Book Review: The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

We all live like strangers in a strange land, trying to cobble together a sense of family and belonging, in the world of Coetzee's latest novel.

A man leaving his homeland for a new life takes on an abandoned boy - let's call him David, as his real name is lost - in order to help him locate his mother, or, rather, a mother.  He finds a candidate almost randomly and proposes the new family to her:

     "Let me be more precise," he says, speaking softly and rapidly.  "The boy has no mother.  Ever since we got off the boat we have been searching for her.  Will you consider taking him?"
     "Taking him?"
     "Yes, being a mother to him.  Being his mother.  Will you take him as your son?"
     "I don't understand.  In fact I understand nothing at all.  Are you suggesting that I adopt your boy?"
     "Not adopt.  Be his mother, his full mother.  We have only one mother, each of us.  Will you be that one and only mother to him?"

No wonder the man and boy read a children's version of Don Quixote together, the original modern novel, one where identity and belonging are confabulated with fantasy and misperception.  Coetzee's novel leaves you wondering if your concepts of self and your understanding of your role in your family and society are what you imagine, or perhaps we are, a bit like the knight-errant, suffering from flattering delusions.  In this work, as in life, there is neither a happy nor sad ending, nor an ending at all, just the steady onward sweep of days and hopes and searching.

Book Review: Astonished by Beverly Donofrio

Maybe we can think of crimes more disturbing than rape, but there is no need.  Rape is horrible enough.

But I've never given rape much thought.  Why would I?  I know of no one close to me who has been raped, and as a regular American guy more focused on education and auto didacticism, I've had no reason to delve into this dark corner of the criminal psyche.

And I didn't see it coming when I picked up Beverly Donofrio's latest title, Astonished.  Her first two memoirs, the movie-famous Riding in Cars with Boys and then the quieter Looking for Mary, told her tales of self-defeating attempts to live freely and boldly, to find both excitement and solace in a confusing world.  Her rape, however, permeates this book like oxygen in the air.  It reminds me of a time I went on a plane trip and was too cheap to buy a rolling suitcase, opting instead for a heavy duffel bag I carried slung across my shoulder - not the kind of thing you can forget is burdening you with every step as you walk a mile from Gate A to Gate WW.

Donofrio begins the book by expressing her bewilderment that such unspeakable evil would visit her in particular:

Even though I do know the important question is not why this happened to me but what I'm going to do now ... I was absolutely shocked that he chose me.  This was not supposed to happen; I was supposed to have escaped: I had hot flashes and liver spots and was finally in the final stretch.  I'd survived all these decades without experiencing this thing I dreaded as much as death ... 

In the past month I've followed friends on Facebook as they went through similarly shocking bouts with evil: two young girls undergoing multiple surgeries after a car crash, and a highly respected, generous man having a brain tumor removed.  Though they never said as much, I'd guess they at some point asked the same question Donofrio asked, the same question Job asked: Why me?  That question seems to lie behind the books title: Astonished that evil would visit me - ME!

Fortunately, Donofrio circles around that question while still moving forward, searching for a monastery where she can take up residence, if not formal vows, to find a place of peace.  Astonished is something of a chick book, perfect for that demographic (female, middle aged, middle class, NPR listener, etc. - the dang cover is decorated with bracelet charms, for gosh sakes), but she is a talented enough writer to rise above the solipsistic memoir genre and speak from the soul about her quest for peace honestly.  Honestly - she admits when she is petty and judgmental, and not in the sordid reality-TV way we know so well, but with a downright saintly humility.

And yet the rape hovers over the book like a blimp at a football game (apologies for the incongruous metaphor).  Evil is not something we really recover from, when it strikes so personally and deeply; not something we get over.  Still, Donofrio convinces us, we can go on.  We can seek peace.  And maybe even find it.

Book Review: & Sons by David Gilbert

I have finally put the pieces together.  You see, for years I have forced myself to read long, rambling, pointless novels that I was not enjoying simply because the literary establishment hailed the writer as the latest and greatest.  All along I figured something must be wrong with me - am I lacking literary sophistication? do I just not get it?  But now I have put together the pieces of this puzzle, and am glad to announce what picture it forms.

Let's take David Gilbert's & Sons (yes, the ampersand is part of the title, which makes life difficult in this computer age - Amazon has it listed as "And Sons" and you can't tweet #&sons but must spell it out as #andsons - but I digress) along with two similar writers, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. You probably remember Franzen from his dispute with Oprah when he spat on her selection of his 2001 novel, The Corrections, for her book club; and perhaps you saw the film version of Chabon's Wonder Boys.

These three have much in common: rugged yet soft good looks (Chabon's crystal blue eyes account for 72% of his book sales, and that's A REAL STATISTIC), a high literary bent, and long, rambling works with frustratingly inconclusive and meaningless endings.  (Their latest novels run an average of 554 pages.)  And they win prizes.  Franzen, for example, has collected the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and even a coveted spot in Oprah's revamped book club (they made up a decade after their initial spat).  I read Franzen's Freedom when it was the flavor of the month, Chabon's Wonder Boys a few years ago, and recently Gilbert's & Sons.

In all three cases, I suffered through their works like I would a trip to renew my license - tedious, barren, yet unavoidable.  Several times I tried to read other works by these modern masters (Time magazine labelled Franzen the "Great American Novelist") but could not stand more than 50 or 100 pages before giving up to read something more interesting, like the new issue of Wired or the ad copy on the back of the store brand granola bars.

The characters in these novels all have horrible relationships with everyone around them, especially family, and the plot just plods along without the characters learning or changing or even recognizing their self-defeating foibles.  Is that their point, then?  That humans are doomed to egotistical futility?  Seems so.  Why, then, are these writers so highly acclaimed?

That's what Gilbert's work helped me decipher.  You see, he and the others are superb wordsmiths - they can bang out sentence upon paragraph upon chapter of mellifluous prose.  It really is high-flying poetic writing.  But they are like potters who turn massive sculptures that, though technically exquisite, are repugnant and useless.  & Sons, for example, culminates with the narrator shoving the object of his jealousy in front of a bus because, if he cannot be an insider in the family he idolizes (foolishly), then he will cut off its flowering branch so the whole tree withers.  Really.  That's how it ends.  Oh, and the central character dies of old age without reconciling with any of the people he's hurt.  Now, modern fiction need not moralize or teach Sunday school lessons, but this work lacks the scope of tragedy, comedy, or drama - it just slouches from boring event to boring event until there is no story left to tell.

I am now free.  I no longer need force myself to read these high literary works which garner prize and praise for their beautiful prose when they leave the reader feeling drained of soul rather than filled.  Don't get me wrong: I don't yearn for happy endings and neat tyings-up á la Dickens or Irving; I simply want to enjoy reading fiction, even with a troubled intellectual pleasure.  Is that too much to ask?

Book Review: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

The first recommendation for this book is its publisher: McSweeney's.  No other publishing house today - or in any time - is so serious about literature, so quirky, so willing to invest in promising young authors, and so darned successful at doing so.  Dave Eggers is their flagship writer, and their periodicals - the Quarterly Concern and The Believer - define innovation in both writing and design. And if you enjoy laughing so uncontrollably that chocolate milk shoots out of your nose even though you're not drinking chocolate milk, you must check out their Internet Tendency.

Michelle Tea's Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is perfect for McSweeney's because it defies categorization.  Much like Neil Gaiman's last book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Mermaid has all the trappings of a young adult title but is far more disturbing than what we'd want our young ones reading (at least I think, but in these days of Twilight and such, maybe that red line has shifted as well).  We have a young girl as the main character, an ordinary girl who discovers that she actually comes from a secret lineage of magical beings - a pretty common theme from Harry Potter to, um, other stuff like that.

However, the story owes a much larger debt to Neil Gaiman, and through him, to Diana Wynne Jones - indeed, even the main character's name, Sophie, comes straight from Howl's Moving Castle.

Stranger, though, was when I jumped to Michelle Tea's wikipedia page to learn a little more about the author.  At first I thought, oh, this must be someone else with the same name because this person "toured with the Sex Worker's Art Show" and "is the co-writer of the weekly astrology column Double Team Psychic Dream."  Couldn't possibly be the author of this delightful YA novel, however disturbing it may be at times.  But it is the same person.  Oh.  Interesting.

On an unrelated note, my one gripe with this book - surprising given the publisher's high standards for design - is the horrendous quality of the illustrations.  They appear to have been drawn by someone who simply cannot draw - each depiction of Sophie looks rather different from the rest, and his depictions of pigeons are so strained you can see the sweat drips on the page.  Illustrator Jason Polan's wikipedia page brags that he has been published in The New Yorker, but that was a single cartoon back in 2006 - something I'm sure his mother was quite proud of, but he's no James Thurber, and that's saying an awful lot.

But back to the book.  Mermaid is best suited for adults like you and I who now and then need to put aside Syria and global warming and our tribulations at work and home and indulge in a sweeping, gripping fantasy.  It veers off course unexpectedly and ends up galaxies away from where it seemed to be headed.  And it starts right on page one.  Sophie and her quasi-friend Ella are playing the pass-out game, where they take turns helping each other asphyxiate into unconsciousness.  While buzzing back to the world, Sophie sees a mermaid in the horribly polluted creek, and then is struck by a strange desire:

Suddenly, Sophie craved salt.  In the dry cave of her mouth, down her throat, which felt strange and thick, into her tumbling tummy, she craved a bag of pretzels, the rocky salt collected at the bottom, tipped straight back into her mouth - the reward, she thought, for polishing off the snack. ... Faster than her best friend could cry out in disgust, Sophie tugged her still-shimmering body to the edge of the water and plunged her face into it, mouth open, inhaling the dirty creek into her, the perfect, necessary salt of it obliterating the darker flavors of things she'd rather not think about.  The sharpest taste, salt; she felt it travel through her like a delicious knife, the shock of it cutting through her, making her want more more more.  She sucked at the creek hungrily, like a wild animal digging into its kill ... 

So right on the first few pages we have several things we wouldn't want our daughters doing, but written in the most captivating manner imaginable.  And that's the core of this book - the story truly captures your imagination and leaves you hungering for more; like Sophia and her salt craving, you'll find yourself tipping back the pretzel bag to enjoy the last, sharply stinging bits of this book.  Fortunately, Tea has promised this to be the first in a trilogy, so we have those tangy treats to look forward to.

Book Review: Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

While I grew up loving reading, not until I hit my late teens did I become a reader, the sort of creature who prefers the company of books to the company of people.  At the time, I felt such a fierce devotion to books as whole, contained works of art, that I could never skip sections or abandon even the driest read.

But now I have no such trouble - indeed, I often check books out of the library with no intention of finishing them, of just reading the first few chapters (The Signal and the Noise, anyone?).

And that's how I recommend you read Scott Barry Kaufman's important new book, Ungifted.  In sections.  Or maybe just the first few chapters.  Though you may want, like I did, to wade all the way through its deepest waters.

Early on, at the end of the first chapter, he develops and lays out his central premise: "Greatness is not born, but takes time to develop, and there are many paths to greatness."  Emphasizing that educational labels can not only influence but derail children's self-concept and thereby shape their destiny, Kaufman argues against simplistic definitions of intelligence that draw, in our president's phrasing, a red line separating the gifted children from the ungifted - that by calling a select few (less than ten percent at my school) gifted, you define the other ninety percent as not gifted.

The book draws upon and is interwoven with Kaufman's own experience as a bright young man who did not perform well on his IQ test and ended up in the euphemistically named Resource Room across the hall from the kids he felt a strong and justified affinity for, the gifted students.  And, as a teacher of gifted students myself, I sympathize with Kaufman's negative opinion of the gifted label: I start each year by explaining to my gifted group and their classmates that every one of them has many gifts, but we only have tests for certain types of reading, mathematical, and creative abilities.

Here's where you get to chapter skipping, though, if you'd like.  Remember how Gore lost popularity points because he was, as journalists pegged him, a policy wonk?  Well, Kaufman is a neurological psychology wonk.  The bulk of the book is clogged with dense research reporting, as such:

Without activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, the spontaneous generation of ideas can bypass executive control and flow directly through the anterior cingulate pathway into the motor system to produce a creative response.  According to the researchers, "deactivation [of the lateral prefrontal cortex] may have allowed a defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations and sudden insights.

Right.  Of course.  And these two heavyweight sentences are about, of all things, how jazz improvisation works.  So maybe check out after chapter four, if your pulse does not quicken at phrases such as "reduced latent inhibition" and "lateralization of brain functions."

But don't let the headiness of the book detract from the brilliance of Kaufman's message: "children who are stamped with an enduring label are being fed a fixed theory of intelligence, which dramatically influences their motivation, how they approach learning, and how they handle setbacks.  Many important skills aren't being developed because we are cultivating erroneous beliefs about how abilities develop."

So, when you read Ungifted, feel free to skim over some of the dense research reporting, but don't skip so much that you miss Kaufman's call to action.  We need to challenge and change our concepts of what constitutes intelligence - make them scientifically based - and start recognizing the gifts in all our children.

Book Review: Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett

" ... she was, just for an instant, ... impressed by her own arcane powers ... "

Reading Jincy Willett's wincingly comic novel, Amy Falls Down, I couldn't help but think of that Springsteen classic, "Glory Days."  The gist of the song - and this book, in a way - is how strange we are to yearn for a past which we've painted gold, rather than engage with the present day.

Aren't we all, in the flush of some youthful success, impressed, just for an instant, by our own arcane powers?

Amy, the novel's main character, enjoyed a brief and minor celebrity - extremely brief and extremely minor - as a young writer, but has since slipped into a torpor where the closest she comes to writing is slowly filling a notebook with potential short story titles from snippets of phrases she catches in her dull days.  She fears failure, and so she dare not risk trying - not beyond titles, anyway, titles which stare vacuously at us atop empty pages.

Perhaps it's just me, but I suspect it's a facet of the human condition to savor a glorious moment from our early days, once to be impressed by our own arcane powers, and thereafter to live in fear that we will never again achieve such heights, molehills though they might have been.

Amy, however, falls down.  And bumps her head.  On a birdbath.

From this accident, she rediscovers writing and is rediscovered as a writer - she is born again, albeit accidentally.  She finds her voice, sings again, taking those infertile lists of story titles and opening them like umbrellas full of rain, pouring out words and ideas.

Can success then be a simple accident, a mishap, a misunderstanding?  We'd like to claim our brilliance and industriousness brought us to greatness (such as our greatness is), but secretly we know that we benefited from forces outside our control and design.  Maybe we should ban the concept of greatness from our vocabularies and philosophies, and just allow people to do what they do without being measured against some ridiculous list of eminent ones: Einstein, Picasso, et al.

What damage do we inflict upon our children by telling them "You can be the greatest, you can be the best," when we know that 99.99% of them will hover in the range of average accomplishments.

I read the obituaries every day, and even the most accomplished of our locally deceased will vanish to living memory once everyone who knew them passes on.  Yet we yearn for greatness as the path to immortality.  How silly.

No wonder this is a comic novel, for this is a comedic life.

Book Review: Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Telling my son about Neil Gaiman's latest book, I struggled to come up with the essential adjective - you know, the way (Southern) "Gothic" describes Flannery O'Connor or "piquant" describes Christopher Hitchens.

I tried "eerie," but so much of the book was filled with hopeful longing, and the sweetness of childhood, that the word wilted the second it left my lips.  All of its synonyms failed, as well: unearthly, otherworldly (though that one comes close), creepy, odd, freakish.

Yet Gaiman has given us scenes like this between a once-affectionate father and his seven year-old son:

     He didn't say anything in response.  The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.
     Then, swiftly, he picked me up.  He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
     I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs.  He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie.  He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.
     Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

I almost used ellipses to omit the paragraph describing the father's clothing, but realized that it was elemental to the scene's brilliance (and terror).  The details: light blue shirt, maroon paisley tie, and the care he takes to spare his watch though not his child - these heighten the tension, as we already suspect that something horrible is about to happen.  That descriptive break slows the pace and lets us inside the boy's innocent thoughts.  And his feeling of weightlessness contributes to the effect, both thrilling and chilling, yet also hearkening back to his younger years when his father would have swept him up and carried him more often, and more affectionately.  Brilliant.  And terrifying.

Yet those adjectives, even in combination - or ghastly, shocking, appalling, and so on - ignore all the tender scenes refulgent with the beautiful innocence of childhood, as on the narrator's seventh birthday:

     My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had.  I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father's youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolante, a play filled with lords and fairies.  I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. ...
     That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him.  In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.
     Fluffy slept on my bed at night.  I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue.  It never did.  I did not mind.

So we'd have to pair up contrasting descriptions, such as "warmhearted" and "eerie," but even then the pairing fails to show how tightly Gaiman interweaves the beauty and terror of the narrative.  I suppose resistance to simple description makes a work worthy of our praise.  And praise this work we must.

Book Review: I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman subtitled his book, "Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)," and that word "grappling" aptly describes the tenor of this work.  He wrestles with the concept of the bad guy as Jacob wrestled the angel: a somewhat confusing contest with no clear victor.

Early on, after conjuring up the classic picture of a villain as the man in the black hat who ties the pretty young woman to the train tracks, he defines a villain as someone who knows but does not care.  It's a strange definition.  Though it covers the greedy industrialist dumping chemicals into the river, it seems awfully passive - knowing, not caring - states of thought and emotion, rather than actions.

But I think Jesus would agree with this definition, however imperfect it might be.  Evil comes from the heart, and the hands simply carry out its intentions.  The man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her.  It is not what goes in a person, but what comes out, that poisons him.  Yet the definition must be as flawed as our perceptions of what constitutes good and evil, and not only philosophically, but in the ways we live these concepts out in ways ranging from the music we loathe to the people who disgust us; and, conversely, the music and people we adore and admire.

Take a divisive figure like Bill Clinton.  People will condemn and defend him for reasons political and moral, never convincing anyone to change their views.

[Clinton is] the kind of man you could trust to lead the world, but not to drive your wife to the airport.  He was a tireless, talkative, highly functioning sex addict.  When his affair with Lewinsky was on the verge of exploding nationally, he continued to deny its existence to every single person he worked with ... If described to someone with no memory of the recent past, the villain in the Lewinsky scandal seems stupidly obvious ... It should be a simple equation.  But it isn't. ... The larger vilification was ultimately split five ways.  Mr. Clinton, of course, was first against the wall.  But Monica Lewinsky was next, and she was hammered just as aggressively (and with much less justification).  So was Linda Tripp, Lewinsky's comically untelegenic gal pal who coerced her into detailing the affair while secretly taping their phone conversations.  So was Kenneth Starr, the obsessive lawyer who spent most of the nineties trying to destroy the Clinton administration and forced the American public to participate in his quest.  And so was Hillary Clinton, a person who did nothing wrong ... 

So with the advantages of hindsight and distance from the turmoil of the news cycle, can we today peg the villain in Clinton's travails?  Yes, each of us can, but each of us would do so differently and for differing causes.  Some would make the argument that the question is moot - why stamp labels on these people, "good" or "bad," oversimplifying a highly nuanced story (which others would argue never should have made it beyond the Oval Office).

Klosterman explains why we need to identify a villain in this case:

[Clinton] lies about it to the entire world, is exposed as a liar (and admits this on television), is impeached by the House of Representatives, and jeopardizes both the reputation of the office and the memory of every positive thing he accomplished as president.  It should be a simple equation.  But it isn't.  Clinton's impeachment worked to his short-term political advantage ... the public saw this as excessive and unjust.

Perhaps we can return to Klosterman's original definition of a villain: someone who knows but does not care.  Like a president who knows he compromises his office and legacy for the sake of some fleeting pleasure, but does not care.  Like a young woman who knows she's doing something wrong but is too entranced by power to care.  Like her friend who knows betraying someone for a moment of fame is wrong, but does not care.  Like a lawyer who knows the whole charade is ultimately meaningless yet pursues it like a captial case just to inflict harm on the president's reputation.  Like a wife who disregards her husband's philandering because she cares more about her own rise to power than this "loveless House of Cards agreement."  But surely the villain should be Bill Clinton, yet he remains "the person who is perceived the least negatively" but "is the person who was the most irrefutably immoral."

But why?  Klosterman blames it on our "looks-based, superficial society," and that we eagerly gloss over Clinton's indiscretions because he is (or, at least, was) one handsome devil, and he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut on the topic.  It was Lewinsky, Tripp, Starr, and Hillary who tried to garner clout and advantage from the debacle, but Bill smartly shut up and moved on.

So our ideas of villainy - our very ethics - can be swayed by good looks, charm, and a good job of feigning innocence.  It's not easy to know who's a villain when the bad guys refuse to wear the black hat.

Book Review: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin & Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman

This type of book thrives by stating the obvious emphatically.  Advice tomes, self-help manuals, life & business inspiration.  Have a taste, and see if you can guess which quotes are from Seth Godin ("one of the most popular business bloggers in the world") and which are from Neil Gaiman ("one of the creators of modern comics").

1. "If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do."
2. "An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo."
3. "Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain.  A distant mountain.  My goal."
4. "When you speak your truth, you have opened a door, allowing others to speak to you, directly to you, to your true self."
5. "Life is sometimes hard.  Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong."
6. "Art has no right answer.  The best we can hope for is an interesting answer."
7. "So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."
8. "Artists fail, and failing means that sometimes you need to change your mind about what you thought the best path might be."

The odd numbered ones are from Gaiman; the even from Godin.  But they all sound like they came from the same barrel of platitudes, from the shelves of AphorismMart.  They're all true and yet like keys you find on the street - they don't open any doors you have to open.  I like that metaphor: these self-evident truths are someone else's keys that don't work on your locks.

And yet I just read - eagerly - both of these works, and paid close attention, searching for ways to move closer to my distant mountains.  I suppose there is something of a useful thrill, then, in finding someone's keys on the street, knowing that they open some door somewhere, taking hope that your keys must also be somewhere around here.

Book Review: Point Your Face At This - Drawings by Demetri Martin

Demetri Martin is mainly a stand-up comic, which explains the breed and brand of humor in his new book.  Comics excel at examining the everyday expressions and behaviors we fail to examine, the phrases we hear and utter regularly without thinking, the things we do automatically, and, thus, the days we spend - the lives we live - without thinking.  A good comic makes us think.

Take one of Martin's drawings in the book: it's a simple number line, running from -2 to 12.  A bracket identifies the number set 5, 6, 7, 8 as "choreography."  Think about it for a moment ... get it?  Another drawing depicts, wordlessly across two pages, six drinking vessels that accompany our passage through life: baby bottle, fast food drink cup, beer stein, martini glass, tea cup, and little water cup with meds.  I know the jokes probably don't work as well when described, but it is a book of drawings.

A section of the book includes charts and graphs such as this one.  There's something inherently funny about turning something as non-mathematical as family guilt into a mathematical graphic that is, in its way, precise and insightful, more than most data-based charts.  Other drawings take common expressions and look at them in a uniquely comic way.

Martin's book of drawings makes for hilarious but quick reading, so I recommend checking out his book of mostly writing, This Is a Book by Demetri Martin (yes, the title includes the attribution), which came out in 2011.  Perhaps you already know him from his work on Comedy Central with The Daily Show and his own program, Important Things with Demetri Martin?  If not, search out some video and take in as much of this wise guy who is quite a wise guy, whose dry, subtle humor might make you laugh out loud, but will more likely make you laugh - and think - in your head.

Book Review: Light & Shade - Conversations with Jimmy Page by Brad Tolinski

Grandma Romeo had given me some money for my birthday.  I can't recall exactly how much or even which birthday it was.  And I'm not sure if I ended up in the music section of Caldor or Bradlees, but I do remember one thing clearly.

My brother recommended using my precious funds to purchase my first record.  I probably was only five or six years old, come to think of it, so the record had been out for a few years already.  The record was Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.

I spent the next few years enthralled by what we'd now call Classic Rock, a term I despise as it evokes a radio programming slot rather than the power it imparted to many a young mind.  The same way RunDMC would grab me a decade later, and U2 shortly after that, Led Zep, along with Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and their ilk, allowed me to dream beyond the confines of ordinary life.

As a young guy, I preferred the more poppy tunes on the album: Dancing Days, D'yer Mak'er (the title of which I didn't get for many years).  Now, the solemn, driving No Quarter and the moody Over the Hills and Far Away appeal more.  But Led Zep shine has never faded in my heart and ears though my tastes have shifted away from rock n roll as I pass from youth to middle age.

Brad Tolinski's interview-based biography of Jimmy Page was, for me, then, like drawing back the curtain on the wizard of my childhood, but, unlike Dorothy, finding that there really was a wizard back there working the controls.  Tolinski himself is an avowed fan, so if the book has any fault, it would be his unremitting praise even for some of Page's lackluster post-Zep projects, but I suppose we can forgive him that much if it buys us passages like this:

Q:  While "Immigrant Song" is built around a very straightforward, pile-driving riff, it's the subtle variations in it that make it more than just another hard-rock song.  For example, toward the very end of the song, instead of playing a straight G minor for the accents, you play this very astringent inversion of that chord that really adds some bite.  Where did that come from?
A:  It's a block chord that people never get right.  It pulls the whole tension of the piece into another area or another dimension just for that moment and a bit of backwards echo makes it a bit more complete.  It's putting all these elements together that makes the music have depth. ... So to answer your question, where did that unusual G chord come from?  I didn't have that chord when I started writing the "Immigrant Song," but it suddenly appeared while we were working together, putting on a massive brake to this machine.  You know those old brakes where you clutch them and it just pulls out again, pulling it back in - that's how I see the function of that chord.

Great to know that there really is magic in this world.

Book Review: Food by Mary McCartney

I have no use for two types of cookbooks: the esoteric and the simplistic.  I also dislike those which lack photographs of the completed dishes as much as those which overindulge in candid shots of hot chefs.  Mary McCartney's collection of vegetarian recipes and photographs, then, is the perfect book: the recipes are challenging but won't cost you a hundred bucks in specialty items from every ethnic grocery in town, and, since her first calling is as a photographer, the photos illustrating the book are a tremendous and beautiful help in selecting and preparing meals.

I made a full, fancy meal from three recipes in the book: the eggplant wraps, quinoa & white bean soup, with coconut rice pudding for dessert.  I did have to cough up a few extra bucks for fancy ingredients: pignoli (aka pine) nuts, quinoa, arborio rice, and sundried tomatoes, but all of these came in under $20 together and were available at my neighborhood supermarket.

The eggplant wraps were fantastic yet simple: wilted spinach, toasted pignoli nuts, and cheddar wrapped in a thick slice of fried eggplant.  I love recipes where a vegetable substitutes in for bread; we once made tacos where a broad leaf of lettuce served as taco shell, and I don't think I've ever had better.

The quinoa & white bean soup was stomach- and heart-warming, but perhaps better suited for a winter's eve than a summertime brunch.  The quinoa, however, seemed kind of useless for such a pricey item, and the soup would have been just as good with pastina in its place.

A chocolate sauce made the coconut rice pudding leap from the bowl rather than hunker gelatinously as pudding often does.

I did spend a good four hours preparing this big meal, so I wouldn't recommend constructing an entire menu from McCartney's book unless you have that time; also, the total grocery bill ran upwards of $50 just for this meal.  However, one would do well to select a recipe once a week from this collection to try out something new and surely delicious.  By the way, we had a vegan and two gluten-free eaters at this meal, and McCartney's recipes easily pleased everyone (though my son had his eggplant wraps minus the cheese).  And a final note: yes, Mary McCartney is the daughter of Linda and Paul McCartney, a legacy she neither hides nor overemphasizes in the book, but pays respectful homage to, as many a cookbook author gives a nod to her forebears and influences.

Book Review: WARP - The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer

Full disclosure: I am an Eoin (pronounced "Owen") Colfer (pronounced "Colfer") fan.

I have read everything he's written, all fifteen or so young adult works, his handful of young readers, and his two novels for adults (well, three, really, counting his Part Six of Three continuation of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series).  I got 30 copies of Artemis Fowl and made 35 of my students read it.  I "liked" him on Facebook.  We named our dog after him (though we spell it "Owen").

Moreover, I consider him a modern master; he can balance a swiftly developing, viscously convoluted plotline while drawing in precise detail fascinating and wildly different characters.  His scenes remain embedded in your memory as if they had happened to you; you will see people in the park or grocery store and mistake them for his characters.  Pardon me a second while I wipe the foam from the corners of my mouth.

Colfer is best known for his nine-book Artemis Fowl series, and this title marks the first in a new, open-ended series involving time travel between Victorian London (think Jack the Ripper) and the modern day.  And my mentioning of Jack the Ripper is not accidental: the villain in this novel is the man who is such a murderous devil - Garrick - that he himself knifed Jack the Ripper just to show him up.  Now that's a bad dude.

Witness how Colfer controls the tension in a particularly bloody scene:

     Percival whistled two notes, high and low.  The signal for Turk to advance from the folds of velvet curtain that concealed him.
     Turk made even less noise than Percival, as he wore silken slippers, which he called his murder shoes.  He came up on Garrick from the rear and reached out for a shoulder, to steady the magician for the scimitar's blade, but his questing fingers skinned themselves on glass instead of flesh and bone.
     A mirror, thought Turk.  I have been misled.
     Terror sank into his gut like a lead anchor - he had the wit to know that he was done for.
     The mirror image of Garrick reached out through the mirror and plucked Turk's own sword from his hand.
     "You will not have need of this," said Garrick's image, and he plunged it directly into Turk's heart.
    Turk died believing a phantasm had killed him.

Obviously, if you were expecting something cute and nifty along the lines of Spy Kids, you, too, like Turk, have been misled.  I doubt Disney will be making this one into a movie any time soon - it would be the first NC-17 kids' movie ever.

But you can see, even in such a short passage from the center of the book. how Colfer shapes short-lived characters amidst a tense action scene - Turk's name, his silken slippers, his nickname for them, his scimitar, his darkly comic "I have been misled," his confusion as he dies - all these little touches delineate a character distinctive from the others (he is one of a trio sent to kill Garrick).  Colfer makes this person real and living even as he kills him.

If you cannot bring your big adult self to read young adult fiction, no matter how masterly crafted, then go for Plugged or Screwed, Colfer's works for big people.  However you go about it, step into one of his perfectly formed worlds and you'll find the boundaries of your world blown open.

Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Back in April of 2011, we won tickets to see David Sedaris at the Lucas Theater, courtesy of The Book Lady Bookshop here in Savannah.  At the signing table in the lobby, he sat beside a sign prohibiting photographs, which I assumed was for proprietary reasons - after all, public figures own their words and images the way Walmart owns their BlueRay players and Hello Kitty purses.  But in an essay titled "Author, Author," from his latest collection, Sedaris comes clean about the sign:

     Unlike a lot of authors I know, I enjoy my book tours - love them, as a matter of fact.  That said, I'm in a fortunate position, and have been able to eliminate the parts that don't agree with me - the picture-taking, for instance.  People all have cameras on their cell phones now, and, figuring, I guess, that they might as well aim them at something, they'd ask me to stand and pose a good thirty times a night.  This wasn't an inconvenience so much as an embarrassment.  'You can do better than me,' I'd tell them.  And when they insisted they really couldn't, I'd feel even worse.  Thus, at readings, there's now a notice propped atop my book-signing table.  'Sorry,' it announces, 'but we don't allow photos.'  This makes it sound like it's the store's idea, a standard policy, like no eating fudge in the fine-arts section.

Whether or not you accept Sedaris's self-effacing justification is up to you, but I'd tend to doubt that a man whose every book has hit the NYT best seller list and who can pack a house at fifty bucks a head just to hear him talk really struggles with an inferiority complex.  I'd bet he just finds it annoying, as he indicates by calling it an "inconvenience."

However that may be, that ambiguity between the real David Sedaris and the rampantly autobiographical essayist permeates this collection.  In one piece, "Mind the Gap," he takes the issue head on.  Actually, he doesn't.  What he does is parody his own Europhile snobbery, but in a way that seems to validate it.  The running joke Sedaris sets up is his use of British slang while conversing with Americans:

     I said to my father yesterday afternoon, 'Do you fancy my new jumper?'
     When he answered, 'Huh?'  I was like, '"Jumper?" It means "sweater" in England.'
     'Right,' he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn't take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn't that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?
     'Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it's the most brilliant jumper I've ever seen,' I told him.

The crux of the joke is Sedaris's wearing of the sweater just for the sake of employing its British name, which left me wondering, at least, Did he really do that? And, if so, did he realize his pretension at the time?  The world will never know, just as we never bridge the gap between the writer's voice and the person behind the pen.  In the meantime, though, as with Twain and Dave Barry and Sarah Vowell, we can enjoy the writing, if not the person.  And no piccys, please, indeed.

Book Review: Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment

I will never understand how people can get so riled about politics - excited, knowledgeable, involved, even partisan and opinionated: these can be positive qualities, but angry and irrational, not so.  I'm not talking about those who, say, oppose an unjust war or protest for lower taxes.  Those activities fall under the exercise of first amendment rights which keep our democracy vital.  I'm talking about those who scream (usually online) about Obama being a foreign-born Muslim socialist and such.

So it was refreshing to read Reckless, Bob Deans's level-headed partisan pamphlet.  He writes to criticize Republican congressional actions that erode environmental law, but he does so respectfully and thoughtfully.  The basis of his case, in fact, is the long history of Republican defense of the environment.

"'What is a conservative, after all, but one who conserves,' ....  'And we want to protect and conserve the land on which we live - our countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests.  This is our patrimony.  This is what we leave to our children.  And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.'"

What daisy-sniffing, meadow-tripping tree hugger said that?  None other than conservative hero President Ronald Reagan.  But the granddaddy of conservative conservationists, of course, is Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke emphatically of our moral mandate to environmental protection: "'Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.'"

Nowadays, though, Republicans want to declaw and dismantle the EPA, even though, Deans reminds us, "It was Republican President Richard Nixon, after all, who created the Environmental Protection Agency."

Why have Republicans shifted?  Deans quotes the explanation of a Syracuse professor: "'Scientifically, there is no controversy.  Politically, there is a controversy because there are political interest groups making it a controversy. ... It's not about science.  It's about politics.'"

Deans points to the business interests behind the politics, such as mining companies who will profit from the removal of environmental safeguards, but he particularly bemoans the big lie that protective laws are "job killers."  Deans asserts that "There simply isn't any evidence to support the GOP illusion of some vast regulatory regime running roughshod over personal industry and individual rights.  In fact, our country depends on a sound regulatory environment, as every modern economic power does, to function in a stable and predictable way.  Environmental regulations create jobs and provide additional economic benefits worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year, many times their annual compliance cost, while promoting American economic growth and competitiveness."  Deans quotes all the facts and figures to support this assertion, pointing to economic growth resulting from regulation, and statistics proving that industry regulations do not adversely effect job creation.

But "That hasn't kept some companies from claiming that regulations are forcing them to fail," Deans continues, explaining, however, how "It's very seldom true."  Again, Republicans historically have favored government regulation of business for environmental protection: Nixon in 1970 set the policy: "'We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. ... This requires new regulations.'"

And the American public is not behind Republican efforts to weaken these regulations.  While Congress has a ten percent approval rate, "71 percent of Americans believe the EPA should enforce restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution."

Finally, Deans gets to the essential question: "How did the House Republicans move so quickly from their own party's environmental legacy and so far from the traditions of modern conservatism?  The answer, according to political analysts, scholars, and Republicans themselves, is that much of the party has been captured by a virulent combination of tea party anger, corporate cash, and the fears  of the ultra right wing, at a time when the GOP's two-step program for change - reduced public investment and less public oversight of corporate polluters - would do the struggling economy more harm than good."

Deans cites the difference in environmental attitudes amongst Republican factions as evidence of this analysis: for example, 68 percent of tea party Republicans favor cuts in environmental protections, while only 31 percent of "Main Street" Republicans do.  Similarly, corporate influence has shifted Republican policy: "Over just the past five years the [oil and gas] industry has spent $686.6 million pressing its priorities in Washington alone, deploying an army of nearly 800 lobbyists ...."

So what is to be done?  First, we need to dispel the false dichotomy between a vigorous economy and a thriving environment.  As President Obama said, "'I do not buy the notion that we have to make a choice between having clean air and clean water, and growing the economy in a robust way.'"  Deans also criticizes the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that expanded corporate influence in Washington, encouraging campaign finance reform to roll back those gains for lobbyists.  In the end, the government and its power rests in the hands of its people - in our hands - and we must put those hands to work to protect our environment.

Book Review: Nothing Gold Can Stay, stories by Ron Rash

A few stories into this collection of fourteen I found myself asking aloud, "How did I ever miss this guy?"

Rash hasn't exactly been obscure: he's won several prizes over a decade of publishing novels and short stories.  But I hadn't ever come across his work before.  Now I have everything he's written out from the library, stacked beside the couch for a glorious summer author study.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, as the title indicates, bears the heavy theme of decline and death - the cover art,  a bare tree silhouetted grey on black before the moon of the "o" in "nothing" - captures the feel of the book perfectly.  The same tree is featured on the spine, but in gold.

The story "Where the Map Ends" demonstrates the collection's verve.  Two fugitive slaves - one older, one younger - spend the night in the loft of a barn, and wake to find the farmer has discovered them.  Rash frames the tension beautifully:

A cowbell woke them, the animal ambling into the barn, a man in frayed overalls following with a gallon pail.  A scraggly gray beard covered much of his face, some streaks of brown in his lank hair.  He was thin and tall, and his neck and back bowed forward as if from years of ducking.  As the farmer set his stool beside the cow's flank, a gray cat appeared and positioned itself close by.  Milk spurts hissed against the tin.  The fugitives peered through the board gaps.  The youth's stomach growled audibly. ... The farmer did not look up but his shoulders tensed and his free hand clenched the pail tighter.  He quickly left the barn.

The tension releases when the fugitives realize the farmer is not overly fond of their former master and therefore sympathetic to aiding their escape.  But not entirely.  The farmer sees traces of the slave master's red hair in the younger fugitive and directs all his antipathy for the war and wealth at this one, while aiding the older, African-born fugitive in his quest for freedom, leaving the elder slave to decide if he can abandon his youthful charge.

The people in Rash's stories are desperate, trapped by circumstances, and scrambling for release from their trials.  Like the elder fugitive in "Where the Map Ends," they learn that freedom does not come without its burdens.

Book Review: Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz

Here's how I introduced myself to a class of sixth-graders in Pont Sonde, Haiti: "Him (indicating their teacher), he looks like a teacher.  I look like a tourist.  I know this.  But I, too, am a teacher."

The word I have here translated as "tourist," blan, literally means "white," and hearkens back to the grand blancs who were masters over Haiti's slave plantations in French colonial days.  Today the word means something more along the lines of "foreigner" or "outsider," but skin color does play a role in identifying a blan, though skin color alone (I'm told) does not determine one's status as blan or its opposite, neg.

So we blan constantly seek credibility in Haiti.  I noticed that whenever I tell people about our church visit, I mention the number twenty-eight.  "We've supported this parish in Haiti for over 28 years," I say, to differentiate us - well, myself, really - from the slew of Johnny-come-latelys (including Bill Clinton and several hundred youth groups) who infiltrated the country like a Mongol horde of do-gooder Marines after the January, 2010 earthquake.

And so for Amy Wilentz in her new book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti.  Wilentz repeatedly reminds us that she's been visiting the country for years, met Aristide before he became president, and strides through the refugee camps fearlessly.

Why do we blan so feel a need to establish our credibility, our homeboy street cred, in Haiti?  I suppose it's the same reason we do the same here in the states when encountering another culture.  We feel guilty for the past.  The US's involvement in Haiti, despite many good intentions and much beneficial aid, has been marred by everything from a full-on maritime invasion to presidential depositions to a gutting of the rice market.  We should be proud of our ongoing commitment to help this nation, infamously the poorest in the Western hemisphere, yet we remain ashamed of our country's incessant meddling and politics of greed in the region.

Ultimately, Wilentz's book moves beyond establishing her credibility.  But it still casts a pallor over the work, and we turn the last page sensing that the effort was more about her than her subject.

Book Review: Dave Barry's Insane City

I'm a little concerned about Dave Barry.  I've long been a fan of his quirky, albeit predictable, humor: throw some asparagus into the toilet! set the cat's farts on fire! (and such), and have read approximately 33/42 of his books (approximately).  But now I'm concerned.

I remember back in Big Trouble, Dave had these frogs whose skin, when touched, transmitted some hallucinogen (I think - I read that a while ago and may have been hallucinating myself).  Now, in his new novel, Insane City, the main character is ... marijuana.  Oddly, though, only one character (a very sweet, lovable girl) every lights up a doobie - mostly, the characters indulge in pot brownies.  And the drug use turns crusty old men into avuncular buddy-types, and forges friendships across the usual socio-economic borders (yes! I went to college) that prohibit the superwealthy from even meeting, let alone sharing hashish with, Joe Six-Pack.  Or is it Joe Dime-Bag?

So what is Dave getting at here?  We all need to loosen up and pot is the way?  At least in edible form? (He does gently wag a finger at inhaling, at least more than ten times a day.)  I don't know, and I don't think Dave knows, either.

In any case, Insane City was a fun read that will keep you turning pages right to the totally formulaic cheesy romantic ending (Dave?  Dave?  I wouldn't do that if I were you), and the sitcom-friendly "everything worked out in the end" wrap-up (even the Haitian refugees get married and start on the path towards citizenship!  not kidding!).  Hey, we all need a break from Faulkner now and then.

Book Review: The Queen of Katwe

It would be easy to dismiss Tim Crothers's The Queen of Katwe as just another feel-good, underdog triumph tale.  And, make no mistake, it is exactly that - but it's a darn good one all the same.  If a person can live in the most abject poverty and disadvantage imaginable and yet rise to junior chess champion of her continent, maybe we all can dare to hope.  Maybe we all can take inspiration from Phiona Mutesi and do something with our lives, accomplish something during our brief stay on earth.

As you'd expect, though, the book lacks nuance and complexity where it needs it most.  The author states in the epilogue that, upon writing a magazine article on Phenomenal Phiona, he knew he must expand it to book length and tell the whole story.  Now, the book will only do good for Phiona (and possibly others in Katwe), but the story (at least as Crothers relates it) should have remained in the periodical realm.

He spends the crucial second chapter telling the rather confusing life story of the man who came to run the program that introduced Phiona to chess, and many other parts drag on as filler to take a rather simple story to book length.  At the same time, Crothers pays no attention to the political realities of Uganda that foster the slums which make Phiona the rare exception to the rule of degrading and desperate poverty.  He mentions Idi Amin in passing several times as if he were simply a former president, like Gerald Ford, and not the Uber-African despot.  In the end, the book reads like an overlong magazine fluff piece, when it could have been a serious book about not only an exceptional girl, but also about the world which makes a successful girl something to marvel at.

Book Review: Diana Wynne Jones, "Reflections On the Magic of Writing"

I came to Diana Wynne Jones's work in a roundabout way.  Already a fan of Hayao Miyazaki's movies when Howl's Moving Castle came out, I was surprised to find that someone else's book lay behind the story, since Miyazaki has a way of owning everything he uses - his style and vision are so engulfing.  The book was so, well, magical, that I went on to read three more of her novels.

Now we have a collection of essays and various other pieces by Jones, Reflections On the Magic of Writing, that, even for a casual reader of her work like me, not only exposes the influences and thinking behind her own writing, but solidifies her place among major 20th-century English writers of fiction.

Neil Gaiman contributes a heartfelt introduction, but his star power fades swiftly when Jones takes the stage and reveals her approach to writing children's literature, a method like that of a research psychologist:

     From my window I can see a steep stretch of woodland ... I have watched it for five years now.
     It is full of children who appear to be mad.  A group of girls totter down the slope. ... anyone
     who watches this wood, or anywhere else where children habitually play, will quite soon notice
     a number of things, all of which ought to have great importance for anyone who is interested in
     writing for children.

But Jones doesn't analyze: she embraces.  She writes about Tolkien, Narnia, learning to read Anglo-Saxon, and a favorite of mine, the somewhat obscure but startlingly brilliant poet Mervyn Peake.  She takes each in her arms as one would a child one adores, but without sentimentality or stooping to hero-worship.

What sets this book apart from all other posthumous essay collections is that it shines - these are no leftovers, or some last scraping at sales by a publisher.  This collection sparkles, it crackles, it burns with life like the fiery burning bush that not only burns without consuming, but provides a place for the voice of the divine.

Book Review: Garry Wills - "Why Priests? A Failed Tradition"

We arrived at Trinity United Methodist a few minutes late for Garry Wills's talk because we were chatting with Marisa Meyer while she signed my daughter's copy of her new book, Scarlet, at this year's Savannah Book Festival.  Garry was already going full steam, and we had to creep along the balcony and ask a gentleman to move his coat in order to sit down (his umbrella clattered to the floor).

I always enjoy the challenge of reading an intelligent diatribe against something I believe in - Christopher Hitchens (God rest his soul) remains one of my all-time favorite authors.  And, having read several of Garry Wills's works (What Paul Meant, What Jesus Meant, the one on Augustine, etc.) before, I bounced in my seat as I put a hold on his new book, Why Priests? (he likes titles with interrogatives, apparently) and bounced yet higher when I heard he would soon be visiting Savannah.

But, ultimately, I was disappointed by the blunt force of his argument against the priesthood - he made the error of starting with a position ("Down with priests!") and then searched out the Scriptures and history for random supporting evidence.  What a shame for such an esteemed scholar.  His primary thread of debate regards the absence of a Christian priesthood (as we now know it) in the time of Christ or the Apostles.  What matters that, my friends?  The doctrine of the Trinity (see C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity for how this belief all but defines the faith) did not develop for, um, millennia after God told Abraham to "kill me a son."  The priesthood is no more far-fetched than Christianity itself.

Hopefully Wills returns to actual scholarship following this sterile invective, putting down his axe (to grind) and taking up the surgical knife of astute historical and religious analysis that made him such a respected author in the first place.  He's welcome to take views contrary to Church teaching, but he must refrain from cherry-picking evidence in such a biased manner - he dwells on every last molehill of sin of priests and the Church without the slightest appreciation for the mountains of good they both raised.  I look forward to reading him again with a smile of discovery rather than a puckered mouth of sourness.


Note:  I had established this blog to cover educational issues, but there are issues with that concept.  For example, I have both a legal and moral obligation to maintain my students' privacy, and it's difficult to discuss education without bringing up what happened at school.   Therefore, I turn this ship towards another love: reading.  We'll see how that goes!