Cool Reading V (2008)

The Best American Essays 2000

This is my second volume from the Best American "Essay" series. Out of the 24 essays or so only 6 stood out enough to mark them for later re-reading. I guess after 8 years since its publication some feel dated or not as relevant, but it's also possible to get a broader perspective of what has lasting value.

My six favorites are William Gass' "In Defense of the Book" (Harper's Magazine) which poetically describes the many ways books are superior to digital. This is a common theme among many writers but Gass approaches it in a new and original perspective, and without being Luddite. In Richard McCann's "The Resurrectionist" (Tin House) he describes what it was like to loose a kidney and have a transplant, I was really moved by his heroic fortitude and truth of experience. Peter Singer in "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" (New York Times Magazine) lays bare the ethical delima of rich nations and poor nations on a very personal level. He posits, what would you do if you could save a child from being hit by a train by sacrificing your car in its path (which contains all your worldly goods). Likewise he provocatively suggests individuals from rich countries should be sending excess wealth - beyond basic needs - to those in the poor countries. The essay "Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain" (Creative Nonfiction) is a fascinating first-person essay by Floyd Skloot who has a serious brain injury. He describes its effects both in an external social sense and inner self. Cheryl Strayed in "Heroin/e" (Doubletake) writes about her mothers death from cancer and her own subsequent degeneration into a serious heroin addiction. A dark, sad and aesthetically beautiful piece. Andrew Sullivan in "What's So Bad About Hate?" (The New York Times Magazine) discourses on what exactly is a "hate crime" and concludes there is no such thing, every person is motivated by complex inner motivations and not an external single emotion. Similar to the "war on terror", the "war on hate" is a war on an emotion that is misplaced and causes more problems than it solves.

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

Frank Norris (1870-1902) is comparable with other turn of the century American writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Harold Frederic. Like Crane he died at a young age (32), but not before producing an impressive body of work that anyone twice his age would have been proud of. He is best known for three novels: McTeague: (1899), Octopus (1901) and Vandover and the Brute (posthumously published 1914), the last critically his best. All three are now in a single volume by the Library of America ensuring Norris a place in the American literary canon.

Norris was mainly influenced by Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. McTeague, written while Norris was in college taking sophomore level grammar classes on how to write, was a conscious attempt at bringing the "European style" of Zola, in particular Zola's masterpiece L'Assommoir (1877), to American literature. With its focus on the poor working class who "degenerate" into alcohol, sex, violence and greed - it was thought poor people were naturally (genetically) disposed to these vices - Norris copies and imitates Zola's Naturalism, but set in the city of San Francisco. Critics generally hated it and saw it as cheap genre titillation of the sense hardly worthy of review, but a few saw it as groundbreaking.

Norris is incredibly easy to read, he was originally a journalist and wrote simply to get the facts across, considering himself an "anti-stylist" without using complex sentences or fancy words. His intention was to get to the truth of the thing and such a simple writing style is very effective aesthetically for the novels subject. At the same time it lacks the depth and scope of Zola; the characters often feel contrived and one-sided, the secondary characters are right out of Dickens complete with sentimentality which jars with the Realism. The novel starts out slow but picks up pace in the last third, maintaining a gripping narrative up to the surprise last sentence that left me hooting for joy.

Norris had seen early cinema and many of the scenes are described in a way that is reminiscent of early film. McTeague had such an impact on director Erich von Stroheim that he made it into an epic 10-hour long film Greed (1924), the most exspensive film ever made at the time, today it is one of the most famous films in history.

Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World

The sub-title of Beef hints of an "untold story". Actually, it turns out, there is not a single story, but many stories, each from 1 paragraph to a few pages long. These wide ranging mini stories, encyclopedic snippets really, are categorized into chapters along chronological order, from pre-history to the present. Such a presentation, without a central narrative, would not hold many readers attention, so the authors also took some trips to exotic locations and weave in travel tales related to beefy places and people. This is a standard creative non-fiction technique commonly found in books like Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History although the overall effect here is muted because there is no "mystery" to create tension. We also get some recipes, including how to make cheddar cheese.

The last chapter of the book is the best, from the 20th century to the present. It suggests the current industrialized methods of raising beef are unsustainable and the future will see changes. The earlier chapters about the history of beef are interesting, but prior to the 19th century, I found it somewhat meandering. It's not a scholarly or definitive treatment. I noticed a few mistakes; the authors use the term "Dark Ages", which has been largely deprecated by medieval historians; and they mistakenly use "sweetmeat" to refer to offal.(*)

Sort of like how a cow is made up of many cuts of beef, Beef is a a number of styles and techniques weaved together. History, travel, journalism, recipes. Some parts are more interesting than others, and it will largely depend on what the reader already knows and is interested in. It's a short book that can be read easily in a day (or cross USA plane trip).

(*) Sweetmeat is bread, sweetbread is meat. Strange as it sounds, the Oxford English Dictionary confirms it. Since I am reading an Advanced Readers Copy, this may be corrected in the final edition.

The Best American Travel Writing 2006

I bought this anthology based on the strength of its user reviews on Amazon and LibraryThing, plus my positive experiences with another title in the series The Best American Science and Nature Writing. However I had serious trepidations, after all isn't modern travel writing mostly just light touristic pieces found in Reader's Digest or the local newspaper, barely hidden attempts at selling us packaged vacations? Was I ever wrong and pleasantly surprised, the 2006 collection turns out to be one of the best books I've read this year. There are 26 essays and not one is bad, they are all fantastic and at least 4 of them are classics. Normally in anthologies like this I'm happy when a third are favorited enough to mark the page for re-reading later, but here it's almost 100%; marking the pages is superfluous.

The guest editor for 2006 is Tim Cahill, founder and editor of Outside magazine, so it is perhaps not surprising that, as a professional editor of a magazine that caters to travel writing, he was like a Saudi Sheik with unlimited funds on a shopping spree in Paris, able to pick and choose from the best the world has to offer, the only limit being 320 pages. But how does he pick the "best"? "In choosing pieces for this anthology", he says, "I've looked for the best stories I could find", [emphasis added] - clarifying what he means by story, "if I can't find a story, I often feel I'm being beaten over the head with an encyclopedia. Stories are the sole written instrument that can bring tears to our eyes, or make us laugh.. and they are more fun to read. Story is of the essence. " This collection then is a testament to Cahill's ideal of travel writing as story, and it succeeds brilliantly. Cahill also posits that America is currently in a "Golden Age" of travel writing and after reading this collection I might agree.

If you read only one travel writing anthology this would be an ideal place to start. Even if your not interested in travel writing as a genre, most of these pieces were not written as strictly travel writing, or for traditional travel magazines. The articles are mostly by well established and known journalists and novelists and non-fiction authors in top-tier magazines like National Geographic, The New Yorker, GQ and others. I look forward to reading more from this series, but based on admittedly shallow investigations of user reviews, none of the other volumes in the series look as good as this one. Perhaps 2005 was just a very good year for travel writing, perhaps Cahill has an unusually good talent for picking the best articles, or perhaps since this is my first experience with the series, and my initial low expectations - whatever the case this volume will be revisted in later years and has earned a satisfying place on my bookshelf.

Letters From My Windmill

Alphonse Daudet (1840-97) was one of the most popular French authors of the last decades of the 19th century. He was a peer of Emile Zola and read and appreciated by Charles Dickens and others. Today he is almost entirely forgotten. Soon after his death his work suffered some serious criticisms, and it has only been recently that scholars have begun to restore his reputation. He was from Provence in southern France and before he became an accomplished writer he was as a charismatic oral storyteller with a looming presence, long fingers and thick beard that could entrance an audience. Thus reading him today his style can seem antiquated but when heard through the voice of a storyteller it has more resonance. Apparently his writing is very difficult to translate because of his heavy use of poetic styles and slang terms, and I do believe much has been lost in translation.

Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869) is one of his earliest and considered one of his best. It is an anthology of newspaper pieces he wrote in his 20s about life in Provence. Mostly it is recounting local legends, ghost stories, humor and encounters with local characters, embedded with extra flourishes to give the tales a little more punch to make up for what would have been more dramatic told in person. They are framed by the first story which tells how Daudet found an old abandoned wind mil and set up there in a picturesque surrounding to write the stories. The stories are generally short, enchanting, naive and innocent bliss that captures some of the romance of Provence and 19th century life before modernization.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai

The Bridge Over the River Kwai (1952) is a short genre WWII adventure tale loosely based on real events. Its literary virtues, self-conscious and formulaic, can be attributed to Joseph Conrad's influence (Boulle's favorite author), in particular the novel Lord Jim (1900), about Victorian moral certitudes within a crumbling colonial empire, the ridged view of the system being more important than the individual - old ground for the the modernists by the 1950s. Boulle was French, and the character Colonel Nicholson was based on two actual French officers Boulle had known while in the military - but Nicholson was an old stereotype, more appropriate in World War One, by World War Two he was an anachronism and would never risen to the rank of officer in the British army, at least not without being killed by his own troops.

Boulle is best known as author of Planet of the Apes (1963) and Bridge oddly foreshadows it with a quote about the Japanese: "Monkeys dressed up as men! The way they drag their feet and slouch around, you'd never take them for anything human." He would transfer the relationship between Japanese soldier and Allied prisoner into the future exploring issues of morality between master and slave, man and animal. In the end Boulle is Conrad-light, a generation or two late, with a talent for ironic racism. Excellent movie adaptation as a sheer thriller but looses the depth, what there is.

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

The Perfect Storm started out as an article in Outside magazine, where Junger was an occasional free-lance contributor, although his day job was a lumber jack and waiting tables. When he wasn't slinging an axe or chops, he expanded the original article into a book, his first, published in 1997 when he was about 34 years old. It did well on the New York Times list and quickly went on to a big-budget star-powered movie. The natives of Gloucester, the New England fishing town at the center of the story, gave it a positive reception, which for Junger was its highest praise. In fact it made some of them famous, Linda Greenlaw went on to write her own book The Hungry Ocean.

Stylistically the success of the book is remarkable because the final moments of Andrea Gail, the climax of the book, are a mystery. Jungler says it was "journalism by analogy". But the effect works well by lending the account authenticity while engaging the readers imagination to fill in the blanks, making it all the more terrifying. In addition it lends a great deal of sympathy and compassion to the friends and relatives of the dead, who also live with the unknown and terrors of the minds eye. Most non-fiction authors would have no problem interjecting some fictional dialog or scenes to make the book more readable, but it would have been a lie, the truth is unknown and it showed a great deal of integrity on Jungers part to take the high but more risky and difficult road.

Of course the book is about the storm, and not just the Andrea Gail. Probably the most riveting part of the book concerns the Air National Guard helicopter that forced landed in 100 foot seas. The details of this are well documented and Junger is thus able to sustain a strong narrative without falling back on tangents, or "analogy," as he does in the Andrea Gai story - which happens to make up four-fifths of the book. Thus some of the most popular complaints by readers is that it doesn't flow well and has awkward anecdotal tangents breaking up the storyline. However for anyone with a natural curiosity with how things work (fishing, boats, rescue), this type of braided narrative - common in creative non-fiction these days - is perfectly normal.

Overall I'm impressed with the books integrity and compassion. The writing is workman-like, dense like a magazine article but not stylistically original, except for the effective use of journalistic analogy to tell a story.

Siddhartha

Much has been written from a spiritual and literary view about this famous 1922 book by Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse. I will look at it from a historical context perspective. Hesse was born in 1877 into the generation immediately after the German victory of the Franco-Prussian War. Think of the generation in America born after WWII, or in England after the Napoleonic Wars. It was a generation full of bright futures and expectations, Germany would at long last fulfill its destiny on a global stage. As it turned out it was this same generation that lead Germany into the misery and defeat of WWI (1914-17) and the dream and future died in the slaughter of the trenches. So it was in the aftermath in 1922 Hesse the philosopher became popular with Germans with his introspection and inward looking examination of what life really meant, what is really important. The outer world had defeated Germany and it would find strength and solace by looking inward. Perhaps it is not surprising that another generation resonated with this same message of rejecting the outer world and embracing inner vision, the counter-culture of America in the 1960s, when Hesse's book first became widely read and known in English speaking countries.

A Year in Provence

Mayle's vision of Provence is pure fantasy. It's true, the details of food and weather and habits are accurate, but it rings of 19th century English colonial patriarchy. The French "peasants" are portrayed like happy go lucky children living in a Romanticized garden of Eden uncorrupted by the real world of London and Paris. Mayle is the benevolent Patriarch in contrast to the towns cast of cartoonish personalities (it's no accident this book was adapted to a comedic TV series). If it was a novel at least there would be a plot, but instead it's a faux anthropological survey with Mayle studying the life and habits of local natives and imparting information for those back home who wish to follow his colonial ambitions (Mayle was in advertising). Its been said travel writing is stuck in the 19th century and this is a prime example of the genre with a modern voice. The book has been very popular - it really is very enjoyable at a certain level - but believing the fantasy and traveling there expecting a similar experience is being complicit in a form of modern day colonialism. Mayle apparently has since left Provence because the town changed - one can only imagine why.

With that said I enjoyed reading about Provence and plan to read Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin or Letters from My Windmill published in 1869 - it is beloved in France and offers perhaps an authentic French perspective on the region just before modernization.

Penguin Island

I only read the first 177 of 324 pages - I'm not a huge fan of old satires when the historical context is unclear, I'm reading the words but not really understanding, it's an in-joke with me on the outside. The first half was a lot of fun because I knew European history enough to understand the allegories and allusions . The second half of the modern period is beyond me and tiresome. One day I may return to finish when I have more context.

The Hoksinson Festival

Helen E. Hokinson (1893-1949) was a cartoonist for The New Yorker from about 1925 to 1949. She died in a plane accident at age 55 cutting her career short at the height of popularity and leaving many despondent fans. Her cartoons, collected in this volume, are of her trademark "dowagers", or late middle aged women typical of the period, denizens of woman's clubs, beauty parlors, art galleries and summer resorts. They are "full figured", wear funny hats, and the sins of the flesh tend to the dietary. She called them her "Best Girls".

Hokinson is mostly forgotten today, she was the product of a generation that has mostly passed away, and with woman's liberation, her work is no longer politically correct. Yet there is something warm, timeless and appealing, sort of like the soup grandmother used to make. It certainly brings back fond memories of my grandmother, and helps explain some of my mothers own tendencies as she moves on in years. A great collection of a forgotten but beloved artist.

It should be noted that James Reid Parker was a "silent collaborator" with Hokinson, he dreamed up the situations and wrote the captions to Hokinson's drawings.

Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

Scheisshaus Luck belongs on a groaning haunted shelf labeled "Holocaust Testament". Most are by Jewish survivors, but Scheisshaus is unusual because it is by a "gentile" (non-Jewish) French boy of about 17 years old who was accidentally caught up in the Nazi death machine. Pierre Berg's account of Auschwitz is fairly unique. His style of writing is one of cynicism and religious irreverence with romance, sex, humor and a young mans rebellious spirit that keeps him alive. This as not great literature like Elie Weisel or Primo Levi, but the story is gripping and compelling, I had trouble putting it down as it smoothly moves from one death defying incident to the next. As a story of survival it is remarkable, but sadly not uncommon for the time. The scenes in the wars aftermath during the Russian occupation of Germany are fascinating, in particular the descriptions of the Russian army as a motley horde of mixed Asian steppe races moving into Eastern Europe, the great ancestral fear of Germany come to pass through their own doing. Berg's imprisonment lasted only 18 months but by the end it feels like a lifetime has passed, the reader has aged years along with Berg, a sense of transition into a new era of innocence lost.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006

As usual with this series, I learned a lot in the 2006 edition.

In "Dr. Ecstasy" I learned about Alexander Shulgin who, in a Frankensteinian laboratory in his home in CA, has single-handily created over 200 psychedelic compounds, including ecstasy. In "My Bionic Quest for Bolero" a deaf man describes his quest to restore his hearing with cutting edge "bionic" ear implants (this article became a book: Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World). In "Show Me the Science", the ever fascinating Daniel C. Dennett shakes his head at the anti-science movements and their techniques, notably the "intelligent design" crowd, but just as easily applicable to global warming deniers, Holocaust deniers and anyone with a political agenda that is at odds with science. In "Buried Answers" I learned about the business of autopsy and how important they are and how rarely they are performed these days.

"Conservation Refugees" is probably the most important article of the book. Mark Dowie introduces the concept and term "conservation refugee" and it since become more commonly used with this article a sort of genesis. Conservation refugees are (usually) native people who have been oppressed or expelled from their traditional lands after those lands have been put into conservation, usually by one of the big NGO's such as the World Wildlife Fund or Conservation International. The result is the growing recognition that "wild" lands can not be left barren of people, that humans play an integral part of nature.

"The Mummy Doctor" is a great human interest story of the worlds leading expert on the dissection of mummies. The graphic descriptions of organs like cardboard and smells are priceless. In "Out of Time" I went on a journey into the Amazon and lived with a small band of dangerous head-hunters with little contact with the outside world. In "Buried Suns" I learned about the underground nuclear testing in Nevada.

These are my favorites, there are more, most of which can be read online at The Online Index to The Best American Science and Nature Writing Series.

The Analects of Confucius

I found the 2007 translation by Burton Watson to be highly readable. I know nothing about Confucius or even Chinese history but still found many valuable passages. It is easy to see how this (and I presume other Confucius texts) could form the ethical foundation of a culture, not unlike the Bible or Tora and other sacred texts. It's even more remarkable for being secular and not mythological based, which lends it even greater credibility, at least for this modern reader. Its emphasis on "humanity" can never go out of style. Considering its age this is certainly among the greatest books of world literature.

Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

In 1773 James Boswell (age 33) convinced his older friend Samuel Johnson (age 64) to go on a 4 month tour of Scotland. Boswell took on the role of tour guide and confidant introducing Johnson to the "lairds" and "chiefs" of Boswell's native Scotland. For Johnson, it was his first trip outside of England. They each wrote a travel book, with Johnson focusing on Scotland, and Boswell on Johnson.

Boswell's Tour is something of a literary breakthrough. At the time it was not considered good manners to be too specific about ones personal habits but Boswell often talks about seemingly mundane things that for a modern reader would seem normal in a travelogue but for the day was scandalous. Boswell repeated conversations with well known figures that didn't portray them in a glowing light and this resulted in years of tit-for-tat newspaper editorial attacks and defenses. Later editions would include letters, apologies and defenses. Today with all the personalities long dead it seems like a Hollywood tabloid. In the context of the times, Johnson and Boswell were seen by some critics as outsiders gatecrashing the establishment - Johnson was a provincial "hack" as one Londoner called him, and Boswell was Scottish, damning enough on its own, but with a personal reputation as a "rouge" (ladies man) and heavy drinker (demons that would follow him to the grave). However their reputations as towering figures of the Enlightenment would soon be solidified, further increasing the popularity of this book.

As a work of literature Boswell's account is warm and endearing. Johnson and Boswell are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively. Boswell at once mythologizes Johnson hanging on his every word, a great master who can say no falsehood, and at the same time makes him into a lovable blundering traveler. Certainly Charles Dickens' Mr. Pickwick of the Pickwick Papers was influenced by Boswell's Johnson. As travel literature Boswell's observations of Scottish life are valuable. Boswell had an excellent memory and kept a daily diary so we have very exact details of food and conversation, although Boswell did not think much of scenery or geography.

Tour to the Hebrides was a best-seller from its first publication and is still widely read. Its influence is probably hard to quantify, it was partly responsible for popularizing the English tradition of traveling to Scotland which would be so common among the literary set in the late 18th and 19th centuries (and to this day). One can only wonder how many travelers have re-traced Johnson and Boswell on a literary vacation. In the early 20th century a cache of Boswell's unpublished papers were discovered in a castle, among them the complete unedited manuscript of the Tour. This was published in 1936, it is substantially different, with many passages cut from the original restored, it is the better and recommended.

Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

I just finished reading Piers Paul Read's Alive (1974) a few days ago, and so fresh with names, maps and time lines, I had high hopes Miracles in the Andes would add a new dimension to this amazing story. Unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed, all the more so given the generally good reviews Miracle has been getting. It is perhaps inevitable in the shadow of Read's classic masterpiece that anything else will pale in comparison. The re-telling of events from Parrado's perspective is interesting but misses a lot - for example he was in a coma the first three days of the accident - and he doesn't seem to add much that is new to Read's version - which almost without exception is better told.

Beyond a retelling of the events, I had hoped Parrado would reveal something new about himself and the other survivors, but instead if often read like hagiography, glossing over the differences among the group to show them as united friends, discounting and minimizing character defects. It reminds me of how the Catholic Church writes history of saints, and it is probably no coincidence that the survivors were from Catholic backgrounds, and saints in the minds of true believers who saw the hand of God at work in this "Miracle in the Andres". I was hoping for a more in depth psychological examination of the survivors, a sort of personality x-ray to bring them to life, to intimately know them as friend or brother. Instead there is a polite respectful distance, which is frustrating, given the intimate nature of the experience.

Despite these sentiments I still recommend the book to anyone who has read Alive. Parrado's inner struggle with life and death - while not exactly original or new - is profound and worth the reminder of what is important. There are also new pictures, and an Epilogue with brief bio's of what happened to the survivors after the rescue to the present day. Whatever the faults, as the men age, and the myth grows, more books and films will appear to hopefully peel back more layers behind the "Miracle" in the Andres. But Alive remains the best book of this disaster and it is hard to imagine it ever being replaced.

The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World--Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home

The Jungle Effect is what Dr. Miller noticed when her San Francisco practice patients went on a "native diet". Unlike typical Western diets, which caused her patients health problems, when they switched to native diets - traditional foods from native cultures - their health improved, often dramatically. To learn more about native diets, Dr. Miller visited places such as Iceland, Nigeria, Crete, the Amazon, Okinawa to discover what they are doing right. Thousands of years of human trial and error, according to Dr. Miller, have selected for the best diets for human health and longevity.

Dr. Miller is not new in this approach. Dr. Weston A. Price in the 1930s saw the same thing and today there is a large and active community of native nutritionists surrounding Price and his legacy (see Sally Fallon's classic Nourishing Traditions). However Miller's book does offer some new and interesting perspectives. She actually traveled to native regions and sampled the foods and diets, and this makes for fascinating reading in an up to date journalistic human-interest story style. She dispels the notion that genetics plays a significant role, suggesting that anyone of an ethnic background can adopt any native diet (eg. a European can benefit from an Okinawa diet). Finally, she suggests food is more than its parts, each dish is symbiotic, so it is important to eat the entire food way, not just its elements. For example olive oil is good, but best in combination with the entire Mediterranean diet. Oddly enough, she also recommends mixing and matching various native diets (she personally cooks from different regions each night).

Dr. Miller's book is an excellent primer for anyone not already familiar with native nutrition. Her research supports and adds to the work done by the Weston A. Price Foundation, with a slightly different approach. Her field-trips make for excellent reading and reveal specific regional food-ways. The Jungle Effect is a valuable contribution to the growing literature, and an easy and fun to read introduction to native nutrition.

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974) is one of the most widely read books in the Outdoor/Adventure genre. It continually ranks in Amazon's top-25 sellers for its category, and National Geographic ranks it #58 on its list of all-time 100 Best Outdoor Literature. The story grips you by the collar and pulls you forward never letting up until the end. You wonder if you read a book, or were actually there, it is effortless. Alive is about a group of mostly under-25 men faced with starvation and physical endurance in a remote and harsh geographic region, it reminded me of two other classic narrative non-fiction works, Alfred Lansing's Endurance (1959), and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea (2001).

I have some minor quibbles. In the interest of a gripping narrative, Read sacrificed character development, so it was often difficult to keep names straight. By the end, about a handful stood out as "knowable", but the rest it seemed like we hardly knew them. I found myself constantly shifting back and forth between the pictures as I came across a name to remind myself who the person was. This worked, but it was a lot of work on my part that could have been smoother had Read devoted a chapter or two to more fully develop the important characters.

In addition, there is now a new book out by Nando Parrado (Miracle in the Andes (2006)) which tells the story from a survivors perspective, and while I have not read it yet, it is reported that he shows things in a different light. Contrary to Read's image of a quarreling fractious group, Parrado emphasizes less titillatingly banal aspects, and goes into the deeper transformations members went through. It is generally being reviewed as a more subtle, introspective and mature work. It has the advantage of being a first-person account and not a journalistic summary, but Alive was written within a year of the events and so retains perhaps a more authentic memory.

Alive is and will always be a classic survival story, in particular for those involving cannibalism. I can't wait to see the two movies based on it plus Nando Parrado's book.

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction

City is David Macaulay's second book. Unlike most of Macaulay's other books in this series, rather than a single building, he draws an entire city. It is interesting and I learned a lot, the Romans were more advanced with basic infrastructure like plumbing and heating than I had imagined. I think Macaulay's subject is too broad though, so he isn't able to get into the hyper-detail that otherwise is the strength of his work that makes it so fascinating. It feels like a book for 14 year olds and not enough for the adults. Still, like all of David Macaulay's books, it is well worth it.

The Known World

A novel full of compassion in most unexpected ways, "what literature should, and can be."

This is a difficult book for me to review - I've read all the "professional" reviews I could find online, two stand out as must-reads. Luckily they are pro and con so you get a good contrast of perspectives, depending if you like or dislike.

Pro
The Known World, by Stephen M. Deusner in PopMatters

Con
The Known World, by Dan Schneider in storySouth

A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontline of Humanity

This is my second biography of a top level United Nations humanitarian official (after Chasing the Flame) and the subject matter makes for surprisingly riveting reading. Unlike the image of a desk-bound UN bureaucrat, some of these guys put their lives on the line, out in the field in remote jungles, working with some of the worlds most recluse and violent groups, and dealing with massive crisis at the center of a global event like the Indian ocean tsunami. If there is a single hero that saves the world, probably the closes the world has is the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, or the UN Emergency Relief Chair (these boring titles don't do the job justice).

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian, worked at the UN from 2003 to 2006 and this is an eyewitness account of the disasters and problems he dealt with during that period. Egeland is probably most familiar to American readers as the man who called the US "stingy" after the 2004 Tsunami when the US pledged only $15 million in aid - the details of this incident are fully revealed in the book but suffice it to say he was mis-characterized by right-wing fanatics. Other conflicts Egeland discusses include: Ivory Coast, Iraq, Columbia, Darfur, Lebanon, Zimbabwe and Uganda. These are very personal accounts and in some cases Egeland is the first person to meet with rebel groups, it's fascinating and revealing how they live and operate. At the same time Egeland does not fully explain the historical context of the conflicts so it can be taxing to read minutia detail - I often found myself wading through areas of specialized knowledge to the more riveting human interest stories.

The title refers to the bottom 1 billion of the world who are often ignored and bear the brunt of problems. Despite the litany of death and disaster, Egeland is optimistic that the world is improving, it is better now than it was 30 years ago and so on back in time. People like Egeland, those who devote their lives to humanitarian work, are really among the worlds heroes.

NOTE: If you have already read Chasing the Flame, this book makes a fantastic coda as Jan Egeland started his job at the UN the very day Sergio was killed, at the Canal Hotel bombing, so he brings much of the recent history of the UN up to the present from where Chasing the Flame left off.

Desert Places

Desert Places (1996) is Australian adventurer Robyn Davidson's second major travel book, her first being the better known Tracks (1980). She repeats a camel journey through the desert, but this time in Western India in the company of a nomadic people known as the Rabari. As usual, Davidison is full of lovable contradictions, sweet one moment and ready to kill en masse the next. Likewise her approach to the book takes a consciously anti-travel literature track, just about everything we associate with travel literature Davidson turns the tables. Or, at least she tries, but in the end it is still fundamentally part of the genre. For most readers, who are not conversant with the recent scholarly debates about travel literature (in relation to post-colonialism, post-modernism) the overall effect may be a little off-putting, with one New York Times critic interpreting Davidson's irreverence as "bad faith". In the end I think Davidson succeeded in writing a good travel narrative, updated with politically correct concerns about the fate of traditional nomadic people under the homogenizing assault of globalization - but her overall attempt at breaking out of the genre into something greater probably did not succeed. Still it is a fascinating look into what life is like for the Rabari, stripped of romanticism and from the perspective of women, and that makes it an important, unique and worthwhile journey.

Island Nights' Entertainments

Island Nights' Entertainments is a collection of short-stories by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1893. Stevenson died young in 1894 so this is some of his last works but represents a signal change in his writing style that left some clue to where he was headed had he lived longer. Stevenson was best known and beloved for his Romantic works like Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde and Kidnapped. However when he decided to move to the worlds most romantic place, the South Seas, his work took a turn towards realism. Stevenson no doubt thought he was growing up and becoming a more "serious" writer, although some of his contemporary critics at the time thought his realist works were among his most forgettable and that it was a shame he didn't stick with what he was best known for. However what his critics could not see was that realism was soon to morph into modernism through the introduction of symbolism, and Stevenson was already beginning to experiment, at least a decade before Joseph Conrad. I have no doubt that had Stevenson lived he would have been known as a modernism pioneer, he was just on the cusp with stories like "The Beach of Falesa". This represents Stevenson's first realistic story, focused less on the plot than on the mannerisms of society. As Stevenson wrote in a letter to his friend back in England: "It is the first realistic South Seas story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else that has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost - there was not etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library."

The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars

The Eves of Heaven is an "auto-biography" by Thong Van Pham. In fact it is written by his son Andrew, but he takes on the first person voice of his father Thong, similar to the technique used by Dave Eggers in What Is the What?. It is difficult to know how accurate it is, or what degree of artistic license is involved, but in a way it doesn't matter because as creative non-fiction it reads like a novel.

Not only is the story highly engrossing, thrilling and fascinating, but it is humane. Thong never seems to loose his sense of dignity and respect for life despite the horrors of violence, drugs and prostitution that stalk him. The lush prose is deliciously sensuous in one chapter, then shifts to scenes of deprivation the next, like a master chef playing the pallet between extremes of texture and temperature - and like the fusion of French and Asian culture that is Vietnam.

The Eaves of Heaven covers over 30 years of war in Vietnam as it transitioned from a "feudal" age to the modern world in one or two generations - the Japanese in WWII, the French and then the Americans. One mans lifetime saw it all from start to end. Through this wonderfully written, humane and moving memoir of a single life, the reader is able to more fully understand the Vietnam experience as a whole.

Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered

There are so many lengthy difficult books about the Early Middle Ages, written for and by specialists, what a delight to find a short and easy to read summary of the latest scholarship of this rapidly changing multi-disciplinary field, written for a general audience by a medieval scholar with an up to date and useful bibliography.

The term "Dark Ages" has a long and complicated history ever since its invention by Italian Humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries. Modern medieval historians try to avoid the term Dark Ages with its pejorative implications. However some will still justify its use because the period was "dark to us", because of the lack of written record. However even this is no longer the case, a wealth of archaeological information has surfaced to enlighten the period. The old prejudices of a violent, backwards and stagnant time are falling away. Was it different from Rome? Yes, but to apply a value judgment of a "Dark Age" is inappropriate, this powerful metaphor has sadly shaped many peoples vision of the period.

Peter Wells examines some of the enduring myths and shows, through new archaeological findings, rather than a sudden break with the past, a continuity of history. For example there is a myth that urban centers declined or were abandoned, Wells shows substantial evidence this was not the case, using a case example of London. There is a myth of continuous violence and warfare, however Wells suggests this could not have been the case because of freedom of movement and trade that was occurring. There is a myth that technology halted or went backwards, when in fact it was a period of innovation, including the deep plow, horse harness and 3-field system which created a surplus in food, population and specialization. There is a myth that Roman roads deteriorated, which is true, but the original Roman roads were built on ancient roadways and were mainly only meant for military purposes anyway. Artwork flourished in this period finding new and original expressions.

Barbarians to Angels is a quick read for a general audience that summarizes a lot of recent and difficult scholarship. For more specialized works, to understand how we know what we know, the "proof", there is an excellent Bibliography.

The Return of Martin Guerre

This short work - about the length of a long journal article - reconstructs the dramatic events behind the very well known 16th century legal case of Martin Guerre, in southern France. Natalie Davis is the first modern historian to scientifically investigate the facts of the case and try to answer questions of what exactly happened and why. First published in 1984, the book today is generally considered a classic because it crossed a number of boundaries. First, it is one of the leading examples of "microhistory", which in medieval history means documenting the lives of peasants, which represented 90% of the population, but who left behind very little evidence for historians to work with, and have thus traditionally been under-represented in history. This school of history arose in the 1970s and when this book was published in 1984 it was sort of the height of fashion (which doesn't take away from its value). Secondly, the book has a wide popular readership because of the film of the same name, for which Davis was a consultant. Finally, it is a solid and commendable work of scholarship. Unlike other popular histories (such as A Distant Mirror), it sacrificed nothing in its scholarly integrity while remaining approachable and entertaining, thus introducing many general readers to real medieval history without much requirement for specialized knowledge. The story of Martin Guerre continues to be re-told centuries later around the world, its power and vitality undiminished by centuries of time or the cold lens of scholarship.

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, and other stories

A feel good character study of a kindly old Victorian English boys school professor. It is too saccharine sweet sentimental for my taste. Hilton tells us how wonderful Mr Chips is, how funny he is and beloved but doesn't convincingly show it, it's all sentimentality. I can see how it would remind older readers of Victorian era professors they had, sure and confident of themselves and the world before it blew up in WWI - the older reader could "know" Mr. Chips the archetype based on an amalgamation of professors they had grown up with, so it's hard to be critical of that. But Hilton has not fully fleshed out Mr Chips so he comes across for modern readers flat, a cartoon character out of a British children's boarding school genre novel.

The illustrations by Dianna Diamond in the Readers Digest edition are excellent, photographic in detail. I have not seen a movie adaptation but hope to do so as I think the sentimentality will transfer well to film.

The Duel

The Duel (1905) is Russian author Aleksandr Kuprin's realist masterpiece, wining him literary fame and friendship with Anton Chekov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Nobel Prize-winning Ivan Bunin and Leo Tolstoy. Kuprin was a born storyteller and has been compared with Kipling and Jack London. Like London, however, Kuprin "degenerated" later in life with the vices of women (prostitutes) and drink and his works similarly became sensational, like with the lurid account of prostitutes in The Pit (1915). But he reached a pinnacle of high art with The Duel.

The Duel explores "honor" in its many permutations. Honor in career, love, and the hypocrisy inherit. The main character, Romashov, is a 21 year old military officer in training in a backwater provincial town where everyone knows everyone and gossip spreads quickly. Kuprin's realistic portrayal of the horrors of Russian military life is a wonderfully rich portrait of an "odious and wanton liaison [of] gambling, drinking, soul-killing, monotonous regimental routine, with never a single inspiring word, never a ray of light in the black, hopeless darkness."

Romashov experiences a number of setbacks in his career and his romantic notions of being a hero to the Czar are shattered by cruel realities - on the brink of suicide (a common occurrence in his regiment) he undergoes a change when he discovers salvation through empathizing with the sufferings of others: "it was clear to [Romashov] at once how petty and insignificant was his own sorrow in comparison with [his friends] cruel fate." By rising above soul-crushing military doctrine of honor and violence, and finding instead sympathy with others, he finds freedom, "a proud, triumphant feeling of malicious joy and defiance."

To this end Romashov then discovers that most professions are based on "mistrust of the honor and morality of mankind.. supervisors and official, policemen, book-keepers, priests, etc.." and there are only two careers that are truly noble, science/art. and manual labor. Thus Romashov navigates his way through the world of honor in the sphere of his career, but he has a fatal flaw and that is love. In the end he is tricked by honor in love (or lack thereof) and it is his undoing. Kuprin was not entirely happy with the novels ending, and I tend to agree that its sensationalism mires it in the 19th century. It could have been a modernist novel had Romashov's duel ended in a different way, such as the alternative path suggested by his friend Nasanski. However it is still dramatic and satisfying.

The Duel is available online its original 1916 English trans.

The War of the Worlds: Deluxe Illustrated Edition

This is a multimedia collection of primary and secondary works about H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds and Orson Welles' 1938 radio play. It contains:

1. Forward (Ray Bradbury)
2. Introduction (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
3. A short biography of Orson Welles and history of the radio play (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
4. Mars in popular culture (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
5. A short biography of H.G.Wells and history of the book (Holmsten/Lubertozzi)
6. Transcript of Orson's radio play (Howard Kotch [w/ Welles])
7. The complete text of the novel (H. G. Wells)
8. Afterword (Ben Bova)
9. An audio-CD including 5 tracks:
9a. "The War of the Worlds", the complete 1938 play (1 hour)
9b. Orson Welles press conference the day after
9c. H.G and Orson co-interviewed in 1940.
9d. An excerpt from a 1968 radio version in Buffalo, NY that caused similar panic
9e. An excerpt of Orson looking back on the play 40 years after.
10. Many illustrations and pictures.

This is a very generous book. Even if you already own the novel, there is enough supplemental here to make it worth having. My only complaint is that H. G. Welles original book is not very good, until Orson immortalized it on radio in 1938 (with substantial changes) it was not one of H.G.'s most well known works. Indeed, Orson's adaptation is genius, while H.G.'s story is mostly derivative of the existing genre known as Invasion Literature which was very popular in the run up to World War I. Having already read Ther Battle of Dorking (1871) I felt like I was reading it all over again, but less convincing, repetitive and sort of sappy. If it hadn't been for Orson's radio play I suspect the novel would be a minor work of H.G. Wells and not the iconic 20th century story it has become. Luckily the hour long broadcast is freely available online, but this book, if found cheap enough, is a great resource and a lot of fun.

The Old Curiosity Shop

The Old Curiosity Shop is Dickens 4th novel, serialized between 1840 and 1841. It was his best selling work to date and contains some strong auto-biographical elements concerning the death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, as seen in the death of Nell. After he finished Dickens said he though it his best work and would always be his favorite, although this sentiment would later change with David Copperfield. It sold well in America - one of the best known stories about the novel is that readers would line up at the dock, as ships came in from England, asking if Nell had died, however this is apocryphal.

Critically the novel has had a mixed reception and it is generally considered to be near (but not at) the bottom of his 16 major works. The character of Nell in particular has been the focus of scorn for being too sentimental or "vulgar" - I found certain passages of her death to be unreadable, and during her escapades around the countryside I found myself caring not one bit what happened (I almost gave up the novel entirely but luckily kept going). Up until about page 340 (of 521) the novel is fairly unfocused and not much happens. The remaining 150 pages or so are probably the best. The character of Quilp is the most memorable - Dickens doesn't fully flesh it out, but it is obvious from his habits that Quilp is an old sea-hand, old enough to have been in the Napoleonic Wars and probably one of many veterans who plagued Englands unemployed ranks in the years after. Thus for me he held a certain fascination not only as a comic "Ogre", but as an archetype of what probably was not uncommon in the period.

Despite the attention on Nell she is not really the hero of the novel, who is Richard 'Dick' Swiveller, a name not dissimilar to the authors own and Dickens' favorite character. He is transformed by 3 weeks in a coma and comes out the other side strong enough to take on and beat the evil Quilp.

Despite problems this is still a Dickens novel and fairly good. There are certain scenes and passages and characters that will live with me always.

For more in depth, an outstanding and enlightening review can be found here by "Murr".

Getting into Guinness: One Man's Longest, Fastest, Highest Journey Inside the World's Most Famous Record Book

Getting into Guinness appears to be the first ever "biography" of The Guinness Book of World Records (as it's called in the States). "The Book" (as Olmsted and others sometimes call it) is the worlds best selling book, second only to the Bible, its sales buoyed year after year by its target market of 7 to 15 year old boys. However Getting into Guinness is for adults and is a fascinating behind the scenes look for all of us who remember, for example, the man with the longest fingernails - in case your curious he recently offered to cut them off and sell them on Ebay for a quarter million, but no one bid.

Olmstead, in the tradition of "Gonzo" journalism, writes about not only the book, and its sub-culture, but actively participated by breaking a few records himself. Thus the chapters move back and forth from scholarly archival material of history and the psychological and historical forces that have made it so popular, to his own accounts of trying to bread into The Book on two occasions (playing poker and playing golf). Throughout Olmstead investigates some of the most prolific record breakers, the most famous, the most bizarre and the most dangerous. He fluctuates between calling record breakers "fame junkies", addicted to getting into the book like alcoholics - to modern day Olympians: "it is the last bastion of pure [sports] amateurism, celebrating the drives and passions that were once embodied by the Olympic Games."

The Book started as a dry encyclopedia in 1956 meant to be used in Pubs as a reference so that bar disputes among patrons could be settled (it's founder, Hugh Beaver (1890-1967), worked for the Guinness Brewing Company). However it quickly caught the public's fascination and within a year people were breaking records for no other reason than to get into the book. This phenomenon, known as "Guinessport" in which odd-ball "sports", like balancing a milk jug on your head while walking backwards, is a direct result of competition among the fame junkies to do one better than the previous record holder.

Over the years The Book has changed, originally it was about nature and science with little focus on people, but today it is exactly the opposite being almost entirely about human records. The Books golden age was the 1960s and 70s, a period when consumer culture and materialism led to more comfortable lives and free time to live out dreams, and find 15 minutes of fame when there were otherwise limited channels. Today as countries around the world go through this same process of development, like in China, they are also discovering The Book - in 2004, China entered the "top 10 countries with most records" and is expected to continue upwards in rank over time.

Getting into Guinness is a breezy magazine style human interest read, probably the perfect format for the subject. A more scholarly account would be possible but it wouldn't be nearly as fun.

Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction

This appears to be a CliffNotes version of a longer textbook. It requires a fair amount of knowledge of English history background, the subject is so vast that names, events and places are not explained by assumed to be understood. It's sort of the worst of all worlds, a text loaded with dry statistics and no central "big picture", then condensed. Parts are good, worth skimming through and picking out the sections and chapters of interest and for the recent bibliography.

The Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction

This is Macaulay's first book (1973) and with Castle is probably his most popular, but he had yet to fully develop his techniques and while the basics are there, it is thin in comparison to the only other Macaulay book I've read (Mill, 1983). Still it provides an intimate and detailed cross-generational perspective, the sense of passages of time through the lives of people contrasted with the permanence of architecture is very well done. The Cathedral no longer seems a cold stone monument but embodies vibrant and living hopes and dreams.

The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2005 (The Best American Series)

I'm writing this review in July 2008 about an anthology of magazine articles published in 2004 - I probably would have given it 4.5 or 5 stars when it first came out but 4 years on makes the difference. Many of the pieces - as chosen by guest editor Jonathan Weiner (The Beak of the Finch) - have a topical bent about current events, in particular Bush (anti) science policies which have since played out. As a Guest Editor there is a pull between choosing pieces with lasting value, and those that are period pieces soon forgotten. Weiner seemed to focus on pieces with an ideological bent, or more accurately, pieces that attacked ideologies, either way it seemed like "ideology" was a central theme.

My favorite articles include: Jared Diamond, "Twilight at Easter", a classic re-telling of the Easter Island parable of planet earth. I read this same account in his long book Collapse but I think in this shorter form it is more powerful and concise. Malcolm Gladwell's "Getting Over It" suggests that most of us get over traumatic experiences fairly well and don't need to dwell on it. Reinforcing this is Jerome Groopman's "The Grief Industry" which shoots giant holes in the whole PTSD theory and the industry it has spawned. Sherwin Nuland's "The Man or the Moment?" is a historiography piece about approaches to history, in particular the social historian who looks at the "zeitgeist" as the main driver, and the "great man" historians who focus on individual actions. Although the Great Man theory has largely gone out of favor, he makes some surprising observations how individual personalities do in fact drive history at a certain level. Michael Specter in "Miracle in a Bottle" takes on the vitamin industry which is mostly unregulated and makes claims with little scientific basis. This is an important piece because it clarifies how free market capitalism without government controls can cause problems. I used to be big into suppliments but have since focused on eating a balanced healthy diet. A similar article by William Weed "106 Science Claims and a Truckful of Baloney" underscores the barrage of scientific-sounding stuff we are exposed to every day and how 90% of is just plain, well, baloney.

Two other pieces are memorable for good stories - "The Curious History of the First Pocket Calculator" which was designed by a Jewish concentration camp inmate in Germany during WWII - and "To Hell and Back", the story of Bill Stone a cave explorer and all around polymath, who may someday end up on the moon.

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip--Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

Waiter Rant is a memoir by an anonymous author who for the past few years has been writing an award winning blog [online public diary] about his daily experiences as a waiter in a New York City Italian Bistro. The blog, also called Waiter Rant, has been very popular. After being noticed and approached by HarpersCollins to make a book, this is the result. It is a sort of Cinderella story since most amateurs - the author is entirely self-taught and previously unpublished - only dream of such an opportunity.

Since the author is anonymous, for the sake of the review I will call him "Phillip" after Phillip Marlowe, the private detective in Raymond Chandler's 1930s hard-boiled pulp-fiction crime novels. Chandler is "Phillips" favorite author and he credits him as a major influence on his writing style. Indeed Phillip seems to model his life as something of a wise guy - hanging out with prostitutes and drinking heavily after a hard days work, the all knowing waiter veteran who can see through customers with a thousand yard stare. There is a rough edge to it, but at the same time, Phillip is able to convey in parts some surprisingly insightful passages. His best writing is in the earliest and last chapters where he talks about his own personal challenges, history and demons. Chapter 21 "Demons" in particular made me pause long and hard. Phillip has a psychologists insight into himself and others and his honesty and candor are refreshing. However this comes at a price in other chapters where he tends to be the smart guy know it all at the expense of customers and staff - sometimes he takes it too far with a youthful bravado.

It's a well written book and although I allocated myself three days to finish I had trouble putting it down and finished in less than a day and half, it goes very quickly.

Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

There are a whole bunch of biographies of Janis, including the well known 'Buried Alive', but this late comer published in 1999 appears to be the most even-handed, well-researched, and scholarly. In fact Alice Echols is a scholar of the 1960s (without any personal connection to Janis) so there is a lot of contextual information to put the period in perspective - I've probably learned more about the 1960s San Francisco scene in this book than anywhere else, it's worth reading for that reason alone.

This is my first "rock-star biography", a genre I have avoided because of the groaning shelves of narcissistic "tell alls". I choose Janis to be my first (something she would have loved) after seeing a couple YouTube clips: one showing her singing "Ball and Chain" live, the other a TV interview at her Texas hometown high-school reunion. In these clips I saw a deep, complicated and obviously brilliant person, her charisma on stage was memorizing and off-stage equally so. For me she became more than a raspy-kinda-scary voice on the radio from another era, and I wanted to learn more about who she was, and why she had become so famous and died so young.

Joplin's personality was a wild horse who kept on the move, never finding but always seeking a new home and greener pastures, running from her personal demons while embracing her desire for living life in the moment to the fullest. She drank heavily (Southern Comfort), fucked thousands of guys and hundreds of women, got in fights with Hells Angels, shot heroin and was a mainlining speed freak. She was a vulnerable, loving and kind child from a well-off Middle Class suburban family. She was a walking enigma. Her origins are with the beatniks and folksie scene of the early 60s, she was never fully accepted in the San Francisco scene as a hippie, yet she is widely imagined as one of its founding mothers as "Perl" in a costume of boa-feathers, clunky bracelets and lots of beads.

In the end her death was no surprise even to herself, she put her body on the front-line of the cultural revolution pushing the boundaries forward on many fronts. It is unfortunate she was largely forgotten in the 70s and 80s but I think with historical reflection on the 60s her life will find more prominence - if nothing else than an archetype of a generation, but also for being ahead of her time as a woman rock star in a male dominated industry.

Echols does a good job of balancing the exterior fame with the interior truths of Joplin, a psychological profile that will remind the reader of other people they know like her, it's believable because she seems so "normal" (in a somewhat abnormal way). I came away both with an intimate understanding of Janis and a much stronger sense of the 60s having seen it through the life of a single person who was a central catalyst.

Germinal

Zola's naturalism is among my very favorite styles of literature, and Germinal is his Masterpiece, so my feelings about this novel are nothing but praise. I first read it at 16 and now again at 41. It feels so real, the people, places and events, it's hard to imagine they never existed - but in a way I suppose they did exist in mining towns all over the world. Such is the magic of Zola to merge the specific (fictional) and the general (reality) in a singular vision. I look forward to reading it again once enough time has passed as both readings have brought new insights and understandings.

After reading I watched Claude Berri's 1993 film adaptation, but in French which I am not fluent - however it didn't matter, it allowed the foregrounding of the beautiful sets and costumes which are the strengths of the film; Zola was a visual author which makes transition to film that much smoother. The vision I had built up from the novel matched up almost perfectly with the movie, suggesting Zola did an excellent job of getting at the reality of the thing - over 125 years of distance in time and a translation to English melt away through the power of words to bring a common experience.

The Boat

Steve Koss wrote an insightful review on Amazon, I agree with everything he said and wanted take it a step further. As Steve says the first story is the key to the book - Nam Le tells us he "could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, [he] choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." Why? These are strange things to write about and the question is what do they have to do with the ethnic literature?

Everything. The problem is, as Lee says, so-called ethnic literature is "a license to bore. The characters are always flat, generic." We as readers are either numb to it because of over-use or no frame of reference. However it is still possible to convey the feelings of the experience through a proxy, and so all of these stories immerse the reader with certain themes in preparation for the last story. Each story is similar in its exploration of alienation and loneliness in the face of a crisis, usually with death hanging over all.

It's been said there is no loneliness more acute than that experienced around other people, in particular family. The New York artist who waits alone in the restaurant for the daughter who never comes; the high school football star who fights his demons, but even with his father taking the punches, still faces it alone; the Colombian assassin who faces his destiny without his friends help; in each of the stories the main character is isolated and alienated and faces a great trauma. The experience of reading this book reminded me of when I was child, lost in the crowd, my parents seemingly gone forever and the world a difficult and cold place.

By the time we get to the last story of the book, "The Boat", our sensibilities have been so finely shaped to this sense of alienation, fear and dread that Nam Le is able to convey the Vietnamese "ethnic experience" to just about anyone in the world. The details and facts are the words on the page, but the feeling and sense of experience comes from within ourselves. Within that interpretive framework this no longer seems like a collection of short stories but a work greater than its elements, a masterful use of the short story format.

The Leopard

The Leopard was published in 1958 making 2008 the fifty year anniversary. If - as Goethe once said - Sicily is the key to Italy, than The Leopard is the key to understanding Sicily. While clearly a modernist novel with multiple points of view and a focus on the body, it reads like a late 19th century novel of manners, perfectly re-creating for a modern audience a lost world. This is sort of summed up neatly in the novels most famous line "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Some critics have charged it is too celebratory of the Aristocracy and old order, but Lanza Tomasi (Lampedusa's adopted son) recently said the "miracle" of the book is no reader identifies with the lower class, "everyone believes he is the Prince." The Prince is torn between intelligence and lust, described with irony in softly poetic passages. It feels like a 19thh century novel but the use of Freudian psychological theory to explain and understand motives lends it a lack of moral certitude and thus cleary placing it as a 20th century modernist tradition.

As a curious aside with numbers, the main part of the text takes place in 1860 - the last chapter jumps forward fifty years to 1910 Incidentally, the same year Virginia Woolf famously announced the end of an era: "On or about December 1910 human character changed." Fifty years after 1910 in 1960 The Leopard reached a world wide audience. And this review is written 50 years after that. Such are the neat and tidy 50-year periods of the story intertwined with history, I believe Lampedusa would have smiled with the continuity.

Tracks

Robyn Davidson (b. 1950) by 1975 was something of an Australian bohemian who had lived in Sydney's equivalent of Haight-Ashbury, an enclave of rebels and artists. Fed up with people and the world she decided to travel across the desert of Australian alone on a camel. The only problem is she didn't have any money or know anything about camels. The first half of Tracks describes Robyn's experiences in the town of Alice Springs, a dirty and uncultured place about right in the middle of Australia where men where men and blacks (aborigines) were treated worse than the Jim Crow south. It was here that she ran into an elderly ex-German with a sadist streak that taught Robyn how to work with camels. The second half of the book describes her trek, which became something of an international news event and a National Geographic article in 1978. She had struck a nerve with the popular imagination - the lone women in the desert on a camel - and this unknown young lady in her 20s was now a hot commodity - much to her chagrin as she hid from spotter planes and roving reporters with telescopic lenses while seeking a solitary experience.

Tracks is important in the canon of travel literature (if such a thing exists) for a number of reasons. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing considers it one of the three most important travel books of its era (1970s - the others being Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard), saying "although formally less innovative [than the other two], Davidson's feminism and anti-racism articulated the views of a new generation and showed how a genre long associated with colonial and imperial attitudes could be freed from some of that heritage." In other words, Davidson takes a very sympathetic view to the plight of the Aborigines, how poorly they are treated by whites, and the value of persevering their culture - today these things are politically correct and expected, but Davidson was ahead of the curve in the mid-1970s Australian outback. Likewise Davidson's persona is very strong and in many ways she offers a female perspective of exploration that is refreshing and enlightening.

Davidson has a number of connections with other well known artists. She went on to have a friendship with Bruce Chatwin in the early 80s and both authors had a fascination with "nomadism." (Davidson's next most important book, Desert Places (1996), also explores this theme). She had a romantic affair with the National Geographic photographer who took pictures of her trip (Rick Smolan, probably best known for his "Day in the life.." photo books). Davidson also had a three year relationship with Salman Rushdie in the mid 1980s.

Not So Wild a Dream

Eric Sevareid (1912 - 1992) was a third generation Norwegian-American born and raised in a small town in northern North Dakota. His book of memoirs Not So Wild a Dream, published in 1947, is mostly about an action-filled 15 year period from high school graduation in 1930 (age 17) to the end of World War II (age 32). During that time Sevareid professionally and personally went through a number of adventures that typify his "Greatest Generation" and events of the world at large.

Sevareid was one of the pioneering "Morrow Boys", a team of radio journalists who filed daily radio journalistic pieces from Europe during the war. This allowed him to travel to many places and get up close to the front and fighting. Sevareid is at his best narrating his adventures, the book is episodic and some of the best include: Bombings in London during the Battle of Britain; the plane wreck while going over "the hump" into China; his experiences in Paris during the "phony war" and "Exodus"; the horrors of war on the Italian front; the D-Day invasion and subsequent Battle of the Rhine; the mutiny on-board a Liberty Ship in NY harbor. His accounts of the Great Depression, when he tramped around as a hobo on a train are really excellent, as is his description of a 2500 mile canoe trip, which is covered in more detail in his 1935 book Canoing with the Cree. These two books, written while still a young man, would be his most popular, and last real literary output - although he always considered himself a writer first, most of his later career was on television..

Sevareid was known for writing "think pieces", for example in one transcript, aired late in the war to popular acclaim, he talks about the unknowability of the experience of combat for a soldier, the impossibility of words to describe the immediate and often irrational emotions and thoughts of a soldier. These "think pieces" became a trademark of his later in life as a TV reporter, and Not So Wild a Dream often goes off on a thinking tangent. If there is a theme to the book, Sevareid is seeking the essence and spirit of his time and generation, what we might call the "Zeitgeist", and he often comes very close to capturing the immediate feeling of change. It is why this book is so important as a primary source for documenting the times and his generation. One of the more profound moments for me is when he sees a change in his generations attitude towards war:

"Our own men, whose cult was antimilitarism [in the 1930s students were highly anti-military], whose habit is to identify themselves merely as civilians in different cloths who detested soldiering, now subtly changed. There was a dash and verve about them that I had rarely observed before, and young boys would frankly say: "In Italy all i used to think about was going home. Now I kinda hate to quit before we get to Berlin." It was if they suddenly realized they were soldiers by profession, with the honest desire to complete this masterpiece of their skill down to the last detail."

Sevareid is right, during WWII the American military went from a small and and unpopular enterprise to a large beast that to this day is a major force in American culture, the consequences of which Eisenhower predicted in his military-industrial complex speech. Another area Sevareid muses on is the waning power of Britain and the ascending power of the USA - which given the events post-Cold War and the "Rise of the Rest" of the world, also has a prophetic tone. To get an idea what the US will be like as it becomes less relevant in the world - with the rise of China, India and the rest - one only has to read Sevareid's account of the waning power of Britain in the last chapters of the book.

In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin in 1974 was an unknown British journalist with no books to his name. Seeking the life of a nomad he flew to the southern part of South America and severed ties with his newspaper and former life with a single-sentence telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia." For the next 6 months he walked and hitchhiked around this remote region keeping a diary which became the basis for the book. According to the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002) it is one of three most important travel books of its era: "[its] laconic and elliptical style, in its ninety-seven short sections averaging little more than a couple of page each, seemed to finally bring modernist aesthetics to a fundamentally nineteenth-century genre..[it was] a landmark in contemporary travel writing." The narrative does follow a geographic route, but the included map does not show it, the reader has to piece together where on the map Chatwin is next. There is almost no narrative about actual travel, each of the mini chapters starts in a new place with Chatwin already arrived. The people he meets and stays with have no background or reason why he is there. Throughout is interweaved chapters on Patagonian history, often highly esoteric and in some cases true original research by Chatwin he solves some puzzle or mystery of history: Chapter 49 is as good an etymology on the word "patagonia" as will ever be found.

Subsequent revelations showed some of it to be fiction; some of the people Chatwin wrote about later came forward and denied things happened, or who were characterized incorrectly. Chatwin never denied this but explained that his work did not so much change reality as augment it, sort of like how political cartoons can bring out a hidden truth.

Chatwin, who died age 48 of AIDS (he was bi-sexual and one of the super-star AIDS victims in the 1980s), went on to write other well known books and is recognized as a skilled stylist. His travel writing is very literary and the book is credited with reviving interest in the genre as a legitimate form of literature. It is full of great poetic imagery, I just picked a page at random and found this quote: "She was waiting for me, a white face behind a dusty window. She smiled, her painted mouth unfurling as a red flag caught in a sudden breeze. Her hair was dyed dark-auburn. Her legs were a mesopotamia of varicose veins. She still had the tatter of an extraordinary beauty. She had been making pastry and the grey dough clung to her hands. Her blood-red nails were cracked and chipped."

Lord Jim

Conrad was experimenting with new narrative forms that would soon be known as modernism. Rather than a straight chronological narrative from a single perspective there are multiple narrators and time shifts. As well he explored the Victorian value of honor and duty which the First World War literally blew apart, thus making it a unique snapshot of a culture in its last days, no one could write a book like this today (that wasn't sarcastic). Because of these period trappings I can't give a "timeless acclaim" of 5-stars, but the writing is still wonderful, Conrad was a master of the language.

The story reminds me in many ways of Frenchmen Pierre Loti's novel My Brother Yves (1883), also about a morally ambiguous sailor who is taken under the wing of a narrator. Loti is little known today but at the time in 1900 he was probably better known that Conrad, certainly a more canonical literary figure (Loti's reputation, at least in the English speaking world, has not lasted).

The Snow Goose

Probably one of the shortest books I've read in a while (about 30 minutes) but the story is powerful and a "tearjerker". I think it suffers from an attachment to Dunkirk as a period piece with nationalistic undertones during a period when England was searching for its identity under the looming possibility of a Nazi invasion, and the United States was still on the fence about entering the war (a debate at the time as heated as the Iraq War today). But it is hard to be critical of a book like this, it is beautifully written and probably Gallico's most successful and still well worth reading.

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

Reading Theroux's travel literature, one wonders why he left home - the people he meets are almost universally irritating for him, and he takes little interest in much else except perhaps his own physical discomforts and prejudices. Of course we love to hate this type of splenetic and cantankerousness writing, not unlike Tobias Smollett's 1786 Travels Through France and Italy (Smollett also took a 'Grand Tour'). Theroux models himself an anti-tourist, resisting seeing the sites but when forced he rarely has anything positive to say. This appeals to the reader who wants to travel without being a tourist, but in the end comes across as crass and of little value. He is at his best describing the lowest encounters, prostitutes seem to fill the most interesting stories (it's unclear if he partakes but he does imbibe in smoking a fair amount of hashish). Theroux followed the "hippie trail" for part of the way but found them, like most everyone, open to ridicule.

There are some interesting historical curiosities. He traveled through Vietnam in late 1973 when the US military was pulling out, and so he got to see first-hand the deserted bases overtaken by squatters, stripped of every valuable not unlike what happened to Iraq in the wake of the US invasion in 2003, and perhaps not unlike what might happen again in the near future. He also makes a literary connection between the Vietnam War and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, well before the appearance of Apocalypse Now (1979). The best scene in the book I think is with the 3 Americans living on the beach with some Vietnamese women.

In the end this is an important book in the travel literature canon because Theroux set out to create something new and found a wide following of readers helping to revive interest in the genre, but he was eclipsed by writers like Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia) who really did move the state of the art out of the 19th century into a modern aesthetic.

Lapham's Quarterly Book of Nature

"Book of Nature" is Lapham's third journal in this wonderful new quarterly (see previous review). The topic is of course "Nature" and the range and variety of works is broad. Since this is an area that I am already somewhat familiar with, many of the pieces are not new to me, but it was a delight to run across favorites, and of course the parade of new pieces I had never heard of before. There are over 100 so I will detail just a few that stood out:

The first section is called "Howling Wilderness" and deals with the power of nature that both commands worship and instills fear. Immanuel Kant, before altering the course of philosophy with the categorical imperative, mused on the aesthetics of beauty giving some wonderful definitions of "sublime" and its variants. Evan Connell recounts an epic Antarctic survival story from Shackleton's 1909 expedition, his near death experiences are so often "one is tempted to exclaim 'Oh, come off it!'". Pliny the Younger vividly re-tells one heroic tragedy during the Pompeii volcanic explosion, when citizens wore pillows on their heads to keep off falling rocks. Robinson Jeffers poetically describes sea-lions being attacked by killer whales. Jack London recalls the SF Earthquake, with people hauling trunks of possessions through the flames, the working man able to dig a hole and bury it, the middle class man without the tools or strength forced to abandon.

The second section "Garden's of Earthly Delight" is about man's control of nature according to his image. John Burger looks at the history and philosophy of the zoo, revealing its origin in early 19th century Romantic Nationalism. Vitruvius in the first-century BC discovers the length of both arms equals the height of a man, and many other fascinating body-part symmetries. Curtis White writes in 2007 about the philosophical side of environmentalism, suggesting it needs more than just science, but also an ethic, morality and spirituality. E.B. White laments the passing of a pig (not the one from Charlotte's Web).

The third section "Terra Incognita" has works which suggest "we don't know what's going on." Al Gore starts off with a motivational excerpt from the book An Inconvienent Truth - I have only seen the movie but the book seems even better. C.S. Lewis provides a wonderful quote: "What we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument." A Crow Indian laments the death of the Buffalo.

This issue contains 6 original essays all of which are very good. The first essay by D. Grahamm Burnett attempts a summary of the history of the evolving concept "nature" in the Western tradition - a complex journey indeed, I think C.S. Lewis did a better job of it in The Discarded Image, but this is probably the academically strongest essay of the bunch, although a complex and difficult topic. Bill McKibben re-examines Thoreau's Walden and its importance to modern readers. Simon Winchester ends with a really cool and fascinating essay about how different the world would be if a volcanic mountain had popped up a few miles from its present location, thus altering the course of the Yangtze river away from China. If you read only one essay in the entire issue, don't miss this one.

Twice-Told Tales

Hawthorne wrote this collection of short stories anonymously in the 1830's, first published in local papers. At the urging of a friend he signed his name and raised the money to publish it as a book in two collected volumes, a copy of which was sent to former classmate and famous writer Henry Longfellow at Harvard. Longfellow gave it a favorable review and thus launched Hawthorne out of obscurity and on the path to well known works such as The House of the Seven Gables and his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.

Overall the collection is a mixed bag, some are clearly dated while others have timeless appeal. There are a lot of stories and only a handful will I remember and/or want to re-read in the future so it was a bit of a chore to read through them all. Hawthorne was honing his style so some of the pieces are dead ends, while others echo some of his later better works.

My favorite stories include "The Minister's Black Veil" about a 17th century New England puritan minister who vows never to look at the world except with a black veil over his eyes - the reason why is the mystery of the story and revealed to us at the end. "Wakefield" has a similar theme of mysterious behavior, a man decides to walk away from home without saying he was leaving and then return 10 years later - it is based on a true story and in fact there are modern accounts of similar things happening. "The Gentle Boy" beautifully captures 17th century religious fanaticism, intolerance and historical forces concerning the conflict between Puritans and Quakers in New England. This story is probably his most mature and serious of the book. "Mr. Higginbothem's Catastrophe", about a rumor of a man's murder, is a riddle wrapped in a story, I was perplexed and enthralled to the end. "David Swann", about a young man who falls asleep by the side of the road, is a philosophical story about the nature of fortune and fate. "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", about a liquid that makes the old young again, presages Robert Louis Stevenson and more recent movies like Cocoon.

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson (1907-64) died of complications from breast cancer at the age of 56 which makes Silent Spring, published before she told anyone of her condition, a haunted book, a dead woman walking seeking justice for a crime. Carson's body is almost is a metaphor for the planet. The so-called modern "environmental movement" - which the book is commonly thought to have started - is really about human justice, people are part of the environment and justice for the environment is justice for people. By reading Carson today and remembering how and when she died, we are reminded that keeping our campsites in better condition than we found them (old Boy Scout motto), not trashing our backyards, is a moral consideration both about nature and people, ultimately one and the same. Carson's appeal for justice from the grave has not been met, her predictions have come true: cancer is epidemic, public health in general is eroded, and DDT and other chemicals now permeate the earth from the Arctic to our mothers milk. Progress has been made but "environmentalism" still carries a heavy stigma among many. The American pledge ends with "and justice for all" - human justice can never be obtained so long as nature, of which humans are a part, continues to be debased.

Cat Man

Edward Hoagland is best known for non-fiction environmental writing, but his first book in 1955 was a novel based on his experiences in his early 20s with a traveling circus. Most circus literature is about the performers while the crew are so much background ambiance. In Cat Man, Hoagland flips the picture and foregrounds the working guys while the circus itself fade into the background. There are two types of circus workers: performers and support crew. They have separate dining halls, buses and trains: the "first train" people are the guys (they are almost all men) who put up the tents, feed the animals, run the machines - the "second train" performers arrive later. The performers are highly paid rare talent while workers tend to be down and out low-paid alcoholic drifters - "winos" with missing teeth, long hair, ratty clothing and a homeless odor. Times were different back then, rougher, and Hoagland's world is a dirty, smelly, low-brow violent place. Yet, as ex-clown Stephen Brennan said, Cat Man is "the best, the truest circus novel I've ever read." The plot is almost non-existent, other than about a young drifter who runs off the join the circus, and it even lacks a chronological progression with chapters jumping back and forth in time and place. Some of the chapters would stand alone quite well as short stories, vinaigrettes. Rather it is almost entirely a character study and hyper-real detailed description of day to day life working behind the scenes in a circus. One critic in the New York Review of Books compared it to Moby-Dick because of its encyclopedic detail.

I really enjoyed the novel although at times found the prose so dense with detail and so slow in action that I would scan over sections waiting for something to happen, in particular the descriptions of the big cats. But like a war novel, it captures the essence of long periods of inactivity and sudden bursts of action, usually violent and dangerous. As realistic documentation of the rougher side of circus life Hoagland's Cat Man is a timeless classic.

News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir

Peter Fleming (1907-71) was Ian Fleming's (James Bond) older brother. Peter first rose to popularity in his 20's, during the early 30's, with 3 major travel/adventure books about trips through Brazil (33'), China (34') and Central Asia (36'). News from Tartary is the last of the three and describes a 6 month 3500 mile trip from Peking (Beijing) due west across Chinas western provinces and south to India. "Tartary" is an old western term meaning "Central Asia". At the time China's most western province of Sinkiang (sometimes known as "Chinese Turkestan") was embroiled in a complex struggle of colonial and civil wars with Russia, China, etc.. and was a black hole of news. Sort of like Chechnya today, it held a certain dangerous fascination for intrepid western adventurers. Fleming traveled with Swiss writer Ella Maillart (1903-97) who was herself an accomplished adventurer, although not so well known in the English speaking world, she also wrote her own book about this trip and the two can be read for profitable comparison. There are many re-prints of News in circulation but the original edition is best as it contains dozens of fascinating black and white photos, thick rough-cut paper and a color tri-fold map of the route.

News from Tartary is today considered a classic of travel literature ranked #64 on National Geographic's "100 Best Adventure Books". It is an early example of "British understatement", the bumbling amateur English gentleman who travels for no reason other than traveling, as would be copied in the post war years, with authors such as Eric Newby. Fleming graduated from Oxford with an advanced degree in English literature and while he believed in adventure, he wondered how - in a modern world of motor vehicles, trains and planes - real adventure could be written of anymore. Just as Cervantes in Don Quixote believed in the spirit of chivalry, but knew its time had passed, he was able to write about it through a bumbling knight who could be laughed at. Likewise Fleming sought to disarm his readers with word play and self-deprecation, thus strengthening the more serious parts of the book and lending the author more credibility - Fleming succeed, in the readers eyes, not because of physical prowess and skills, but despite them. By being an approachable everyman, he is more able to vividly convey to his readers - who probably have never been to remote central Asia and never will - how it feels to travel through the Gobi desert on camels, arriving in oasis, going through sandstorms and traveling through the Himalayas.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey hinges on old questions that writers have been asking since Antiquity: does man have free will; and why does God cause suffering? As Wilder says "..in my novel I have left this question unanswered.. we can only pose the question' correctly and clearly, and have faith one will ask the question in the right way." Its didactic nature is meant to steer readers to a Christian perspective on these age old questions. This of course would have resounded strongly in mainstream Protestant America of the 1920s and 30s, who largely questioned the value of reading "romances" at all, but today it feels dated. As another reviewer pointed out The Life of Pi is a more modern example of this type of work (and looking backwards Voltaire's Candide (1759) asks similar questions, although is more a political tract). In any case the symbolism of the bridge is strong if not overtly so, it is a character unto itself, it's easy to make up some possible symbolisms: In the early descriptions the knotted braids of rope holding it together, built by the Incas, are like the threads that bind the history of Europe and the Americas together across the chasm of time. The life paths of the characters are like points on opposite sides of a circle with a line between them, each line intersecting in the middle, the middle being the bridge, the common point where they all come together.

Wilder doesn't really answer the question he asks, which honestly anyone can write a novel asking big important questions and no answers. The bridge feels somewhat cliche and middle-brow, we all use a bridge as symbolism in every day conversation in a sort of folksy way. It continues to get good reviews and is on the Modern Library top 100 novels of the 20th century, but how many people still read it? On LibraryThing it has a popularity of about 2100 which is pretty low for a Modern Library 100 novel (again Voltaire's Candide, a short book which deals with similar themes, has over 5 times the number of readers - and that for an 18th century novel). The Wikipedia article as of 2008 was almost void of any real content and amounted to a long stub (I just doubled its size by adding one long paragraph). A Google search doesn't turn up a whole lot of criticism or blog posts or the type of stuff we usually see for true fan favorites and/or academic darlings. At 100 pages it's a quick read, it's a clever story and the prose is lyrical so I think most people check it off the "best of" list and move on, but I would be surprised if time treats it as kindly as the canonical list makers have so far.

Candide

From the "Introduction":

"Voltaire would probably have been both pleasantly surprised as well as bemused by the exceptional and enduring popularity of Candide, which he viewed as one of his minor works, unworthy to vie with his tragedies, historical essays, and epic and philosophical poems, on which he staked his posthumous reputation... Voltaire wrote contes (tales) late in his career and almost as an afterthought, for he subscribed to the neoclassical canon and hierarchy of literary genres according to which tragedy in verse and epic poetry gave an author his most reliable passport to posterity and immortality. Novels, short stories, and contes were looked upon suspiciously as upstart genres with n credible aesthetic or even moral pedigree." (Gita May, 2005)

The above quote from the Barnes & Noble 2005 "Introduction" ironically demonstrate the message of Candide - Voltaire spent a lifetime working in neoclassical genres, serious long works that are largely no longer read today - this is a tragedy really almost exactly like that described in Chapter XXV about a noble Venetian with a great library that he never reads. However, in a comic twist, it is Voltaire's least serious work in an "upstart genre" (the novel) that has remained the most popular and widely read. Thus Voltaire in a way pre-saged his own career, a timeless message in which the message is the message itself. Today the "classical" form is the novel, perhaps in the future it will be a new "upstart genre" such as blogs, Wikiipedia or other online written forms.

The Greatest Circus Stories Ever Told: Amazing Stories of Life Under the Big Top

The Greatest Circus Stories Ever Told (2005) is an anthology of 13 essays and book excerpts from sources first published between about 1900 and 1926 (two are from 1955 and 1972). The editor is Stephen Brennan, a former circus clown, who provides an introduction to each piece with a little background about the author and facet of circus life. Since most of the pieces are old, they mostly discuss the circus silver age (golden age?) between about post-Civil War to WWI. However the age of the pieces should not discourage readership as the pieces are all well written, engrossing and capture a more romantic time in America.In addition I love anthologies like this because they reveal obscure but good authors and works I never would have heard of otherwise.

Of the 13 pieces I found 8 to be stand-outs. Two of these are excerpts from novels which I am now reading in full: James Otis' Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus (1881) and Edward Hoagland's Cat Man: A Novel (1955) and for that reason alone, discovering these novels, the anthology has been well worth it. The other six favorites include an essay by Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of; two essays by Courtney Ryley Cooper who is new to me but endlessly entertaining and sadly obscure today (see his Wikipedia profile); an essay by another obscure ex-clown with a talent for writing Robert Edmund Sherwood.

Water for Elephants, a modern novel about old circuses, has been in in the best seller list for years now. In comparison, reading about real life experiences from people who actually lived it, in short approachable extracts, vetted by an old hand, is an authentic and rewarding experience. While the crowds ohh and ahh their attention on the center best-seller ring, reading this book is like being out back of the tent, hanging with the circus people as they tell stories around a campfire: old retired clowns, the skeleton man and his wife the Fat lady, the romantic tight-rope walker, canvas men on the run, rummies - memorable stuff.

Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus

Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks in a Circus was first published in Harper's Young Peopleas a serial in 1877, and then as a book in 1881. It was an immediate classic and favorite among young boys and girls who dreamed of running off with the circus. It was very popular and sold so well that a few years later Mark Twain wrote his own story of a run-away conscious-stricken orphan who joins the circus: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The central theme of the novel is doing what you know is right versus doing what comes naturally and following your instincts, as shown by the character Mr. Stubbs the monkey. Although written to be a "wholesome" children's novel of what happens to bad boys, most remember it for the romantic story of running off with the circus. Indeed, by the end Toby has become so successful in the circus, his reason for returning home stretches credibility (probably to the secret delight of younger readers who knew what they would have done in Toby's shoes: stayed with the circus!). The novel was influential for at least 3 generations, a young Carl Sandburg thought it his favorite novel and William S. Burroughs mentions it in his memoirs. Disney paid it homage in a 1960 movie adaption. Since then it has become increasingly obscure, but it's close similarities with Huckleberry Finn should give it a wider audience as a comparison novel. The original included 30 pen and ink drawings by W. A. Rogers (1854-1931) which are essential.

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The Swiss Family Robinson

The Swiss Family Robinson was initially written in German by Swiss author Johann Wyss in 1812, and then soon after an accurate English translation was completed by William Godwin in 1816. The Godwin translation remained the standard in English for a generation or two, but by the mid-19th century the number and variety of English translations began to multiply - there were no enforceable copyright laws and translators freely added episodes, changed names (and even genders) of some of the characters and cut portions of the text to conform to changing views on education and aesthetic tastes. There are probably over a dozen such variations and most who read the novel today are not reading the original (the 2007 Penguin Classics edition, edited by John Seelye, is the 1816 Godwin translation, which is the closest to the original). I have now read both William Kingston's 1879 adaptation (one of the more common versions) and Godwin, I believe the original by Wyss/Godwin is better. It's not abridged like most later versions so certain scenes just make more sense - some of the characters are more dynamic, like Ernest shows himself to be a capable bloodthirsty killer like his brothers (a scene cut from later editions to maintain his "bookish" nature) - the theories on education are classic Rousseauian (he is mentioned twice in the narrative).

This isn't your childhood Swiss family. Godwin's 181