Have they changed the rules without telling me? Is it now obligatory for intellectuals, having established their reputation in one discipline (maybe eHave they changed the rules without telling me? Is it now obligatory for intellectuals, having established their reputation in one discipline (maybe even two) to try to dazzle us further by writing essays (or, God forbid, entire books) about completely random stuff in which they appear to have no particular expertise?* I expect to find Professor Schama writing about history, or art, or art history. I'm not so sure I care that much about what he has to say about travelling, cooking, eating, and I am absolutely sure I don't want to read his writing about baseball. And while he is obviously within his rights to include the transcripts of lectures he was invited to deliver on some honorific occasion, omitting them might have been wiser. Because, frankly, that one lecture "Gothic Language: Carlyle, Ruskin and the Morality of Exuberance" might have been terrific when delivered in person with Professor Schama's indisputable panache. But, in print, it seems so ridiculously overblown that it borders on parody, like some kind of academic in-joke.
You don't need to show off for me, Professor Schama, I know you're smart as all get out, and it's just kind of embarrassing for everyone when the compulsion to rub our noses in it gets the better of you. For example:
as an introduction,
You always remember where it was that you first read the books that changed your life. I first read Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian in September 1976 in rocky, Medusa-infested coves on the Aegean islands of Hydra and Spetsai.
might be a perfectly true statement, but it doesn't endear you to the reader. It's a little ... obnoxious, perhaps. Not that pleasing the reader is the be all and end all, but a few of these essays provoke the question of whether they were written to be read, or just admired.
So I didn't care much for the recipes, the baseball essay, the fluffier travel pieces; it's a matter of personal taste. I'm too much of a philistine to be interested in essays about Macaulay, Carlyle, and Ruskin and their views about how history should be written. It was a nice gesture to include an essay about your history tutor at Oxford, but very few people are likely to read it all the way through.
Before I seem to be a complete grouch, let me say clearly that some of the essays in this book are extraordinary. Ten of them are sublime. These are the essays focusing on the visual arts. Schama's writing about art is hypnotic - you want him never to stop (even when Ruskin is involved). These essays make up about a quarter of this book. They alone are well worth the entrance fee. If someone could persuade Professor Schama to stick to his strong points and write another dozen such essays, I for one would be happy. I am not ever likely to be interested in Professor Schama's recipes. Not for ice cream, not for cheese souffle, not for bolognese sauce. But if he writes about art, I'll read every word.
*: Well, not completely random stuff -- one standard gimmick is to travel somewhere a little off the beaten path (or not) and cobble together some kind of impressions piece. It appears to be a common belief that such pieces are necessarily fascinating (public intellectual in exotic location = searing insights etc etc); the results are often fodder for the Sunday supplements, but rarely attain a shelf-life beyond that. I guess what I'm suggesting is that not every newspaper or magazine article merits inclusion in a collection like this.
It seems unfair to single Professor Schama out for criticism in this respect; I have on my desk Updike's hefty "Higher Gossip", a collection of pieces that weighs in at 500 pages. Mostly, it's great stuff, but I would have much preferred the skinnier, 350-page collection struggling to get out, the one that omitted Updike's thoughts about golf, dinosaurs, cosmology, Mars, and Einstein, and where the editor's gentle reminder that transcripts of past speeches often age badly had been heeded. And why, in the name of God, is Steven Pinker now writing books that attempt (in a highly dubious, completely unreadable fashion, if you ask me) to analyze the history of human violence. Books that go on for 800 pages. Are these guys now being paid by the kilogram?
This volume of 17 essays on the work of David Foster Wallace synthesizes the proceedings of the "first ever conference devoted to the work of DFW", a This volume of 17 essays on the work of David Foster Wallace synthesizes the proceedings of the "first ever conference devoted to the work of DFW", a 2-day workshop held on July 29-30, 2009 at the University of Liverpool in England. My first reaction was "God help us all! Now that the academicians have entered the field, they will suck all life out of his body of work and bicker querulously in the ashes".
It's not quite as bad as all that. Some of the essays in the book are definitely egregious crimes against language and the laws of nature. But not as many as you might expect. The truly dreadful stuff stays pretty much localized to five or six of the 17 contributors. Let's get this out of the way with one cheap shot (I can't resist). Stuff like:
Unexpectedness also is a key feature of the referentiality of this particular footnote. Despite the fact that there is no sub-footnote anchor in footnote 6, footnote 6(A) can be considered to be also referring to the preceding note 6 on the basis of the numbering scheme. The narrative thus subtly and ambivalently simulates self-reflexivity as second-order narration.
One has to wonder what might drive a person to write a dissertation on the use of footnoting in the work of DFW. And how it might feel. Yes, I know -- it's unkind to mock the poor souls who feel forced to churn out that kind of stuff in their desperate pursuit of tenure, but surely patronizing to pretend that it's anything other than lethally boring.
If, like me, you're a general reader who just happens to like DFW's work a lot, your question may be whether the whole book is written in the peculiarly incomprehensible jargon used by academics when writing for other academics. Not entirely. About one third of the articles seemed indisputably like gibberish to me - simultaneously incomprehensible and worthless. Another third were a little heavy on the academic jargon at times, but at least one came away with the sense that the author may have had something useful to say. The remaining pieces would be accessible to anyone who had read the particular DFW work being discussed.
What aspects of the Wallace canon (besides his deployment of footnotes) have attracted the scrutiny of these bright young academic minds? A little of everything: several contributors examined the philosophical underpinnings of various works, others looked at the "new sincerity" DFW is alleged to have brought to the post-postmodern landscape, and at his effectiveness as a journalist and non-fiction reporter. These essays were generally relatively lucid and reasonably accessible.
As topics got more weirdly specific and arcane, intelligibility took a dive. Claims of similarity between DFW and Laurence Sterne were interesting, if not entirely persuasive. I certainly don't begrudge the editor (David Hering, a graduate student at Liverpool) the fun it must have been to work those Sierpinski gasket diagrams into his paper. A fractal analysis of Infinite Jest? Why not?
Connie Luther, in contrast, trod much more treacherous ground in her efforts to provide a mathematical analysis of the deforming function of post-modernity (sic). Some exercises are best left to the mathematical professional, or - better yet - not undertaken at all. Because they are fundamentally BOGUS. Kiki Benzon just disappears into the morass altogether, with her muddled prose and her fatal tendency to bandy around terms like orderly-disorder, chaotic indeterminacy, strange loops, intermediariness, turbulent flow, as if she knew what they meant. Matt Tresco's willingness to make sweeping generalizations about autism, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders was startling, but not in a good way. Finally, what to make of Gregory Phipps's insistence on reading layer after layer of meaning into the behavior of John Wayne, the only Canadian student at Enfield (the tennis academy in Infinite Jest)? Gregory is pursuing a degree at Magill - should his contribution be regarded as some kind of French Canadian rebuttal? His essay is singularly odd.
Because I have a very low tolerance for academic bullshit, I thought this book would upset me more than it did. But several of the essays were at least readable, and the better ones left me eager to revisit the work in question. Which is, I think, a marker of some degree of success. So I rate this 2.5 stars out of 5, rounded down to 2, because I recognize that DFW is not for everybody, something which must be true a fortiori about academic analyses of his work.
There are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to haveThere are flashes of charm in this book, counterbalanced by some very tedious patches indeed. Elif Batuman is apparently well-connected enough to have Roz Chast do the artwork for the book cover. She also seems to have a remarkable talent for self-promotion. This book has generated a considerable amount of buzz, and some near-hagiographic reviews.
I don't quite understand why. If one wanted to view things uncharitably, Ms Batuman spent seven somewhat aimless years as a graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford without ever really figuring out why she was there. She did prove quite adept at ferreting out travel grant money, which she used to make various trips to Russia and other former Soviet republics. This book is essentially a travel memoir - the record of those trips. Like most travel memoirs, it is interesting only in spots. Two of the book's seven chapters are quite well-written and manage to sustain the reader's interest (the author's attendance at a conference about Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate, a trip to Saint Petersburg to visit a reconstruction of an ice palace first built in the reign of Catherine the great).
But that's as good as it gets. Ms Batuman once spent a dismal summer visiting Samarkand. Inexplicably, she insists on telling us all about it. In excruciating detail, spread over three chapters. It takes up almost half of the book and is indescribably tedious. As a general rule, other people's travel memoirs are most interesting when things go wrong, but Ms Batuman's account of her summer in Samarkand almost made me stick pencils in my eyes, just to make it stop. Fortunately, the Kindle has an off switch. Two other chapters, the author's ruminations on Dostoyevsky prompted by a trip to Venice and an account of a conference devoted to Isaac Babel that she helped organize at Stanford, were readable, but not particularly interesting. Ms Batuman, or her editor, should have realized that departmental gossip, though it might be catnip for graduate students, is of almost no interest to anyone else.
One point needs to be addressed. Elif Batuman does not want you to think of this book as just a collection of travel pieces. Seven years in graduate school have apparently given her higher aspirations. So she places this really bizarre section at the end of her introductory chapter, in which she essentially seems to be claiming profundity by association. This kind of thing:
What if you read "Lost Illusions" and ... you went to Balzac's house and Madame Hanska's estate, read every word he ever wrote, dug up every last thing you could about him - and then started writing? That is the idea behind this book.
Say what now? Is Ms Batuman suggesting that simply attending a conference on Tolstoy held at the Tolstoy estate will provide deep insight into his work, or magically improve the quality of one's writing about Tolstoy? This seems charmingly naive, not to say stupid. Or is she just trying to assign some kind of retrospective meaning to her seven years at graduate school?
At any rate, the book is studded throughout with Batuman's assorted drive-by thoughts about various authors, most of them Russian. These are largely innocuous, with the exception of her "analysis" of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", which is an embarrassment from start to finish. A plodding, blow-by-blow summary that stretches for pages, is followed by a summary of what her Stanford professor told the class about it, leading in to her infatuation with charismatic classmate Matej, a smouldering Croatian cliche straight from central casting whose "narrow glinting eyes and high cheekbones" cause her to lose control altogether:
"a long-limbed, perfectly proportioned physical elegance, such that his body always looked at once extravagantly casual and flawlessly composed".
Matej alternates between smoldering and brooding, reducing his classmates (male and female) to a state of drooling concupiscence, eventually triggering some kind of epiphanic advance in Batuman's understanding of "The Possessed" (was the trigger his two-pack-a-day habit, the discovery that his great-uncle was a cardinal, or just the shock of finally landing him in bed?) It's to Batuman's credit that her discussion of "The Possessed" avoids the usual mind-numbing academic jargon -- an unfortunate side effect is that its utter banality becomes impossible to conceal.
I cannot agree with those more enthusiastic reviewers who suggest that Batuman offers particularly keen insights. She clearly enjoys reading, but is not especially adept at engaging the reader's enthusiasm. Unless you have a particular interest in obscure Uzbek poets, or the tedium of life in the former Soviet Union, this much-hyped book is likely to disappoint you. ...more
Of all the anthologies appearing annually under the "Best American" rubric, the one whose quality appears most highly dependent on the particular choiOf all the anthologies appearing annually under the "Best American" rubric, the one whose quality appears most highly dependent on the particular choice of guest editor is the "Best American Essays" collection. Just compare the 2007 and 2008 collections, edited respectively by David Foster Wallace and Adam Gopnik, to see just how much difference a guest editor can make (DFW leaves Gopnik in the dust, unsurprisingly). So I was somewhat reassured to see Christopher Hitchens as this year's invited editor. After all, Hitchens can be regarded as a kind of literary Simon Cowell -- someone who projects the image of being way too self-satisfied with his own gleefully obnoxious persona, but who's nonetheless possessed of reasonably good judgment, with a refreshing unwillingness to suffer fools gladly. Although one might be repelled by his personality, the chances of his serving up a plateful of dud essays seemed remote. At the very least, he seemed likely to have high editorial standards and a broad range of interests. So I had high hopes for this year's anthology.
Which were, unfortunately, not quite met. The 2010 collection of "best" essays is not a complete failure. Many of the contributions are excellent, though there are few that I would classify as outstanding (Steven Pinker's "My Genome, Myself" is an honorable exception, though I had already read it twice - in the NY Times when it first appeared, and in the 2010 anthology of Best American Science Writing; James Woods's New Yorker piece on George Orwell, "A Fine Rage", also shines, as does Jane Churchon's exquisite "The Dead Book"). But there were many pieces that simply failed to take off, in that the reader could only observe the writer's passion for his subject, but was never moved to share it ("Brooklyn the Unknowable", "Rediscovering Central Asia", "Gettysburg Regress" all proved too soporific for me to finish). And I remain puzzled as to the reason for including the longest essay in the collection, a 24-page profile of former Washington DC mayor, Marion Barry, whose relevance in 2010 would appear to be non-existent. Retired ophthalmologist John Gamel's beautifully written piece "The Elegant Eyeball" was spoiled for me by being about a decade behind the times as far as available treatments were concerned. I thought Zadie Smith's recent essay collection Changing my Mind was astonishing, but "Speaking in Tongues" is not the essay I would have singled out for inclusion here. Fans of David Sedaris will be more delighted than I was by inclusion of his piece "Guy Walks into a Bar Car", but my Sedaris-fatigue is well-documented, so your mileage may vary.
A breakdown of essay by general topic/type is revealing:
# of pieces concerned with writers/writing - 8 of 21 # of pieces that are autobiographical - 10 of 21
Even allowing for some double counting between those two categories, that's still an awful lot of navel-gazing for a 250-page volume. And this is ultimately what prevents this collection from being anything more than adequate. Perhaps if writers understood that the world of writers and writing is nowhere near as infinitely fascinating to the general reader as it apparently is to them, there would be a greater chance of producing an anthology of pieces that are genuinely interesting.
I thought Christopher Hitchens might have the breadth of vision to produce a genuinely dazzling collection this year. I was wrong. The 2010 anthology is not an embarrassment. But neither is it particularly exciting.
Only four stars this year. It's still good stuff, but there was a little too much self-conscious cleverness in the shorter entries this year. So not aOnly four stars this year. It's still good stuff, but there was a little too much self-conscious cleverness in the shorter entries this year. So not as awesome as previous entries in the series.
Plus, I am so over David Sedaris, which might have had something to do with it. Would it have killed him to write an introduction that actually made reference to the damned book? Mr Sedaris, like some other regular contributors to "This American Life" suffers that rare problem of living an over-examined life. Myself, I lost interest at least two books ago.
It's still one of the best damned anthologies around, though. ...more
This annual selection is generally a good bet, though there have been some recent bum years (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Series editor This annual selection is generally a good bet, though there have been some recent bum years (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). Series editor Jesse Cohen minimized his risk this year by prevailing on Jerome Groopman to serve as guest editor. Dr Groopman's own science writing is familiar to readers of the New Yorker; he is also author of several best-selling books. For me, seeing his name on the cover of this anthology was an immediate guarantee of quality - I'm pleased to say that the collection lived up to my expectations.
In his otherwise excellent introduction Dr Groopman introduces the metaphor that the book might be thought of as a "symphony of science". It's not a particularly fortuitous choice (one suspects it may have been forced on him by the series editor), but he struggles gamely with it to the bitter end. I prefer his introduction to a previous, similar, anthology (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33...), in which he laid out his criteria for inclusion:
"the articles ... have novel and surprising arguments, protagonists who articulate their themes in clear, cogent voices, and vivid cinema. They are not verbose or tangential. They are filled with simple declarative sentences. ... I suspect none of the articles was easy to write. Each shows a depth of thought and reporting that takes time and considerable effort."
These are admirable criteria, indicating an editor who keeps the reader's welfare firmly in mind. And, with very few exceptions, the articles in the 2010 anthology satisfy them, so that the collection is accessible, thought-provoking and fun to read. I came away with the impression of a slight bias in favor of biomedical research (only weakly confirmed upon closer inspection of article categories), and a relatively narrow spectrum of sources:
New York Times : 5 New Yorker : 3 Science : 3 Salon.com : 2 Wired : 2
and one each from The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Harper's, Discover, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Scientific American, and Science News.
This reliance on sources from what might be termed the "north-eastern establishment" prevented me from awarding a fifth star - one thing I look for in this kind of anthology is to be led to articles I might not otherwise come across, and on this criterion Dr Groopman let me down. But this sin of omission was a relatively minor disappointment, given the high quality of the articles that were included.
Some of the contributors are famous scientists(Steven Pinker My Genome, My Self, Steven Weinberg The Missions of Astronomy), some are established science writers (Elizabeth Kolbert, Benedict Carey, David Dobbs), all but a few* contributors write clearly and engagingly.
My favorite articles were Elizabeth Kolbert's contribution about the link between climate change and the extinction of entire species and Sheri Fink's account of the agonizing triage choices that hospital staff faced after the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. But there were at least a dozen other articles that were strong contenders.
This is an excellent anthology, which I have no hesitation in recommending.
* : I read Daniel M. Wegner's How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion three times and found it as devoid of substance on the third reading as on the first. Jonah Lehrer's The Truth about Grit had the blindingly obvious message that perseverance is necessary to succeed in science, but ran for almost eight pages and resorted to such unfortunate verbiage as "a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won't change careers every year". ...more
No, I don't have nearly enough batteries, sensible foodstuffs or kitty litter stored for the cataclysmic event that the Discovery and History channelsNo, I don't have nearly enough batteries, sensible foodstuffs or kitty litter stored for the cataclysmic event that the Discovery and History channels* assure me is just a matter of time. But I feel uniquely qualified to survive the experience of stumbling into a wormhole and waking up as a weekend guest in an English country house between the two world wars. You see, I have discovered "The Week-End Book" and, having done so, intend to keep a copy with me at all times. To cover any potential time-travel episodes, you understand.
(*: Each of which now devotes at least one week per month of scheduled programming to the imminent Apocalypse. Will it be a meteor hit? Lethal pandemic? Bioterrorist attack? Nuclear holocaust? Major earthquake? Cataclysmic climatic shift? Only the Illuminati know for sure, and they're not telling.)
Forget all that Gosford Park stuff you've absorbed from overexposure to PBS. All might seem like comfort and pampered elegance on Brideshead and Poirot, but the reality is infinitely more cutthroat. It's a jungle, in which only the socially adept can expect to thrive. Better polish up that glistening repartee, because you're going to need it.
Fortunately, "The Week-End Book" is there to help. Study it closely, absorb its lessons and - unless you're a complete nitwit - you will be sought after by hostesses from Buckinghamshire to Balmoral. General editors Vera Mendel and Francis Meynell and music editor John Goss approach their task of assembling their survival manual for the weekend guest with a kind of brook-no-nonsense, Cold Comfort Farm sensibility that is refreshing. The result was sufficiently popular to warrant 17 reprintings of the first edition between 1924 and 1928. The editors point out that any self-respecting guide of this sort should undergo a major revamping every five years; a greatly expanded second edition was published in 1929 - my copy is a version of the second edition. (No need to haunt the used book stores - "The Weekend Book" has been back in print since 2006)
How will "The Week-End Book" enrich your life? How about 200+ pages of poetry** to begin with, helpfully arranged into five categories:
GREAT POEMS STATE POEMS HATE POEMS EPIGRAMS THE ZOO
Continue with 80 pages of songs (with music), including folk songs from at least six different nations, spirituals, ballads, sea shanteys, hymns, and several so-called "vulgar fragments".
Rest assured that none of the games suggested in Chapter 7 will require a joystick or monitor. Options like "Salted Almonds" and "Go-Bang" are not for the mentally feeble, who may instead enjoy the less cerebral attractions of "The Roof Game" or "Sardines". Only the most robust friendships are likely to survive an honest game of "Russian Sledges" though, so attempt it at your own risk.
An extra helping of that goofy British charm is provided in the chapter "Travels with a Donkey", which gives advice on how to do just what its title promises. Subsequent chapters on birds and the night sky by season should prove invaluable to people like me who are generally oblivious to their physical surroundings. A chapter on Food and Drink mixes eccentricity with sound practical advice, including cocktail recipes from Satan's whisker to the Rajah's peg.
Recognizing that things don't always go as we might wish, the final two chapters address "the law and how you break it" and administering "first aid in divers crises". Whether you want to "stay the hicquet", gain relief from the "windy spasm", or know what to do before "hobnailing the liver", it's all here in one handy reference volume. There is an ample supply of blank pages to jot down items of interest encountered in one's reading.
You can buy this book on Amazon for less than $20. What are you waiting for?
**: Why trust the editors' taste in poetry selection? Well, for one thing, there's that awesome "HATE POEMS" section. Then that list of poems that were not included on the grounds that any civilized person would already have them committed to memory shows me these editors aren't messing around. Plus it's got the original mondegreen poem:
They hae slain the Earl of Moray And hae laid him on the green.... ...more
Everyone else seems to think this book deserves a minimum of 4 stars, and maybe it does. Maybe it's some kind of highbrow chicklit. No matter. I disliEveryone else seems to think this book deserves a minimum of 4 stars, and maybe it does. Maybe it's some kind of highbrow chicklit. No matter. I disliked it thoroughly -- I found these stories almost unreadable.
The marketing hook for this collection (in the jacket blurb and the worshipful introduction by Russell Banks) is a biographical one. Gallant was born in Montreal to English-speaking, Protestant parents, an only child who was shipped off to a French Catholic boarding school at age four. Her father died early, her mother remarried, but from an early age, in Gallant's own words, she was "set afloat". Russell Banks assures us that this background, the experience of being forced at a very early age to navigate the straits dividing Catholic/Protestant, franco/anglophone, children/adults, men/women, of being, as he puts it "situated simultaneously inside and outside her given worlds", places Gallant at the Borderlands, the ideal site for a writer of short stories*.
The stories in this particular collection are undeniably somewhat autobiographic, and are firmly situated in the Quebec of Gallant's youth. That doesn't necessarily make them interesting, or good. I found them dull, and ultimately claustrophobic. After the sixth or seventh exploration of the stultifyingly provincial concerns of the singularly joyless Quebecois that populate these stories, I'd had enough. I'm happy for Mavis Gallant that she managed to escape, and to live in Paris for the last 50 years. I can understand why she might feel impelled to pick at the scabs of her childhood. But I don't want to watch. Most of the characters in these stories live lives that are circumscribed or emotionally stunted. It's entirely possible to write gracefully about the way cultural pressures or tribal differences can limit or distort people's emotional well-being -- William Trevor has been doing it his whole life. But there's a humor and affection for his characters that rescue Trevor's stories from total bleakness. There's not much affection in Gallant's representation of the milieu she grew up in - the stories read more like the work of someone who is settling scores, or still trying to work through the legacy of her own idiosyncratic childhood (the prevailing narrative voice is that of an adult reinterpreting earlier events from childhood).
Even though Gallant is adept at characterization, you get the feeling that she never warms up towards her own characters. She definitely failed to make me care about them. Giving myself permission not to read the remaining six or seven stories was a great relief.
* the common fallacy of confusing an eventful biography with good writing; clearly, an eventful life is not necessary to be a good writer (Flannery O' Connor, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes), neither is it sufficient.
I skimmed through this book again earlier today, in an effort to figure out why Thomas Mallon's "Yours Ever" was such a damp squib (down to its nondesI skimmed through this book again earlier today, in an effort to figure out why Thomas Mallon's "Yours Ever" was such a damp squib (down to its nondescript title). Mallon would have done well to pay attention to the (relatively simple) elements that make this book so terrific:
1. Andrew Carroll includes entire letters, not just snippets. 2. The quality and variety of the letters included are phenomenal. 3. Carroll keeps his own editorializing to a minimum. His 8-page introduction is eloquent and succinct, infinitely preferable to Thomas Mallon's repeated, rambling interruptions.
Expanding a little on the second point - a major part of the book's charm stems from the inclusion of letters from people in all walks of life, famous and unknown, rich and poor. Carroll is an exemplary editor - almost every letter included in this book packs a punch. The usual suspects are here, certainly (Groucho, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Flannery O' Connor, "Yes, Virginia"). But how refreshing that the letter from John Cheever is a hilarious update to a friend whose pet the Cheevers were catsitting (it didn't go well), or to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's letter to his daughter Scottie.
The collection is also a stark reminder of the general deterioration in writing standards across the generations. Sherman's explanation of his refusal to spare Atlanta to the city's residents is a masterpiece. But one can find the same eloquence in letters from soldiers in the ranks to their families.
Letters in the book are grouped into the following categories: Letters of arrival, expansion, and exploration Letters of a new nation letters of slavery and the civil war Letters of war Letters of social concern, struggle, and contempt Letters of humor and personal contempt Letters of love and friendship Letters of family Letters of death and dying Letters of faith and hope
A foreword by Marian Wright Edelman introduces this outstanding collection. ...more
There seems to have been a bit of a backlash against Malcolm Gladwell during the last year, but this book, a collection of his New Yorker pieces, remiThere seems to have been a bit of a backlash against Malcolm Gladwell during the last year, but this book, a collection of his New Yorker pieces, reminds us why he achieved such prominence to begin with. Gladwell's particular talent is to take a subject which might seem initially to be irredeemably dull and to poke at it from all sides until he locates the particular angle which will allow him to tell a story, simultaneously entertaining and edifying his readers. There's a little more to it than that, of course: in particular, a seemingly unbounded curiosity about why the world is the way it is, and the skill to craft narratives that engage the general reader without being either boring or condescending. One of the factors which contributes greatly to his success is an almost uncanny ability to explain technically complicated material in an accessible manner - he makes this seem so effortless that I think people have begun to take this aspect of his work for granted. I think it's anything but effortless, that it takes hard work every time and he is one of only a handful of writers to pull it off regularly. You may find yourself disagreeing with something that Gladwell is telling you, but you generally won't have too much difficulty figuring it out.
Gladwell groups the essays in this book into three broad categories:
Part 1: Obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius Part 2: Theories, predictions, and diagnoses Part 3: Personality, character, and intelligence
In the first part, which includes profiles of Ron Popeil (the infomercial king), Cesar Millan (the dog whisperer), Nassim Taleb (contrarian investor and author of "Fooled by Randomness"), as well as chapters on ketchup, hair coloring, and the history of the contraceptive pill, Gladwell sticks closest to his source material, avoiding the kind of premature generalization that is his Achilles heel. He isn't always successful in doing so in the remaining parts so that, while his lucid common sense on the topics of mammography, plagiarism, homelessness, and criminal profiling is a breath of fresh air, his arguments about organizational culture (the Enron debacle, the Challenger explosion) and predictors of individual performance (why some people choke and others panic, are smart people overrated?) are not entirely persuasive.
Nonetheless, this is a fine collection. Gladwell on a bad day still manages to eclipse most other non-fiction writers out there.
This fine, darkly funny, collection by Roald Dahl contains all the stories previously published in the two volumes "Tales of the Unexpected" and "MoreThis fine, darkly funny, collection by Roald Dahl contains all the stories previously published in the two volumes "Tales of the Unexpected" and "More Tales of the Unexpected". The back cover of my edition describes it as a "superb compendium of vengeance, surprise, and dark delight" and that's as good a characterization as any I can come up with. Continuing with my shameless plagiarization of the cover blurb, it describes the recipe for a typical Dahl tale:
Take a pinch of unease. Stir in a large dollop of the macabre, add a generous helping of dark and stylish wit, and garnish with the bizarre
Again, that gives you a pretty good sense of what you will find in this terrific collection of 25 stories. Though it perhaps fails to convey just how funny they are. Not to mention well-constructed and well-written. Dahl has a particular knack for knowing just which detail to include - and just as important - knowing what to leave out. Many of the best stories in tbis book stop just on the threshold of the truly dark, because the author knows that it's far more effective to leave the details unfold and reverberate in the reader's imagination.
These tales may remind some readers of the stories of Patricia Highsmith. My sense is that they are not as dark as Highsmith's, nor meant to be, because where one feels that Highsmith's misanthropism ran through to the bone, Dahl's is worn lighter. You can almost feel him winking to the reader, as one nasty character after another meets a suitably macabre fate "it's only a yarn, chum". I suspect Dahl actually liked other people quite a bit more than Highsmith. Upon reflection, a better comparison for these tales might be the stories of Saki (H.H. Munro).
Either way, it's a hugely enjoyable, often hilarious collection, which I consider the best of Dahl's work. (I may be one of the few people on the planet who doesn't "get" Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , which I find excessively weird, both the book and - pace, Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp fans - both film versions. And some of Dahl's other work, e.g. the frankly misogynistic "My Uncle Oswald", doesn't do it for me either. Though you gotta love "Matilda", and I've never read the story on which the "Fantastic Mr Fox" movie is based).
Almost all of these stories have been adapted for TV, by directors ranging from Hitchcock to Tarantino. Even if you've seen the series "Tales of the Unexpected", the stories themselves are well worth reading. My personal favorite is probably the little old lady taxidermy story, though the one about Liszt reincarnated as a kitty has to be a close runner-up. Or "Royal Jelly". Or "Lamb to the Slaughter". or "Parson's Pleasure". But this way madness lies, because really, there's not a dud in the bunch. ...more
It almost feels as if I'm abusing my "unexpectedly terrific" shelf these days, but this book, another in the Penguin "Great Ideas" series, which I disIt almost feels as if I'm abusing my "unexpectedly terrific" shelf these days, but this book, another in the Penguin "Great Ideas" series, which I discovered recently in the local foreign language bookstore here in Madrid, really does merit its place. Like all the books in the series, it is (appealingly?) short* (100 pages), but the quality of the writing more than compensates for its brevity.
Perhaps shamefully, I had never heard of John Berger before stumbling across this collection of his work. A little googling points to a fairly extensive body of work, which I look forward to exploring further. The book comprises eight essays, one poem, and a concluding vignette of the philosopher Ernst Fischer, a personal friend of the author. As the title essay suggests, most of the pieces deal with the relationship between humans and animals; they range from the gently playful "A Mouse Story" (a man, a mousetrap, and several murine protagonists), to more elegaic pieces such as "The White Bird" and "Field", both of which use the commonplace (a wooden bird carved by a peasant of the Haute Savoie, a field near the author's home) as starting point for more general rumination on aesthetics. The poem "They are the Last" is a surprisingly moving appreciation of cows. Perhaps because of the quality of the writing, each of these pieces has a low-key charm which I enjoyed thoroughly.
But the meat of the book (no pun intended) lies in the three longer essays: "Why Look at Animals?", "Ape Theatre", and "The Eaters and the Eaten", which, taken together, provide a thoughtful, unexpectedly engrossing, investigation of the relationship between humans and animals. Although Berger's purpose is undoubtedly didactic, precisely what I found appealing about these essays is the lack of any kind of preaching tone. In contrast to, say, someone like Peter Singer, whose general air of moral superiority I personally find completely offputting, and whose preachy tone diminishes the cogency of his arguments, Berger's approach is far more low-key. And because of that, more effective, at least for this reader. Whereas the extremity of some of Singer's arguments just makes me fling him aside after a while, Berger writes with a sly charm that is beguiling, with the result that I found these essays thought-provoking, and not easily dismissed.
Which, I imagine, would please the author. I did not expect to like this collection of essays nearly as much as I did. Try them for yourself - you might feel the same way.
*: I think the marketing folks at Penguin are quite smart - they know full well that a 300-page volume that advertised itself as containing "great ideas" would be a tough sell. Whereas the slim volumes that they have assembled are actually pretty appealing, even if some (Orwell's essay on "Books v Cigarettes" or on "The Decline of the English Murder", for example), though not without a certain charm, seem to stretch the definition of "great ideas" more than a little ...more
Louis Auchincloss has been chronicling the lives of the very rich for what seems to have been his entire lifetime. And you have to hand it to the man Louis Auchincloss has been chronicling the lives of the very rich for what seems to have been his entire lifetime. And you have to hand it to the man - he does it very well. Somehow he manages to cajole the reader into looking beyond the ridiculously insane degree of gilded privilege his chosen subjects enjoy, and to make the case that lives of pure entitlement can be interesting enough to merit our attention. The very rich, it turns out, have their problems too, even if it would be stretching things to say that they are just like you and me.
In the hands of a less subtle author, the protagonists of these stories would be insufferable. But Auchincloss manages to strike just the right note of unapologetic irony in his narration, and to create situations that hold the reader's interest. A certain elegance of style, combined with erudition that does not condescend, lend a definite charm to these tales of the obscenely wealthy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is - this is not a book to read if you are currently experiencing financial difficulties. Nor is it suitable trip reading for travel in any of the world's developing countries (not sure if that is the currently PC term for what used to be referred to as 'third world' countries). It's hard for me to recommend that you rush out and buy this book. But if you were to come across it in your friendly local second hand bookstore, you could do much worse than to bring it on home. For one thing, each of the eight stories actually tells a story. An old-fashioned virtue, but one not to be sneezed at.
I give it a solid 3.5 stars. My final rating will therefore be decided by a flip of my special goodreads 50-centavo coin. ...more
Reading this was a bit like that scarfing down that jumbo tub of popcorn that you buy at the movies against your better judgement. Enjoyable enough toReading this was a bit like that scarfing down that jumbo tub of popcorn that you buy at the movies against your better judgement. Enjoyable enough to read, but completely forgettable. And indistinguishable from one another. It felt like reading the same story over and over again.
If you enjoy stories about 40-ish NASCAR fans with women problems, populated by characters ranging from (not-so-endearingly) quirky to outright oddball, you might enjoy this collection. Otherwise, give it a miss. ...more
This collection delivers everything that was missing from the 2008 essay anthology edited by Adam Gopnik. The writing is crisp and engaging throughoutThis collection delivers everything that was missing from the 2008 essay anthology edited by Adam Gopnik. The writing is crisp and engaging throughout, with very few exceptions. What really sets it apart though are the topics discussed. The best pieces in the book -- Jane Meyer's "The Black Sites" (on CIA interrogations post 9/11); Joshua Kors on the denial of medical and disability benefits to Iraq veterans; George Packer's scathing account of the shameful betrayal by the U.S. government of the Iraqi interpreters who had provided invaluable help at great personal risk; Steve Oney's profile of one young marine who served and died in Iraq -- derive their power from the writers' outrage at the events being described. There is none of the "look at me, what a terrible life I've had" solipsism that contaminated so many of the essays in Gopnik's collection. Instead, the reader is led to understand, through detailed consideration of some very specific cases, just how devastating the consequences can be when a government and its military pursue an ill-considered strategic objective, with little or no attention to practical issues of implementation, and scant regard for the welfare of the very people trying to execute it.
The four pieces dealing with Iraq alone would make the book worthwhile. But they are joined by five equally fine pieces:
# Mike Kessler on the failure of the federal government to honor its promise to compensate cancer-stricken workers who assembled nuclear bombs at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver. # Jeanne Marie Laskas writing about the lives of coalminers in south-eastern Ohio. # Paige Williams's account of a teenage refugee from Burundi who has to rebuild her life from nothing in Atlanta. # Peter Hessler writing about China's economic transformation ("China's Instant Cities"). # William Langewiesche reporting on how a gang of criminals reduced Sao Paolo to a state of chaos for a 7-day period in May 2006, in a coordinated attack so fierce it took the police a week to mount a credible response.
All nine of these pieces benefit not only from excellent writing; it is obvious that each was based on exhaustive, on-the-ground, research and reporting. The book has more to offer: interspersed with the longer pieces of "serious" reporting there are some very funny essays:
"I am Joe's Prostate" (Thomas E. Kennedy) "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" (Walter Kirn) "So Many Men's Rooms, So Little Time" (Christopher Hitchens)
as well as short pieces on the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns, the financial meltdown, and Ken Burn's WWII documentary, by Matt Taibbi, Hendrik Hertzberg, Kurt Andersen and Tom Carson, respectively.
There were only three of the twenty pieces in the collection that I found weak -- Vanessa Grigoriadis on the media-gossip blog Gawker.com, Caitlin Flanagan's somewhat aimless remarks about the risk posed by online predators, and Matthew Scully's risible mudslinging at his former speechwriting colleague in the Bush White House about who deserved credit for exactly which piece of turgid, forgettable pablum inflicted on the nation by President Bush over the last eight years. Scully's delusion that this is something worth bickering over, or something that more than a dozen people might care about, is so surreal it's almost endearing. If he weren't so ridiculously petty.
The final piece in the book is Evan Wright's long (70-page) profile, "Pat Dollard's War on Hollywood", which I haven't yet had the chance to read. Nonetheless, the overall quality of the other pieces is so high that I don't hesitate to give this book a four-star rating....more
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