Cart
|
|
my account
|
wish list
|
help
|
800-878-7323
Hello, |
Login
MENU
Browse
New Arrivals
Bestsellers
Featured Preorders
Award Winners
Audio Books
See All Subjects
Used
Staff Picks
Staff Picks
Picks of the Month
Bookseller Displays
50 Books for 50 Years
25 Best 21st Century Sci-Fi & Fantasy
25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
25 Books From the 21st Century
25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
25 Women to Read Before You Die
25 Books to Read Before You Die
Gifts
Gift Cards & eGift Cards
Powell's Souvenirs
Journals and Notebooks
socks
Games
Sell Books
Blog
Events
Find A Store
Don't Miss
Creatives on Creating Sale
Spotlight Sale
Picture Book Sale
Powell's Author Events
Oregon Battle of the Books
Audio Books
Get the Powell's newsletter
Visit Our Stores
Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
(0 comment)
Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
Read More
»
Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
(0 comment)
Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
(0 comment)
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
##LOC[Cancel]##
Customer Comments
reader richard has commented on (27) products
View from Lazy Point A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
by
Carl Safina
reader richard
, February 24, 2011
The Book Report: Carl Safina is an August Personage. He's a Guggenheim Fellow. He's a MacArthur Fellow. He's won at least two awards for literary merit in writing about science. He founded Blue Ocean Institute. He's been on the teevee, too! PBS, even Nightline! Here he chronicles the full twelve months of his year of environmental activism and study for our delectation and enlightenment. My Review: I am not delectated and not particularly enlightened, and if I didn't owe a review to the publisher, I'd just quietly pass this dull, overwritten snoozefest to someone who's never read Silent Spring and therefore has no basis for comparison re: quality advocacy writing with a personal touch. A note to editors: Capitalizing Species Names Is Like Having Your Eyelashes Plucked. It Starts Out Annoying But Ends Up Inducing Homicidal Feelings Towards The Perpetrator. A cedar waxwing is a cedar waxwing, not A Cedar Waxwing.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 3 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Duck: An Outer Banks Village
by
Judith D. Mercier
reader richard
, February 24, 2011
The Book Report: Academic and writer Mercier finds paradise on the Outer Banks in the form of Duck, NC, a dinky little dune burg between the mighty Atlantic and the estuarine remnants of a bay that got cut off from the sea by the inevitable actions of time and tide. She then sets about excavating as much as she can of town history, both black and white, to preserve and present the face of change in a sad little elegy to the Good Old Days. My Review: I am uncomfortable with made-up conversations in this sort of book. An entire chapter on the largely unchronicled life of Duck's black folks contains imagined dialogue that makes me squirm. It's condescending, and I don't think for an instant that it's what they said, and why in the hell didn't the lady stick to facts and let the cutesy impulse go? She could, and maybe should, write a novel about the life of the couple she places at the center of the black world of Duck. Better still, let someone more ept do it. But don't lard it in to the "growth has prices, always has and always will" book that you've got here, Dr. Mercier. It detracts from the real merits of the book as it is, and it isn't your forte, quite frankly. It's not really recommended by me for that reason, unless you're a fanatical enthusiast for the Outer Banks. (Guilty.)
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Murder On The Leviathan
by
Boris Akunin
reader richard
, February 02, 2011
Diverting entry in an ongoing series. Erast Fandorin is a charming, nineteenth-century Russian James Bond if he was fathered by Nero Wolfe sleuth trapped on board a huge new luxury liner with a greedy, murderous genius who is after the world's greatest hoard of gemstones. People die right and left as the sleuth, ineptly assisted by seemingly every passenger assigned to eat in his dining room, closes in on the inevitable identification of the killer/fortune hunter. Much entertaining diversion available, though the novice to the series can pick this volume up and start right here with no fear of missing a step. Akunin is a master of the enriching aside, the grace note that adds a little something to the series' fans' pleasure, but isn't required for the newcomer to understand to get the full impact of the story or the characters. Genially recommended.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Turkish Gambit An Erast Fandorin Mystery
by
Boris Akunin
reader richard
, January 25, 2011
The Book Report: Erast Petrovich Fandorin, titular counsellor of the Tsar's Special Branch (secret police, ugh), finds himself in the thick of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. In a manner very like that of a skinny, stammering love-child of James Bond and Nero Wolfe, Fandorin arranges things so that the party responsible for the sudden and inglorious halt of victorious Russian armies to Constantinople, long the most urgent desire of Imperial Russian froeign policy, comes inevitably to light. His newly minted assistant, the silly and delightfully idealistic Varvara Andreevna Suvorova, takes the center stage for much of this wild, careening caper; a good choice for misdirecting attention, that, and yet the author *scrupulously* plays fair and puts all the clues before the reader...yet Varya's goosey honkings about irrelevancies and her young woman of middling class and wealth scruples, presented with great and genuine affection by the author, do screen the actual malefactor's malefactions quite neatly. One scene, a sword-fight, is particularly nicely handled; Varya's emotions of fear, disgust, and slightly tickled vanity (it's over her honor the parties fight) are so believable that it's hard to imagine the author hasn't had the same thing happen to him. (I doubt much that it has, though.) Quite a wonderful piece of writing (and translation), and not the only one. My Review: All hail friends with reading addictions! My friend's praise tipped the scales for me, causing me to get these books. I don't regret this, though I am sorry that I waited so long. Still, that means I've got a lot of time before I run out of them! There are over ten in the series so far. Very high-quality escapism, written and translated very ably, and presented in a point-of-view that's different enough to make the well-worn genre of lone wolf solves problems for Big Government, and then runs away from the limelight, feel fresh and new. Recommended to all who have a yen for solving puzzles...I didn't figure this one out until halfway through!
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
The New Face of Small-Town America: Snapshots of Latino Life in Allentown, Pennsylvania
by
Edgar Sandoval
reader richard
, January 18, 2011
The Book Report: A series of newspaper columns written by a Mexican man hired to cover the largely Caribbean Latino population of the Lehigh Valley, this book offers a charming, if choppy and repetitious, insight into the new majority of American cities, the Latinos. Sandoval was hired by the (Anglophone) owners of the Allentown Daily Call to report on the 25% of the local population that the paper was simply missing. Typically, they hired someone from Mexico! These are *not* the same culture, not even a little bit, and the local Puertoriquenos and Nuyoricans and Dominicans were a little bit wary of the furrin dude with the wild-assed accent. He won them over by dint of his reportorial chops, his charm, and the way he could blend into the woodwork or the crowd, depending on the situational need. The organizational thread of the book is...well...not very organized. It's all over the town, even the Valley. But it's a collection of newspaper pieces! It's NOT A NARRATIVE, so don't read it as such and you'll find it ever so much easier to enjoy. The book is intended by the author and the publisher to provide an Anglophone audience with a short entree into Latino life and community thought. This goal should be froemost in any reader's thoughts to make the book a successful reading experience. My Review: Well, Mr, Sandoval and I hail from the same part of the world: Nine miles from Mexico, on the Texas/Nuevo Leon border. He's quite a lot younger than I am, but he was a reporter for The Monitor, the Rio Grande Valley's newspaper of record, so I betcha we know people in common: The longtime mayor of McAllen, Othal Brand, is a cousin of mine, and lots of the staffers at the paper know my brother from his years reporting there. So I started this book with a lot of points given to the writer for commonality of experience. In the end, that is what gave me the reason to give the man 3.75 stars. Really and truly, the book isn't all that; not because Sandoval is deficient as a writer, but because the origin of the stories is a newspaper. There isn't any problem with that, basically, but it really doesn't make for a deep and hearty stew of a read, rather a tasty, lightly buttered toast-point with a decent pate on it. Not bad at all! Just not something I'll charge about demanding others read instanter. But do look into it if you're one of the many, many anti-immigrant idiots infecting the body politic. This is the story of your own ancestors, unless you're 100% Native American.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Popular Hits of the Showa Era
by
Ryu Murakami
reader richard
, December 21, 2010
The Book Report: Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully sociopathic young twentysomething men find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses. Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully ugly and unloving, unloved thirtysomething women find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses. One day, one of the men decides, after a horrible sleepless night, to kill one of the women. Thus begins a kind of grisly tontine scheme of murder and reprisal that ends in the death of an entire Tokyo suburb. My Review: Ick. I feel defiled. There is nothing believable about this book, thank goodness, because if there *was* I would be forced to sharpen my longest knife and go out randomly slitting the throats of passers-by. Ryu Murakami, it would seem, is the Dennis Cooper of the Japanese literary scene, exploring the revolting images that modern Japanese society casts in the funhouse mirror. He's won a boatload of prizes for doing this. All I can think is, Japanese society being so buttoned up and tightly controlled, this kind of transgressive hooliganism carries more of a shock-and-awe sensation than it does in our American laissez-faire emotional environment. All it does for me is make me feel like I've spent several hours with the most absurdly overacting players of overwritten parts in an overwrought melodrama that, while effectively satirizing the anomie and autarky of armed camps that constitute modern societies, loses a lot of its force and impact to sheer overexuberance. Thank goodness it's short. Fifty more pages and I'd have to mail-bomb the publisher's offices.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Matterhorn A Novel of the Vietnam War
by
Karl Marlantes
reader richard
, November 30, 2010
The Book Report: Waino Mellas, newly minted Marine infantry lieutenant, arrives in the tender embrace of Bravo Company a scared, green, awkward, scared, stupid, scared kid and, after a huge amount of pain, loss, and hellish enraging waste of life and liberty, becomes a man. No, really. My Review: Marlantes was a Marine in Vietnam. He took thirty years...longer than most of this planet's people have been alive...to bring forth this horrifying, harrowing, agonizing artwork. I expect we will not see another book from him, or if we do, it will be so radically different from this one as to be unrecognizable as created in the same brain. The pain and the horror are obviously not going to let him go. He's exorcised them as best a man can in writing this book. But I don't feel a sense of relief at the end of this book. I don't finish up when he stops writing. I think that's because the experience of reading this book is so shattering. OBVIOUSLY! OBVIOUSLY!! it's no smallest patch on actually living this book, but it's a rare experience to read something so complete, so clearly delineated in its scope and its prupose, and that has power...ask a demolitions person about the power of an explosion contained in a box...but more than that, it has purpose. I don't know Marlantes. I don't know that I want to. I know enough about him after reading this book to hate the idea of sending kids across oceans to kill other human beings before I think they're even ready to *love* other human beings, because so many of them won't live to become the man he has. I hate that fact so much that I hurt inside. I want to scream and cry and rage and mourn and weep with the mothers and fathers whose souls are now scarred and deformed by the pain of losing a child. It won't help, they're launched on a horrible personal journey, but GODDAM IT they're people whose lives changed forever because of some stupid slogan like "national interest." Ahem. The book. So, what has Marlantes wrought? A long, hard journey of a book that millions will read some of, and back away scared...be one of the few who go the distance, and you will never, ever forget the journey or the guide. Worth it.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Waitress Was New
by
Dominique Fabre
reader richard
, November 29, 2010
The Book Report: Over the course of three days, fifty-six-year-old barman Pierre's life at Le Cercle cafe goes from six-year-long trudge towards retirement to unemployment as his creep of a midlife-crisis-ridden boss apparently abandons wife and business for the arms of a younger woman. Said wife even sends Pierre looking for her husband in all the usual suspects' haunts. Pierre, faithful to his own code of honor, does his best to make the situation work by hunting boss-man down, but comes up empty and reports failure; this is followed by the boss-lady's decision to close the cafe. Temporarily, she says, while she finds her husband and sorts things out. Pierre, lacking other commitments and entanglements in his life, watches over the bar, lets the food and liquor delivery people in, wipes his spotless bar down, and watches his regulars drink and eat at La Rotonde, the competing bar across the square. At the end of a week of this useless work, plus the more useful work of getting his pension paperwork in order (four and a half years to go until the full ride is achieved), Pierre gets the call: The boss and wife are in Saint-Malo, starting afresh, and they've agreed to sell Le Cercle to someone else. The staff will be paid to the end of the month, and goodbye. So what does Pierre do? He opens up. He serves the regulars, the staff, all comers, on the house. Why not? He's been screwed out of a safe and secure position, one he does well, and so why not do it one last time? Then he goes home. And because he can't think of anything else to do, he goes to bed. Fin. My Review: How wonderful to read a book like this, short and to the point, one that allows me the reader to discover what kind of person the narrator/PoV character is without being spoon-fed opinions by a mistrustful author. How interesting to be a fly on the wall behind the bar looking on as a business, a thriving one, loses its anchor and spins out of control. How pleasurable to see that not all the occupants of this anchorless business flee like rats from a sinking ship; the staunchness of the narrator is made up from equal parts honor and lack of imagination, which he sort of vaguely realizes. And how very ordinary a man he is: Old enough to have weathered midlife, too young to view retirement with equanimity, still alive enough to notice the lack of a love in his life, and yet not vital enough to break the deadhanded grip of his difficult past (adopted at ten by the woman he still thinks of as his mother, dead these 12 years) and participate fully in the emotional life of the world. In short, there are millions of him walking around, a part of one small segment of the world yet apart from all the main channels of life. The new waitress of the title replaced the waitress that the boss was having an affair with for two and more years. She started on Monday, and by Wednesday the cafe had closed. She lived in the farthest reaches of Paris, traveled over an hour to get to the job, and she was already tired of the job. Pierre reports these facts, he comments on them only in the briefest passages, but the reader feels, thanks to deft authorial choices made by the translator, the whole history of Pierre's life in the short transit of the new girl: He's always in transit, is Pierre, always looking at the ground he's standing on, waiting for it to root him, when he can't imagine how he should send down his own roots. What a joy it was to read this book. Please, do the same for yourself, and revel in the short moment of being treated to a close look at someone more like you than is probably comfortable to view, and at the same time as the adult you certainly are at this point in your reading life.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(2 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford
by
Leslie Brody
reader richard
, November 23, 2010
The Book Report: A chronological retelling of the strange life and exciting times of America's finest 20th-century muckraker, from her aristocratic Fascist upbringing to her time in the Communist Party USA, then her years of fame and glory after writing The American Way of Death, her most lasting contribution to literature. Her heartbreaking family life is presented with as many warts as can be expected; her relationships with her equally famous sisters Nancy Mitford, Lady Diana Mosley, Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire, and Unity Mitford the Nazi are discussed in some detail; her husbands and her children are woven through the story, perhaps less so than her birth family. My Review: Flat. Lacking fizz. Champagne the next day. It felt to me like the book was the proposal for the book and not the whole enchilada. Taking on a larger-than-life personality like Mitford is always challenging. She's not a person whose dimensions are easy to grasp! This daughter of privilege was unquestionably sincere in her rejection of the world she was born into, and she was completely consistent in making her anger and disdain at the family she left behind clear. (I relate.) But a biographer who dedicates a mere 344pp to this Force of Nature risks reporting the facts but leaving the feelings behind. I felt that it was too short, so the book was frustrating...I want to know more about *her* and yet I can't imagine a book more thorough than this one is factually. So what happened? Jessica took the place of Decca (her family nickname)? Mmmaybeee...but no, not entirely. What I think happened is, the balance between Decca and Jessica shifts dramatically after Mitford's first husband Esmond Romilly dies in 1942. We get more Jessica and less Decca. And it ends up not being a satisfying trade-off. So should you read this fact-stuffed tale of one of life's hellions, a scamp and an imp from the get-go? Yes. She's interesting enough to make familiarity with her life an overall good thing. But don't come in expecting your notions (if you had any) about her to change, they won't. She'll still appeal to you or not based on the well-known and hand-crafted image of a rebel and a scalawag already known.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Chess Story
by
Stefan Zweig
reader richard
, November 18, 2010
The Book Report: Lumpenproletarian chess prodigy Czentovic, a boorish and unsympathetic figure, meets noble Jewish Dr. B. on a cruise. The good doctor is escaping the Nazis after a horrific torture-by-isolation. Czentovic is off to new triumphs as the world's greatest living chess master. Dr. B. survived his horrible isolation by reading and re-reading and memorizing and repeatedly playing in his mind great chess games from a book he stole from one of his torturers. The stage is set...the grisly Grand Master meets the gruesomely treated noble spirit in a chess battle for the ages, and is defeated. The doctor retires from the scene, completely unmanned by reliving his horrible confinement through his victory over the taciturn, unintelligent idiot savant Czentovic. My Review: Zweig committed suicide after completing this book. I see why. It's the least optimistic, most hopeless, depressing, and horrifyingly bleak thing I've read in years. Four hankies won't do to stanch the helpless, hopeless weeping induced by reading the book, and a pistol is too heavy to hold in fingers gone too numb to clench even slightly. It's one long flashback. The "action" of the chess match takes on an almost lurid and pornographic tinge after the grim tale Dr. B. tells of his time with the Nazis. It's dreadful. It's downbeat. It stinks of freshly-opened coffins and crematory ovens. If there is a redeeming value in having read it, it's that one need never, ever, ever touch it again, and I ASSURE you I will not.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(2 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Burning Secret
by
Stefan Zweig
reader richard
, November 14, 2010
The Book Report: Wet, drippy little Edgar, his bored, would-be glam mama Mathilde, and the louche horndog Count Otto meet in an Austrian mountain resort. Otto takes a fancy to Mathilde, since she's a visibly bored Jewess of a certain age. He decides he'll lay siege to her virtue via befriending little larva Edgar, who mistakes his overtures for real friendship because it's never occurred to him that adults lie, cheat, and steal in pursuit of sex. After revolting Count Otto thinks he's about to achieve the leg-over, he drops Edgar, and his troubles begin. Hell hath no fury, apparently, like a barely pubescent boy disappointed in love. What this nasty little child dreams up to do to the perfidious, selfish adults is really quite impressive! In the end, his life is completely changed, and one rather trembles at the path his future will take...*cue Horst Wessel*.... My Review: Peopled with deeply dislikable characters, and set in an anonymous vacation destination with no sense of permanence, it's a little hard to invest in the dramatis personae for a goodly stretch of time. I don't think I ever really did all the way. I don't care at all about anyone here, in that if each of them had fallen off an Alp I would've pursed my lips, tutted, and gone about my day. But the story is a very involving one, paradoxically, because the nature of love comes in for a pretty thorough and fairly damning examination, one that would have seemed very risky for Jewish Zweig to conduct so openly in 1913, the year it was published. The love of mother for son, of son for mother, and mother for sex is explicitly explored. The love of any one of these people for anything is revealed in all its unglory as deeply selfish and terribly destructive, as my cynical heart believes love always to be. (Want to screw up a friendship? Fall in love with your friend! *bang* goes any hope of remaining on good terms...but I digress.) A movie version of this novella, starring Faye Dunaway, appeared about 25 years ago. It wasn't very good. I am amazed at that, since Zweig's writing is so clear and simple that I'd think it was a shoo-in to have excellent dialogue come out of the characters' mouths. C'est la vie, as conventionally Francophile Mathilde would say...doubtless in a heavy Viennese accent. So, okay, the point is: Recommended to Zweigers, cynics, and those with pubescent boys at home. Romantics, leave on shelf. "Life is Beautiful" and "La Traviata" fans, turn your backs upon. Multi-eyed, part-alien cyborgs, read and learn...this is what humans are *really* like, and it's not a terribly pretty picture.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Novel Bookstore
by
Laurence Cosse, Alison Anderson
reader richard
, November 09, 2010
The Book Report: Well, okay, see, this is a French novel, and it's really, really hard for a Murrikin like me to disentangle what French novels are about, like what the author set out to do, because the French don't really have the same rules we Murrikins do for novel-writing. It seems to be about two people, a rich, smart woman and a poor, smart man, who sorta kinda fall in love in a way and yet they don't because she's married to a major Philistine a-hole and he's in love, for some unfathomable reason, with this dreary little chickie half his age who seems drippy, useless, and uninteresting to *me* and, I suspect, to the rich lady too. So the rich lady does what rich people do best and unbelts with a big pile of gelt for the poor-but-smart dude to start this bookstore that will sell only novels, and only the best, the finest, the most ut of the lit'ry output of the planet, chosen by eight of the best (French) writers now writing. Hijinks ensue, which are frankly completely incredible (in its literal sense), but are lots of fun. What this book is *not* is any species of thriller or mystery; it's a French novel. That's what it is. No more, no less, no different. So, in the end, the Philistine husband and the poor-but-smart dude part ways but the store must go on, and the book's narrator is revealed, though I have to say it's not a huge surprise, though I think it's intended that way. The end, happily ever after but sadder and wiser. My Review: I gave the book a generous 4.1 stars because it's one of those books that, while reading, goes wildly up and down the star scale; but in the end, cover closed, glasses chewed upon, assumes a different shape than the one that the reading process creates. I'd recommend this book to all and sundry if only because of this passage, beautifully translated by the very talented Alison Anderson, on page 150 of the Europa edition: "Literature is a source of pleasure...it is one of the rare inexhaustible joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be dissociated from reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction. Every subtlety in life is material for a book....Have you noticed...that I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder: What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who will say no, literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature informs, instructs, it prepares you for life." If that passage rings you like the bell you wondered if you might be, then this book will speak to you and shape you a bit differently than you were before; if it seems tediously long, avoid this book like it's got herpes, because you'll hate it. *gooonnnggg* goes my spirit.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Blind Contessas New Machine
by
Carey Wallace
reader richard
, November 02, 2010
The Book Report: On the eve of her wedding to the most eligible, handsomest bachelor in her small world, Contessa Carolina Fantoni announces to him that she is going blind. He laughs dismissively, kisses her indulgently, thus setting the tone for their entire relationship. After full blindness sets in, her eccentric childhood friend and neighbor, an eccentric married inventor and amateur scientist, creates for her the world's first typewriter, that she may continue to communicate with the outside world. And thus the passionate affair begins, one that would, if either had let it, have destroyed two marriages and possibly four lives. That, in the end, the two people remain married to spouses less than perfect is hardly a new plot or a shocking denoument. But in its bittersweet presentation, it's clear that the author understands the losses of compromise and accommodation that relationships demand of us. My Review: I am mortally afraid of only a few things in this life: 1) Blindness; 2) being eaten by a shark; and 3) suffocating/drowning. My mother went blind a year or more before she died, and it was a torture. She read passionately, and suddenly couldn't; she was never able to adapt to audiobooks. This rings me like a bell, a tocsin of terror that has me sweating and crying as I type this on a c-o-l-d night. And this book's careful, polished prose made that horrific nightmare (literally for me, at least once a year) endurable, survivable, where in less skilled hands I would simply have burned the book and paid the library for it. How she did this is, she presented the onset and completion of the process in a series of vignettes that define what it is to see, and to judge the world on what is seen; Wallace makes that process so arbitrary, so essentially meaningless, that as the Contessa charts her progress into eternal night, she and the reader understand that vision as primary perception is a habit of mind. The Contessa plumbs the darkness fearlessly. She lives in it, after she accepts its permanence, with more grace than she appeared to muster during her sighted years. It's quite a lovely achievement, and it's told in lovely sentences. Wallace, whose author photo rather distressingly resembles a high-school senior picture, had an excellent editor, and handed that editor a lovely book to begin with, you can be sure. This sort of prose doesn't get forged into being on an editor's anvil, it gets the spurs and cracks annealed out of it. Something of the book's raw state remains, thank goodness, because there are some places where opportunities are missed and others are simply AWOL where they would have been welcome. Why thank goodness? Because if this effort were to be perfect, I'd have to hunt this youngster down and kill her in furious writerly envy, that's why. And I don't want to go to jail over a book.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Home, Away
by
Jeff Gillenkirk
reader richard
, August 14, 2010
It's taken me *weeks* to calm down enough to write a review of this book that didn't amount to a woman-hating scream of fury at the stupidity and unfairness of a court system and a culture that privileges mothers to the exclusion of fathers. So I don't intend to say a single word about that hugely important part of this novel. I can't be objective in the least on the topic. I limit myself to the broad observation that this is a much needed corrective to the man-bad, woman-good writing that infests family fiction like maggots infest a dead cat. I can tell you that novels about baseball are seldom so deeply satisfying...a man who pursues his dream to become a major league pitcher, gives it up several times to be a father to his son, screws *everything* up and crawls into a bottle to stop the hurting, and then, and then--well, then a dream beyond dreaming comes true, and it's so wonderfully imagined and so movingly presented that I read the ending three times and cried each one of them. I doubt a large number of women will read this book because it's so very honest about them, and who wants to read about *that, right? And it's got LOTS of baseball in it. That's too bad, really. But it is what it is. I am very, very glad Mr. Gillenkirk wrote this book. I truly treasured it. I hope other divorced men, baseball fans, and frustrated fathers will find it.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Bucolic Plague How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers An Unconventional Memoir
by
Josh Kilmer Purcell
reader richard
, August 13, 2010
Review: 53 of seventy-five Title: THE BUCOLIC PLAGUE Author: JOSH KILMER-PURCELL Rating: 4.3* of five Oh no you don't! No sighing, sneaking past this review, and saying how good it is! Sit there and READ this. Josh and Brent, two of the most annoying perfectionist queens Manhattan has ever sucked into its lapidary drum of the effete, are bare-naked and warty as all get-out in this hilarious, touching, brutally honest memoir by the tall one. (Josh.) And he memoirs the way it feels to be human, alive, selfish and self-absorbed and sweet and lovable better than most. He's honest about how hard it is to work like a (highly paid) slave so you can have a dream come true. Then, as so many before him have, he wonders when in the HELL he's going to have time to enjoy the said dream. Then there's the short one. (Brent.) He isn't writing the book, so of course he doesn't get all the best lines. Just most of them. He's the alpha perfectionist of the pair...good gravy, he worked for MARTHA STEWART!...and he decides, on hearing the tall one articulate his dream to live in their fantabulously gorgeous mansionfarm full time, that He Will Make This Happen. Because he loves, so much, the tall one. The scene in the book where they have that conversation, about why they'd have to give the place up in the rancid economy of 2008, made me cry. What they wanted, what their dreams hung on, *pffft* because the rotten shits on Wall Street wanted morebiggerfatter bonuses. Now these two aren't guiltless little cogs in the Murrikin Machine, mind. They were both in the sizzle biz, taking home oodles of the spondulix selling people an unattainable dream's unattainable health goals for old farts (the short one) and unnecessary, overpriced goods and services (the tall one). But they made so much more out of their lives...they worked hard, they deserved their success...than the standard script for rural gay boys reads. And then they found, accidentally and because the tall one is a lousy navigator, the perfect place to turn their well-honed swordsmanship skills at these useless pursuits into the plowshares of a real, and really funny, and very satisfying life. Their website makes me drool. (Not over them, keep your minds out of the gutter.) The farm, the recipes, the products, the involving and addictive blogs, and of course Polka Spot the llama are tremendous pleasures. Their TV show, "The Fabulous Beekman Boys", is a gem and it's worth seeking out on Planet Green, the little bitty Discovery Networks offshoot they run on. This is "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" for the 21st century. Buy it, read it, and heavenly days, recommend it to your friends! The boys need money! Farmer John's goats don't eat air, and that hip replacement wasn't free, and the boys have aging parents who'll need to come live with them soon enough. Think of the scuff marks. Poor short one. (Brent.)
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Lester Higata's 20th Century
by
Barbara Hamby
reader richard
, August 04, 2010
Not every author has the fortitude to start a collection of stories with a story about the death of the title character. Hamby is to be applauded for this, it's gutsy! It isn't extremely successful, though, beacuse the unspooling of Lester Higata's life from 1946 to 1999 is unevenly presented and unevenly edited, as quite some several of these stories appeared in other venues before being collected here. The very best story, the chef d'ouevre, is the delightful, fresh, energetic story of Lester's last day: "Lester Higata's String Theory Paradise." Waking up to a conversation with your dead father, one in which he bashes your equally dead Gorgon of a mother, is a pretty good clue that the rest of the day isn't going to be normal. And it is, oddly, very normal in its events and yet Lester's certainty that this is his last day on Earth manages to make all its events sharp and clear and dear to him. It's an excellent story. It's no surprise to me that this story appeared in TriQuarterly and was edited by the superb, talented, and very accomplished Susan Hahn. She impressed me mightily in our one professional contact, when she bought a story from one of my then-clients in my former life as an agent. Well, I said the collection was uneven...and the next story, "Iniki Chicken", is proof of this. In and of itself, it's not a bad little piece, but it needed a pruning before being put in the show. It appeared in Southwestern Review, which magazine has a decent reputation, but the piece has an overwordy quality that detracts from Hamby's clean and simple message: "Looking at all the people gathered around the table, I wondered how so many different faces could be made in the image of one God? Maybe the Hawaiians were right, and there were many gods: {there follows a list of four gods and their areas of expertise, taking up a long paragraph}...But if there was only one God what could he possibly be like?..." A taut meditation on the nature of spiritual belief and its relationship to human interaction becomes a comparative religion lecture, and loses force and clarity. SO frustrating! The strong stories outnumber the weak ones, fortunately: "Mr. Manago's Mango Trees" is bleak, but wryly witty; "Lani Dances the Zombie Hula in LA" is a spare, cold-eyed flensing of the way promise gets transmogrified into failure and misery; "Sayonara, Mrs. Higata" pitilessly shows the too-late-ness of deathbed regrets, and the hollow-yet-shining face of Duty's Daughters; and "Lester Higata in Love" is heartbreakingly tender and beautifully rendered, its landscape of love's losses and joys as mountainous as O'ahu itself. The University of Iowa press sent this ARC to me as part of the Early Reviewers program. It's a pleasure to be able to recommend the collection to any reader even slightly interested in the geography of love.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer
by
Mari Sangiovanni
reader richard
, June 29, 2010
Oh hell. Here I've got an interesting wife and an adorable boyfriend, and I've gone and fallen in love with a lesbian. Well, can you blame me? This particular lesbian, author of the tome named above, has a wicked sense of humor and a snarky eye for characters and a good sense of timing. She's written, in this her first novel, a laugh-out-loud funny slamming-doors sex farce set in an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica. I mean, really, go fight those odds! I'd fall in love with *Rush Limbaugh* under those circumstances! (No I wouldn't, not a chance, but it's a good line so I used it anyway.) Marie, our heroine, is in a miserable dead-end relationship with the once-gorgeous-to-her Jessica, a cold, cheating slime. Then one fine morning, Marie wakes up rich, with a legacy of $21 million - the ENTIRE ESTATE! - from her mean, evil grandmother, whose respect for Marie's honest dislike of her has paid off. Marie's extended Italian-American family, predictably, goes into hyperdrive debating the use that they will make of (Marie's, and Marie's alone) money. This gets old, so she buggers off to Los Angeles to throw herself at actress Lorn Elaine, hoping to convince the said actress to be in the movie she's written. This fails spectacularly, and Marie slinks off to Jamaica with her entire clan, both to salve her screenwriterly wounds and to announce her decision about the division of the money. That was left to HER, mind. So who shows up at the selfsame all-inclusive resort? C'mon, guess! Oh, all right...Lorn Elaine! With her mother in tow! It's now that the doors begin slamming, the sex (some pretty sticky stuff there!) begins not happening, and the entire cast runs around at warp speed trying to keep secrets and ending up telling lies. If you're unsatisfied by the ending of this book, you're a prune-faced old moralizing killjoy. As for the humor quotient...well, the author's email is
[email protected]
. Go on, say it out loud. I'll wait. Now, if that didn't make you laugh, don't read this book. Read one on how to get a sense of humor.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
This Book Is Overdue How Librarians & Cybrarians Can Save Us All
by
Marilyn Johnson
reader richard
, June 24, 2010
One full star off for snarky reference to avoiding dog ownership and absence of similar judgment on cat-ownership's insanity. I thoroughly enjoyed (most of) this book. It's true that I'm a recent re-convert to library usage, after many years of avoiding them because of one old prune-faced, pursey-lipped hag's humiliation of me: She wouldn't let twelve-year-old me check out Stranger in a Strange Land "because it has S-E-X in it" until my mother approved. Mama's rejoinder to that was, "Honey, so does life. If you're lucky." (Actually, she was middle-aged, plump, and wore a HUGE cross around her neck...when she was done with her mischief, I made my mother laugh by saying, "too bad it wasn't the crown of thorns.") But the many and various challenges that libraries face are completely transparent to the public that uses them. We just expect that they'll keep on being there, checking books out to us, providing online resources for our kids and grandkids, being waystations for us when our own Internet connections go down or whatever. We're not fond of paying for the libraries, either, as demonstrated by the readiness of governments of all sizes to cut their acquisition, staffing, maintenance budgets to the bone and beyond, to the point of amputation. Fortunately, The Librarian is a resolute and resilient subspecies of Homo "sapiens", and has cleverly disguised itself in some very odd places...Google "Second Life" sometime and go for a walk on the Weird Side! Lots of librarians talked to author Johnson, and told her tales of woe; but she heard paeans of praise and odes to joy, too, and reports each and all of these classes of utterance with clarity and asperity. Libraries and librarians have moved onto the World Wide Web with verve and enthusiasm...but back in RL, things aren't so rosy. The New York Public Library's iconic building at Forty-second and Fifth will, for the first time in forty years, house a circulating library. It comes at the cost of the Asian and Russian collections, but what the hell...the money from redeveloping the Mid-Manhattan Branch's site into yet another hotel will do some good, too, right? But...and this is where I get madder than hell...can any amount of material gain make up for the loss to the culture of the world that two collections of rare, irreplaceable material objects (the papers of the Tsarist government! the contents of a monastery's library!) properly curated and indexed represent? I presume the fact that I bother to phrase the question tells you what MY answer is. I said in another review that "{h}istory is the beautiful, brightly lit foam on top of the annihilating tsunami of the unrecorded past. History books are the spectrographic analysis of the light glinting off that foam." Yes, but I left out a key component: Without a library to house, organize, cross-reference, FIND that book, what good does the damned thing do? Support your local library in a PRACTICAL way. And go hug a librarian.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment
Date with a Sheesha
by
Anthony Bidulka
reader richard
, June 08, 2010
I truly do not know how I will fill the next year or so of my life, waiting for book eight in the Russell Quant, Prairie PI, series. It bodes ill that I am already casting feverishly about for possible plot lines that mend the hideous damage done to my beloved Russell in this book. I'm the sort of a boy whose brain needs chew-toys, as my younger brother said once, or it turns on the furniture and tears the place up. I really loved Aloha, Candy Hearts, and felt that the decidedly substandard Sundowner Ubuntu was partially made up for with the new installment's spiffy pace and beautiful ending. I approached the newest book with a high heart and buoyant hopes. And then Bidulka goes and exceeds them. Bar none, this is the best book in the series. The mystery is far and away the most accomplished and polished, pulling a suspect switcheroo successfully twice and marginally once. The ending, in fact the last three chapters, are so exciting I was pacing the floor as I read them. (The dog was most confused, poor little love, pacing along with me, looking worried at my exclamations of surprise and excitement.) The story picks up with Russell happily ensconced in a relationship, seemingly one that's riding on rails it's going so smoothly and directly. He's happy, really truly happy, and the cherry on the sundae of his life lands with a plop in the form of a challenging, extremely remunerative job: Investigate the gay-bashing death of a world-renowned ancient carpet expert in glitzy, ritzy Dubai, all at the expense of a megarich Indian engineer and his wife. It's the engineer's son who's dead. Now...what to tell Mr. Man? "Honey, I'm going away for a few weeks, my life's going to be in danger, kiss kiss!" Clouds gather, shadows lengthen, and once in Dubai, Russell enters the hyper-closeted world of gay Arabia, and the hyper-competitive world of ancient carpet buying and selling. What happens there leads Russell from a hot Arabian sandstorm back to frigid, January-blasted Saskatoon, a chase scene featuring Mr. Man's property's frozen pond, bullets, a dead body, and a Big Reveal that is really a Big Reveal! I love being surprised, especially when I've come to the conclusion that a series is fun but no great shakes, worth reading because it's just entertaining. And now I'm awake and alert again, eager for the next book, agog to see what the author will do to fix a certain giant chasm he's ripped in Russell's life. 2011 can't come fast enough. I need my fix!!
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Chasing Goldman Sachs
by
Suzanne McGee
reader richard
, June 01, 2010
Not to put too fine a point on it, but does the world *really* need another book about The Meltdown That Ate Our Jobs? Do we *really* have anything left to learn about these greedy so-and-sos whose pursuit of their own profits gifted us with a huge expansion of the Federal debt? In a word, yes. Suzanne McGee (a close online acquaintance of mine) assumes that her readers are smart, savvy, and plugged in, so she hits only the highlights of the WHAT about the crisis. Her brief, as the subtitle of the book "How the Masters of the Universe Melted Down Wall Street...and Why They'll Take Us to the Brink Again" makes clear, is analyzing and explaining WHY. She does this in as honest and non-judmental a way as anyone could. She's not pointing fingers at one person per chapter, she's pointing up the systemic and cultural failings that, quite naturally and seemingly inevitably, led to a culture of no-risk gambling that permeated late twentieth century business. It took until the end of the Aughties for the chickens to come home to roost, but as they always do, they did. And who pays? All of us peons, that's who, which is exactly how the system is set up and remains set up to this day. Her style is spare, unfussy, and dryly witty. Her story provides its own plot, so I can't say whether she's good at plotting. She knows how to give a telling detail! "'When {the New York Stock} Exchange is public, when people are willing to own it, it's a sign of a stable financial system, argues {a Canadian investment-firm billionaire}, who also owns stakes in publicly traded stock exchanges worldwide, from Europe to Latin America...The kind of push that come from shareholder-investors to become more competitive and efficient is the best way to make sure an organization is as effective as possible, he adds." (p137, ARC edition) This comes in a book that traces "efficiency" as the principal author of the megadisaster of 2008...and does anyone remember May 2010, when the "efiicient" robo-trading powerslide of the Exchange caused systemic fantods? McGee states, makes, and supports her points throughout this book with a lifetime's reportorial experience and a skeptic's "prove it" attitude. She's done the financially semi-literate a huge and signal service in writing this book. It's a good, involving, and deeply frightening read. Recommended to all who aren't mouth-breathing Fox News watchers.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Guide to the Birds of East Africa
by
Nicholas Drayson
reader richard
, April 30, 2010
Actuarially, I am past middle age. In fact, more than 90% of the world's population is younger than I am. And that shows in the things I care about, read, and buy. Advertisers, take note: Old folks in America are *not lying down to die*! Pay attention to us! Like the author of this book did. Mr. Malik, a widower and Mrs. Mbikwa, a widow, both of a certain vintage, are the focus of the love story in this book. Each has lost a well-loved spouse, each is living a full, interesting life and each is aware of a...space, an unfilled spot, in life. So what do they do? They go watch birds. God, doesn't that sound dull? It's not. It's just the starting point for a deft, elegantly made meditation on what love means and how love is transmitted, received, and propagated in ever-larger and more complete circles. Drayson creates Rose Mbikwa, nee Macdonald, as that hardest to portray character: the lively, sad, solitary widow of a charismatic man. Her loss and her life are completely, and concisely, and elegantly drawn in less time than lesser prose stylists take to make minor characters. Mr. Malik, a complex and private man, isn't so much drawn as peeled, layer by later, until the things we think we know about him become...well...iceberg-tips of the cold, sad, lonely sea inside him. But...and this is the biggest but I can imagine...he's *never* whiny, self-pitying, self-obsessed, nothing like that oh nay nay! He's a force in his own life and he's working on making it, and as much of the world as he touches, a better place. The spirals Drayson spins as Mr. Malik and Mrs. Mbikwa orbit each other are always tightening and yet never constricting or confining our perceptions...this is good stuff, ladies and gentlemen! Good, good craftsmanship and an excellent storytelling eye. I'd say do yourself a favor and read this book. It's short, only about 200pp, and it's fun, and it's got great substance. Most highly recommended.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
American Type
by
Henry Roth
reader richard
, April 20, 2010
Posthumous books don't often turn out well (eg, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women" oh dear oh dear). Books excavated from immense piles of prose don't often turn out well (eg, "Of Time and the River" echhh) either. And this book is both. Did it turn out well? Compared to Call It Sleep, no. Compared to much of the publishing world's present output, yeah. I found Ira, the author's alter ego, to be a bit tedious in all Roth's books. I don't love Rabbit Angstrom (John Updike's most famous character) either. But editor Willing Davidson (what a great name!) found some less irritatingly self-absorbed things to focus this novel on than, say, the entire book A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, which I found nigh on unreadably whiny. Ira's love for his wife M is a huge point in his favor, and though she is never brought to life in the text but is instead shorthanded in as "aureate" or "golden" or smilingly bathed in the sort of light that the Virgin Mary is usually portrayed lit by, she remains the believeable focus of Ira's striving and working and expending effort on. It's curious how that happened; I usually have a hard time with characters that are sketched in when they occupy a central place in a narrative. I felt M, represented by a simple single letter, was appropriately left as an Object of Veneration; it was *right* somehow that she was a collection of qualities with no recognizable voice of her own. Edith, God love her, is as much a cipher as ever, and luckily little missed in this book. I compare this mining job to the pseudo-weighty Jonathan Littell and Andrea Levy stuff lighting things up in Literatureland; An American Type is refreshingly honest and clear and taut compared to those book, among others I've read that have received unstinting praise. It deserves a place on every Roth lover's shelves. I won't recommend it wholeheartedly because it's a bit dull compared to his brilliant first book, and fourth book (A Diving Rock on the Hudson). But give it a chance...there is magic at the very end, worth working for, worth making the effort to see...much like Roth felt life was, I think.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions
by
Frye Gaillard
reader richard
, May 22, 2009
Essays are like bonsai: Small, manicured versions of things that could, possibly even should, be larger. The thing bonsai'd matters greatly, but only to the most superficial of observers; the bonsai itself is reward enough for the more disciplined, receptive viewer. I could, I suppose, review each essay with comments on its individual stylistic merits and demerits, but that sort of reader-response review makes me itch (sort of like Tipper Gore, a profilee herein, does) because it's so off the point (also like Mrs. Gore). What does this group of essays MEAN? Why do they exist between two covers in the first place? Does the author/editor achieve some of their goals in the collection? So...what does this collection mean. Well, now, it's all about the South (note capital) and Southerners (again). It's about what change meant and means to the people and places profiled. It's about cusps and edges, personal and societal, and so it's about moments of truth. Does it MEAN something more than that? Not that I can see. As to why the collection of essays exists between two covers in the first place, well...tricky to say...no new ground gets broken here, and the essays that have the highest probability of being new takes on a subject have already been turned into books by Gaillard himself (eg, "Deliverance: The Greensboro Four" became "The Greensboro Four", and "The Lion's Den and Jimmy Carter" is also "Prophet from Plains"). So why? Hey, why not? It's good stuff in here. Does the author/editor achieve his goal in selecting the collection? Since we're not acquainted, I go with Gaillard's words: "In a sense, the book represents the evolution of one writer's career, but more than that it is intended to be a portrait of a place, or at least a collection of verbal snapshots." (Preface, p. ix) Well...how much of an evolutionary trend is likely to be in a collection wherein the pieces, per the author, are often "recast" into new forms? Is it a portrait of a place? Depends...Nashville, Charlotte, maybe, but the whole South? Ummm...don't really think that's an achieveable goal. And yet, and yet...there is a profile in here that, in my never-very-humble opinion, should be widely read. "The Education of Robert Howard Allen," a poet infuriatingly underknown, whose amazing, incandescent book "Simple Annals" belongs on your shelves whether you like poetry or not. It is simply staggering that a story like Allen's could BE in the 20th Century. A child of poverty whose formal education began at thirty-two, when he went off to college in 1978, Allen learned to read by studying comic books with an elderly relative. He progressed to reading his great aunt Ida, the matriarch of the house, the Bible. The local library, four miles away, was run by a remarkably astute and gifted librarian whose guidance was the rest of his education. When you read his poetry, you'll understand just how astonishing this is. Go on now, go to the book's page and order up "Simple Annals." I'll wait. There. You'll feel better when you've got the book and read some of its clean, burnished lines, which I can't stop myself from quoting one: "Because he whispered to her/The common secrets of an honest heart,/Death, because his finger/Traced words he could not write upon her cheek, death,/..." It's from "Elias Butler" and it's quoted in Gaillard's essay and it's just a small sample of this remarkable poet's beautiful work. The essays on music are, to me at least, the weakest ones in the collection. Profiles of the luminous Emmylou Harris, the amazing Marshall Chapman, and folk legend Si Kahn (which essay gave us the memorable title of the collection) don't tell the reader anything new or startling, and are best read as appreciations. Fine, of course, and inarguably nicely written, but...well, is that really enough to be included in a collection that has "The Education of Robert Howard Allen" in it? Now, I know $24.95 seems like a lot to pay for essays, but believe me you won't be sorry you read any of them (except maybe the one on Tipper Gore, but I could be reacting out of my allergy to her). I recommend the collection.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Captains Surrender
by
Alex Beecroft
reader richard
, April 13, 2009
I gave Captain's Surrender by Alex Beecroft to my friend Frank the Fireman, since like the main character, Peter Kenyon, he is an adult out-comer. I wanted him to, in particular, notice the last chapter wherein Peter goes through the long, dark night of the soul as he struggles between the lifelong conditioning he's heir to...the societal and legal issues surrounding being queer in the Royal Navy of the 18th century...and his love for Joshua Andrews, his best friend, former ship-mate, and one true love. I didn't mention that I wanted him to notice that chapter, I just sat and hoped. I was rewarded by a phone call. Frank was shaken, saying he'd done almost the precise same minuet of fear, anger, doubt, fear, rage, lust and...in the end...honest peace. I told him the author was a woman. He didn't say anything for a minute. "Lesbian?" he asked. "No. Married with kids." "That is one lucky man," was Frank's response. I concur. This book fulfills a long-felt absence in my reading life. It's an historical sea-novel, with nicely handled battle scenes and an authentic-feeling atmosphere of male camaraderie. Its flaws include a rather cavalier approach to time, as in there is no indication that the characters have to wait the extended periods they would really have been forced to endure for news, for travel, for anything. Also bothersome are some absences...backstory mostly, but also some characters have unresolved storylines, and I don't mean opening-for-sequel unresolved, I mean holes. The antagonist of Peter and Joshua is the first one who springs to mind, since he's presented in one dimension and never seen to have reasons for his actions beyond moving the plot along. I make this point because the book is getting a four-star rating. It's not perfect, I'd really really like to see more of the men's backgrounds even if in flashback for example, but it's a beautifully realized love story with excellent atmospherics and a happy ending...and a Happy Ending, too. Well done, Miss Beecroft, and do it again soon.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
First You Fall A Kevin Connor Mystery
by
Scott Sherman
reader richard
, April 03, 2009
I received, unpacked, cataloged, and finished 'First You Fall' by Scott Sherman. Flawed, a first novel for sure, but very funny in many places, poignant in others, and a worthwhile read. Gay rent-boy sleuth has never resolved his feelings for closet-case first love; they meet again when rent-boy's good friend allegedly commits suicide, and first love is one of the cops investigating; hijinks ensue. For a book featuring a rent-boy, there is surprisingly little...ummm, well, a fast consultation shows NONE...no graphic sex in the book. The author talks about sex a lot, but that's sorta what you expect in a book with this main character. That SHOULD win over a mainstream audience. There was only marginally less sex in the 'Brandstetter' mysteries by Joseph Hansen, and they were hugely popular. The mystery aspects of the book weren't its strongest selling points. I was sure I knew who the murderer was, and I was right; I had the murderer's motive all wrong, though, and that made a nice surprise. The satisfying resolution to the red herrings strongly appealed to my orderly side. The romantic complications were believable, and while I have never been a rent-boy (never pretty enough), I have been down the road that Kevin, our main character, traveled, though without the happy ending. Life so needs a better script, don't y'all agree? Recommended for mystery fans, straight or gay, who like to root for the underdog to win; also to fans of the reluctant sleuth genre. The truly homophobic should not even try this book. The mildly, "ewww ick" homophobic might see something worthwhile here.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Full Meridian of Glory: Perilous Adventures in the Competition to Measure the Earth
by
Paul Murdin
reader richard
, March 31, 2009
This slim volume is another entry in the popular science genre made famous by Dava Sobel's book, Longitude. It examines the difficult technical and intellectual feat of creating an accurately measured meridian line, intended to be an aid to mapping and navigation; like the Greenwich Meridian, which we today call the Prime Meridian, it was the zero point for measures of longitude on maps made in France. The issues surrounding the measurement of the Paris Meridian were multitudinous, and the people involved in the project over the course of a century were legion. Voltaire, three generations of the Cassini family, the Marquise du Chatelet; a who's-who of French scientific inquiry, and all on their juciest worst behavior, it seems. That is, to me, the premise for a wonderful, engrossing, informative read. This book, alas, is not that kind of endeavor at all. The problem lies, in my humble opinion, not with the author's talents but with his intentions. Dr. Murdin is a perfectly competent prose writer, and possessed of a dry wit that is all too seldom on display. He has written an account of the story, and not the story, promised in the title. This book as it is now contains all the notes and the sidebars (unless this is a hardcover ARC, the sidebars in the text are criminally poorly handled and should cause the author's agent to lodge a strong complaint with Springer's legal department...the sidebars explaining people, places, and concepts are scattered within the text itself and not delineated by any design element other than smaller type, and are not positioned in any sort of logical order or relationship to the person/place/thing sidebarred!) for the real, juicy book of scientists behaving badly in their noble quest to make the world a better place and their place in it more secure. Perhaps Dr. Murdin was flummoxed in his quest to write that book by the immensity of the cast of characters, mostly unknown to an average English-speaking audience; perhaps he was stymied by the publisher's reluctance to present the marketplace with a huge tome on such an abstruse subject, seeing as it's hard enough to sell $27.50 books on more popular topics; perhaps he simply didn't feel like it was necessary to give us the details that bring a time and a place and a quest to full and vivid life. I am so sorry that he didn't, since I feel certain that he could have and am positive that he should have, since the book as presented is simply not one that will capture and ignite the extant market of pop-sci readers' interest and garner word-of-mouth praise. The field is still open, science writers, for a whacking great doorstop of a page-turner epic on this undertaking....
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
report this comment
Charlemagne Pursuit
by
Steve Berry
reader richard
, December 05, 2008
Steve Berry does it all right in The Charlemagne Pursuit. He starts right, in the pulse-pounding submarine accident that triggers the action in the book; he ends right, with late-night antics about to begin; he keeps his story moving at a fast clip in between, with love, murder, betrayal, revenge, more betrayal, hate, then love again. It's a pleasure to give yourself over to a plot-driven thrill ride of a book at least four or five times a year. I couldn't make a diet of them myself, because they take so much out of me. At least the good ones do, and this is very much a good one. Cotton Malone, our main character, is a man with a bitter past: A lost father, a failed marriage, a career he sacrificed what he now knows is too much to keep. His emotional landscape is a frozen tundra, or so he wants to believe, and he works hard to sustain that fantasy for more than half this book. Why, then, is it such a pleasure to read his adventures? Because Cotton Malone's chill is real, ladies and gents; because we're clued in to his brokenness and not required to experience it with him as it happens, but asked to believe it happened as it's told, most current readers and reviewers seem to be dismissive of the character's reality. This is puzzling. Cotton Malone develops as a rounded and complex character during the course of this novel. The knock on thrillers is that the characters are simply cut-outs that move through the paces the author has designed for your entertainment, and I have certainly read my share of thrillers that fit this description. The Charlemagne Pursuit is not one of them, and neither was The Venetian Betrayal. Steve Berry writes a whacking good story, and he tells it through the actions of well-drawn characters. His villains are motivated by things that make sense in their world, his heroes are likewise people whose reasons to do what they're doing are consistent with the story we're told about them; if readers are not satisfied by the author's technique, I suggest that the fault could easily be said to reside in them, not in Mr. Berry's writing. This is a very satisfying read, and Cotton Malone makes my list of people I'm glad I met in 2008.
Was this comment helpful? |
Yes
|
No
(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
report this comment