kurtwombat's Reviews (902)

The following may be considered to include spoilers. 

I really wanted to like this book. Appears to be universally loved at large and by people I respect. For me, however,  it quickly became THE LOST CITY OF ZZZZZZZ. As presented, the main character of this adventure saga Percy Fawcett is not particularly interesting. His main assets appear to be his ability to stay healthy in a tropical climate….and that’s about it.  He had little concern for his family or anyone going on his expeditions preferring to seek self-aggrandizement above all else. That would be fine, a lot of historical figures share those traits and worse, if the tale was better told. Part of the problem is the author’s insertion into the story. I wanted to remain immersed in history—not be jerked back to the present because the author is having trouble packing for the jungle. When the book should be building momentum in the second half, suddenly the author is complaining about jungle toilets. There is no momentum in this book at all. Fawcett takes a trip to Brazil. Does some stuff. His contributions largely being expanding the mapping of the continent. This would be cool if I was given a sense of why that was important—how it changed the world. He shrunk the boundaries of the unknown world—cool but just saying that doesn’t really mean anything. Fawcett made multiple trips and I began getting them confused. Or was the book redundant. Yes and yes. 

 

Squinting my reading eyes I began to realize how much of the narrative was based upon sitting room supposition or self-interested voices. Because of this, the topic might have been better served in novel form where suppositions can breed and and raise their young without concern or concealment. Of course the tease of the whole book is a mysterious lost city of gold that Fawcett dubs “Z”. Midway thru the book “Z” is reasonably dismissed as tall stacks of eroded stone that resemble giant columns. Naturally occurring stone mistaken for ancient ruins would seem important. What should reveal Fawcett’s adventures as a fool’s errand is just blown by in the book. It is referenced again when the author flies over the jungle. This answer is disregarded again like the author is walking on train tracks ignoring an oncoming train. Then a lot of effort is put into justifying the author’s trip to Brazil by taking what may have been subtle traces of an ancient city (maybe those rises and falls in the landscape are ancient canals or maybe not) and practically demanding this is the site of “Z”. 

 

This is all bad enough, but the whole book turns out to be a swindle. Very late it’s mentioned that Percy Fawcett may have had mental health issues. WHAT? The focus of the book purports to be about his passion to explore—and the guy may have been crazy—and you don’t mention it until parenthetically near the end. This should have been a central focus of the book. Was he born crazy or crazy from the heat? Did it take madness to make him an explorer? Are all explorers mad to some degree? Where is the line between madness and driven determination? Disappointment must be part of the landscape for an explorer—I shouldn’t have to face it as a reader. 

 

 The delightful silliness of Stephen Leacock is a new discovery for me.  I had never heard of him until he came up on two different podcasts that I frequent within a couple days of each other—a delicious coincidence considering he’s a now pretty obscure turn of the 20th century Canadian humorist. Clearly a man who loves word play, the jokes and gags in this collection of faux fantasy tales  are rapid and plentiful. Each tale has a finely hewn logic that kept my smile from ever dimming. While Leacock was a fan of Mark Twain, enough to write a well-received biography of Twain, and I can see some influence in his work, I think a better description of Leacock as a humorist is James Thurber meets Monty Python. I can see the Python’s PHILOSOPHER’S PLAYING WORLD CUP SOCCER sketch (look it up on YouTube) being written by Leacock as well as emulating the mundane details of everyday life that Thurber blows up into bouts of lunacy. Apparently Groucho Marx was also a big fan and credits Leacock with inspiring his humor. I was surprised that this mind was writing over a hundred years ago—the writing is fresh and feels like it could be submitted for publication today. 

 I was vaguely aware of many of the issues brought up about Facebook in CARELESS PEOPLE but it was nice to see them all in one place and the soil from which they sprang—seeded by greed and careless indifference. Facebook is actively trying to suppress the book and any negative reviews I’ve read attack the author not the message. This was all fertilizer for my interest in the book. CARELESS PEOPLE works on twin tracks. Track one is the idealistic view of the author of what good Facebook could do in the world. Track two is the path that Facebook actually follows. The author actively sought a job at Facebook hoping to ride it along her ideal track. Upon finally getting a job and virtually creating her own position, she found that the two tracks virtually never overlapped. Kinda like that dream where you are about to fall, you keep reaching to hold onto something but never quite get a grip—the author faces frustration after frustration in her attempt to get the tracks together. Fascinating to follow the growth of Facebook into an international machine demanding growth at any cost. I am tempted to go issue by issue but instead I will just highly recommend the book and let you follow the evolution of Facebook from benign social media apparatus to a global dangerous influence. 

Frankenstein ***1/2 

Solid recreation of the Mary Shelley classic. The stellar art work raises everything. Of course being Manga, young Frankenstein never looked so cute. Well paced, the tension kept taut throughout and I particularly liked the rendering of “the monster”. The portion about the creation and demise of “the bride” was delicious. The story seemed to be setting up for a smashing ending but sadly just kinda petered out. 

THE SHORT STORIES 

Neck Specter - ★★★
Bog of Living Spirits - ★
Pen Pal - ★★1/2 

After reading these first three stories, I started to get worried. In retrospect I think they were designed to set up mood and form (or am I being generous) but they really didn’t grab me. 

Intruder - ★★★1/2
Starting to get better but not quite there. My hopes rise with the creepy factor.

The Strange Case of Oshikiri - ★★★★1/2
The Strange Case of Oshikiri: The Walls - ★★★★★
The Hell of the Doll Funeral - ★★★★★
Face Firmly in Place - ★★★★★
Now we’re rolling. All these stories are fantastic. FACE FIRMLY IN PLACE left me shook.

Boss Non-non and Hide-and-Seek with Boss Non-non -  1/2
Thankfully very short homage to the author’s mother’s dog. The half star is for the single frame of the author shouting at the dog. 

 

 Maria Bamford is one of my favorite comediennes but with this book she has unleashed a whirlwind. (maybe less so in print but I listened to the audiobook and there certainly weren’t any brakes on that bus) She is a sort of living miracle. Beset with myriad mental health conditions, the “cult”s of the title refer affectionately to the various 12 step or self help programs she has leaned on to greater and lesser degrees much of her adult life. The miracle is how she has managed to navigate these troubled seas jumping from one ship to another balancing various strong medications along the way yet still manage to have a productive and creative career. Her humor bites and chews—spitting herself all over the page. I began this expecting more humor than health talk—and it was an adjustment seeing that the humor is the wrapping paper for a mental health memoir. Blunt is too subtle a word—maybe concussive better describes how a lot of the talk hit me. Fascinating but not always fun. Thought at first listening to it in small doses would help—make the subject matter and the pace and rhythm of her humor and delivery easier to digest. However, I found I enjoyed it more if I just plunged in and adapted. Getting in and out of a violent river is just exhausting—better to stay in and get used to it. And the longer I stayed in, the funnier it got. And the deeper the conversational revelations became. Certainly not for everyone—has to be one of the more DNF’d books on GOODREADS in recent years. I found it rewarding, encouraging and enlightening so stick with it. 

 A mostly enjoyable romp down Marx  Brothers memory lane. These interviews with the then surviving brothers and several folks involved in their careers interspersed with often rare photographs and clippings are a feast for the hungry Marxophile. The highlight and sometimes lowlight is the irascible octogenarian Groucho. Always the brightest and most loquacious of the brothers—sometimes Groucho delivers tasty barbs but other times he is just cranky—and prepare yourself for more than a few F-ing-bombs.  Mostly that language refers to Chico’s off the set activities.  I was particularly interested in the early years—their upbringing and movement into vaudeville. Some fascinating early pictures. Some fascinating early anecdotes. Like sitting around with family going through scrapbooks with someone old enough to tell you about them. Only with more profanity than your grandpa might use. 

 I will admit to a bit of a quandary.  The subject of this book is despicable and virtually everything detailed in this book is despicable. This guy deserves an unkind fate.   Yet—his story is  fascinating and wildly entertaining. Told with a clever directness and bracing humor, I had little choice but to be drawn into the narrative—it’s part of the human condition to identify with the narrator, the act of reading mimics the voice in our own head. So in a sense I was a drug smuggler who beat and killed people. Since this is not how I wish to see myself and the author chooses not to see himself any other way, I chafed at giving this book five stars. Of course, that is the smallest imaginable rebuke for his chosen lifestyle. Any smaller and it would vanish altogether. The compulsiveness, however, with which I devoured the audiobook of this memoir allows me to go no lower. (while the author was always able to go lower) If you are interested in this stuff at all—you will love this.