A Book A Week - Week 21: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

This week's book:
    Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls   by David Sedaris

Grade: A, of course

I'm a David Sedaris fan.  I'm also a fan of his sister, Amy, which really has nothing to do with this book, I just thought it merited a mention.  They're a funny family, what can I say?

No news here, Mr. Sedaris has another winner with 'Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls.'  As with his previous books, he presents a series of unconnected or barely-connected essays, all of them hilariously funny, and most of them extended anecdotes about his life.  He's a keen observer of humanity, the kind of guy who would watch a line of ants instead of a parade, because, let's face it, the ants really are more interesting.

If you've heard the author on NPR, or seen him on TV, I have to say that his essays actually read better when you don't have his voice relating them.  All apologies to Mr. Sedaris, but he's not an actor, and he doesn't really do justice to his own writing when he reads it aloud.  The gems come fast and furious, every page.  Some of my favorites:

On his high-school 'sweetheart' (Mr. Sedaris is gay)
     '... so why not have a two-hundred-fifty pound girlfriend from the wrong side of town?'

On a revealing encounter in a London taxidermy shop:
    '... with no effort whatsoever [the taxidermist] looked into my soul and recognized me for the person I really am: the type who'd actually love a Pygmy and could get over the fact that he'd been murdered for sport...'

On being a victim of crime:
   'There are plenty of things I take for granted, but not being burgled was never one of them.'

I laughed out loud the entire time I was reading this book, and I don't really do that, at least not often.  But the best humor comes from pain, and I get the feeling that the author is in constant pain.  Not physical - though he did have dental implants - I mean he's in existential pain, a deep kind of sadness and despair that he can only release through these essays.  Balling up all the darkness inside him and pasting it on the page, as it were.  I get the feeling that I wouldn't want to be inside his head.
   For that matter, I wouldn't want to be part of his family, they're often the subject of his reminiscences and the fodder for his wit.  After all, there's no better way to get back at an emotionally abusive father than to expose him for who he is to millions of strangers.

If you know who David Sedaris is - and if you like his work - then I don't need to tell you to get this book, you probably already have.  If you're on the fence, maybe you've heard of him but not heard him or read him, then by all means do so, and this book is as good a place to start as any.  If you don't like David Sedaris then... well... what can I say?  You're dead inside, the man's brilliant.

Next week:
   Fifty Shades of Grey  by E.L. James
   I said I would read it, so I'm following through, getting it done.  Not looking forward to it, though...

A Modest Proposal

I've been thinking about corporate malfeasance lately.  It's not like misbehaving corporations are a new thing, the Baby Boomers didn't invent corporate weasels.  They did, however, raise corporate weasel-ism to a high art.  And with the incredibly regressive and punitive laissez-faire Federal policies of the past thirty years things are as bad as I've been alive to see them.

Time was, back in the bad old days of the 50's, 60's and 70's, corporations and the men who ran them seemed to understand that we really were all in this together.  You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family, and America is one huge extended family.  Sure, in the 50's the government ran the corporations as much as the CEOs did - talk about picking winners and losers - but there wasn't the zero-sum mentality that pervades modern American business.

The problem today, as I see it, is that corporations and the weasels who run them hide behind anonymity.  Sure, you'd probably recognize Mark Zuckerberg, maybe Marissa Mayer, but they're names in the news right now.  Who's the CEO of Goldman Sachs?  Of Fannie Mae?  Of Monsanto? Of Archer Daniels Midland?  Of Valero?  What about the most ubiquitous company in the country, a place you can't outrun no matter how hard you try - for God's sake, who runs Wal-Mart?  Do you know?  His name is Michael T. Duke.  Could you pick him out of a police lineup if he punched you square in the face?  Of course you can't, he's anonymous on purpose, he doesn't want you to know who he is.  But he makes decisions every day that directly affect what you can buy with your meager wages, and how much of it you can afford.
   See?  This is a problem.  The people making the most important decisions for us these days are not our elected officials.  Not even close.  The people who run corporations, from the CEO on down, sit behind their desks comfortable in their anonymity, assured that no matter how bad their decisions are, they'll never really be held accountable, and they'll always get paid more next year.  That's the problem, and it needs to stop.

So here's my modest proposal:  we need to change the laws regarding forming corporations and make the C-level executives and every Board member individually and personally liable for any malfeasance, crime, fraud, or abuse committed by the corporations. 

It's that simple.  And that difficult.  No more hiding behind a piece of paper on file in a cabinet in an office in Delaware.  So if, say, BP 'accidentally' spills another hundred million gallons of oil somewhere, their CEO will be personally fiscally and criminally liable.  So will all the board members.  So will everyone who approved the project and carries a title.
   The immediate affect of this would be very frightening for every CEO.  We'd see a rash of resignations, for sure.  Weasels hate more than anything being held accountable.  But then we'd get men and women in those jobs who actually earn their salaries instead of stealing them.  We'd have more measured progress, sure, but we'd have far more responsible progress.  And we'd have companies who know for a fact that they're in it together with us.

Do you want the privilege of doing business in the United States?  Do you want to earn the insane paycheck?  Do you want to sit in the big leather chair?  Do you want the private jets and drivers and country club memberships?  Then you'll need to prove you're committed to more than just a money grab. You need to put your ass on the line.

A Book A Week - Week 20: Glock

This week's book:
    Glock - the Rise of America's Gun   by Paul M. Barrett

Grade:  B+

   'Cause I put away the shotgun, bought me a Glock
   Took a little trip to the funky weed spot...
   -- 'Hand on the Glock'   Cypress Hill

It used to be the Colt, the revolver that won the American West, but in this millennium the Glock has captured the mind and spirit of America.  And the Glock's Austrian.  You know, from that Austria, the country that brought us Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss, Otto Preminger,  Erwin Schroedinger.  Hedy Lamarr (look her up, seriously impressive).  Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Um... and... uh... Hitler.  Funny how things work out, isn't it?

This book is an examination of how one socially-awkward Austrian engineer founded and developed a handgun company that would eventually come to eclipse the most venerable American gun companies.  It's the story of masterful engineering, flawless marketing, smart people with seemingly no conscience, and a very, very large amount of luck.

The author is currently employed as a journalist with Bloomberg Businessweek, and prior to that worked at the Wall Street Journal.  So he knows how to dig, how to tell the complete story.  What he does not seem to know how to do is make his prose pop.  Make no mistake, it's a great read, but, it's no Detroit, and I have to measure this by what I've read before.
   Anybody out there read Vanity Fair?  I love that magazine, and it's certainly well-written, its articles well-researched.  But, man, those articles can be loooooong.  Same thing here.  I have no quarrel at all with the prose, or with the years of painstaking research that went into making this book a reality.  But it does read like an extended article, when it should read like a book.

The author spends a lot of time on how Gustav Glock came to establish his gun company, and how he researched and created the gun that bears his name. He also spends a lot of time on the initial years in the United States, when Glock made some very lucky and very strategic hires that would put his company on the map and grab the American mind-share* it has now.  There are great studies of the company principals, volatile personalities that were both the cause of and the victims of the Glock company's success in the United States.
   The author spends a lot of time on the early years.  A lot.  It was only in the last forty pages or so of the book that he reveals why a book published in 2012 spends such an inordinate amount of time in the 80's and 90's:  he lost access to Glock the company and Glock the man.

This is the reason for the B+ grade.  The subtitle is 'the rise of America's gun' not because that's a stylistic or editorial choice, but rather because the author doesn't have any resources inside the company after the mid-90's.  He admits as much, saying he'd been persona non grata for years, and was surprised by a call from one of Glock's sons after the book came out.  The author still ties up the story, bringing us into the present day, but with a bare fraction of the detail he was able to put into the first years.  I appreciate the effort and the closure, but I still felt cheated.

The Glock story is epic - the man's now a billionaire, largely from selling pistols to Americans - both in its (sort of) rags-to-riches story, but also in the object lesson of a man who was not at all careful about who he surrounded himself with, or did business with, or how he handled the fortune that seems to be slowly destroying his family.

I'd recommend this book to anyone, but especially to any gun nuts you know.  It's not the rah-rah Fox-News-friendly story they'd want, but it has a message they need to hear.  It's also, as I mentioned, a lesson that incredible success does not bring with it the intellectual tools or the emotional maturity to handle that success.  I think that's something a lot of people need to hear. 

* yes, I used the phrase 'mind-share.'  It's late.  I'm tired.

Next week:
   Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls   by David Sedaris
   Can't go wrong with David Sedaris, can you?

A Book A Week - Week 19: The Golem and The Jinni

This week's book:
    The Golem and The Jinni   by Helene Wecker

Grade:  A+

Wow.

I didn't know what to expect, this is the author's first novel.  First novels are usually a dicey thing, they can be an epic failure - like Twilight - or just not worth the effort - like Ready Player One.  The Golem and The Jinni is good.  Damned good.  Ms. Wecker is one author I'll follow in the future, so she'd better keep up the quality.

This is historical fiction, because it's set in the 1890's in immigrant-filled New York City, but it's also branded 'magical realism' because the main characters are - surprise - a golem and jinni.  I would argue, however, that it's not 'magical realism' but a legitimate fantasy novel.  Or historical fantasy.  I think those labels would probably hurt sales, though, so I'll go with whatever the publishers decide to call it.

The author very skillfully brings us into the world of immigrants in Manhattan just before the turn of the 20th Century.  I got the feeling that she'd researched until her eyes glazed over, because the setting feels real, as if she were describing something she saw firsthand.  When writers research a different time there's a tendency to put in too much detail, to kind of show off what they learned, but Ms. Wecker does not fall into that trap.  The lower East Side of Manhattan came alive for me.

The characters of the Golem and Jinni, though fantastic and incredible, also came alive.  They're real people instead of allegories or representations of emotional states.  Or, I should say, instead of just allegories, because they are that.  The Golem, being made of clay, is more forthright and dependable and of service to others, while the Jinni, being made of fire, is more volatile and unreliable and self-centered.  Woman and man.  Yeah, there's more than a bit of symbolism here.

I won't go into the story too much, the plot is too good to ruin, but the Golem and Jinni do eventually meet, even though they're part of two entirely different immigrant communities, and they find themselves draw together by circumstances and the tenuous link of history. Well, and neither of them needs to sleep so they have Manhattan in the middle of the night all to themselves.
    I thought at first that I might have been tricked into reading a romance, and to be sure there is romance in the story, but it's really the story of the need to be true to your own nature, even when that comes with consequences.

Ms. Wecker's writing is excellent.  Seamless  She's gone through many, many drafts, I can tell.  Even though the book is long, she keeps the narrative moving, and doesn't toss in anything that doesn't add to the story or that she doesn't resolve at the end.  No dangling plot threads here.
   If I had one quarrel, it would be that the book felt a little too long.  Maybe fifty pages or so.  Not that there were fifty pages I could find to cut immediately, but, you know, 500 words here or there adds up.

If you like fantasy books, but without elves and unicorns and what have you, get this book.  If you like historical fiction, get this book.  If you like good stories that don't end up in a formulaic fashion, get this book.  If you like great writing and a great story, get this book. 

Next week:
   Glock - the Rise of America's Gun   by Paul M. Barrett
   Back to non-fiction next week. And guns.

A Book A Week - Week 18: Ready Player One

This week's book:
    Ready Player One   by  Ernest Cline

Grade:   C

I'm a day late with this week's book, not because I'm lazy, but because I needed time to digest it.  Which is maybe a sign of my ambivalence.
  See... the problem is that I'm supposed to like this novel.  It's aimed squarely at me.  And I don't mean 'me' in a metaphorical sense, or in a member-of-a-demographic sense, no, I'm the guy in the crosshairs.  I'll explain below, but for now you need to know that I should have every reason to rave about Ready Player One.  But I can't.

Truth to tell, the book actually pissed me off.  And that's why I had to wait.  I had to cool down, to try to give it a reasoned, cautious review rather than the one I had boiling in me yesterday.

Here's the deal:  the book is set thirty years in the future, when the planet is ruined and awful corporations rule the slagheap that's left.  Humanity has largely retreated into an online space called OASIS, where you can go to school, make real money, live, work, play, and even have cyber-sex if you want.  It's one great-big video game.
    The creator of that video game - think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one - has died, and left his fortune to the person who can find the Egg hidden in the game.  As a child of the 80's, the creator has populated the game with his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of 80's pop culture.  The people who are trying to find the Egg, and the multi-billion dollar fortune behind it, immerse themselves in 80's movies, music, and especially video games.  Even the smallest detail of Silver Spoons could be a clue, and it's certainly better living in a re-hashed 80's simulation than in the real world.

The author backs up dump truck after dump truck of 80's trivia, all in the guise of the hero working his way through the quest of earning the three keys to win the Egg.  You name it, Mr. Cline's got it, every movie, every music video, every console game, every coin-op game, every poster, every computer.  Every page of the book, practically, full to overflowing with 80's nostalgia.  Since I was a child of the 80's I got every single reference, the first time through, no explanation necessary even though the author provided one.

After the first ten pages I was bored with it.  I was there, after all, and the 80's kind of sucked.  After the first few chapters I wanted it all to stop.  I was a nerd, I played through Tomb of Horrors more than once, and reading about it in a novel was like strolling through a bad museum exhibit.  Halfway through I started getting mad.  How dare he co-opt my childhood?  This was my history he was playing with.  Mine.  Not yours.  By the last few chapters I was just eager for it all to end.

We get it, Mr. Cline, you loved the 80's.  But that doesn't give you permission to do... this.  Hands off my past, jackass.  Now I understand when old hippies say 'yeah... but you weren't there, man... you had to be there...'  God help me.

 Second, and not nearly as subjective, the novel is about a kid's adventures inside a video game.  So when you're reading, you're not really reading his exploits, you're reading about him reading about his exploits.  It's like watching someone else solve a crossword puzzle, and who gives a shit about that?
   There's more here than the author uses, he barely touches on the alienation and despair rampant in his future dystopia.  The point should be the hollowness of the escape into the game, rather than the excitement of the main character living a calendar year - no lie - in one thirty-foot-square room as he chases the Egg and the creator's fortune.  So many more layers he could have built that just aren't there.

Third, my 'don't diss the genre' note:  I found, I think, one passing mention of William Gibson and Neuromancer.  One.  In a novel which is essentially an 80's nerd squeal, the author rushes past the entire reason he can get away with a book like this, and gives no credit to the man and the novel who created the cyberspace he abuses.

If you had a friend who built his own Altair, if you played Zork, and Asteroids, and Tempest, if you watched anime before anyone else knew the Japanese made cartoons, if you know how to use a 300 baud modem on a rotary phone, if you made appointment TV on Saturday morning well into your late 20's, if you know what I mean when say 'the Blue Box,' if you know who Gary Gygax was, if you at all enjoyed living any part of the 80's even the tiniest bit, then please, please, please, don't read this book.  It's just gonna piss you off.
    If you weren't alive then, go crazy.  The 80's stuff will seem like friendly nostalgia, but the narrative is still pretty mediocre.


Next week:
   The Golem and The Jinni   by Helene Wecker
   Hot off the presses, brand new fiction.  Historical and 'magical realism?'  How's that work?

A Book A Week - Week 17: White Bread

This week's book:
    White Bread   by  Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Grade:   B+

It's become an insult, 'white bread,' and it's become insulting, food that isn't really food.  If you think white bread you think Jerry Springer, you think Wal-Mart, you think lowbrow, beer-swilling, toilet-on-the-front-lawn kind of folks.  But it wasn't always that way.

This book examines the relationship Americans have with the commercial white bread loaf, from the beginning back even into the mid-Nineteenth Century up to the modern day.  I was drawn to this book because in the opening pages the author wonders whether the white bread we eat today, with all its chemicals and synthetic ingredients could even really be said to be food any more.  It's a sentiment that I've expressed often, and nothing makes a person like someone else more than being agreed with.
    Also, the author finds a strong strain of white elitism in the foodie movement, in those people who shop at Whole Foods and local farmers' markets and congratulate themselves for it, and who believe with what conviction they can muster that if only the unwashed masses could be convinced to behave exactly like their betters the listing ship of America would right itself.  I've noticed this myself - I've shopped at Whole Foods and still try to find farmers' markets - where instead of seeing community I see a whole lot of other people who look just like me.  Nobody talks to anybody else and you're just as likely to see award-winning guacamole and gourmet cookies as you are fresh carrots.  So I'm with the author here.

Matter of fact, I agree with the author on almost everything he puts forth in this book.  It's meticulously researched, and he meshes bread-baking ideas and trends across decades expertly, following changes and evolution in American dietary habits and social consciousness like a detective tracking twists and turns in a murder mystery.  He finds social and political influence in the public's attitudes towards white bread, and ties those influences into the subsequent trends in politics and social movements.  It's a book that took years to research and years to write.

It's a very, very well-done book, probably the standard by which other such research will be measured in years to come.
    So why the B+?

It's just so dry.   Dry like a day-old baguette.

The past several non-fiction books I've reviewed I've graded A or higher.  These were books written either by journalists who write for public consumption every day, or by a professor who's particularly adept at turning crazy complicated ideas into something non-mathematicians can understand.  'White Bread' is written by an academic, currently engaged in academia, and it shows.  Dr. Bobrow-Strain, PhD, writes well, and he writes concisely, and he writes completely.  But he doesn't write in a particularly entertaining fashion.  He's not grabbing headlines, he's defending his research.   His job is to be a professor, and this book reflects that; about 20% of the book is end notes and an index.

I would recommend this book to anyone* interested in modern food movements: locavores, raw foods, gluten-free, what have you.  You'll find that you're not so trend-setting as you wish you were, Americans have been advocating your agendas for over one-hundred years.  I'd also recommend this book to any executive in Big Food, because you'll see that we know what you're doing and why you're doing it.  And knowing is half the battle.   I'd also recommend this to anyone who likes a solidly-researched non-fiction book, who is also not bothered so much by books that are half-textbook. 

Next week:
   Ready Player One   by  Ernest Cline
   I'm moving into modern sci-fi and leaving the old school behind.  Hope it doesn't suck.

* mostly well-off white folks, don't pretend it's not true

A Book A Week - Week 16: The Interestings

This week's book:
    The Interestings   by  Meg Wolitzer

Grade:    A

Huh. This is the first 'A' I've given to fiction since Week 9: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I have to say, I enjoyed this book very, very much.  And that surprised me very, very much.

Let me 'splain.  I chose this book because it wasn't a book I'd normally read.  Normally I like my fiction to... I don't know... move.  To have things happening.  To take me out of my regular life and set me somewhere else.  I want my fiction to be masculine, I suppose.  All about purpose and goals and what have you, bearded fiction with steely eyes and big shoulders.  This book, however, is the exact opposite of that.  This book is very feminine, all about examining the unexamined life, about trying to make sense of the relationships people have with one another and how those relationships change over time.  Not exactly my cup of tea.  At least, not that I knew before now.

I really like this book.  Yeah, it's weird to me too.

Meg Wolitzer is an excellent writer, and I only say that because I can't think of an adjective that means 'better than excellent' and still get my point across.  Her prose hangs together like it had always been there and she just discovered it and decided to let others see what she found.  It is, at first glance, the story about friends and how their lives either work out well, or terribly, or just kind of go along at the same mediocre pace.  Underneath, however, you'll find an assessment of the place of art in society, and how the value of art does not necessarily match the value of commercial success.
   It's a meander, reading this book, going from place to place and time to time, but I never got bored.  I was immediately invested in the characters and their lives, and I was eager to see how things would play out for them in the end.  These were real people to me, all of them, and even when a few of the characters became wildly more successful than their old friends at camp the situation felt perfectly plausible and real.
   The author starts the story at the beginning, back at sleep-away art camp in the 70's, and ends in the present day, but in between the narrative takes wide shifts in time.  With other books, this device feels forced, a purposeful obfuscation on what would otherwise be a linear narrative, but with 'The Interestings' it's a necessity, and it works.  Going back and forth is necessary because, taken linearly, the story would seem like it was barreling towards an inevitable conclusion.  This is a compliment, because once you learn the entire story, it seems like there's no other way things could have worked out.  Taken in bits and pieces, out of time order, the author lets the reader sneak up on the truth the story lays out.  Pretty clever.

Because the author is a writing instructor, I will allow myself two pieces of nit-picky criticism:
     I found a few places in the middle of the narrative where the POV shifts focus from character to character within the same scene, and a few times from paragraph to paragraph to paragraph.  Kind of jolting, to have one character be the focus and then have that focus moved to another few characters and back again in the space of two pages. 
     Also, the characters have the habit of sometimes telling rapid-fire jokes, like this was an episode of the to-me-impenetrable 'Gilmore Girls.'  The author reins in the tendency, but I happen to really, really hate cleverness for its own sake, and sometimes this crept in.  And it wasn't always entirely in character.

Who should read this book?  Well, everybody.  If you're a woman you're going to love it, I think.  Yes, that sounds sexist, but, as I mentioned above, this is a very feminine book, and there are no spies or aliens or international peril but lots of interpersonal interaction, and tons of secret-keeping, and older characters looking back on their younger selves.  But I also think that if you're a man you'll love it too, if only because I did and this is so far out of my genre comfort zone it might as well have been in a different language.
   Buy the damn book, already.

Next week:
   White Bread   by  Aaron Bobrow-Strain
   This is not fiction, this really is about white bread.  Stick with me, I think is going to be very interesting.  Seriously.

A Book A Week - Week 15: The Grand Design

This week's book:
    The Grand Design   by  Stephen Hawking

Grade:    A  if you're into science books
              C   if you're like most Americans

Stephen Hawking is getting old.  He's in his 70's now, and had to retire as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (Unversity rules, evidently, not his choice).  He's written several books, and this is, perhaps, his last one, as his condition deteriorates and he gets closer to the time when even those without ALS see the finish line coming up fast.  But as his possible last book, The Grand Design is his best.  And his most controversial.

Here's the spoiler:  in this book Hawking lays out the reason why he thinks there is no God.

I think he saved this one for last because this book is a distillation of his work to date, his understanding of the entirety of physics, not only the icing on the cake but the cake itself, and the table the cake rests on, and the building, and the planet, and the solar system... you get the idea.

I loved this book.  I did not agree with some of it - Hawking like most physicists is entirely too accepting of the concept of the wave-particle duality - but there's nothing I love more than a well-reasoned argument, and this book is certainly that.  He starts out with mythology and moves through Greek science to Renaissance rediscovery and the creation of modern scientific method through Newton and Einstein to present day theories.  His stated aim at the beginning of the book is to answer three specific questions:
   Why is there something rather than nothing?
   Why do we exist?
   Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

Does the author answer these questions?
   Well... that depends.  If you're a fundamentalist of any sort, Christian, Muslim, or whatever other religion allows fundamentalism, then, no, he does not answer those questions.  Matter of fact, everything he has to say would make you want to scream and run from the room.  But then, if you're a true fundamentalist you wouldn't be asking those questions or talking to Professor Hawking in the first place.
   If you're a reasonably smart person and not personally invested in superstition and intolerance disguised as religion, then it certainly does seem as if he answers those questions.  He advocates the strong anthropic principle, or at least ends up there after presenting his arguments.  Essentially, the answer to those three questions is:  we exist in a universe rather than there being a void (Q1 and Q2) because the universe is specifically tailored to produce beings who could ask those questions in the first place (Q3).  
    Hawking reasons his way around to it very elegantly, but he still concludes with what is, at its base, a tautology.  There's more to it, of course, and the author presents his case in an entire book while I've summarized in a sentence.  You'll get more out of it when you read the book.

If you like science books I would definitely recommend The Grand Design.  It's not too long, but it is very well-written.  The crowning achievement of an impossible career.
  If you don't like science books give it a pass.  Seriously.  It's written plainly as possible but if you don't like this sort of thing, this book is definitely not going to change your mind. 

Next week:
   The Interestings   by  Meg Wolitzer
   This is absolutely not a book I would ever choose if I were not reading a Book A Week.  Let's see how much my horizons are expanded.