overweight, Mormon, very conservative for the times -- but he absolutely understood the power of an online fan club. Today, he actually releases most of his books a chapter at a time as he writes them on his web site and actually listens to and incorporates feedback from his fans.

Check out the website or his early book, Ender's Game, but skip this one.

Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Category: Novel Grade: A

This book seems to have become a staple of the book club circuit and its pretty easy to see why. It's a well constructed story with a really good ending. I will warn those of you with squeamish stomachs that one of the themes of the book is animal cruelty and, while it' not horribly graphic, it's definitely there.

Gruen has adopted a somewhat unusual structure for the book. The first three chapters cover the middle, end and beginning of the story and everything converges from there. Since this all happens in the first 15 pages or so, I don't feel bad about having a little bit of a spoiler. The bulk of the book takes place at a not-so-great traveling circus. In the opening pages, we get what is really the climax of the book - a murder (sort-of) and a stampede of all the animals in the circus menagerie and, we meet the book's narrator, Jacob Jankowsky. In the second chapter, we jump way ahead to Jankowsky at age 93 in a nursing home. Then in the third chapter, we go all the way to the beginning of the story -- with Jankowsky as a veternary student who learns that his parents have been killed in a car wreck. When he returns to school after the funeral for his finals, he is so distraught that he ends up running out of the exam room and, in desperation, hopping a train that's moving through town. It's only when he wakes up the next morning that he realizes that the train he's jumped belongs to the Benzini Brothers Traveling Circus and so, without really making a decision, Jankowsky becomes a circus-hand.

The book bounces back and forth between Jake in his 20s at the circus and Jake in his 90s at the nursing home. Most of the interesting parts of the story take place at the circus and leads you to the climax that you already know is coming, but didn't quite understand. You get a great view of circus life and the freaks, roustabouts and performers that populate it. You may wonder, during the book, why Gruen bothered to include the "old Jake" story line. It makes for some good comic relief but, in the end, becomes a critical part of the story.

Grit your teeth through the animal-cruelty parts (and know that it all works out for in the end). You'll enjoy this one.

Einstein

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

Category: Biography Grade: A

I couldn't put this one down. Take what was probably one of the most brilliant scientific minds of all time in an outspoken German Jew in the first half of the 20th century and it's not hard to see why you'd get an incredible story. If you look at the people, in history, who advanced our understanding of the world the most, there are only a handful of candidates - maybe Galilleo, Newton, Watson & Crick (DNA) and, of course, Albert Einstein. Even today, half a century after his death, his face is still one of the recognizable on the planet. But, while everybody knows him as the formulator of the Special and General Theories of Relativity, most people didn't know much about his life. With the popularity of Isaacson's book, hopefully, that will change.

To most of us, the fascinating parts of the book are the biographical parts. Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of science in this book. Between Einstein's inherent ability to make the complex understandable and a surprising knack by Isaacson to make the pictures even clearer, the science became much more comprehensible than I expected. There's a lot about relativity, the lack of an "absolute" definition of time and space and, even, quantum theory, that I understand far better after reading the book. That said, you have to adjust your reading style for this book to jump in to fast forward whenever the science gets over your head. I pride myself on being a pretty smart guy, but there were parts of this book where I had no clue what was being discussed. Everybody will have there own point where the concepts start to blur - just skip those sections.

What you're left with is the story of brilliant non-conformist who lived during interesting times. Einstein is probably the only scientist who ever achieved the status of international rock star. He was universally known and loved in an age before television. On his initial visits to the United States, he was greeted with parades and parties. Part of his appeal was that his science, while not always understood, was very highly publicized. He also, of course, looked the part of the "mad scientist". Closely related to his science were the relationships he maintained with some of the great names (in science, at least) of the times -- Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Oppenheimer, among others. It would have been amazing to have been seated at the table when these minds started discussing not only the nature of the cosmos, but politics, literature and just about everything else. These people, especially Einstein in his youth, were willing to make leaps of knowledge that overthrew centuries of accepted belief. Then you watch, as he grew older, Einstein flip from the rebellious creator of the relativity theory to the reactionary protector of that theory in the face of quantum theory.

The book also shows the personal side of Einstein's life. In his early life, contrary to legend, Einstein was actually a reasonably good student. The "genius who flunked math" turns out not to be true at all. Some of the other "legends", however, are real - most of his best work, including the Special Relativity Theory and the famous equation relating energy to matter, was done in a single year of his life, 1905, while he was very junior clerk at the Swiss Patent Office. He held that lowly job because it was the only one he could get, thanks to a connection, after several years of post-graduate unemployment. He was married twice - the second time to a first cousin. He was very outspoken when it came to politics -- he was, for most of his life a socialist, but his early pacifism was thrown out when faced with Hitler. He was a lifelong proponent of a world government as the only way to deal with a militarized, and especially a nuclear, world. He was a non-practicing Jew, really a deist, who became an ardent Zionist, but one who believed the Jewish moral character would be defined by how the Zionists treated their Palestinian neighbors. He was even, on the death of Chaim Weizmann offered the presidency of Israel, which he declined.

The picture you come away with is of a brilliant man who, amazingly for all the celebrity, was a genuinely nice and kind man. I know that sounds a little trite, but he seemed to be straightforward, open and down-to-earth through his entire life.

A quick word about the author -- this isn't the first of Isaacson's books that I've read or that has become a best seller. He's previous popular biography was Benjamin Franklin, An American Life. He rights in a clear, but insightful way and seems to have a knack for making the complex, whether its quantum theory or international politics of the 19th century, easy to grasp. I do now want to go back and read some of his older books, especially one called The Wise Men about the group led by Dean Acheson that defined U.S. foreign policy for the second half of the 20th century. His other book is a biography of Henry Kissinger. I'm amazed at a talent that can write over such a wide range. It's likely, especially now that David Halberstam is gone, that Isaacson could emerge as one of the premier historians/biographers for the next couple of decades.

Buddha

Buddha by Deepak Chopra

Category: Historical Novel Grade: B+

Coming in to this book, I knew relatively little about Buddha or Buddhism. Once before, I tried Chopra's fiction and it wasn't bad. This book, a novelization of the life of Buddha, seemed like an interesting chance to take. It's short - only 250 pages - so it wasn't a big risk. It turned out, as you can tell from the grade, to be a worthwhile risk to take, although, as you'll see below it had an interested, an somewhat unexpected, impact.

The book is divided in to three sections, as was the life of the subject. In the first section, we see the birth and early life of Siddhartha. Born a prince in a far eastern kingdom, he ends up as the cause of much suffering when the king, after hearing a prophecy about his son's life, decides to raise him in an environment where no suffering is visible. To accomplish this, the king makes Siddhartha a prisoner in the palace and banishes anyone who is old, infirm or ugly from the court. In order to provide companionship to the boy, the king also invites (actually, summons) a cousin, Devadatta to live at court. Devadatta is destined to become the lifelong enemy of Siddhartha.

In the second section of the book and of the Buddha's life, Siddhartha, after wandering from the palace and discovering the nearby suffering population, abandons his life to become a wandering monk known as Gautama. He spends decades in wandering, struggling to become enlightened by learning the powers of meditation and deprivation. His near death leads him to a form of enlightenment and, as he is nursed back to health by a peasant girl, he enters the third phase of his life (and of the book) as the Buddha. In this phase, he returns to his father's kingdom for the inevitable confrontation with Devadatta to big enlightenment and peace ot the kingdom.

The book is well written and interesting. With the frequent appearance of the demon, Mara, and the tales of gurus who teach by remaining in motionless meditation for days at a time, the book takes on an edge of fantasy. Even though the story forms the basis for one of the world's major religions, it reminds me a lot of the fantasy novels of Tolkien or Pullman. Interestingly (and sorry if I offend), this leads inevitably to the fine line between religion and fantasy. The distinction seems to be a pretty basic one -- indoctrination. Raised with a belief in the reality of legend, a child comes to accept his or her religion as "gospel" (again, sorry for the pun). Viewed without the indoctrination, the legends are clearly recognizable as allegorical, sometimes beautiful, fantasy. The historical suffering caused by these conflicting fantasies, however, is very real. Makes you think, huh.

The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide By Jeff Shaara

Category: Novel Grade: A

Shaara is really emerging as the best author currently writing war-based fiction. He comes about his talent honestly. His father was the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Killer Angels, about the Civil War. Jeff Shaara hit the grand running by completing the Civil War series that his father started. He's gone on to write books about the Revolutionary War and the First World War. This book, The Rising Tide, is the first of a trilogy about World War II - more specifically about the war in Africa and Europe against Germany.

Shaara accomplishes a lot with a proven style. First, he believes that, while he writes about history, what he's really doing is telling a great story. While I'm a big fan of W.E.B. Griffin and his military novels, Shaara doesn't get in to any of the soap-opera aspects of the story that are such a prominent part of the Griffin books. Wives, family and sex play almost no part in Shaara's writing making his books more "serious" while, surprisingly not losing any of the entertainment value.

Second, Shaara has a key asset in his M.O. for telling these stories, one that he's used in every book so far, as I recall. While he doesn't write in the first person, Shaara always chooses a few people in the story to serve as multiple focal points. Each chapter in the book uses the viewpoint of a particular person to provide context for what's going on. This technique works because Shaara does such a good job of choosing his focal points. He starts by identifying a small number of the major players on both sides of the war. Here he's used Eisenhower, Montgomery and Rommel with a few chapters late in the book that focus on Patton and Kesselring, Rommel's superior. These focal points allow Shaara to tell the "high level" story -- the international politics, the strategy planning, the frustrations and gives us glimpses of the strengths and the weakness of Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler.

What gives the book its emotional pull, however, is the second set of choices that Shaara makes in finding focal points. He always includes at least a couple of the normally faceless men who actually fight the war. In this book, he's pulled out two that not only show the agony on the ground, but also let Shaara talk about the new tools that began to be used in World War II. The two (fictional) men that Shaara singles out are Private Logan, a tank gunner, and Sergeant Adams, a paratrooper. Through these men, we get to see the on-the-ground reality - the mix of extraordinary boredom combined with the terror experienced by what were basically kids in the face of the most devastating war in history.

The combination of a terrific story and Shaara's style makes for a really incredible book. In keeping with the theme started in the last review, this is exactly the kind of book that we should be assigning to our high school students. While its well researched and, as far as I can tell, historically accurate (except for the completely cleaned up language), what this book really does, aside from entertaining and educating, is make the reader interested in learning more -- exactly what we should be trying to do with kids. Kids who grow up interested in history are far more valuable to them and to society than kids who learn (and may or may not remember) that date of D-Day.