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March 26
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Scott
gave
 
to:
9/11 Commission Report, The: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition)
by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in February, 2008
Scott said:
"The first 10% of this book is very well worth reading, offering as it does a detailed, minute-by-minute breakdown of exactly what happened on September 11, 2001, from the perspective of the various aviation and federal organizations. If you were mes...more
The first 10% of this book is very well worth reading, offering as it does a detailed, minute-by-minute breakdown of exactly what happened on September 11, 2001, from the perspective of the various aviation and federal organizations. If you were mesmerized, like I was, by the documentary-like vision of the movie "United 93" and interested in the particulars of how the other three planes were hijacked, and how the casual ineptness of human agency allowed it to happen, that first chapter is a must-read. The outdated remainder of the book, backfilling the history of al-Qaeda and radical Islam, and recommending a litany of moderately sweeping solutions, is less essential and if anything, more depressing, given how the government failed to enact more than their barest outlines and took post-9/11 policy in a baffling new direction. (Hint: nowhere in this book do the commission members recommend an invasion of Iraq.) Recommended as a sobering history lesson but you may just want to pick over the online version rather than have the full edition on your bookshelf....less
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Scott
gave
to:
Lush Life
by Richard Price
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in March, 2008
Scott said:
"I came around to gradually regard the work of Richard Price -- surely one of America's best crime novelists if not the best -- in a very backwards fashion. Like many (well, some), I saw Spike Lee's movie adaptation of Price's Clockers years ago, and...more
I came around to gradually regard the work of Richard Price -- surely one of America's best crime novelists if not the best -- in a very backwards fashion. Like many (well, some), I saw Spike Lee's movie adaptation of Price's Clockers years ago, and I faintly recall quick-reading the original novel without realizing quite what I had. Fast-forward to years later, with Price and several other heavy-hitters contributing to HBO's outstanding drama The Wire, which kept me captivated to the very end, very interested in the names behind it, and very eager for something to fill the void after the smoke cooled from watching The Wire's devastating finale. Such led me to catch up once again with Mr. Price, who I am primed at last to truly appreciate. Price's novel Lush Life is, then, the first of his that I've REALLY read, and it's hard to remember a novel in recent memory that I've been so absorbed by. Not only does Lush Life contain Price's sharp, acerbic dialogue (best represented by a number of virtuosic police interrogation scenes) but it offers a compelling portrait of the clash of two New Yorks: the homogenized post-Guliani adult playland of bistros and bars, overlapping with the older, more dangerous tradition of criminal activity which spills out from over the poverty line. Price's new work begins as a police procedural illustrating, above all else, how an innocent suspect who acts guilty can really, really mess up a murder investigation, and ends as something different, a painted novel with filled-in detail from all corners of Price's beloved Lower East Side. ...less
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March 10
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Scott
gave
to:
The Beatles: The Biography (Paperback)
by Bob Spitz
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in August, 2007
Scott said:
"2007 marked a full fifty years since the formation of the Quarry Men -- the scruffy teenage Liverpool skiffle group who eventually became the Beatles -- but Bob Spitz' mammoth biography of the Fab Four goes even farther back than that. It starts wit...more
2007 marked a full fifty years since the formation of the Quarry Men -- the scruffy teenage Liverpool skiffle group who eventually became the Beatles -- but Bob Spitz' mammoth biography of the Fab Four goes even farther back than that. It starts with a brief history of the region itself followed by histories of the lads' families and hence spends some pages before getting into the story of the Beatles' meteoric rise. Luckily there is still almost a thousand of pages' worth of space thereafter to expound upon nearly every facet of the Beatles' lives and extraordinary careers, in an almost overwhelming but even-handed treatment that will ensure that even reasonably well-read Beatles fans like myself come away with a headful of new details, many taken from well-chosen interviews both fresh and obscure. The Beatles changed things so much, from their reinvention of pop music to their influence on popular culture and attitude itself, that it's the counter-intuitive things that stand out the most, such as how it took surprisingly long for their flame to catch a spark in America, and about how once it did, the crushing popularity made them walled-in prisoners of their own fame. Don't read if you're unwilling to see the Beatles' warts and all, including not just sex and drugs but also STDs and addictions; still, if you're looking for the true story of the Beatles, this is the only possible place to turn....less
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Scott
gave
to:
Then We Came to the End (Hardcover)
by Joshua Ferris
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in September, 2007
Scott said:
"It's unusual for a novel to be narrated in the first-person plural, but the "we" who tell the story of Joshua Ferris' comic office farce feel completely natural because they're real. The modern American office of any size always has a &quo...more
It's unusual for a novel to be narrated in the first-person plural, but the "we" who tell the story of Joshua Ferris' comic office farce feel completely natural because they're real. The modern American office of any size always has a "we", and if you work there, as I do, you are a part of them, on some of the better days, or apart from them, on the others. The cube-farm in Then We Came To The End is an advertising agency, but it could represent any collective group endeavor which straddles the thin and messy line between creativity and cutthroat commerce. I've known co-workers like the book's Karen Woo, who invents a substance called "lastive acid" for an ad; like Lynn Mason, the well-known yet unknowable middle manager who may or may not have breast cancer; and like Tom Mota, a volatile divorcee who exercises many of the violent urges against his corporate masters about which just as many of us frequently fantasize. Ferris' story isn't so much the old anti-corporate diatribe as it is a very funny look at the good, bad and mundane ways in which corporate culture forcibly molds the psyches of those of us who have to spend over half our waking life there....less
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Scott
gave
to:
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)
by Neal Stephenson
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in February, 2008
Scott said:
"A friend of mine has periodically attempted to get me into the works of Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi writer who made a big splash with the virtual reality novel Snow Crash. Stephenson's work is imaginatively ambitious, and here, in describing the ne...more
A friend of mine has periodically attempted to get me into the works of Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi writer who made a big splash with the virtual reality novel Snow Crash. Stephenson's work is imaginatively ambitious, and here, in describing the neo-Victorian future of a world where matter compilers can make anything, he fills the book with a huge raft of characters and concepts, most particularly "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", a super-intelligent book which uses nanotechnology to take its youthful charges into a world of fairy tale princesses and castles which teaches them the true lessons of life along the way. The Diamond Age truly takes off in those passages "taken" from the Primer, but otherwise I find Stephenson's style, while ambitious, too dry and anodyne to make for a complete reading experience. Aside from the sympathetic portrayal of the Primer's chief (and accidental) test subject, a runaway urchin named Nell, I found myself getting lost in Stephenson's characters and in his elaborate descriptions, which still seem somewhat bound to the dusty constrictions of science fiction, putting forth a whole heaping bunch of plot in lieu of the subtleties of true storytelling, which should show instead of tell. ...less
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Scott
gave
to:
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Hardcover)
by Bill Buford
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
Scott said:
"Few pieces of writing have made me physically salivate like Bill Buford's New Yorker article 'The Secret of Excess', a 2002 profile about master chef Mario Batali, who rewrote the rules on cooking Italian food in America. Reading about Batali's expl...more
Few pieces of writing have made me physically salivate like Bill Buford's New Yorker article 'The Secret of Excess', a 2002 profile about master chef Mario Batali, who rewrote the rules on cooking Italian food in America. Reading about Batali's exploits moved me to be a fan of his Food Network show 'Molto Mario' and eventually to make the pilgramage to Babbo in Greenwich Village and sample Batali's fare for my own self, in the form of a scrumptious 9-course pasta tasting menu which I will never forget. I've never had the courage to try Batali's famed 'lardo' (or 'proscuitto bianco' for the squeamish) which is basically cured pig fat, but damned if Buford doesn't make even it sound extremely tasty. I'm not entirely sure Buford's perfect meal of an article needed to be expanded to this slightly overstuffed book, which eventually wanders away from Batali and endangered losing my interest by the end, but still well worth getting for Batali fans or for anyone interested in the art of Italian cooking, from pasta-making to the deceptively complex art of cutting pig and cow flesh. Buford's own tour of duty as a line cook in Batali's kitchen makes for an eye-opening and mouth-watering guide through the world of orichiette, baccala' and guanciale. Reading about Mario makes me feel like the New York Giants security guard who checks out the rotund chef ("I love this guy. Just looking at him makes me hungry") even if neither experience comes close to sampling the real thing.
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February 08
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Scott
gave
to:
Infidel (Hardcover)
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in November, 2007
Scott said:
"An unlikely polarizing political figure and, to my mind, a true modern folk heroine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has fled two worlds: the rigid, Muslim anti-feminist society of her birthplace Somalia, then later the open and "free" nation of Holland wh...more
An unlikely polarizing political figure and, to my mind, a true modern folk heroine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has fled two worlds: the rigid, Muslim anti-feminist society of her birthplace Somalia, then later the open and "free" nation of Holland which she adopted and then was forced to abandon when that nation's government found it convenient to deport Ali on legal technicalities after she began attracting the wrong kind of attention. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's crime is to tell her own story as she sees it -- a childhood of brutal and emotionally abusive repression codified within the mores of her family and native culture who justified it all in the name of Allah. Her own experiences have galvanized Ali into a steadfast champion of Western liberty and free thought, even if what she says has ruffled the feathers of those on both sides of the political spectrum. 'Infidel' is a page-turning memoir of a young woman's coming of age and political self-discovery, told amid the colorful backdrop of several Middle East countries which will prove informative for the reader who, like me, is largely unfamiliar with the details of their tribes, political history and varied adherance to the laws of Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a calm, clear-headed and yet gripping storyteller, whose tale does not waver late in the book when its location shifts to Holland and Ali's trials there, which include being the flashpoint for the tragic assassination of one of her best friends, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Recommended as an timely and eye-opening expose into the interior of Muslim women's society as well as a truly humanly involving adventure....less
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Scott
gave
to:
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass)
by Philip Pullman
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in December, 2007
Scott said:
"A heady stew of fantasy, theology, sci-fi and junior physics, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is intended for both kids and adults. It includes witches, talking polar bears, angels, zeppelins and several wondrously magical artifacts. At...more
A heady stew of fantasy, theology, sci-fi and junior physics, Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is intended for both kids and adults. It includes witches, talking polar bears, angels, zeppelins and several wondrously magical artifacts. At the center of it all is twelve-year-old Lyra Bellacqua, a wild tomboy whose incredible resourcefulness is a delight mainly because Lyra scarcely seems aware of her gifts; she gets by on pure instinct. She is the ward of an old Oxford college in a world like and yet not like our own. There, a megapowerful church rules the Western world, and its clergical scientists are struggling to understand the secret of "Dust", particles of consciousness which strange properties that may be the atoms of heaven itself. Many things mark Lyra's world as further different from ours; one of the most jarring may be that wherever each person goes, he or she is accompanied by a "daemon", a talking animal familiar which represents that person's soul, and which shapeshifts during childhood but settles upon a representative form by adulthood. If this sounds like a lot to swallow, author Pullman makes it go down easy by wrapping it in a lively adventure story that readers of any age can enjoy. The second book takes things into a different direction by introducing our own world alongside Lyra's, and a second main character, the steadfast and independent Will Parry who becomes committed with Lyra to fulfilling their prophecy and taking down the reign of the senile "Authority" and his tyrannical regent, the angel Metatron. 'His Dark Materials' is first-rate fantasy even if it does not quite rise to the elegance of Narnia or the accessibility of Harry Potter's world....less
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