About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies....
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While the concept of gonzo journalism is most regularly associated with excessive drug use and acts of mayhem while reporting, the founding ideas are a bit more serious. Hunter S. Thompson defined his creation as the pinnacle of engagement, comparable to “a film director who writes his own script, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action.” The driving principal is that in this deep level of engagement, the author cannot remove himself from the story and as such greater depth can be attained than through straight reporting.
From this technical perspective, it’s easy to consider A.J. Jacobs as some form of gonzo practitioner. Jacobs’ writing career regularly involves chronicling a series of social experiments he subjects himself to, ranging from outsourcing his daily life to India to striving for honesty in all cases to studying every last piece of information in an encyclopedia. Not content with these lengths though, he moved from the collected knowledge of man to the collected knowledge of God in his book “The Year of Living Biblically” – and the journey proves to be entertaining and surprisingly poignant.
The book’s title summarizes its intent perfectly: for one year, Jacobs strove to follow the Bible to the letter, ranging from its most basic commandments to the most obscure proverbs. Visibly, this meant donning all-white single-fiber garments and growing a beard resembling the brush outside a haunted house; and behaviorally it meant regular prayer, never lying and giving away 10 percent of his salary. He presents his findings in a journal format, tackling a new issue each day and recording his results.
Of course, the issue with following these rules is that many of them aren’t truly applicable in modern life, and therein lies the real humor of “Living Biblically.” Not eating fruit unless the tree is five years old, not wearing any garments that have more than one fiber, not touching any woman for a week after her period (his wife Julie is not amused) – Jacobs tries to keep to all of these and more, often going to great lengths and annoying those around him. He never betrays any frustration at the limitations, only an increasing curiosity at their origins and how he can work them into his daily life.
The real problem – from his perspective at least – comes up in the variety of instances where the Bible seems to contradict itself, especially when moving from Old to New Testament. A key instance comes in what should be one of the simplest rules, the Sabbath: “A friend of mine once told me that even observing the Sabbath might be breaking the Sabbath, since my job is to follow the Bible. That gave me a two-hour headache.” Jacobs come across as neurotic and yet likable, determined to find an answer no matter what crazy direction it takes him.
Jacobs doesn’t try to work these issues out alone, consulting with a wide variety of scholars and professors to seek interpretations of the Bible and interpretations of those interpretations. He runs the gamut from a sect of snake handlers to openly gay Christian fundamentalists, and even makes a pilgrimage to Israel where he herds sheep and speaks with his “spiritual omnivore” guru Uncle Gil. As with the proverbs he judges none of them beforehand, but simply admires and comments on the strength of their faith.
His neutrality is helped by his own lack of religious background – raised in a secular family and a self-defined agnostic – but as the year goes on he finds that immersion in faith is starting to rub off on him, creating an alter ego dubbed Jacob. Jacob scolds him for paying attention to Rosario Dawson’s sex life, puts olive oil in his hair and pays attention to every little moral choice made during the day. With every prayer or simple “God willing” he inserts into conversation, it’s clear as the book goes on that his journey has changed him, not dramatically but in very subtle ways of thought and appreciation.
At one point in the book, as Jacobs begins to show some frustration at why the Bible can be so contradictory or hard to understand, one of his spiritual advisers offers him a key piece of wisdom: “Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The joy and challenge of life – and the Bible – is figuring things out.” In many ways, “Living Biblically” is defined by this wisdom – a book that confronts hundreds of challenges, and winds up being a joy for the sheer fact that the journey is being undertaken.
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Ever since the death of William F. Buckley Jr. in February 2008, his son Christopher appears to have a target painted on his back. Although he chiefly works as a humorist, with satirical government-based novels such as “Supreme Courtship” and “Thank You For Smoking,” a rather vocal group seems to think he is under a moral obligation to preserve the family legacy in the ways they deem appropriate. When he joined the ranks of Republican intellectuals endorsing Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential election, the backlash was so voluminous that he was forced to resign from the very magazine that his father founded and which he still owns one-seventh of.
But that excoriation pales in comparison to some of the comments directed at his latest book, “Losing Mum and Pup,” which has been criticized as full of selfish, petty smears against parents who are no longer around to defend themselves. Once again, the reaction is overblown and completely missing the spirit of his actions, as it’s hard to think of a book that feels more like saying a fond farewell. Mixing his trademark wry humor with sentimental honesty, it’s not an insult but a tribute to people who may have been difficult to live with but never impossible to respect or love.
Between April 2007 and February 2008, Buckley suffered the loss of both his parents – a loss whose difficulty was compounded by their public reputations. His father was credited as the founder of modern conservative thought (as well as National Review and “Firing Line” and over 50 books); and his mother was “the chic and stunning” Patricia Taylor Buckley, queen of New York socialites for decades. They were people of immense reputation and charm, and Buckley was their only son – a relationship regularly strained by faith, black humor and intellect.
Buckley traces over these difficult months, from his mother’s deathbed to the final memorial service for his father in Connecticut. He was pushed into a variety of roles, ranging from nursemaid to an often obstinate patient to literary executor to organizer of elaborate memorial services (the book has regular asides on the minutiae of cremation costs and military honors). Along the way we also see how his parents’ loss touched the political world, with vignettes on his father’s close friends from Henry Kissinger to George McGovern.
Detractors will make the claim that Chris Buckley is kicking out the pedestal his parents were placed on, and to some extent this is correct. He does not skimp over his mother’s acid tongue, treating us to uncomfortable dinner scenes where she humiliated her granddaughter’s best friend and refused Ted Kennedy a car (“There are bridges between here and Gstaad”). His father is shown as distant and difficult, not at his son’s sickbed or graduation and reviewing “Boomsday” in a uncomplimentary sentence (“This one didn’t work for me. Sorry”).
But none of these comments really ever comes across as mudslinging, more presenting pieces of what made his parents such a complicated package. As Buckley himself says, “larger-than-life people create larger-than-life dramas,” and he more than counters their dramas with the reasons they were larger than life. Pat Buckley could be cruel but she was also a hostess without peer, backing every one of her husband’s ventures without hesitation (after first trying to talk him out of it) and ripping into anyone who dared to insult her son. And WFB was for all his faults “the world’s coolest mentor,” teaching his son how to navigate by the stars and then pushing his limits by sailing in a borderline-monsoon storm.
And the complaints by the indignant reviewers also gloss over the fact that this is probably Buckley’s best-written book to date. He has publicly stepped away from “channeling” his father’s ghost, but between the brisk precision of the word choice and the speed of composition (he has said he wrote it in 40 days) it’s easy to picture WFB offering a spiritual boost. Opening with an Oscar Wilde quote on losing ones parents (“looks like carelessness”), literacy permeates the text with references on everything from P.G. Wodehouse to Joseph Conrad to the labors of Hercules. His mother’s ghost also makes an appearance with various barbs to break the tension: “Oh, do pull yourself together and stop carrying on in this fashion.”
But it’s in the moments where he realizes his looming orphanhood that “Losing Mum and Pup” takes on a singular power, needing no narrative devices other than straight reaction. He may portray his parents as weak but he is in almost as much pain, seeking to rationalize his own thoughts and leave things on as even a keel as is possible. The instance where he gets the call on his father’s death is painfully immersive, showing a war with instincts and emotions and wondering if he should continue what he was doing before, the taxes: “Maybe if I do them, this won’t have happened.”
If there are conflicting opinions about “Losing Mum and Pup,” they may be justified as Buckley’s own opinions were conflicted – but anyone who despises him for daring to show William and Pat Buckley as flawed is blind to the wash of affection he shows them, and the affection they had for each other. “Losing Mum and Pup” is a beautiful piece of work, funny and touching, giving a view of Buckley’s own coming to terms and the universal pain of saying goodbye to your parents.
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The odds are better than average that if you have ever been in college, unemployed, lived in a bad apartment or been in any other circumstance that limited your funds, you have eaten at least one bowl of instant ramen in your lifetime. One of the cheapest meals available – costing less than a dollar per serving – instant ramen has inspired hundreds of variant recipes, spread to almost every single country in the world and even inspired its originating country of Japan to rate it as the most important invention of the last century.
For all the billions of instant ramen servings that have been consumed, it’s a safe bet that few people have ever considered where it came from, or even realized that one man created it: Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products. Andy Raskin was curious about this fact, and in the process of learning about Ando realized the creation of ramen may hold the secret to putting his life back together. “The Ramen King and I” is his memoir of that journey – a stunningly personal, occasionally funny and regularly appetizing story proving the adage that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
At the time he began learning about Ando, Raskin was in a state of emotional collapse. Unable to maintain a long-term romantic relationship, he had been consistently unfaithful to his girlfriends and suffering in his professional life, compulsively running through Craigslist and AOL personal ads to fill the gaps. After getting into a recovery program, a series of Japanese food-related coincidences led him to use Ando as a sort of guiding figure, eventually taking him all the way to Nissin to attempt to meet the man in person. The journey proves to be not at all what he expected, finding Ando’s life and writings may in fact hold the answer to how he can free himself from a vicious cycle.
The thought of picking a 94-year-old food tycoon as your spiritual guide certainly seems like a strange one, but Raskin – a regular contributor to NPR – cooks the disparate ingredients together well. Rather than explaining the results of his journey immediately and recounting the experience, “Ramen King” goes into the story with much the same spirit he did, a feeling that there was something connected he needed to track down. Readers come to the truth at the same pace he does, presented with all the same cues and ideas he was, and the presented results are as satisfying and stunning as they must have been to Raskin at the time of discovery.
This vagueness makes the book feel somewhat random or rough at the start, but Raskin quickly counters this by letting readers very deeply into his life. The main story is interspersed with his “letters” to Ando (not sent but written as part of his recovery program) along with journal entries during a abstinence “detox” period. The entries are very emotional, showing his flaws with no attempt to hide or justify – a stunning honesty that makes one much more inclined to see if he’s capable of finding redemption.
If his entries on his personal life add feeling to the book, then his discussion of Japanese food and culture adds the flavor. Raskin has lived in Japan several times (a decision almost always based on the women he was seeing), can speak the language and has a keen appreciation for the culture. He discusses the interaction between customer and chef at a sushi restaurant – a relationship as important as the one between the fish and the rice – and locates a legendary ramen restaurant with portions so rich they burst his gallbladder. There is even a bit of literary discussion worked in as he critiques various food-related manga comic books, mixing their storylines with quotes from Ando’s biographies.
And it is all these elements that push Raskin to his final discovery, answering the question that plagues him from San Francisco to Osaka: why did Ando suddenly devote his life to making instant ramen, and why does that matter so much to him? He refuses to answer it until the very last sentence of the book, when he and the reader are ready, and its revelation is as satisfying as slurping the last noodle from the bowl. “The Ramen King and I” is a memoir of rare depth and honesty, a journey embarked on with some misgivings but which makes perfect sense in the end.
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While the Internet has wreaked its share of havoc on the newspaper and magazine industries, a less prolific casualty of its spread has been the encyclopedia. The format itself is certainly still popular – moreso than ever in fact with the advent of wikis – but hard-copy, multi-volume encyclopedias have essentially been phased out in favor of easily updated online editions. The new format may be more convenient, but it removes the physical feeling of having complete knowledge in front of you, and the youthful belief that you can learn everything from A to Z.
It’s this feeling that Alistair McCartney clearly longs for, and pays homage to, in his first novel “The End of the World Book.” Well, “novel” doesn’t quite cover it – it’s a work that’s part memoir, part essay, part collection of poetry, part social commentary and part compendium of knowledge. It’s certainly like no book that has ever been written before, an experiment that may not be for all readers but is certainly to be commended for its scope and creativity.
Like an encyclopedia, “The End of the World Book” is split into 26 alphabetical chapters and filled with entries on historical figures and events, professions and religions, activities and items. Unlike a traditional encyclopedia, however, McCartney’s entries are heavily dependent on his own interests and connections, mixing in the names of loved ones and personal totems. Additionally, none of the entries are presented as straight fact, but rather brief prose where he considers just why it is matters.
McCartney falls on this classification system because to him “when faced with existence, it seemed the only thing to do was to describe and categorize.” A melancholy, almost fatalistic tone permeates the entirety of the book, regularly trying to escape into a dreamlike state where each item cataloged can achieve some sense of permanency. While the writing style comes across as overdone for some entries (“you can always find me in the space halfway between the world and its destruction”), the fact that there are hundreds of topics means readers shift easily to the next and not be turned off by the work.
And it’s truly surprising the amount of things that matter to McCartney and what he can write about. In one letter alone – F for example – entries range from the mortality of fingerfucking to flies cutting their wrists to the Dominican monk Fra Angelico to Marie Antoinette’s taste in furniture. It’s random but creative at the same time, each entry going off in a direction sometimes only tangentially related to its topic. As a result some absurd extensions result, such as comparing the Bronte sisters to Los Angeles cholo gangs or speculating on how Franz Kafka would have written gay pornography.
While the format may not lend itself to a narrative, McCartney manages to tell stories by linking up the various entries, using successive articles on hair and dreams as mini-biographies for his childhood. There are also several recurring items: “Anna Karenina” and Kafka make multiple appearances, as do several almost Burroughsian references to young men and assholes (one particularly entertaining section points out no two are the same and they identify as well as fingerprints).
Ironically, “The End of the World Book” ends up something very hard to classify under one word or even one letter. At various points inspiring and frustrating, and by definition not the sort of book to be read in one sitting, it’s an ambitious work that occasionally gets bogged down in pretension but immediately makes you laugh or think with the next entry. McCartney’s entry on the world itself states he loves “every object and every hairline crack in every object,” and that fascination shines through and makes his book as weighty and interesting as any gold-edged encyclopedia volume.
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When you look at mainstream television and wade past the slew of reality shows and generic comedies, scripted drama tends to be dominated by two genres. First is the criminal world, represented by epic series like “The Sopranos” or “Law and Order”-style procedurals; and second is the medical field, headed by the “ER” juggernaut and a slew of comedic dramas such as “House” or “Grey's Anatomy.” Both series have their own distinct traits but also share common threads: overly tense environments, a heavy dose of gallows humor and a professional lingo that takes a few episodes to understand.
Despite the similarities between and popularity of both genres, the two rarely come together – which is a mistake, if Josh Bazell's first novel “Beat the Reaper” is any indication. A mix of “ER” and “A History of Violence,” casting a hitman in the role of a downtrodden medical resident, “Beat the Reaper” is a book with a distinctive voice, an educated grasp of its subject matter and a talent for delivering some truly shocking scenes.
The hitman in question is Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, alias “Peter Brown” – a contract killer for a New York crime family who has been placed in witness protection and now works agonizingly brutal graveyard shifts at Manhattan Catholic. At the start of one of these shifts, he finds out a terminal cancer patient not only recognizes him, but has contacted a friend to put the word out in the event of his death. With the patient about to go under the knife, Brnwa has to feverishly find a way to keep him alive – while at the same time dealing with every other demand an understaffed hospital encompasses.
Obviously there's a big difference between the Hippocratic oath and murder for hire, but Bazell does a surprisingly solid job of melding the two. The story, told in first-person present tense, shows how Brnwa's mind processes the situation from a medical standpoint, such as when he downs mugger with brutal efficiency and goes through the anatomy of breaking the elbow. It's a wry, cynical voice reminiscent of Edward Norton's narration in “Fight Club,” and it drives the story on through his narration and a variety of wry footnotes rattling off medical facts and legalese.
Brnwa makes for an interesting character, but it's the hospital he operates in that commands your attention. Bazell, who holds both an MD and an English literature degree, has stocked the book full of details that could only be known by someone operating in the healthcare trenches. Readers will learn how residents function during obscenely long shifts (stimulants procured from drug reps, Milk of Magnesia poured over cold cereal), see just how sexist an oncologist can be in the operating room and how a doctor can tell how old you are at first glance. All of these asides are offered in the same cynical and resigned tone, resembling the narration for “Scrubs” as read by Mel Gibson.
The medical terminology is so well mastered that the mob chapters regularly come up short. There's a fair share of gratuitous violence and commentary on the state of America's legal system, but many of the characters depicted lack the realism and personality of the hospital residents. A few scenes are simply over-the-top even in the book's context and there are also one or two unnecessary plot twists – one in particular involving the background of Pietro's grandparents – that feel like Bazell is reaching for impact.
And reaching isn't something he needs to, as the book is ripe with truly disturbing scenes. Beyond the burnout and apathy of the general hospital staff, Manhattan Catholic is rife with events that require a strong constitution to even witness. Syringes of unidentifiable contents, legs that swell up with blood for unknown reasons and clearly unsanitary surgical equipment all populate the area, and give Brnwa more immediate concerns than mafia shooters. The last few chapters are particularly macabre, with a trapped Brnwa once again falling back on medical school to create the most wincingly painful improvised weapon in literature.
While the book is a bit too eager to set up a sequel – the epilogue chapter is almost ham-handed in presenting plot threads – the majority of the volume is so well done that its continuation is encouraged. “Beat the Reaper” is entertaining and fast-paced, a thinking man's suspense novel with enough of the real world in it to make readers even more uncomfortable about their next visit to the hospital.
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The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs
lesismore9o9, July 21, 2009
While the concept of gonzo journalism is most regularly associated with excessive drug use and acts of mayhem while reporting, the founding ideas are a bit more serious. Hunter S. Thompson defined his creation as the pinnacle of engagement, comparable to “a film director who writes his own script, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action.” The driving principal is that in this deep level of engagement, the author cannot remove himself from the story and as such greater depth can be attained than through straight reporting.From this technical perspective, it’s easy to consider A.J. Jacobs as some form of gonzo practitioner. Jacobs’ writing career regularly involves chronicling a series of social experiments he subjects himself to, ranging from outsourcing his daily life to India to striving for honesty in all cases to studying every last piece of information in an encyclopedia. Not content with these lengths though, he moved from the collected knowledge of man to the collected knowledge of God in his book “The Year of Living Biblically” – and the journey proves to be entertaining and surprisingly poignant.
The book’s title summarizes its intent perfectly: for one year, Jacobs strove to follow the Bible to the letter, ranging from its most basic commandments to the most obscure proverbs. Visibly, this meant donning all-white single-fiber garments and growing a beard resembling the brush outside a haunted house; and behaviorally it meant regular prayer, never lying and giving away 10 percent of his salary. He presents his findings in a journal format, tackling a new issue each day and recording his results.
Of course, the issue with following these rules is that many of them aren’t truly applicable in modern life, and therein lies the real humor of “Living Biblically.” Not eating fruit unless the tree is five years old, not wearing any garments that have more than one fiber, not touching any woman for a week after her period (his wife Julie is not amused) – Jacobs tries to keep to all of these and more, often going to great lengths and annoying those around him. He never betrays any frustration at the limitations, only an increasing curiosity at their origins and how he can work them into his daily life.
The real problem – from his perspective at least – comes up in the variety of instances where the Bible seems to contradict itself, especially when moving from Old to New Testament. A key instance comes in what should be one of the simplest rules, the Sabbath: “A friend of mine once told me that even observing the Sabbath might be breaking the Sabbath, since my job is to follow the Bible. That gave me a two-hour headache.” Jacobs come across as neurotic and yet likable, determined to find an answer no matter what crazy direction it takes him.
Jacobs doesn’t try to work these issues out alone, consulting with a wide variety of scholars and professors to seek interpretations of the Bible and interpretations of those interpretations. He runs the gamut from a sect of snake handlers to openly gay Christian fundamentalists, and even makes a pilgrimage to Israel where he herds sheep and speaks with his “spiritual omnivore” guru Uncle Gil. As with the proverbs he judges none of them beforehand, but simply admires and comments on the strength of their faith.
His neutrality is helped by his own lack of religious background – raised in a secular family and a self-defined agnostic – but as the year goes on he finds that immersion in faith is starting to rub off on him, creating an alter ego dubbed Jacob. Jacob scolds him for paying attention to Rosario Dawson’s sex life, puts olive oil in his hair and pays attention to every little moral choice made during the day. With every prayer or simple “God willing” he inserts into conversation, it’s clear as the book goes on that his journey has changed him, not dramatically but in very subtle ways of thought and appreciation.
At one point in the book, as Jacobs begins to show some frustration at why the Bible can be so contradictory or hard to understand, one of his spiritual advisers offers him a key piece of wisdom: “Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The joy and challenge of life – and the Bible – is figuring things out.” In many ways, “Living Biblically” is defined by this wisdom – a book that confronts hundreds of challenges, and winds up being a joy for the sheer fact that the journey is being undertaken.
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Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley
lesismore9o9, June 15, 2009
Ever since the death of William F. Buckley Jr. in February 2008, his son Christopher appears to have a target painted on his back. Although he chiefly works as a humorist, with satirical government-based novels such as “Supreme Courtship” and “Thank You For Smoking,” a rather vocal group seems to think he is under a moral obligation to preserve the family legacy in the ways they deem appropriate. When he joined the ranks of Republican intellectuals endorsing Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential election, the backlash was so voluminous that he was forced to resign from the very magazine that his father founded and which he still owns one-seventh of.But that excoriation pales in comparison to some of the comments directed at his latest book, “Losing Mum and Pup,” which has been criticized as full of selfish, petty smears against parents who are no longer around to defend themselves. Once again, the reaction is overblown and completely missing the spirit of his actions, as it’s hard to think of a book that feels more like saying a fond farewell. Mixing his trademark wry humor with sentimental honesty, it’s not an insult but a tribute to people who may have been difficult to live with but never impossible to respect or love.
Between April 2007 and February 2008, Buckley suffered the loss of both his parents – a loss whose difficulty was compounded by their public reputations. His father was credited as the founder of modern conservative thought (as well as National Review and “Firing Line” and over 50 books); and his mother was “the chic and stunning” Patricia Taylor Buckley, queen of New York socialites for decades. They were people of immense reputation and charm, and Buckley was their only son – a relationship regularly strained by faith, black humor and intellect.
Buckley traces over these difficult months, from his mother’s deathbed to the final memorial service for his father in Connecticut. He was pushed into a variety of roles, ranging from nursemaid to an often obstinate patient to literary executor to organizer of elaborate memorial services (the book has regular asides on the minutiae of cremation costs and military honors). Along the way we also see how his parents’ loss touched the political world, with vignettes on his father’s close friends from Henry Kissinger to George McGovern.
Detractors will make the claim that Chris Buckley is kicking out the pedestal his parents were placed on, and to some extent this is correct. He does not skimp over his mother’s acid tongue, treating us to uncomfortable dinner scenes where she humiliated her granddaughter’s best friend and refused Ted Kennedy a car (“There are bridges between here and Gstaad”). His father is shown as distant and difficult, not at his son’s sickbed or graduation and reviewing “Boomsday” in a uncomplimentary sentence (“This one didn’t work for me. Sorry”).
But none of these comments really ever comes across as mudslinging, more presenting pieces of what made his parents such a complicated package. As Buckley himself says, “larger-than-life people create larger-than-life dramas,” and he more than counters their dramas with the reasons they were larger than life. Pat Buckley could be cruel but she was also a hostess without peer, backing every one of her husband’s ventures without hesitation (after first trying to talk him out of it) and ripping into anyone who dared to insult her son. And WFB was for all his faults “the world’s coolest mentor,” teaching his son how to navigate by the stars and then pushing his limits by sailing in a borderline-monsoon storm.
And the complaints by the indignant reviewers also gloss over the fact that this is probably Buckley’s best-written book to date. He has publicly stepped away from “channeling” his father’s ghost, but between the brisk precision of the word choice and the speed of composition (he has said he wrote it in 40 days) it’s easy to picture WFB offering a spiritual boost. Opening with an Oscar Wilde quote on losing ones parents (“looks like carelessness”), literacy permeates the text with references on everything from P.G. Wodehouse to Joseph Conrad to the labors of Hercules. His mother’s ghost also makes an appearance with various barbs to break the tension: “Oh, do pull yourself together and stop carrying on in this fashion.”
But it’s in the moments where he realizes his looming orphanhood that “Losing Mum and Pup” takes on a singular power, needing no narrative devices other than straight reaction. He may portray his parents as weak but he is in almost as much pain, seeking to rationalize his own thoughts and leave things on as even a keel as is possible. The instance where he gets the call on his father’s death is painfully immersive, showing a war with instincts and emotions and wondering if he should continue what he was doing before, the taxes: “Maybe if I do them, this won’t have happened.”
If there are conflicting opinions about “Losing Mum and Pup,” they may be justified as Buckley’s own opinions were conflicted – but anyone who despises him for daring to show William and Pat Buckley as flawed is blind to the wash of affection he shows them, and the affection they had for each other. “Losing Mum and Pup” is a beautiful piece of work, funny and touching, giving a view of Buckley’s own coming to terms and the universal pain of saying goodbye to your parents.
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The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life by Andy Raskin
lesismore9o9, May 31, 2009
The odds are better than average that if you have ever been in college, unemployed, lived in a bad apartment or been in any other circumstance that limited your funds, you have eaten at least one bowl of instant ramen in your lifetime. One of the cheapest meals available – costing less than a dollar per serving – instant ramen has inspired hundreds of variant recipes, spread to almost every single country in the world and even inspired its originating country of Japan to rate it as the most important invention of the last century.For all the billions of instant ramen servings that have been consumed, it’s a safe bet that few people have ever considered where it came from, or even realized that one man created it: Momofuku Ando, the founder of Nissin Food Products. Andy Raskin was curious about this fact, and in the process of learning about Ando realized the creation of ramen may hold the secret to putting his life back together. “The Ramen King and I” is his memoir of that journey – a stunningly personal, occasionally funny and regularly appetizing story proving the adage that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
At the time he began learning about Ando, Raskin was in a state of emotional collapse. Unable to maintain a long-term romantic relationship, he had been consistently unfaithful to his girlfriends and suffering in his professional life, compulsively running through Craigslist and AOL personal ads to fill the gaps. After getting into a recovery program, a series of Japanese food-related coincidences led him to use Ando as a sort of guiding figure, eventually taking him all the way to Nissin to attempt to meet the man in person. The journey proves to be not at all what he expected, finding Ando’s life and writings may in fact hold the answer to how he can free himself from a vicious cycle.
The thought of picking a 94-year-old food tycoon as your spiritual guide certainly seems like a strange one, but Raskin – a regular contributor to NPR – cooks the disparate ingredients together well. Rather than explaining the results of his journey immediately and recounting the experience, “Ramen King” goes into the story with much the same spirit he did, a feeling that there was something connected he needed to track down. Readers come to the truth at the same pace he does, presented with all the same cues and ideas he was, and the presented results are as satisfying and stunning as they must have been to Raskin at the time of discovery.
This vagueness makes the book feel somewhat random or rough at the start, but Raskin quickly counters this by letting readers very deeply into his life. The main story is interspersed with his “letters” to Ando (not sent but written as part of his recovery program) along with journal entries during a abstinence “detox” period. The entries are very emotional, showing his flaws with no attempt to hide or justify – a stunning honesty that makes one much more inclined to see if he’s capable of finding redemption.
If his entries on his personal life add feeling to the book, then his discussion of Japanese food and culture adds the flavor. Raskin has lived in Japan several times (a decision almost always based on the women he was seeing), can speak the language and has a keen appreciation for the culture. He discusses the interaction between customer and chef at a sushi restaurant – a relationship as important as the one between the fish and the rice – and locates a legendary ramen restaurant with portions so rich they burst his gallbladder. There is even a bit of literary discussion worked in as he critiques various food-related manga comic books, mixing their storylines with quotes from Ando’s biographies.
And it is all these elements that push Raskin to his final discovery, answering the question that plagues him from San Francisco to Osaka: why did Ando suddenly devote his life to making instant ramen, and why does that matter so much to him? He refuses to answer it until the very last sentence of the book, when he and the reader are ready, and its revelation is as satisfying as slurping the last noodle from the bowl. “The Ramen King and I” is a memoir of rare depth and honesty, a journey embarked on with some misgivings but which makes perfect sense in the end.
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The End of the World Book by Alistair Mccartney
lesismore9o9, May 25, 2009
While the Internet has wreaked its share of havoc on the newspaper and magazine industries, a less prolific casualty of its spread has been the encyclopedia. The format itself is certainly still popular – moreso than ever in fact with the advent of wikis – but hard-copy, multi-volume encyclopedias have essentially been phased out in favor of easily updated online editions. The new format may be more convenient, but it removes the physical feeling of having complete knowledge in front of you, and the youthful belief that you can learn everything from A to Z.It’s this feeling that Alistair McCartney clearly longs for, and pays homage to, in his first novel “The End of the World Book.” Well, “novel” doesn’t quite cover it – it’s a work that’s part memoir, part essay, part collection of poetry, part social commentary and part compendium of knowledge. It’s certainly like no book that has ever been written before, an experiment that may not be for all readers but is certainly to be commended for its scope and creativity.
Like an encyclopedia, “The End of the World Book” is split into 26 alphabetical chapters and filled with entries on historical figures and events, professions and religions, activities and items. Unlike a traditional encyclopedia, however, McCartney’s entries are heavily dependent on his own interests and connections, mixing in the names of loved ones and personal totems. Additionally, none of the entries are presented as straight fact, but rather brief prose where he considers just why it is matters.
McCartney falls on this classification system because to him “when faced with existence, it seemed the only thing to do was to describe and categorize.” A melancholy, almost fatalistic tone permeates the entirety of the book, regularly trying to escape into a dreamlike state where each item cataloged can achieve some sense of permanency. While the writing style comes across as overdone for some entries (“you can always find me in the space halfway between the world and its destruction”), the fact that there are hundreds of topics means readers shift easily to the next and not be turned off by the work.
And it’s truly surprising the amount of things that matter to McCartney and what he can write about. In one letter alone – F for example – entries range from the mortality of fingerfucking to flies cutting their wrists to the Dominican monk Fra Angelico to Marie Antoinette’s taste in furniture. It’s random but creative at the same time, each entry going off in a direction sometimes only tangentially related to its topic. As a result some absurd extensions result, such as comparing the Bronte sisters to Los Angeles cholo gangs or speculating on how Franz Kafka would have written gay pornography.
While the format may not lend itself to a narrative, McCartney manages to tell stories by linking up the various entries, using successive articles on hair and dreams as mini-biographies for his childhood. There are also several recurring items: “Anna Karenina” and Kafka make multiple appearances, as do several almost Burroughsian references to young men and assholes (one particularly entertaining section points out no two are the same and they identify as well as fingerprints).
Ironically, “The End of the World Book” ends up something very hard to classify under one word or even one letter. At various points inspiring and frustrating, and by definition not the sort of book to be read in one sitting, it’s an ambitious work that occasionally gets bogged down in pretension but immediately makes you laugh or think with the next entry. McCartney’s entry on the world itself states he loves “every object and every hairline crack in every object,” and that fascination shines through and makes his book as weighty and interesting as any gold-edged encyclopedia volume.
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Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
lesismore9o9, May 16, 2009
When you look at mainstream television and wade past the slew of reality shows and generic comedies, scripted drama tends to be dominated by two genres. First is the criminal world, represented by epic series like “The Sopranos” or “Law and Order”-style procedurals; and second is the medical field, headed by the “ER” juggernaut and a slew of comedic dramas such as “House” or “Grey's Anatomy.” Both series have their own distinct traits but also share common threads: overly tense environments, a heavy dose of gallows humor and a professional lingo that takes a few episodes to understand.Despite the similarities between and popularity of both genres, the two rarely come together – which is a mistake, if Josh Bazell's first novel “Beat the Reaper” is any indication. A mix of “ER” and “A History of Violence,” casting a hitman in the role of a downtrodden medical resident, “Beat the Reaper” is a book with a distinctive voice, an educated grasp of its subject matter and a talent for delivering some truly shocking scenes.
The hitman in question is Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, alias “Peter Brown” – a contract killer for a New York crime family who has been placed in witness protection and now works agonizingly brutal graveyard shifts at Manhattan Catholic. At the start of one of these shifts, he finds out a terminal cancer patient not only recognizes him, but has contacted a friend to put the word out in the event of his death. With the patient about to go under the knife, Brnwa has to feverishly find a way to keep him alive – while at the same time dealing with every other demand an understaffed hospital encompasses.
Obviously there's a big difference between the Hippocratic oath and murder for hire, but Bazell does a surprisingly solid job of melding the two. The story, told in first-person present tense, shows how Brnwa's mind processes the situation from a medical standpoint, such as when he downs mugger with brutal efficiency and goes through the anatomy of breaking the elbow. It's a wry, cynical voice reminiscent of Edward Norton's narration in “Fight Club,” and it drives the story on through his narration and a variety of wry footnotes rattling off medical facts and legalese.
Brnwa makes for an interesting character, but it's the hospital he operates in that commands your attention. Bazell, who holds both an MD and an English literature degree, has stocked the book full of details that could only be known by someone operating in the healthcare trenches. Readers will learn how residents function during obscenely long shifts (stimulants procured from drug reps, Milk of Magnesia poured over cold cereal), see just how sexist an oncologist can be in the operating room and how a doctor can tell how old you are at first glance. All of these asides are offered in the same cynical and resigned tone, resembling the narration for “Scrubs” as read by Mel Gibson.
The medical terminology is so well mastered that the mob chapters regularly come up short. There's a fair share of gratuitous violence and commentary on the state of America's legal system, but many of the characters depicted lack the realism and personality of the hospital residents. A few scenes are simply over-the-top even in the book's context and there are also one or two unnecessary plot twists – one in particular involving the background of Pietro's grandparents – that feel like Bazell is reaching for impact.
And reaching isn't something he needs to, as the book is ripe with truly disturbing scenes. Beyond the burnout and apathy of the general hospital staff, Manhattan Catholic is rife with events that require a strong constitution to even witness. Syringes of unidentifiable contents, legs that swell up with blood for unknown reasons and clearly unsanitary surgical equipment all populate the area, and give Brnwa more immediate concerns than mafia shooters. The last few chapters are particularly macabre, with a trapped Brnwa once again falling back on medical school to create the most wincingly painful improvised weapon in literature.
While the book is a bit too eager to set up a sequel – the epilogue chapter is almost ham-handed in presenting plot threads – the majority of the volume is so well done that its continuation is encouraged. “Beat the Reaper” is entertaining and fast-paced, a thinking man's suspense novel with enough of the real world in it to make readers even more uncomfortable about their next visit to the hospital.
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