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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

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.

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.

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.

OTHER REVIEWS

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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?

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.

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.

OTHER REVIEWS

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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.


OTHER REVIEWS

The Scarlet Letter

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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.

OTHER REVIEWS

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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.

OTHER REVIEWS

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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!

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.

Review: John Stewart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a philosophical piñata. 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.

OTHER REVIEWS (Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.)

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)

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.


OTHER REVIEWS
The Internet Review of Books
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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.

IN TRIAL: be back soon

100th Book of the Year!

Much to my surprise, I figured out that I have read 100 books already this year. I usually read about 100 in a whole year, so I am not sure why I am ahead of the game this year. A big part of it has to do with listening to more audiobooks, I know. After over ten years of working at home, I started working in a law firm again. Even though my commute is only about 15 minutes each way, that half an hour a day listening to a book adds up. Also, because I have been listening in the car more, I got in the habit of listening while I putter around the house making dinner and doing chores. So it could be the audiobooks. It could also be that I am not working actively on any major lists right now. After I finished the Modern Library list, I have been reading more randomly. It's not that the books I have been choosing are all light reading -- I've gone through Moby Dick and that very dense biography of John Stuart Mill in the past month alone -- but I haven't been wading through Theodore Dreiser or Henry James. Whatever the reason, I have enjoyed my 100 books of 2008 and look forward to three more months of reading before the end of the year. My 100th book? Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome. Part of my 19th Century reading jag. It's sort of a cross between Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a P. G. Wodehouse novel.

Even better!

Bookforum.com just added my John Stuart Mill review to their system of telling people about things they might want to read. It's in the "monsters" paragraph at the top of the page right now, but here is the permanent link. How exciting!

I'm moving up!

My stock as a book geek is rising! My review of Richard Reeve's new biography of John Stuart Mill is the top review in the current edition of the Internet Review of Books. I'll post the review here when I get a chance.

List of the Day: Vacation Books

Oh, it is hard to come home from vacation! How nice it was to spend two weeks away from work, doing nothing but peeping at leaves, avoiding headlines, taking in the New England vibe, and reading the kinds of books that I store up for such trips:

Kane and Able by Jeffery Archer;

The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy;

A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane;

Absolute Zero by Chuck Logan;

To the Hilt by Dick Francis; and

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

These were all good yarns; all entertaining. Perfect for vacation.

Review: How Far Can You Go?

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge is a fascinating, anthropological novel following the lives and religious development of a group of English Catholics from their days in a college church group in the 1950s, through the tumultuous years of the sexual revolution.

The friends question their religious tenant and traditions as they face marriage, families, religious callings, sexual identity, and mortality. At the same time, the Catholic Church wrestled with Vatican II, the battle over contraception, internal reform efforts, and the charismatic movement.

The title jokingly refers to the question the young Catholic men asked their priests about “How far can you go with a girl?” But more substantively, the book asks how far the Catholic Church can alter its rituals and adapt to modern mores and still remain the Catholic Church. Or how far individuals can abandon their religious customs and personalize their faith and still remain Catholics or even Christians. On a different level, the title refers to how far a novelist narrator can insert himself into the story and still count the book as a novel.

This is an absolutely intriguing novel. It won the Costa (Whitbread) Award for best novel in 1980. Anthony Burgess included the book in his list of the best 99 novels since 1939. Catholics (whether they lived through the changes depicted or came along after), other Christians, and general readers interested in religious cultures should find it mesmerizing.

Review: Crescent City

Crescent City by Belva Plain has all the makings of a great historic saga: Jewish immigrants flee the poverty and persecution of 19th Century Europe for a life of luxury in the religiously tolerant boomtown of antebellum New Orleans; families are torn apart over the slavery issue and fight on opposite sides of the Civil War; there are loveless marriages, adulterous affairs, hoop skirts, burning plantations, and even blockage runners.

Unfortunately, the book is still boring. It only skims the surface of the major events of the plot and the conflicts the characters face. It lacks the emotional depth and pure entertainment of the classic Gone with the Wind. It lacks the details of the really good historic epics, like John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles. It lacks the smutty thrill of a good bodice ripper like that 1970s gem, The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.

Despite being over 500 pages long, Crescent City comes up short.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Thomas Paine

In Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, Craig Nelson taught me that Thomas Paine was the Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment.  He bumbled along through life, usually with no money, no real job, or no home of his own.  Yet he was involved in the most important events, and with the most notable figures, of the Eighteenth Century.

Paine (then Pain) spent his first 37 years in England when, separated from his wife, bankrupt, and fired from his job, he decided to go to America.   It was then that he precipitously met the most famous American in Europe, Benjamin Franklin, who became his lifelong friend and his immediate benefactor by providing him letters of introduction.

Arriving in America in 1774 with his cache of Franklin letters, Paine was a delegate at the first Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.   He began another lifelong friendship, this time with George Washington.  While struggling along as a magazine writer and editor, he wrote Common Sense, which sparked the American Revolution. Although he did not fight in the Revolution, he was often at the front lines with Washington, and his line, “These are the times that try men’s souls” was the troops’ rallying cry.

Following American independence, Paine did not hold office like many of the other Founding Fathers.  But he was sent to France to represent America in negotiating peace with Britain.  He wrote Rights of Man, which sparked the French Revolution and was a world-wide best seller.   It also earned Paine, in abstentia, a British death sentence for sedition.

During the French Revolution, Paine was elected to the French National Assembly, where he was the only member to vote against beheading Louis XVI.  He got himself crosswise with Robespierre and was thrown into prison, destined for the guillotine, when the tide turned against Robespierre and American diplomacy got him released.

While waiting in France until it was safe to sail to America, Paine wrote The Age of Reason.  He also provided military advice to Napoleon Bonaparte about how to invade Britain.  He returned to America upon the invitation Thomas Jefferson.

Nelson does a good job with the story of Paine’s life and adventures.   His “grand theme” gets a little attenuated towards the end as he tried to tie everything together.  But overall this is an entertaining overview of this omnipresent at the revolution Founding Father.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is my favorite book about astronauts. Of course, it is the only book about astronauts that I will ever read, so that isn't the strongest praise. But it is perfect for a general reader like me looking for an entertaining history of America's early space program.

Wolfe definitely keeps the tale interesting. He focuses on the personal, rather than the technical and administrative, aspects of the Mercury space program and the first seven astronauts involved. He follows the seven through their early careers, mostly as test pilots, through each of their turns in a Mercury capsule.

The most remarkable part of the story is the connection Wolfe makes between fighter jet pilots and astronauts. Having grown up in the NASA age, I did not know that the Air Force had a competing rocket program (a program that managed to send pilots several miles into space and then have them actually land the aircraft back on earth) before it was scuttled in favor of NASA's moon missions.

The only drawback of the book is Wolfe's Gonzo journalism style, which much have been refreshing and bold back in 1979. Now, the hipper-than-thou tone is a little tired and can get exasperating.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Restless

 

Restless by William Boyd is one of the rare novels that is enjoyable from the opening quote to the final paragraph. The story goes back and forth between the cloak-and-dagger world of WWII British espionage and the “contemporary” (1976) relationship between a mother and her daughter.

The premise is that a proper English grandmother, tucked away in a tiny Oxfordshire village, puttering in her garden, gives her daughter a manuscript she wrote, which reveals that she had been a British spy. From there, the story of her life as an intelligence agent develops along with the daughter’s completely new understanding of the person her mother is.

While it has its exciting bits, it is not a heart-racing thriller. Instead, gets into the minds of the characters to look at what it was like to have once been a spy, then live a normal life, and what it would be like to learn that your parent had been a spy with an adventurous life no one knew anything about. Fascinating.

OTHER REVIEWS

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NOTES

The audio book version was particularly entertaining because the woman who read did remarkably well on the accents. She had to portray characters with a variety of English and American accents, as well as Irish, Scottish, French, German, Russian, Mexican, and Iranian. She did an incredible job.

Review: The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award in 1964.

The story follows the life of the eponymous hero from childhood in Chicago, through a sojourn in Mexico with a zany huntress, to life on the seas in the Merchant Marines. Full of Bellow's over-the-top characters and riddled with discourses on Big Ideas, Augie is a great American hero. Bellow is a treasure.


OTHER REVIEWS

Bibliofreak (a thorough and excellent review)

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Review: The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher is a plot-driven family saga centered around Penelope Sterne, daughter of an artist and mother of three unlikable adult children (well, two are outright unlikable; one is supposed to be admirable but is singularly off-putting). Penelope, now 64 and suffering from a weak ticker, putters in her English garden, ponders her past, and considers how and when to dispose of the few of her father’s now-valuable art works in her possession.

The story moves right along at a bracing clip, through lengthy detours into Penelope’s childhood in Cornwall, Britain’s WWII home front, and the younger daughter’s sojourn in Ibiza. It is an enjoyable read, well-deserving of its decades of popularity.

Only in retrospect does the novel disappoint. The main weakness is a lack of character development. The characters spring fully-formed onto the page. The “good” people are all generous, hard-working, independent, and bluntly forthright. (They are also startlingly unsentimental.) The “bad” folks are greedy, vain, self-centered, and silly. None of them change, either individually or in relation to the others. When the narrative reaches its chronologically natural ending, resolution of the various threads is brusquely efficient, but not convincing or satisfying.

Overall, it is an entertaining but unfulfilling read.

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NOTES

The Shell Seekers is on the BBC's Big Read list.  

Review: Hard Times

Hard Times by Charles Dickens is one of the many Victorian Era classics that I had never gotten around to reading. But thanks to an audio version new on the shelf of my library branch, it made it to the top of my TBR pile.

In equal parts good old fashioned storytelling and outdated social criticism, Hard Times is the tale of the Gradgrind family and their struggle to reconcile the rational, fact-based side of life with the emotional and imaginative side. Thomas Gradgrind, Sr. is proud of his “system” of raising children – his own and those in the school he runs – to know and depend only on facts, with no “wondering” or amusement. The ultimate failure of his system leads to the final showdown and resolution of the story.

Dickens packed the book (first published in installments in 1854) full of his usual extraordinary characters. These really came to life in the audio version. Along with some Victorian moralizing, he mixed in plenty of humor and even a little intrigue and adventure. None of the characters are particularly likeable, perhaps especially to a modern reader with less sympathy for the outmoded social constraints under which the characters labor, but they all get their just deserts – for good or ill – in the end. Despite its age, Hard Times remains thoroughly entertaining.

Review: The Assistant

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud is the moving story of an Italian-American stranger who works his way into the lives of an immigrant Jewish shopkeeper and his family.

Malamud perfectly portrays the grinding worries of running a mom-and-pop grocery, but also brings out bigger themes such as the importance of education and an individual’s ability to overcome bigotry. Focusing on the value of loyalty, repentance, and personal responsibility, it is a story of the redemptive power of love and forgiveness. Four stars.

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Review: Havoc in its Third Year

Havoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett is a mystery and a morality play and a historical novel all rolled into one.

In 1630, John Brigge is the coroner and one of the Governors in an unnamed Northern England town. When he is called into town from his family and farm on the other side of the desolate moor, he finds not only a woman accused of murdering her newborn son, but political upheaval as law-and-order extremists use fiery oratory and public torture to consolidate their power.

There are times when the implicit comparison to modern times is a little heavy handed, but, in general, the author avoids preaching by focusing on human ambiguity rather than human hypocrisy. Whether the final ending is hard-heartedly cynical or comfortingly realistic is up for debate.

Review: On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is a perfectly crafted tragedy that describes the way a life can go so easily astray. Through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, we watch the excruciating, awkward wedding night of Florence and Edward who, in 1962, are too freighted with history to breach the cusp of the sexual revolution. The consequences are heartbreaking.

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Review: The Pirate's Daughter

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson spans generations of a Jamaican family, focusing first on Ida Joseph who, as a teenager, has an affair with aging movie star Errol Flynn and bears his daughter May Flynn, the focus of the second half.

Usually, I find novels using real people as characters to be irritating, and I am not a big fan of mother/daughter novels, so I had trepidations about reading Cezair-Thompson' s hefty novel.  My worries were put to rest within the first couple of chapters.  The Pirate’s Daughter turned out to be a surprisingly delightful read.  It has an elegantly constructed plot, complex characters, steady pacing, and a satisfying resolution.

The book is about the story, not the writing, which is clean and unobtrusive.  Even the author’s use of Jamaican dialect is so natural it blends right into the narrative.

At one point, May is talking with her would-be lover, a character based on novelist and ex-pat Jamaica resident, Ian Fleming, about writing books.  He tells her he is thinking of writing a book that would be “Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Rebecca all mixed together and set in Jamaica.”  Cezair-Thompson may not have accomplished such a lofty goal, but she made a respectable effort.  The Pirate’s Daughter is a good book.

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Review: Thérèse Raquin

Published in 1867, Thérèse Raquin is Emile Zola's first novel and a magnificent proto-noir thriller.  All the necessary elements are here -- a hot-to-trot young wife, an invalid husband, a greedy lover – all simmered together in a Parisian stew of lust, murder, deception, debauchery, and guilt. 

With the macabre ghoulishness of Poe and the diabolical desperation of Cain, Thérèse Raquin should be on any noir-lover's bookshelf.

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Review: Gifted

Appropriately enough for a book about math, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani is more than the sum of its parts. It is the story of a math prodigy, a coming-of-age novel, and a look at immigrant life. But it all comes together in a way that is so interesting, so satisfying, that it is a truly great novel of general appeal.

The heroine, Rumi Vasi, is the “gifted” young daughter of Indian parents living in Wales. Driven by her parents to excel in mathematics, Rumi achieves their highest hope for her – acceptance at Oxford University when she is 15. Lalwani masterfully captures the awkwardness and inner turmoil of this out-of-place adolescent.

Lawani’s writing is remarkably polished for a first novel. Her language does not get in the way of the story, either by being distractingly beautiful or stumblingly clunky. The words flow so naturally you do not notice them, allowing the story to unfold with natural grace, right up to the suitably dramatic ending with its hope of positive resolution.

NOTES

This was the first book I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.

Review: Lost in Translation

 

Lost in Translation* is an imaginative and satisfying novel by Nicole Mones. The protagonist, Alice Mannegan, is an American living in China, working as an interpreter, and striving to be accepted in the culture she has adopted. When hired by a second-rate American anthropologist, the two hook up with his Chinese counterparts and head to Inner Mongolia looking for the lost remains of Peking Man.

Mones does a great job of weaving the histories of the characters into the main story. While the team follows the trail of homo erectus, Alice struggles to understand her relationship with her powerful father; her boss worries about losing his son’s affection and respect; and their Chinese cohort searches on the sly for the wife he cannot abandon although she disappeared to a work camp during the Cultural Revolution.

Mones uses the historic relationship between French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his platonic lover, Lucile Swan, to bring thematic unity to the varied story lines. Equal parts historical mystery, foreign adventure, and cross-cultural romance, Lost in Translation has a lot to offer.

* Which has nothing to do with the Scarlett Johansson movie with the same title.

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Review: The Bone People

The Bone People by Keri Hulme is a difficult book about identity, love, and belonging.  Hulme tells the story of three tough-as-nails characters: Kerewin, an isolated artist who can no longer paint; Joe, a Maori workman struggling to raise his adopted son alone; and Simon, the mute little boy Joe found washed up on the seashore.

The style is difficult because the point of view switches around among the three main characters without warning; Hulme uses Joycean made-up words as well as Maori words; and it is hard to tell when the adults are speaking their own words or thinking out loud what they think the mute little Simon is trying to communicate.

The story is difficult because of the child abuse at the center of the plot. The ambivalence with which Hulme treats the topic makes the story incredibly interesting, but absolutely distressing.

The characters are difficult because none of them are likable. Simon is sympathetic, for sure. But even he has his moments of maliciousness, although these are less convincing than Hulme may have intended. Joe, on the other hand, does not deserve the sympathy Hulme seems to want the reader to give him. Yes, he gets his comeuppance in the end, but it does not seem sufficient punishment. His role is key to the story because he is the hinge between Simon and Kerewin, but the ultimate resolution seems a little unrealistic, given the prior conflict.

Kerwin is particularly prickly and seething with anger. She is quick to lash out verbally, and if angry enough or drunk enough, physically. She has cut herself off from her family and her community, preferring to live in an isolated tower by the ocean. She has even isolated herself from her own sex, considering herself to be a third gender – a “neuter.” But Kerwin’s story makes the book worth reading. She is one of the most complex and intriguing characters in contemporary literature.

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Review of the Day: Moby Dick

Moby Dick is one of those classics that I never got around to reading. So, while I am on a 19th Century lit jag, I picked up the audio version from the library.

(Melville-like aside: I prefer audio books for older literature because I find them easier to follow. Someone else has parsed the dense, long paragraphs and figured out the proper phrasing, the use of different voices for the characters make them more engaging, and the books are just more lively. To me, it is the same as the difference between trying to read a Shakespeare play -- difficult -- and watching one performed -- enjoyable.)

I was worried that Moby Dick would be really boring, but I loved it. I thought the search for the whale would be slow, but it was a lively high seas adventure. I thought the deeper, allegorical themes would be heavy handed, but it was not so bad. There is definitely a lot there -- I can understand how scholars could spend careers (or at least graduate programs) analyzing the details -- but it was not a chore to read. It moved right along and there were funny parts.

What surprised me the most was how Melville played with the book. He used several "tricks" that were almost post-modern, such as inserting theater directions and actors' dialog; having Captain Ahab and others make Hamlet-like soliloquies; talking to the reader about his writing ("This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!"), and taking breaks from the story to insert his research notes about whale science, history, religion, and other background topics. I was not expecting such deviation from a straightforward tale and it really made the book interesting.

I wish I had not waited so long to read what is now a favorite.>

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Review of the Day: A Grave Talent

 

Laurie King's mystery, A Grave Talent, was King's debut novel and the first in her San Francisco-based series featuring police detective Kate Martinelli. The book does not have the most intricate plot, but the characters make it worth reading.

Vaun Adams is a reclusive artist living in a neo-hippy community (not quite a commune) in the coastal mountains near San Jose. Because of her past troubles, she is the first suspect when three little girls are found murdered in the isolated community. Martinelli and her curmudgeony partner, Al Hawkins, dig into Vaun's past and learn they may have the story turned around.

Like many "first in a series" novels, several characters are introduced with enough detail to make them interesting, but not filled out enough to make them really compelling. For instance, we learn a lot about Martinelli's personal history and private life, but we don't see her demonstrate any of the talent and intelligence that, supposedly, has made her a rising star in the San Francisco Police Department. She spends most of her time driving her partner or babysitting Vaun Adams.

In Hawkins, on the other hand, we learn very little of his past or his personal life, but we see layers to his personality as he acts as a skilled interrogator, a compulsive workaholic, something of a ladies’ man, and both a boss and friend to Martinelli. Hopefully, the characters develop further in the later novels.

King is a prolific author, best known now for her second series, the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries featuring the very young apprentice of a very old Sherlock Holmes. Her stand alone novels, such as Folly and A Darker Place, are strong, non-formulaic suspense stories starring independent and iconoclastic, if flawed, women protagonists. King offers plenty of good reading.

Author of the Day: James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke writes wonderful, literary mysteries. He has a couple of series going, but his most famous is his Dave Robicheaux series, featuring an ex- boozer and ex-New Orleans homicide cop now settled in New Iberia Parish. The series has gone on for so long, that Robicheaux has gone from cop, to bait shop owner, to sheriff, to ex-sheriff, to sheriff again. He's on his 4th wife. It's hard to say how old he is, but he must be pushing 70. His three-legged pet raccoon named Tripod is the oldest living raccoon in history, since it first appeared in Heaven's Prisoners in 1988 and was still scampering around, at least as of Crusader's Cross in 2004. Just how long do raccoons live? The series is dark, complex, plenty gritty, and rich with lyrical details of beauty and evil. Once you sink your teeth into one, you want to gobble them all up. But I have found that more than a couple at a time are too much. I get tired of Robicheaux's dry drunk sermonizing, bored by the 700th description of rain on the bayou, and as worn out by the parade of creepy bad guys as Robicheaux himself must be. But then a few months or so will pass and I am ready for another. According to List of Bests, I am 58% finished with the series. Those I've read are in blue. I am halfway through Heaven's Prisoners. The Neon Rain Heaven's Prisoners Black Cherry Blues A Morning for Flamingos A Stained White Radiance In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead Dixie City Jam Burning Angel Cadillac Jukebox Sunset Limited Purple Cane Road Jolie Blon's Bounce Last Car to Elysian Fields Crusader's Cross Pegasus Descending The Tin Roof Blowdown Swan Peak

What the Dickens!

Nineteenth Century novels in general, and Charles Dickens novels in particular, have captured my fancy lately. When I mentioned my current interest to Hubby, I saw his eBay eyes light up.

Sure enough, he surprised me with a very nice 10-volume "Standard Classics" set of Charles Dickens books this past weekend. He was going to save it for Christmas, but gave it to me early as a "congratulations" present because I won my trial last week (a big deal for me

This is the complete set of that particular edition, but not a complete set of Dickens's works. It includes The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Christmas Stories (some in multiple volumes, which is why there are 10 books total).

It is beautiful. The seller said it is a 1930 edition, although I did not find any publication date. He said he found the set in its original box, unread.

Good husband. Great books.

Review of the Day: 7 Wheelchairs

Do not describe Gary Presley as confined to a wheelchair! Nothing raises the hackles on this feisty author faster than this unthinking comment, no matter how benignly intended. To Presley, each of his seven wheelchairs has meant independence and self-reliance in a life otherwise dependent on others for mobility. His wheelchairs have been the opposite of confining; they are his ticket to freedom.

In 7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio, Presley describes his life after polio left him permanently paralyzed. He tells what it was to be a 17-year-old boy who walked out of basketball practice with a headache only to wake up in an iron lung, never to walk again.

This is not a book about polio victims, people who use wheelchairs, or the general experiences of disabled people before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. This is the story of one man who learned very slowly how to live a life he never considered would be his. It is the story of the “riding lessons” Presley learned by rolling through the decades in his seven wheelchairs. As he explains:

[A]fter I had ridden through three decades in a wheelchair, I began writing about life as a person with a disability. I didn’t write, really, to complain or to change things. I wrote because I found myself unsure of my place in the world, and I wanted to explore my boundaries.

This book is the culmination of that exploration so far. The first half of Presley’s memoir is generally chronological, setting out his story from the ill-fated polio vaccine that left him a “crip,” through wasted years of depression, to the happenstance that resulted in his long-time insurance career. The second half gets off a strict chronological path, filling in the details of Presley’s life after his parents’ deaths through observations and discussions of various aspects of his life, including his marriage and religious development. The first part of the book packs the most wallop, only because Presley makes so real the confusion and despair of sudden disability in a time when America was on the cusp between “warehousing” its “invalids” and trying to integrate people with disabilities into mainstream life.

He does not spend much time on his early, pre-polio childhood, merely explaining that his family settled on a small Missouri farm when his father retired from the military. Bucolic Missouri seemed particularly sleepy after a nomadic life spent moving from base to base. Little did Presley expect he would stay there, dependent on his parents’ care until they passed away. He recognized that caring for a disabled adult son was also not how his parents had planned to spend their golden years. Presley’s examination of the way his own anger and self-pity blinded him to his parents' emotional needs, and how he now lives with guilt thinking of those years, cuts to the bone.

Equally thought-provoking is Presley’s consideration of the psychological effects his disability has on himself and his loved ones. From today's viewpoint, when counseling is much more common, accepted, and expected—especially as part of treatment for a traumatizing event—it is hard to even comprehend how he and his family dealt alone with the emotional and mental side of his condition. At a time when Presley and his family needed guidance most, he was sent home after three months in an iron lung and six months of recuperation and physical therapy, having only visited a “mind doctor” two times, including once just to determine if he was intelligent enough to use his new equipment. He wished his doctors at the rehabilitation center had asked him, "What would you like to do with your life? How do you plan on earning a living?" Or, "Better said, I wish I had known the question needed to be asked." Instead, he was left to come to grips with his situation on his own; professional guidance and an "outside perspective" were not available and went against his family’s nature. Reading of his decades-long struggle with self-pity, anger, guilt, and depression—all without the benefit of professional counseling or psychotherapeutic drugs—only offers a shadow of the frustration Presley must have lived with.

In the second half of the book, Presley tells how his years of struggle left him a “burnt out case,” self-nicknamed “Gimp.” He describes his love affair and marriage with Belinda, a woman 20 years his junior and mother of two sons. He discusses his conversion to Catholicism. But in general, this part of the book is more emotional and abstract, as Presley tries to pull different threads together. It is apparent here that this book began as a collection of essays, as the narrative flow is a little crooked. There is less attempt at straight-forward biography and a more rough and tumble expression of true feelings, some of which are as confusing and difficult for the reader to grapple with as for the writer. For instance, Presley makes it clear that he does not want to be defined by his wheelchair, but ignores the obvious irony that he only wrote, and we only read, this book because of his experience with polio and wheelchairs. Also, when Presley disdains all pity because it “objectifies, dehumanizes, and degenerates,” yet recognizes that “it’s all so damned confusing, that murky line between compassion and pity, sympathy and condescension,” the reader is left to wonder just what one is supposed to feel when reading Presley's story.

Finally, Presley's candid acknowledgement that he lives always with “[i]ncoherent, unjustified, unearned rage; putrid rage, mostly buried, mostly festering into guilt” that runs inside him “like a stream of molten lava,” makes it absolutely clear that this is no warm and cuddly, feel-good memoir. In the end, these difficult passages are the real appeal of his story, if not in the immediate reading then in the later pondering.

Presley’s book is as ambiguous, frustrating, and inconsistent as real life, with all of life’s rough edges and raw patches. It is not a guide to understanding “the disabled” as a group; it is a glimpse of the world through one man’s eyes. It is intensely personal story, and all the more powerful for it.


Cross-posted in the September edition of the Internet Review of Books

Review: The Spirit of the Place

Samuel Shem is famous for his 1978 best seller, House of God – a humorous expose of hospital intern life and still a “must read” for many medical students. His latest novel, The Spirit of the Place, is also about the practice of medicine, but this time leaves the hospital for solo practice in the small Hudson River town of Columbia, New York.

Nominally, the hero is Dr. Orville Rose, whose mother’s death brings him back to Columbia from Europe, where he was in the middle of a divorce-triggered mid-life crisis centered on an affair with an Italian yoga instructor. Strong-armed by the terms of his mother’s will, Orville must live in her house and practice medicine in Columbia for a year and 13 days if he is to inherit her fortune.

But the town of Columbia is really the main character. A rocky escarpment flanked by swamps, shouldering an inexplicable (as it was once a freshwater port) whaling theme, Columbia has seen better days. The town and it citizens are now burdened with every problem imaginable, from industrial pollutants and gang violence, to a gonorrhea epidemic and chronic obesity. On top of it all, Columbia has a well-earned reputation for “breakage” – anything the town does goes wrong, including parade floats and city council slide shows.

Orville’s battle with Columbia is the central conflict in the story, but he is in conflict with everyone and everything. He cannot seem to get along with his ex-wife, his Italian lover, his new Columbian girlfriend, his sister, his brother-in-law, his neighbor, himself, or even his dead mother who keeps appearing to him for conversations as well as sending him posthumous letters. All of this makes for a compelling plot with plenty of interesting side stories and the obligatory cast of colorful locals.

Shem gets an A- for conceptualization.[1] But he deserves a C- for execution. Quirks in his writing style prove so distracting that it is hard to get into the flow of the story. First, there is the jarring dichotomy between the medical storyline and the personal. Shem is at his best when writing about medicine, especially in describing the bone-wearying monotony of injury, violence, illness, and death that fills a 36-hour shift in a small town emergency room. But his hard boiled prose and gallows humor (Orville calls to say he will be late for dinner because everyone is dying, they’re just not doing it fast enough) contrasts jarringly with the fluffy soft New Age drivel in the personal scenes, such as this particularly saccharine passage:

Miranda leaned against the doorjamb. Seeing this man she loved make the move towards fathering, she felt her heart lighten, lift, her whole being lift so it seemed she had to hold on to the door to stay down on the ground. Her face flushed, her eyes teared up, her heart opened like a new tulip.

What is worse – the use of “father” as a verb? Or, “her heart opened like a new tulip”?

Also distracting is Shem’s use of multiple perspectives. The story is told in third person, mostly from Orville’s perspective. But some of the scenes with girlfriend Miranda are written from her perspective. Worse, Shem sometimes switches perspective between the two within the same scene, or even the same conversation.

Finally, Shem’s humor can get tryingly cheeky – proving the rule that it is very hard to write a funny book. Shem always goes for one too many laughs, pushing the joke too far: too many quirky villagers, too many funny business names, too many small town silly juxtapositions. Some jokes, like the ménage à trios involving the flamboyantly gay amateur theater director, a bitter divorcee, and a rent-a-clown are just too cute by half.

Overall, The Spirit of the Place simply does not live up to its potential.


[1] Many readers may knock down his grade for conceptualization for setting the story in 1983/84. There is nothing about the story that requires the mid-1980s setting. It takes a while to figure out that the story is not set contemporaneously, and it is distracting to try to figure out why. There is no apparent reason, other then Shem’s obviously urgent need to criticize Ronald Reagan, which he does in several passages. While gratuitous Reagan bashing may warm the cockles for some readers, others will be put off by this display of the author’s personal anger a quarter of a century after the fact.>

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TRIAL UPDATE

I won! Back to blogging as soon as I calm down a little.

IN TRIAL: be back soon

Dang! I hate it when my job interferes with my hobbies.

Cookbook Library: Licensed to Grill

Although it is a rainy Labor Day weekend here in Portland, tradition calls for grilling. So I turned as always to License to Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, authors of the very popular Thrill of the Grill. This time, I tried their Grilled Shrimp and Bacon Skewers with Pickled Onion and Avocado Salad. The recipe was simple, although it involved a lot of separate parts. Use one pound of raw shrimp—peeled and deveined, but with the tails on. The recipe called for 16-20/pound shrimp, which Safeway didn’t have, so I used 20-25/pound shrimp and they worked fine. Start the salad first: Thinly slice one red onion and soak for one hour in white vinegar. Chop two avocados into medium chunks. Seed and core one medium tomato and chop into 1/2” to 1” chunks. Toss avocado and tomato with 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/4 cup fresh lime juice, 1 tablespoon cumin, and 1 teaspoon crushed garlic. Set in fridge while onions soak. Right before serving, drain the vinegar off the onion; toss the onions with the rest of the salad; add 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro. (See NOTE.) To make the kebabs: Dice 8 oz of slab bacon (the kind that isn’t pre-sliced) into 1/2 oz cubes. Blanch in boiling water for about 1 minute to they are cooked before the go on the grill. Thread the kebabs: alternate shrimp, a cube of bacon, a 1” red pepper chunk, a 1” piece of green onion, repeat. I got 3 shrimp and 2 of everything else on a 9” stick. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill over medium heat for about 3 minutes or so, until the shrimp are cooked through but not dried out. Serve kebabs on top of the salad. NOTE: There were a couple of things I would change about the recipe. 1) The bacon, even though it was cooked through and gave good flavor to the shrimp, was too blubbery to eat. I don’t know what to do about that. I think substituting a pre-cooked sausage like a kielbasa would give the same flavor without the blubber -- and no par-boiling required. 2) Unless you REALLY love onions, use only half or less of what the recipe calls for. I made them all, but only used about 1/3. 3) The salad needs something crunchy. I served it on a couple of romaine leaves and that turned out to be a very good addition. All in all, a good recipe because it got me to try shrimp kebabs on the grill. Needs adaptation, but I will make this one again.