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April 15
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Mateo
gave
 
to:
The Year of Magical Thinking (Paperback)
by Joan Didion
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my rating:
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read in September, 2007
Mateo said:
"Of the many fine writers who pen for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion has long been one of my favorites, because she's an information and control freak who does the reading. I recall a review of a Reagan bio from a few years b...more
Of the many fine writers who pen for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion has long been one of my favorites, because she's an information and control freak who does the reading. I recall a review of a Reagan bio from a few years back--I think the book was by Dinesh D'Souza--and the pleasure I had in watching her patiently, dispassionately pick it to shreds. Her process was simple: check a passage or allegation against the record, against the quotes, against the facts.. It was devastating in its directness and simplicity, and the almost bloodless way it worked.
Other works by Didion have felt more uneven, in part because her style is so pronounced, so mannered, but overall I've generally greatly appreciated her while recognizing her flaws. In Year of Magical Thinking, the flaws are a little too visible for me, as though, with her husband gone, she couldn't quite control her worst tendencies. Chief among these are a steep reliance on repetition and the calling out of detail in dramatic, one-sentence paragraphs.
I found one of John's sweaters.
It was green.
He was wearing a green sweater.
I had worn green in Acapulco.
That sort of thing. With a subject like death, a writer needs a light hand ("No one without a sense of humor should ever write tragedy," Robert Benchley once said of one of Eugene O'Neill's ponderous weepers), you need to let the subject do some of the heavy lifting itself; the last thing to do is to emphasize every little detail as portentous, even if (as Didion is supremely aware) that's what grieving makes you do.
Two factors also make it difficult to sit too long at this pity party. First, her husband was 71 years old and had a long history of heart trouble, including a pacemaker. So it's not as though she didn't know this was coming. Sure, knowing that death awaits doesn't remove the sting, but it does lessen it. Second, she seems to have led such a fabulously blessed life, full of trips to Honolulu and Paris and drinks with movie stars and meals at tony restaurants, that it's hard to work up a good head of sympathy for her. I mean, it's not like she was some Calcutta garbage-picker whose husband was killed in a chemical explosion, leaving her with six babies and a full set of dentures.
Still, the book is full of valuable insights and nice passages, so I don't regret reading it. But it wasn't written for me. It was written for Joan Didion.
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January 19
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Mateo
gave
to:
Courtier And The Heretic (Hardcover)
by Matthew Stewart
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my rating:
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read in January, 2008
Mateo said:
"At last, a book for all of us who have been long awaiting a work about the fateful 1676 meeting between Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz.
I enjoyed this book. I know nothing about philosophy, unless by "philosophy" you mean the Pa...more
At last, a book for all of us who have been long awaiting a work about the fateful 1676 meeting between Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz.
I enjoyed this book. I know nothing about philosophy, unless by "philosophy" you mean the Packer's West Coast short passing game, but I enjoyed this book nonetheless. I fall short in sharing the author's almost carnal reverence for Spinoza, whose philosophy strikes me as remarkably turgid and who, I can't help think, really should have just been an atheist and have done with it--although I appreciate Spinoza's devotion to reason and materialism over received theology and its bracing effect on Western thought. And I rather think that Stewart has it in for poor Leibniz, who, while admittedly a prevaricating, egotistical flatterer whose notion of monads strikes me as something that you'd come up with if you were in a Loony Tunes cartoon and had just been struck with a mallet, DID invent the calculus, after all.
Despite a tendency toward repetition (forgivable when dealing with such dense themes), as well as a bit of oversell on his themes--I can accept that Spinoza was influential, but Stewart lays it on a bit thick--Stewart does a good job of presenting the arcane themes of philosophy in their historical context. He's also leavens the book with some sly humor, which comes as something of a relief, given the amount of angels-dancing-on-pins that goes on in philosophy. ...less
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Mateo
gave
to:
The Conscience of a Liberal (Hardcover)
by Paul Krugman
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my rating:
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read in December, 2007
Mateo said:
"If you're an unreconstructed lefty like me, you'll enjoy Paul Krugman's unapologetically liberal--emphatically not radical--new book. If you're not, you may find the book contains some surprising facts, figures, and conclusions.
Krugman's thesi...more
If you're an unreconstructed lefty like me, you'll enjoy Paul Krugman's unapologetically liberal--emphatically not radical--new book. If you're not, you may find the book contains some surprising facts, figures, and conclusions.
Krugman's thesis is that, against conventional wisdom, politics have driven economics, and not vice-versa, over the last 30 or so years of right-wing dominance, resulting in the profoundly unequal society we live in. He claims that before the Reagan Revolution (which had its roots in Goldwater movement conservatism), America was not only a much more egalitarian and fair place, it was--McCarthyism notwithstanding--a more politically tolerant and consensus-driven place, as well. In the '50s and '60s, there was general agreement by both Republicans and Democrats in the broad outlines of a socially engaged government: high taxes on the rich, a good social safety net, and modest progress on civil rights. And this came crashing down with the rise of the neocons, the theocons, and the anti-tax fanatics.
Krugman's proposals are all conservative, in the sense that he proposes very little that's new, but, rather, a return to the economic status quo of, say, the late 1950s. He is unstinting in his praise of the New Deal, which may frustrate more radical thinkers but has its practical advantages. One of the nicest things about this book is its upbeat optimism: Krugman believes that the right wing may be at its ascendancy, and that there is real opportunity to effect a return to New Deal-style liberalism. (He sees universal health care as the issue that can drive this change.) This is a nice change of pace for those of us who finish books on current politics generally so depressed that we look to Ingmar Bergman movies for snappy, uplifting, Panglossian comedy. ...less
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Mateo
gave
to:
Gibbon's the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Paperback)
by Moses Hadas
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Mateo said:
"Not without reason is Gibbon considered one of the masters of prose style in English. His elegant, supple, and nuanced writing has influenced writers in English for hundreds of years. (Churchill, for example, was an impassioned devotee who used Gib...more
Not without reason is Gibbon considered one of the masters of prose style in English. His elegant, supple, and nuanced writing has influenced writers in English for hundreds of years. (Churchill, for example, was an impassioned devotee who used Gibbon's style to burnish his own writing.)
So call me a Philistine, call me uneducated, call me a cab, but I found this book to be, frankly, tedious. Yes, Gibbon's sly, understated manner can be a marvel of polished prosody, but it can also be rococo and impenetrable. (It's no coincidence that Gibbon reminds me of no one so much as the late journalist Murray Kempton, whose prose--probably derived from equal parts Gibbon and Damon Runyon--was equally outfitted with serpentine bangles, although Kempton mostly wrote about mobsters and pugs.) On numerous occasions I found myself rereading paragraphs simply to figure out what Gibbon's subject was. Is he talking about the Goths? The Romans? The plebeians? Who knows? On to the next paragraph!
Thus, even with this extremely truncated abridgment, my enthusiasm began to flag after a hundred or so pages and I barely dragged myself across the finish line, unable to remember one dictator from another or, for that matter, to care. It didn't help that the book pales by my modern standards of historiography; it's highly tendentious, idiosyncratic, and poorly referenced.
So, yes, I am a Philistine. Now, where's Phyllis? ...less
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Mateo
gave
to:
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Hardcover)
by Joe Bageant
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my rating:
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read in November, 2007
Mateo said:
"Not a bad book, but a disappointing one. Disappointing when compared with, for example, Thomas Frank's excellent What's the Matter with Kansas?, another son-of-a-red-state writer's rueful look at how corporate neocons have hijacked the minds ...more
Not a bad book, but a disappointing one. Disappointing when compared with, for example, Thomas Frank's excellent What's the Matter with Kansas?, another son-of-a-red-state writer's rueful look at how corporate neocons have hijacked the minds and hearts of rural America.
There's some good stuff here--Bageant writes well and is funny, and he has an interesting perspective, that of a liberal who goes home to his redneck roots. When he sticks to cases, he can be very informative--he provides perhaps the best explanation of how supposedly "non-profit" hospitals screw their patients and their community I've read, for example. In some ways he's like an embedded reporter in his own town, and he presents his people, not without sympathy, in a way that most of us in the big coastal cities will never know them. His final essay, "American Hologram," is a masterful philippic about how America has been stolen away from the sleepwalking, TV-drugged citizenry.
But Bageant is less an analyst than a partisan; you get the feeling that he's on the Blue Team and just hates the (big corporate) bastards on the Red Team. (It doesn't help that his only suggestion boils down to better education.) The book is more laced with rant than analysis; too often he'll follow up an example of particularly unenlightened redneck politics with a "That's the sort of crap the Republicans believe" comment. Consequently, it's unlikely to change anyone's opinion. Take, for example, his pro-gun chapter, which could be lifted directly from an NRA handout:
"Those [pro-gun] facts are sure to generate a lot of buts from a misinformed public and to attract criticism from 'experts' whose academic or lobbying careers are built on gun control. I'm sure they will make arguments that sound quite convincing. But the fact remains that much of the conventional wisdom about guns is completely wrong." (p. 149)
Well, that certainly convinces me. Or:
"Liberal America in particular lives in thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every working white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb rightly called America's 'paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.' Whether educated liberals believe this or not, it is true." (p. 205)
Thanks, Joe. I'll jot that down.
Again, not a bad book, and worth the look inside the redneck mentality, but I'll take Kansas.
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November 04
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Mateo
gave
to:
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (Paperback)
by Guy Delisle
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in November, 2007
Mateo said:
"When I was a little kid, we read comic books like Archie and Jughead or Dennis the Menace--innocent reads for innocent kids. Later, we--wait. I just have to interrupt myself to say this: Is there any way that Archie and Jughea...more
When I was a little kid, we read comic books like Archie and Jughead or Dennis the Menace--innocent reads for innocent kids. Later, we--wait. I just have to interrupt myself to say this: Is there any way that Archie and Jughead were not totally gay? I mean, totally, completely, flamingly homo gaius maximus? Because, look, here you have two incredibly well-chested hotties in Betty and Veronica, walking around in miniskirts and hippie beads, and meanwhile A. and J. are hanging out with each other instead of trying to get the girls high and then suggesting that they all go over to the abandoned quarry to give each other henna tattoos on their private parts. I mean, besides Archie showing up in a pair of leather chaps while Jughead sang Village People songs, I'm not sure what more obvious signs there could be.
All right, then. Back to my subject. Anyway, later on we discovered Zap Comix and R. Crumb, and sometime around the time of Maus comics became "graphic novels" and soon ponderous, self-important tubesteaks like Frank Miller started treating them like they were whipped cream on the nipples of Literature, and you couldn't really enjoy them because half the people were taking them too seriously and half the people were not taking them seriously at all, while the third half didn't even know they existed at all.
I don't read comics (or comix) anymore, haven't since college, but Guy Delisle's Pyongyang caught my eye and flung it right back at me. This is a first-rate book. It's depressing and scary as hell, because it's like reading 1984 and then finding an end-note that says, "Oh, and by the way, this is all true and happening now." It's also quite funny in parts, and more than a little touching and poignant in others. It's also a book that really works as a graphic novel. Sure, he could have written this as, say, a magazine article, but then you'd miss out on the simple but highly affecting drawings of eerily empty restaurants, or a pitch-black North Korean capital illuminated only where gigantic portraits of Kim Jong-Il are found. My only caveat with this book is that you have to be careful not to read it too fast; you can finish it in an hour or so, but skipping through the wordless panels means missing the oppressive silence that dominates a dictatorship.
Highly recommended.
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Mateo
gave
to:
The Postal Confessions (Paperback)
by Max Garland
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my rating:
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read in November, 2007
Mateo said:
"Another recommendation by the trippingly cool Ms. Tracy O.
Look, we all know how poetry books are supposed to work: you walk into a poetry book, you read a few poems, congratulate yourself on your artiness, make sure all your friends know you'v...more
Another recommendation by the trippingly cool Ms. Tracy O.
Look, we all know how poetry books are supposed to work: you walk into a poetry book, you read a few poems, congratulate yourself on your artiness, make sure all your friends know you've read it, and move on to reading Ken Follett under the covers. Well, never mind that, The Postal Confessions is more like reading 50 little novelettes with strange line breaks, novelettes that are funny and clever and sad and touching and good. Gardner has a great sense of the perfect image (a King James Bible "cooling like a black loaf on a nightstand," for example) and, better still, perhaps the most deft way with an unexpected metaphor of anyone I've read since Richard Brautigan:
"even the town pigeons walked like taxpayers / near the market"
"a woman is washing and drying a dish,/ a long calendar of dishes"
"the chihuahua ... wound like a waterbug / around the dumpling / ankles of the lady visitors"
And the poems themselves manage to feel very complete and full, while leaving an itch to scratch. In one, for example, he describes a corn snake left alone in a barn to devour a field rat, a "little creature whose name was filth, / but whose flaw was genuine hunger" -- a nice way of describing the way we all make compact with the bullies of this world to keep down the desperate. A homage to white bread subtly draws a connection between the near holiness of the white food and the complexion of those who celebrated it. Another imagines the God of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel reaching out to Adam not to impart a spark of divinity, but in a longing gesture of infinite loneliness. These are the realms of novels as much as poetry, and Gardner is to be praised for making such fine poetry.
Excellent.
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Mateo
gave
to:
Shades of California: The Hidden Beauty of Ordinary Life (Paperback)
by Robert Daseler
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my rating:
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read in November, 2007
Mateo said:
"Photography occupies a distinct position, in that it is both art and journalism. Not only can photography be intended either as fine art or as historical record (or both), but a single photograph can be viewed as either, no matter the photographer's...more
Photography occupies a distinct position, in that it is both art and journalism. Not only can photography be intended either as fine art or as historical record (or both), but a single photograph can be viewed as either, no matter the photographer's intention. Hence the person viewing an exhibition of photos may experience a certain uneasiness about how to react. Is this Art? Is this History? What's the Meaning here?
With Shades of California, happily, the only likely response is one of delight. Originally a project of the Los Angeles library system and later expanded statewide, Shades of California invited ordinary citizens to bring in ordinary photos--of weddings, workplaces, backyards, cultural festivals, farms, city streets, schools, and every other place one can think of, dating from the 1800s up to the turn of this century. The result is a wonderful pastiche of lives unfiltered by any thought of professionalism or even public viewing, and a crowning tribute to the diversity of the California experience. We see Chicanos in the Fifties in their clean white T-shirts and pressed Levis, working on cars; Japanese farmgirls at high school dances; middle-aged white car salesmen in their 1970s checked suitcoats and wide ties; Chinese laundries in the 1930s; car clubs from black Oakland at the end of the 1960s; and much, much more. Some of the photographs are hilarious (though not always intentionally so), while a few, like that of a funeral of a child lost during the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1919, are tragic, and quite a few are either startlingly familiar ("Hey, we lived on a street just like that") or shockingly alien ("They used horses back then?"). Almost all, though, are touched by a certain diffident sweetness, as though the people in them were both proud and a little flustered to find themselves in such a public setting.
Highly recommended.
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October 20
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Mateo
gave
to:
Under the Banner of Heaven (Paperback)
by Jon Krakauer
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in October, 2007
Mateo said:
"You know, I probably shouldn't have read this directly after finishing In Cold Blood. I'm not saying the combination brought out the homicidal psychotic in me, but I did have to pay for stabbing the hell out of a turkey in the Albertso...more
You know, I probably shouldn't have read this directly after finishing In Cold Blood. I'm not saying the combination brought out the homicidal psychotic in me, but I did have to pay for stabbing the hell out of a turkey in the Albertson's meat section the other day.
Is there a stranger sect out there than the Mormons? I mean, golden plates ... lost tribes ... Nephites battling Lamanites ... Orrin Hatch.... Well, yes, I guess one look at Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's couch suggests that Scientology has a lot to answer for, as well. For that matter, I've never understood how a burning bush speaks to someone. Why a burning bush? Why not, say, a burning acacia tree?
But if mainstream Mormonism is a little on the far-out side, then fundamentalist Mormonism--sort of like regular Mormonism with more fanaticism, more racism, more welfare cheating, more taking of wives, and more child rape--is like the spastic uncle that mainstream Mormonism keeps in the wine cellar. "Thumping? What thumping? I didn't hear anything. Did you hear anything, honey? I didn't hear anything."
Krakauer does a fine job of interweaving Mormon history, profiles of fundamentalist breakaway Mormon sects, and the hideous, gruesome story of the two God-soaked fundamentalist brothers who slashed the throats of a young woman and her infant daughter. He attempts to be as fair-minded as possible about all these subjects while never neglecting to call a spade a spade. Personally, I would have used the word "nutjob" and "charlatan" a lot more often, and not just in connection with the fundamentalists, but Krakauer makes a point of not passing judgment on the validity of firmly held religious beliefs. I guess a book called Is the Entire State of Utah Out of Its Mind? wouldn't sell.
In sum, though, Under the Banner of Heaven is as gripping and hard to put down as Krakauer's other fine books, and offers a valuable insight into a strange, deeply American phenomenon. Recommended.
One small but not unimportant note: Krakauer includes a final "Author's Remarks" section at the end of the book. These remarks chiefly concern Krakauer's own attitudes toward religion and Mormonism, as well as his intent in writing the book. It's unfortunate that he added this postscript, not because it's unwarranted but because a) it's largely superfluous, and b) it rather ruins the picture-perfect way the rest of the book ends. John, you had it in the bag, man; all you had to do was dribble out the clock. Everything in that postscript should be said in interviews.
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OK very funny. I am not about to blow up anything - BUT, you made me look.............Your reviews are great - all new and unexpected and I will be develving into them................
