An amateur literary aficionado blogs his way through his bookshelf in an effort to justify the time and expense of keeping a collection of hundreds of books in the cramped confines of inner city Melbourne living.
Created by timwattsau on 23/07/2009
Last updated: 12/03/10 at 12:27
Tags: Books Blogging Literature
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Synopsis: The late entrepreneur historian Stephen Ambrose recounts the WWII experiences of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from domestic training to the seizure of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. A very American history book.
My Take: I found “Band of Brothers” to be a deeply frustrating book to read. On the one hand, the story of Easy Company is more than compelling. The company featured prominently in D-Day, Operation Market Garden, The Battle of the Bulge and the famous siege at Bastogne, the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and the occupation of Goering’s Palace and Hitler’s Eagles Nest. Further, the fact that the Company was a volunteer unit formed before the war offered “Band of Brothers” a group of characters that readers could get to know and follow throughout Easy Company’s experiences.
However, these strengths are more than off-set by two major, and in my mind related, weaknesses in this book.
First, Ambrose completely over-eggs the dramatic story telling aspect of the book. I’m certainly not against using a dramatic narrative to improve the accessibility of history, in fact there’s clearly a lot of value in this, but at times “Band of Brothers” read like a teenage boy’s G.I. Joe Fan Fiction. I wish I was exaggerating in this regard, but take for example the following, not atypical paragraph:
“Get ‘em?” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy-gun, Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy-gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.”
I’m sure I’m not the only non-American who was grimacing while reading the passages like this. What made this even more frustrating was that the substance of Easy Company’s war experiences were more than dramatic enough without the jingoistic, melodramatic flourishes. The “Fan Boy” dramatic passages of the book were both embarrassing and unnecessary.
The second glaring weakness of “Band of Brothers” was the complete lack of perspective and objectivity that Ambrose shows throughout the book. Ambrose doesn’t just describe Easy Company’s exploits with added schlock, he views them through rose coloured glasses tinted with the Stars and Stripes. As described in Band of Brothers, Easy Company were the All-American, pure of heart, defenders of democracy and the Free World. He’s so close to his subject that he is completely unable to position the Company’s actions within any kind of broader context or offer any meaningful insight into the experience of war.
It is clear from even a superficial reading that “Band of Brothers” is heavily dependent on the accounts of members of Easy Company. Even more disturbingly, Ambrose offers little or no critical perspective on these accounts. Jarringly, at one point, after quoting extensively from a Staff Sergeant’s account of a heroic battle field experience, Ambrose goes so far as to add the following post script:
“If that sounds idealised, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and through the American Army – and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too – fought the war.”
Forgive me if I become sceptical when historians are defending ‘idealised’ accounts of the experience of war. Ambrose genuinely sounds more like a cheer-leader than a historian at times in this book.
Even worse, Ambrose has been caught out a number of times copying extracts from veteran’s accounts almost verbatim. As Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado has observed:
“You can’t get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,” said
After reading philosophically substantial war historians like Antony Beevor and Vassily Grossman, “Band of Brothers” feels more akin to reading a comic book account of war – a one-dimensional, triumphalist sketch of something far more complex and nuanced. I suppose “Band of Brothers” works as a piece of pop non-fiction written for an American audience – it certainly sold enough copies. But for those wanting a bit more substance and perspective and a bit less myth-making and self congratulation, there are far better options.
Highlight:
“Webster (a Harvard English literature graduate and member of Easy Company) went back to the road to get in on the shooting. A German turned to fire back. “What felt like a baseball bat slugged my right leg,” Webster recalled, “spun me around, and knocked me down.” All he could think to say was, “They got me!” which even then seemed to him “an inadequate and unimaginative cliché.”
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Synopsis: The nephew of an eccentric Professor of Anthropology discovers the horrors of the inter-galactic, flying cephalopod worshiping “Cthulhu Cult” while investigating the circumstances of his grand-uncle’s death. First-rate, tongue-twisting horror.
My Take: While I’m not much of a science fiction fan (relative to its real adherents), as a general principle I do try to give the seminal authors of all genres the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, if you’re the best of breed in one genre, you probably have something to offer people outside of your niche. As a result, H. P. Lovecraft has always been on my list of authors to give a try.
His work, most of which was released in the mid-1920s has been deeply influential both within the Sci-Fi community (frequent references to his work on Boing Boing is a testament to this) and a broader fraternity of artists who take a darker perspective on the progress of human civilisation (including Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jorge Luis Borges). Writing before the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror genres were even recognised (they were collectively referred to as simply weird fiction at the start of the 20th Century) Lovecraft has subsequently become a canonical writer in all three.
So with this in mind, thanks to my trusty Kindle, copyright expiry and Project Gutenberg, I recently sat down with Lovecraft’s most famous work “The Call of the Cthulhu”. TCOTC tells the story of a young man who stumbles across a pre-historic blood cult that worships extra-terrestrial beings who look like a cross between a squid, a dragon and a man and inhabited the earth before mankind. In the abstract, it all sounds more than a little absurd, but Lovecraft is a dab hand at the art of story-telling and “The Call of the Cthulhu” unfolds with impressive suspense through three independent, documentary style narratives. While each narrative largely stands alone, as each develops, the narrator reveals a bigger, horrifying picture to the reader.
Lovecraft’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and the influence that the great author had on his work is obvious in TCOTC. Despite its globe-wide setting, the book’s first person retrospective format gives the story a dark and claustrophobic feel. Overall, it’s first class horror. Amusingly enough, despite its fame and cultural influence Lovecraft himself was not particularly enamoured with TCOTC describing it as:
“rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”
I think Lovecraft is being a bit hard on himself here. Yes, it’s a bit absurd – but it’s well told and atmospheric – more than enough for a good ‘weird fiction’ tale.
Highlight:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Lovecraft’s protagonists are nevertheless driven to this “piecing together,” which becomes a primary plot device in many of his works.
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Synopsis: Intellectually impaired factory cleaner undergoes experimental surgery to triple his IQ, dramatically changing his inner-life, his relationships and his outlook on the world. “Of Mice and Men” meets “Frankenstein”.
My Take: You know you’ve written a story that has really had an impact on popular culture when it forms the basis of not one, but two episodes of The Simpsons. Throw in an Academy Award winning movie adaptation, a Hugo Award for Best Short Story and a Nebula Award for Best Novel and you’ve got a real cultural icon.
“Flowers for Algernon” (first published as a short story in 1959 and as a novelisation in 1966) tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a middle aged intellectually disabled man, and Algernon, a laboratory mouse, who both undergo experimental surgery to triple their IQ. Told in the first person via contemporaneous entries in Charlie’s personal journal (an ‘epistolary novel’ for the pedants), Keyes’ story explores a number of complex moral and philosophical questions through his protagonist’s intellectual awakening. Given that “Flowers for Algernon” tackles subjects as significant as the meaning of happiness, the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional and the proper role of science in an engaging and accessible way, it’s easy to see why it has had such an impact.
The central dramatic engine of “Flowers for Algernon” is provided by Charlie’s growing understanding of the world around him. This knowledge opens up new worlds and opportunities for Charlie – both intellectual and emotional, but it also destroys many of his simpler pleasures as well as the naïve illusions that have protected him from hurt in the past. Most challengingly, his ever increasing IQ allows Charlie to understand both what has been done to him in the past – by family, friends and his doctors – as well as what lies in his future. In light of Charlie’s tormented sentience, the reader is left to ask whether he would have been better off remaining in blissful ignorance. Thought-provoking and engaging reading.
Highlight:
“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”
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Synopsis: Overweight Dominican uber-nerd battles a ‘fuku’, a Caribbean curse that has beleaguered his family across two countries and over three generations, in his quest for love and the fame of becoming “The Dominican JRR Tolkien”.
My Take: Strangely enough for a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, I only heard about Junot Diaz’s “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” whilst perusing a few ‘Best books of the Noughties’ lists earlier this year. I’m not sure how I missed it when it was released in 2007 because it’s just the kind of thing that I’m naturally drawn to – a quirky, cross-cultural narrative with a prose that fizzes and pops with life. Better late than never though I guess, because “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is one of the best books I’ve read in recent times.
TBWLOW is a difficult book to categorise. It somehow manages to combine elements of an urban modernist tale, a multi-generational family epic, a cultural history of the Dominican Republic and a magical realist fable into a genuinely unique literary form. Similarly, it’s not often you read prose that combines Hispanic street slang, obscure science fiction references, high literary allusions and magic realist metaphors in a single novel. It’s bizarre – but it works.
These disparate literary forms are bound together by the eponymous Oscar de Leon (mockingly known as “Oscar Wao” in reference to the Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom Oscar’s peers disparagingly claimed he resembled when in costume as Dr Who). Oscar is a strange and sad protagonist. Growing up as a poor Hispanic immigrant in Patterson, New Jersey, Oscar is saddled with the dual burdens of a morbidly obese frame and a personality shaped by his devotion to Science Fiction/Fantasy (or as Oscar describes the “the more speculative genres”).
As Yunior, the third-person narrator of Oscar’s story sums it up “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”. These afflictions are particularly tragic because beneath his overweight and nerdy exterior beats the heart of a hopeless romantic. Oscar is no wall flower – against all odds he continues to put himself out there in pursuit of his frequent crushes however his appearance and his “Dune” allegories, “The Matrix” quotes and “Lord of the Rings” references are unable to win him even a single kiss (strangely enough proclaiming that a girl is “orchidaceous” is not a winning strategy). Even worse, Oscar knows he needs to lose the weight, as well as the comic books and role-playing games if he is going to get the girl, but for some reason is powerless to become the master of his own destiny.
This is where TBWLOW takes a very strange turn. Through the eyes of Oscar’s mother, Beli, and his sister, Lola, TBWLOW takes on an epic aspect and Diaz portrays the sweep of Dominican history and the story of the D.R.’s U.S. Diaspora on a grand scale. We learn that a run in with the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic two generations ago has left Oscar’s family as the victim of a ‘Fuku’, a curse that pervades all aspects of the family’s life. As this new aspect of the story unfolds, a strong magic realist thread emerges opening up a completely unexpected dimension to the novel.
It’s all very strange, but somehow it works perfectly. The novel never seems to jar despite the jumble of literary methods it employs and the core narrative of the story feels like it is unfolding completely naturally. It’s only when you look back on the story and think “how did I get here?” that you realise the strange mix of approaches that are brewing in this novel.
I can’t recommend the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao enough.
Highlight:
Sophomore year Oscar’s weight stabilized at about two-ten (two-twenty when he was depressed, which was often), and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood pariguayo. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto Rican Afro, had enormous Section-8 glasses (his anti-pussy devices, his boys Al and Miggs called them), sported an unappealing trace of mustache, and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus (a comparison he made himself one day, going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school Dominicana he knew who loved jazz; she’d arrived in the States in the early sixties and shacked up with morenos for years until she met Oscar’s father, who put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party). Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.
He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close. Inside, he was a passionate person who fell in love easily and deeply. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity—roamed across all Paterson, affixed itself everywhere without regard to looks, age, or availability. Despite the fact that he considered his affection this tremendous, sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it.
Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice. His tío Rodolfo (only recently released from Rahway State) was especially generous in his tutelage. We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of those Greenwich Village maricones, Tío Rodolfo muttered ominously. You have to grab a muchacha, broder, y méteselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y méteselo! Rodolfo had four kids with three different women, so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metiéndolo expert.
Oscar’s sister Lola (who I’d start dating in college) was a lot more practical. She was one of those tough Jersey Latinas, a girl soccer star who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in sixth grade, she was raped by an older acquaintance, and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had stripped her of cowardice. She’d say anything to anybody and she cut her hair short (anathema to late-eighties Jersey Dominicans) partially, I think, because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her ass—a source of pride, something I’m sure her rapist noticed and admired.
Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.
Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.
Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.
Sound counsel, which he did not adopt. He was one of those niggers who didn’t have any kind of hope. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been, like Don Bosco, all male. Paterson, however, was girls the way N.Y.C. was girls. And if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, then, head south, and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken—an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. He wasn’t even safe in his own house; his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, and when they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who dated only weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. (His sister was the anomaly—she dated the same dude all four years of high school, a failed Golden Gloves welterweight who was excruciatingly courteous and fucked her like he was playing connect the dots, a pretty boy she’d eventually dump after he dirty-dicked her with some Pompton Lakes Irish bitch.) His sister’s friends were the Bergen County All-Stars, New Jersey’s very own Ciguapas: primera was Gladys, who complained constantly about her chest being too big; Marisol, who’d end up in M.I.T. and could out-salsa even the Goya dancers; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe, who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these girls hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard; they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives while he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering, there’s a male unit in here. Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.
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Another post, another excuse for sparsity of posting. Life remains professionally intense (though interesting) and Blogging the Bookshelf has had to take a backseat this month while I’ve focused on the day job.
Thankfully while my blogging has suffered, my reading time has held up well (the one saving grace of interstate commuting) and I’ve had a good run of very enjoyable books in recent weeks including “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, “Stalingrad” and “Berlin” by Antony Beevor and “The Uninvited” by Geling Yan. So I’ve got a long backlog of freshly read books ready for blogging once I get some more free time.
The most exciting and blog-worthy arrival on my bookshelf in recent times however is my brand new shiny Amazon Kindle. I am a long time ‘early adopter’ of gadgetry, or as some have less charitably characterised it, a ‘prolific buyer of toys that I don’t need’. However, I have to say that so far I am especially pleased with my kindle purchase.
As a biliophile with hundreds of hard copy books on their bookshelf and a passion for stalking second hand book stores at every opportunity, I didn’t make the jump to e-books lightly. Given the (significant) upfront cost of a Kindle, you pretty well have to swear off buying hard copy books for quite a while to justify the purchase – a difficult sacrafice for someone with my proclivities.
However, after a lot of reflection during the extended period between the announcment of the international version of the Kindle and it’s availability for purchase, there were a few factors that ultimately tipped the balance in favour of taking the plunge:
Never having to pay for literary classics again
As an earnest young reader with pretentions of literary seriousness I’ve been slowly but steadily trying to work my way through the cannon of literary classics. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m really not a library person – it feels like a fascist imposition to me to have someone tell me when I need to read a book – so every classic means another purchase. Even at second hand prices this adds up.
However, thanks to the joy of copyright expiration and the non-existent distribution costs of electronic books, there is a mindblowing number of literary classics available for free download from sites like Many Books and Project Gutenberg. Kafka, Camus, Dickens, Twain, Joyce, Austen, Bronte, Carroll, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov etc etc. There’s more than enough free content out their for the Kindle to keep you occupied for a very long time.
Savings on Amazon Shipping Costs
Yes, Kindle books retail on Amazon for around half their hard copy list prices (plus a 15% increase for Australian readers), but to my mind, the real savings a realised through not having to pay the exorbitant costs of having books shipped half way around the world to be delivered to Australia (not to mention the agonising wait!). There’s real potential for savings here.
Kindle’s Versatility
The final tipping point for my purchase was the fact that Kindle provides each user with an email account to which they can send documents for uploading onto their device. The benefit of this? Anyone (like me) who has a job that involves voluminous amounts of reading can easily email whatever documents they are working their way through to their Kindle for a portable, and more pleasurable reading experience. Instead of staring at an electronically lit rectangle for hours, or lugging around a bulldog clipped print out of the report de jour, I now transfer these documents onto my Kindle for my civilised consumption. I had heard a number of people in the US blogosphere spruiking this function for sometime before the Kindle’s release in Australia and was keen to take advantage.
The Reading Experience
What I couldn’t be sure of until I got my hands on one in real life was what the reading experience would be like. After a week’s reading I am happy to say that it is fantastic. The Kindle is light enough to be more comfortable in the hand than a paperback, but solid enough that you don’t feel like you’ll fumble it. I’ve already found myself strongly prefering it for reading in bed or on the couch where previously I needed to prop up books somewhere. The screen is very easy on the eye and if anything is a better experience than reading print on paper.
However, the most satisfying aspect of the Kindle reading experience was completely unexpected. Because the Kindle screen fits slightly less text than a paperback page, the more frequent ‘page turning’ gives you a satisfying feeling of momentum whilst reading. The progress bar at the bottom of the screen reinforces this effect and gives you a graphic appreciation for how much you’ve read in a sitting.
Gripes
As you can see, on the whole I love my Kindle. I do however have a few gripes – and they are pretty well all functions of being an international Kindle user. You really are a second class citizen as an international user of Kindle. No access to content that is widely used in the US: no blog content, a very limited library of magazine content (no Economist, no New Yorker, none of the literary reviews) and a sadly limited library of books for purchase. It’s not just Australian specific authors who aren’t available to Australian Kindle readers – but many major new release books. Hopefully this will improve with time as Amazon reaches agreements with Australian rights holders, but it’s far from ideal at present.
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Ok, so I’ve been MIA from Blogging the Bookshelf for a while now (a few weeks in fact!). Things have been fairly busy work wise so I’ve had to cut back on discretionary activities and the blog was the first to go. Unfortunately I think work will continue to be quite demanding for the foreseeable future so posting may be sporadic, but I have good intentions not to lose all blogging momentum during this period.
So, without further ado, back to blogging the bookshelf….
Synopsis: An influential collection of “Neo-realist” fictional novellas from a leading member of China’s “New Generation” of nihilistic authors.
My Take: Part of the reason that I love modern Chinese fiction is the rich vein of conflict that the nation’s ongoing economic and societal upheavals offer the nation’s authors. The fact that the economic and cultural structures that underpin Chinese society have been in a constant flux for more than 50 years offers Chinese fiction writers an enormously rich dramatic canvas on which to practice their craft.
Zhu Wen’s “I Love Dollars” is close to the paradigm example of this. Released in 1994, “I Love Dollars” pushed Zhu to the forefront of the “New Generation” of post-Tianenmen, “Neo-Realist” Chinese authors. These authors sought to break from the strictures of both the classical and propagandistic Chinese literary paradigms and to portray the changing Chinese society as it is (or more accurately, as they saw it). The result is a highly unsentimental take on a series of characters trying to adapt in a world that is moving rapidly beneath their feet.
Zhu’s novellas romanticise neither ‘traditional’ Chinese society nor the receding Communist economy, expressing equal contempt for the desire to cling too closely to either world. However, neither does Zhu’s writing express any particular enthusiasm for the future. The economically liberalising China of Deng’s creation is seen not as liberation from the repression of the past, but as a society wide sand-blasting of all human values bar the pursuit of economic enrichment.
As a result, Zhu’s characters seem almost universally cut off from a meaningful life. Those who have adapted to the new China are often nihilistic or hedonistic souls adrift from any moral anchoring. Those who long to return to either of the nation’s agrarian or communist pasts are viewed as sad, slightly pathetic anachronisms. All however, are victims of the larger forces of Chinese society and the helplessness of the individual amidst the grand sweep of historical change.
While there’s more than enough of interest in the ‘big picture’ themes of Zhu’s books, his prose is also worth checking out. Zhu’s writing conveys the minutiae of modern Chinese life via a sparse and positively caustic prose. The opening of one of the novella’s in this collection, Pounds, Ounces, Meat offers an illustrative glimpse:
On the bridge by the old Drum Tower I was stopped by a shabby individual, clearly someone who’d wandered in from out of town, with a black bag tucked under his arm and an unnerving gleam in his eyes. He told me my physiognomy was most unusual; he simply had to tell my fortune, he wouldn’t charge a cent. The plastic on top of the bridge had melted tackily in the sun: crossing felt like walking over spat-out chewing gum, or smoker’s phlegm, or snot, or semen, or fresh dog shit. I include these comparisons purely to illuminate, not disgust, you understand. If I were to suggest you imagine it was raw meat underfoot, now that, I admit, would be nauseating. Fuck off, I told him as impatiently as I could manage.
Briefly, all too briefly, the man was transfixed by shock, too transfixed to manage any kind of response, till I’d reached the end of the bridge’s elevation and was about to set off down the steps on the other side. Good luck’s coming your way this year! He screeched vengefully at me across the asphalt. About fucking time, I muttered to myself as I descended. When I was halfway down, I happened to look up and see a girl with a healthily tanned face coming toward me up the steps, carrying a black parasol and a copy of I Love Dollars. My heart began to pound. I wasn’t sure, at that moment, whether this counted as my good luck or not. In subsequent weeks and months, I often thought back over this scene, about this girl and that book, about how she kept the latter pressed beguilingly up against her chest, blinding me to its obvious flatness.
This blunt style of writing caused a not insignificant degree of controversy in the PRC of 1994. However it doesn’t feel affected in the context of the disconnected nature of the book’s characters and the neo-realist ambitions of the author. It’s blunt, but appropriately so.
Highlight:
“Is sex the only thing that matters ? Is there nothing else ?” Father threw the pile of manuscripts to one side, shaking his head furiously.
“Let me ask you a question: how come you only pick up on the sex in what I write, and nothing else ?”
“A writer ought to offer people something positive, something to look up to, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom, stuff like that.”
“Dad, I’m telling you, all that stuff, it’s all there in sex.”
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Synopsis: Bored New York psychiatrist begins living his life according to the roll of a dice in order to escape the constraints of his personality. Unpredictable, but ultimately boring.
My Take: There’s promise in the premise of this book. I first heard of “The Dice Man” gimmick via the highly entertaining Discovery Channel travel series of the same name. The concept of someone making decisions according to the roll of a dice certainly adds a healthy dose of conflict and unpredictability to a narrative. Similarly, a mechanism that allows an individual to explore one’s ‘minority self’, the ‘parts’ of you that might want to do something unusual that are ordinarily repressed by your dominant personality, is also intriguing.
However, I just couldn’t get onto this novel’s wavelength. After finishing it, I couldn’t quite work out whether it was satire (and if so, what the main target was – 70s psychiatry? Society in general?), whether it was intended to be subversive or whether it was simply a comic farce. Of course, it shouldn’t matter what the book’s purpose/genre is so long as it’s engaging, but while it is amusing in parts, the novel’s plot aimlessly meanders for so long that by the end, the appeal of the gimmick is thoroughly exhausted.
And so as I was reading “The Dice Man” I was left wondering “What is the point?”. On the one hand the novel is clearly scathingly and amusingly satirical about 70s psychiatry. However, one the other at times the book seems to come perilously close to genuine advocacy of “dice life” as a response to the repressive absurdities of modern society. If you think that this is a naïve reading of an intentionally satirical text, consider that the author claims to have actively used ‘dicing’ himself for a decade before writing “The Dice Man” after musing on the nature of freedom while teaching Nietzsche and Sartre as a psychology lecturer. I may be wrong, but there were plenty of moments while reading “The Dice Man” that my mindset shifted from ‘This is amusing’ to ‘This is absurd’.
While it’s not without redeeming characteristics, unfortunately, I can’t recommend “The Dice Man” to others.
Highlights:
“I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.”
…
“If that dice has a ‘one’ face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs to rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror evaporated and excitement swept over me: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the dice?’
…
Now the curious reader will want to know what kind of an analyst I was. It so happens that I practiced non-directive therapy. For those not familiar with it, the analyst is passive, compassionate, non-interpretive, non-directing. More precisely, he resembles a redundant moron. For example, a session with a patient like Jenkins might go like this:
JENKINS: ‘I feel that no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail; that some kind of internal mechanism always acts to screw up what I’m trying to do.’
[Pause]
ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you always forces you to fail.’
JENKINS: ‘Yes. For example, that time when I had that date with that nice woman, really attractive – the librarian, you remember – and all I talked about at dinner and all evening was the New York Jets and what a great defensive secondary they have. I knew I should be talking books or asking her questions but I couldn’t stop myself.’
ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you consciously ruined the potential relationship with that girl.’
JENKINS: ‘And that job with Wessen, Wessen and Woof. I could have had it. But I took a monthly vacation in Jamaica when I knew they’d be wanting an interview.’
‘I see.’
‘What do you make of it all, Doctor? I suppose it’s masochistic.’
‘You think it might be masochistic.’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
‘You aren’t certain if it’s masochistic but you do know that you often do things which are self-destructive.’…
The intelligent reader gets the picture. The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who’s curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts, with old thirty-five-dollars-an-hour echoing away through it all behind the couch.
And it works. It works precisely as well as every other tested form of psychotherapy. It works sometimes and fails at others, and its success and failures are identical with other analysts’ successes and failures.
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Synopsis: A tribal patriarch in pre-colonial Nigeria is forced to confront the changes to his society brought on by the arrival of European settlers. The Anti-“Heart of Darkness”.
My Take: “Things Fall Apart”, Chinua Achebe’s first novel, is a seminal work in the modern literary cannon. Released in 1958, it was one of the works of literature written from the African perspective that was widely read in the West. This, combined with Achebe’s outspoken stance on the representation of Africa in the Western cannon, gives “Things Fall Apart” a significance beyond its (not insubstantial) literary merit. In short, there are cultural, literary and historical dividends from reading this book.
Achebe took the title of “Things Fall Apart” from a Keats poem about the collapse of European societies in the aftermath of World War I titled “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
It’s disturbing prose and an ideal allegory for the book’s overarching theme– the wholesale upheaval in the normal order of things in African society brought on by the arrival of European colonisers. Achebe explores his theme through the eyes of Okonwo, an esteemed patriarch in a small tribe in pre-colonial Africa. Okonwo is born of humble origins but rises to a position of high status in his village through many years of hard work and personal, emotional sacrifice. Okonwo is someone who has invested much to progress according to the norms of pre-colonial African society. Inevitably, the violent change in social norms and the loss of equilibrium brought on by the arrival of European settlers hits Okonwo more than most.
Achebe paints a convincing portrait of how the arrival of Europeans broke down the bonds and structures that held pre-colonial African society together. Interestingly, he dedicates particular attention to examining the impact of European missionaries and the spread of Christianity on tribal society. The animistic religions of tribal Africa were the foundation stone of societal organisation. As these religions were the primary source of power in these societies, the spread of Christianity and its active hostility to these beliefs, did not just cause a spiritual upheaval, but also resulted in a wholesale destabilisation of society.
“Things Fall Apart” is interesting in a cultural sense as Achebe consciously wrote the book in an effort to counter the negative stereotypes of African society perpetuated by turn of the century European authors like Joseph Conrad. However, the book really doesn’t have the feel of a public service announcement. Okonwo is far from a likeable hero – in fact in a lot of respects he really is a stupid and nasty piece of work. However, Achebe skilfully reveals the human drivers for his stupidity and nastiness. Okonwo isn’t nice – but he’s significant from a literary perspective for the mere fact that the story is told from his perspective as a complex human being influenced by the forces around him rather than as an outsiders view of a simple animalistic brute.
Highlight:
“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
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Synopsis: The greatest economics writer in the blogosphere switches medium to offer an extended treatise on the use of economic principles to improve the non-economic aspects of your life. Utility is maximised.
My Take: Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, is hands down one of the best blogs on the ‘net. Not because he is the best economist online today (Greg Mankiw, Dani Rodrick, Paul Krugman, Steven Levitt and Gary Becker/Richard Posner would all have claims here), but because his personality is so perfectly suited to the medium. Instead of producing worthy and dry pieces of brilliant economic analysis, Cowen’s approach to Marginal Revolution is that of a cultural Bower Bird; collecting and displaying fascinating titbits from both his professional and cultural interests. The New York Times describes Cowen as:
a world-class polymath who whips through graphic novels and 816-page bricks like Africa: A Biography of the Continent, listens to everything from Bach to Brazilian techno, searches out exotic cuisines all over the world, and still finds time to travel to remotest Mexico to update his collection of amate painting. For him, deep immersion in culture defines the good life, and his readers get the vicarious benefits.
Cowen successfully translates this eclectic mix of rigorous classical economics and cultural diversity into the literary world via “Discover Your Inner Economist”. In DYIE, Cowen takes a more in-depth look at his cultural preoccupations through the prism of economic analysis and with an eye to maximising utility. As he puts it:
“Economics developed out of a recognition of the fact that many things worth having don’t just fall into our laps in the course of our everyday lives… The real purpose of economics is to get more of the good stuff in life.”
Cowen’s overarching insight into our cultural lives is illuminating. For him:
“The critical economic problem is scarcity. Money is scarce, but in most things the scarcity of time, attention, and caring is more important.”
Once you accept that there are limits to most people’s (ie non-professionals) interest in the arts and capacity to pursue this interest, the question then becomes how an individual can most efficiently maximise their enjoyment of culture within these constraints.
Again, Cowen’s insights into how one could go about this are both useful. Take his approach to art appreciation. Cowen begins by acknowledging the relevant constraint:
“Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe… Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. “
Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the… public.
So how should we go about maximising our attention and making most efficient use of our time:
“In each room, ask yourself which picture you would take home – if you could take just one – and why? This forces you to keep thinking critically about the displays. If the alarm system was shut down and the guards went away, should I carry home the Cezanne, the Manet, or the Renois? In a room of Egyptian antiquities, which one caught my eye? And why? We should discuss the question with our companion.
To put it crudely, we must force ourselves to keep on paying attention. Ranking the pictures focuses our attention on our favourites. It also focuses our attention on ourselves, which is in fact our favourite topic….
…
At the end of the visit, ask which paintings stuck with you. Did you find yourself thinking back on the Munch, the Pollock, or the medieval tapestries? A week later ask the same question. Then go read about those artists or that period. That is a more useful procedure than reading about art in advance.
We should view paintings repeatedly, but especially after we have spent time with other artworks. The best way to understand one art museum is to go see another art museum with a related but not identical collection.
As someone who has always diligently tried to broaden my cultural horizons at every opportunity, it resonated with me that ironically, the best way to do so was to narrow your initial focus in a new direction and then expand from a beach head of new knowledge. It’s also liberating to see how this isn’t simply a lazy or selfish approach to high culture, but rather a utility maximising approach to cultural enlightenment.
Highly recommended for anyone wanting to enrich their cultural life.
Highlight:
“We must ignore the carping of the sophisticates. Well-educated critics may claim that pictures cannot be ranked, value is multidimensional or subjective, or that such talk, represents a totalising, colonising, possessive, post-capitalist, hegemonic Western imperialist approach. All of those missives are beside the point.
When it comes to the arts, dealing with the scarcity of our attention is more important than anything, including respecting the artists.”
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Synopsis: Dilettante son of a nouveau-riche family seeking societal acceptance meets the refined daughter of an aristocratic family struggling to adjust to the changes in Japanese society brought on by the Meiji Restoration. A deeply intense and culturally significant story of forbidden love.
My Take: “Spring Snow” is generally regarded to be Yukio Mishima’s greatest masterpiece. The first instalment in his epic Sea of Fertility tetraology, an allegorical examination of the Westernisation of Japanese society between 1912 and 1975, “Spring Snow” was a best seller on its release despite Mishima’s political unpalatability.
At the most basic level, “Spring Snow” tells the story of star crossed lovers, Kiyoaki Matsugae and Satoko Ayakura, as narrated by Kiyoaki’s stoic best friend Shigekuni Honda. While the financial prosperity of Kiyoaki’s family and the aristocratic standing Satoko’s family made the couple a mutually beneficial pairing, Kiyoaki’s initial equivocation about their relationship allowed Satoko to be betrothed to a member of the Imperial household. However, once Satoko’s matrimonial commitment makes her unattainable, Kiyoaki’s feelings for her crystallise and the pair are set on a course for self-destruction.
While “Spring Snow” starts slowly, dwelling on the characteristics of the alien and hermetically sealed Japanese aristocratic society, as Kiyoaki and Satoko’s relationship builds momentum towards its inevitable conclusion the story develops a gut wrenching intensity. It really does have an emotional weight that leaves you physically weak upon completion.
However, this novel is more than just a Japanese “Romeo and Juliet”. Like all of Mishima’s works, the real emotional impetus for “Spring Snow” flows from the deep internal conflicts within the author and the broader Japanese society. I’ve written before about the contradictions inherent in Mishima’s life as a homosexual fascist bodybuilder/writer but the force of these conflicting desires is writ large in “Spring Snow”.
While societal pressure plays a role in heightening the tension of “Spring Snow”, the fundamental conflict in the novel is internal to Kiyoaki. The protagonist’s alternating ambivalence, hostility and obsessive love for Satoko is the main source of tension in the book and mirrors Mishima’s love/hate relationship for the changing Japan. Kiyoaki doesn’t know whether to welcome the opening up of Japanese society or resist its Westernisation and as such is conflicted about how to deal with this contradiction within Satoko who, by virtue of her position as the daughter of an aristocratic family, is at the forefront of these changes. “Spring Snow” is much more than a simple story of obsessive or forbidden love.
“Spring Snow” isn’t an easily accessible novel and Mishima doesn’t make any concessions to the reader in terms of exposition. It’s literary fiction in its purest form and as with all Mishima novels, it’s prose is jaw-droppingly beautiful. It’s not airport reading, if you’re willing to put the effort in, it’s a rich and rewarding work.
Highlights:
“Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”
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Synopsis: A thematically arranged collection of Hendrik Hertzberg’s political essays for the New Yorker and the New Republic stretching from the mid-1960s to the end of the Bush Era. Reading political journalism with the benefit of hindsight is fun!
My Take: Hendrik Hertzberg is like an over-sized red-velvet armchair in the corner of The New Yorker’s metaphorical living room. A relic of a past era now slightly out of fashion, but a comfortable favourite for those who’ve grown up with him.
I enjoy Hertzberg because while he is an unreconstructed 60s lefty (and a Jimmy Carter speechwriter at that!) he treats politics seriously without being self-righteous. He’s a rare breed – a long term left-wing commentator that hasn’t turned bitter and contemptuous as the world has changed around him. As a result, Hertzberg can be wry without being sarcastic and can be critical without being shrill. Equally rarely, he’s a political writer who isn’t so arrogant as to assume that he is always in right and that everyone else is motivated by stupidity or ill will. Combine this with the fact that he’s an extremely talented writer and Hertzberg is one of the most reliably enjoyable political columnists in America.
“Politics” is a collection of the best of Hertzberg’s political writing over the past forty years. It’s worth reading just to luxuriate in an extended dose of Hetrzberg’s writing, but the best part of this book are the tit-bits of trivia and minutia political life from eras past. For instance, it pains my soul that I wasn’t able to experience the unintentional comedy of the Dan Quayle era of US Politcs. While the 1988 Vice-Presidential Debate is infamous for Lloyd Bentson’s vicious take down of Quayle, the real highlight of the debate as recounted by Hertzberg was the eventual Vice-President’s total disconnection from reality:
“Tom Brokaw sadistically asked (Quayle) to describe the last time he had visited a poor family and to tell how he had explained to that family his votes against the school breakfast program, the school lunch program and the expansion of the child immunization program. In a quavering voice Quayle said he had too me with ‘those people’ and that ‘they didn’t ask me those questions on those votes, because they were glad that I took time out of my schedule to go down and talk about how we’re going to get a food bank going..”
….
“Asked to name a ‘work of literature or art’ that had impressed him lately, Quayle cited a book… by Richard Nixon…. One CBS guest commentator said that this answer ‘came across as non-prepared’.”
Also amusing was the coverage of the Gary Hart saga capped by this surreal exchange on Newshour highlighted by Hertzberg:
Lehrer: You don’t think it speaks to the question of judgement as to what a person would do as a candidate for president of the United States?
Hart: Jim, if I may call you Jim, let’s reverse the logic. Does it suggest that because Ronald Reagan used poor judgement on Irangate that therefore he’s unfaithful to his wife?
Lehrer: I don’t understand what you mean.
Reading contemporaneously written accounts of past political eras also offers provides the added amusement of allowing judge historical predictions against reality. Given his generally humble approach, Hertzberg comes out of this pretty well, but there are a few clangers. One example that springs readily to mind is an amusingly misguided article pimping Michael Dukakis’s Presidential prospects titled ‘The Tortoise’ and positing that Dukakis’s positive campaigning (“Good jobs at Good wages”) had George Bush on the defensive. The opinion of British journo quoted in the same article summing up Dukakis as ‘a hopeless wanker’ has held up rather better with time.
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Synopsis: The world of Scarlet O’Hara, an intemperate, ruthless and self-centred plantation owner’s daughter is turned upside down by the US Civil War and further, by that scoundrel, Rhett Butler. It’s a hell of a story apparently – 30 million people can’t be wrong.
My Take: The things we do for those we love. When my future wife told me that “Gone With The Wind” was her favourite book, I thought the only appropriate thing to do was to head out and grab a copy as quickly as possible for my own consumption. Usually epics, especially those featuring ‘strong’ heroines, aren’t my style and as a result, I hadn’t even seen the iconic movie before being guided to the book by love. But “Gone With The Wind” did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and has managed to sell more than 30 million copies to date, so I figured it must have something going for it.
And it does. To an extent. I’m glad to have invested the time to read GWTW and not just for reasons of domestic harmony. Margaret Mead has crafted an extraordinarily meticulous portrait of late 19th Century life in the US South in GWTW based largely on the first hand accounts she heard from relatives as a child. To the extent that you can ever trust accounts like this, I learnt a lot from the sheer volume of detail that Mead packs into GWTW. So I felt like I got something out of the book there.
That being said, you don’t read GWTW for a history lesson. Most readers who are drawn to this book pick it for the grand sweep of its narrative and its iconic characters. It’s here that I part from the consensus (and the views of my better half). Margaret Mead has described the main theme of the book as ‘survival’:
“…what makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under…? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”
Ok. I can see this. Scarlett is able to survive the societal cataclysm brought on by the war through her determination and stubbornness and Rhett is able to survive through his cunning and pragmatism.
The problem is that I didn’t much like Scarlet O’Hara despite her admirable perseverance and fortitude. While she had spunk, she was also self-centred and ruthless. While her independence and spunk are undoubtedly good examples for young girls, especially in the less enlightened times in which this book was published, frankly Scarlett consistently treated those who cared for her (particularly Melanie and Rhett) appallingly. There’s no truer line in the book that Rhett’s frustrated explanation for why he could never show his love for her:
“You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”
For a book this long, you’re going to struggle to keep me interested if I don’t particularly like the protagonist. This was partially offset by the strength of Rhett Butler’s character (a rake, a speculator, a blockade-runner and a social pariah – but a romantic at heart) but not enough to save the book to my mind.
I’ll finish by noting that what GWTW needed more than anything else was an editor. There was simply no real reason for this book to be the giant that it was. It would have been a much better read if it was half the length.
Highlight:
Rhett Butler on the imminent war:
“‘All wars are sacred,’ he said. ‘To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”
…
“There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.”
Scarlett O’Hara in the ruins of Twelve Oaks:
“Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: ‘As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill – as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.’”
Favourite GWTW factoid found while looking for background to this post:
(Margaret Mead) originally called the heroine “Pansy O’Hara”, and Tara was “Fontenoy Hall”. She also considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day
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Synopsis: Socially maladjusted US nerd consumes all 44 million words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica then provides an alphabetical cliff’s notes of the experience. The sum of the parts is less than the whole.
My Take: I am a bit of a sucker for condensed knowledge. It’s a deeply shallow (if that’s possible) way of learning, but I love adding to my stocks of knowledge by digesting pre-masticated titbits of trivia. So when I came across “The Know It All” (first Chapter available online here) in my favourite second-hand store I had high hopes. Surely a condensed and accessible Encyclopaedia Britannica would be both an interesting and rewarding read?
Unfortunately, I was sadly mistaken. These kinds of eclectic narratives depend heavily on the judgement and personality of the curator and I just didn’t warm to “The Know It All’s” author, AJ Jacobs. Partly this was because I thought he came across as a bit of a wanker, but mostly what rubbed me up the wrong way was his approach to reading and learning more broadly.
Jacobs’ body of work gives you a bit of a flavour for his approach; in addition to his Britannica reading stunt, he has also penned books on the experience of spending a year following every single rule in the Bible (“The Year of Living Biblically”) and on turning his life into a series of human experiments (“The Guinea Pig Diaries”). In short, he has become quite the exponent of the literary gimmick in recent times. You get the feeling reading “The Know It All” that despite the affectations, it’s all just a bit of a stunt for a book deal and he doesn’t have any real passion for his cause.
Yes, there are plenty of interesting facts, but Jacob’s self-reflection is facile and the bolt on memoir about his family is just dull (not all families are interesting enough to be memorialised sad to say). There are redeeming sections, but on the whole the book is formulaic and pitched at the audience of Entertainment Weekly.
One issue in particular that would have been worth some consideration, but seemed to be completely overlooked was whether Encyclopaedias have any role whatsoever in today’s society. In the times of Google, Wikipedia and the internet, is there any point in a generalist collection of introductory information on subjects chosen and edited by a chosen few? Jacobs claims that:
“The Britannica is still the gold standard, the Tiffany’s of encyclopedias. Founded in 1768, it’s the longest continually published reference book in history. Over the years, the Britannica’s contributors have included Einstein, Freud and Harry Houdini. Its current roster includes dozens of academics with Nobels, Pulitzers and other types of awards with ceremonies that don’t feature commentary from Melissa Rivers. The Britannica passed through some tough times during the dot-com craze, and it long ago phased out the door-to-door salesman, but it keeps chugging along. The legendary Eleventh edition from 1911 is thought by many to be the best-it’s inspired a fervid if mild-mannered cult –but the current editions are still the greatest single source of knowledge.”
Really? The ‘Greatest single source of knowledge?’ Come on. This is the gimmick wagging the book – a justification rather than an examination of the medium.
Jacobs almost stumbles an interesting insight into the changing role of the medium when he cites Hans Koning’s explanation for why the 11th Edition of the EB, released in 1911 is considered by aficionados to be the greatest of all Encyclopaedias:
“The eleventh was the culmination of the Enlightenment, the last great work of the Age of Reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view. Four years late, the confidence and optimism that had produced the eleventh would be, as Konig puts it, “a casualty in the slaughter at Ypres and Argonne.”
Now here’s a topic for some critical reflection – the changing role of the EB in a world in which there is no longer a single fount of knowledge and the internet is changing the way that we seek, find and use information. Unfortunately, Jacobs isn’t interested:
“Yes, there’s the Internet. I could try to read Google from A to Z. But the Internet’s about as reliable as publications sold next to Trident and Duracell at the supermarket checkout line. Want a quick check on the trustworthiness of the Internet? Do a search on the words ‘perffectionist’ and ‘perfestionist.’ No, I prefer my old-school books. There’s something appealingly stable about the Britannica. I don’t even want that new-fangled CD-ROM for $49 or the monthly Britannica online service. I’ll take the leatherette volumes for $1400–which is not cheap, but it’s certainly less expensive than grad school. And anyway, at the end of this, maybe I can go on Jeopardy! and win enough to buy a dozen sets.”
Sigh. All he’s interested in is his gimmick and as a result the level of analysis you get from him rarely rises above that that you’d get from a reality television show. In summary, an interesting concept poorly executed.
(Random) Highlights:
From the original 1768 edition of the Britannica on Cats:
“Of all domestic animals, the character of the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious. He is kept, not for any amiable qualities, but purely with a view to banish rats, mice and other noxious animals from our houses… constantly bent on theft and rapine, they are full of cunning and dissimulation; they conceal their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment… In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship.”
On Nathaniel Hawthorne (of The Scarlet Letter fame):
Towards the end of his life Nathaniel Hawthorne “Took to writing the figure ‘64’ compulsively on scraps of paper’.
On Montaigne and the writing process:
Montaigne “coined the term ‘essay,’ which translates to ‘attempt,’ or a little ‘project of trials and error’.
On the quirks of fate:
“On the dropping of Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: “The B-29 spent 10 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point; it then proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, where at 11:02am local time, the weapon was air-burt at 1650 feet with a force of 21 Kilotons.”
Jacobs’ final insight from 44 million words:
“We have made our lives better. A thousand times better. Never again will I mythologize the past as some sort of golden age. Remember: in the 19th Century, the mortality rate was 75 percent fro a caesarean section… the workday was fourteen hours.. the life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty nine years. Widows had to marry their late husband’s brother. Originally forks only had one tine, and umbrellas were available only in black, and you ate four-day old fetid meat for dinner.”
(I don’t disagree with this BTW).
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Synopsis: Twenty years after the Nazi’s have won WW2 a criminal detective in the SS starts investigating the deaths of a number of senior party officials in the lead up to celebrations for Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday. It’s Agatha Christie meets George Orwell.
My Take: Let’s face it – the main appeal of historical fiction is the details of the alternative reality that the author creates and there’s a lot for history geeks to amuse themselves with in Robert Harris’ first work of fiction, “Fatherland”. A second major offensive through the Caucasus in 1942 allows Nazi Germany to defeat Stalin on the Eastern front in 1942. German counter-espionage enables the Nazi high command to first learn that the British have cracked the Enigma code and then lure the British fleet to its destruction. Cut off from the US, the United Kingdom is forced into an armistice in 1944 and a puppet government led by Edward the VIII is installed on the throne. Winston Churchill flees to Canada, where as he predicted, the remnants of the British Empire continue to resist. The German discovery of the nuclear bomb in 1946 leads to a cold war stalemate with Americans that continues until President Joseph Kennedy (Snr) initiates a détente between the two superpowers. The details of the Nazis’ Holocaust have been lost to the fog of war, but the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine is known around the world as “Stalin’s Holocaust”.
Harris uses this alternative historical context to create a reality just as rich as that put together by any science fiction or fantasy author. Like Orwell’s 1984, it’s the details of Harris’s Nazi society that are most the effective in creating the claustrophobia of the totalitarian state. Particularly amusing in this regard was the following passage preceding a discussion of the State sanctioned torture practiced by the state security apparatus:
“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.’
I quickly thumbed back to the publisher page of the book after reading this passage only to learn that the first edition of “Fatherland” was released in 1993, more than ten years before the Bush Administration sanctioned it’s very own program of “Enhanced Interrogation”. While the plot arc of “Fatherland” is nothing special and the prose is pretty ordinary, little gems of spot on historical imagination like this makes the book a worthwhile read.
Highlight: Wikipedia describes the landscape of the Nazi capital Harris in “Fatherland”:
Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments; the Great Hall holds over 160,000 people at the highest Nazi ceremonies; the enormous Arch of Triumph is inscribed with the names of German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and straddles the Grand Avenue, an immense boulevard lined with captured Soviet artillery and towering statues of Nazi eagles. The Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate are dwarfed by the vast, severe, granite civil buildings which dominate Berlin’s city centre; the Grand Plaza, the sprawling Berlin railway station, Hitler’s mammoth palace, the headquarters of the German Army, and the parliament of the powerless European Community.
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Synopsis: Twenty years after the Nazi’s have won WW2 a criminal detective in the SS starts investigating the deaths of a number of senior party officials in the lead up to celebrations for Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday. It’s Agatha Christie meets George Orwell.
My Take: Let’s face it – the main appeal of historical fiction is the details of the alternative reality that the author creates and there’s a lot for history geeks to amuse themselves with in Robert Harris’ first work of fiction, “Fatherland”. A second major offensive through the Caucasus in 1942 allows Nazi Germany to defeat Stalin on the Eastern front in 1942. German counter-espionage enables the Nazi high command to first learn that the British have cracked the Enigma code and then lure the British fleet to its destruction. Cut off from the US, the United Kingdom is forced into an armistice in 1944 and a puppet government led by Edward the VIII is installed on the throne. Winston Churchill flees to Canada, where as he predicted, the remnants of the British Empire continue to resist. The German discovery of the nuclear bomb in 1946 leads to a cold war stalemate with Americans that continues until President Joseph Kennedy (Snr) initiates a détente between the two superpowers. The details of the Nazis’ Holocaust have been lost to the fog of war, but the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine is known around the world as “Stalin’s Holocaust”.
Harris uses this alternative historical context to create a reality just as rich as that put together by any science fiction or fantasy author. Like Orwell’s 1984, it’s the details of Harris’s Nazi society that are most the effective in creating the claustrophobia of the totalitarian state. Particularly amusing in this regard was the following passage preceding a discussion of the State sanctioned torture practiced by the state security apparatus:
“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.’
I quickly thumbed back to the publisher page of the book after reading this passage only to learn that the first edition of “Fatherland” was released in 1993, more than ten years before the Bush Administration sanctioned it’s very own program of “Enhanced Interrogation”. While the plot arc of “Fatherland” is nothing special and the prose is pretty ordinary, little gems of spot on historical imagination like this makes the book a worthwhile read.
Highlight: Wikipedia describes the landscape of the Nazi capital recreated by Harris in “Fatherland”:
Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments; the Great Hall holds over 160,000 people at the highest Nazi ceremonies; the enormous Arch of Triumph is inscribed with the names of German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and straddles the Grand Avenue, an immense boulevard lined with captured Soviet artillery and towering statues of Nazi eagles. The Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate are dwarfed by the vast, severe, granite civil buildings which dominate Berlin’s city centre; the Grand Plaza, the sprawling Berlin railway station, Hitler’s mammoth palace, the headquarters of the German Army, and the parliament of the powerless European Community.
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Synopsis: An idiot’s guide to the various streams of contemporary Chinese policy debate. When you view the world through the eyes of China’s intellectuals
My Take: Those who know me know that I’m a bit of a Sinophile. While the human rights record of the Chinese government is obviously indefensible and deserves public attention and debate, I do get a bit annoyed at the generally simplistic analysis applied to issues involving China.
China is obviously not a free society. Its citizens are constrained by the constant threat of brutal repression. But the trajectory of societal development is clearly towards increased personal freedom. There’s a legitimate discussion about whether the pace of this societal change is adequate, but nobody could argue that China under Hu Jintao is less free than it was under Jiang Zemin, or less free under Deng Xiaoping than it was under Mao. China today is more complex than the totalitarian police state caricature.
China’s people are far from a brain-washed, homogenous mass. While there are still absolute taboo topics with hideous consequences for transgressors, there is currently a vigorous political/philosophical debate occurring in China. Mark Leonard’s book, “What Does China Think?” provides a useful idiot’s guide to these debates. The book’s introduction provides a good synopsis of the ground that Leonard covers:
“Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.
….While it is true there is no free discussion about ending the Communist party’s rule, independence for Tibet or the events of Tiananmen Square, there is a relatively open debate in leading newspapers and academic journals about China’s economic model, how to clean up corruption or deal with foreign policy issues like Japan or North Korea.”
To my mind, the most interesting part of “What Does China Think” is Leonard’s survey of Chinese experiments with new models of governance. There seems to be a lot of experimentation with different ways of making Government more responsive to its citizens – without actually introducing democracy. The result is an interesting series of bounded public consultations – focus groups, opinion polls, citizen deliberative juries – designed to increase citizens’ voice within specific circumscribed parameters, without actually giving them the power to challenge the Communist Party’s power.
As Leonard tells it:
The west still has multi-party elections as a central part of the political process, but has supplemented them with new types of deliberation. China, according to the new political thinkers, will do things the other way around: using elections in the margins but making public consultations, expert meetings and surveys a central part of decision-making. This idea was described pithily by Fang Ning, a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He compared democracy in the west to a fixed-menu restaurant where customers can select the identity of their chef, but have no say in what dishes he chooses to cook for them. Chinese democracy, on the other hand, always involves the same chef—the Communist party—but the policy dishes which are served up can be chosen “à la carte.”
The authorities certainly seem willing to experiment with all kinds of political innovations. In Zeguo, they have even introduced a form of government by focus group. But the main criterion guiding political reform seems to be that it must not threaten the Communist party’s monopoly on power. Can a more responsive form of authoritarianism evolve into a legitimate and stable form of government?
Leonard terms the result ‘deliberative dictatorship’ and it’s interesting despite its numerous and obvious shortcomings. “What Does China Think” is a useful primer for the way the Chinese elite view the world and the policy challenges facing their nation.
Highlights:
“We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story of China’s intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.”
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Synopsis: Married woman meets famous writer and falls in love. Then falls in love with writer’s wife. Then falls in love with cousin. Then her psychoanalysis. Then diarises sexual awakening.
My Take: Yes, I admit have particular preferences when it comes to my reading habits. I read more than my share of modern Asian fiction, Kennedy biographies and blokey Australian literature. However, I do consciously try to read outside of my comfort zone on a fairly regular basis. I figure even if it’s not to my tastes, at least I’m broadening my horizons (and have one more topic that I can bullshit my way through a conversation about).
Enter Anais Nin. I remember shortly after reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” thinking that I really didn’t read many female writers and that I should make more of an effort to challenge my ignorant and patriarchal biases. So I figured I’d dive into the deep end with some of the chickyist femo-lit around – Anais Nin’s semi-infamous diaries of sexual awakening and literary exploration in 1930s Paris with Henry and June Miller.
I promise that I did come to this with an open mind. I was looking for enrichment and broadening of horizons. Unfortunately, what I found was a bit of a mess. Nin is a poetic and whimsical writer, but even in the edited version I read, the internal monologue got tiring pretty quickly. Nin’s frank writing about her sexual awakening and liberation might have been enough to carry the book in an earlier time, but I wonder about its relevance today. I suppose that I should give Nin a leave pass on this one given that she never intended the diaries to be published, but even disregarding the lack of narrative framing for an external audience, there wasn’t much in the diaries that made me think that I would enjoy Nin’s writing/perspectives/insights in a fictional context.
Highlight: I would include a highlight, but a lot of it is NSFW so I think I’ll take the path of discretion…
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Synopsis: Married woman meets famous writer and falls in love. Then falls in love with writer’s wife. Then falls in love with cousin. Then her psychoanalysis. Then diarises sexual awakening.
My Take: Yes, I admit have particular preferences when it comes to my reading habits. I read more than my share of modern Asian fiction, Kennedy biographies and blokey Australian literature. However, I do consciously try to read outside of my comfort zone on a fairly regular basis. I figure even if it’s not to my tastes, at least I’m broadening my horizons (and have one more topic that I can bullshit my way through a conversation about).
Enter Anais Nin. I remember shortly after reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” thinking that I really didn’t read many female writers and that I should make more of an effort to challenge my ignorant and patriarchal biases. So I figured I’d dive into the deep end with some of the chickyist femo-lit around – Anais Nin’s semi-infamous diaries of sexual awakening and literary exploration in 1930s Paris with Henry and June Miller.
I promise that I did come to this with an open mind. I was looking for enrichment and broadening of horizons. Unfortunately, what I found was a bit of a mess. Nin is a poetic and whimsical writer, but even in the edited version I read, the internal monologue got tiring pretty quickly. Nin’s frank writing about her sexual awakening and liberation might have been enough to carry the book in an earlier time, but I wonder about its relevance today. I suppose that I should give Nin a leave pass on this one given that she never intended the diaries to be published, but even disregarding the lack of narrative framing for an external audience, there wasn’t much in the diaries that made me think that I would enjoy Nin’s writing/perspectives/insights in a fictional context.
Highlight: I would include a highlight, but a lot of it is NSFW so I think I’ll take the path of discretion…
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Synopsis: Leopold Bloom spends a day wandering through Dublin on June 16, 1904. Modern literature will never be the same again.
My Take: Ulysses is my literary white whale. I’ve sat down to try and read it a couple of times, but have never had the requisite endurance or appreciation. I get the feeling that I will enjoy it one day, but I’m just not ready yet.
In this regard, I think I have to endorse Gary Dexter’s observations on Ulysses “How Books Got Their Titles”:
In 2006 the poet laureate Andrew Motion recommended that all schoolchildren read Ulysses as part of their essential grounding in English literature. One can see why. To read Ulysses is to realize that the whole of twentieth-century literature is little more than a James Joyce Appreciation Society. … But in another way his suggestion was absurd. Ulysses is not a book for children. It is barely even a book for adults. The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.
I’ve no idea how long it will remain unread on my bookshelf, but I know I’ll get there one day.
Highlight: I’m sure there are many, but so far all I’ve got from my aborted attempts to finish “Ulysses” is neck strain as I watched the meaning constantly soaring over my head. Sigh.
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Synopsis: The second instalment of Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire historical fiction series follows the travails of the United States during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. From the ballot to the bullet as it were.
My Take: It took me a while to give Gore Vidal a try. As regular readers know, I have a bit of hero worship thing going on with Robert Kennedy. And while Vidal was the step-brother by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy and therefore technically Bobby’s step-brother-in-law-by-marriage-one-removed, the pair famously did not get along.
As a result, my early exposure to Vidal came consisted entirely of a series of highly unflattering accounts in various Kennedy biographies. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, court historian to the Kennedys writes in his magisterial “Robert Kennedy and his Times” (extracted from Google Books), their relationship was strained from the start:
Bobby hated Vidal’s pretension (and let’s be frank, his homosexuality) and Vidal hated Bobby’s ruthlessness and impertinence and frequently spoke out against RFK whilst on the campaign trail.
This natural bias against Vidal was further entrenched by the fact that Vidal was similarly estranged from another of my literary favourites, Norman Mailer. Amusingly enough, the feud between this pair of US literary giants culminated in Mailer:
Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.
All of which I was very familiar with before having read a single word of Vidal’s writing. So you’ll forgive me if I thought Vidal’s critical bite was bigger than his literary bark.
That was however, before I read “Lincoln”. Put simply, it’s a tour de force. Historical fiction is an extremely difficult medium to do well. How do you go about credibly writing dialogue for a figure that has been canonised to the extent of Lincoln? If you want to see how badly it can go wrong, go no further than the television mini-series adaptation of “Lincoln” staring Mary Tyler Moore. Fast forward past the credits until you get to the stilted dialogue and overacting and get ready to cringe – it takes a talented writer indeed to avoid coming across as hackneyed or clichéd with subject matter like this.
In “Lincoln”, Vidal pulls off this difficult task with aplomb. Telling his story from multiple perspectives (the primary narrator being Lincoln’s presidential secretary, and later Secretary of State, John Hay),Vidal vividly recreates the world of Civil War era Washington and the massive figures that inhabited it. Luckily, there’s plenty of action in the period for Vidal to draw on to keep his plot moving forward too. Putting to one side the obvious drama of the Civil War, the constant political machinations of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, principally his Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, is enough to drive the narrative of a political thriller in its own right.
Highlight: Not from the book itself, but from Vidal’s public response to a critical review of “Lincoln” in The New York Times by a historian unhappy with the historical accuracy of the book. Vidal describes his reviewer as “the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era” and “pleasantly scatterbrained” then goes on to state:
Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (’hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.
Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.
Quite!
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Synopsis: The second instalment of Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire historical fiction series follows the travails of the United States during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. From the ballot to the bullet as it were.
My Take: It took me a while to give Gore Vidal a try. As regular readers know, I have a bit of hero worship thing going on with Robert Kennedy. And while Vidal was the step-brother by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy and therefore technically Bobby’s step-brother-in-law-by-marriage-one-removed, the pair famously did not get along.
As a result, my early exposure to Vidal came consisted entirely of a series of highly unflattering accounts in various Kennedy biographies. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, court historian to the Kennedys writes in his magisterial “Robert Kennedy and his Times” (extracted from Google Books), their relationship was strained from the start:
Bobby hated Vidal’s pretension (and let’s be frank, his homosexuality) and Vidal hated Bobby’s ruthlessness and impertinence and frequently spoke out against RFK whilst on the campaign trail.
This natural bias against Vidal was further entrenched by the fact that Vidal was similarly estranged from another of my literary favourites, Norman Mailer. Amusingly enough, the feud between this pair of US literary giants culminated in Mailer:
Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.
All of which I was very familiar with before having read a single word of Vidal’s writing. So you’ll forgive me if I thought Vidal’s critical bite was bigger than his literary bark.
That was however, before I read “Lincoln”. Put simply, it’s a tour de force. Historical fiction is an extremely difficult medium to do well. How do you go about credibly writing dialogue for a figure that has been canonised to the extent of Lincoln? If you want to see how badly it can go wrong, go no further than the television mini-series adaptation of “Lincoln” staring Mary Tyler Moore. Fast forward past the credits until you get to the stilted dialogue and overacting and get ready to cringe – it takes a talented writer indeed to avoid coming across as hackneyed or clichéd with subject matter like this.
In “Lincoln”, Vidal pulls off this difficult task with aplomb. Telling his story from multiple perspectives (the primary narrator being Lincoln’s presidential secretary, and later Secretary of State, John Hay),Vidal vividly recreates the world of Civil War era Washington and the massive figures that inhabited it. Luckily, there’s plenty of action in the period for Vidal to draw on to keep his plot moving forward too. Putting to one side the obvious drama of the Civil War, the constant political machinations of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, principally his Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, is enough to drive the narrative of a political thriller in its own right.
Highlight: Not from the book itself, but from Vidal’s public response to a critical review of “Lincoln” in The New York Times by a historian unhappy with the historical accuracy of the book. Vidal describes his reviewer as “the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era” and “pleasantly scatterbrained” then goes on to state:
Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (’hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.
Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.
Quite!
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Synopsis: Guns, Drugs and Women – Misha Glenny travels from Eastern Europe to South America, Africa, Israel, India, Dubai, Canada, China and Japan tracing the globalisation of crime since the early 1990s. The globalised economy may well be ‘Flat’, but it also casts one hell of a shadow.
My Take: Misha Glenny is probably the only journalist in the world who could have written a book of this scope about a subject matter so murky. Poly-lingual and with the street smarts that come from years spent reporting on the frontlines and the backchannels of the Balkan Wars (brilliantly recounted in “The Fall of Yugoslavia”), Glenny has the ability to do first-hand reporting that most journalists would have neither the ability nor the courage to undertake. Glenny uses his unique skill set to follow the smuggling routes for illegal cigarettes, drugs, women and guns, to trace the paper trail of financing and money laundering needed by the illicit economy and to meet the muscle and influence needed to protect these operations. It’s a rollicking tale with some great characters.
However, it’s the bigger picture of Glenny’s story that I found both more interesting and more frustrating. On the interesting side, Glenny spends a lot of time exploring the factors influencing supply and demand for the outputs of international crime. Glenny makes a compelling case for how the high level of demand in the West for commodities like oil, cigarettes, drugs and women combined with the void of institutional authority in Eastern Europe, Africa and South America in the early 1990s to create an explosive, transnational, illicit supply response in the developing world.
As Glenny puts it:
“One group of people.. saw real opportunity in this dazzling mixture of upheaval, hope and uncertainty. These men understood instinctively that rising living standards in the West, increased trade and migration flows, and the greatly reduced ability of many governments to police their countries combined to form a goldmine. They were criminals, organised and disorganised, but they were also good capitalists and entrepreneurs, intent on obeying the laws of supply and demand.”
Through his case studies, Glenny demonstrates the globalised economy’s ability to quickly direct financial and physical resources in response to the opportunities for supra-normal profits created by illicit markets. As Glenny rightly points out, more often than not, it is government policy that creates these extraordinary returns via domestic regulation eg via prohibitions, trade embargos, cross-border barriers, extremely high rates of tax etc. Where either the substance of these regulations differs from on national market to another, incentives are created for the trans-nationalisation of crime. It’s interesting stuff that I haven’t seen too many other people writing about.
The frustrating thing about “McMafia” though is that Glenny doesn’t frame the book through this insight. Instead, he clouds his thesis with a series of interesting, but only tangentially related stories without any explanation for where it all fits together. Glenny has aggregated so much reporting about modern trans-national crime that he can’t seem to bare to leave any of it out. The ultimate effect is to leave the reader wondering how it is all connected.
For example, Glenny dedicates a substantial portion of the book to discussing market opportunities created by the mass concession of the state’s monopoly over the use of force throughout Eastern Europe. It’s interesting stuff and Glenny goes into quite some detail on the causes and implications of the privatisation of coercive power in the wake of the collapse of Communism:
“All manner of operatives lost their jobs: secret police, counterintelligence officers, special-forces commandos and border guards, as well as homicide detectives and traffic cops. Their skills included surveillance, smuggling, killing people, establishing networks and blackmail.
The Police and even the KGB were clueless as to how one might enforce contract law. The protection rackets and Mafiosi were not so clueless – their central role in the new Russian economy was to ensure that contracts entered into were honoured. They were the new law-enforcement agencies, and the oligarchs needed their services.
By 1999, there were more than 11,500 registered ‘Private Security Firms’, employing more than 800,000 people. Of these, almost 200,000 had licences to carry arms. The Russian Interior Ministry has estimated that there were at least half as many again that remained unregistered.”
It’s interesting stuff to read about the wrestlers, boxers, weightlifters and spooks that were previously employed by various Communist regimes contracting out their services to the private sector en masse. But Glenny doesn’t contextualise the multiple chapters he dedicates to this collapse in Government within his broader message about the causes of the internationalisation of crime.
Highlight: One of the most fascinating parts of the book (and the source for its title) was how international criminal syndicates were implementing many of the business strategies of their licit counter parts, to wit the following example of branding, licensing and franchising:
“One of the most violent and feared groups to emerge in Moscow and elsewhere was the Chechen mafia. Their mere reputation for being both fearless and gruesome was often sufficient to cow an opponent or persuade a businessman to take them on as his Krysha (literally ‘roof’).
But their members were not drawn exclusively from the Caucasus, let alone from Chechnya: ‘The Chechen mafia (who should not be confused with the guerrillas fighting in the Chechen war) became a brand name, a franchise – McMafia if you life,’ explained Mark Galeotti, who has devoted the last fifteen years to studying the Russian Mob. ‘They would sell the moniker “Chechen” to protection rackets in other towns provided they paid, of course, and provided they all ways carried out their word. If a group claimed a Chechen connection, but didn’t carry out its threats to the letter, it was devaluing the brand. The original Chechens would come after them’”.
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Synopsis: Thinly veiled autobiographical account of David Malouf’s adolescence and early adulthood and his changing relationships with his eponymous best friend, Johnno and the town of his birth, Brisbane. A must for all Queenslanders.
My Take: I have a very warm spot in my heart for David Malouf. He’s the kind of writer that I would love to be – a poet who divides his time between writing classical allegories set in the Roman Empire and stories of humid days and stormy nights spent on the decks of Queenslander houses. He’s living proof that “Queensland literary giant” is no oxymoron and as such I cling to him dearly.
“Johnno” isn’t Malouf’s best work (I’ll plump for the Miles Franklin winning The Great World in this respect), but as a fellow Queenslander, it is my favourite. No other book I’ve read quite evokes the experiences and outlook of the Great Northern State quite like Malouf’s first book, “Johnno”. While the Brisbane City Council may not usually be recognised as a noted judge of literary achievement, its recent selection of “Johnno” as the book that best represents Brisbane was spot on.
While quite short and simply written, “Johnno” is a complex and layered book. In a funny way, “Johnno” is part Hugh Lunn, part Aeschylus. At the most basic level, it is a lovingly told coming of age story of two unlikely friends in 1940s and 50s Brisbane. Thematically however, Malouf piles many layers of meaning into this work. I’m no literary expert, but to my mind the most interesting part of this book is how Malouf uses the evolving relationship between the urbane but insecure auto-biographical protagonist, ‘Dante’ and his hedonistic and superficially assured best friend Johnno as a platform for exploring Malouf’s evolving perceptions of place and family.
On the one hand, throughout his youth Dante/Malouf envies Johnno’s bravura and seemingly blissfully relaxed approach to life. While he feels like an outsider, Dante/Malouf genuinely wants to fit into the simple, happy, physical lifestyle in Brisbane that his father long enjoyed. On the other hand, Dante/Malouf is repelled by Johnno’s lack of refinement and ambition. Dante/Malouf sees himself as ultimately being apart from Brisbane, an intellectual and sophisticate with broader horizons and ambitions than other Queenslanders.
Unfortunately, as a young man, Dante/Malouf invariably failed to see that his perceptions of Johnno/his father/Brisbane were more a function of his insecurity than their shallowness. Throughout the majority of the novel Dante/Malouf views Johnno/his father/Brisbane in black and white. As a result he feels the need to reject what he feels Johnno/his father/Brisbane stand for in order to validate his own, broader intellectual ambitions.
In this regard, Dante/Malouf’s strident complaints about Brisbane ring true to anyone who grew up there:
‘I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.’
‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world…It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’
However, the fact that these complaints are so familiar directly undermine any justification for Dante/Malouf’s sense of separateness. Dante/Malouf was never as isolated and stifled in Brisbane as he thought as a young man. Many of those around him who he had written off as dully shallow and suburban had similar rich internal lives and ambitions. However, it is only when looking back with the benefit of age and the perspective of having lived in Paris, Italy and London that Malouf is able to realise that Johnno/his father/Brisbane were far more nuanced and complex than he had given them credit for.
Malouf has a real talent for bringing out these realisations in the most affecting ways. In one of the saddest moments of the book, Johnno’s last letter to Dante before his suicide reveals that he had always admired the intellectual qualities in Dante that he had thought Johnno had misunderstood, describing him as:
‘the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince’.
Similarly, when sorting through his father’s belongings soon after his death, Dante is forced to similarly revaluate his perceptions of his Father:
‘Now as I began to sort through his “effects” it occurred to me how little I had really known him … I had forced upon my father the character that fitted most easily with my image of myself; to have had to admit to any complexity in him would have compromised my own.’
In this way, I think “Johnno” is a story about what all Queenslanders go through at some point in their lives – the process of revaluating the black and white judgements of their youth about the place in which they grew up. “Johnno” is about the process of leaning that while Queensland is far from the most cosmopolitan place in the world, neither is it a cultural backwater devoid of the human experience. Life might still seem impossibly boring there, but it’s ultimately the people that make a place what it is. If you make the effort to look below the surface, you’ll see that the people of Queensland are just as complex and nuanced participants in the human experience as anyone else. It might not make you feel as special or unique to admit it, but it opens up a world of enriching relationships that might never have realised existed.
Highlights:
‘Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.’
….
‘The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.’
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Synopsis: First novel (in order of release, not chronology) of the seven volume Foundation series tracing ‘psychohistorian’, Hari Seldon’s efforts to restore civilisation in the wake of the collapse of the Galactic Empire.
My Take: I’m not usually a fan of Science Fiction (and I’m NEVER a fan of fantasy. Yes that includes The Lord of the Rings – don’t even get me started). In my (admittedly limited) experience science fiction novelists too often submit to the temptation to invest too much of their imaginative skills in creating a fictional alternative world and not enough in creating depth and complexity in their characters. Similarly, to my mind, the ability to ‘make the rules’ in the fictional universe allows authors to imagine their way through some pretty improbable plot arcs. It’s a bit weak I know, but I just can’t see it as ‘real’ literature.
However, I make an exception for the Foundation series. It may be because I came upon him at a tender age, before I was overcome by my current insufferable pretentiousness, but for some reason I can forgive Isaac Asimov of the sins of science fiction writing. I can still see all of the usual shortcomings, but for some reason they don’t seem to irritate me. Go figure.
While Asimov wrote more than 500 books, and managed to get an entry into 9/10 of the Dewy Decimal System categories (striking out in the 100s; philosophy and psychology), the Foundation series are considered his best work. Will Smith and Robin Williams might have popularised Asimov’s ‘Robot Series’ in recent times, but for the Sci-Fi geeks, Foundation still reigns supreme. In fact, it was awarded the Hugo Award in Science Fiction for “Best All-Time Series”
The series tells a 500 year story arc beginning with the development of psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that could be used to predict the future at the macro-level (essentially it is like a kind of econometrics but with less grand claims). Interestingly, ‘Foundation’ has long had an appeal to economists and inspired the careers of Paul Krugman and Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.
Using psychohistory, Seldon predicts the collapse of the current Galactic Empire (groan, I know) and the descent of man into a 30,000 year long dark-age. In an effort to reduce the time spent in decline to a mere millennia, Seldon establishes two ‘Foundations’ isolated and secluded planets tasked with preserving human progress to date and re-establishing civilisation.
How can this possibly be interesting reading if Seldon could see the future and therefore eliminate any prospect of failure for the Foundations? Well firstly, psychohistory only works at the macro-scale – it can’t predict the behaviour of small, isolated groups of people, which is exactly what is left after the collapse of the empire. Secondly, the citizens of the Foundations are not themselves aware of Seldon’s macro-predictions – such knowledge would affect the accuracy of his predictions. So the success of the Foundations in re-establishing civilisation is always in the balance – you’ll just have to read all seven volumes if you want to know whether the Galactic Empire is restored.
Highlights:
The Three Theorems of Psychohistorical Quantitivity:
The population under scrutiny is oblivious to the existence of the science of Psychohistory.
The time periods dealt with are in the region of 3 generations.
The population must be in the billions (±75 billions) for a statistical probability to have a psychohistorical validity.
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Synopsis: A group of American dilettantes living in post WW1 Europe travel from France to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. The men in the group (as well as many of the locals they encounter) covet and vigorously pursue the beautiful and promiscuous Brett Ashley, but the narrator, war veteran Jake Barnes, is unable to consummate his desire for her as a result of a war injury that spared him his life, but took his manhood.
My Take: So I’ve got a bit of a thing about macho writers – the Hemingways, the Mailers, the Updikes and the Roth’s of the literary world. There’s something in me that enjoys seeing their antiquated and uncomplicated visions of masculinity put down on paper. It’s not because I think it’s a realistic view, but more because it makes for some great fiction as conflict inevitably manifests itself between their ideals of manhood and reality.
“The Sun Also Rises”, one of Hemingway’s best books is a great example of this tension. The protagonist of the story, American war veteran Jake Barnes, is a none-to-subtle exploration of what it means to be a man. Barnes physically lost his manhood in a plane crash in WW1, but did not lose his manly desires. In Hemingway’s world, this inability to act on the most fundamental aspect of manhood meant that Barnes could never be happy.
It is the basic act of consummation that matters beyond all else. Any other form of non-physical fulfilment never crosses Hemingway’s mind. Throughout the book, Barnes attempts to salve his wounded manhood through physical labour, heavy drinking, hunting, fishing, bull fighting, through a whole series of actions, but can never bring himself to seek emotional satisfaction.
What I find most interesting about “The Sun Also Rises”, was that Hemingway chose this conflict not to critique this over-emphasis on the physicality of masculinity, but to emphasise it. Hemingway has obviously thought deeply about the subject. As Gary Dexter writes at the excellent ‘How Books Got Their Titles’ blog:
On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:
Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.
So Hemingway had considered the central conflict of this book in some depth and the conclusion he reached was that without sex, ‘there was nothing they could do about (their love)’. Seriously, you can’t help but be amused at self-parody as good as this.
“The Sun Also Rises” is a Hemingway at his best. Succinct and direct writing, great dialogue and a pervasive overlay of out of control machismo. Great stuff.
Highlight:
“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”
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Synopsis: Series of nine short-stories published before Perlman really hit the big time with “Three Dollars” and then “Seven Types of Ambiguity”. Not badly written, but just not to my taste.
My Take: The way I remember it (and it could have course been completely different for everyone else), the mid-90s were a strangely depressing time. The Cold War was over, but instead of celebrating the lifting of this looming an existential threat, the Western world seemed to fall into a crisis of meaning. At a time when academics were proclaiming ‘The End of History’, people seemed to start asking “What’s the point?”. The great political and ideological struggles seemed to have been fought and people were left to contemplate a boring life spent climbing the corporate ladder. Personal angst flowed into the void created be the removal of political tension. This vibe seemed to change with the arrival of a new existential/ideological challenge in the form of the Global War on Terror, but there was a brief window when cynicism and resignation seemed to pervade the public mind.
To me, “The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming” felt like it was written in the middle of this mid-90s funk. The themes of the book – soulless corporatism and hollow relationships – combined with its method of delivery – a brooding internal monologue – gave the book a bleak feel that just didn’t speak to me. The writing’s not bad (if a little monotonous at times) but it just seemed unnecessarily bleak to me. Maybe this book would have connected with me more when it was written, but the crisis of meaning that seemed to underpin the stories just didn’t seem relevant to me today.
Highlights:
‘Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.’
…
‘Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same and no one know how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines you choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.’
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Synopsis: A group of American dilettantes living in post WW1 Europe travel from France to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. The men in the group (as well as many of the locals they encounter) covet and vigorously pursue the beautiful and promiscuous Brett Ashley, but the narrator, war veteran Jake Barnes, is unable to consummate his desire for her as a result of a war injury that spared him his life, but took his manhood.
My Take: So I’ve got a bit of a thing about macho writers – the Hemingways, the Mailers, the Updikes and the Roth’s of the literary world. There’s something in me that enjoys seeing their antiquated and uncomplicated visions of masculinity put down on paper. It’s not because I think it’s a realistic view, but more because it makes for some great fiction as conflict inevitably manifests itself between their ideals of manhood and reality.
“The Sun Also Rises”, one of Hemingway’s best books is a great example of this tension. The protagonist of the story, American war veteran Jake Barnes, is a none-to-subtle exploration of what it means to be a man. Barnes physically lost his manhood in a plane crash in WW1, but did not lose his manly desires. In Hemmingway’s world, this inability to act on the most fundamental aspect of manhood meant that Barnes could never be happy.
It is the basic act of consummation that matters beyond all else. Any other form of non-physical fulfilment never crosses Hemmingway’s mind. Throughout the book, Barnes attempts to salve his wounded manhood through physical labour, heavy drinking, hunting, fishing, bull fighting, through a whole series of actions, but can never bring himself to seek emotional satisfaction.
What I find most interesting about “The Sun Also Rises”, was that Hemingway chose this conflict not to critique this over-emphasis on the physicality of masculinity, but to emphasise it. Hemingway has obviously thought deeply about the subject. As Gary Dexter writes at the excellent ‘How Books Got Their Titles’ blog:
On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:
Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.
So Hemingway had considered the central conflict of this book in some depth and the conclusion he reached was that without sex, ‘there was nothing they could do about (their love)’. Seriously, you can’t help but be amused at self-parody as good as this.
“The Sun Also Rises” is a Hemingway at his best. Succinct and direct writing, great dialogue and a pervasive overlay of out of control machismo. Great stuff.
Highlight:
“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”
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Synopsis: Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker spends two years travelling in Rwanda in 1995-97 and produces an illuminating, if not always objectively rigorous, account of the Rwandan genocide, its causes and its aftermath.
My Take: Philip Gourevitch’s account of the collective insanity of late 20th century Rwanda is a moving account.
Not simply because it tells a horrific story mainly from first hand accounts, but moreso because it is told unashamedly from a position of moral clarity. Gourevitch doesn’t equivocate in this book. He tells the stories he’s heard directly and with clear moral verdicts. His writing isn’t annoyingly hectoring or self-righteous, but it clearly places blame where it belongs (ie the Belgians, the French, the Hutus, the UN, the French, the Americans, the UNHCR, the French). No where is this approach more clear than in the title of the book, which comes from a letter written by several local pastors to their regional superior, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Seventh-Day Adventist Pastor who was later convicted in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda with aiding their killing the following day.
In many ways Gourevitch’s approach reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s writing on the holocaust in this regard – more interested in humanity, and what the genocide said about it, than in providing an objective political history. He delves into some detail into Rwanda’s history and culture, but more for philosophical reflection on the absurdities of human nature than to factually enlighten the reader. One particularly interesting section of the book in this regard was its discussion on the absurdly vague distinction drawn within the country between Hutus and Tutsis.
The very nature of the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis is difficult to articulate. Ethanographers and historians agree that they cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups. Similarly, the difference does not quite fit the description of classes, castes or ranks. What can be said is that the perceptions of difference probably sprung from historical occupational distinctions between Tutsi as herdsman and Hutu as cultivators. Allegedly, the increased value of cattle gave the numerically inferior Tutsis some social and political cache that was entrenched by entrenched in the 19th century when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the throne, and expanded the state to around its present borders.
All of the above is difficult to verify as a result of the ambiguities of oral history and the substantial distrust that now overlays the area. However, what can be confidently said is that it was the Belgians that entrenched and perpetuated these distinctions in order to administer their colonial rule. As Gourevitch tellingly recounts:
“Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.”
….
“In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.”
Combine this institutionalised societal division with the brutality and repression of the Belgian colonial administration and the die was well and truly set. But again, Gourevitch does not recount this history to offer lessons, but more so to muse on the nature of humanity. It’s an approach that works in literature, if not in conflict studies. No doubt the causes of the genocide were more nuanced and ambiguous than Gourevitch recounts. No doubt it’s also important for subject matter scholars to study and analyse these reasons. But for the broader mass of humanity, the rights and wrongs of genocide are patently clear. Gourevitch’s moral clarity in the face of the victims he has encountered seems appropriate and his reflection on the nature of humanity seems the best thing that anyone from outside of Rwanda can take from the tragedy.
Highlight:
“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, the horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”
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Synopsis: An assortment of hilarious vignettes from the periods of Burroughs’ life not already canvassed in “Running with Scissors” or “Dry”. Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant.
My Take: Here’s the thing about Augusten Burroughs. I love him – at its best, his writing zings and fizzles with caustic, but good natured wit. Sadly, my fiancée’s first exposure to him was via his least impressive work; his most recent effort ‘Wolf at the Table’. She wasn’t impressed, and to be honest, neither was I. This state of affairs is doubly unfortunate as it has led me to evangelise Burroughs to her even more than I ordinarily would. It’s a conundrum – the more I push it, the more the pressure will increase, building up the expectation to heights that can’t possibly be met and decreasing the likelihood that she will like him at all. It’s a strange thing this compulsion to bully your friends into liking the books that you yourself loved.
Anyway, I’m hoping that the next Burroughs’ book that she picks up (after I subtly wear her down) will be “Magical Thinking”. His life as a neurotic, gay, New York advertising executive turned best selling author with an excess of personal baggage from a truly bizarre childhood provides a rich subject matter. In this context, Burroughs’ furtive attempts to develop healthy, loving relationship with a partner in spite of his calamitous personal history are warmly and amusingly told:
”I must ease people into the facts of me, not deposit large, undigested chunks of my history at their feet. Too much of me too fast is toxic.” ….
”My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a ’survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education.” ….
”(The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.”
However, while Burroughs shows a little more of himself in this book than say “Running with Scissors” but the star of “Magical Thinking” is still Burroughs’ writing. The prose in this book sparkles like a Burroughs concentrate. Burroughs’ masterful dry wit is sprinkled liberally throughout the pages of “Magical Thinking” and his narrative asides are a delight:
“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.” ….
”Telemarketers… (are) calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy?” ….
‘I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.’
“Magical Thinking” is one of those books that leaves you giggling and chortling throughout. Highly recommended.
Highlight: “Roid Rage” the story of the time Burroughs’ spent using steroids in order to live up to the buffed stereotypes of New York’s gay dating scene”
‘To nobody’s surprise, steroid use is common among gay men. When you combine a love for men with a love for drama, you end up with a guy on steroids.’ …
‘I said – I’m doing it for medical reasons’ my boyfriend would reply ‘your vanity is not a medical reason.’ ….
‘On typical days, (dust) is simply irritating. On Roid Rage days, it made me want to stomp down to the highway, pull drivers out of their cars, and bash their faces into pavement; Suck up that dirt like a good little Electrolux, Jersey Boy Bitch.’ ….
‘It’s weird. The day after I get the shot, I’m usually fine. It’s the day after this where I turn into somebody capable of committing a triple homicide, then going to a Ben Stiller movie.’
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Synopsis: I think everyone pretty well knows the deal here.
My Take: WARNING RANT AHEAD
I would have never picked up this book if left to my own devices but I was bullied into it by both friends and family who accused me of being a shallow snob for turning my nose up at a book because the masses had embraced it. Given my love for Bundaberg Rum, a Holden V8 and Neighbours, I was unaccustomed to being labelled a snob and so resolved to see whether I really was being unreasonable about this and give Mr Brown a proper chance.
Having now actually read the book I now feel on firmer ground insisting that this book is crap. And it’s not that I don’t like trash, even popular trash. I love Tom Clancy. John Grisham is a great way to waste a couple of hours. It’s just that this book was shit. I thought it was poorly written (cringingly expositional in parts), implausible (as a thriller, not historically) and mind numbingly obvious. I’m sorry, but the fact that people who don’t often read read this book isn’t an advertisement for its quality. I do often read and my mind rebels at being spoon fed formulaic drivel aimed at US soccer moms.
Fatally for The Da Vinci Code’s chances with me, it reminded me of the plot of the grand novel that Ewan McGregor’s deadbeat character in “A Life Less Ordinary” was planning:
Richard: Perhaps this is a good opportunity… to tell you about my novel.
Celine: Look, I’m not interested in your novel.
Richard: It’s 1960 right? And Marilyn Monroe… is giving birth to a baby girl. She’s on the phone to Jack Kennedy… saying, “Jack, it’s yours. It’s yours,Jack.”
Celine: So the orphan grows up… And she solves some great mystery, right? It’s kind of obvious, Robert.
I couldn’t have said it better myself: It’s kinda obvious Dan.
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Synopsis: As search, storage and distribution costs trend towards zero in an increasingly digital world the economics of commerce are changing. While massively selling high-demand ‘hits’ remain important, lower costs have made it economical to trade in an ever increasing ‘Long Tail’ of low (but not zero) demand niche products a la iTunes, Amazon, eBay etc etc.
My Take: Should be seen as one of the most influential books written in recent years. Neatly identifies and summarises the paradigm change in the economics of culture and commerce that has been brought on by the Web 2.0 world. I’d read the original article this book was based on a while back so I thought I was across the concept and I wasn’t in any hurry to read the extended version, but now I’m kicking myself for not having read it earlier. There are insights on every page.
Highlight: Some stunning facts about the history of media consumption including:
In 1954, 74% of houses with TVs tuned in to watch “I Love Lucy” (compared with only around 19% who watch the highest rating show on TV today – “CSI“).
When the VCR was introduced in that late 1980s, early 1990s, movie distributors tried to sell videos at retail for $70-$80 a pop! Unsurprisingly, high market power content providers have struggled to deal with all historic changes to their market.
Finally, the most amusing description of the skills of a DJ I’ve ever read “Clubgoers vote instantly with their feet, relaying their decentralised expectation and preference info to the DJ in aggregate”. ie they leave the dance floor if they don’t like the music! (To be fair, this sentence is in no way reflective of what is an extremely accessible book).
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Synopsis: A month by month reflection on one year of Hornby’s personal reading. Not a collection of book reviews, but a review of the reading process.
My Take: I knew I would love this book from the moment I opened Chapter One to see two columns containing separate lists for ‘Books Bought this month’ and for ‘Books Read this month’. It was the first of many moments of self-recognition for a fellow bibliophile. As Hornby rightly observes:
‘When I’m arguing with St Peter at the Pearly Gates, I’m going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. ‘This is Really who I am,’ I’ll tell him.
Like Hornby, I am also congenitally unable to control myself in a bookstore. Like Hornby, my wallet is bigger than my bedside table and I end up buying far more books than anyone could possibly get around to reading. And just like Hornby I have an addict’s gift for rationalisation and self-deception. I well recognised Hornby’s desperate justifications throughout ‘The Polysyllabic Spree’ for the amount of money he spent on books during the month:
‘I don’t want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it’s my money. And I’ll bet you do it too.’
I do Nick….
‘I read 55% of the books I bought this month – five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: they go up on the shelves straightaway (as opposed to on the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again…. So I’m taking the poetry out, and calling it five and a half out of eight – and the Heller I’ve read before, years ago, so that’s six and a half out of eight. I make that 81 ¼%! I am both erudite and financially prudent!’
As am I Nick, as am I. I’ve now limited myself to purchases from second-hand bookstores at half the price of the chains; which means I’m completely justified in buying twice as many books!
Even when Hornby is finally shamed into an admission of guilt (not something that I’ve ever owned up to) he hides it in small print in footnote at the bottom of the page:
‘I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read and didn’t list’
Obsessive book buying was just one of many aspects of a booklover’s reading experience that Hornby insightfully and amusingly catalogues in “The Polysyllabic Spree”. Hornby totally eschews pretence when recounting his monthly reading – and as such conveys the true experience of reading brilliantly. This is not a book written to pose for the literati. Like the average reader, Hornby freely admits to a periodic lack of motivation for reading since:
‘Reading is a domestic activity and is therefore susceptible to any changes in the domestic environment.’
He similarly admits to struggling to stay interested in overlong books, getting a cheap feeling of satisfaction from knocking off the shorter classics (’Candide’ was a special favourite at less than 100 pages) and finding “writers’ writers” interminable. All things that I’m sure most readers would own up to if pushed, but wouldn’t want to advertise too widely in the literary community.
This is a book lover’s book written for book lovers. If you love the reading experience, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy.
Highlights:
On the process of knocking off an extra long book:
‘We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes – usually late at night, in bed – he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses. Only in the last fifty-odd pages, after I’d landed several of these blows, did old Wilkie show any signs buckling under the assault.
On the natural superiority of books as a cultural form:
‘One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began.’
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Synopsis: Autobiographical account of Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl live happily until girl dies of pulmonary embolism. Boy spirals into depression before loving again etc etc.
My Take: Hmmm. I was rooting for this one to come off. The subject matter has great potential – very emotionally rich.
Unfortunately, the author can’t quite pull it off. I felt like the book couldn’t decide whether to be serious literature or a magazine feature (the author is a writer for Rolling Stone) and ended up as a not particularly good hybrid. The whole idea of framing the relationship through 15 mix tapes the couple made for each other I’m sure sounded like a good idea at the time didn’t really work in my opinion.
It’s a shame because it’s a horrific thing to happen to someone and he clearly loved this woman so much, but just wasn’t able to convey this in an engaging way. It was a NYT best seller though so lots of people clearly disagree with me.
Highlight:
Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!”
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Synopsis: One time choir boy, Rhodes Scholar and Dukakis operative pens a first person account of the experience of being a senior staffer for the Clinton campaign and subsequently presidency. Honest, insightful and controversial.
My Take: The best book ever written by a political insider. Odds are, that if you ask someone who has spent any real amount of time working in politics, they will nominate this book as the most real account of what it’s really like. It’s a bit of a cult classic for political hacks the world around.
What sets ‘All Too Human’ apart from most other political tomes is its revealing honesty and self-analysis. Stephanopolous’ book is not an insider’s account of the Clinton candidacy and Presidency. It’s a first-hand account of the experience of being a senior political staffer. Stephanopolous perfectly captures the pressure, lack of control and resulting stress of political work, but most candidly, he freely reveals and reflects on his motivations during this period. Stephanopolous is honest enough to admit that often, he was as much driven by the desire for power and influence as he was by public service. As he notes:
“I believe in original sin … I know that I’m capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids … I understand that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion …”
Stephanopolous laments not only the compromises that he made in the pursuit of these selfish ends, but also his failures to achieve these personal ambitions. This theme is especially prominent when Stephanopolous is forced to confront his eventual exclusion from Clinton’s inner circle (and the usurpation of Dick Morris) – a personal setback that triggers a downward spiral into depression and eventually resignation. It was fairly clear to me on reading Stephanopolous’ account of this period that the cause of this depression was not the feeling that Clinton would be less able to serve the public interest without his advice, but more the personal disappointment of losing recognition and therefore influence. As Stephanopolous frankly states:
”I was excluded, which was killing me and my pride.”
As a result, Stephanopolous fell into a deep depression – and felt unable to seek treatment for fear that his situation would be exposed in the media. His situation became so physically dire that his face broke out into permanent hives and he was forced to grow a thick beard to hide the effects. Much of the book feels like an honest personal reflection on this period and a genuine attempt to understand what brought him to this point – in particular his conflagration of personal success in politics and his sense of self-worth.
This honest recognition of the personal interest in public service generated substantial vitriol amongst the journalists who reviewed Stephanopolous’ book. For instance the New York Times scathingly wrote:
It is a positive recommendation of Clinton that he took less advice from Stephanopoulos as time went on. It was this exclusion, not any moral repugnance at power, that made Stephanopoulos a nervous wreck.
…
What we are offered in this book is a little moral homily on the way a good Greek Orthodox altar boy was almost corrupted by power, but finally escaped.
….
But he was not corrupted by power. He was corrupted by the fear of losing it, a fear he brought with him to the White House, not one he picked up there. He tells us himself that he did not choose Clinton as his candidate because he admired him. He admired Mario Cuomo, had ties with Richard Gephardt and was urged by his family to support Paul Tsongas because he was Greek. He went with Clinton instead, since he thought he could win, and his famous funk over the Gennifer Flowers revelation was less an expression of moral repugnance than a frustration that his winner might be a loser after all.
Equally viciously, Salon commented that:
The dish immediately takes on the tone of a spurned lover … the president turns out to be a cad, so his confidences are betrayed, on page after page, with an air of righteousness. The betrayer comes across as shallow, deluded, naive, appallingly star struck and disgustingly ambitious — qualities that, combined with all the stress the roguish Clinton causes, eventually necessitate therapy and psychotropic drugs.
…. a tour de force of self-loathing and self-promotion, “All Too Human: A Political Education.” A poorly written fable about an arrogant young Greek who flies too close to the sun and crashes to the ground — call it the tragedy of Prickarus — it’s recommended mainly to those who already loathe Stephanopoulos and desire more evidence to back their feelings up.
….
Not unlike Monica Lewinsky, he seems to bear more than a touch of unrequited love for the man who now refuses to let aides mention his name in his presence. However pathetic that seems, it’s actually one of Stephanopoulos’ more endearing qualities.
Ouch. This kind of viciousness towards those working in politics from the media is a bit of a personal bug-bear of mine. It’s true that this book was released at a time when the association between depression and the pressures of political life was less well understood (Alastair Campbell, John Brogden, Geoff Gallop etc). However, I do think it reflects a common view in the media that those who work in politics should not only be treated with a healthy scepticism, but with a genuine contempt. The fact that those working in politics are human and subject to human foibles is rarely recognised, and almost never accepted as a reason not to personally vilify those working in public life. Journalists are justified in holding political operatives to account – but not holding them in contempt.
At the end of the day, I have to agree with the sentiments of an Amazon reviewer who commented that:
I praise his frank recounting of how he was working for himself as well as for the president and his agenda. Those who chide Stephanoulos for striving for personal success, and telling us how he pursued it, need to reevaluate their own career motives before they pass judgement.
I think most political staffers who’ve read ‘All Too Human’ appreciated the anxieties that Stephanopolous recounts in this book. While those who work in political life ought to be primarily motivated by a sense of public service, it’s unreasonable to hold them to a standard in which all self-interested actions are grounds for vilification. Stephanopolous’ honesty in recognising these personal motivations, rather than portraying himself as purely publicly minded saint was a refreshing change for a political memoir. This kind of candor should be the subject for congratulations, not contempt.
Highlight:
On having realised that that the TelePrompTer had been misloaded for Clinton’s health-care address to Congress:
“The thought of the president trying to concentrate on his delivery as gobbledygook whirred by his eyes made me sick with worry — for him and me. This screwup might not have been my fault, but it was my responsibility. ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened,’ I muttered. ‘I dunno,’ replied Mike Feldman, the vice president’s aide, ‘the Holocaust was pretty bad.’ Very funny.”
Yep – I know that feeling well.
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Synopsis: A Chinese family flees war and conflict in Vietnam and Cambodia for the Western suburbs of Melbourne. A young girl grows up Asian in Australia.
My Take: I had a typically ‘old Australia’ childhood in country Queensland. Cricket, football, fishing, “Australia All Over” with Macca on a Sunday morning. It was great fun, but it wasn’t exactly a melting pot of cultural diversity. The pictures of the Queen of England in the school assembly hall didn’t really count as multi-culturalism in my book.
Since moving to Melbourne after university of course, things changed dramatically. It wasn’t long before my friendship group was teeming with those permanent fixtures of Collins St corporate law firms; over-achieving first generation Asian-Australians. In addition to dramatically improving my access to quality Yum Cha, I also managed to pick up a fiancée in the process so I feel like I’ve done pretty well from this cultural enlightenment.
So understandably, I was favourably inclined to enjoying Alice Pung’s ‘Unpolished Gem’. It had been recommended to me by a few of my Asian-Australian friends as strongly reflecting their own experiences of growing up in Australia and I was keen for an insight into a childhood experience that was very different to my own. They were right, it’s a lovely read.
Pung tells her family’s story with an elegant simplicity. Ironically enough for someone who’s edited a collection of stories titled “Growing up Asian in Australia”, I think Pung has a distinctly ‘old’ Australian voice – self-deprecating, laconic and matter of fact. Her writing is both observant and insightful without being introspective or overwrought.
The strength of this book is in the details. The book is packed with endearing little observations of immigrant life. I particularly liked I love how her family “wah”s at the prosperity in Australia and how her grandmother referred to Centrelink reverentially as “Father Government… like Father Christmas, as if he is a tangible benign white-bearded guru”. Equally amusing was her parents desire for her to study at “Mao-Bin U”. ‘Their pronunciation made the place sound like a shonky university in China for discarded communists.’
At times, Pung’s story is genuinely sad. The pressures on a young Chinese girl, whether growing up in Australia or in Asia, are not insignificant. Similarly, the strains on mother-daughter-grandmother relations of not just a generation gap, but also a growing cultural gulf are a source of much family tension. At times I just want to wrap her up and say “It’s all going to be ok! You’ll survive and even better- Eurasian kids are going to be the coolest people in the next generation”
Highlight:
My father’s idea of getting familiar with someone was to tell them war stories. He didn’t do it to sober them up or edify them. He did it to crack them up.
“This fish reminds me of the Pol Pot years when the starved, dead bodies floated up the river during the flood. I got the job of dragging them to higher, dryer land. We wrapped them up in a dry blanket and me and my mate grabbed on to each end. Every time we tripped, the blanket would get water-soaked and even heavier. Hah hah, so funny! And listen to this – my mate turns to me and says, “Hope you’re not going to be this heavy when it’s time for me to drag you”, and I say to him, “What do you mean when you drag me? I’m going to be the poor soul who will be dragging you!””
He finished by exhorting his guests to eat more fish.
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Synopsis: The economics correspondent for the Financial Times writes a pop economics textbook illustrating economic principles in accessible and engaging examples.
My Take: Should be required reading for all high-school students. Clearly articulated, widely accessible and practically illustrated explanations of the fundamentals of economics.
Highlight: A great chapter highlighting the benefits of sweatshops as a transitional industry in countries like South Korea and India. They might be unappealing to Western minds, but in the short-term sweatshops are often the best of a bad set of choices in developing countries and in the long run a path out of poverty for those lucky enough to work in them:
Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means—hard as it is to believe—that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods.
… [NYC's resolution banning sweatshop-made products] can only harm sweatshop laborers: they’ll be out of a job and—literally, for those in Manila—back on the trash heap. Of course, it will be good news for textile workers in rich countries, who’ll get the business instead….
We need to understand that narrowly focused initiatives on “fair trade coffee” or “sweatshop-free clothes” will never make a substantial improvement to the lives of millions. Some, like the campaign to prevent New York City from buying uniforms from poor countries, will actively cause damage. Others, like the numerous brands of fair trade coffee, are likely to improve the income of a few coffee producers without causing a great deal of harm. But they cannot fix the basic problem: too much coffee is being produced. At the slightest hint that coffee farming will become an attractive profession, it will always be swamped with desperate people who have no alternative. The truth of the matter is that only broad-based development of poor countries will ever lift the living standards of the very poor, increase coffee prices, and improve wages and labor standards in shoe factories.
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Synopsis: An aspiring writer and practising bartender is shot dead in a mugging gone wrong on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It’s written by a screen-writer for The Wire – what more do you need to know?
My Take: I hadn’t even heard of Richard Price when a friend recommended “Lush Life” to me, but when a friend told me that he was a writer for the superb HBO series, The Wire, I grabbed a copy as soon as I could. Happily, “Lush Life” delivers exactly what any fan of The Wire would expect from one of its writers; a brilliantly observed, Dickensian panorama of inner city American life. This is not your average police procedural, linear crime novel – it’s a rich, detailed and wide-ranging portrait of Lower East Side New York amidst which a murder happens to occur.
The shining highlight of “Lush Life” is the absolutely brilliant dialogue. Reviews rave about Price’s mimetic gifts and pitch perfect language. In fact, The New York Times went so far as to open its review of “Lush Life” by claiming that:
“no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price—not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase.”
The New York Magazine gushes in its brilliant in character review that Price is the:
“Best writer of dialogue since Plato. Slang you never even heard of. Keep expecting the page to stand up and wander off somewheres, make a pass at your wife, order a bacon sandwich.”
It’s not just hyperbole – Price really is a virtuoso of verbal interaction. At one point in “Lush Life” Price writes a 75 page police interrogation scene that doesn’t lose momentum once; an amazing achievement.
Despite this, critics are divided as to whether the “Lush Life” constitutes a great book of substance and narrative or simply an impressive collection of scenes. I can see the concern – while the dialogue is brilliant, I wasn’t exactly clear what Price himself was trying to say through “Lush Life”. Similarly, as a result of Price’s reliance on dialogue, the book is much longer (over 400 pages) than it could have been with a bit more narration. But I’m not too fussed by this. It wasn’t so long as to be painful and Price’s prose offers delights on every page to compensate for any passing lack of direction.
Highly Recommended.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/10/lush-life-richard-price/
Synopsis: A collection of the words that Robert Kennedy used to move others, and the words of others that moved Robert Kennedy.
My Take: Compiled by RFK’s ninth child (!), “Make Gentle The Life of This World” is a delicious combination of extracts from Robert Kennedy’s own speeches and a selection of passages from a daybook collaboratively compiled by both JFK and RFK from their vociferous personal reading. Thematically organised around the subjects that RFK continually returned to throughout his life (eg “The Act of Living”, “An American Spirit”, “Seeking a Better World”, “A Citizen in a Civil Society”), these selections paint an evocative picture of the character of the man.
One is struck while reading the selections from RFK’s daybook at the volume and depth of the man’s reading. RFK was no mere political hack, no “Hollowman”. His daybook drew from sources as diverse as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Goethe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Dante, Francis Bacon, Lao-Tzu, the Ramayana, Thomas Jefferson, Herodotus, Ernest Hemmingway, George Orwell, Montesquieu, Lord Acton, Thomas Paine, Pericles, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Shakespeare. What is even more impressive is that Kennedy clearly read deeply in these authors. The passages he extracts are not the traditional ‘Inspirational Quotes’ one might encounter in Bartlett’s. Instead they are often obscure and united more by their philosophical constancy than their quotability.
In this sense, the selected passages offer genuine insights into Kennedy’s world view. As Maxwell Kennedy notes in the introduction:
“The selections in this book can be read almost like poetry, or as meditations for someone who wants to think about Robert Kennedy and the 1960s and the nature of politics and leadership.”
What I also found striking while reflecting on these passages was the remarkable foresight in Kennedy’s intellectual fixations – especially on issues that were quite controversial in progressive politics 30 years ago. While RFK is remembered best for speaking out on the timeless issues of racial harmony, equality of opportunity and the end of the Vietnam war, Bobby was no progressive populist. Kennedy was constitutionally incapable of biting his tongue in the face of lazy thinking. As such, he continually returned to issues that he thought were being neglected or being led by blind ideology. In this way, he came into conflict with the left wing of his own party just as much as he did with the Republicans (and no doubt fed much of the antipathy towards him during his life). But with the passage of time, Kennedy’s approach to the issues on which he came into conflict with his own party has largely been vindicated. Whether it was speaking out against oppression abroad (principally Communism), the moral import of employment, the deleterious effects of a reliance on welfare, or the central importance of law and order, Kennedy’s views, while unpopular at the time have now become widely accepted as core tenants in progressive politics.
If you have an interest in progressive politics, this book is like a full body massage for your inner idealist. You can’t help but come away from this book feeling reinvigorated about the potential of the political process. For those of you employed in the day to day business of politics, regular mental escapes into high-minded philosophy of public service are an essential reminder of why you are in this business in the first place.
Highlights: Again, I haven’t sought to replicate Bobby’s most famous quotes below, instead I’ve selected some of the less well known, but equally insightful passages included in this book:
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/09/make-gentle-the-life-of-this-world-the-vision-of-robert-f-kennedy-maxwell-taylor-kennedy/
Synopsis: Two stats geeks methodically unpick common statistical misrepresentations while giving readers a tool kit to allow them to test statistical claims that they come across themselves.
My Take: “The Tiger That Isn’t” really should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in public policy – advisers, politicians, activists and in particular, journalists. In their capacity as hosts of the BBC Radio 4 series “More or Less” Blastland and Dilnot have applied themselves to debunking statistical misrepresentations in the public debate for many years. This book is a lightweight and accessible distillation of the most common lessons of the show and includes a deceptively useful section on estimation techniques/ball park evaluations that I now use quite frequently (the value of questions as simple as “Is that a big number?” or “What exactly is being counted?” can be quite surprising).
Highlight: From a personal perspective, one of the greatest services that this book carries out is the debunking of the Average Wage myth. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics know that averages, while a useful summary statistic, can be appallingly misleading if you are trying to measure some form of central tendency in a group. All it takes is a handful of outliers to render the statistic basically useless for finding the ‘middle’ of any population.
One area in which this basic short-coming of the use of averages is routinely, flagrantly disregarded is in the analysis of national wage data. Lazy or ignorant journalists and deceptive politicians frequently cite the ‘Average wage’ or ‘Average Household Income’ as though this is a useful figure in some way. However, as Blastland and Dilnot vigorously point out, the presence of a handful of extreme outliers at the top end of the income scale inevitably skews average wage data dramatically above that of a ‘middle’ earner. As the old joke says, Bill Gates walks into a bar and everyone became a millionaire – on average. As such, as Blastland and Dilnot point out, a much better measure of central tendency for most policy discussions is the population’s median ie the middle value of an ordered set of values (or the average of the middle two in a set with an even number).
In Australia, while the average wage is frequently cited as being around $55,000 for an individual, as Andrew Leigh has pointed out, the median wage is around half this:
median
As you can see from Andrew’s invaluable chart, someone earning $55,000 would actually be at around the 80th percentile of income earners ie earning more than 80% of workers. These figures come as a shock to most people when they first hear them – so ingrained is this statistical misconception in the public debate.
This misleading use of average wage data distorts public debate, by leaving punters under the impression that the ‘average Australian’ is doing substantially better than an economically ‘middle class’ Australian actually is. Similarly, it buttresses the provision of (the misleadingly named) middle class welfare by government by creating the impression that the quite well off are amongst the bulk of Australians. It really is a malignant feature of the public debate.
This misrepresentation continues to be perpetuated for a number of reasons. Some journalists are ignorant of basic statistics. Other journalists resort to using average wage data when they discover how difficult it is to locate up to date median income data. Finally, the political elite have little incentive to question the data as inflated average wage figures bring their relatively incomes closer towards the fabled ‘middle class’ to which most Australians aspire to attribute themselves. In this context, ooks like “The Tiger That Isn’t” that swim against the stream and highlight this popular misconception are performing an important service to the public debate.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/08/the-tiger-that-isnt-michael-blastland-and-andrew-dillnot/
Well today marks Blogging The Bookshelf’s 50th post – I’m about 10% through and thoroughly enjoying it. While I’m still getting a disproportionate amount of traffic to my post on Confessions of a Mask (thanks to the unintended consequences of including the words ‘Gay’ ‘Japanese’ and ‘boy’ in the post), Blogging the Bookshelf is now attracting a steady and slowly growing daily audience.
Being something of a milestone day, I thought I’d use today to provide a bit of a signpost of what is to come on this site. Using one of the best content crutches for bloggers around the world, I thought I’d do this in the format of a list – and someone else’s list at that.
Below the fold I’ve included The Guardian’s list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read and noted those that you can expect to see a post on here sometime in the coming months. I’ve selected The Guardian’s list for this purpose because it broadly reflects my own approach to reading. As the introduction to the list notes:
A thousand novels might sound like an awful lot of pages and a dizzying number of words, but the idea behind this series was always to come up with a list that was, in its own way, realistic. Not necessarily in the sense that you might be able to work your way through all of our picks in a month, but in the sense that it can inspire and guide book-lovers of all tastes and ages. The temptation, when coming up with projects such as these, is to plump with much bravado for either an elitist or a populist approach. We could have listed the worthy but dull “1000 greatest novels of all time”, including a few more recherché Victorian epics and forgotten gems of late Mexican vanguardist modernism. Or we could have come up with a fun but shallow list of “1000 most popular novels of all time”, inevitably adding Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Neither of these approaches felt quite right. It would have meant either excluding those novels we had read but felt we shouldn’t, or those we felt we should read but hadn’t.
I definitely know that feeling of ‘books I have read but felt I shouldn’t and books I haven’t read but felt I should have.’
Anyway, given that I’ve only got maybe 500 books at present and a good 50% of them are non-fiction, annotating a list like this is going to be a good way to feel inadequate – but might provide something of a taste of what is to come here from a fiction perspective.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/07/50-down/
Synopsis: A case of mistaken identity results in the pastoralist nature writer for the London tabloid, The Daily Beast, being sent as a foreign correspondent to cover a brewing Communist insurrection in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia. Satire that makes ‘Frontline’ look like a loving homage to the media.
My Take: Bitchiness like this can only come from personal experience and unsurprisingly this novel is apparently based on Waugh’s own experience as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in the lead up to the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Similarly, the arrogant, abrasive and ignorant owner of the Daily Beast is allegedly (and plausibly) an amalgam of the infamous Lord Beaverbrook (the first of the media barons) and Lord Northcliffe (a contemporary rival).
Far be it from me to make comment on the media, but the jaded political hack in me enjoyed the satirical skewering of the fourth estate in ‘Scoop’. It’s worth remembering too that this withering account was penned in the 1930s – a period that would be viewed as something of a golden era of the press, especially when seen from today’s climate of plummeting newspaper audiences, even faster fallings revenues and resulting cost cutting. Unfortunately, a Scoop for the modern era would be more tragedy than farce.
Highlight:
I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/07/scoop-evelyn-waugh/
Synopsis: Technological advances that dramatically reduce the costs of collecting and storing data combined with vast increases in computer processing power has made data driven decision making both more powerful and more feasible.
My Take: Ian Ayres is a great advocate. Perhaps the reason for this is that he divides his time and expertise between the law and economics (He is both the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management). As a result of these divided loyalties, as a writer, Ayres retains the enthusiasm of an amateur as well as a lawyer’s focus in prosecuting a case. This mix can produce some engaging and exciting advocacy, but it can also leave him somewhat blind to the limitations and obstacles to his cause. “Super Crunchers”, is no exception. In this book Ayres makes an enthusiastic and compelling case for the potential of data driven analysis, while completely overlooking the not insubstantial obstacles to realisation of this promise.
The core premise of “Super Crunchers” is a good one. The emergence of technologies that allow the collection of extraordinarily large datasets combined with the computer processing power that allows for the easy use of regression and randomisation trials to analyse these data sets does create an enormous opportunity for data driven decision making. And as Ayres demonstrates over and again in “Super Crunchers” the decisions informed by statistical algorithms frequently outperform those made by highly educated, but more intuitive, subject area experts.
The seminal example Ayres gives of how good data and a better algorithm can best the experts in the seemingly most subjective of fields is the story of Princeton economist, Orley Ashenfelter and his Liquid Assets wine newsletter. Armed only with an algorithm informed by time-series regression analysis Ashenfelter was able to predict the quality of Bordeaux vintages using only data on the vintage’s winter rainfall, average growing season temperature and harvest rainfall. While originally the subject of scorn and derision, Ashenfelter’s predictions proved to both gazump and better those of the connoisseurs on a consistent basis. Ashenfelter’s success and the publicity his cause attracted went on to inspire other data geeks to apply their statistical toolkits to other areas, most notably Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who applied the tools to the analysis of baseball prospects. Since the release of “Super Crunchers”, statisticians have achieved public success in a range of other fields including Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets (“the Dork Elvis of the NBA”) in basketball and Nate Silver in politics.
However, while there are plenty of success stories and while the potential is real, the fact is that a utopia of ubiquitous, rational, data-driven decision making is a long way from reality (For a good Australian take on this see Andrew Leigh here). As David Leonhardt pointed out in the New York Times review of the book:
“Evidence-based medical treatment, to take one of his favorite examples, is still far from the norm in this country.”
While Ayres correctly identifies the potential of “Super Crunching”, I’m afraid he vastly under-estimates the social and institutional barriers to its proliferation.
For starters, there is a thicket of government regulation around privacy and data protection that stands in the way of data collection in a number of fields not the least of which, Medicine.
But moreso, the most significant barriers to the adoption of data-driven decision making are social and institutional. The ‘experts’ that Ayres anticipates being usurped by Super Crunching will not go slowly into the night. These people currently hold positions of significant respect, power and influence by virtue of their ‘intuitive’ expertise. As has been seen in most of the examples that Ayres cites in his book, they will use their privileged and powerful positions to protect their current status whether via formalised professional standards or informal marginalisation of data geeks. While Ayres is cheerily optimistic about the ability for the demonstrably better Super Crunchers to naturally outperform and usurp the experts, I’m not as convinced. For the moment at least, the majority of fields of expertise are not quantitatively measurable. In a lot of areas, it’s not possible to decisively determine a winner and a loser in a contest between a Super Cruncher and a traditional expert. In these situations, the status quo will be a powerful obstacle to the adoption of wide spread data driven decision making.
Highlight:
“We are in a historic moment of horse-versus-locomotive competition, where intuitive and experiential expertise is losing out time and time again to number crunching.”
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/06/super-crunchers-how-anything-can-be-predicted-ian-ayres/
Synopsis: Two Korean babies are adopted by American families with different approaches to ethnicity.
My Take: I only picked this one up because I thought the little Asian girl on the cover of the Australian edition was cute – and yes, you can judge a book by it’s cover. A totally lightweight book targeted at stay at home mums. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a stay at home mum, but the author was trying to tug at heart strings that I just didn’t have.
Highlight: Yeah, it was the front cover.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/05/digging-to-america-anne-tyler/
Synopsis: Privileged LA teen returns to the West Coast on holiday from his East Coast University. The protagonist attempts to confront the emotional emptiness of his casually amoral life the only was he knows how – through sex, drugs and pointless consumption.
My Take: In my first year at university I went through a bit of a nihilistic phase in my reading. I started devouring authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, J. D. Salinger and above all, Bret Easton Ellis. I can’t say I really know what precipitated this phase – maybe it was just the first time I had had the opportunity to access literature like this having just left small town Queensland for the (relative) retail literary diversity of the Gold Coast (you mean there are alternatives to Dymocks??). My own outlook on life wasn’t particularly grim at the time and I certainly wasn’t some kind of Goth/Emo morbidly luxuriating in the negativity of it all. But I do recall feeling that experiencing the darkest perspectives of literature would enrich my appreciation of the more uplifting things in life. In this sense, I can certainly say that having worked through the Brett Easton Ellis cannon, I felt much more optimistic about my experience of the human condition.
“Less Than Zero” is a relatively brief, very tightly written debut novel that Ellis published at the obscene age of 19(!). While it’s not as rich or layered as his later works (in particular “American Psycho”) it’s fair to say it was spectacularly successful, becoming a best-seller and being adapted as a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. Appropriately described by one Amazon reviewer as being “like The Catcher in the Rye on Crack”, “Less Than Zero” is a harrowing exploration of the alienation and disconnection of the children of the wealthy elite of LA in the 1980s. Given Ellis’ own privileged LA upbringing, it’s difficult not to see him writing from personal experience here.
While I can’t say I’m too sympathetic to “Poor Rich Boy” literature in general, “Less Than Zero” is notable for its extremism if nothing else. Amidst the pages of this thin novel, the protagonist and his fellow travellers manage to confront or engage in endemic drug use, forced prostitution, anorexia, rape, paedophilia and a snuff film. It’s seriously full-on stuff and ultimately no surprise that a novelist that could produce a debut like this would ultimately go on to pen something like “American Psycho”. However, despite its grotesque extremity, the most striking aspect of the book is the all encompassing numbness of its characters. While the protagonist has a vague conception that he should be disturbed by what he is confronting, he is unable to feel anything beyond the generalised anxiety he feels about life as a whole. I guess this is kind of the point of nihilistic literature and I remember appreciating its import at the time, but in retrospect I can’t really see the appeal.
Highlight: The opening paragraph of “Less Than Zero” perfectly captures the sense of disconnection that pervades the rest of the book:
“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than “I’m pretty sure Muriel is anorexic” or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair’s car. All it comes down to is the fact that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge. “
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/04/less-than-zero-bret-easton-ellis/
Synopsis: Parisian survivor of Hiroshima and owner of the world’s largest collection of manuscripts concerning clouds hires an unassuming librarian to catalogue his collection. As the librarian learns about the men of history who had become obsessed by clouds, she is tasked with locating the mysterious Abercrombie Protocol, an attempt by a obscure 19th century meteorologist to document every variation of cloud…
My Take: The best way to describe “The Theory of Clouds” is to say that it is French. Very French. By that, I mean that “The Theory of Clouds” conforms to all of the most stereotyped clichés of Frenchness – pretentiousness, sensuality, ambition, obscenity and richness.
Unsurprisingly, it sharply divided audiences when it was released. In France, it was widely lauded and the novel was awarded the prestigious Prix Maurice Genevoix from the French Academy. In the United States, the much anticipated English translation did not meet with universal critical or commercial success.
Strangely enough, I originally picked up this book based on the strong recommendation of economist/blogger Tyler Cowen who lauded Audeguy as a French Ishiguro. I can see what he was saying to an extent, as with Ishiguro, Audeguy eschews linearity in his story telling, infusing large parts of his prose with retrospective, melancholic reflection. In this regard, Audeguy’s layering and inter-weaving of the modern day narrative of Akira Kumo and his private librarian, Virginie Latour with historical and faux-historical interludes is one of the strengths of the book. This style allows Audeguy to pepper the novel with interesting real-life factoids (such as the story of Luke Howard, a Quaker apothecary and member of the Royal Society who devised the names for clouds that are still used today) while maintaining a beautiful, poetical narrative progression.
Where Audeguy departs from Ishiguro however is in his inability to keep his feet on the ground and his insistence on turning the book into a highly conceptual wank-piece. Don’t get me wrong. I like a bit of surrealism in my reading and I definitely like writing that presents the reader with layers of meaning to explore. HOWEVER, I have to say that I was left a little bit confused when the plot began to pivot around a book full of close up photographs of vaginas and the execution of an orang-utan. Too pretentious by half me thinks. Like I say, very French.
On the whole, “The Theory of Clouds” has enough engaging prose to make it a worthwhile read. However, it’s just a little too conceptually ambitious for me to whole-heartedly recommended it.
Highlight:
“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.”
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/03/the-theory-of-clouds-stephane-audeguy/
Synopsis: A collection of 15 of Haruki Murakami’s most surreal short stories.
My Take: The Elephant Vanishes is classic Murakami – strange, whimsical, reflective and more than a little confusing. You don’t find stories based on of the disappearance of a man’s favourite elephant or a woman being haunted by a gardening, green monster in every collection of short stories. However, despite being deeply strange, Murakami’s work never feels like fantasy or science fiction. Instead, it retains a dreamlike, contemplative quality that gives his writing a feeling of sophistication that goes beyond its unreal subject matter.
In this regard, I prefer Murakami’s surrealist work in small, day-dream size stories (like the similarly excellent Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman). While it’s still interesting, I find that when Murakami’s strange ruminations are expanded to novel length (like the overrated Kafka on the Shore) his oddness can start to get a bit tiring. Much better to get a brief taste of one of Murakami’s quirky ideas, enjoy the strange flavour for a dozen pages and then move on quickly to the next before the strangeness becomes overwhelming.
Highlight: It’s slightly twee, but for me, the highlight of The Elephant Vanishes” was the shortest story in the book: “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning”. In fact, it’s so short that I’ve reproduced it below:
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/02/the-elephant-vanishes-haruki-murakami/
Synopsis: Photo-journalist Paul Fusco presents a collection of his photographs from the carriage of Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train.
My Take: Bobby is a bit of a political hero of mine. He was pilloried as a ruthless political operative in life and is revered as an inspirational idealist in death. He combined compassion and pragmatism in equal measure and was a model for centrist, progressive policy. He felt the honour and public duty of political participation acutely, but never let higher ends impede political means.
Given that I’m an avid reader and an RFK obsessive, I have close to a dozen different RFK biographies, collections of essays, photo books, and manuscripts. I’m not sure how I’m going to blog them yet as there’s a fair bit of overlap between them, but I thought that I might as well start with my favourite. A limited edition, signed hardcover of The RFK Funeral Train given to me as a brilliantly perceptive birthday present by JJ (especially given that the journey took place on my birthday, June 8). It’s twee, but it’s true: The people who love me buy me books.
The RFK Funeral Train is a gorgeous, elegant and moving collection of photographs of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans who turned out to line the route of RFK’s funeral train from the body’s original viewing in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to its final resting place in Arlington Memorial Cemetery, Washington DC (retracing the journey that Abraham Lincoln’s train had made 103 years before).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG4vJxi9Kis]
Fusco was a professional photo-journalist at the time and had been commissioned to cover the funeral train’s journey. It was an extraordinary opportunity for a photographer to capture the American polis at its rawest and most emotional moment.
The pictures show Americans from all walks of life – rich, poor, black, white, young and old – standing in the summer heat waiting for the opportunity to farewell a man who had come to embody their hope of a better quality of leadership and a better quality life. People who had already endured the despair of the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the disillusionment of the Vietnam War and saw in Bobby, the potential for the country to move in a new, more positive direction. People who for their troubles, a few short months, would be subjected to the first term of the Nixon administration.
Fusco’s moving photos are preceded by a foreword by Norman Mailer and are interspersed with extracts from Kennedy’s most famous speeches. It finishes with a quote from Senator Edward Kennedy’s eulogy for RFK that states:
“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
Highlights: A sample of the dozens of photos included in this book are attached below:
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/07/01/rfk-funeral-train-paul-fusco/
Synopsis: Young former Melbourne corporate lawyer turns hundreds of other young, former Melbourne corporate lawyers green with envy by publishing a phenomenally successful collection of nuanced and beautiful short stories.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/30/the-boat-nam-le/
Synopsis: A collection of newspaper columns on Chinese/Western society written by the a columnist on Chinese life for The Guardian.
http://www.bloggingthebookshelf.com/2009/06/30/what-the-chinese-dont-eat-xinran/
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