ironSoap – Complete

author: Rachel Maddow
name: Paul
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/18
date added: 2012/07/19
shelves: history, new-in-2012, non-fiction, politics
review:
I’m not a fan or follower of Rachel Maddow, as I tend to shy away from talking-head pundits of any political stripe, finding them all insufferably extremist, adding little to the national discourse. However, I decided to check out Drift as it is not (on the surface) a catch-all “Here’s My Worldview” type of book, but rather a focused examination of the United States’ military as it exists today, with an eye cast to the historical series of events that resulted in the current state.

I will say that Ms. Maddow’s politics are hardly hidden here, but she admirably refrains from digressing from the topic at hand and stays focused on the expansion of military spending, the changing face of how war is waged since Vietnam and the increased reliance on long-term, low-impact conflicts aided not by sacrifice from the populace at large but by private para-military contractors. She is very thorough in her dissection of the way this all came about, though you can kind of feel the pull of her personal opinion in the way she chooses to levy the responsibility (or is that blame? it’s not spelled out, but it’s heavily implied) of the shift from citizen-soldier run combat and national burden to deficit-funded and unilaterally mandated on Reagan. I can’t say I fully buy that the title’s drift began the moment Reagan took office (if nothing else, Eisenhower’s speech in 1961 warning of the dangers of the military industrial complex indicates that some of this framework was in place twenty years prior to Reagan), but Maddow makes a pretty convincing case that no matter where it started, war today is almost indistinguishable from what it was less than a century ago.

It’s particularly telling that Maddow devotes dozens and dozens of pages to both Reagan and George W. Bush’s role in the slide from war as a difficult, national decision to one made by the guy at the top but she skims the surface of the roles Clinton and even Obama have played in this transition. Not that she lets them off the hook, far from it. But considering the depth of her dive into the Grenada invasion, Iran-Contra, Desert Shield/Storm and then the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq (again) and Afghanistan, it does induce some eye-rolls to note how little (other than the Balkans) time she devotes to military action during Clinton’s eight year term.

The most compelling pat of the book is Maddow’s description of the state of our nuclear arsenal, now aging and no longer necessary from the perspective of what it was assembled to accomplish (arranging the mutually assured destruction deterrent against the Soviet Union), including the number of mishaps and mishandling mini-calamaties that are, perhaps, inherent in trying to maintain 5,000 true WMD, some of which date back sixty years. This is a chilling account of past mistakes, current dangers and policy nightmares that make this an ongoing concern—where “concern” is the lightest possible term for something that ought to be a sort of systemic panic but is really more of a casually shrugged-off low-priority issue. Perhaps books like this one will shine some much-needed light on the pressing need for disarmament, a point in which I find myself in full agreement with Ms. Maddow.

Drift is a book that I’m not sure I can use the word “enjoy” to describe my experience with; it is certainly interesting and well-written with Maddow’s casual-but-earnest style that makes it easy reading. More so than anything, I find this to be a book I’d recommend because it invites (perhaps demands is the better word) thought and discourse, which is something that I think both Maddow and I would love to see more of in our politics, especially when it comes to questions of how we exert our military might, how we make those decisions and what we do going forward.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — July 19, 2012 at 10:38AM

author: Susan Cain
name: Paul
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/13
date added: 2012/07/13
shelves: non-fiction, new-in-2012
review:
Reading Susan Cain‘s book about introversion left me feeling very polarized. In a lot of ways, the breadth of research involved is impressive, and the sincerity with which she chronicles the research into what introversion is and what makes introverts that way illuminates her passion for the topic. Then again, the book suffers a bit under the weight of its presentation.

Cain makes regular effort to highlight that, despite her own admitted introversion, being an extrovert isn’t bad, per se. The problem I found with this is that despite her lip service to one characteristic not being preferable to the other, the book comes across as kind of a manifesto in favor of toning it down or, at the very least, elevating those who aren’t as comfortable being the squeaky wheel. I don’t know that it was possible for this to not be a factor since part of the thesis of the book is that culture (at least American culture), in Cain’s view, values extroversion more than reserved sensitivity. But, despite being pretty introverted myself, I found myself disengaged by the “us vs. them” subtext.

Which is not to say Ms. Cain’s findings and arguments are not enlightening and persuasive. Her descriptions of research surrounding the science of introversion, the correlation between introversion, shyness, sensitivity and empathy are engaging, perhaps not revelatory but certainly worth noting. Though at times the book seems to be aimed at introverts as a kind of legitimizing, empowering tome, I think the best audience for the book are people, especially extroverts, who have introverted people in their homes or workplaces who could use some eye-opening as to what makes the more reserved in their midst tick and how to best accommodate them and draw out their strengths.

What frustrated me the most about Quiet though is that Ms. Cain peppers her findings with specific examples of people, using them to illustrate her points. Illustration is fine, and I don’t even mind the regular use of case studies, but Cain dwells on these anecdotes as if they were supposed to be universally applicable, all while reminding readers regularly that no generalization is really accurate. This where the book feels padded, similarly to a book I read earlier in the year, A Single Roll of the Dice by Trita Parsi, in which a lot of the details (or, here, personal examples) feel contrived to increase word count to flesh out what might otherwise be a solid 100-page scholarly discussion, leaving something like 170 pages that feel burdened by personal asides and digressions.

To make matters worse, there is a weird structural flaw in the way the information and research is presented such that in the first half of the book Cain persistently references future chapters, saying “…which I will discuss more, later, in chapter X.” Then in the latter half of the book, she regularly cites previous topics, like, “…as you recall from chapter Y.” It occurred to me that a better overall arrangement of the material would have avoided the cross-referencing, allowing concepts to flow into each other more seamlessly. As it is, it feels disjointed and spread around, often losing the point and making something that should be clarified feel muddy.

Quiet is an interesting read and a decent book, helped along by some somewhat hidden but very useful/insightful pieces of practical advice. It isn’t without its flaws, unfortunately, making it somewhat less of a tour de force than it may have had the potential to be, but for those interested in the subject matter in particular, it’s worth checking out.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — July 13, 2012 at 03:12PM

author: William Landay
name: Paul
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/06/30
date added: 2012/07/02
shelves: mystery, new-in-2012, novel
review:
William Landay‘s searing, crafted novel, Defending Jacob, is by far the most unexpected book I’ve read in a while. It struck me as particularly interesting that while I don’t read a ton of legal thrillers (and I’m not sure this counts as one), those that I have read don’t really seem to cross with mysteries very often. In Defending Jacob, there is a distinct mystery at the core of the book, though it is framed in the context of the trial proceedings and not principally within the initial investigation.

The book follows Andy Barber, Massachusetts ADA, who is called when the body of a young boy is found murdered in a woodsy park in his own Boston suburb of Newton. Initially there are no suspects, but as the investigation proceeds, two possible perpetrators emerge. One is a convicted sex offender and the other is Andy’s own son, Jacob. The District Attorney’s office makes the decision to pursue Jacob as their suspect, pulling Andy off the case and setting off a sequence in which the largely circumstantial but nevertheless compelling evidence mounts against Jacob.

The central thrust of the plot is the twin spires of the case. One is the draining effect it has on the Barber family, with the secrets it unearths, the questions it raises and the way it re-casts the entire family in the eyes of the community. The other is the mystery of the case itself, the particulars and the “what if” elements: what if the jury convicts? What if the actions of the parents are called into question? And mostly, what if Jacob actually committed the crime, regardless of what the jury decides?

Landay uses a narrative structure that has the majority of the case being recalled by Andy some time after the initial trial and investigation as part of a grand jury hearing in which the weight of suggestion is heavy that there are events that take place outside or after the initial trial that are as, if not more, significant than the trial and its outcome. In these sequences, mostly told via court transcripts of contentious examination by Andy’s understudy at the DA’s office, the cloud of these events are palpable but believably obscured (for the most part).

What unfolds then is a series of examinations between crucial trial moments where the nature of family, fatherhood, belief in the inherent goodness not just of children but of your own actions are dissected, drawn out, examined, and re-defined. A central theme is the concept of nature versus nurture, of psychology and the revelations of genetics, as well as the definitions of self. There is a secret about Andy that affects (or perhaps does not affect) Jacob which casts a particular glow across the whole proceeding, paving the way for Landay (through Andy) to muse on the topic of which comes first: the murder or the murderer.

As the book artfully sets the stage with a languid sense of the reader not having the whole story but the tale being told compellingly, eventually the trial begins and the tension begins to mount. Landay paces himself so that what seems at first to be a meandering, thoughtful study of a family in crisis begins to ratchet up, the crescendo suddenly maximizing until the final 100 pages or so become so engrossing that a book I felt confident in my ability to take my time with out of nowhere became a page-turner so engrossing I had to stay up ridiculously late just to finish.

And oh, the finish.

But I’ll come back to the finale in a moment. First let me pause to discuss the few flaws the book has. Primarily, I found it frustrating that the question of genetic predisposition toward violence is never satisfactorily pursued. Particularly, Andy, as the narrator, seems to occasionally hint toward a confession about his own, personal, sense of morality or his possible predilection to violence. A few times he seems to act as if he believes that he does have a draw to anger and/or unthinking action, which could easily include violence. But the exploration of this topic feels incomplete, even in a novel that is unafraid—admirably so—to leave questions unresolved. The other small but nagging annoyance is that Landay (or Andy, though I don’t think you can write this off as a character element) repeats and rehashes certain topics to drive home their significance rather than expanding the discussions. This is particularly noteworthy when the topic of those genetic or nature-based propensities to do harm to other comes up, but also he revisits the concept of the “unknowable other” several times without really diving into what that means or what that says about the characters and events that take place. It’s a missed opportunity because it could really enhance the narrative, but Landay leaves it on the mantle, unfired. There are a few other minor examples as well.

A large concern is that the central framework is a fabrication. Obviously the narrator and the ADA cross-examining him in the transcript interludes know more than the audience is privy to up until the closing chapters. In almost any other hands I’d probably cry foul and declare it a cheat, but I think Landay does as good a job as I’ve seen in making this work, in not having it feel terribly artificial, at least during the initial read. I admit that after the fact it was so glaring that it buffs some of the luster off the polish of the book, but I can’t say that I protested during the subterfuge. It’s a weird pseudo-flaw then: a contrivance that works until you become part of the informed, at which point it reveals itself as a cheat, though one that is forgivable if you can admit how exhilarating it was to be blissfully unaware.

My veiled hints refer to the book’s final pages—literally the last twenty—which flip the central tenets of the story to that point once and then just as you are in the midst of the mindwarp provided there, the whole novel is re-cast as the brutal, unflinching and pointedly unresolved final sequence unfolds. I can see how some people are going to read this and want to fling the book across the room. I checked mine out from the library so that wouldn’t have been an option for me. But it was never a danger anyway because I was among those who wanted to immediately find Mr. Landay and shake his hands for having the stones to drop such a pitch-perfect ending onto an already gripping book. It’s messed up, yes. It’s hard to deal with, sure. But it’s so effective, I just can’t imagine it ending any other way.

In the end, I highly recommend Defending Jacob to people who like thoughtful family dramas, people who like thoughtful crime or legal dramas and people who can say they don’t mind being duped as long as it’s for a worthy cause. I liked the book very much and I can’t wait to find some other people who’ve read it so I can discuss it with them, because the real power of the novel, I suspect, will be in the ensuing conversation.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — July 02, 2012 at 02:09AM

author: John Steinbeck
name: Paul
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1945
rating: 5
read at: 2012/06/26
date added: 2012/06/26
shelves: classic, novel
review:
There’s a point I reached in my reading of Cannery Row where I flipped to the back and noted the tightly-margined pages only counted 120 or so, and it made me sad. John Steinbeck‘s tale of a place and time, filtered through the experiences of a cast of people in a meandering, semi-linear narrative snapshot is one that I wished would go on a bit further. I suppose the beauty of Cannery Row could be in the way it doesn’t wear out its welcome, but it was so descriptive and transportive that I found myself lingering on it, taking longer to read each page than even my usual slow reading requires so I could stay in the Row.

It’s possible that part of my affection for the novel is that I live in Northern California, close enough to Monterey that I can visit in a day and still return home. I’ve vacationed there several times for longer stretches; I genuinely love the area, and did so before reading Steinbeck’s book. Reading Cannery Row then is like seeing a well-made documentary about your hometown or discovering an old diary from a favored relative. I don’t know exactly how realistic Steinbeck’s depiction of Cannery Row during the Depression is, but I find that I like to believe that his portrayal of the area is at least spiritually accurate.

I suppose it can’t be possible for it to be completely grounded in truth; Steinbeck’s obvious fondness for vagabonds and drunks and whores probably doesn’t mean that down-and-outers all have hearts of gold. Still, the world that is presented here, fantasy or not, is one that I completely fell in love with. Steinbeck’s ability to describe and conjure is startling. He doesn’t rely on literary gymnastics like Vladimir Nabokov, nor does he simplify to the point of relying on mere suggestion like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Instead, Steinbeck achieves a kind of homespun poetry that lacks pretension but is, in its own rootsy way, very stunning. It’s also funny, which was something I didn’t expect.

Take, for example, this description from Chapter 30:

“The nature of parties has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, generally understood that a party has a pathology, that it is a kind of an individual and that it is likely to be a very perverse individual. And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.”

There isn’t much of a plot to Cannery Row, the loose connection of vignettes regularly returns to the band of hobos who live in The Palace Flophouse, led by Mack, who try throughout to do something nice for the neighborhood benefactor (of sorts), Doc, who runs the marine biology lab on the Row. Throughout, Steinbeck weaves shorts about the couple who move into the abandoned industrial boiler, Lee Chong who runs the local grocery and operates almost exclusively on credit, madam Dora Flood and her prostitutes at the Bear Flag Restaurant, and other less frequently appearing characters who all serve to give Cannery Row its distinct, homesick-inducing personality.

By now I suppose it’s redundant to say I really loved this book, but I think any work that gave me a new appreciation for a place I already thought had a certain charm, that made me want to visit again right away, that made me laugh and that simply made me happy that I could step into its world even for a short time is one that deserves to be called out as not just good, but especially remarkable.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — June 26, 2012 at 01:01PM

author: Adam Ross
name: Paul
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/06/18
date added: 2012/06/19
shelves: novel
review:
Every once in a while I run across a book (or a movie, or game, or show, or album, etc) that even my hyper-opinionated mind just can’t seem to come to a consensus about. I’m at a loss in these moments, with my go-to analytical predilection fails and I’m left unsure what I think about something. Did I like it? Hate it? Perhaps I just didn’t understand it? Adam Ross‘s warped, layered and origami-like novel Mr. Peanut falls firmly into this category. I just don’t know what to make of it.

Indulge me, then, if you will, as I try to work through my confusion through review.

Mr. Peanut is about David and Alice Pepin, a long-married, childless couple living in New York City. David is a video game designer, head of a successful company and husband of Alice, a woman haunted by demons that have caused her to lose the battle with her self-control and her weight has begun spiking the scales into morbid obesity. Alice suffers from a myriad of food allergies, notably peanuts and early in the novel she appears to have died from ingesting a handful of Planters Peanuts. David is accused of murdering her, though he insists it was a suicide on her part. This seems unlikely to the investigating officers, Detectives Sheppard and Hastroll, who note that at the time of her death, Alice had lost hundreds of pounds, slimming down to a svelte 130, regaining her sense of beauty and self-confidence.

But the investigation into David opens wounds in Sheppard and Hastroll, both of whom have struggled with their own marriages. Thus begins the overlapping, layered narratives that pull parallels from strange, dreamlike free associations. Detective Sheppard is actually Sam Sheppard, former doctor and inmate, convicted in the fifties of bludgeoning his wife to death and supposedly struggling with the murderer (or murderers) who were never recovered. The case became the inspiration for The Fugitive and following the overturning of the conviction due to lack of evidence, Sheppard left his medical career to instead (I guess) pursue a career in law enforcement. Ross dissects the turbulent marriage between Sheppard and his wife, Marilyn, through the cold resignation of a bitter wife to a philandering husband, her own desire for revenge and closure or revelation.

Ross also delves into Hastroll’s union with his wife, who has at some point decided to confine herself to bed in some sort of test or trial or battle of wills that Hastroll must decipher or accept or comprehend. Sheppard and Hastroll may have their own baggage when it comes to marriage, but they still have to decide what role David Pepin played in Alice’s death. Then they discover the book that David is working on, a book called Mr. Peanut that becomes a meta-novel, part MacGuffin, part self-referential tool for Ross to weave his brazenly pretentious and ambitious structure around, trying to create the literary equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting—Escher in fact being oft-referenced in the novel.

There are stacks of meaning being applied here, with the parallels between the agonized, faithful resolve of Hastroll with his uncooperative boor of a wife, and Sheppard and his reactionary, revelatory adulterousness, his utter contempt and longing for the clarity of love and then David with his dual-nature, overlapping motivations and hazy, shifting persona. Each treatise on marriage and fidelity is woven around pop cultural reference touchstones, intentionally vague at times, maddeningly complete at others, always falling back on the curious parallels between the yin and yang of Escher’s mirror worlds, the works of Alfred Hitchcock, the time and place context of marriage in the “halcyon” days before feminism versus the enlightenment of modern times, the conflict at the core of monogamy and union that both must but also cannot on its own endure the ultimate erosion of time and routine.

In a way, trying to find the real plot inside Mr. Peanut is like trying to find the back side of a Möbius strip, and I can’t help but think this is intentional. Ross is really showing that the nature of marriage is conflict, and the interlocking plots that rest not just on top of but within and through each other as well are ancillary in a way to the treatment here of wedded bliss as anything but. Not that Ross seems to think of marriage as useless or foolish, he seems to genuinely be trying to sort out how the paradox of love that leads to commitment and then must transform into an ideally unending stream of compromise and negotiation, of which love is perhaps not even a real component (other than as a remembered facet in earlier decision-making). He tries to look for where the self fits in to the increasingly blurred entity that is the married couple, the swirl of him and her, me and you, I and us.

It’s weird because I don’t know that Ross ever succeeds in this, unless perhaps his only goal was to make it all the more confusing, to showcase how abstract and dizzying it really is. His choice of using Escher as a model seems apt until you realize that most of Escher’s work does resolve, to an extent. Eventually the birds blend into focus, wings and feathers no longer hinting at the rows of field and crops; the inverse true. The black gremlin and the white dancing man do finally shake hands. The stairs lead to somewhere. Mr. Peanut, though, I can’t say does resolve. Ross tries to split the difference by pulling a Clue (the movie)-like stunt at the end, a sort of Choose Your Own Finale that made me kind of resent him for leading me into this complex maze of piled translucency and then shrugging as if to say, “Well, I dunno either. You figure it out.”

Unlike other novels with disappointing ends, I didn’t dislike the direction or the destination in the closing pages, instead I revolted against his indulgence, his spineless decision to try to have his cake, eat it and come back for thirds. This is especially true because even with all this intentional contradiction, he neither unties the laces and displays the conviction to let them lie loose next to the shoe, nor does he do the reader the service of tying them up. Rather, they are half-knotted, dangling, a tripping hazard.

Admittedly, the book is gripping, thought-provoking, challenging and showcases a very, very talented writer. I don’t think you can ignore the enviable way Ross constructs his descriptions or arranges his ambitious structures. But, it’s not a flawless work. The long diversion into Sheppard’s case and past overstays its welcome. The introduction of the curious (and delightfully enigmatic) hitman, Mobius, is poorly handled. David Pepin’s character himself suffers from a lack of believability as he is a computer scientist and video game designer who doesn’t play video games; his malleable body is strangely unappealing in description yet (as with most self-insertion characters) commands sexual attention from secondary female characters. Some of the ways in which Ross characterizes women are uncomfortable not in specific instances but in totality, where they all come across as some flavor of cruelly manipulative, inscrutable just to be enigmatic and spitefully guarded.

Yet in a lot of ways I respect the novel, and I enjoyed the exercise of reading it, of following the path Ross lays out. There are sequences, such as the analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s work and his diagnosis of suspense and several of the conversations between Sheppard and Mobius that are breathtaking. There are also characters that are given the exact right amount of narrative exposure to make them cement in memory, like the man from the airline who comes to rescue David (and, by extension, Alice) following a harrowing experience en route to Hawaii, and the man who could be Sheppard’s brother, a simple house cleaner who harbors all manner of secrets and represents Marilyn’s possible door to a different life. There is also a strange lack of emotion present in a book that, maybe, ought to be ripe with pathos, as if Ross were slathering on complexity to keep not just the reader but also himself at arm’s length from the grim subjects and darker conclusions almost arrived upon.

In the end, my relationship with Mr. Peanut, the novel, is as twisting and conflicted as the Escher paintings the book fashions itself after. For every amorphous white blob there is an identical stain; for every point at which the horizon seems identifiable, there is a competing perspective that results in a book both wonderful and awful, both inspiring and disgusting. It is, then, both a triumph and a failure, something that results in me wanting to brush myself off, to retreat to less conflicted territory of YA science fiction or glib mystery novels. My final, perhaps only lucid takeaway is this: I can’t wait to see what else Adam Ross has to offer.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — June 19, 2012 at 10:31AM

author: Donald Hall
name: Paul
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/07
date added: 2012/05/08
shelves: memoir, non-fiction
review:
Let’s assume you were wondering if there was ever a market for blogging before the semi-coherent daily ramble became a legitimate form of communication ten or twelve years ago. To confirm this, you need look no further than Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a semi-topical serialized set of quasi-daily ruminations on the subject of work, self, life, death, family, history and the intersections of all the above. Written in the very early nineties, this book is a blog, regardless of whatever memoir title might be attached to it. The short essay formatting, the tangental discussions on a broad central theme; the only things missing are ironic hyperlinks and the occasional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll be better soon, I promise!” entires.

I was assigned Life Work as a part of an English course I took during one of my failed attempts at college. This would be back in like 1996, when the web was just starting to be ubiquitous and when the notion of an online life was still mostly science fiction. In that time, which sounds quaint to describe and depresses me greatly to think of a time less than twenty years ago as such, the notion of a person spending an hour or more a day on actual post mail as opposed to email or Twitter or whatever was still current enough to not seem strange. Reading the book now, it kind of boggles my mind to know that something so central to communication when I was not even just a small child but a teenager, a near-adult, has all but been antiquated. Hall describes his work, his idealized day involving the anticipation of a day spent working on poems and essays and letters and books, then relaxing with his wife and attending to various chores come evening. He describes the workdays of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents. He talks about work in a general sense, he talks about it in great detail.

You can tell that Hall is a poet; his prose and essay stylings are peppered with dips into lyrical rhapsodies. He’s also kind of hard to like sometimes: he is stuffy and pretentious one moment and then grounded and rootsy the next. I kind of liked that he manages to convey the complexity of a real person by preserving the daily shift in tone and mood, in refusing the temptation to not edit down or smooth over these transitory notes. Still, there are a lot of points where Hall’s topic of work, as presented in this proto-blog format, become a kind of slushy non-thesis, weighed down by specifics that I don’t think anyone asked for.

Partway through the book, Hall deals with a health crisis, which puts a new spin on the topic (and a welcome one, though saying so sounds absolutely terrible I know), propelling the end of the book through with a renewed urgency that adds a nice edge to the languid tone of the first half. I did like that Hall kind of sold me (as if I needed selling) on the quiet life of the comfortable country writer; his depictions of an unhurried New England life ignited both my aspirational drive as well as some wanderlust to explore the semi-rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire he creates in mental landscapes. Perhaps these places don’t or never did exist, but I’d like to go and see for myself.

And maybe, then, this is the final success of the book. In a collection of meandering essays about living and working, Hall has made me interested in doing both, doing more with each, and finding a happier junction where the two—inevitably, as Hall believes—meet.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — May 08, 2012 at 08:23AM

author: Trita Parsi
name: Paul
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2012/06/04
date added: 2012/06/04
shelves: new-in-2012, non-fiction
review:
Whew. This was a tough one for me to get through. About a year ago when I started making a concerted effort to finish more books, I made a little deal with myself that if I ever had a bit of downtime and I found myself specifically not wanting to pick up the book I was reading, that meant I wasn’t into it and I needed to set it aside and read something else. It was an effort to prevent the logjam that sometimes happens when I’m reading a difficult or dry book that I want to finish (either because someone recommended it or because the subject, if not the presentation, is something I’m interested in) but struggle with. I came close to putting Trita Parsi‘s book about the Obama administration’s early efforts at diplomacy with Iran aside in this way because there were some times when I had a chance to read and found myself looking at the book thinking, “Meh.”

In the end I powered through because while I wasn’t thrilled about reading it all the time, I did continue to stick with it. I think, ultimately, the main complaint I have with A Single Roll Of The Dice is that it doesn’t feel to me like it needed to be a book. This is an exhaustive examination of a period of only about three years, and a lot of the detail here frankly feels like TMI. For example, Parsi goes into an insane level of detail on the backstory of Brazil’s diplomatic history and their desire to win a seat on the UN Security Council, which he presents to contextualize why Brazil partnered with Turkey in order to get Iran to agree to a diplomatic deal that had originally been floated by the US to ship low enriched uranium out of Iran in exchange for fuel rods (enriched elsewhere) to power a research reactor that would provide medical isotopes. In other words, the US wanted to stall Iran from enriching their uranium toward weapons grade but didn’t necessarily feel they shouldn’t be allowed to use non-arms applications of nuclear technology.

While it’s sort of interesting that Brazil wanted to get involved, the whole explanation of why Brazilian President Lula felt his country could assist here is tangental to the point that Turkey and Brazil had reasons for getting involved and ultimately got Iran to agree to the deal that US and European negotiators some months before had been unable to sell to Iranian officials. This is but one example of where Parsi over-explains, possibly just to show off how much he knows about all of the details of the complicated matter of diplomacy with Iran, but loses the forest for the trees.

I think in the end the core story here is fascinating but this should have been an in-depth article, something like 30-40 pages worth, condensed to its most pertinent essence, and not a 200+ page book of wearying tales of which ambassador was present in which meeting and what sources say was discussed and how they relayed the information to the press, ad nauseum. Most tellingly, the drama conveyed by the snappy title does not carry through to the sea of minutiae within.

I certainly didn’t hate this book, and the subject that compelled me to check it out from the library pulled me through to the end, as a pleasant side effect of the belabored point is a pretty decent education on the history and current state of international relations as pertains to Iran. There’s also a very good overview of the Iranian elections which caused so much news cycle coverage a few years ago, told from both the internal perspective of Iran as well as from the external point of view as seen by the rest of the world, and by those inside the Obama administration. For that reason alone I might be tempted to suggest that someone with some general questions about the state of affairs in Iran check out this book. But then again, it’s possible I’d recommend it only because, for now, it’s the most timely portrait of that and even then, it’s probably been supplanted by newer works covering the latter half of 2011 and the first part of 2012. And those would probably be shorter, more journalistic articles. By the end of this year, I suspect the reasons to read this book would have almost disappeared entirely unless someone really wanted to know exactly what US-Iran relations were like as of late 2011. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — June 04, 2012 at 03:24PM

author: Timothy Ferriss
name: Paul
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/21
date added: 2012/05/21
shelves: non-fiction
review:
There is an element to Timothy Ferriss‘s treatise on how to decouple yourself from the standard life track of school-work-retirement that rings a bit like P.T. Barnum. At times, hearing Ferriss wax about creating revenue streams that dump money into accounts without real heart or soul commitment gives one a cognitive dissonance effect as you wonder if the book was written as some kind of hokum he cooked up to finance his latest round of jet-setting and continent-hopping. There is a passing reference late in the book where Ferriss seems to indicate that writing is what he feels is his passion, but it still feels like he’s somehow gaming the reader.

Which would be more of an offense if he weren’t so persuasive in his efforts to sell the notion of skirting standard practices and focusing on that which is truly enjoyable in life. The early sections in the book where he describes the drudgery of the daily grind felt like he was talking directly to me at times. His passion for travel is infectious and his ability to convince readers that this sort of drastic course correction is not only possible but maybe imperative really worked on me. I suspect the efficacy of his arguments will depend somewhat on how dissatisfied the reader already is going in, but a lot of the stuff about embracing the worst case scenario and delineating your personal goals is easily adaptable to even smaller shifts in the program.

Of course, not everything Ferriss presents as shrug-worthy is really so easy. His recipe for creating businesses sounds like the kind of thing anyone could do, but I suspect that if anyone could come up with a business model that would permit a Ronco-style cash flow you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his oft-referenced New Rich. And at times he seems to be advocating a strong link between being kind of a steamrolling jerk with being successful. Maybe that’s actually true, but if so, I’d have to consider if Ferriss’s brand of success is really something I’m interested in.

Some of the sections that are full of very specific, practical advice can feel a bit like filler, and in my edition can come across as dated. I guess this is the hazard of a book that advocates technology solutions; newer developments that could be easily leveraged to facilitate some of the things Ferriss discusses (like social media or crowd-sourcing) are ignored or perhaps simply post-date the edition I read. Then again, considering Ferriss’s unusually luddite-like approach to communication tools considering his leveraging of other technological solutions, maybe he would think of the babysitting necessary for building cults of personality like Twitter or Kickstarter to be wastes of time better spent living the “dreamlines.”

I’m of two minds about The 4-Hour Work Week. On one hand it’s incredibly compelling, and easy to read, full of thought-provoking and motivating bits and pieces. On the other hand, it’s never clear how many of these strategies are effective independently of each other. As a full lifestyle design blueprint, I’m sure it could work out for people willing to devote all the effort to modeling your life after Ferriss. For those who don’t necessarily want to tell people that they only check email once a week or practice staring down people just to learn how to maintain eye contact at the risk of a profound butt whooping, I’m not sure there is enough here to really make this more than an interesting thought exercise/case study in subverting societal expectations.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — May 21, 2012 at 10:45PM

author: Jenny Lawson
name: Paul
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2012/05/17
date added: 2012/05/18
shelves: humor, memoir, new-in-2012, non-fiction
review:
Jenny Lawson is a recent discovery for me. I came to be aware of her website, The Bloggess, following the Beyoncé (the giant metal chicken) post. As a result, I don’t know for sure how much of what appears in Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is lifted directly from her blog, how much is expanded or condensed from other blog posts and how much is new material. I say this because the Beyoncé entry appears late in the book, verbatim from the blog as near as I can tell. That’s not really a complaint because the original post was awesome and deserves to be included. What I mean, really, is that it’s possible that if you’re a longtime reader of her blog, some or most of this won’t be fresh material.

For me, that doesn’t really matter because like I said, there was only one brief chapter (worth re-reading anyway) that was familiar. And, I suppose, if you were a longtime fan of Lawson’s blog, you might be the kind of person to pick up this book just to have it, or just to support her career. So I’ll assume for the sake of the argument that you’re like me and un- or passingly-familiar with The Bloggess.

The main thing to be said up front is that Lawson is hilarious. I mean, really, really, hilarious. It’s hard to remember the last time I laughed out loud at a book as frequently or as uncontrollably as I did reading Let’s Pretend. It got downright embarrassing at points to be reading this book on the train/shuttle combo I take to work, because I’d be sitting there, shoulders shaking with laughter, tears and snot running down my face, side aching and trying desperately to convince my fellow commuters that I wasn’t having some sort of attack. Which of course I couldn’t, because I was laughing too hard to breathe or speak. I’m really surprised no one called an ambulance.

What surprised me a little is how touching the book can be as well. It’s not really a see-saw kind of thing that plays with your emotions, but there are nuggets of sweet truths peppered throughout, just enough to make you understand that this isn’t simply a stand-up routine in prose. Lawson is brutally (I actually want to use the word “ruthlessly” here) honest, over-sharing almost on every page, but to perfection. I really can’t think of anyone else who can make a chapter about three miscarriages and the resulting mental breakdown that understandably accompanied them snort-beverage-through-your-nose funny, but Lawson manages it.

I will say that, in case you didn’t catch the implication from the above, Lawson’s humor is raw, no-holds-barred and totally inappropriate. Which is the same as saying it’s not for everyone. I assume, anyway; maybe there aren’t any people out there who dislike jokes about taxidermy and OD’ing on laxatives. What do I know? I do know that there are people I can think of to whom I wouldn’t necessarily give this book as a gift, so maybe that’s all I’m really saying. But for me, this was just a funny, funny book from cover to cover.

I must be really weird about comedy, though. Because my inclination is to give this book four stars, even though I loved it. Somehow something that makes me laugh feels like… I’m not sure. Easy, maybe? But then I just got through saying that I couldn’t think of a book that had made me laugh as much as this. I guess something makes me think of humor as sort of disposable, as if it could only ever reach a certain plateau if it also contained a riveting plot or something. But then I have to remember that this is a memoir, and plot isn’t really the point. Then I start to think, “Yeah, but does this book really belong up there with my all-time favorites?” Perhaps not. But then again, I can’t think of a single reason for anyone not to read this book unless you’re the kind of person who doesn’t find Lawson’s brand of warped, irreverent, neurotic writing funny. At which point I decide to stop being stingy with my ratings just to be a grump and give it my highest praise.

Seriously, though, read the book.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — May 18, 2012 at 08:53AM

author: Emily Giffin
name: Paul
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2012/05/16
shelves: novel
review:
Now and then I like to choose a book to read that maybe I wouldn’t usually try, just because it is one that means something to my wife. Her and I have pretty divergent tastes in a lot of things, but I would hope that if I found an amazing science fiction novel that I thought she might be able to enjoy, she would humor me and give it a shot. So likewise from time to time I ask her what book she would want me to read. Emily Giffin‘s Something Borrowed is, for the time being at least, among her very favorite books so when I asked which of her books she’d recommend, this is what she selected.

Something Borrowed follows Rachel, a straight-edge lawyer living in New York, and her best friend from childhood, Darcy. Darcy is a force of nature: beautiful, casually successful, engaged to a great guy and full of the self-confidence unique to the chosen few who seem to figure out early that life is a game and the deck is stacked. Next to Darcy, Rachel is mousy and doormat-ish, but like anyone who has ever had a self-absorbed friend, she accepts Darcy at face value. Then, on Rachel’s 30th birthday, she ends up alone with Darcy’s fiance, Dex, and they sleep together. At first, Rachel is horrified by her mistake, but as she timidly navigates the reconciliation with Dex, she finds that he wants more and she’s surprised to discover she does, too.

Eventually Dex and Rachel begin a full-fledged affair, fall in love and struggle with their twin betrayals of Darcy. The majority of the book is spent on this back-and-forth internal monologue where Rachel presents a series of anecdotes that gradually paint Darcy as a steamroller, an egotist, deceitful and more than a little petty. She struggles with her feelings for Dex, with her feelings for Darcy and faces some hard truths about herself in the way she lets herself get pushed around at work (in a job she hates, no less), the way she passively experiences life and the way she frames everything about herself against the backdrop that is Darcy.

The core of the book hinges on the following premise: make The Other Woman seem sympathetic and justified. To a certain degree this works, but I think perhaps not in the way Giffin intends. For one thing, the Darcy character, up until the end when Giffin pushes her so over the top to drive home the point, never really seems like she’s all that bad. Sure she’s self-obsessed and domineering, but those traits are also framed as if they’ve been present in her since elementary school so the negative impact they have on Rachel ends up feeling more like Rachel’s fault for not being honest about how that makes her feel more than justifications for betrayal. I suspect Rachel’s is supposed to be in self-discovery mode throughout the novel, but it really comes across more as if she’s discovering the truth about a friend she’s known for over twenty years. Perhaps this is intended to be revelatory but the effect to me was just to make Rachel look like an unobservant patsy.

Mostly it all feels very contrived, as if Giffin were trying her hardest to create this monstrous character in Darcy but constantly had to pull back to make it believable that this venomous wretch would actually have plural friends, or even singular friends. Meanwhile Rachel waffles and grovels and commiserates and acts flighty, never really seeming all that likable. It’s a strange sense because I don’t have a problem with protagonists who are flawed, complicated people and I don’t have a problem with antagonists who are less than pure evil, but where I struggled with the characterizations was in the way that I got a clear sense of what the author wanted me to think, but I simply couldn’t reconcile it with what I actually took from the way the narration presented them.

Granted, at the end Giffin stops splitting the middle and drops all the main players into neat little buckets which creates a pat ending to a novel that was, up until that point, happily complex. I think what I resent most about Something Borrowed is that I would have liked to read the book that was coming through the pages, but someone needed to tell Giffin that it’s okay to keep the point-of-view characters a little out of arm’s reach and to let the bad guys in books be mostly good. I would have enjoyed a story that didn’t always feel like it had to apologize for the bad behavior of the main character and had to add a twirl-ready mustache to the conflict sources. A more nuanced, more neutral approach to all the characters and their relationships would have made for a less clear cut but far more fascinating novel.

Still, I enjoyed Something Borrowed a lot more than I maybe expected to. This is a first novel so I was able to forgive a few of the rough edges like sketchy characterizations of some peripheral players and the persistent brand name dropping which I think is supposed to add an air of authenticity but comes across like product placement somehow. I do think that my wife’s suggestion that upon finishing this book I would be compelled to run out and read the follow-up, which I guess is told from Darcy’s point of view, called Something Blue, is not accurate. More than anything I think a book containing a bunch of snooty rich New Yorkers who (without irony) say they’re going to “summer” instead of “vacation” and who think the core of a person’s being can be defined by how they reacted to news of Princess Diana’s death is the kind of book I can tolerate once in a while, but not in a back-to-back kind of way. But, I won’t say that I’ll intentionally exclude Something Blue from my to-read list.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — May 16, 2012 at 09:28AM