This is the stuff of nightmares, and David Grann will once again astonish readers with his ability to synthesize material from god-knows-where and preThis is the stuff of nightmares, and David Grann will once again astonish readers with his ability to synthesize material from god-knows-where and present what looks like a whole piece of sail. But...the winds and waters of south America sound so astounding they cannot be believed. Can you imagine what these folks went through? Nights I slept thinking of the pleasure of my soft bed, knowing I could not have endured...When the end of Grann's telling came, and I am showing the greatest restraint by not telling you what came after their shipwreck, I was open-mouthed at the conclusion.
I am not going to go through the details. The whole point of this book is details. Let me just say that when I heard of this book I naturally enough thought it was about a gamble. I would never have signed on with a ship called 'The Wager.' And I would have been right....more
Word of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anywayWord of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anyway, I was surprised debut author Van Pelt managed to pull this off as a fiction, but it worked very well after a sluggish first half.
While I am not usually interested in reading about a grumpy older woman, in this case Tove reminded me so much of people of Nordic descent that I have known that I found her approachable. And Marcellus, the octopus, well…he was a wonder and lovable in his invertebrate way. Probably the most disturbing portrait in the story was that of a teenaged boy who imagined himself unloved and who appeared destined to flame out in a drugged and drunken stupor before he even knew the good bits. It felt too real to be comfortable.
Tove is certifiably old, at 70 years, but to keep busy and because she finds it interesting, she works at a cleaner at a local aquarium on the northwest coast of the U.S. She notices that Marcellus appears to watch her from his hiding place and she makes efforts to befriend him. It works! Marcellus loses a bit of his fear and Tove allows him to escape his tank to eat some of the ‘seafood’ in the other tanks at night without telling the management.
Its a reasonable arrangement until Tove hurts herself falling off a ladder. Then things start to unravel and the book takes flight. The second half of the story is propulsive and hard to put down, so involved are we with the lives of these characters. Van Pelt does a great job of writing with enough depth that we understand and recognize the motivations of all players and are grateful for the opportunity to think long and hard about the octopus Marcellus.
I read recently that fishermen are planning to make octopus the center of the seafood menus in restaurants now (now that they have managed to overfish all other types of seafood). I would urge everyone to think more than twice about choosing octopus to eat. We really do not want this species to collapse. Also, if you have access to Netflix, please try to see the film, My Octopus Teacher, written and directed by a South African diver who spent a year befriending an octopus off the west coast of Cape Town....more
This legal thriller bursts out of the gate from the first pages, easily capturing the attention of anyone who has ever been, or known, a teenaged girl This legal thriller bursts out of the gate from the first pages, easily capturing the attention of anyone who has ever been, or known, a teenaged girl. At the same time it underlines and validates the well-deserved success of Swedish novelist Malin Persson Giolito, who won Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year for her English-language debut Quicksand. Persson Giolito has not so much captured the genre as reinvented it for a sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience. We may never have set foot in Scandinavia but we certainly know their crime writers. Quicksand was optioned and produced as a Netflix Original Series, and debuted in April.
This story is presented as a case of possible wrongful imprisonment; as each new fact is uncovered, our vision blurs and we are not sure if we have corrupt law enforcement, a scam trial, evil parents, or #MeToo run amok. The victim is fifteen and a model student. A doctor is in jail for her murder. A female lawyer in mid-career is asked to look into the case by her old professor, as a favor. Reluctantly, this lawyer begins to investigate the old case, now fifteen years past, and sees the possibility of retrial or release.
The story has resonance, the subject is personally interesting to everyone, and Persson Giolito’s writing is sharp and insightful. She adds short propulsive chapters of character development to bind us to the characters. We see marriage with the boredom left in, and then later, the exquisite and intimate tenderness. We enjoy the sight of a woman exhausted by the mental and emotional toil of lawyering take a 3-ton sailboat out on a northern ocean by herself in March for a week. We recognize the misplaced pride of the old professor who may have sabotaged his protégé’s case because he wanted the recognition due her.
This novel is just being published in time for summer reading this year and I urge you not to pass this one by when you are developing your summer reading list. It is definitely an immersive rain day read at the beach, but will keep anyone occupied for what it tells us about the psyche of young girls, the legal system in Sweden, and the state of criminal forensics in Europe. Apparently everyone looks to England for “the latest equipment” and to America for discoveries in the field: the TV show CSI makes the actors look authoritative beyond all reason.
The final third of this novel is reason to read through to the end. It is utterly without formula and gripping for that. I don’t think anyone will predict how this legal case might turn out. Americans may have a view of Sweden as famously liberal sexually, but what struck me beyond the fact that fifteen is considered to have reached the “age of consent,” is how similar our wealthy classes appear to be in terms of social development. In other words, a teenager is a teenager is a teenager, with all the teenaged angst fairly shared around the world.
Women will feel a bond with Persson Giolito after reading this novel. She is, after all, a professional woman making her way in what used to be called “a man’s world.” Male supremacy has not ended yet, but there are chinks in the wall. Persson Giolito has her main character make casual comment about the backlash that plaques a professional woman making any kind of public statement that could conceivably be the subject of controversy; she describes the now all-too-familiar online and media troling that is difficult to survive, emotionally, personally, professionally.
The backlash often comes in the form of sexual attack. When I examine my own thinking, I have to admit the most outrageous swear word still taboo is the C word, only recently publicly breached and used in mixed company, but still not normalized. When we get mad, we get sexual. Persson Giolito also makes reference to the court of public opinion: how bad information about a person may be introduced into the public sphere through social media and is almost impossible to combat. This is partly why this book feels so contemporary, and cosmopolitan. Women and men must deal with this new world now.
Persson Giolito is now a full-time writer based in Brussels. In an earlier incarnation she worked as a lawyer for the biggest law firm in Scandinavia and as an official for the European Commission. She is a writer of enormous gifts, and her invention looks like the real deal. Her perceptions are invariably enlightening. Her description of winter sailing made me want to pound my chest Tarzan-style. Women are just getting better and braver and that is a good thing....more
It is difficult to know where to start when talking about the northern migration of Africans, South Asians, and Middle Easterners to Europe. By now maIt is difficult to know where to start when talking about the northern migration of Africans, South Asians, and Middle Easterners to Europe. By now many of us have formed opinions based on the nature and number of migrants to Europe in the past several years. Davide Enia reawakens our sense of wonder at the existential nature, the true terror and dangerousness inherent in the refugee journey by sea. And in the process, he reawakens our compassion.
The book is a multi-year set of interviews with survivors of the mass landings of migrants on Lampedusa, an island of about eight square miles nearly midway between Italy and the coast of Africa. Approximately seventy miles from Tunisia, Lampedusa is closer than Sicily (127 miles from the African coast) and Malta (109 miles distant).
In the days following the Arab Spring, flotillas of migrants arrived daily, thousands of people, thousands more than there were islanders on Lampedusa. It was overwhelming.
“Fear and curiosity coexisted with mistrust and pity. The shutters remained fastened tight, or else they’d open to hand out sweaters and shoes, electric adapters to charge cell phones, glasses of water, a chair to sit on, and a seat at the table to break bread together. These were flesh-and-blood people, not statistics you read about in the newspapers or numbers shouted out over the television.”
This book is written by a man trying to work out his own complicated view of the migrants, from the point of view of the shell-shocked rescuers. This attempt to understand what is at stake is braided together with Enia’s relationship with his Sicilian father and dying uncle. Gradually he unveils the thoughts of those who have spent years witnessing the movement of migrants some of whom are picked up moments before their already-swamped craft sinks irretrievably.
The migrants are all ages and agonizingly aspirational. In photographs of the debris found in the refugee boats were items thought indispensable: skin creams, jars of preserved vegetables and fruit, insect repellent, chapstick, toothpaste, a can of Coca-Cola, cooking pots, lids, padlocks, keys, beach wraps, wallets, rings…the list of items took my breath away, coming as it does after learning of an invisible shipwreck in 2009. Refugees from one boat rescued in open seas remained standing on the dock on Lampedusa, staring at the horizon. A sister boat which had set sail with them the same day, holding four hundred people, never arrived.
Sometimes migrants return to Lampedusa, which they call their birthplace, their second birthday the day they arrived, alive, from the sea. One young man gives some idea of the difficulty of the crossing. Their rubber dinghy ran out of gas “almost immediately.” When the salt water drenched them again and again, their skin burned and their heads felt as though they would explode. The sun shone cruelly. They floated for eighteen days, out of all provisions, reduced to drinking urine.
A Maltese patrol boat appeared and tossed them gas, water, food, then sped off. The patrol watched from a distance as the dinghy moved into Italian waters. It was three more days until an Italian Coat Guard vessel picked them up. Of the eighty who had left Libya, seventy-five of them had died.
Enia doesn’t begin with the tragedy in October 2013 that brought Lampedusa so vividly to everyone's attention around the world, the day a boat sank within sight of the shore, the day the seas filled with bodies. But he works up to that moment, sharing with us the experiences of those who have witnessed years of landings so that the full scope and horror of the event can be understood, looked at, and borne.
The other day I saw a video clip of a landowner on the U.S. border with Mexico saying he’s a big Trump supporter, strong on national defense, and the biggest conservative around. “But,” and I’m paraphrasing him now, “I think they’re wrong on this border wall. These folks aren’t criminals or terrorists.” It sounds like this man has seen a few things. At some point we all need to imagine how we will act when faced with naked need and hardship beyond comprehension.
On Lampedusa, a warehouse was refurbished with a shower to give those who escaped under the fence of the overcrowded refugee holding facility a chance to get cleaned up.
“Little by little, even some of those who regularly inveighed against these immigrant kids started leaving bags in front of the warehouse with donations of shampoo, soap, shoes, and trousers. They’re seeing people on the street who were malnourished, barefoot, raggedy, and so they did their best to help them with their primary needs.”
This is a necessary book, beautifully and thoughtfully written, so that all our conscious and unconscious prejudices can bubble up…and float free. And we can be the people we hope to meet, were we in need....more
This detailed and useful book was published in the U.S. in 2010 by Timber Press and authored by three long-time North American experts on cephalopods.This detailed and useful book was published in the U.S. in 2010 by Timber Press and authored by three long-time North American experts on cephalopods. James Wood maintains his own website, called The Cephalopod Page. This collection includes 38 color plates, and the discussion is for the non-specialist. It includes recent developments in the field and offers information in a way that is inviting.
No one knows how many octopus species exist, but it is estimated there are 100 members of the genus Octopus. Octopuses (not octopussies, everyone) are found at every depth in the ocean and while some are very large (up to 80 lb), most can be measure in millimeters at hatching. And yes, octopuses lay eggs.
Many variations in observed habits are discussed here, but the important thing is that octopuses don’t generally have a long lifespan—usually around two years, though the range is six months to four years, depending on the species. Sexual activity takes place towards the end of the lifespan, the mother often dying shortly after the eggs have successfully hatched. During gestation the mother typically doesn’t eat, neither attracted to food nor interested to attract possible predators to the cave in which she is holed up with a bunch of developing eggs. Her last days are spent spurting oxygenated water over the eggs attached to the walls of caves.
Much of what we know about the octopus is that they are great escape artists: they squeeze into tight spots, change color, and will lose an arm to evade capture. They can also put on a dazzling camouflage called ‘Passing Cloud,’ which is designed to confuse potential prey, not predators. This display makes nearby prey think something large is passing over their environment casting a moving shadow. It is thought the intent is to startle a motionless prey into revealing their location so they can be captured by the octopus with spread arms and web.
One of the things I like best about this book is that the information is delivered painlessly and in a conversational tone. The authors freely seed the work with ravishing stories, like the one about finding ‘a cuttlefish singles bar’ on a small rocky reef in South Australia in 2002—a huge aggregation of giant cuttlefish (41,000 estimated, about one per square yard) ready to reproduce, four males for each female, all trying for courtship, changing skin displays & waiting for a guarding male to get distracted. It’s just hard to wrap one’s mind around. This is determined, thinking behavior. Isn’t it?
Anyway, this book reminds me of the kind of book many of us read as pre-adolescents, obsessed with dinosaurs or airplanes or something, and reading whatever we could find on the subject until… until we were teased out of our expertise or the lure of the opposite sex scrambled our brains. Even a child could enjoy reading this book.
The authors have side comments on argonauts (yes, the ones the Greek playwrights mentioned), cuttlefish, squid and specific individual octopuses that made a difference in the lives of countless scientists. This is a terrific gift for the not-yet-specialist....more
John McPhee’s first published book came out in 1965, twenty-five years before this one was published in 1990. McPhee was pretty sure of his effect on John McPhee’s first published book came out in 1965, twenty-five years before this one was published in 1990. McPhee was pretty sure of his effect on readers by then, and he seemed to relax into this description of following a friend in the Merchant Marine find a ship, allowing it the tone and apparent effortlessness of an overlong magazine article. Within he quotes mariners constantly making comment on how the field of ocean shipping is changing. Twenty-five years on some factors have indeed changed, but his work winkling out the feel of a life on board has not changed. Some of this chronicling, like sea stories of old, are as timeless as the sea itself.
As of 31 December 2016, the United States merchant fleet had 175 privately owned, oceangoing, self-propelled vessels of 1,000 gross register tons and above that carry cargo from port to port or more.[8] Nearly 800 American-owned ships are flagged in other nations.[9][10][Wikipedia]
The reality of living on the ocean in a ship, no matter the ship is the length of Penn Station, is brought home, McPhee says, by flipping through a stack of the quarterly Mariner’s Weather Log in which the most devastating casualties on the seas are blandly recorded. Ships are regularly cut in half by a rogue wave, or run aground, or collided with, or face some fate never recorded when they disappear without trace. To say that some of the ships are old rust-buckets, names overpainted a dozen times as the ships change hands, their longevity a little more precarious each time, captures only a little of the danger these men face.
The ship McPhee joined was captained by an old salt Captain Washburn, in his fiftieth decade on the sea. He had a few tales to tell, and a personal history that would curl your hair. But what we learn is that an affinity for the seagoing life does not necessarily run in families. There is something about always being on the move that appeals to some folks.
Every ship is marked with ‘Plimsoll marks’ indicating the depth to which a ship can be safely loaded.
“These levels, worked out specifically for each ship, ‘take into consideration details of length, breath, depth, structural strength and design, extent of superstructure, sheer, and round of beam,’ and are collectively called the Plimsoll mark, after Samuel Plimsoll, a member of Parliament who, in the eighteen-seventies, wrote the act creating them in order to outlaw the greed-driven excessive loading that was the primary factor in the sinking of ships…load lines are set by classification societies, which are private companies that play a checking, testing, and supervisor role in ship construction—services that are optional in the sense that if you don’t sign up for them no one will insure your ship.”
There are well known areas of each ocean that hold special terrors for ships, mostly due to the unpredictability and viciousness of the weather. One of those places is about eight hundred miles north of Hawaii, known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Another is the North Atlantic in winter. The lowest Plimsoll mark on a ship is ‘WNA,’ or the maximum depth to which the ship can be loaded in the winter North Atlantic. “The North Sea, the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, and the Gulf of Alaska are the stormiest waters in the shipping world after the winter North Atlantic.”
Pirates are common and expected: they often come aboard at mealtimes with manifests, walking around looking for the TVs or other easily sold items, but the ship’s men “did not sign anything that said they would defend the ship with their lives.” They do not feel a responsibility to solve this ubiquitous problem. A small pirogue can only take so much stuff, even if it comes thirty times to the ship, off-loading in a protected marsh nearby. The ship may carry four hundred thousand pounds of coffee and a hundred thousand pounds of shrimp, among other goods. The ordinary size of things is diminished.
Stowaways and illicit drug stashes are also a constant problem for the captains are responsible for whatever comes on the ship, intentional or not. Stowaways are charged to the ship, and require lots of paperwork. One must hire guards to see they do not escape before they are safely deported. Of the drugs, perhaps only ten percent of what is shipped is being discovered. When it is discovered, a ship may be impounded and fined. The ships, the length of Rockefeller Center and piled high with containers, might carry a crew of thirty-four aging mariners. There will be no reasonable defense of the ship. It is a sitting duck.
McPhee ends with an engine failure, leaving the ship stranded on the high seas. The temperature in the engine room exceeds 110 deg F as they try to clear water from the oil lines. Water is in the oil lines because the ship is old, and has been ‘stretched:’ the bow and stern are original, but an extra piece has been added to the middle which extends the amount of material the ship can haul. The engine and the rudder were made to steer a much smaller ship, but it is the crack in the side of the ship and in a fundamental oil tank that causes the water in the oil. The ship will probably be repaired, and go on plying the seas until one day it can’t anymore....more
Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with horror and disbelief. Of a boat holding 500 people, eleven survived.
Even before the cruelty of rival smugglers (I only assume that’s who they were), Doaa’s life was filled with harsh treatment and a constant threat of kidnapping or physical abuse at the hands of strangers. Forced to leave Syria as a seventeen-year-old when government forces started targeting rebellious youth in her hometown of Daraa and outright killing townspeople and dumping their bodies, Doaa was sympathetic to the rebellion. The rebellion, however, was diffuse and never allowed to develop widely before government forces came down hard.
The Al Zamel family fled first to Jordan and then to Egypt, where they were welcomed at first by the the local populace and by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were distributing food and blankets under the protection of the Morsi government. This Egypt piece of Doaa’s journey I didn’t want to skim over: I had so many questions about why young men were constantly asking for the girls hands in marriage, unless this was meant as a jibe, a joke, or a kind of harassment. Did Egyptians perceive Syrians as wealthier, more educated, or more sophisticated? If so, why? Why did I get the impression that Doaa looked down on the Egyptian locals? Was it just a cultural distance?
When another young Syrian expatriate, Bessem, decided upon seeing Doaa that he wanted to marry her, I started feeling that distance one does when viewing another country’s cultural norms. This is so far from acceptable in the United States, despite Bessem’s friendliness and gift-giving to the family, that I was uncomfortable with the inevitability of it all. I understand the family was under duress. That is really the only condition under which such a decision to marry that man could be acceptable. Sure enough, shortly after agitating constantly and finally getting his way, Bessem, then insisted the two of them depart Egypt for either Syria or Europe.
Doaa was emotionally coerced into accepting the decision to move, and I resent this, even from my distance of several years and many miles. That she later recalled this man as the great love of her life shows us how circumstances change perceptions. I resent that change in her emotional landscape, and can’t help but see it as a kind of dishonesty. However, placed next to all the other things in her experience, a kind of fake love is surely least awful. She had a horrific experience getting to Europe, and deserves all the support she can get. Or handle, really. When many countries combine their attention, it can be another kind of overwhelming horror.
Doaa’s story reminds us how fragile is our careful calm construction of a life, and how easily it can be disrupted through no fault of our own. I recognize Doaa’s insistence that her destination be Sweden, despite Greece offering her a stipend and citizenship. Sweden was the original goal, and the confusion she, all alone, must have felt when all her constraints suddenly fell away must have been monumental. Now that she has many choices, instead of one uncertain one, which should she choose? Fleming’s retelling of Doaa’s options allows us to feel those uncertainties along with her.
During all Doaa went through, she must have asked herself repeatedly if in fact she and Bessem really had “no choice” but to attempt a migrant illegal crossing. As sorry as I am for what their situation was in Egypt, I would have to conclude that in fact, it was their hope for a better, more prosperous existence with more opportunity that led them to attempt the crossing, not once but three times.
They had a choice. After all, their parents and family stayed in Egypt. I understand conditions were bad in Egypt. I understand they had limited understanding of what went on outside their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. But I am not sure they have the right to attempt to move to another country just because they want what that country offers its citizens.
What reasonable people must ask themselves is how they can help communities torn apart by war or natural disaster. This kind of migration is humanity’s problem. It doesn’t have to be as deadly as it is at the moment. There may be solutions that address the root issues and do not require the kind of dangerous, deadly journey that Doaa passed through. In some ways her story tells of a kind of grim lottery. If one makes it through the gantlet of death, all kinds of benefits are bestowed upon one.
That viewpoint, however, doesn’t take into account Doaa’s personal bravery to engage the world in this critical conversation about the best way to pursue one’s dreams. I’m quite sure she would rather have not gone through that horror, but sometimes we have…no choice.
Doaa's story was translated twice, from Arabic to Greek and from Greek to English, before it became this book. This fact lends a little distance to the narrative that one must overcome to get at the real experience of this woman and millions like her. The really difficult task of organizing the material fell to Melissa Fleming, and of asking questions that readers like us wanted to know.
I was especially grateful for her including things someone speaking of their own experience may not have included, e.g., what was the composition of the migrants on the boat, their ages and country of origin, who were the ones who rammed the boat (we never learned who they were, but their manner and words were included), the manner the ship went down, and all her time in Egypt, information which was supplemented by interviews with Doaa's mother and sisters. Doaa probably couldn't have done that on her own so soon after her ordeal. ...more
Gosh, I wasn't crazy about this. Godfrey-Smith is an Australian, Sydney native, teaching at City University in New York. He began studying octopus in Gosh, I wasn't crazy about this. Godfrey-Smith is an Australian, Sydney native, teaching at City University in New York. He began studying octopus in 2008 by following them around in scuba gear. He is a philosopher, not a scientist. I did not grasp that when we began. There were some very un-scientific notions presented that struck me as weird
"[Cephalopods and baboons] are both partial cases, unfinished, in a sense, though one should not think of evolution as goal-directed."
I should think not. There was some other strange stuff about a gentleman who became aphasic occasionally but still had to express himself, which he did by pointing. Godfrey-Smith thought the man's aphasia 'proved' the man no longer had the capacity for language...despite the man being mentally aware and was pointing to things. Just seems a notion the author is floating that doesn't really bear scrutiny.
Look, the man had some terrific times observing squid, giant cuttlefish, and octopus and has some terrific stories (and even some photos) to tell about them--the way they morph shape, texture, and color and look interested to be around humans. We learn that the cephalopods live about two years, which does seem exceptionally short, though Godfrey-Smith goes off on another philosophical tangent about why such a big-brained animal would live so short a time when the dopes of the animal kingdom live comparatively forever.
Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget that notion. The play, which is being performed scene by scene for film, is thoroughly explained by the director to the players who happen to be presently incarcerated...in the Fletcher Correctional Institute. Eventually, the screening of the play for an audience of government and prison officials is paralleled with a real-life enactment of the play featuring the inmates, a female dancer, and the play's director. Atwood kindly gives a short and snappy synopsis of Shakespeare’s original story after her own presentation to refresh our memories. If you have the book, you can read that first if you want.
The Director of the Fletcher Correctional Players, once a Duke who directed plays for Canada's prestigious Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, takes the role of Prospero himself. He loses his position at the theatre festival one year and is pushed out to sea in a small boat (rusty old car) where he washes up in a cave-like rental for some years before he decides to stage a comeback using the Fletcher Correctional Players.
The audio for this book is particularly good. Some of the Fletcher Players shorten and update Shakespeare into current rap rhyming lyrics. This seems so entirely appropriate since Shakespeare often did the same, not in such short meter, but to the same end. And as the Director/Duke points out, Shakespeare often appeared to modify and create character’s speeches on the spot in the theatre, depending on the skills of the person in the role.
The Director had a rule for inmates: they couldn’t swear at one another using the more commonplace four-letter words we are familiar with, but they were allowed to use Shakespeare’s own swear words, e.g., born to be hanged, whoreson, pied ninny, hag-seed, abhorred slave, red plague, etc. Caliban calls himself hag-seed, and though his role is central to this retelling, the real thrust of Shakespeare's story belongs to Prospero, who seeks revenge for his dismissal so late in life.
There is real tension in this re-telling, and readers are dying to know how it is going to work out. Prospero’s plan is an elaborate deception featuring magic, and in this case, eavesdropping and kidnapping within a prison environment. We are at the edge of our seats to know what Prospero has in mind and whether his chosen goblins can pull it off without losing the thread (or losing their parole).
The play is a big success, and after the production is all over, the Director/Duke/Prospero gives the players the opportunity to discuss the outcome of the play as they see it. This important part of Atwood’s presentation fills out our modern perception of the centuries-old play, as each of the main characters tries to explain what might have become of them after the action of the play as written has ended.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we get at least one unpleasant but realistic take on the journey back to power for Prospero. The Miranda role, in another’s telling, is a completely unexpected evolution along the lines of the action movie grande dames like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger.
But the most rewarding of the after-stories is the one presented by Caliban, the Hag-Seed himself, who escapes the play altogether and creates a new one. And this is why this book is called Hag-Seed. In the end, the story is not about that old revenge play The Tempest at all, but about the rolling ball of creation, and how it is impossible to stop its onward journey.
I had access to the paper copy of this book while I listened, which allowed me to get every nuance. If one must choose one, I think I would go with the audio, which is beautifully read by R.H. Thomson, and who has a string of screen and theatre credits to his name. Produced by Penguin Random House Audio, the production is also available as Whisper-sync from Audible. Hogarth produces the paper copy. Choose your weapon and let the show begin....more
This has a very cool premise and neat characters. However, I found it had too many words. I adore this kind of scary mystery and Sigurðardóttir may haThis has a very cool premise and neat characters. However, I found it had too many words. I adore this kind of scary mystery and Sigurðardóttir may have managed it further on in pages that surround readers like the endless ocean outside the yacht. Only I would not see it because I would be dead already....more
In light of Elaine's review, I rewrote my initial snarky take on this novel and posted to my blog. To get full enjoyment from this novel, I urge you tIn light of Elaine's review, I rewrote my initial snarky take on this novel and posted to my blog. To get full enjoyment from this novel, I urge you to see what a reread will do for you.
Below is my original review. ---------------------
This short novel feels too long. An anthropologist, Sofia, quits working on her PhD ostensibly to care for her mother, who is unable to walk. No explanation can be found for the mother’s malady so mother and daughter travel to Spain in hopes a specialist there may be able to elicit a cure.
Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this novel comes after a long history of successful poetry, novels, and screenplays by Levy, so we are primed to find it praiseworthy. And it is, but she very nearly tips us into the deep, endlessly cycling the trauma of caring for someone apparently suffering a psychosomatic illness.
There is something we are meant to pay attention to: the notion that some people would never consider doing things that are not to their own advantage. The idea arises again and again in the course of the novel, first explicitly stated when the daughter visits her estranged and happily remarried father to ask for financial assistance or, at the very least, moral support for her efforts to care for his first wife. He refuses, and his new wife snorts with derision that he would consider doing any thing not to his advantage.
Women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters--often do things not strictly in their best interests. They do it out of love, usually, or say they do. But when one is the head of one’s own household, one is responsible for oneself—to oneself—to manage, to persist, to succeed. [Truthfully, and this is completely unrelated to the book, I know a woman who takes care of herself before everyone else and she is one pain in the caborum.]
(view spoiler)[ Near the end of the novel Sofia tells her mother that she must start doing things that are to her advantage and take charge of her life. Her mother promises to try. Sofia wants her to because she wants to do the same. She wants to return to school and finish her PhD. I suppose it took years in England, a month in Spain, and a visit to the estranged ex-father in Greece to figure it all out, but it seemed like the long way ‘round to me. (hide spoiler)]
There is more in this novel: a kind of forbidden love with a luscious, unstable blond of German descent and a lustful affair with the tent supervisor for jelly-fish stings. There are fabulous white-white sheets (must get some of those), blue embroidery thread that spells out a misunderstood and potentially dangerous message, and a leather-booted horse trainer. There is a doctor of the psyche and his sexy Sunny daughter, to say nothing of a pregnant white cat and a chained dog who howls whether or not he is leashed. It all has the tone of a late-adolescent fling about it. Good for some…
There is nothing wrong with a little fun in the sun—I feel like I missed my beach getaway this year so may sound a little dour about the descriptions of daily swimming and tan lines. Maybe it all could have been said in a poem, or a screenplay that features a stage covered in dunes with a backdrop of bluest ocean and a sliver of sky. The claustrophobia of that setting would mirror how I felt revolving in the confusion of Sofia’s mind. When finally the doctor tells Sophia, “Your confusion is willful,” we echo his diagnosis and frustration.
There is a twist at the end which will thrill some readers. Being who I am, however, it didn’t surprise me. But that’s just my sour nature coming out. I have only read a couple Booker Long List nominees so far, but I guess this wouldn’t be at the top of my list. ...more
This terrific mystery feels positively handcrafted and reminds me of my favorite music. Since childhood when different folks ask me what kind of musicThis terrific mystery feels positively handcrafted and reminds me of my favorite music. Since childhood when different folks ask me what kind of music I like my answer has always been the same: “homemade.” That means anything not overly processed that can be listened to up close and personal and bears some relationship to its sources and its roots.
In a sense this mystery is an invitation to a mystery: how some people manage to live by their wits and their art, whether it be music, carpentry, motorbikes, surfing, or any other of a million special fascinations.
John Pedersen is a fiddler, banjo player, and owner of Amazing Grace Music store in San Anselmo, CA where he and his wife do stringed instrument repairs, among other things. I knew John in high school and by some miracle of internet he reconnected long enough to send me this marvelous mystery that brings us deep into the Irish music and vintage motorcycle scene in and around San Francisco.
Soren Rauhe plays accordion nearly every night amongst friends in the pick-up Irish music spots around San Francisco. By day he is a wave-watcher and motorcycle mechanic, restoring vintage mounts for connoisseurs and enthusiasts in the region. The rich variety of Rauhe’s interests and talents extend to being a chump for a white-skinned, blue-eyed, red-haired beauty of his childhood acquaintance who manages always to find more prosperous benefactors than himself or his best buddy, the carpenter and guitarist Sean, who is likewise smitten. The tension in the triangle offers depth of background to a foreground of recent hook-ups.
When Soren clumsily spills coffee on a woman in his local breakfast bar, that unexpected encounter becomes the entree to an accordion mystery that reaches back to San Francisco’s great earthquake in 1906.
Everything about this San Francisco mystery felt authentic, right down to the Russian rocket scientist handcrafting replacement parts for 70-year-old motorbikes, and the care the restorers take in handling the motors. The bump and scrape of setting up in houses or bars for a night of music sounded right also, as did the habitual morning scramble to gaze over rooftops to catch a glimpse of the breakers on the beach.
The central mystery of the accordion and the factory in which it was fashioned was as deeply fascinating to a nonspecialist as it would be to one who repairs instruments every day. I especially love the way Soren’s expectations of the people he initially met on the phone were confounded in person: an Asian man Soren pictured as a thin intellectual with bow-tie and eyeglasses was a brawny hulk of a man and the blue-eyed Nordic type he imagined from the factory was in fact short, thin, dark, and the meanest crook.
We also get a glimpse of the path to a man’s heart in that the woman who eventually captured Soren was capable in her own right and not given to unnecessary drama, was an inventive and enthusiastic lover, and was able to put together a homemade meal without undue fuss. I can verify that this is the perfect recipe for an attractive male companion as well.
Perhaps best of all, this mystery gives us a glimpse into the unimaginable mysteries of city life, of how our tangential lives glimpse and bounce off one another, unaware of the richness of the experiences going on all around us.
Because good novels are difficult to write well, especially for a full-time musician, we can’t expect that Pedersen will be able to pull off the writing schedule of a-mystery-a-year that professional crime writers do. He does have an earlier novel, featuring a bluegrass fiddler and a mystery violin, called Scroll and Curl. But I sincerely hope that one of his future novels include surfing experiences which are also part of his world. Ever since reading Finnegan’s two-part New Yorker article in the 90s about surfing, I am a complete surf-potato if such a thing exists. I adore reading about it, watching it, marveling over it. Don Winslow, another California writer, has a Boone Daniels mystery series devoted to surf buddies. Hope springs eternal, as does music, surf, and mystery.
Joanna Basford, the biggest name in adult coloring books, has a spectacular new coloring book for adults called Lost Ocean: An Inky Adventure & ColJoanna Basford, the biggest name in adult coloring books, has a spectacular new coloring book for adults called Lost Ocean: An Inky Adventure & Coloring Book that brings to mind all manner of meditation mandelas, craft projects, color theories, visual recognition games, to say nothing of the wonders of the underwater world. The pictures are dense and detailed, far too complex for a child to manage, but perhaps just perfect for a teen or adult, perhaps even a much older adult, who wishes to try out a color palette, or concentrate on something unrelated to daily life.
Apparently the phenomenon of an adult coloring book market is large and growing, and Penguin provides a kit for groups of adults to work together on projects—a “community coloring club” is what they call these gatherings. They have also announced the release of a Coloring Club Kit which includes:
• Recipes for refreshments. • Playlist. Johanna Basford tells us she likes to draw to music by bands like The xx, and Florence and the Machine, “anything with too strong a beat interrupts the flow of the coloring.” We’ve compiled a special playlist to help unleash your creativity. • Ice Breakers to get your coloring club members chatting. • A special Q&A with the undisputed Queen of coloring books, Johanna Basford.
Truthfully, I was thinking these might be a good solution for adult community centers, but I can imagine a craftsperson finding the designs intriguing for color design. And finally, someone who needs design help generally might find inspiration here.
My sister is a docent at a seaside State Park that carries items like this in their museum store. Looks like a good seashore gift item generally, or a purchase a seaside Bed & Breakfast might find attractive. Keep your eyes peeled for this title in a bookstore near you this season, or buy it directly from the penguinrandomhouse.com website.
On my blog you will find a few sample pages and a giveaway posted until the book is released October 27. ...more
A friend of mine recently divulged his personal favorite among Bishop’s poems, "The End of March," which I immediately sought out, the end of March beA friend of mine recently divulged his personal favorite among Bishop’s poems, "The End of March," which I immediately sought out, the end of March bearing some significance to me, now. I’d always thought of Elizabeth Bishop as a short story writer, and having sought out the Library of America edition of her collected poems, prose, and letters, I discover that I like best of all her essays, which read to me like her poems must read to others. Her essays are the real thing—life--in color, with context, in language as carefully chosen as any of her poems. She manages to pick among the all the true things in an experience for particular words which tell us volumes…she was a careful curator of the authentic, one with a true artist’s eye.
Bishop has a fearful darkness at the core of her writing. I don’t know why—it almost seems as though she must have an illness that tired her and reminded her how close nothingness is. I did not read any biography of her; perhaps I should. Why it is that poets can make blackness blacker than any other artists, I could not say. But even in her short stories, for instance "The Last Animal," there is an air of menace, a whiff of death. In the essay, "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939" we know right from the title that the character we read about is dead, or will die, as it happened. We had forgotten that at the promising start, all hot sun and bright flowers, the shade of palms and the act of creation (paintings) make us forget that death is waiting, and not patiently.
The poem, "The End of March," it shouldn’t surprise us, is also about death. Walking along the beach with a cold biting wind freezing one side of the face, the walkers come upon a "man-sized" tangle of kite string "but no kite" washed up on the shore. At the same time, one walker glimpses a boarded-up beach house tethered by a wire (electricity?) to something off beyond the dunes. The walker imagines a retirement there,
"....doing nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."
Robert Pinsky was asked just recently in The New Yorkerpoetry podcast to choose a poem to read from the New Yorker archives and he chose a Bishop poem first published in that magazine in 1947. Called “At the Fishhouses,” the poem Pinsky calls "plain" has something of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” description that she reprises more than once.
"…I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, Slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, Icily free above the stones… …It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, Drawn from the cold hard mouth Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts Forever, flowing and drawn, and since Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."
As it often happens in the way of things, Colm Tóibín has recently published a book with Princeton University Press, On Elizabeth Bishop, whom he has been reading for forty years. Tóibín shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop and the poet Thom Gunn in this article in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian, Lavinia Greenlaw reviews Tóibín's new book. Each of these yields great insights into Bishop's life and style.
I almost gave up on this. I couldn’t get a grip. A GR friend had said there was a great section at the end. I flipped there and discovered where SATINI almost gave up on this. I couldn’t get a grip. A GR friend had said there was a great section at the end. I flipped there and discovered where SATIN in the title comes from, and noticed that in The Acknowledgements McCarthy talks about spending his grant time watching video loops of oil spills projected on his office walls. That was my entry point. I started again.
This profoundly disturbing novel is written in chapters that resemble memos to oneself while the main character, U, engages in a corporate job that requires much flight-time and international conferences. "Call me U" is an anthropologist, an in-house ethnographer for a consultancy.
"The Company (let’s continue to call it that) advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies, governments how to narrate their policy agendas…What we essentially do is fiction."
It can hardly be said U was happy in his work. U would dream at night, like many of us, but his sexual dreams might have pieces of his work or things he’d read in the news incorporated. If he read about an oil spill, for instance, his dreams would have some kind of female figure, sexy, arising out of the sea covered in oil blobs:
“a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in the blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.”
At least two things were happening to U while he was preparing a report for the corporation he worked for. One was that he’d read about a parachutist whose strings to his parachute were cut before he took a dive, and the other was that a business associate of his was dying of thyroid cancer. Both men "were dead before they hit the ground," as it were. The crime scene was "in the sky", in the very air we breathe.
(view spoiler)[This is a novel about our death, but before the "fall" as it were. The parachutist "had been murdered without realizing it." The man with thyroid cancer is already dead while he continues to relate the doctor’s findings every day. The people on this planet are dead while we continue to document to infinitude the activities of humans past and present, including the oil spills and the waste dumps, one of which is Satin Island, formerly Staten Island, now covered over with golf courses and walkways and greeting visitors to the United States in the same general vicinity as the Statue of Liberty.
You (that is, U) don’t have "to go to Staten Island--actually go there--[that] would be profoundly meaningless....Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well…the explosion’s already taking place—it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice…"
U has a sense, while he does his work as an anthropologist, of having come “too late.” He knows there is more to the patterns he sees in the oil spills and the sudden deaths but he can’t make them out until a coworker tells him of her experience as a demonstrator, a protester, against the G8 Summit in 2001.
The novel is disturbing because I also think there may be no way back to health on the planet, but I would never just give up. When some of our best scientists are thinking one way to save the human race is by sending representatives to colonize Mars, life as we know may be...let’s say, limited. (hide spoiler)]
Only after finishing the novel did I know what that earlier reviewer I linked to in the top of this review meant. When you get there, you will see it, too. ...more
This story is so fantastical I felt I had to suspend disbelief. That so much could happen to one man makes one realize how little most of really live This story is so fantastical I felt I had to suspend disbelief. That so much could happen to one man makes one realize how little most of really live in our lifetimes. Not that we could have managed as well as Louis Zamperini. He was exceptional in so many ways.
Hillenbrand does a marvelous job with the material, interspersing her considerable research into topics that Zamperini, necessarily, knew nothing of. Her handling of the dropping of the atomic bomb and its aftermath was particularly masterful for I felt tremendous sadness and regret when she could have made much of our sympathy for our American soldiers caught in deadly prison camps and exploited beyond endurance.
Mutsuhiro ‘The Bird’ Wantanabe was similarly transfixing. Hillenbrand understood that any great hero needs a worthy opponent and The Bird was all of that. Following Wantanabe’s story after the war was a critical piece of history that brought Hillenbrand’s story to fullness.
That Zamperini could come through so much was testament to the strength of his character. That he could lose his moorings when he returned to the United States was testament to his humanity. Hillenbrand continues to amaze and instruct with the depth of her research and the emotional elasticity of her writing about tenacity and resilience.
This book made me look for books about the WWII Pacific theatre. Last year I'd read Vickie Croke's marvelous work on elephants in Burma just before and during WWII, called Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II. Both these books made me realize that my lack of knowledge was preventing me from being able to enjoy these books with the sense of relish and critical thinking they obviously deserve. These exceptional authors make me feel I must pony up and do the work necessary to be able to highlight their achievement. ...more
Dip into this lovely small atlas anywhere and enjoy the fruits of Schalansky’s many years’ labor cataloging, mapping, labeling “Fifty Islands I Have NDip into this lovely small atlas anywhere and enjoy the fruits of Schalansky’s many years’ labor cataloging, mapping, labeling “Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will.” The drawings have a timeline and scale; they are labelled with longitude and latitude and are pinpointed on a globe. Each drawn island has contour with shading showing mountains, water, and plains. Each location sports a short introductory essay often including reports related by the earliest discoverers, or seafaring men who came upon these remote locations and told of what they found. The flyleaves show the islands pinpointed all together. A masterpiece of careful description, this wallet of dreams is something special for the sailor in all of us.
Consider this short essay about Pagan, a Pacific island 2,670 km from Manila and 840 km from Iwo Jima, discovered in 1669 by Diego Luis de Sanvitores:
The tallest mountain range in the world is underwater – where the Pacific plate converges with the Philippine plate in the Marianas Trench, several kilometres deep – and its smoking volcano cones rise out of the ocean. Pagan is a double island of two of these volcanoes held together by a land mass, At its narrowest point, it is only a few hundred metres wide.
The village of Shomushon lies at the foot of Mount Pagan in the north. Its people want to be evacuated because smoke has been rising from the summit for some time, and there have been earthquakes. But no one takes any notice. They say the volcano is not dangerous.
On 15 May 1981, it erupts, spewing fire, hirling rocks and hooting fountains of lava into the air. The sky turns black; it rains ash and smells of sulphur and burning earth. The raised huts in Shomushon shake, and a flood of lava spread though the palm trees, Soon the first crackle of fire in the village is heard. The mayor sends a message by short-wave radio - This is it! Come get us! – before the sixty villagers flee, crossing the narrow neck of land to the south. They take refuge behind a mountain ridge and pray to be spared from the glowing river.
When they are evacuated by air shortly after, only the rooftops of Shomushon can be seen above the layer of brown ash. On Pagan, there are now 20 million tonnes of tuff stone, the material of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla.
I am offering a giveaway of this title on my my blog until Dec 15, 2014. Visit and put your name in. ...more
To tell the truth, polar exploring never held much fascination for me. The only thing that makes me think it might be magical is that so many explorerTo tell the truth, polar exploring never held much fascination for me. The only thing that makes me think it might be magical is that so many explorers have mentioned the quality of the light. But the idea that one would risk one’s life and spend more than two years to “get through the ice pack” really seems like a dumb idea to me.
Given that, I probably was not the ideal reader for this book, but I took on this story because I thought maybe all would become clear. Sides tries to make it sound exciting, but he spends a lot of time going over the lives of the financial backers (James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of The New York Herald), and detailing the previous failed attempts to reach the North Pole. By the time the men leave San Francisco bay July 8, 1879, it already feels too late.
The U.S.S. Jeannette was first burdened with the task of trying to locate Adolf Nordenskiold's Scandinavian expedition to find a "Northeast Passage" which was seriously past its return date. The detour to Siberia meant the Jeannette's crew was late in getting off on the real purpose of their journey and indeed, once through the Bering Strait, they became stuck in pack ice. “Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about,” DeLong wrote. Well, not so much, really.
Anyway, for two years these folks tried to free themselves and their ship from the relentless cold and shifting ice. The ice pack would move them northwest, only to circle back later. Eventually all choice was taken from them when their ship was crushed by the enormous forces of the ice. It is a frustrating story of hardship and heartbreak, though some of the men made it out alive to tell the tale and pass on locations of the ship’s log, which had to be abandoned.
What they learned was practically all negative: the maps and theories of the polar regions being floated at the time, notably those of the German cartographer August Petermann, were dead wrong. But they did discover a couple of islands (Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett seen below) and they learned that arctic ice is constantly in motion. In 1884, some years after Jeannette was wrecked in 1881, some of Jeannette’s wreckage (one of DeLong’s sealskin boots), washed up in Greenland, proving the ice movement absolutely.
[image] [image]
[image]
Sketches of Islands Discovered by U.S.S. Jeannette
Sides does a remarkable job of research, and for those interested in polar exploration, this book must be a wondrous cache of riches. Sides collected the mass of information in a complete and rounded way, stretching long before and long after the two-and-a half years of the expedition. I, however, came away wondering at the choices of some folks. They prepared the best way they could at the time, and did amazingly well finding folks they thought might be able to take the isolation and challenges they were to face. I note that the innovative Mr.-Fixit-Melville was the man who ended up writing the stories of the others who died. He had both heart and brains and survived to tell the tale. There were other exceptional men among their number, Neidermann among them, who could take any amount of cold and physical toil. Tales of their exploits still thrill us. But the cost? These are the trade-offs men make. ...more
Oh yeah. Don Winslow has so many great things going on in this novel it is difficult to pick the best thing to tell you about. It is light and dark atOh yeah. Don Winslow has so many great things going on in this novel it is difficult to pick the best thing to tell you about. It is light and dark at the same time. At one point, one of the good guys goes to do something bad, but it turns out good anyway! That was a very cool twist of fate the pen.
Winslow manages to make the writing sound like a five-piece band…instead of a mystery with two threads and a protagonist, I felt like I just watched a great concert. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the main guy, Boone, has awesome backup. His team is called the Dawn Patrol, a group of surfers who meet in the water in the mornings before work.
The six, whose interests outside of surfing do not necessarily align, trust one another implicitly, and so when when things in water or on land get seriously out of whack or when one of the team does something really dumb and needs rescuing (happens to the best of us), the team surfaces, spreads out, calls on buddies…Talk about social networking…This is California, after all. Since everyone is fit and smart and good at what they do, having a team like this at one's back is like having a superpower.
Surfing for me is a little like fishing. I love reading about it. My first encounter with the concept and culture came in the form of an article by William Finnegan in The New Yorker, written years ago. It awoke in me something akin to awe, and ever since I read hoping to rekindle that early excitement I had about surfing. Winslow does a good job, but most importantly, perhaps, is that he is one of my tribe. Reading and surfing…Boone is a man after my own heart.
So this story has many threads…what with all the folks out there, waiting for waves. We genuinely care about these characters with vulnerabilities, so we have skin in the game pretty quickly. The main story is that young (really young) Mexican girls are being brought in to Pacific Beach and sold for hourly trysts. The financial payoff is apparently sufficient to make liars and murderers of many marginally ethical folks, and their pressures exert a downward ‘domino effect’ on the society in which they operate. When this spills over to include Boone, he finds and condemns the source of the pressure.
Winslow appears laid back in his vernacular, but anyone that can keep so many balls in the air is not casual in his writing. His writing is fit and tight and his storyline exercised and exorcised of fat. I love this stuff. If you are missing California, or not seeing enough of it in your daily commute, put a little light in your life with Winslow’s series. He gives us a sense that there are still people who have their values screwed on straight. ...more
So what makes a good fishing tale? Perhaps it is a little like real estate: location, location, location (or, as the Australians like to say, “positioSo what makes a good fishing tale? Perhaps it is a little like real estate: location, location, location (or, as the Australians like to say, “position, position, position...”) But it is more than that: it is the temperament of the fisherman, the poles, the flies, the weather, the obstacles to success…as well as the size of the catch. There also has to be a little time for contemplation, and ruminations about the state of the world, both personally and globally. All this is here for the taking in this first self-published novel by Graham Spence, co-author of several nonfiction titles about the African bush with the fabled conservationist Lawrence Anthony, who died in 2012.
I read this story in a day because Spence made this fiction absolutely propulsive. The central character, Chris, sells advertising for a small newspaper in Queens, New York and is bored with his life. He is middle-aged, divorced, and barely speaks to his wife or daughter anymore. After experiencing a “heart incident” in a meeting one day at work, he decides to go ahead and live before he dies. He wants to fish the wild places where fish have never seen a human. This is the tale.
He first chooses South Africa. The narrative shifts between moments of sunny calm and great, satisfying catches with moments of breath-catching, death-defying horror. The absolute best part of this narrative (who really trusts a fisherman/storyteller anyway?) are the details and keen insights that convince us that this is the real thing, the actual location, the true situation. It is fascinating. But Chris doesn’t end there.
The next location is Colombia, South America of all places. Chris thinks that no one in their right mind would go to Colombia with all the FARC activity and kidnappings, so he won't have any competition. He researches locations and decides fishing along the coastline beaches and away from the jungle would probably be safe. His Colombia section just reminds us just what a fisherman (tall tales) Chris really is. But he is so good at storytelling and fishing, we find it hard to put the book down. He survives (!) his travels in Africa and South America and we move on...to Chechnya... I don’t want to give away all his secrets. This is something you need to discover for yourselves. It was a blast.
So I discovered this title when I began researching the authors of The Elephant Whisperer, an exceptionally well-written nonfiction about game conservation and elephant killings in Africa. Graham Spence has a low-key website on which he introduces his two self-published fiction titles, including this one. I really enjoyed Spence's work with Lawrence Anthony so thought, for the princely fee of $1.99/each on Amazon or bn.com, I would like to try his first attempts at fiction. I am so happy I did. If tall tales about fishing floats your boat, get this one.
Do yourself a favor. I can guarantee you will have an unusual (and terrific!) day’s reading ahead with a natural raconteur, especially if you like fly fishing stories.
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