http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/13315 en-US Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:37:39 -0800 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 2354868 Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:37:39 -0800
Nonetheless, any 500+ page book that can keep me till the end must be doing something right. I guess I'm holding it to the Pulitzer/everybody-raving-about-it standard. If I thought nobody had discovered it, I'd probably be raving about it, too. For a couple of weeks, at least.

Now that I think about it, it's a lot like Moby Dick! It's more flamboyant than many people care for--with its behold-dear-reader-isms and its stylistic digressions, it's presumption that it can do and be anything in any moment. Both strive to describe a larger society through a personal story: Moby Dick the American whaling industry and the whole nation that depends on it, and Middlesex the story of Detroit and also America's ideas about gender.

And both articulate this larger world by occasionally digressing to explain it in factual terms unrelated to the story at hand. In Middlesex this can be precarious, but overall is a great thing. It's a good way to be both informative and entertaining, to keep fictional stories rooted in the fertile soil of true social history, like stories that could have happened, may as well have. In a way, the fictional element is just a great way to articulate the cause and effect of that true history, rather than the factual element simply providing a plausible backdrop to the story.

So I liked that.
]]>
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Sam
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 07/07
date added: 02/21/08
shelves:
review:
Wow, what a flat ending to an otherwise good book. For a while I was really into it. Writing style got my goad a few times, drew a lot of attention to itself. There were moments of brilliance, and kind of like Moby Dick, where it's just all out there on page--sprawling, encyclopedic--there was an ebulence to it. It's an eager and energetic book, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just uneven.

Nonetheless, any 500+ page book that can keep me till the end must be doing something right. I guess I'm holding it to the Pulitzer/everybody-raving-about-it standard. If I thought nobody had discovered it, I'd probably be raving about it, too. For a couple of weeks, at least.

Now that I think about it, it's a lot like Moby Dick! It's more flamboyant than many people care for--with its behold-dear-reader-isms and its stylistic digressions, it's presumption that it can do and be anything in any moment. Both strive to describe a larger society through a personal story: Moby Dick the American whaling industry and the whole nation that depends on it, and Middlesex the story of Detroit and also America's ideas about gender.

And both articulate this larger world by occasionally digressing to explain it in factual terms unrelated to the story at hand. In Middlesex this can be precarious, but overall is a great thing. It's a good way to be both informative and entertaining, to keep fictional stories rooted in the fertile soil of true social history, like stories that could have happened, may as well have. In a way, the fictional element is just a great way to articulate the cause and effect of that true history, rather than the factual element simply providing a plausible backdrop to the story.

So I liked that.

]]> 10262788 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:47:50 -0800
author: Gina Kolata
name: Sam
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 02/08
date added: 02/20/08
shelves:
review:
You can't beat good science writing, and in case you fell behind on your Times, Times Magazine, and New Yorker reading--almost every piece in this volume originally appeared in one of those--this is a good way to catch up. It's a pretty good survey of the most important scientific and medical fronteirs: genomics, neuroscience, and particle physics; but it also, as was the editor's stated intention, humanizes science by focusing on the personalities involved. We get quirky mathematicians, loner paleontologists, and patients whose lives and identities hinge on radical technologies and discoveries. This, of course, is how popular science writing is often done, and a reader wanting a deeper core knowledge of the science itself will find it fluffy and patronizing. But in hearing the passions, personal quests, and sense of wonder that motivate the work, we are reminded that the scientific eye will only survey the area we collectively want it to and will pay for it to. It is not doing everything all at once, as it sometimes seems when obscure studies come out of the woodwork. Rather, it is, wondrous though it be, as limited and earth-bound as any of our endeavors.
]]> 15887153 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:26:21 -0800
author: Jacques Barzun
name: Sam
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 04/08
date added: 02/20/08
shelves:
review:
Blowing my mind one page at a time. It's a lot to digest, so I may have to use this space from time to time to ruminate.
]]> 3173489 Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:32:38 -0800
Solnit overwrites a little, but she's clearly a fine researcher, and a good Americanist. Not only do I now know more about Muybridge than is probably necessary to get along in society, I also have a much clearer sympathy with his era. It was an explosive moment in American history, and one that truly lies between the modern and the rest of human experience. While in school the story is told through the symbolic moments of the Intercontinental railroad or the Indian Wars, in Solnit's story these become moments in the life of a photographer. Swirling around like so, this world of fronteirsmen and magnates, ports and deserts, violence and paradise, very old and very new, comes alive like I've never seen it before. ]]>
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Sam
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 12/07
date added: 12/11/07
shelves:
review:
It's not so much a biography as a description of a historical moment, when, the author would have us believe, our species changed in fundamental ways. Time stops and speeds up. Distance collapses into almost nothing. The very acts of seeing, doing, remembering, and being in a place take on new dimensions. Hilarity ensues.

Solnit overwrites a little, but she's clearly a fine researcher, and a good Americanist. Not only do I now know more about Muybridge than is probably necessary to get along in society, I also have a much clearer sympathy with his era. It was an explosive moment in American history, and one that truly lies between the modern and the rest of human experience. While in school the story is told through the symbolic moments of the Intercontinental railroad or the Indian Wars, in Solnit's story these become moments in the life of a photographer. Swirling around like so, this world of fronteirsmen and magnates, ports and deserts, violence and paradise, very old and very new, comes alive like I've never seen it before.
]]> 8447526 Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:33:56 -0700
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Sam
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 12/07
date added: 10/30/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 1007828 Mon, 25 Jun 2007 07:22:38 -0700
I suppose there is some of that behind this all. The first-person narration of Binx Bolling does not explicitly mull over his position in a teetering line of New Orleans aristocracy, but we piece this together from the world he moves in. The cast of family and friends, the homes and neighborhoods, all help us know his cultural and historical context. That is, who he is supposed to be.

Maybe that's why, with no apparent awareness of these expectations, and a total fixation on his own quest, Binx is our hero. By moving himself away to the suburbs--a nicely bland, uninscribed world--he choses to glean his identity instead from the movies, arguably the American consensus. Here's how he describes one movie, in it's entirety:

"Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals."

That's it! No genre, no setting, no events. Just an existential arc will define what this movie is about.

Now toward the end of the book, where you often get that long speech by a secondary but crucial character that defines the meaning of the wrapup thereafter, we get just that. Binx's great Aunt, who has clearly represented the aristocratic element, finally lays out on the line all the stuff that's been seething below the surface, laying bare her disdain for the fate that has befallen her kind at the hands of negroes and the less classy elements of society who stick up for them.

What we end up with is a book about the dissolution of class-consciousness amongst what would become the suburban middle-class, and the freedom that affords to pursue a more narrow and narcissistic, but also a more self-perfecting quest for morality.

That doesn't feel quite right. This book's about more than that. And perhaps I haven't read it quite closely enough. But consider that a thread, at least.

]]>
author: Walker Percy
name: Sam
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1960
rating: 3
read at: 05/07
date added: 06/25/07
shelves:
review:
This is a slow-burner. A seether. It simmers. Lots of events, but uneventful. But the sense of urgency is steady, and the emotional dynamics are thorough and broad. I didn't expect it to be so obsessed with the existential search. I thought I was getting into Southern Fiction, so I expected a parable of race and class, an articulation of social paradoxes.

I suppose there is some of that behind this all. The first-person narration of Binx Bolling does not explicitly mull over his position in a teetering line of New Orleans aristocracy, but we piece this together from the world he moves in. The cast of family and friends, the homes and neighborhoods, all help us know his cultural and historical context. That is, who he is supposed to be.

Maybe that's why, with no apparent awareness of these expectations, and a total fixation on his own quest, Binx is our hero. By moving himself away to the suburbs--a nicely bland, uninscribed world--he choses to glean his identity instead from the movies, arguably the American consensus. Here's how he describes one movie, in it's entirety:

"Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals."

That's it! No genre, no setting, no events. Just an existential arc will define what this movie is about.

Now toward the end of the book, where you often get that long speech by a secondary but crucial character that defines the meaning of the wrapup thereafter, we get just that. Binx's great Aunt, who has clearly represented the aristocratic element, finally lays out on the line all the stuff that's been seething below the surface, laying bare her disdain for the fate that has befallen her kind at the hands of negroes and the less classy elements of society who stick up for them.

What we end up with is a book about the dissolution of class-consciousness amongst what would become the suburban middle-class, and the freedom that affords to pursue a more narrow and narcissistic, but also a more self-perfecting quest for morality.

That doesn't feel quite right. This book's about more than that. And perhaps I haven't read it quite closely enough. But consider that a thread, at least.


]]> 462612 Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:34:53 -0700
While Sante's view is unromantic, his stories show that pre-bureaucracy city allowed for moments of cultural thriving unseen today. Imagine audiences caring enough about theater to throw rotten produce at acts they didn't like. Imagine Manhattan a true patchwork of ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, from places we don't even know about today. Imagine an afternoon walk around downtown taking you through several of these. Not one bit like today.

Sante doesn't go into it, but from reading this I realized how much less organized life was in the pre-modern city. Though today's poor are often mired in debt, bureaucracy, and correctional facilities, there is still a state structure that at least tries, however ineptly, to account for them. We have housing laws instead of shantytowns. Welfare instead of orphans selling paper flowers on every corner. Clean, running water to even the most meager housing instead of massive typhoid outbreaks. While some aspects seem to be with us still--gang wars to protect crime precincts, for example--one does appreciate that low was much lower back then, and that the project of NYC to this day is one of constant vigilence by and on behalf of those whom the system has failed, and a constant increase in state ivolvment and regulation. Whether you find this arc hopeful or repugnant when drawn over the national story, in NYC it has been a true necessity, a check on the unspeakable oppression a city can inflict. While some Americans outside of New York may feel self-reliant, and claim that state meddling only impedes the ability of individuals and communities to do their thing, in NYC no one is under the impression that we are that unconnected.

]]>
author: Luc Sante
name: Sam
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 01/06
date added: 03/28/07
shelves:
review:
This has really enlivened my experience in NYC. Highly anecdotal and well-researched account of the street gangs, urchins, gamblers, actors, criminals and small-time entrepreneurs of Old New York. You meet the cast of characters who used to move amongst these very streets.

While Sante's view is unromantic, his stories show that pre-bureaucracy city allowed for moments of cultural thriving unseen today. Imagine audiences caring enough about theater to throw rotten produce at acts they didn't like. Imagine Manhattan a true patchwork of ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, from places we don't even know about today. Imagine an afternoon walk around downtown taking you through several of these. Not one bit like today.

Sante doesn't go into it, but from reading this I realized how much less organized life was in the pre-modern city. Though today's poor are often mired in debt, bureaucracy, and correctional facilities, there is still a state structure that at least tries, however ineptly, to account for them. We have housing laws instead of shantytowns. Welfare instead of orphans selling paper flowers on every corner. Clean, running water to even the most meager housing instead of massive typhoid outbreaks. While some aspects seem to be with us still--gang wars to protect crime precincts, for example--one does appreciate that low was much lower back then, and that the project of NYC to this day is one of constant vigilence by and on behalf of those whom the system has failed, and a constant increase in state ivolvment and regulation. Whether you find this arc hopeful or repugnant when drawn over the national story, in NYC it has been a true necessity, a check on the unspeakable oppression a city can inflict. While some Americans outside of New York may feel self-reliant, and claim that state meddling only impedes the ability of individuals and communities to do their thing, in NYC no one is under the impression that we are that unconnected.


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