Friday, November 28, 2008

Review: The Magnificent Ambersons



The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkinton's 1919 Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of those books that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I was afraid it was going to be heavy and dull, and it certainly wasn't. Still, it was not a favorite of mine.

It moved right along through the story of the demise of the once-prominent Amberson family and the growth of their Midwestern town into an industrial city. However, it moved along at such a clip, and with so little thematic subtlety, that it seemed like a book for young adults.

I'm not saying that Tarkington should have handled his themes with the heavy hand of Henry James, but a little of Edith Wharton's nuance or F. Scott Fitzgerald's precision would have added depth to the tale.

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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Writers' Dojo

A message from my dear friend Kirsten Rian, who is an artist, poet, musician, and all-around wonderful person:

Hi poetry lovers. Wanted to let you know about a new project I’m really excited about. Writers' Dojo is an online literary journal of which I was asked to be the poetry editor. Published by some astoundingly creative and soulful folks, I feel very, very lucky to be part of it all. has been a lot of focus and work on the part of our team and we are now up and running. Still in beta mode and still with a few kinks to work out, the publication was launched at Wordstock. Here’s my latest blog. You can also see the fiction, non fiction, and poetry sections of the site.

Some amazing writers and voices in the nw literary community have been mobilized around this project. Feels good to have it up and available to the world! Happy thanksgiving to you all.

K

Monday, November 24, 2008

Notes re West With the Night

West With the Night is Beryl Markham's compelling memoir of growing up in British East Africa. She is best known for flying solo from England to North America and she ends her book with this story. But the rest is about running wild on her father's farm as a child, learning to hunt and having lion-centered adventures; becoming a professional horse trainer at 17; and her life as a bush pilot in Africa between the wars. The audio version was particularly enjoyable. According to ListOfBests, I am now finished with 11% of the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Review of the Day: The Islands of Divine Music

 

The Islands of Divine Music is delightful find. This first novel by John Addiego tells the multi-generational tale of the Verbicaro family from their immigration to America through the turbulent highlights of the 20th Century.

The Verbicaro family grows out of the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, with all the vitality and tumult of their adopted city. After the first generation starts a demolition company, the second generation gets in on the ground floor of the WWII Bay Area building boom.

The family business provides a structure for the family as well as the narrative of the book. That family structure is badly damaged by the Vietnam War, leading to a final adventure that tests the faith and love of the third generation of Verbicaros.

The book is dense with historic and family details, but is still as emotionally effervescent and essentially joyful as the extended family it portrays.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Book Frustration! Friends Can Help

In anticipation of a pre-Thanksgiving house move, I packed all 800+ books on my TBR shelves and took them to the new house. Now our move is delayed until January because renovations are taking longer than planned (which we should have planned), so I do not have access to the books I want to read. I am not entirely without TBR books, because I have all those that have come to the house since I packed the shelves. I've been to a couple of library book sales, received a few review copies from publishers and LibraryThing, and even gathered a handful of books by author friends. So I have books to read. But I usually like books to mellow on the shelves for a while, waiting to read one until it percolates up to the top of my consciousness for one reason or other. I feel trapped and rushed having to read the books available from this relatively small pool. I think I will concentrate on Books by Friends. That is a short list and I can finish them by the end of the year: Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites by Mitchell Stevens: Mitch is a sociology professor at NYU (at least until January when he moves to Stanford) who has written a insider's guide to elite college admissions. I am about halfway through this book and find it fascinating. The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide by Sally Pipes: Sally is the President of Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank in San Francisco, and author of Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health-Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer. Water the Bamboo by Greg Bell: Greg is a former lawyer, now a "speaker, trainer and facilitator" who works with companies and organizations to improve relationships and communication. His book is subtitled "21 Strategies for Extraordinary Results in Your Profession or Team."

Review: Wide Sargasso Sea



I am perfectly ambivalent about Wide Sargasso Sea. Every reaction I had to the book is balanced by its opposite reaction:
  • The moody, languid prose captured the tropical setting: I longed for a more direct narrative. 
  • The switches in perspective deepened the relationships among the characters: it was frustratingly difficult to track who was saying what and when they were saying it. 
  • The themes of madness, alcoholism, cruelty, and love were fascinating: the characters were all horrible and it was awful to watch them destroy themselves and each other. 
  • The connection between the heroine and the insane wife in Jane Eyre is an inspired literary device; the tie-in with Jane Eyre is a manipulative gimmick. 
See what I mean? Everything I like about the book, I dislike about the book. Equipoise. But it made it to both the Modern Library and Radcliffe lists of best novels of the 20th century, so the half of me that disliked the book is at least pleased to have accomplished two tasks.


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Friday, November 21, 2008

Review: Little Green Men



After the famous host of a Sunday morning talk show, and Washington uber-insider, is abducted (twice) by space aliens, he becomes the pariah of the Beltway but the celebrity leader of three million UFO believers.

This set up in the hands of America's funniest political satirist is sure to be entertaining. And it is. Little Green Men is fun and funny and goes down like a bomb pop on the first hot day of summer.

My only problem with Buckley's books is that they are never as good as the first one I read. That is, I think that whichever one someone reads first will be that person's favorite, because it is so surprising to read a clever, really funny, contemporary satirical novel. The first one sticks with you. So, for me, while I find all his books to be entertaining, none will compare with Thank You for Smoking, which made me laugh out loud from cover to cover.

As a side note, it will be interesting to see if Buckley's literary star rises or falls after the kerfuffle caused by his (rather lukewarm) endorsement of Obama. He enjoyed a following among right-wingers because of his famously conservative last name and willingness to shatter some progressive icons in his books. But he may now have gotten the attention of some liberal readers.

Hmmmmmm . . . perhaps there was a method to his madness?

Thursday, November 20, 2008

More on JSM

The New Yorker might not have the cache of The Internet Review of Books [insert emoticon of choice], but its recent review of Richard Reeve's John Stuart Mill biography is worth reading. In fact, Adam Gopnik does such a good job with the review, it would be easy to skip the book. Gopnik, author of the must-read Paris to the Moon, is clearly a fan of JSM. His review is less a critique of Reeve's book as a summary. He hits all the highlights of Mill's life and does it with wit and grace -- two qualities in short supply in Reeve's dense tome.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Review: The Photograph



The Photograph begins when a youngish widower finds an old photograph of his dead wife on a picnic with friends.  He becomes obsessively interested in her in a way he never was when she was alive.  Through his search to learn about his wife, we learn about the two of them, as well as her family and circle of friends.

As with every Penelope Lively book I've read, I was really wrapped up in this story.  The characters were fully formed, with interesting lives and complicated relationships.  In contrast, the dead woman at the center of the tale is indistinct, defined neither by occupation nor personality.  Cath is most remembered for being pretty in a purely decorative way -- more than one character describes her as being like a vase of flowers.  Cath's vague character is a useful literary device for developing the other characters and their stories.  She is a foil for the others.

But this device led (for me anyway) to an unsatisfactorily pat ending, as one by one the characters learn Cath's secret and begin to cope with her death.  Looking back from the end, it just did not seem likely that no one in her life understood her enough to realize the one thing that was the most important to her.

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Monday, November 17, 2008

Review of the Day: The English Major



For newcomers to Jim Harrison’s work, The English Major is a delightful introduction to the fiction of this sometimes overlooked American treasure. Fans will enjoy another boisterous romp along Harrison’s literary highway, although the particularly jaded among them may find the themes getting a bit tread worn.

When Cliff and Vivian split after a long marriage, sixty-something Cliff heads off on a mind-clearing road trip inspired by a childhood map of the United States, while Vivian stays in Michigan launching her real estate career with the sale of his family farm. Along his journey, Cliff falls into an affair with a former student, reconnects with his big shot son in San Francisco, visits an old buddy at a snake farm, and undertakes his magnum opus of renaming all the states and birds.

The pages are filled with Harrison’s usual wit; curmudgeony charm; and musings on food, liquor, round bottoms, favorite dogs, and just how square peg loners can adjust to living in round hole society.


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The Scarlet Letter

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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Review: The Winter of Frankie Machine



Three quarters of the way through The Winter of Frankie Machine, I was ready to give it up. The protagonist, a former Mob hitman turned bait shop owner, was trying to figure out who had put the hit on him by reminiscing about every job he’d done over the past 40-odd years. This long walk down Mafia Memory Lane read like the author’s box of index card notes on “Great Gangster Scenes.” It was entertaining, but without narrative cohesion – like watching a Sopranos highlights reel.

Luckily, in the last quarter, Winslow gets back to the actual plot of the story. He ties many (by no means all) of the threads together and wraps the whole thing up in an exciting finale. He managed to salvage the book for me, but just barely. Winslow’s world-weary killer-with-a-heart-of-gold protagonist made a great hero. His muscular writing style has just enough wry amusement to give the story a little edge, without being too cheeky. It’s just too bad that the plot was cobbled together.


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Friday, November 14, 2008

Review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek



I want to like Annie Dillard, I really do.  I think the world is a better place because Annie Dillard thinks and writes in it.

But . . . the bugs.  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is chock-o-block with looking at, thinking about, and describing bugs.  Some other creatures too, both larger and smaller than bugs, but mostly bugs.

As much as I appreciate the conclusions Dillard draws about the natural world and the nature of God, her minute observations about critters and plants could barely hold my attention.   I took pious pleasure in finishing the book, like I had done something that, while a little boring, had its interesting moments and made me a better person – kind of like going to church.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

TRIAL: It Gets Better!

The judge awarded $3 million in punitive damages at our hearing yesterday morning, so the total amount of the judgment is over $4,550,000 – we are pretty sure that is the largest trial win in a sex abuse case in Oregon, and the largest in any personal injury case in Marion County. True, the guy doesn’t have million to pay the judgment, or anywhere close, but he can pay a little bit of it. And because he cannot discharge this kind of judgment in bankruptcy, it will dog him for 20 years. The best part was that the judge gave him quite a lecture! Told him he was a monster and should be in prison. And my client was there to hear it, which did her a world of good. And we made the news!

Sunday, November 9, 2008

List of the Day: Book Club

Although I read a LOT, I have never been in a book club until this past year or so. I've enjoyed the experience greatly because the gals in my club are fun, interesting, and make a point of reading the books. We get into some great discussions. All of us were brought in by another member, but no one really knew more than one or two other people before joining. It has been a lot of fun to develop new friendships as well as enjoy a shared pastime. We do not have a theme or work from any pre-fab list of books. The set up is that we rotate hosting responsibilities, the hostess tries to cook (or at least serve) a dinner that is related to the book somehow, and the hostess picks the next book. So, for instance, the gal before me picked A Thousand Splendid Suns, I cooked Afghan food, and then I followed that disturbing book about wife abuse by choosing The Bone People, a disturbing book about child abuse. Luckily, our books aren't always so grim. In the past year, we've read the following: Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky Leap of Faith by Queen Noor The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini The Bone People by Keri Hulme (reviewed here) The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver Next up is Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. I have that one teed up on my iPod to start as soon as I finish the 2007 National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Review: John Stewart Mill



John Stuart Mill was a philosophical piƱata. Break open his mind and it would be chock-a-block full, with treats enough for everyone, no matter their political ideology. Of course, it would be impossible to piece it all back together again.

But Richard Reeves’s goal in his new Mill biography is not to make a coherent whole out of Mill’s economic and political philosophy. In John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, Reeves sets out to make Mill contemporarily relevant to modern political liberals. Reeves acknowledges that bits and pieces—some quite large—do not fit this paradigm, but he does his best to cram as much of Mill as he can into the mold he wants to use.

Born in 1806, Mill turned out to be a child prodigy. His father James home-schooled him relentlessly, so that by the time he was 12 he knew Latin and Greek. He undertook “a complete course in political economy” at 13, and published his first substantive essays when he was 16. At 17, Mill followed his father professionally by joining him at the East India Company, ultimately succeeding his father as Examiner at India House.

Mill also followed his father philosophically, becoming an ardent Utilitarian in his youth, influenced by his father’s friend Jeremy Bentham. Mill went on to tinker with the Utilitarian “greatest happiness principle,” arguing that qualitative differences in forms of happiness need to be considered in analyzing what would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill argued that intellectual and moral pursuits brought true happiness in a way that entertainment and amusements could not, explaining:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.
Mill’s own happiness centered on Harriet Taylor, his one true love, possibly his mistress, and ultimately his wife. Harriet influenced Mill’s philosophic development, primarily by fostering his interest in causes near and dear to her, such as women’s rights. She helped him with his work, and her influence can be seen in many of his best-known books, including Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women. The latter, published after Harriet’s death, earned Mill the title of the Father of British Feminism.

There was a lot going on in Mill’s mind and career. After leaving India House, he focused on his writing. Later, he served a term in Parliament. He was an avid traveler, hiker, and botanist, dividing his time between England and his adopted France, where he had a house in Avignon.

Reeves’s efforts at corralling this massive amount of information about Mill raises a minor, but nagging, problem with the book—the lack of visual breaks in the text. Reeves uses no page breaks, subheadings, or any other indication of a change of subject. In chapters fifty or sixty pages long, covering multiple subjects, it is daunting to face nothing but dense text. For example, in the 58-page chapter titled “A Short, Bad Parliament (1865-8),” Reeves covers Mill’s involvement in causes as diverse as Irish land reform, the secret ballot, cooperative ownership of business, Jamaican governance, and women’s suffrage, without any visual transition. There is no hint of where to take a break. At 487 pages, the book is long, but not so long that a few double spaces between topics would not be welcomed.

A twenty-first century examination of Mill’s writing and actions is a worthwhile, if daunting, undertaking. There is no question but that evaluating Mill’s wide-ranging, nuanced, often anachronistic, and sometimes contradictory thinking makes for heavy sledding. But not content to simply examine Mill’s work, Reeves goes one step further, perhaps one step too far, to try to find a hook that will make Mill appealing to a modern audience. There is enough in Mill’s thinking to catch the attention of political animals of every stripe, from free traders to die-hard Marxists. As Reeves explains:

Politically, Mill has been claimed, and continues to be claimed, by pretty much everyone, from the ethical socialist left to the lasses faire, libertarian right—and at various points by every major political party.
Faced with this hodgepodge of thinking impossible to fit into a modern-day political cubbyhole, Reeves engages in a little semantic sleight of hand to make his point. He uses political labels such as “conservative,” “liberal,” “radical,” and “progressive” as if they have always had the same meaning from Mill’s day to ours. By consistently labeling Mill as a liberal, with progressive ideas, sometimes undertaking radical causes, Reeves positions Mill as a hero of the modern left.

But Mill’s liberal ideology was often closer to the “classic liberalism” of Milton Friedman and others of a libertarian bent. The progressive causes Mill pursued were often the opposite of what today’s progressives would support, whereas conservative notions of Mill’s time would be championed by today’s liberals. For example, Mill’s liberal agenda stressed greater freedom for companies to industrialize, while the conservatives in opposition “railed against the rise of cities [and] industry” and called for “worship of nature and proper acknowledgement of the value of the human spirit.”

For readers new to Mill—and there are many—a straightforward analysis of how the various aspects of Mill’s philosophy square with contemporary political and economic thought would be valuable. However, because in the century or more following Mill’s death in 1873, “Mill’s intellectual stock fell, and his radicalism was covered over with dust,” Reeves needed an angle to try to renew interest in Mill’s life and works. By trying to make Mill a standard bearer for modern liberalism, Reeves may indeed appeal to a broader audience, but he contributes less to solid scholarship.

Nonetheless, Victorian Firebrand adds much to an overall analysis of Mill’s philosophy and is as good a starting point as any for a contemporary study of this prolific writer and controversial thinker.

NOTE

First published in the October 2008 issue of the Internet Review of Books.

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Author of the Day: Michael Crichton

He was the master of using fiction to discuss hot topics and was feisty enough to go after politically correct taboo subjects. He was at the top of his game, so his passing is a real loss. R.I.P. His novels: The Andromeda Strain (1969) The Terminal Man (1972) The Great Train Robbery (1975) Eaters of the Dead (1976) Congo (1980) Sphere (1987) Jurassic Park (1990) Rising Sun (1992) Disclosure (1994) The Lost World (1995) Airframe (1996) Timeline (1999) Prey (2002) State Of Fear (2004) Next (2006)

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Review of the Day: Abbeville



Abbeville is a short, well-written novel built on a solid structure, but it should be twice as long to do justice to the story John Fuller attempts. The book tells the parallel stories of the narrator’s attempt to rebuild his life after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and his grandfather’s own boom and bust struggle in the Great Depression.

The grandfather’s story predominates and involves several complex subplots. The central theme to the story is the conflict between the grandfather’s desire to succeed and his perceived duty to help people. This themes plays out primarily in the relationship between the grandfather and his younger brother, whose wastrel ways result in the grandfather’s financial and social downfall.

Unfortunately, there is not enough flesh on the bones. Both the plot and the characters are too sparsely drawn to make them compelling. For example, the key act that culminates in the grandfather’s ruin is described so cryptically, in just one brief sentence, that the reader must speculate about why what happened happened. At least one key storyline just ends with no explanation other than that people often disappeared during the Great Depression. Other story lines simply fizzle out.

Without details, the characters and their relationships are flat and stiff. The tension between the brothers is described so sparingly that it is difficult to fully understand the relationship, let alone to care about it. The grandfather comes off as less a noble man sacrificing for his internal sense of honor as an unsympathetic, thick headed martyr. The narrator never rises above a character sketch of a concerned but clueless father.

It could be that Fuller was trying for a style as strong, clean, and minimalist as his rural Michigan setting. But the result reads more like an outline than a finished novel.


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Monday, November 3, 2008

TRIAL: We Won! And Won Big!

The jury awarded over $1.5 million in compensatory damages to my client, finding that she was sexually abused by her stepfather when she was 12 to 14 years old. The abuse was "especially pernicious" (in the words of our expert witness) because it involved cross-dressing, bondage, and a nylons fetish. The jury also determined that my client is entitled to punitive damages. By agreement of the parties, the judge will decide the amount of punitive damages after a hearing on the 10th. Look for updates here after the hearing. This is a huge win for my client on many levels, not only because it is one of the largest jury verdicts for a case of this kind in Oregon. She is now 24 years old and has finally been vindicated for what she suffered through. She is ready to move forward with her life. This trial was the most satisfying thing I have done as a lawyer. The best part was watching my client grow stronger as the trial progressed and to see her face when the judge read the verdict.