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

I believe I have a winner to offer.

Enchanted Night by Steve Millhauser, arrived in the mail this week (a gift from the same person who sent me Book Thief, hint to Martha).

It's a tiny little book, 130 pages; I read it in one day, almost in one sitting. Can't possibly describe it any better than the back-cover blurb, so here it is:


I want to read everything he's ever written. And I want to ration myself. Magical realism in Connecticut. Easily one of my top two novels for the year.

Just started "The Forever War." The writing helps; I'm not a big non-fiction reader (unfortunately I'm a big non-fiction buyer...)

It's on the list, and I have a $25 B&N gift certificate.

All books, plays, and movies about the Holocaust are sad; they are, however, not all interesting. Fred Wander's The Seventh Well (translated by Michael Hofmann) is sad and, except in a few sections, tedious.

Wander, a camp survivor, approached his material logically, at least IMHO…"'Six million murdered Jews!' he writes …. 'It's not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to write a story about!'" (page 151) Sadly, for me, the approach didn't work. Were there only three or four individuals? It felt like more, and I never had a clear idea of who was who as Wander jumped back and forth among them. I had much the same reaction years ago to Schlindler's List. Horrible things were happening to those characters, but there were so many and in their tattered black-and-white clothing, they looked so much alike that I had trouble identifying with any one character. So much for emotional involvement.

As a comparison, I believe TV's Roots worked in pointing out the horrors of slavery because it was about specific individuals in each decade it covered. I wish someone would write a Roots about the Holocaust. Maybe I should go back and watch again the TV miniseries called, I'm pretty sure, The Holocaust. I don't remember it as great TV (Is that an oxymoron?), but I do remember at least caring about some of the characters.

James Lee Burke's Burning Angel was so-so. Usual cast of thousands—okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I still resent any book where I have to work to keep track of which lowlife character is which, except, of course, in Russian novels where you know from the start that keeping track of characters, all of whom have a minimum of three names, is part of the game.

Anyway, Burning Angel presented the usual number of organized crime members, shady characters, police officers and private investigators. On the plus side it also threw in dissipated members of old Southern families, offspring of blacks who been slaves for those families, and a healthy dose of miscegenation.

After Burning Angel though, I have to admit becoming impressed with how Burke makes history an active part of all his stories. In Burning Angel it's the emotional scars suffered by those who served in Vietman and the always-present and lingering effects of slavery. At one point Burke makes reference to the Faulkner quote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In fact, IMHO, that theme is as alive in Burke's Robicheaux novels as it is in those of Faulkner.

I first read John Patrick Shanley's Doubt ASAP after it won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I wasn't terribly impressed.

Last week, being a huge Meryl Streep fan, I saw the movie. She is terrific, and I'm ashamed to admit I had totally missed the humor in scenes that in the movie were amazingly funny and clever. But then there was end of the movie where Streep, the completely rigid nun who willingly "move(s) away from God" when evil is encountered and fought, breaks down and cries—a way-too-mild verb—about the doubts she has. Say what? Nothing in the Streep performance, at least IMHO, showed anything resembling doubt. The friend I saw it with said she turned a crucifix the wrong way, an indication of doubt, and that turning from God to fix wrongdoing showed doubt. BS!

Had the stage play ended, IMO, so jarringly? I got home, pulled the script and looked. Yep. The words were there. So why, for me at least, did the movie end so poorly?

Last night, still puzzling, I reread the script. Streep's characterization, in terms of the written text, was dead-on. There are no indications of doubt in the writing. But Streep's a better actress than that, and there was a director. Then I thought of something else. Stanley, the author, directed the film. Now, when I was a student in schools that had (still have, I think) good theatre departments, a rule of thumb was that playwrights should not direct their own work. Had I just seen evidence of that? Stanley has credentials for both writing and directing. He wrote Moonstruck and was an assistant director. For him, knowing the characters, maybe the end of Doubt was planned for. But such planning/foreshadowing sure didn't penetrate my mind.

Now I'm curious. Is anyone else feeling as stunned by the end of Doubt as I was?

Since I'd really like to know, I'm violating a rule—at least I think it's a rule—and double posting this entry. It's going in my book page thread because I have read the play, twice in fact, but I feel I might get more responses on what's bothering me if I let the movie have its on thread. Moderators, if the double posting remains illegal, even with the explanation, cut it from the book page. Or pm me, if that's the procedure, and I will.

Robert B. Parker has never captured my interest. Years ago I ploughed through a couple of the Spenser novels, then decided to leave him alone. A few months ago a friend, who is a Parker fan, sent me one of his YA novels she had bought by mistake. I read it, enjoyed it, and was intrigued by a couple more of his YA novels that were described on the back cover.

I've now finished Parker's Edenville Owls. Its subjects include basketball, domestic violence, cowardice, white supremacy and a touch of romance. A group of teenage boys set out to win a basketball championship and "save" a favorite teacher who appears to be in an abusive relationship. They're fifty percent successful.

All in all, it was okay. I've now decided, once again, to leave books by Robert B. Parker alone.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hodstadler is a fifty-pager—and that was pushing it. Being at the core an egghead, I had high hopes for the book, particularly since as a country we've been led by a man with whom the majority of voters would like to have a beer, that being, IMHO, an example of anti-intellectualism at its best.

So what went wrong? Disenchantment surged when I saw the book had won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction—not there's anything wrong with the 1960s. I was simply expecting a more recently published book. Actually, it's even a bit more dated than that. Hofstadter's aim is to explain anti-intellectualism in the sixties by studying, among other things, McCarthyism of the fifties. Now based on the little I read, the book appears to be well researched and Hofstadter's point carefully—nay, meticulously—explained, but it's hard reading, and I'm just not in the mood. Maybe later I will be. Of course, we're talking years, maybe even decades, later.

I do, however, have a question about documentation for any scholarly types out there. I noticed that when Hofstadter reaches footnote number nine, the next footnote is one. I ran through two plas one-through-nines before page fifty. Now I was writing theses and stuff at the same time Hofstadter was working on this book. If I'd tried that, some professor would have, at a minimum, sent me back to the drawing board. Has anyone else ever run into this truly bizarre, IMHO, form of documentation?

Martha, my essential authority for all documentation things is the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. It states in section 16.26, "Notes, whether footnotes or endnotes, should be number consecutively, beginning with 1, throughout each article or chapter--not throughout an entire book, unless the text has no internal divisions."

The formal change occurred in 1861 when the confederate states seceded from the nation. President Lincoln held that to be an illegitimate act and the ensuing war settled the question in favor of unity. Clearly, the identity of the United States as a nation evolved between the 1787 constitution and the 1861 crisis, with regional differences in evolution speed.

Interesting. Thanks for the information.