Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Book, Movie & Podcast Reviews my own book page

Well, I finished Supercapitalism by Robert Reich, and I highly recommend it. It gives insight into the realities of economic developments of the latter half of the 20th century that I found very compelling. It is non-judgmental regarding the growth of corporate influence, but clear-eyed with regard to its corrosive effect on democracy. He shows he understands the imperatives of the market and presents sound solutions for how to combat its influence on our democratic institutions. It will not be everyone's cup of tea, as it is an economic treatise, but it is far more readable than the typical economics text, and it is well researched and cogently argued.

I am now reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. I have only gotten through the opening chapters at this juncture, but it provides a background for understanding his campaign, his hopes, his aspirations, and his strategy for governance. I now understand why his speeches are less substantive than critics assert (although that is not a narrative that I subscribe to), and I have grown to respect him even more as a result. It is a very readable text, and he has as much a flair for the written as the spoken word. So far it is answering so many questions about him and his campaign that I am sorry I had not read it before. It is also on my recommended list.

I just finished the Black Dove by Steve Hockinsmith. He has apparently published quite a few prior but this is my first. A very innovative and readable whodunnit set in San Francisco in 1893.

Very enjoyable.

Next: John Rechy's About My Life and the Kept Woman.

I read "A Thousand Silver Suns" FINALLY. The story of Afghanistan in the last part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century is told through the eyes of two Muslin women. It was, as you all told me, very difficult to read. Some of the prose was indeed poetic.

I wonder if it will stand the test of time. The story is so relevant as to not be ignored but in 50 years will it be the Leon Uris "Exodus" of 2007?

I wonder.

I'm now reading Platoon by Garrison Kellor. I thought I needed a little lift after being on the battlefield in Kabul for the last few days. Kellor tells stories with the same reckless abandon in which I write. It amuses me.

kathy

Wow! Kathy scored, if not a homerun, a solid three-base hit. Up until now I've found most of her mysteries readable. Not so David Rosenfelt's Dead Center. I liked it; I REALLY liked it. The plot was interesting. The solution might have felt a bit "tacked on" or forced, but it was prepared for and therefore believable. The characters were interesting and distinctive. Mostly, though, I admit to being easily seduced by humor. Examples:

1) The narrator describes two of his friends. "They remind me of Abbott and Costello, but with less dignity." (page 19) That was the first time I laughed out loud.

2) He describes his office. "It looks like it was decorated in early Holiday Inn, during a chambermaid strike." (page 26) It's the unexpected detail that does it for me.

3) His law partner "opened the Law-dromat, an establishment that offers free legal advice to customers while their clothes are washing and drying." (page 29)

I could point our many, many more humorous spots that won me over, but I'll just say I was still grinning on an every-other-page basis by the end of the book.

I also like writers who can make me think how true something is or wonder how come I never noticed it. "Taking out car keys is a nonverbal way people say, 'I gotta get out of here.' I do it all the time; sometimes I'll take them out even if I haven't driven to the meeting." (page 61) Cool.

But Miss Picky was sitting on my shoulder and, of course, found things to complain about.

1) "I keep waiting for Aunt Bea to appear with homemade apple pie and ice cream." (page 55) Only Aunt Bee I know spells her name Bee. Come on. Martha, how picky can you get? Okay. Fine. I admit that not everyone has been lucky enough to stumble upon an online newsletter devoted to reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, and I might have forgiven him the misspelling if his narrator hadn't later bragged about his knowledge of small-town life by saying "I used to watch The Andy Griffith Show." (page 86) Somehow that makes me think he should have known. After all, everyone on the online newsletter does.

2) On this second one I totally agree with Miss Picky. A murder is described where the neck was so twisted that the head almost came off. "'Linda Blair,' I say referring to the head-turning star of The Exorcist." (page 193) IMNOHO, it's a bad idea to explain humor. If a reader doesn't get it, nothing's lost. If the reader does get it, his first thought is likely to be: how stupid does this author think I am? How much better it is to have the get-it reader thinking: what an obscure reference; how clever I am to catch it.

Anyway, I liked the book, I plan on reading the other three he has written, and I'll keep an eye out for any more he writes.

I really enjoyed the first 350 pages of 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. The remaining twenty pages? Not as much. Rose goes into a detailed discussion of his depression that was caused by Katrina and how he was able to move beyond it. His depression was certainly understandable, and I'm glad he was able to cope with it, but his best writing, by far, occurred before then. So I'll concentrate on those 350 pages and a few things I really liked.

1) First, the title. Shortly after Rose returned to New Orleans, he passed by a house and on its front porch saw a sign with those words on it. Although he never belabors the point, those words—to me at least—demonstrate an underlining cause of the terror that Katrina produced. Let's look at the words. 1 Dead …. "1?" Whoever was there wasn't only a "1." He/she was a person. A mother. A father. A child. Any of whom would have had more family. Certainly friends. And now he becomes "1"? No! …in Attic. Attic? Was anyone else there? Children that "1" might have handed to someone on a boat? Or was he the resident in the local "bad" house, the one that parents told their children to "hurry past" on their way home from school? Regardless of that, did "1" suffer in that attic? How long did "1" live with the knowledge that there would be neither a boat nor a helicopter for him? "1" indeed! That title will haunt me for some time.

2) Rose does irony well. Apparently part of the Christman celebration is "Drunken Santas," a group of men who, dressed as Santa, serenade throughout the city. They did perform in 2005, but there were problems. One member had lost his Santa suit to Katrina. "He was forced to participate in his street clothes. When will the horror stop? How much more can we take?" (page 125) I think Jonathan Swift would have liked that paragraph.

3) Rose summarizes some arguments for and against having Marti Gras in 2006 and ends with "If we don't have Mardi Gras, the terrorists win." (page 128) Okay, terrorists didn't cause Katrina, but Rose is talking about not living in fear. I went to NYC for Thanksgiving in 2001. Macys held its parade. Balloons floated above the street; high school bands marched and played their hearts out. It may have been a shorter parade than in years past, but it happened. And no one scared the state of New York into voting for George W. Bush in 2004. Roosevelt would have applauded New Orleans for holding Mardi Gras in 2006.

4) Rose jokes about a secret plan to turn the chocolate city into vanilla. The first big step will be to bring in NASCAR. "Nothing gets white folks excited like really fast cars making a left turn for three hundred miles." (page147) Like I said in the last review, I'm easily seduced by humor. But isn't that a great description of NASCAR?

5) Rose's love for New Orleans shows up frequently. "I ride by the newly opened Cajun Fast Food To Go, operated by Asians and patronized by African Americans, and isn't that a New Orleans story?" (page 209) I sure hope it is.

All in all, I'm glad I read 1 Dead in Attic, and I wish New Orleans well.

Well I finished John Rechy's latest, About My Life and the Kept Woman. Very enjoyable and for the most part well written.

It is what he calls a fictional autobiography meaning he is bound neither to actual events nor the order in which they may have occurred. Actually it is a pretty straightforward [well, it is John Rechy, aka "Johnny Rio"] account of his life.

The "kept woman" is a conceit he uses to tie his story together and at the end explain why he wrote about it now.

For those unitiated into the world of John Rechy, his first very controversial novel [or autobiographical novel] was City at Night the tale of a hustler in 1960's Los Angeles, which of course, is what Mr. Rechy himself was. That and his Sexual Outlaw were banned for years and provided many a young gay man, including me, with names and locations of where the action was.

While the book will have an appeal to gay men of his era, the story is well enough crafted to have universal appeal.

I've just a few minutes ago finished "The Commoner," by John Burnham Schwartz. It is a novel, with its roots in a true story - the marriage of the Emperor of Japan to a commoner in the late 1950s.

The book begins just after the war, when Haruko, the future Empress, is a young girl. It follows her meeting with the Crown Prince, her marriage, and its effect on her family - her parents, first, and later, her children.

The world of the Japanese nobility and royalty is a very secluded one (at least according to the book) - much more so than the British royals. Haruko's introduction to the Prince occurs only a few years after the Japanese Emperor has been declared to be human, and not a god. The book does a good job of portraying the enormous loss of freedom in the transition from commoner to royal, and the price it extracts from the human mind.

It's well-written, and I love reading about other cultures. I can't say there's any one thing about this book that jumped out at me, but I've wanted to post it here for three days. The passages I really wanted to quote are just too long, and can't be cut without ruining the flow.

Well worth the $25 (I didn't want to wait for the library copy, and it's only available in hardback.)

The End of Alice by A. M. Holmes disappointed me. Because of all the warnings, I was expecting to be horrified, grossed out and disgusted. At a minimum I knew I'd wind up throwing the book across the room and suffering from nightmares for at least a week. Instead, I was—dare I admit it?—bored. Alas, I am forced to admit I'm apparently devoid of human feeling. I am at best a robot, at worst a psychopath.

Such discoveries about myself, however, did force me to come up with reasons why the book didn't affect me. I mean I can be moved by horror in books. I remember reading an account of the heath murders that took place outside of London in the 1960s and being afraid of what the next page would reveal. Does that experience mean I can respond emotionally only to nonfiction? I don't think so. Harlan Ellison in Deathbird and Other Stories has a character looking out a window when some sort of monster does "an unspeakable act." The phrase appalled me. In Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot when a mother and father finished drinking their baby's blood and tossed the body aside, I almost stopped reading. What gives?

I've now been pondering my lack of disgust with The End of Alice for around twelve hours, and I've come up with three explanations.

1) Ellison's "unspeakable act" left the specifics to my imagination. A. M. Holmes spells out every horrific thing the narrator does. Had some things been implied rather than told, I think the book would have troubled me more.

2) I identified with absolutely no one in Alice; thus I had no emotionally involvement. In the book on the heath murders, two unsuspecting young adults are lured into a terrifying situation. I'm usually unsuspecting. I could identify with those "kids." With Alice I couldn't connect with either the pedophile who molested Alice or with the college coed who took delight in molesting young boys. (I'm phrasing that carefully so if anyone is interested in reading Alice, I won't be giving away a major plot device.)

3) The third problem was that I found the writing to be pretentious. The King example mentioned above worked because the writer presented the event in clearly written prose. He didn't couch it with clever alliteration, nor did he tell me how horrible the event was. If he had, I would have lost interest—as I frequently did during Alice.

I will grant that the overall structure of the plot was interesting, particularly in an academic, aren't-I-clever sort of way. In a similar vein, I found the author's choice of the name Alice interesting in light of the argument claiming that Lewis Carroll might have been a pedophile.

Final analysis: I'm sorry Alice didn't turn me into a basket-case. Maybe the next book will. I'm nothing if not ever hopeful.

I'm GLAD it didn't turn you into a basket case. I found it one of the most disturbing things I'd ever read, and I don't think I had much of anything left over to judge quality.

Hope it didn't take up too much of your time.

Just finished one of those books that I have been reading alongside lighter fare -- Revolutionary Characters by Gordon S. Wood. Taken together with another work by him that I read a couple years ago, The Radicalism of the American Revolution it presented a very in depth analysis of our nation's founding.

Revolutionary Characters gives a reader biographies of many of the most important men who played instrumental roles in those early years. Some of the information presents a view of many that is significantly at variance from popular mythology. More often the individual founders take on quite different personalities than I had ever read of before.

Again, taken together, this view of America's earliest years debunks many myths and often is substantially at variance to some of the characterizations of "original intent" now put forward by conservative pundits.

Both books are exceptionally well written and although dense with information, with some patience will reveal an America you may never have encountered before.

Highly recommended reading.