wahistorian's Reviews (506)

I did not enjoy this psychobiography of Groucho Marx and will not be finishing it. Lee Siegel is an insightful thinker about matters of popular culture, but his subject is unlikable and unsympathetic. Essentially Siegel's argument is that the Groucho we see on screen--misogynist, narcissistic, aggressive, and full of barely contained rage--is the *real* Groucho (sans four-letter words). (A recent 'Atlantic' profile of Donald Trump by Dan P. McAdams makes a similar argument that what you see is what he is.) Because Siegel's is mainly a Freudian analysis, Marx's overbearing mother and passive father bear much of the blame, a basic argument that seems overly simplistic especially as part of a series titled 'Jewish Lives.' There are many interesting anecdotes here, but always at the core is Groucho's angry personality. Enough already.

I was intrigued by the premise of this book when I picked it up--murder on a small luxury cruise ship--and I had enjoyed Ruth Ware's 'In A Dark, Dark Wood.' Two things in its favor. Ware has discussed her unreliable narrators in a blog post for Powell's Books (http://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/the-truth-about-unreliable-narrators) so I'm not spoiling anything when I say that the protagonist, travel writer Lo Blacklock, becomes increasingly unreliable, and even unlikeable, as the book progresses, to the point that it's difficult to stay on her side in her quest to solve this mystery. Ware enjoys the unreliable narrator because "we are all the center of our own universe" and memory is fraught with errors, but in both these books her secondary characters tend to drop away as real people, in favor of the protagonists' strong and sometimes anxious personalities. This might not even be so bothersome if the plot was compelling enough, but in this case, like a locked room mystery, we need a well-rounded set of suspects to pursue with Lo; absent that, the mystery is a bit of a navel-gazing exercise. In fact the resolution comes when the perpetrator explains what happened in a moment of stress. That's that.

It's always unfair to compare, but immediately after this I picked up an old Agatha Christie--not even a good one--and read a few pages. Granted, she is the master of the locked room mystery (or any formula), but Ware's 'The Woman in Cabin 10' might have benefited from a bit of 'Murder in the Orient Express' added to it.

My rating of this book reflects my fascination with Christie's incredibly detailed observations of Britain immediately after WWII, which results in a plot that captures the country's zeitgeist: desperate people taking desperate measures. Britons in 'There Is a Tide' are sick of high taxes and waiting in lines at the bakery, and "foreigners," and penury and sacrifice, and their stiff upper lips have given way now that the crisis has passed. The Cloade family in rural Warmsley Vale is no different; their benefactor was killed in the London blitz, his young wife inherited everything, and they are all terrified of living within their own straitened resources. As Hercule Poirot observes, the several murders is is a case full of motive.

Others have recommended not reading the last chapter, in which Christie resolves Lynn Marchmont's confusion about her gender role in a way incomprehensible to contemporary readers. You can NOT read the final chapter without doing damage to the book, and in fact I wish Agatha Christie hadn't felt the need to tie up Marchmont's life in a scary little noose. But she did, and if we consider that Marchmont is the character closest to Christie's own experience in the First World War, we have to wonder about her conclusion. Agatha Miller quickly married her fiancee Archie Christie, an RAF flyer on leave for Christmas 1914, and while he served in France, she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses in her local hospital, where she got a quick education in nursing and pharmacy. Several years after he returned from war, he announced he was in love with their friend Nancy Neele. Their marital difficulties precipitated Christie's famous 11-day disappearance, and in some accounts she never completely got over their divorce.

It is interesting to think about Lynn's confession of commitment in the context of Christie's wartime experience. Did she regret marrying so quickly? Question her own commitment? Or did Lynn's decision express Christie's own perception that she had made a poor choice? At the very least, the fact that this is an acceptable ending tells how how much things have changed for most women in 70 years.

Hannah Breece's memoir is a remarkable account of her time as a teacher in Alaska from 1904 to 1918, teaching Native Alaskan children and the children of mostly Russian settlers. She had already taught for the U.S. Department of the Interior on Native reservations in the Rocky Mountains when she headed for Alaska at the age of 45; she had a strong sense of mission and was willing to go where she was needed, so left for Kodiak with a spirit of adventure that she called upon often. Her account describes the woeful condition of the schools and houses she lived in, as she moved about from Afognak Island to Iliamna to Wood Island to a fishing camp at Nondalton to Ft. Yukon. Her account is a fascinating snapshot in Alaskan time, and commentary by her granddaughter--urbanist Jane Jacobs--addresses many questions left unanswered by Hannah's desire to put the best face on her experience. She is so matter-of-fact in most of her memoir, it's easy to overlook the number of times her life was genuinely in danger. Hers is a fascinating story of early cross-cultural experiences, albeit from one perspective, and is well worth reading.

Nina Simon's work is always provocative, especially for museum professionals. This one reads like a no-nonsense how-to book for museums desiring to inculcate new audiences and better serve their communities. As such, it can be an occasionally tedious read, because of its prescriptive tone and the fact that the author has little sympathy for cultural institutions lacking staff, funds, or training to make the leap into working with unknown communities; the examples of successful initiatives are the most inspiring parts of the book. An important work, in spite of its flaws.

When you're reading a first-person travel account, it *is* like traveling with someone; if you don't like them, the most wondrous scenery, delicious food, and enlightening experiences somehow can't compensate for unpleasant company. I can't say I enjoyed traveling with Ken Ilgunas--he has odd ideas about women and marriage, is singularly mean to his mother, and often doesn't have the courage of his anti-pipeline convictions. But it's hard to imagine that a walk across two First World countries could be dangerous until you read this book; hostile property-owners, suspicious cops, and aggressive cows challenged Ilgunas's desire to trace the pipeline's path. The book is particularly timely now, given the anti-pipeline protests in North Dakota. Worth a read.

I almost always enjoy Graham Greene as an extremely erudite and astute observer of the human condition, but this book was slow going for the first quarter of the book. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out in the forward, this is not the romantic expedition of on-the-train novels like 'Murder on the Orient Express' and 'The Lady Vanishes.' It is instead almost a modern novel of manners with a bit of international politics thrown in. Greene's emphasis is on the characters and the ways in which they come to understand one another, rather than plot. The characters include a Jewish importer--with the anti-semitism of Greene's period--a murderer on the run, a showgirl on her way to a job in Constantinople, but hoping for a meal ticket out, and a middle-aged spinster (read: lesbian) coming to terms with the loss of her companion.

There is something so cinematic about Greene's vision here, which is fascinating for a book written in 1931. But don't look for sustained suspense or moral tension, the hallmarks of Greene's best work--they're not here.

I don't read enough science fiction to know how fresh Blake Crouch's concept is, but I was disappointed that a writer of his caliber didn't spend a bit more energy on the psychological and philosophical implications of "losing" your life and a bit less energy on the plotting. Jason Dessen is abducted off the street late one night--no spoilers here--and wakes to find himself separated from his job, his home, and his family, the subject of some sort of physics experiment into the nature of matter. The physics are beside the point, however, as Jason spends the rest of the book desperately trying to reclaim his family from evil doppelgangers. I say "reclaim," because his quest increasingly becomes one of keeping his wife *from* the others, rather than restoring some rich emotional life together.

This is where more thoughtful exploration would have made a better book: what if there *are* Jasons who are better for his wife? Or what if she's better on her own? None of that matters as the reader is supposed to root for the preservation of Jason's original nuclear family, no matter how long that takes, or how far they grow apart, or what the other people in this scenario want. If Jason wants it, we do too, and I didn't.

Not a stand-out in the Joyce Carol Oates oeuvre. Creepy, yes; terror, no. Oates is always a keen observer of people, their oddities, and their effects on others, however, and that eye for emotional detail does carry you along. The best story in the book, "Equatorial," has as much to say about gender relations among men and women of a particular class and a particular age as it does about fear.

Ana Maria Spagna's book is about "saving" the earth through restoring, rehabilitating, and, yes, reclaiming in all its complexity. Spagna hopscotched up and down the West Coast, visiting Death Valley, Marin County, Rocky Recah Dam, Celilo Dam, and many others, to explore the trend toward reversing the early 20th-century landscape "improvements" made by humans taming the American West. Her approach and writing style sometimes replicate the challenges of the task-at-hand, as she records not only the many issues associated with dam removal, or Native control of land, or protecting trees, or safeguarding rivers, but also her own missed phone calls, broken fan belts and water pumps, and cultural miscommunication. Still, her willingness to listen deeply to the stories of the reclaimers, to accept that many perspectives have validity, makes for an important and thought-provoking book. Most importantly, Spagna problematizes the question of what we aim to restore landscapes to. "Aren't we better off considering, always, changes humans have made in the past, for better as well as for worse," she concludes, "when considering ones to make in the future?"