Review: My Word Is My Bond: A Memoir

My Word Is My Bond: A Memoir by Roger Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Roger Moore died May 23, 2017 so it felt good to fit this in as my last completed read in 2017. I am not real fan of his acting or the Bond films; just a casual fan. I don't even know who my fave Bond portrayer is so I just enjoyed this as the octogenarian's career memoir that it is. It is very easy to read and very casual - salty and even crude at many points. It felt like opportunistically sitting next to him on a long transatlantic flight and getting a candid and jocular review of his many decades in The Saint, playing James Bond after Sean Connery, other TV and movie roles, and a globe-trotting career representing UNICEF after being introduced to the tole by a grateful Audrey Hepburn. Lots of medical issue arise; kidney stones and a pacemaker.

View all my reviews

Review: Under a Wing: A Memoir

Under a Wing: A Memoir by Reeve Lindbergh
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I just finished reading breathless recollection of the pioneering cross-Atlantic flight of "Lucky Lindy" in The Start 1904-30 and so it felt right to read about the family privacy so jealously guarded after the aviation breakthrough and the murder of Charles Lindbergh III. Reeve recalls a self-described "non-benevolent dictator" running the children and household like a martinet. Reeve recalls the long train of false Charles Lindbergh III's at the door and writing and her understandably appalled feelings about humorous references to this horrific crime. There is also much about her literate, sensitive, and creative mother Anne Morrow Lindbergh, including dealing with her senility and sharing the painful night of the sudden death of Reeve's son. The Morrow branch back in Detroit also makes for interesting reading. I was very surprised not to see any extensive recollection of the motivation to step away from privacy to contribute to the invention of the perfusion pump, but I guess that makes sense as the high point of activity on that was 10 years before Reeve's birth.

View all my reviews

Review: The Start

The Start by William L. Shirer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very good autobiography covering the first third of the 2oth Century through Shirer's Zelig-like existence beginning with his Chautauqua tent raising to hearing William Jennings Bryant speak to shaking President Coolidge's hand. Later as a foreign correspondent in Paris, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa rube that went to town (Chicago) gets wrapped up in the excitement of solo Atlantic crossing, including going to Lindbergh's landing, Gene Tunney's wrapped up pugilist career (Shirer did much sport writing and it opened doors) and works alongside James Thurber and F. Scott Fitzgerald while seeing through the self-worship of Gertrude Stein. A fascinating, circumspect life.

View all my reviews

Review: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the 2015 election cycle I became interested in reading this autobiography, but I lost interest due to the controversy around facts asserted in the memoir. However, I have read it anyway. The points of contention could be, IMHO, left out of the book and do no real damage to the bones of the story. The early success with conjoined twins after a laudatory success in medical education at Yale and University of Michigan through the 60s and 70s making him one of the most accomplished Black Americans is a worthy story in itself. The medical angle continues to prove interesting due to the advanced and prolific successes with the hemispherectomy technique to combay seizures in children.

View all my reviews

Review: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find with this collection, my opinion on Poe is evolving; becoming more refined. First, this may be better named The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Other Tales as Poe’s only full-length novel closing out this compendium is the lion's share of the pages. Also, purported as a response to a Poe hoax is completes the bookends with the initial newspaper piece "Balloon-Hoax".

In this realm of writing, I find there is science fiction - tales tethered to scientific facts - and science fantasy - fiction with more magical, mystical premises. Popularily, Poe may be thought more in the fantasy with this "macabre" musings, but really he is more like Jules Verne in that he is tightly bound to a scientific reality, if even he relies on unproven assumptions. Much of that here is of a nautical flavor: "Ms. Found in a bottle" and "Descent into the maelstrom", etc. I find Poe loses effectiveness when he tries to bring in byzantine details and the ornate imaginings crowd out of the exposition anything that would allow a reader to solve the case or even put it together from any missed clues on a re-read as in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined letter" where the delight in details becomes a breathless exercise in ratiocination thus being some of world's first detective stories but with deux ex machina reveations. More to the fantasy side we have "Black cat" (I recoil at the animal cruelty) and maybe even the eponymous "Fall of the house of Usher". Some of his famous stories here for me are exemplars of how he should just keep it simple. "Pit and the pendulum" gives to us the relentless, nearing death but does anyone really reflect back with joy on the multiple awakenings, pit-within-a-pit, compacting walls, and Lord of the Flies ending? Similarly, in "Masque of the red death" like in The Village (2004 film) (even with the 'bad color') we have the seeds of destruction brought into the man-made Eden, but do we really need the various monochromatic rooms and intricacies of spreading light? I feel Poe is best at simple, direct tale of base and basic human motivations with little adornment, as in "Cask of Amontillado" and "Tell-tale heart", which Stephen King called “the best tale of inside evil ever written”.



View all my reviews

Review: The Painted Word

The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a quick, easy listen-read on Wolfe spectating the burgeoning modern art movement. Very short and in audio without pics, most of it breezes by this Wolfe fan that is not an art aficionado. I can picture Pollack, sure, but not Jasper Johns... It is interesting and relevant the point that the painting world does not have a popular following, like music, film, etc. Also, it is interesting but I can not form an opinion on the accentuating of inherent "flatness" in the post-cubists art movements.

View all my reviews

Review: How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent, motivating and readable exploration of the philosophy of Montaigne's Essays. I was underwhelmed the first time I read them, but know I must consider them again. This helps with context: the ataraxia sought by Montaigne like that of the Stoics was borne of the war and turbulence of his time... Bakewell delivers the relevant biography of Montaigne's full life and the life and evolution of the text itself.

View all my reviews

Review: A Pirate Looks at Fifty

A Pirate Looks at Fifty by Jimmy Buffett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a quite easy to read and an enjoyable memoir--a travelogue of a Caribbean and South American trip Buffet and family took to celebrate his 50th year. Wonderfully discursive and wandering in and out of the past, this can be read at any point. Buffet looks back to his Vietnam-era college years in Mississippi after growing up in Alabama and then transmogrifying into a musician on the Bourbon Street stages. (He intriguingly promises to write a book about these wild and seminal French Quarter years in a future book.) A few of the short chapters and vignettes focus too much on the technical minutiae of flying and fishing for me, but over all I found it a warm and pithy memoir waxing philosophical along the easygoing and nonchalant"Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" vein.

View all my reviews

Review: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fun, quick easy read with narration by < a href="https://tantor.com/narrator/mirron-wi... Willis voiced very much like Tyson himself. It is interesting not only in the scientific angles around Pluto's classification, but the media storm with Tyson at the center after a visiting New York Times reported noticed Pluto's absence from a (not new) exhibition at Hayden Planetarium. In all the details here, including appendixes covering Pluto's stats and lyrics to songs commiserating with the demoted plutino are two questions foremost in my mind about this tempest in a teapot:

1. What is about Americans that they feel democracy and even sentimentality admit into scientific classification?

and,

2. Was there anything like this in the movement from the four classical elements (air, earth, fire, water) to the Table of Elements? I guess if this did happen, it would have been during of before Lavoisier's Elementary Treatise of Chemistry, was written in 1789 and considered to be the first modern textbook about chemistry. It contained a list of elements.

View all my reviews

Review: The Story of My Life

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very good narration by Sara Morsey makes this a special edition of this warm and personable autobiography by the deaf-blind Helen Keller'. This is especially detailing of her early life, including recollections of her earliest days before illness stole her ability to see and hear. Dealing with accidental plagiarism defended in front of a panel and other difficulties, like learning math, this runs up her early life to where she became the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. Keller comes across as very perceptive, humble, and wise - quite a remarkable autobiography.

View all my reviews

Review: And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion

And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion by Adrian Shirk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this jumble of family recollection and travelogues musing about wonderfully blunt proto-feminist Sojourner Truth, tarot reading, a connection with Jitterbug Perfume and author Tom Robbins as well as the voodoo jambalaya of Marie Laveau's NOLA, Christ Scientists, Flannery O'Connor, the Fox sisters and modern Spiritualism's Lily Dale abode, the outlandish Aimee Semple McPherson and her proto-superchurch Foursquare Church. and much more.... A great stew of ecstatic visions and women of bold imagination.

View all my reviews

Review: The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero by Timothy Egan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an amazing story of Irish, American, and Irish-American history made all the better by the Irish-inflection in the hearing as it is narrated By Gerard Doyle. The arc of Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 to imprisonment in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) to escape to America to becoming commander on the Union side within the 69th Infantry Regiment (New York) during the civil war and then holding the Territorial governorship of Montana! Wow. Apparently, this bright light was assassinated before Montana statehood could carry him to even more accomplishments such as Senator, etc. Epic mini-series, anyone?

View all my reviews

Review: The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood by Mark Kurzem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a way, this is a story too good to fact-check: According to the spellbinding story, Alex Kurzem (father to the author) is the former boy mascot of the collaborationist Latvian police Schutzmannschaft Battalion 18. Certainly, photographs and survivor interviews support this mascot role. Controversy remains as to whether Alex is Jewish and if he actually witnessed the other Jewish residents of his shtetl massacred by an open pit by (an early Nazi massacre mode I read of in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning) soldiers allied with those that took him in. That the old man could be incorrect about his childhood memories does not surprise me. That he was a "puppy" in Battalion 18 seems beyond doubt - whether he even is Jewish. Regardless, the well-paced story of unraveling this mystery makes for one of the best Holocaust memoir page turners I have read. I hope in years to come, some DNA testing bring some resolution to the matter, as it did (mostly) for the Thomas Jefferson affair as I read of in The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures.

View all my reviews

Review: A Critical Edition of Ibn Al-Haytham S on the Shape of the Eclipse: The First Experimental Study of the Camera Obscura

A Critical Edition of Ibn Al-Haytham S on the Shape of the Eclipse: The First Experimental Study of the Camera Obscura by Dominique Raynaud
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The main content here is a translation and thorough reconstruction of Ibn al-Haytham’s On the Shape of the Eclipse, with Arabic text, from available manuscripts. More, in quantity of pages, and at least as important is the examination of this work as the first known scientific analysis of the camera obscura. That is, this a Tenth Century example of rigorous experiment with the camera obscura as the apparatus and a partial eclipse as the opportunity to assay fundamental optics. Reading of this circa 990 A.D. experiment stirred within me the same feelings of wonder at first-hand theoretical confirmation as reading of the 1919 solar eclipse; Sir Arthur Eddington’s opportunity for the first experimental test of relativity. Working a millennium before, al-Haytham did his own important work..."

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

(For viewing the 2017 solar eclipse from Michigan, I built a box pinhole projector six-feet long for a quarter-sized image on a white label sticker surface.)





View all my reviews

Review: Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools

Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools by John Giduck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is in roughly three parts. First, there is fifty-ish pages of introductory material mostly stating that this book is going to be a wake-up call for America before Islamist terrorists - maybe even Chechens themselves - enact a similar tragedy on American soil. The middle part is a taught, blow-by-blow account of the takeover and take-down for which the author is prepared from his career in anti-terrorist training. Ex-soldier Giduck is part of Archangel, a U.S. 501 (c)(3) non-profit, NGO providing anti-terrorism consulting, training and related services to United States law enforcement, military and governmental agencies. He also went on site to review the school before it was demolished. From his interviews with Russian military responders to the Beslan school siege, including the elite Alpha and Vympel units of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), he garners many stunning details I had not heard before. This includes a surrounding angry and drunken mob complicating matters and rabid, sadistic perpetrators - apparently some deluded mercenaries - that, among other things, forced mothers to choose staying with all their children or leaving with one infant. There is also the moving case of the 7-year-old Aida blown from the gym holding area by premature explosions wire to destroy the school who out of confusion and fear crawled back into the terrorists' control.

Giduck's final part is a clarion call to get your head in the game, watch out for Chechens crossing the border and count the days until this happens to a U.S. school. Hopefully his prediction will continue to not bear out. I wonder how he feels knowing perhaps the closest his prediction has come true is due to mentally unstable Americans (citizens and residents) with access to guns: the Virginia Tech massacre, the Northern Illinois University shooting, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

View all my reviews

Review: Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Ah, I think I've had too much of the 18th Century voice for a while...

I really read mostly non-fiction, but am occasionally drawn to Dickens out of some sense of Great Books obligation...

I admire the scope and intricacy of this noir-ish caper epic packed with more characters than an Avengers flick.

So, it ends up, I walk away from another Dickens with three appreciations: great plot (love the body-double impersonation theme), a great character name, and a great quirky character.

This time, my fave name is that of "Fascination Fledgeby" (owns Mr Riah's moneylending business and is greedy and corrupt and makes nearly marries Georgiana Podsnap to gain access to her money).

My favorite character is Silas Wegg, the ballad-seller with a wooden leg; a "social parasite" hired to read despite not being entirely literate himself and raises his scheming to blackmail. A close second is Jenny Wren "the dolls' dressmaker."

View all my reviews

Review: Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography

Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography by Will Birch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a well-researched biography of pioneering Dury. There is a first act to the story of detailed genealogical data - I am sure more than any other Dury biography. Art school, music in and out of The Blockheads and bit film roles are covered chronologically in detail. I was especially surprised to learn of the UNICEF anti-polio globe trotting while suffering from the cancer that would kill him too soon. For the obsessive, along with many pics, this book has an extensive discography and gigography.

View all my reviews

Review: One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School

One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School by Scott Turow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Overall, this is an engaging and enlightening memoir. Much of it I liked very much, but it falls short for me in a couple of key areas, preventing me from giving it a 4. (If I could, I could give it a 3.7)

Turow does an excellent job pulling back the curtain on the anxious and thrilling experience of engaging with law study at Harvard Law School in the late '70s. This seems, even if more extreme, a special case of graduate school. It does not seem all that different from my own experiences, except perhaps the magnitude of reading and memorization for would-be lawyers. The details and logic of law - from feudal origins of property law to the irreconcilable hopes for equal application and human context - is the meat to the experience and could be amplified in detail and nuance. This is where the content begins to falter.

Where it more meaningfully falters for me is the details around "The Incident." A student is belittled by pseudonymous Harvard Law Professor Rudolph Perini. (Apparently based on Arthur R. Miller.) From my own experiences as a graduate student and college instructor it is hard for me to see how this rose to the level of a multi-student written protest and plan for collective action. There was also student body meetings on protesting curriculum design. Was this just a '70s active student body? did things change at all? Turow does not reveal....

Probably most important - and this surprises me from a professional novelist - the pyschological and existential dimension of "meet my enemy," his term for, I guess, elements of his personality he disrespects and finds ugly yet finds enshrined in institutional law, is a subject too vague in the telling.

I was also better educated on the status and import of being part of Harvard Law Review. A decade later, Obama was the prestigious journal's first black president while during Turow's time, the first woman to serve as the journal's president was Susan Estrich (1977), who later was active in Democratic Party politics and became the youngest woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School.



View all my reviews

Review: The Roman Revolution

The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The "Roman Revolution" was more of years of civil war that seen a military despot (Julius Caesar) traded for August the autocrat; the war-like Roman city-state emerged from its bloody throes a domineering empire with a monarchy with not really much in the way of republican ideals.

Octavius was named in Caesar's will as his adopted son and heir, then known as Octavianus (Anglicized as Octavian). This author eschews that Anglicization even to the point of calling Mark Antony Marcus Antonius. All those -ius suffixes this Anglicized reader found wearying. Surely, the author is in the right here, as he obviously knows his Roman history in detail. He speeds through it like a fanboy reeling off Marvel Comics back stories of minor characters. Before I even absorb the fact there were 800 to a thousand senators at any one time during this period, he is off on the available details of the nearly lost career of some of them.

The story is told in three acts. Act I, Octavian, Mark Antony, and Marcus Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate to defeat the assassins of Caesar. Act II: War! My copy has extensive marginalia from the previous reader, often about place names. It makes me realize this book needs some maps for the years of conflict about the Mediterranean.

Following their victory at the Battle of Philippi, the Triumvirate divided the Roman Republic among themselves and ruled as military dictators. The Triumvirate was eventually torn apart by the competing ambitions of its members. Lepidus was driven into exile and stripped of his position, and Antony committed suicide following his defeat at the Battle of Actium by Octavian in 31 BC. Actium, here, is shown to have nationalistic impact on developing the Roman identity like Yorktown for us. Because, this is as much about the unification of Italy and an identity for the entire peninsula as hub to the provinces.

Act III: Consolidation and establishment. After the demise of the Second Triumvirate, (now named) Augustus restored the outward façade of the free Republic, with governmental power vested in the Roman Senate, the executive magistrates, and the legislative assemblies. (So much for the rewards of revolution, but the weary populace and subjugated peoples were ready for a new godhead on the throne.) Princeps Civitatis ("First Citizen of the State") oversaw a constitutional framework became known as the Principate, the first phase of the Roman Empire.

View all my reviews

Review: The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating, if ultimately sad and tragic, work of investigative journalism about a man of promise and opportunity lured back lethally to the drug trade in his native New Jersey. The author was at Yale, a dorm mate to Peace. In detail, the rise and fall of Peace is retold without really any serious effort at explaining the inexplicable, or that which needs no explanation.

View all my reviews

Review: Père Goriot

Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The novel is a tragedy set in Maison Vauquer, a boarding house owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. The residents include the law student and naif Eugène de Rastignac, a mysterious agitator named Vautrin, and an elderly retired vermicelli-maker; Jean-Joachim Goriot of the title. The old man is ridiculed frequently by the other boarders, who soon learn that he has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters. The tragedy of Goriot, brought to stroke and death by his heartless and materialistic daughters, recalls King Lear to me. However, the real here the undergoes complete transformation is Rastignac who after Goriot's funeral, to which the indifferent offspring send only empty coaches, each bearing their families' respective coat of arms, sets out to dine with Goriot's daughter Delphine de Nucingen and declares to the city: "À nous deux, maintenant!". Rastignac having endearedf himself to her, already extracted money from his own already-poor family for her and seems headed down the same route that was Goriot's fall.

This translation by Henry Reed is the best that I know of. To compare, Raym[author:Proust Marcelond R. Canon|3881314] translates that climactic line as "Henceforth there is war between us." Overall, I think Reed gives the best translation for the modern, casual reader. Reed's concluding emphatic statement is "Now I'm ready for you!", which is a more believable sentiment from the young man, now jaded and ready to dance with the devil. (Another translation offers "It's between you and me now!") Reed also breaks the text up helpfully into chapters; along the lines of Balzac's original plan. (The original has not chapters making it difficult to know when it is OK to take a break.)

Reed also offers an Afterword with relevant biographical details and explanations of Balzac's obsessive and expanding revision process, which explains why I feel this is nearly as over-written as a Stephen King novel. I think Reed understanding this combats "malformed" ideas in his translation and the afterword also repeats helpful analysis from Proust Marcel.

View all my reviews

Review: Père Goriot

Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The novel is a tragedy set in Maison Vauquer, a boarding house owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. The residents include the law student and naif Eugène de Rastignac, a mysterious agitator named Vautrin, and an elderly retired vermicelli-maker; Jean-Joachim Goriot of the title. The old man is ridiculed frequently by the other boarders, who soon learn that he has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters. The tragedy of Goriot, brought to stroke and death by his heartless and materialistic daughters, recalls King Lear to me. However, the real here the undergoes complete transformation is Rastignac who after Goriot's funeral, to which the indifferent offspring send only empty coaches, each bearing their families' respective coat of arms, sets out to dine with Goriot's daughter Delphine de Nucingen and declares to the city: "À nous deux, maintenant!". Rastignac having endearedf himself to her, already extracted money from his own already-poor family for her and seems headed down the same route that was Goriot's fall.

This translation by Raymond R. Canon translates that climactic line as "Henceforth there is war between us." Overall, I do not think Canon gives the translation that best serves the modern, casual reader. I much prefer the Père Goriot edition translated by Henry Reed. There the concluding emphatic statement is "Now I'm ready for you!", which is a more believable sentiment from the young man, now jaded and ready to dance with the devil. (Another translation offers "It's between you and me now!")

View all my reviews

Review: Not So Dumb Animals

Not So Dumb Animals by Robert Themack
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

While the humor is pretty unremarkable, it was interesting to see so many animal-themed cartoons in one collection. these are from varied cartoonists and nary a Gary Larson among them. Robert Themack as editor seems to gone in for two broad categories, both in the overlap area of the Venn diagram between the world people and that of anthropomorphized animals; that is animals in human situations and animals injected human-like into human situations.

View all my reviews