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

Rain Gods

2009-11-08T04:42:00.000-08:00

James Lee Burke

I am attracted to James Lee Burke's characters despite their dark nature. Each of his protagonists is a veteran, scarred by his experience in war. Private detective Dave Robicheaux and lawyer Billy Bob Holland in Vietnam. In Rain Gods Burke introduces Sheriff Hackberry Holland a 74 year old former prisoner of war in Korea and young Pete Flores, severely burned in an attack on his tank in Baghdad. Once again Burke's characters are be alcoholics, either active drinkers or recovering ones in AA, although God only knows what their higher power might be.

Burke holds his fictional universe together, bringing some New Orleans organized crime figures to Texas, displaced by hurricane Katrina. He adds a truly evil caricature of a Russian mobster, a motley collection of colorful freelance killers for hire, a young beautiful folksinger and a female deputy who rubs up against the elderly sheriff to add another complication to his life.

The freelancers, working for the Russian, in the first of a series of odd and comical mistakes, hire the unemployed Pete Flores, for $300, to drive a truck containing a group of smuggled illegal aliens, who are hiding balloons of uncut heroin in their stomachs. When the balloons begin to leak and cause a medical emergency, inconvenience and loss of the Russian's product, solve their problem by shooting all of them and burying them, using a bulldozer, in a remote corner of Hack Hollands county - for storage. Pete, after getting drunk on bootleg mescal, makes an anonymous call to the Sheriff, setting the course of the bloody adventure.

Burke attempted to create a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil, creating a Character, Preacher Jack Collins, who believes himself to be living an old testament life, one of cosmic importance and who kills on impulse, justifying himself in the name of his vengeful God. Sheriff Holland is set against him, showing compassion for the weak, being kind to animals and resisting temptation, provided by his deputy, all while feeling sinful and unworthy right up to the final confrontation where Collins is defeated but vanishes without a trace. It feels more than a bit contrived, which, of course, it is.

-30-

2009-11-08T04:25:00.000-08:00

The thirtieth Book Review Blog Carnival is posted at the Book Review Blog Carnival" blog. Who woulda thunk it?

The next edition will be hosted by Linus's Blanket on November 22nd. Submit your reviews now at our Blogcarnival.com page.

Long Quiet Highway

2009-10-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

Waking Up In America
Natalie Goldberg

"People would rather read about how to become a writer than read the actual products of writing: poems, novels, short stories," says Natalie Goldberg in the opening chapter of this, her third and, I think best, memoir. Her first two bestsellers, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, are disguised as how to books for aspiring writers, so she should know what she is talking about when she says this, laughing all the way to the bank. Perhaps reading about how to write is related to watching cooking shows on television while ordering takeout. The idea of cooking, the idea of writing are appealing. The hard work, not so much.

In Long Quiet Highway Goldberg goes into much more detail about her journey from her Long Island childhood to a career as a writing coach in New Mexico and as a student of Zen Buddhism in, of all places, Minneapolis. She talks about her writing practice and teaching methods without prescribing them and ties her methods in to her meditation practice and study with Dainin Katagiri Roshi at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center.

There is a great contrast between Goldberg's exposition of the practice and the benefits of Zen meditation and the "ancient secrets" that Dan Brown describes in his novel The Lost Symbol. Granted, Brown's book is fiction and deals with the Judeo Christian tradition, yet when Goldberg describes her exploration of Judaism, she finds a direct similarity to what she was taught by Katagiri, not some kabbalistic mumbo jumbo. The inner peace and sense of belonging in the world, the rightness, that she discovers in the zendo, is the same thing that she finds in the ritual practices of Judaism. Neither is easy, though. Both take a lot of work.

Just do your practice for it's own sake, just be who you are with no expectation of reward, these are the lessons Goldberg brings to her book. The hard work, to her, is it's own reward. Getting up a four in the morning to walk six blocks to the Zen center in mid Minnesota winter and sit on a wood floor. This is her work and she learns to love it. Sitting down every day for several hours with a pen and a notebook and putting words down on the pages without pre-judgment is also her work. Somehow Goldberg makes books happen this way but you'll need to read the other two books to learn how.

The Lost Symbol

2009-10-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

Dan Brown

I'm probably the last person in the wold to write a review of the latest mega best seller by Dan Brown, who burst onto the scene with The Davinci Code in 2003. In The Lost Symbol, Brown brings back his professorial protagonist Robert Langdon once gain, to obfuscate a plethora of historic trivia and build yet another pyramid of innuendo.

The target of his misinformation this time is the Freemasons, a fraternal organization with a history dating back to the 17th century. There have been rumors about the rather theatrical rituals of Freemasonry, drinking wine (or blood some say) out of a skull and such, which Brown makes free use of. Brown is careful, though, to picture the Masons as the misunderstood good guys in The Lost Symbol. Perhaps he was sufficiently cowed by the reaction to his treatment of Opus Dei, a relatively innocent Roman Catholic fraternal organization, that Brown demonized in The Davinci Code.

I will cite one glaring example of Brown's misuse of historic information in pursuit of his plot. He claims that Thomas Jefferson, in assembling the "Jefferson Bible" was trying to preserve the "Ancient Wisdom" in the new testament, the references to supernatural powers that are alleged to be available to all of us if we study and practice. In fact Jefferson cut out of his new testament all of the miracles, anything, in fact, that was contrary to physical science as it was known in the late 18th century. His was an attempt to preserve the humanistic lessons of Jesus, for example the Sermon on the Mount. Jefferson redacted the water into wine, healing of lepers and raising the dead, the very things that Brown wishes to emphasize and implies that Jefferson was pursuing.

There have been hundreds of fraternal organizations, ranging from the Elks Club to the Klu Klux Klan, founded in the United States. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, membership in one or more of them was standard for middle class adult male Americans. Almost all of them have, or had, some secret initiation ritual. The Freemasons, being the oldest of them has the richest history of ritual and possibly the weirdest. The Masons claim to fame is that George Washington was a member. Washington was also a founding member of the Society of the Cincinnati, a club for Revolutionary War officers who all swore to return to civilian life and not pursue political power, modeling themselves on the Roman dictator Cincinnatus, who resigned and returned to his farm.

In The Lost Symbol Brown makes use of the "Ancient Wisdom" often touted in New Age literature, and discusses mystical powers of the mind to affect the physical world with pure thought. I often heard spooky whoo whoo music in my head while reading the book. Of course there is a mad evil villain who is trying to steal the Masons' secret rituals of supernatural power, which don't exist and a scientist studying "noetic science." Brown uses this idea of transcendent powers as a plot device yet it appears to me that he is a bit embarrassed by them. At no time does Brown exhibit the actual use of any transcendent powers in the story, although there were several opportunities for him to do so.

The CIA is there, too, flying around Washington DC in black helicopters, chasing Robert Langdon. The reader gets a virtual tour of the Capitol building, the library of Congress and some parts of the Smithsonian Institution. These are almost worth the price of admission themselves.

Dan Brown knows how to write a page turner, even though is language can be a bit florid at times and even embarrassingly awkward. Poor Tom Hanks, if he makes another movie from this book, will not have a love interest unless they give the story a bit of a rewrite. A rewrite might be a good thing.

Book Review Blog Carnival # 29

2009-10-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

I posted the first Book Review Blog Carnival on this blog on September 28th last year. Since then there has been a carnival every other Sunday without fail. Today's carnival is hosted by a newcomer, Kitsch Slapped, a tastefully presented blog about bad taste.

The next edition, #30, will be hosted at the mother ship, the Book Review Blog Carnival blog. If you write book reviews on your blog you may submit a review to the carnival at our page at Blogcarnival.com. I'm also looking for hosts for next year. Email me at the address in the sidebar to the left if you would like to host a carnival.

Half Moon

2009-10-18T15:57:00.001-07:00

Henry Hudson and the voyage that redrew the map of the New World
Douglas Hunter

Henry Hudson didn't take directions very well. He was hired by the Dutch East Indies Company to go look for the northeast passage, a route to the Pacific Ocean over the top of Russia. Instead he went west and discovered New York City. Hunter's book explores Hudson's reasons for going so far off course, traces the actual voyage as best as he could determine and talks about the consequences for the colonization of North America that stem from Hudson's discoveries.
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Hudson had made two earlier voyages of exploration, both financed by English business interests. In 1607 and 1608 he went to Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean searching for a trans polar route and a northeast passage to the Pacific Ocean and the lucrative trade with China. In 1609 no English patronage was to be found for another expedition. Hudson wanted to find a northwest passage, north of Canada or a mid continental route, through North America. The Dutch East India Company was interested in finding a northeast route, which Hudson had already tried. He knew that sea ice made that route impossible but because the Dutch were willing to finance a voyage Hudson agreed to go. After a quick trip to the arctic Hudson turned his ship, the Half Moon, westward to look for a passage to China. He was in direct violation of his instructions from the Dutch, who wanted him to go northeast and report back to Holland immediately. In Half Moon Hunter speculates that Hudson may have been working as a double agent, exploring for England on Hollands dime.

Hunter incorporates what is known about exploration in the beginning of the 17th century into the story. Richard Hakluyt, the English geographer and supporter of new world exploration gave Hudson all the latest information about explorations on the North American coastline, including Giovanni da Verrazzano's brief visit to the mouth of the Hudson River in 1524. Hakluyt had pieced together reports from French, Spanish, Dutch and English explorers, fur traders and fisherman which seemed to indicate that a river on the east coast connected to one that reached the Pacific with only a short portage west of the Allegheny mountains. Of course he was wrong.

Half Moon makes connections between Sebastian Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Henry Hudson, Samuel de Champlain in the search for a mirage, a quick passage to Asia, and how their efforts led to the colonization of North America by Europeans. While they made voyages of discovery, others, some of them members of their crews, came to trade, farm or fish and built new nations in the process.

Book Review Blog Carnivals: Two for the price of one!

2009-10-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

The 28th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival was posted this morning at Books For Sale?. NathanKP has given us a lovely, clean, minimalist post, with 15 reviews from 15 various blogs.

I realized this afternoon that I never posted about the 27th carnival, which went up two weeks ago at At Home With Books. My apologies to Alyce, who worked very hard to build us a beautiful carnival and deserves recognition.

Pilgrims

2009-10-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

A Woebegone Romance
Garrison Kiellor

I used to listen to A Prairie Home Companion and I even enjoyed hearing Mr. Kiellor talk, even though it was mostly lies, about Lake Woebegone and the people out there on the edge of the prairie. Those are my people he's talking about after all. I liked the show just fine except that somebody ought to tell Mr. Kiellor that he shouldn't sing. He's not a singer and no radio show is going to make him one, even if he is the one that runs the show.

I have tried to read some of Mr. Kiellor's books before but never succeeded in finishing one. This time I stuck it out because it is my duty to write a post about it. The book is made up mostly out of stuff taken right out of his Saturday night monologues, which is all right, I guess. He is getting double use out of a lot of it. I wonder if he gets paid twice when he uses the same material over like that. It doesn't really seem fair, does it? Anyway, Mr. Kiellor has sent a group of people from Lake Woebegone on a trip to Rome, the one in Italy, to glue a plasticized picture of a WWII hero, from Lake Woebegone, on his gravestone in the cemetery where he is buried, which is conveniently located in Rome.

One thing that Mr. Kiellor did was stick himself right into the book, like he was some kind of post modernist big shot, like my friend Mr. Barth or somebody, but he is about thirty years too late with that trick and it just makes him look like he's full of himself. The other people in the book, the one's from Lake Woebegone, see right through him, with his sneaky little notebook, writing down everything they say. They know that he is going to put them all in a book and make gobs more money out of them. They're not impressed, even if he did pay for their trip to Italy.

The romance part of the book is mostly about Margie Krebsbach and her husband Carl or sometime about Carl, who is a bit of a old duff and doesn't get very romantic, even if he is a German Catholic and not a Norwegian Lutheran, but there's also an Italian guy named Paulo. Father Wilmer even gets in a little romance for a paragraph or two. If you used to listen to A Prairie Home Companion then you might not know that Father Wilmer took over at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility after Father Emil retired, which was quite a few years ago. Well it looks like Father Wilmer is on his way out now, too, because he got hurt in a car accident and then, in the hospital he fell in love with his nurse and they've been seeing each other in secret, but anyway, that's neither here nor there.

There are some really bad poems that Mr. Keillor wrote, in the book too, which it didn't need at all. Somebody should tell Mr. Kiellor that he's not a poet, either. It takes more that a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota to make a poet out of someone. I know that he writes song parodies for his show all the time, but it's the music that carries them and he has some professional musicians to make it work, but he doesn't have any musicians to carry his poetry in this book.

Well I finished the book and I guess it's OK, but Mr. Kiellor is going to make some people back home in Lake Woebegone really mad when they find out what he's been saying about them - again.

The Age of the Unthinkable

2009-10-07T18:41:00.000-07:00

Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It
Joshua Cooper Ramo

Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, which makes him a high priced consultant in the field of foreign relations. He's a Nixon to China kind of guy, speaking Mandarin and promoting the idea of talking to those funny furriners, even if they do eat strange food and speak in unintelligible gibberish. I'm sure he hangs out with Henry Kissinger. He has written two books about China and one about skydiving.

In this newest book Ramo discovers that the world doesn't always do what we expect and he proposes that we all get loose and flexible as the best way to deal with crisis. Ramo seems to think that this is something new. I tend to disagree with him. The problems du jour change but the surprises have kept on coming throughout history. Every time that our peerless leaders, whether they be Nixon or Napoleon, thought they had a handle on things, all hell has broken loose.

Ramo believes that the high degree of global interconnectedness we are experiencing today, in trade, communication and travel make the world more unstable instead of less. Viruses from afar can hitch rides on airplanes and travel thousands of miles in a few hours. Trouble in the U.S. mortgage markets cause a panic in Russia and China. A bunch of highly educated Saudi's, financed with millions in oil money, can wreak havoc in New York, London or Washington D.C. It would actually be more impressive if a gang of goatherds from the Afghan mountains could do that, but without the Saudis money that still isn't possible.

The pace of things has surely speeded up, but we haven't seen anything like the 1918 flu epidemic or the black death, for some time. (Knock on wood.) Genghis Khan made a pretty hash of things for the Chinese in his day and the South Sea Bubble is still the most egregious example of financial markets gone bad. Things have not really changed all that much.

I do rather like Ramo's proposed solutions. He has invented the term "deep security," which means paying attention to the basics, like ensuring meaningful work for people and giving them universal health care as a way of cushioning the effect of financial panics, employing diplomacy, to ensure that our enemies as well as our friends know what we (talking about the U.S. here) expect from them and what we are willing to do to get it. It may be a hard sell politically but I do think that aggressively fighting AIDS and engineering clean water supplies in sub Saharan Africa will, in the long run, lead to fewer wars, fewer pirates and fewer terrorists.

It took quite while, after chapters of scary scenarios, for Ramo to get to his point about "deep security," and even then, I found him a bit vague on details. Creating "deep security" is a lot of work. Even talking about it is. It's a lot easier to make up slogans like "bomb bomb Iran," which is why politicians do so much of that sort of thing.

The Art of Detection

2009-09-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

A Novel Of Suspense
Laurie R King

A whodunnit by an author who is new to me, The Art of Detection, is set in San Francisco in 2004 and 1924. The book is from the middle of a series featuring SF police detective Kate Martinelli.

King cleverly intertwines a "lost" Sherlock Holmes short story, purportedly written by Arthur Conan Doyle while visiting San Fransisco in the '20s into the story of the murder, in 2004, of a collector of Sherlockia and member of a Sherlock Holmes themed dinner club. The Sherlock Holmes story, prominently featured in the liner notes, is what drew me to this book. It is also a major clue to the 2004 murder.

King has written another series of books, set in the 1920s which are centered around a character, Mary Russell, who is apprenticed in the art of detection to the retired Sherlock Holmes, who is living the life of a beekeeper in Sussex. This is actually where Doyle leaves Holmes after unsuccessfully killing Holmes in a battle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarity, at Reichenbach Falls in The Adventure of the Final Problem.

His fans would not let Doyle stop writing Holmes stories and Doyle was forced to bring the character back to life, rather like Mr. Spock in the movie Search for Spock. This begs the irrelevant question, is Spock Sherlock Holmes?

Appropriately, the novel and the short story both deal with issues of homosexuality, gays in the military and same sex marriage. What else is there to write about in San Francisco in 2004? Fortunately, King did not choose to make Sherlock Holmes gay in her "lost" story. The gay issues are dealt with in a tasteful an inoffensive way.

King has done her Sherlock Holmes research and there is much Holmes and Doyle trivia to be gleaned in The Art of Detection. Did you know that Doyle never had Holmes say "Elementary my dear Watson" or smoke a calabash pipe?

There are two fictional murders to solve in The Art of Detection, separated by 80 years. Who committed them? Don't ask don't tell.

Naming Nature

2009-09-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

The Clash Between Instinct and Science
Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Whatever editor though up that dumb subtitle should be sent back to the mail room for reeducation. There is no clash in this book between science and instinct. Instinct is not even mentioned. What there is, is an interesting discussion of the way that esoteric systems of classifying the plants and animals of the world, used in the in he academic pursuit of biology, have become far removed from the way we, regular people, recognize them.

Yoon, a biology graduate student turned science journalist, calls this ordinary view of the natural world the "umwelt" (oom-velt) which is a German word for the way we, or the different ways other creatures, perceive the world. A creature's umvelt depends on what kind of senses that creature has, where it lives in the world, what it looks for to eat and what eats it. A dog's unwelt, for instance, has a lot to do with how things smell and prominently features squirrels and the postman. In our case, how we think about the world is another major factor.

Naming Nature contains an entertaining history of the study of taxonomy, starting with Carolus Linnaeus, known to his friends as Carl. Linnaeus devised the system, familiar from high school, of dividing life into domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. He established the tradition of naming species with two Latin names, the binomial system. Linnaeus' system is an artificial construct which helps us to comprehend the relationships between different plants and animals. Yoon makes the mistake of equating Linnaeus' taxonomy with the taxonomies of any and all cultures, saying that we all organize nature in our minds in the same way, even though she, herself, gives several examples of cultures that classify animals in bizarrely different ways. Her argument for the universality of Linnaeus is weak. It's also beside the point.

As she proceeds with the history of taxonomy Yoons point becomes clear. Just as physics has wandered far from the common sense of Isaac Newton into the far out realms of relativity and quantum mechanics, taxonomy has found, through statistical analysis, DNA matching and cladistics, all of which Yoon talks about in some detail without any MEGLO (My Eyes Glaze Over) effect, that some of the common sense relationships we believe in, among plants and animals, don't really exits. She quite proudly announces the demise of fish as a teaser at the beginning of the book. Her later explanation of this, having to do with the lungfish having characteristics similar to a cow, seems a bit off the wall, but no matter. That salmon I had for dinner was not a fish. I believe her.

Yoon calls for a revival of the umwelt in our daily lives. Don't let those snooty scientists tell you that nature is a strange place inaccessible to ordinary mortals. Go out there with your Peterson's Field Guides and revel in it before it's too late. Good advice. I think I'll shut off my computer now and go outside.

Ed Note: I went back and corrected the spelling of "umvelt." See the comments below.

26th Book Review Blog Carnival

2009-09-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

This week the 26th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival is hosted by Pizza's Book Discussion. Come in and have a slice while you browse.

If you ever wrote a book review on your blog you can submit the post to an upcoming carnival at our page at Blogcarnival.com. I'm always looking for host blogs, too. Email me at the address in the sidebar if you are interested in hosting a carnival.

Oh, Johnny

2009-08-31T18:34:00.000-07:00

Jim Lehrer

This is the nineteenth novel by Jim Lehrer: yes, that Jim Lehrer, the host of The News Hour on PBS. In it, Lehrer brings back a couple of his favorite themes; the Marine Corps; Lerhrer was a Marine, and buses, the Greyhound and Trailways kind. I know from hearing him interviewed on the radio that Lehrer owns an old reconditioned bus and occasionally takes it out on the road near his country home outside Washington DC. Johnny, the central character, is the second Lehrer protagonist, after The One Eyed Jack, to become a bus line ticket agent, a job that Lehrer once held himself.

Oh Johnny asks the same question that I did, or intended to, in my review of to Ken Robinson's The Element. What happens when a person pursues a dream, to do something that he loves and is very good at, and yet he fails? In reality this is an all too common occurrence. As in real life Lehrer's answer is "not much."

We meet Johnny Wrigley as an 17 year old Marine on a troop train headed west to go fight the Japanese in WWII. Because of the war he has missed a chance to play minor league baseball. The team that offered him a tryout has, along with the rest of the league, suspended operations for the duration of the war. Johnny is convinced that some day he will be a star center fielder in the majors.

Stopping for a 30 minute layover in Wichita Kansas - Jim Lehrer's birthplace, incidentally - Johnny meets and falls in love with a young girl he meets on the station platform. After some truly horrible experiences in the war, which Lehrer gets us through with minimal fuss, Johnny returns, to find that he is unable to locate his dream girl. Returning to his home in Maryland Johnny does get into the minors but injures himself by running into the center field wall and is no longer able to play.

The book revolves around Johnny's "shell shock" or PTSD, as we would now call it, his inability to find his Betsy and his disappointed attempts to become a professional baseball player. At one point he does eventually find the girl he met but finds that she is a completely different, and less attractive, person than he had thought. Professional baseball reveals itself to be a hard life in which one mistake can end your career and in which no quarter is given, even by one's own teammates.

Johnny's expectations are dashed at every turn, throughout the book, yet he finds a sunny optimism, based on the idea of luck, which carries him through the war and through his attempts at professional baseball. Betsy, the girl on the Wichita platform was his good luck charm. When he finally meets Betsy he learns how false his good luck has been.

There is a dramatic scene in which Johnny's life turns around involving a baseball field. I won't give it away any further than that. In the end Johnny settles for a life as a bus line ticket agent, married to someone other than his dream girl. He leads a normal mundane life and is just fine with it. His is not a life of quiet desperation.

It is possible that Jim Lehrer eventually settled for a life as a national evening news host and a novelist when his dream was to drive a bus.

Book Review Blog Carnival #25

2009-08-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

The twenty fifth Book Review Blog Carnival is available for your reading pleasure at This Girl's Bookshelf. Stop by and take a look at the 30 reviews listed. Be sure to leave a comment, even if it's just to say hello and please link to the carnival from your own blog if you have one. Help us spread the word.

Inherent Vice

2009-08-29T03:22:00.000-07:00

Thomas Pynchon

This new novel by the author of Gravity's Rainbow and V is written in the style of a hard boiled detective novel. It is also classic Pynchon. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1969 with a central character who is a pot smoking disillusioned hippie turned private invvesigator, a veteran of the early 60's surfer scene, named Doc Sportello. Sportello's bete noire is L.A. Police detective Bigfood Bjornson, an aggressive, rule bending, Dirty Harry like figure who turns out to be a henpecked husband with a sentimental streak.

Pynchon's ever present themes of paranoia, conspiracy and corruption are to be found in Inherent Vice. As in his earlier novels there is a secret society, this time called "Golden Fang," which is introduced as the name of a schooner which slips in and out of the harbor at night on mysterious errands, but is also an investment group run by dentists, a drug cartel, the owner of a run down casino in the wrong part of Las Vegas, a real estate development company, a right wing political group and a rehab clinic.

Sportello wanders in a marijuana induced haze, through the streets of Los Angeles searching for clues into the disappearance of developer Mickey Wolfmann. He is given bits and pieces of information by a wide variety of characters, heroin addicts, surfers, the saxophone player in a psychedelic surf band working undercover as a police informant and political provocateur, a former teenage runaway and her dentist/lover. Each revelation makes the plot more convoluted but seems to lead toward a hoped for but never revealed resolution. Doc Sportello is as clueless at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. There is never a denouement where Sortello reveals his clever solution to the crime. He does get paid, though, by the conspirators themselves but in a plausibly deniable way.

Although Pynchon uses themes from film noir and the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and makes references to John Garfield movies, this is not a mystery novel in the classic sense. It is a rambling, paranoiac Thomas Pynchon novel. As in all of Pynchon's work, the confusion and sense of pointlessness you are left with are the whole point of the book.

Thomas Pynchon has made somewhat of an enigma of himself. He does not allow himself to be photographed and keeps his whereabouts a secret, as though he were one of the characters in his novels. Rumor has it that Pynchon is up for a Nobel Prize in literature. All he needs to do is reveal himself as a female writer from a third world country and he's in like Flynn.

The Element

2009-08-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

Ken Robinson, Ph.D.
with Lou Aronica

According to a popular myth there is a calling for each one of us, something that we are so good at and love doing so much that it doesn't feel like work at all. Ken Robinson advocates for the existence of this perfect occupation. He calls it being in one's "element," and recommends looking for that element in our own lives and pursuing whatever calling it presents us. Unfortunately, Henry David Thoreau's often quoted "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" is more true now that when he wrote Walden in 1854.

Robinson never mentions this, but I believe that finding such an "element" for each and every person on Earth would be a good argument for the existence of a personal, omniscient and ever present God. Who else could organize the world in such a way that every single person would born with such a perfect fit to one or more pursuits? The evidence is not in favor of this hypothesis, though, as Thoreau has pointed out. Very few people ever find an "element."

Robinson uses examples, such as Paul McCartney, Julia Child and one of my favorite people, physicist Richard Feynman, to illustrate his thesis. Each of them did find something to do that was eminently suitable to his talents and each of them enjoyed his job immensely, not to mention making a pretty good piece of change at it. These very talented, very lucky people were able to take advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves and they all created careers for themselves doing what they loved doing. Most of us are just not that talented, or that lucky.

Dr. Robinson wants to encourage each of us to find our "element" and to help our children find theirs.I found his argument against the emphasis on standardized testing in schools, the core of "No Child Left Behind," to be highly cogent. As Robinson says, "I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state." His basic thesis, however, I find to be messy, new age claptrap. Not that I am against people pursuing their dreams, but I think it's important to have a fallback position in case it doesn't work out.

After reading The Element I am ready to quit my job in order to pursue my dream of becoming a rock star. Or maybe not. He did mention being good at it.

The Twenty Third Book Review Blog Carnival

2009-08-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

The twenty third edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival has been posted at Bart's Bookshelf. Bart has done a bang up job, even tracking down cover art for all 29 books reviewed by the carnival participants.

If you review books and would like to participate you may submit a review for the next carnival at Blog Carnival, which handles the submission process. Inkweaver Review will host the next carnival on August 16th.

The Pluto Files

2009-07-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet
Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The Pluto Files is a rather tongue in cheek look at the demotion of Pluto from it's status as a planet by the International Astronomical Union, written by the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's Museum of Natural History.

In 2000, the freshly renovated Hayden Planetarium, under Tyson's direction, opened a new exhibit showing the relative sizes of the planets - excluding Pluto. The exhibit classified the planets as either Earth like - the inner group or gas giants, the outer group. Pluto, being very small and made mostly of ice, did not fit in either group, and was left out of the exhibit. This led to a large controversy, many angry letters from elementary school students and, eventually, a vote, in 2006 at a gathering of the IAU, to define the term planet in a way that excludes Pluto.

Tyson's reason for leaving Pluto out of the exhibit is that it is not a member of either class of planets, neither a rocky Earth like planet nor a gas giant. How can you have a class of one? he asks. Pluto is a very small object, smaller than our own moon. It's orbit is eccentric, dipping in closer to the sun than Neptune's for one part of each turn around the Sun and veering off from the plane of the ecliptic. Pluto is like a small child running around and between the legs of a group of adults.

Later, as other Pluto like objects have been found in what is now known as the Kuiper belt, named after Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper. At least one, Eris, is larger than Pluto. We now have a class of objects with several thousands of examples, of which Pluto and Eris are the largest known members. Are they both planets, then? No because the AIU had voted on a definition of a planet with three criteria: 1. that it orbits a star and not another object 2. That it has enough gravity to give it a spherical shape and 3. That it has cleaned up it's orbital zone of debris. Both Pluto and Eris, and also one Asteroid, Ceres, meet the first two of these criteria, but not the third.

This last criteria is problematical. The Earth is always being struck by meteorites, which are debris in it's orbital zone. Is the Earth not a planet? Just last weekend Jupiter was struck by a large object which has created an Earth sized impact disturbance in it's atmosphere, visible by amateur astronomers, arguably an object not previously cleared from Jupiter's orbital zone. It appears to me that this is an arbitrary criteria, with exceptions being made in order to include, really, any planets at all. Besides, since when is science subject to a vote?

I suggest that the orbit clearing criteria be abandoned as a bad job and be replaced to the requirement that a planet must have an atmosphere. this would restore Pluto to the status of a planet, possible Eris, too, and exclude Ceres. We would then have nine or ten planets and counting. Pluto has been redefined as a dwarf planet. OK, but a dwarf planet is still a planet.

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.