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Yes, Sam Jr. was my first cousin, my father's brother's oldest son. My father' brother, my Uncle Sam, was the minister in the church George Wallace attended.

EmmaG

Cool. And interesting.

Dang! Now I'm curious.

The book is "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" by Aron Ralston. I'm reading it now, so I'm curious why you say this. Granted, I have not finished the book, but I met Mr. Ralston and heard his personal description of the events in his book and I did not get an impression of arrogance. It was quite emotional. If anything, he agreed he made a huge mistake and reiterated the importance of always letting someone know where you are going when taking on such a journey.

My main reason for saying it, SuZQ, is that he broke just about every rule of backcountry recreation. No one knew where he was - not which park, not even which state. He told no one he was leaving town, or why. He parked his truck in a remote area, didn't check in with rangers, left no information on his truck about where he was hiking or how long he planned to be gone. It's been a long time since I read that book, but I remember it made me very angry. He was very lucky to survive -- but it needn't have been nearly as dramatic or dangerous if he had followed some basic rules. As an experienced backcountry hiker and climber, he should have known better.

He made some comments near the end of the book about having a portable blender so he and friends could make margaritas in the high country on backpacking trips. I can understand getting thirsty while backpacking - but alcohol at high altitudes is never a good idea, and if he's hauling margarita makings, I wonder what essential gear he's leaving behind in order to make room. Or, worse yet, what essential gear might be left behind by a cocky reader with an attitude who decides to carry some Jack Daniels instead of first aid equipment or adequate food. This kind of irresponsibility in someone who had paid such a high price for disregarding safety really tries my patience. Just what would it take to teach him to be careful?

I've done very little backpacking and no backcountry hiking unless I was with experienced friends. I never developed that kind of knowledge. But I still remember, the very first time I wanted to hike alone (on a very populated trail, although I didn't know it at the time,) I was concerned about how I would get help if I fell, how long it would take someone to check the car, how anyone would know to look for me. If I was that smart, as a flatlander with no outdoor experience at all, I'd expect far more of Ralston.

I would like him a lot better if, instead of "look what I did to survive," he had focused the book on "here are the stupid mistakes I made, here's what it cost me to survive, here's what you need to do to avoid being in this kind of situation." There was some of that, but not nearly enough, as I recall. My feeling was that there was a lot of bravado.

He just struck me as a very irresponsible person. Again, it's been years since I read the book, and I hate to sound judgmental, but it clearly left a very bad taste in my mouth. If I misread/misinterpreted, I'm sorry, but that's how it struck me.

It's been a long time - I'd guess I read it the year it was published, but I don't remember when that was. Somewhere between four and ten years ago, is as close as I can come. It's certainly possible that I'm completely wrong, that I'm being completely unfair; that other experiences I no longer even remember, wrongly colored my take on the book. But it left a mark; I have no idea why it provoked me so much.

Julia, this incident actually happened in April 2003, so you must have read it sometime in the past 5 years. And yes, he did break just about every rule of back country recreation. When I heard him talk, he described what lengths his mother went through to find him. I said to him after his talk that, as a mother, I could almost feel the anguish this must have caused his mother. I remember he commented "Yes, you mothers are the rock stars". I guess I would attribute some of his pre-event behavior to youthful bravado and stupidity, but I didn't get the impression he still felt that way.

I found this excerpt from the book, as he realized the consequences of his actions:

SuZQ, as I said, I may have gotten it all wrong. I only know that he left such a bad taste in my mouth that I very much doubt I will re-read the book to find out. Must have been something personal.

Again, I do believe he had every clue that he had screwed up bigtime; I wouldn't suggest otherwise. I just...didn't like him.

Sometimes books just take me that way. I loved Krakauer's Into Thin Air but Into the Wild left me with such an "I don't like this and I'm not sure why" feeling that I don't care if I never read another Krakauer book. Strange, huh?

(Later) I just did some searching for on-line reviews and comments, and they seem to be fairly evenly divided between my outlook and yours. Fair enough.

I ran across Deaf Sentence by David Lodge shortly after Slipped Mickey had a thread here about hearing impairment, so I picked it up.

It didn't grip me the way I thought it would (not entirely the book's fault; I got called away in the middle to deal with family issues, and lost the rhythm) but it was interesting, and worth the time it took to read it.

The narrator, Desmond Bates, is a professor of linguistics in northern England. He has had to take early retirement due to a worsening hearing impairment; he can still lecture, but can't hold a discussion with his students. His attempts to stay engaged in social occasions and with family discussions form one plotline (as much as there IS a plotline.)

A second plotline follows his efforts to support, from a distance, his aged father in London, an old dance-band musician rapidly approaching the point where Something Must be Done with Dad.

The third plotline has to do with an American student who wants Desmond as an advisor - but she never quite seems to be who or what she says she is.

As I said, it's not a gripper, but as a portrait of a fairly ordinary man, it's worth a read if you happen across it in the library.

The aftermath of an unsolved crime, a crucifixion, from forty years ago. Race relations in the Louisiana countryside where the Civil Rights movement of the sixties had been no more than a blip on a screen. An idealistic photographer whose early pictures had been merely setups. A Hollywood company, complete with a crass director and an undercurrent of sex and drugs, in town to make a movie. James Lee Burke's Sunset Limited held lots of promise. Close to three hundred pages later, however, I was once again struggling with who was who—even though I had been treated to a costume sketch every time one of them entered.

I will give him credit for the occasional, well written sentence, but not when Miss Picky became irritated..

1) Two analogies caught my attention. A) About a section of New Orleans: "… back streets with open ditches, railroad tracks that dissected yards and pavements, and narrow paintless houses in rows like bad teeth, …" (page 30) Yep. Poor neighborhoods can look like that. B) Describing a phone call: "It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley." (page 162.) Cool. Even if not terribly productive.

2) Summing up in a few words what I consider to be a truth impresses me. Robicheaux wonders why the forty-years-ago crucifixion haunts him. "Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence." (page 71) Dang! Faulkner used a whole lot more words to say the same thing over and over again. And why do I think it's true? Because of slavery and its aftermath in our country. IMHO, Eric Holder's controversial statement last month hit the nail on the head.

3) Now a word on foreshadowing: In the last Robicheaux book, I quoted a moment that I thought was good foreshadowing. What I didn’t mention was that IMHO Burke loused it up by having the anticipated moment happen on the next page—and not be that big a deal. He does it again in this book. "Idle words that I would try to erase from my memory later." (page 70) Rochicheaux has been warned that his partner, Helen, can be "very creative." Cool. What's Helen gonna do? Curious—nay, make that anxious—I flip pages—or page. Then, a man on the movie set gets out of line and she hits him. BFD. If you're gonna build anticipation, gratify it! I don't think I'll be trusting Burke's foreshadowing any longer.

4) I don't think an author has to search for untold different words to describe the same action. I read the sentence "He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth" (page 180) and was totally pulled out of the story. Inserted? IMHO "insert" connotes an action performed with a degree of care. As a smoker for many years, I never sensed I inserted a cigarette. So why "insert," Mr. Burke? I started watching the book's smokers. " … [H]e stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth." (page 211) Much better. I think there was one other spot, but I didn't mark it, so I'll make my point from these two. Granted, writers should not use the same word over and over and over. But when the alternate word ruins the flow? I dunno. Maybe it's simply a judgment call, but I think that in this case Burke chose wrong.

Overall? Five fish to go.

A twofer:

1) Only made it to page 42 in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shafer and Annie Barrows. (OMG! It took two people to write it?) Structurally it's a series of letters, one of the letter-writers being a woman who wrote humorous newspaper stories during and dealing with World War II. Maybe the articles would have done it for me. The book, cute gliding right on into pretentious, didn't.

2) Havana Nocturne by T. J. English is a history of the mob in Cuba and its overthrow by Castro. YAWN! I read the first sentence and looked at the pictures. Damn, those mob bosses were short.

And after the above two books, I have to say something: Kathy, I love your generosity and desire to share. I enjoy our outings. I admire your dedication to your causes. So please accept that I do not mean the following in any cruel way. Except for trashy Hollywood biographies and Sue Grafton, we do not share the same taste in books. Tell me what a book is about; if I have any interest in it, I'll let you know.