kurtwombat's Reviews (902)

I have been a fan of Sarah Vowell since hearing her little girl fights squeaky door voice on NPR a decade ago or more. Upon hearing her voice delivering one of her essays, it is virtually impossible not to hear it as you read her. While the voice is unique, it is the flow that really stays with you. As a reader, you know where the pauses fit and why and where to rush ahead a little before catching your breathe again after a well delivered punch line. Essays about her childhood invariably touch on some aspect of American history, while her essays about history reveal that America is a family that we are all a part of for better or ill. She has a great way to sum up the often conflicting emotions we have about families and history in her essay about the forced Indian migration known as The Trail of Tears: "When I think about my relationship with America, I feel like a battered wife. Yeah, he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance." This book TAKE THE CANNOLI is a collection of her earlier works. Some I had heard on the radio but I did not mind visiting them again. Though the work is often topical, it does not suffer with the passing of time or the passing away of cultural reference points. This is a testament to the precision of her prose. She stays with the humorous marrow even when the flesh has been gleaned from the historical bones. Highly recommend anything she has written though this is probably more accessible than some of her more history centric works like THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT and THE WORDY SHIPMATES--both of which I love.

The essence of memory is that we rarely get right to the heart of the matter. Something floats up into our thoughts and teases out a recollection. If that recollection has an emotion attached, then we are pulled down deeper towards other memories. As those memories gather about us, the world is recreated for us as it once was. Or at least how we saw it once upon a time. Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean’s MR. PUNCH is all about how we access memory. The story starts with shallow memories, brief bits about his grandparents. Each round of memories adds depth, and soon they begin to connect. There is a wonderful sense of tension built up as the story progresses. The traditional puppet show of Punch & Judy is retold in various forms and fragments--working like memory does in bits and pieces. The puppet show acts like a mirror of the memory that we are eventually being drawn toward. The wonderful illustrations are dark like half remembered images and many contain bits of this and that tossed together like disorganized thoughts. The images become more detailed and tangible as we get deeper but seldom is there anything particularly bright to hang hope on. There is no hope in memory, they are what they are. We can glean some understanding, but must be concerned about them taking over our lives—a point the book makes very well. MR. PUNCH does not seem like much at first and it knows this. Sparse at the dialogue keeps you moving until it knows it has you hooked. This is a wonderful creation starting like a light mist until by the end it has become an emotional downpour.

Just as each day I wake my dreams remain shrouded by night, so each day I live my childhood becomes more dreamlike and drifts a little bit further beyond my grasp. The results of that childhood are evident every day, the loves and insecurities produced in the factory of my childhood course through my veins with every beat but the factory itself is dark, empty and abandoned. THE GRAVEYARD BOOK captures this feeling for me. From the beginning it has the quality and language of dreams in its description of the murders that set the story in motion. As the child grows, the ghosts who raise him, echoes of the people they were at the moment they died, are dreams that walk and talk. It is a joy of the book that the real world remains a threat to this dream childhood the way ghosts are usually considered a threat to the living. As the child grows, some of his ghost friends fall away, reject him, as he continues to grow up (and grow more real) while they remain still. Others remain by his side, watching over him and teaching him what they learned up to the point they stopped living. As a child I would have absolutely adored this book. As an adult there are modest flaws that bothered me. The author admits to having written the book in chunks over time and this lends to a certain disjointed quality in the narrative, some abrupt stops and simplified solutions. I also never bought the conspiracy revealed at the end to be responsible for the murders that start the book. Beyond all that I loved the book's presentation of childhood being a land of ghosts. The magic used to navigate those lands left behind as we grow. The whole world before us as we walk out the gates that once protected but also contained us.

The genre term pulp comes from the cheap paper that these books were printed during their original heyday. Another way to define pulp is as just plain fun. The authors were clearly having fun as they teamed up on this and two more books in the series and the reader is not left behind. Lots of sex, double dealing and violence splash from every page. After a bit of a rough start, the plot settles into a nice pass the ball rhythm--each character taking turns being on top of things before falling under the thumb of someone else. While fun, it doesn't rise much above that. Each character seems to be given a James Cagney "Top o' the world Ma!" White Heat moment whether it makes sense or not and the little characterization that exists is betrayed in the last third of the book when characters do things inconsistent with who they are. So many balls are thrown in the air to keep you entertained but eventually you realize they are there to distract you from there being no one to catch them when they fall. Fun but not satisfying.

I love history but so often it is presented as static and inevitable. The heartbeat of history is entombed in a bloodless waxworks of names, dates and figures forgetting that people are the driving forces setting the whirly-gigs in motion. The best authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin (TEAM OF RIVALS) and David McCullough (1776) pump the blood back into those rendered lifeless by time. The pulse of America is palpable in both those author's works. As it is in Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. Part of loving history is asking the big "What If...?" questions. What if certain guns jammed, or bombs failed to detonate or certain people lived or died due to run of the mill happenstance either inserting into or deleting their appearances from history. Roth asks one of these questions. What if Roosevelt lost the 1940 election to Charles Lindbergh leader of AMERICA FIRST (isolationists) which fought to keep the US out of WWII. A young and handsome hero, Lindbergh was how America wanted to see itself--creating a kind of Camelot before the Kennedy's. Written during the Bush administration, it is easy to see a kind of template over which the novel was created. It was left vague, for example, just how much Lindbergh was even in control of his own administration versus the machinations of others making decisions for him. I think it is limiting to just assume it's goal is to bash Bush although I would consider it mission accomplished. Instead, I feel it succeeds in warning against allowing anyone the power to define right and wrong without the tempering hand of common decency. Before reading I anticipated history with a big "H"---seeing all the movers and shakers (Hitler, Lindbergh, Roosevelt, etc) at home and abroad running their paths through history but to alternate destinations. What I found instead was more fascinating--history with a small "h" (personal history). History does not just affect those who create it. History falls upon us all in trickles or downpours. Even upon the Roth family of Newark, New Jersey. The power of this novel is that it reads more like a memoir. Dramatic world events unfold but we view them from the perspective of a nine year old boy who's primary concerns are his friends, his stamp collection and his family. The author takes great care in lighting up the interior lives of his novel bound Roth family so that all the shadows thrown by that light are true to those characters. I was drawn into the family as if reading letters found in the long neglected closet of my own childhood. The family was real, which made the community real and thus the greater world felt real as it worked to marginalize, obliterate and absorb a unique culture in the name of protecting America. My only complaint about the novel would be the somewhat haphazard nature of it's conclusion. I understand it is likely a reflection of how an adult would look back at his childhood...after the bright burning memorable crisis has passed, events that follow are often jumbled puzzle pieces that one no longer cares enough about to piece together. Even so it was a tad jarring to be so involved personally with the characters to have such a vivid world allowed to dissolve in such a fashion. A small quibble however when I enjoyed the rest so thoroughly.

NO LONGER AT EASE is a beautifully realized tug-of-war with a human being as the rope. Obi Okonkwo returns to Africa after being educated in England thinking that he pretty much knows who he is. The ease with which he defines himself is tested as soon as he gets off the boat and begins his new life. Obi is caught between white and black cultures, European and African mindsets, poverty versus affluence, family versus personal and even how a man deals with women. Author Chinua Achebe does not allow Obi to battle one conflict at a time but instead marvelously shows how there might be multiple issues pulling on either side of the rope at any given time. In the midst of Obi's battles, the novel deftly ribs everyone with a soft touch. Characters cannot help but reveal themselves. As they so often fall back on the clichés of their own cultures and natures, they reveal how limited their understanding of the world around them really is. Obi is blind to some of the things that might make his life easier (for someone facing financial worries, it never occurs to him to dismiss his driver or his houseboy) but the author allows us to see it if we will--nothing is forced at the reader. The world is presented and the reader has to realize what Obi does not on their own. While Achebe's previous book THINGS FALL APART deals with a community and culture being destroyed dramatically by advancing machines spewing black smoke and death, NO LONGER AT EASE shows a slower crumbling destruction without a clue what if anything might rise from the debris. While I liked the previous book better--probably because on a human level it was easier to follow a protagonist who truly knew who he was--I still enjoyed this one though I wish it had more to it. At a light 154 pages, I wished it had a little more heft to it. Would like to have known a little bit more about a lot of other characters and learned more about Obi's culture but it is the rope and what the rope feels like as it gets pulled that is emphasized and not those pulling on the rope.

The first time I have read a book where the title was designed to be forgotten. While the title may be intentionally elusive, the charm of the story is not. Van Allsburg has set among a black family a universal tale of sibling rivalry. Though simply told, the illustrations contain his usual magic of capturing big moments but understating them at the same time. The illustrations are done in browns and tans which convey how the kids see their world while also giving the book an instant feeling of nostalgia--of being kids again right along with the characters. Like the kids you are pulled in and left feeling surprise and wonder by the end.

I have often puzzled over how to express what makes a memoir different from an autobiography. Reading Hannah Nyala's POINT LAST SEEN has helped solve this for me. A memoir is jazz to a biography's pop song. A biography suffers from a predictable structure, often the story is so familiar that you can tap your feet to what you haven't read yet. But a memoir, drawn from a life in fits and starts, the structure is often an improvisation on memory and emotion. There is no timeline of familiar rhythms, but a shifting focus from important memory to important emotion and then playing until they find each other. This is the case with Nyala's memoir presenting her attempt to escape a violent and controlling husband and somehow forge a new identity from the one that had been beaten black and blue into oblivion. This is not a blow by blow telling of that relationship, but instead she only refers to it as it inevitably creeps back into her life. She does not dwell on it, but neither can she escape it. The law is on her husband's side so he retains their two children--giving them and taking them as he pleases to express his control. As part of rebuilding, Nyala picks up one piece of herself at a time. She rediscovers her love for the outdoors, the healing power of nature. In this environment, she begins tracking (as in search & rescue for a national park) partly because it comes naturally to her and also because it requires intense focus--taking her mind and body away from her pain. The physical landscape is described with such a loving eye for natural detail, that the ground she covered is still seared into my memory as if I had been there for a hundred years and the desert sands are still in the creases of my clothes. The story is seldom a happy one but remains compelling. Memory and emotion playing off each other, drawing us in breathlessly then allowing us to breath. She writes with a clear voice, unfettered by rationalization or second guessing or blame. Like the tracks she follows, they are just there to be followed until we reach an understanding. Hannah Nyala carries us and that burden well.

History parades before us in many forms—quite often corrupted. Was Dolly Madison the wife of the fourth President of the United States or a baking company known for its ZINGERS? Gradually time calcifies the perception of history until the shape of it is all we see. And we get used to it—even rely on it as a short hand. Partly because of this I had assumed I had a decent general knowledge of the Revolutionary War. I have wanted to read something by David McCullough for some time. Having both 1776 and his John Adams bio on the shelf I pondered. I chose 1776 thinking the briefer time frame under consideration might allow me to walk before I learned to run with a new (to me) author. I assumed as I read that I’d be checking off familiar moments in history paying closer attention whenever John Adams was mentioned as a kind of prep for the more substantial book to come. I was surprised as I read 1776 that it all felt completely new to me. Events don’t unfold in domino fashion and even when they appear to, the fascination is derived from just how easily everything could have been different. McCullough does a marvelous job of breathing life into history we think we know. 1776 is certainly not the whole war but it is that part of the war that defined how the war would play out. The author unfolds the participants on both sides of the Atlantic revealing how they would rise or fail to rise to the coming war. Attention is given equally to weather of a given day, the perceptions of a soldier or baker or general, and the decisions of those wielding the most power. The thoroughly rendered details inform the world from which springs history broken from its calcification and allowed to breath. The pivotal character amidst all this is of course Washington who was clearly not the same man at the end of the year as he was at the beginning. America was not the same place by the end of that year. And thankfully I do not have the same view of the Revolutionary War that I did when the book began.

It is easier to live with a bad book with low aspirations than a mediocre book with high ones. I was mad much of the way through Mario Vargas Llosa's THE STORY TELLER because I wanted to love it but he wouldn't let me. Llosa touches on many themes that touch me including displaced cultures, indigenous mythology, cultural and personal identity, comparative religions, man vs. nature, media vs. culture, art as communication and communication as art. After an introduction that teases a great mystery, we know almost immediately what the answer to the mystery will be and that it will not be satisfying. In the meantime we are held at bay as the author plays out his themes as if in a series of writing exercises. The indigenous myths are meant to parallel the progression of the story in fact and structure but they are slapped onto the narrative in such a ham fisted manner that I felt like I had to wade through them rather than have them rise and lift me. There is some jumping back in forth in time that only accentuates the lack for forward movement the narrative. It's like reading Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS if Marlow talked about the river but never got into the boat. There are interesting parts where he touches on the history and politics of Peru and the history of indigenous tribes and the missionaries who live with them and working within the Peruvian TV industry--but it all feels disjointed like many separate small streams that never meet to form that mighty river.