false 12 12 12 true 5632486 read 0 true 1499559 currently-reading 0 true 1499558 to-read <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'The Omnivore's Dilemma']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/74085529 to: The Omnivore's Dilemma (Hardcover) by Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is my hero. In this book, he takes a subject of huge relevance to every American--where our food comes from--and explores it with infectious curiosity. His research is thorough, and his writing is such a pleasure to read. It's clever and almost poetic, and sort of unpolished in an appealing way. I kept chuckling. He also convinced me that eating meat is ethical, as long as the animals are raised and slaughtered humanely. (A big "as long as," I know.) He twists around the standard perspective, arguing that farm animals deployed their own successful evolutionary strategy to become tasty to humans, ensuring their survival. He also makes some of the more radical animal rights' activists seem pretty absurd. When faced with the predation of animals on one another, Peter Singer and his ilk don't think that makes meat-eating acceptable for humans. Fine, that's reasonable. But their reaction is to wonder whether they should intervene in the violence animals do to other animals. This makes them seem, as Pollan points out, against nature itself. He says predation is an essential part of nature, keeping species--both predator and prey--alive, even as it kills individual members. That's one key difference between him and the animal people: the latter focus more on individual animals, to the detriment of thinking about species as a whole.

]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Daniel Deronda']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/74084547 to: Daniel Deronda (Modern Library Classics) by George Eliot
This was the first Eliot novel I'd read. Very absorbing story, written in masterful prose. I loved Daniel Deronda. (I also love his name.) He is compassionate, empathetic and wise. Gwendolyn is initially less sympathetic, but ultimately I liked her a lot too. Eliot weaves her perceptive observations about life, relationships and religion into the narrative. ]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Couples']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/63054905 to: Couples (Paperback) by John Updike
Skimming a few of the other reviews on this site, I feel as though I've had a rather common reaction to this book. The language is definitely impressive. In Updike's hands, English feels infinitely supple and expressive. But reading this novel, I kept thinking, What is the *point* exactly? The story involves a group of youngish couples with small children in the early 1960s in a small Massachusetts town on the water. The primary interest to me was anthropological, assuming his portrait is somewhat historically accurate. The couples are constantly "swinging." Some have affairs on the sly, and other couples swap partners more or less openly. They party every weekend and, by today's standards, are negligent parents. It was interesting and kind of shocking to see how middle-class values about marriage and parenthood have changed in the past few decades. (I hypothesize that a big part of the reason adultery is much less common or at least less acceptable now is that people have multiple partners *before* they get married. Thus they both get the urge for promiscuity out of their systems to some extent, and they conduct more trial and error to find the right person to stick with.)

Anyway, most of the characters are not very sympathetic. A couple are insufferable: one man repeats almost everything he says in French. I think he's supposed to be ridiculous, but it's still annoying. Piet, the protagonist, sleeps with four different married women over the course of the book (five including his own wife). No one seems to learn much or change much. There is little momentum to the plot.

That seems inconclusive, but I don't have anything else to say.
]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/62080207 to: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Hardcover) by Geoff Dyer
I was disappointed by this book. All the reviews I've read have been glowing. I was immediately put off by the imprecision of the language. A small criticism: one of the main characters is an American woman, but she uses subtle Britishisms, like ending sentences with "isn't it?" and saying "straight away" instead of "right away." Maybe it's petty to complain about, but I feel like the author has an obligation to at least have an American friend read it and catch those things.

Anyway, this book consists of two novellas. The first chronicles a few days of mostly empty hedonism in Venice. The narrator, an art journalist named Jeff, goes to a lot of parties, hates his job, has status anxiety, and drinks a lot. In Venice he meets abovementioned American girl, they hit it off, and they have good sex.

In the second novella, a nameless narrator, who seems a lot like Jeff, goes to Varanasi in India. Apparently this is a place where there are a lot of funerals, or something? I didn't catch exactly what it's known for, but it has something to do with death. The narrator gradually loses his desires, becomes very serene and kind of eccentric. I think maybe I was supposed to admire him when he reaches this stage but I found him kind of repulsive. But maybe that says more about me than the book.



]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/58756481 to: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Hardcover) by Jeffrey Toobin
This book is a fascinating introduction to the quirkily glamorous world of the Supreme Court. It drove home the extent to which Sandra Day O'Connor dominated the Court during much of her tenure. I came away impressed with O'Connor's confidence and practicality, but sometimes she seemed to suffer from a shortage of thoughtfulness (most egregiously in Bush v. Gore). I am intrigued by Souter's independence and indifference to convention--there are a couple of priceless anecdotes about him, although they seem like the could be apocryphal.

I was probably most surprised by the parts about Thomas. I was under what Toobin says is the common misimpression that he is sort of Scalia's lackey (this may be due partly to racism, but I think also has to do with the fact that he joined the Court later and seldom speaks from the bench). In fact, according to Toobin, he is well to the *right* of Scalia, which I didn't even realize was possible. I also thought of him as a bitter, brooding man, but apparently he is gregarious and well-loved by his colleagues (although indeed extremely bitter about his confirmation hearings).

Toobin doesn't come out and say whose jurisprudence he respects most and least, but Kennedy's doesn't come off very well. He has a penchant for lofty, meaningless rhetoric, and he doesn't seem to have a coherent philosophy. I wish Toobin had analyzed Ginsburg's, Stevens's, and Souter's juridprudence more extensively. They seem perhaps the most respectable, but then again that may just be because he didn't critize them.

Overall, this was a great read, and highly informative. ]]> <![CDATA[new comment from Rebecca]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/43971802 Rose's review of Dreams from My Father
by Barack Obama

hi rose,
i agree!
]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/52413992 to: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel (Paperback) by Zoë Heller
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49293019 to: A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Hardcover) by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
I am still actually reading this book. I am about halfway through. It is about 1000 pages. So I want to record what I can remember now, because by the time I finish I'll probably have forgotten it all.

Well, Schlesinger is clearly brilliant. His prose is superb. This book is so valuable because it's an insider's account, but he has obviously done a lot of additional research to supplement his own experiences and memories. He has a gift for politics--for analyzing the situation trenchantly, including all the personalities and egos involved--but also a sense of irony about it. It seems the same was true of Kennedy.

The parallels between Kennedy and Obama are striking. I know it's almost a cliche, but as I read Schlesinger's descriptions of Kennedy's character, it was uncanny. He was intellectual yet pragmatic, young and handsome. His campaign promised change and his administration excited hope throughout the country and the world.

The story of the Democratic Convention was dramatic and taught me a lot I hadn't known. It all happened very differently then. The nominee was chosen at the convention by the delegates. Johnson was running for president too. Adlai Stevenson wasn't running, but he had a lot of support and apparently could have been nominated anyway. But ultimately Kennedy prevailed. And then, exhausted by this process, he had to choose his running mate immediately! Within a day or two, I think. He offered it to Johnson on the assumption that he'd say no. LBJ was already extremely powerful as the Senate majority leader, and the vice presidency was not seen as especially desirable. The liberals didn't want him on the ticket. Kennedy didn't particularly want him on the ticket, but felt he had to make the offer to appease him. Schlesinger speculates that Johnson accepted because he was getting tired of his job, and because he felt a responsibility to keep the South in the Democratic party.

I also learned about the Bay of Pigs. I will write more on this later. I know this review is long and probably boring, but I'm writing it for myself to refresh my memory later. More soon...

OK, so there was this nebulous plan developed under the Eisenhower administration to train Cuban dissidents in the mountains of Nicaragua to overthrow the Castro regime. The aim of this training was just to keep the option open, not necessarily to execute the plan. But, as Schlesinger points out, these things develop their own momentum that can be hard to stop. The dissidents themselves, having invested all this time and energy under difficult circumstances, wanted to go through with the plot. They were also isolated and developed a group-think mentality, convincing themselves the task would be easier than it really would. The Americans--specifically the CIA--were susceptible to similar logic. And in the White House, there was intense pressure to accept the arguments of these experts. There was also pressure to seem tough; it was always harder to argue for diplomacy and "soft" power than to go with the military option. Schlesinger was against it, and wrote a memo to that effect, but nearly everyone else was for it. Kennedy was adamant that the US could not contribute any forces; this would be an operation conducted by Cubans, in the name of the revolution (which the Americans and these dissidents believed Castro had betrayed). The fantasy was that once the invasion made some progress, all the other anti-Castro Cubans would spontaneously join them and overcome Castro's forces.

The result was a fiasco. In addition to the major miscalculations--underestimating both the strength of Castro's forces and his popular support--there were myriad minor errors, as trivial but crucial as forgetting about the time difference between Cuba and Nicaragua. There had also been serious miscommunication, with the Cubans expecting the American military to intervene and help them if things didn't go well--but Kennedy did not want it to turn into an American coup. Actually, I wish Schesinger had provided more specifics on what happened to the Cubans. He doesn't say how many were killed. He implies that a lot of them rotted in prison. Kennedy felt terrible, but learned important lessons he would apply in the future, especially in the Cuban Missile Crisis. More soon... ]]> <![CDATA[new comment from Rebecca]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/35661507 Rose's review of Madame Bovary (World's Classics)
by Gustave Flaubert

hey rose,
i don't get why you gave this book four stars.

love,
becca ]]> <![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/51477569 to: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Paperback) by Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild is an exceptionally talented researcher and writer. This book is about the British antislavery movement in the late 18th century. Although most of the activists favored emancipation, the movement's explicit goal was more modest--abolition of the British slave trade. This was still an extremely ambitious, almost outlandish, aim at the time. The slave trade and slave-produced goods were a huge part of the British economy. Hochschild compares the importance of sugar then to oil today. The British Carribean colonies, such as Jamaica, Barbados, and St. Domingo (now Haiti), had climates ideal for sugar cane cultivation. And the labor was brutal--so much so that while the slave population of the American South grew over time, that of the Carribean islands declined, and constantly needed to be replenished by the slave trade. (It was called the "triangle trade" because sailors would sail from Britain to the coast of Africa, where they would trade goods for slaves, then transport the slaves (in horrific conditions) to the Carribean (this part of the journey was called the "middle passage"), where they would trade the slaves for sugar and rum.)

To convey how absurd the idea of abolishing slavery seemed at the time, Hochschild invokes another analogy: it would be as though a small group today convened and decided that, for environmental reasons, we needed to abolish cars. I don't know if that's an exaggeration or not. His main thesis is that the abolitionist campaign pioneered most of the tools of activism that would come to be commonplace: media campaigns (activists enlisted sympathetic poets the way we would solicit op-eds today); boycotts (there was a widespread sugar boycott); petitions (the only way most citizens could make their voices heard in a time when few could vote); testimony before Parliament; and letters to supporters laying out the facts. The commercial interests also pioneered some tactics still in use, such as appropriating the language of their critics, and claiming, for example, not that slaves were unworthy of concern, but that slavery was good for them.

Hochschild explores why the movement took hold in Britain long before it would elsewhere. He theorizes that it had to do with a contradiction in British life: people in some ways had more liberties than in other countries, and prided themselves on a robust free press and freedom of speech generally. But at the same time, there was a tradition of the "press gang," in which the Royal Navy would essentially kidnap young men and press them into service for all the wars they were engaged in. So the people had a taste of freedom, which made them want to share it with others, but they also had the experience of basically a form of slavery, which made them more empathetic with the African slaves.

Another factor Hochschild points to is geography: the movement's most tireless activist, Thomas Clarkson, spent years riding horseback all over the country organizing. He would not have been able to do that in a bigger or less developed country.

Reading this book made me think anew about activism. In recent years, I have shied away from activism and tend not to particularly like the activist personality. Temperamentally, I'm more comfortable with observing, making nuanced, pragmatic, moderate conclusions. Activists often seem self-righteous, unrealistic, and annoying to me. In reading this book, I realized that I might have felt the same way about these characters, even though now we see them as indisputably heroic. To us, slavery seems like such a clear-cut wrong. But it wasn't so clear-cut at the time; it had been a reality for all of recorded history. Today, things that can appear nuanced will someday, perhaps, be seen as just wrong. Indeed, one other point that emerges from the book is that what replaced slavery wasn't always so different from slavery itself. Ex-slaves in the Carribean had to pay rent and taxes. So they usually ended up continuing to work for the plantation owners and paying their meager wages in rent--to the plantation owners. Or, sometimes, the owners would strike a deal: the freed slaves could live rent-free if they would forgo their wages. Given the lack of real alternatives, this seems hard to distinguish from slavery.

You may be wondering (if you've read this far) why I didn't give the book five stars. I was extremely impressed by Hochschild's skill, and I'd be overjoyed if I could write a book like this. But I didn't feel really gripped by the characters, really invested in them personally. Still, I'd recommend this book to anyone.



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