Archive for the ‘Library Book (2011)’ Category
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Alternate history, that literary genre in which an historical event is tweaked, removed, or reversed, can be interesting. It is always great fun to play the “what if game” with the actual events of our shared past: “what if the South had won the Civil War,” “what if the Normandy invasion had failed,” or “what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated?” Much fascinating fiction has originated from those and similar questions. Jim Fergus plays a more subtle version of the game in One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd.” He wonders what might have happened if, in 1875, President Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, had agreed to exchange one thousand white women for an equal number of Indian horses.
Grant is at first shocked and disgusted by Little Wolf’s proposition, but he has to admit that the idea makes sense. Since, in the Cheyenne culture, children belong to the tribes of their mothers, Little Wolf sees the “Brides for Indians” program as the best chance to assimilate his people peacefully into the white culture that seems destined to overwhelm his own. Grant, on his part, hopes that the women can influence their husbands into accepting, or at least tolerating, white ways and religions to the point that open warfare with the tribe can be avoided. Thus is born the secret “Brides for Indians” program, a program that will require Grant’s people to scour mental institutions, debtors’ prisons, and other jails and prisons in search of the one thousand women needed for Grant to meet his part of the bargain.
May Dodd, resident of a Chicago mental institution, is one of the first women recruited to go west to meet her new Indian husband. May has been institutionalized by her father for the unpardonable sin of bearing two children out of wedlock to a man beneath her social status. To her father’s way of thinking, no woman in her right mind could do such a thing – his daughter has to be insane. Rather than spend the rest of her life locked up, May, ever the adventurer, leaps at the chance to regain her freedom by becoming an Indian bride for the required two-year commitment.
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| Author Jim Fergus |
One Thousand White Women is told largely in the words of a series of journals May begins to record almost the moment she decides to make her break for a new life. Through these journals, we meet May’s colorful traveling companions and learn of their adventures and hardships as they begin their new lives as wives of men with whom they have so little in common. The women, although they will suffer the hardships of winter encampment, inter-tribal warfare, kidnappings, and one horrible night when their men succumb to the evils of alcohol, find that they are learning as much about what is good and proper in society as they are teaching. But is it all too late to save the Cheyenne from what the army has planned for them?
The audio version of One Thousand White Women is read by Laura Hicks who does a remarkable job with the various accents and languages she has to deal with: two of the characters are Irish, one is Swiss, one is from the Deep South, one is an ex-slave, and some are French. Hicks handles all of these accents well, in addition to voicing a believable version of the Cheyenne language. This one should appeal to a variety of readers, among them: alternate history fans, western fans, and those who enjoy feminist novels with especially strong female characters.
Rated at: 5.0
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The great success of Water for Elephants made it almost a certainty that Sara Gruen’s follow-up novel would suffer by comparison. That one set the bar so high that it would have been a real surprise if Gruen had been able to reach those heights with successive novels. What we know now is that, though she might very well achieve that kind of magic again one day, Ape House is not the one that will do it for her.
Ape House begins rather promisingly in the Great Ape Language Lab where Isabel Duncan and her university assistants are studying the communicative adaptability of a small family of bonobo apes. By using basic ASL (the American Sign Language system), the apes are able to converse with their keepers, even to the point of expressing their desires, emotions, and feelings about their life behind bars. The apes, in effect, have learned to understand, and speak, simple English. Isabel Duncan has, at the same time, grown so close to them that she considers the apes to be family.
All too soon, however, Gruen takes Ape House in the wrong direction. Rather than concentrating on the unique relationship between the apes and their humans, she spends the bulk of the book exploring the romantic relationships of her human characters, in effect stealing any potential magic Ape House had, and transforming it into a mediocre romance novel.
After the lab is blown up by a grotesque group of animal activists, and Isabel is almost killed in the explosion, reporter John Thigpen feels compelled to follow the tragedy to its end despite having to take a job with a trashy Los Angeles tabloid in order to be able to do so. Thigpen had visited the apes only hours before the blast and was changed by the experience, coming away from the lab with the feeling that the apes were every bit as “human” as the newspaper crew flying home with him.
While Isabelle is still recovering from her injuries, the university sponsoring the language lab decides to sell the apes to a pornographic film producer who wants to give the animals their very own reality television show. The bonobos are given their own house, complete with a computer to order whatever they desire (including individual food selections), exercise equipment, comfortable furniture and a big screen television. There are so many cameras in the house that the animals never have a moment of privacy – everything they do is shown on live television, 24 hours a day.
Despite the fact that none of Ape House’s human characters are as interesting (and certainly not as likable) as the apes, the novel spends the bulk of its time on human relationships. Gruen uses these characters, and their efforts either to exploit or to save the apes, to expose the absurdities of modern culture – particularly in regard to reality TV, Hollywood phonies, shrinking newspaper circulation, and celebrity worship. She neglects, however, what would have perhaps saved the book: the interrelationship between the apes and the humans with whom they come into contact. The chance to explore such a relationship is probably what drew most readers to Ape House in the first place, and its near absence leaves the book reading more as farce than legitimate social commentary.
Rated at 2.5
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Jimmy Burns is an ex-Marine, an ex-dealer in stolen pre-Columbian artifacts, and an American expat living the simple life deep inside Mexico in a little town called Merida. He does manage to make a living using his old beat up truck to do small hauling jobs to the jungle for archaeologists and others seeking to exploit the country’s buried past, but he is easily distracted. Jimmy enjoys his down time and is not overly concerned about his future, content to take life one day at a time.
While he may be an idler, Jimmy does care about the people closest to him and he has a keen sense of the absurd. This is a good thing since his little corner of Mexico is about to be invaded by some of the most absurd Americans imaginable, a group of hippies and slackers who barely know where they are, much less why they are.
Gringos centers around Jimmy’s search for Rudy Kurle, a young man for whom Jimmy feels responsible after allowing him to wander away from a dangerously isolated dig site. Jimmy’s search takes him and his crew to an ancient holy site just when dozens of the worthless hippies converge there in expectation of some major revelation. Here the search grows complicated, and changes focus entirely, when Jimmy is forced to rescue two children who will not otherwise survive the night’s weirdness.
Gringos is one of those novels that suffer from a lack of likable characters to such a degree that it is difficult to care what happens to any of them, including the novel’s supposed hero/narrator. The whole novel, at times, seems as tired and pointless as the lives led by its characters, making its ending, in which Jimmy unresistingly drifts into the next phase of his life, unsurprising.
Readers captivated by the renewed interest in Charles Portis novels (following the recent success of the movie remake of True Grit) will want to take a look at Gringos since Portis has written so few books. I would, however, suggest that they might want to read this one after having first sampled other Portis novels.
Rated at: 2.0
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Author T. Jefferson Parker has a theory that outlaws, in the spirit of the old American West, still exist. Parker, in fact, not only contends that outlaws still exist – his theory includes the belief that, just as in gunslinger days, many of today’s most notorious outlaws spend some portion of their lives working as law enforcement officers. In The Renegades, his follow-up to L.A. Outlaws, Parker tells the story of two modern day outlaws, both of whom just happen to be Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs.
Deputy Charlie Hood is one of the good guys. He is somewhat of a loner who prefers to ride the roads at night, even in his off-time, as he grows accustomed to his recent assignment to the county’s Antelope Valley. Charlie would, in fact, be just as happy never to be assigned a partner, but he soon finds himself working with Terry Laws, a man known to his fellow deputies as “Mr. Wonderful.” After Mr. Wonderful is assassinated while he and Charlie are on a routine call, Charlie accepts a transfer to Internal Affairs so that he can get to the bottom of the murder. Perhaps, he thinks, Mr. Wonderful was not really so wonderful after all.
Getting to the truth about his partner’s murder will not be easy – or safe. In the process of figuring out what Mr. Wonderful was up to, Charlie will make some ruthless men on both sides of the border nervous enough to want him dead. And they will do their best to make exactly that happen.
There is a good deal of dramatic action in The Renegades, but Parker has chosen to tell his story in a straightforward manner that offers few real surprises. Once the main characters have been fleshed-out in the minds of readers – and the plotline set in full motion – their ultimate fates are too easily predictable. Part of the fun in reading a police thriller of this type is trying to guess what will happen next as the hero gets into deeper and deeper trouble. Surprisingly, however, that fun is somewhat lessened when, as in this case, the reader always guesses correctly.
The nine-CD audio book version of The Renegades is read to good effect by David Colacci, a man whose voice is likely to sound very familiar to fans of audio books. Colacci’s differentiation of tone, accent, and cadence make the numerous characters relatively easy to follow despite the book’s frequent changes between first and third person perspectives. Not having read L.A. Outlaws, I am uncertain of how wise it is to read this sequel first. Jefferson does make an effort to repeat the key points from the first book to help his readers understand just how Charlie Hood turned into the man he is today, but it is very possible that readers with more background will experience The Renegades very differently than readers coming to it cold.
Rated at: 3.5
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Tom Chaney makes the biggest mistake of his already despicable life when he murders Mattie Ross’s father and robs him of his horse and the cash in his pockets (including two unusually shaped, and easily recognized, gold pieces). Now he has to deal with Mattie Ross, the murdered man’s fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who will not rest until she sees Tom Chaney hang for the murder.
Mattie makes the trip to Fort Smith, Arkansas, with two missions in mind: claim her father’s body and send it home for burial, and hire someone to help her capture his killer. The first task is a relatively easy one, but the second is more of a challenge. Mattie, though, knows exactly the kind of man she is searching for and, once he sobers up, U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn seems to be the answer to her prayers. He is a man with true grit enough to match Mattie’s own.
Rooster Cogburn has a history of his own, having ridden with the infamous Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War, but he is smart enough to keep the odds in his favor. Not only has he accepted a $100 contract from Mattie Ross to capture her father’s murderer; he also draws a U.S. Marshall’s salary and hopes to claim the bounties being offered on Chaney and others traveling with him. After LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger/ bounty hunter, offers to split the bounties with Cogburn, the two men decide to team up – and to sneak out of Fort Smith early enough to leave Mattie far behind. It would not be that easy.
True Grit is first rate western adventure as seen through the eyes of Mattie Ross, now an old woman recalling the adventure of a lifetime she experienced at age fourteen. Young Mattie sees the world in black and white terms. She wants Tom Chaney to hang for the murder of her father or she wants him shot dead if it proves impossible to take him alive. What’s right is right, and she will not rest until she makes it happen, even if she has to shoot the man herself.
There is adventure in True Grit and there is humor. The more subtle humor stems from the way that the roughest and toughest characters in the book speak their dialogue. Even in the heat of battle, or while throwing personal insults at each other, Cogburn and the rest speak in Mattie Ross’s voice, including her vocabulary and grammatical style. It took me more than a few pages to figure out that the book is more a monologue than a traditional novel. The reader is hearing the elderly Mattie Ross recount her adventures, and each of the characters, from Rooster to Tom Chaney, speaks the way that Mattie would have spoken had she been in their shoes.
It is easy to see why True Grit made Charles Portis’s reputation; it is a shame, however, that Portis wrote so little else. This is one of those books that can be enjoyed by readers of all ages, and it is good to see that the new movie version has given it new life.
Rated at: 5.0
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I have followed, and very much enjoyed, Showtime’s Dexter series from the start, but Dexter Is Delicious is my first exposure to Dexter in actual book form. It is not like I have been unaware of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter books all this time, however. The only thing that kept me from reading one of them before now was my erroneous assumption that the books were little more than recaps of the same stories I had already watched on Showtime. That is certainly not the case.
The books are TV Dexter’s alternate history (or should I phrase that the other way around?). Dexter is basically the same likable serial killer we know from television but some of what he has experienced in that series has not happened to Printed-Word Dexter (and I assume that the opposite is also true). Certain key characters have died television deaths but live on in the books. Dexter’s new television son is his new daughter in Dexter Is Delicious. His innocent young step-children from film are his not-very-innocent step-children in the books.
Dexter Is Delicious is a bizarre tale involving young Miami cannibals, a group that is, in its own special way, working to control the illegal immigrant population of that fine city. However, only when two teen girls from an expensive private high school appear to have been kidnapped by the cannibals does the Miami Police Department get seriously involved. The case falls into the lap of Dexter’s sister, Deb, who treats Dexter (a blood-splatter expert working for the same police department) as her personal employee, yanking him from the laboratory and running him all over the county in pursuit of the missing girls and those who might have them.
Dexter, while he is perfectly willing to help Deb hunt the bad guys, is, at the same time, waging an internal battle brought on by the birth of his new baby girl. He wants to rid himself of his Dark Passenger, that inner voice requiring him to kill on a regular basis. Dexter wants nothing more than to feel the emotions any new father can be expected to feel. To blend in despite being a sociopath, Dexter has already learned the proper things to do and say when around other people. Now he is having longer and longer moments of actually feeling those emotions. But what will his Dark Passenger think of all this?
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| Author Jeff Lindsay |
The plot of Dexter Is Delicious is a bit farfetched, but that is unlikely to bother Dexter-regulars because this is nothing new. From the point-of-view of someone who came to Dexter first via television, what did bug me was the limited, or even nonexistent roles played by some of Dexter’s fellow television cops. Too, I kept wondering how a blood-splatter expert could get away with running all over the Miami area for so long doing physical police work and only occasionally going in to the blood lab.
The audio book version of Dexter Is Delicious, a nine-CD set, is read by its author, Jeff Lindsay, who does a good job giving voice to Dexter and Dexter’s sense of humor. I was a little slow settling into Lindsay’s narrative style but by the second CD it all started to sound very natural, and in character, to me. Anyone just willing to go with the flow of the story is going to have fun with this one.
Rated at: 3.5
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Yasmina Khadra (pseudonym of Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul) closes the circle on his Superintendent Brahim Llob series with this third book in the series, Autumn of the Phantoms. Superintendent Llob’s tendency to speak his mind as bluntly with his superiors as with the criminals he chases has made him a marked man in present-day Algeria. Not only does he have to worry about Muslim terrorists wanting to assassinate him; he has to fear the same from those in power inside his own police department. Llob knows too much, talks too much about it, and is determined to go down swinging if he has to go down at all.
Now, it seems, his superiors have the perfect excuse to push Llob out the door: his novel,
Morituri, in which the Superintendent exposed the corruptness of practically everyone with any power or influence in Algiers, including the police. First fired, and then allowed to retire (with one of the most surreal retirement tributes imaginable), Superintendent Llob now has to decide what to do with the rest of his life. Common sense dictates that he move to the countryside with his wife where, hopefully, he will no longer be a likely target for assassination. But first, Llob must attend the funeral of one of his oldest friends, a man tortured and killed by those who want to do the same to Llob. What happens after the funeral – to Llob and the local villagers, terrible as it is, is typical of what happened all over Algeria during the worst of the country’s so-called civil war.
Yasmina Khadra captures the paranoia and terror of Algeria’s recent religiously inspired bloodletting to such a degree that those already familiar with its details will cringe as they read the author’s account of what happened on a nightly basis to those unable to protect themselves from the terrorists – and from the soldiers and policemen charged with protecting them. As one character put it as life went on and the carnage was ignored: “Here, young girls are raped and beheaded, children are maimed by bombs, whole families are hacked to pieces every night, and we behave as if nothing’s going on.”
Criminals and religious fanatics thrive in this opportunity to rape, murder, steal, and run wild in ways almost unimaginable. The army and the police are so overwhelmed that many in their ranks grow to be as vicious as those they are supposed to control. Civilians are the most unfortunate because they can trust neither the “bad guys” nor the supposed “good guys.”
Perhaps, as one of Superintendent Llob’s friends reflects, what hurts most is the realization that all the violence comes from fellow Algerians. He said:
“We’ve been taught to hate ever since we came into the world; we were turned from the Truth. We’re taught hatred of the Other, hatred of the Absent and the Foreign – a manufactured hatred, in short. And look, Brahim, just look. Who’s burning our schools today, who’s killing our brothers and neighbors who’s beheading our intellectuals, who’s putting our land to fire and the sword? Aliens? Malaysians? Animists? Christians? … They’re Algerians, just Algerians, who not so long ago were belting out the national anthem in our stadiums, who rushed in the thousands to help the victims of disasters and mobilized impressively for every telethon. And now look. Do you recognize yourself in them? – I don’t, not at all…My race of people, Brahim, are all those who, from one end of the world to the other, refuse to allow these monsters to be forgiven.”
I was fortunate to spend several years working in Algeria. What I read in Algerian newspapers (and what my Algerian friends told me) about the slaughter of whole villages in one bloody night, the beheadings of men in front of their families, the hijacking of buses filled with men who would be murdered on their way to work, and the beheadings of foreign workers, is even worse than what Khadra describes in Autumn of the Phantoms. I do believe that there are thousands of Algerians that “refuse to allow these monsters to be forgiven.” Pray that they survive long enough to get back their country.
Rated at: 4.5
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I have been aware of Christopher Hitchens for a long time, but it is only in the last few years that I’ve really been much of an admirer of his. It’s amazing how much “smarter” the man seemed to become as his political views grew closer to my own (for those unsure, this is my lame attempt at a joke) – even his “take no prisoners” debate style seemed less abrasive than before.
Hitch-22 is in some ways more than the book I expected and, in other ways, a bit less than I hoped for when I first picked it up. On the one hand, Hitchens is frank about many aspects of his personal life, including the family scandal that cost his mother her life when she was killed by her lover in one of those murder-suicide incidents that destroy so many families. He addresses his own bisexuality, tracing it all the way back to his boarding school days during which homosexual experimentation among the students was commonplace – and admits that he became more of a womanizer after he came to believe that signs of physical aging made him unattractive to men. On the other hand, however, Hitchens says very little about either of his wives or his children, using them more as props, than anything else, in stories about some of his more famous friends, and enemies in the literary world.
Most interesting to me is the explanation Hitchens gives for his gradual shift of political views, all the way from being about as far left as one could be in 20th century England to becoming an advocate of the far right viewpoint on American/world politics by the 21st century. Along the way, Hitchens became friends with some of the most influential political and literary minds of his day; as his politics changed, some of those same people would become his bitter enemies. Hitchens, never one to pull his punches, tells the reader exactly what he thinks of the politicians, writers, pundits, and personalities he encountered along the way. While that it definitely a good approach to writing a memoir, many American readers are likely to find themselves a bit befuddled by some of the names and situations Hitchens describes from his earlier life. Too, these particular chapters constitute some of the most dryly written ones in the book, and it takes determination on the part of the reader to get through them despite the war zone adventures they often describe.
Hitch-22 does, though, reflect the personality of its author, and the book will not disappoint Hitchens fans. The man’s feisty, confrontational approach to life, one leavened by his rather raunchy and witty take, is there for all to see – and enjoy. Even taking into account his current fight for survival, few would say that Christopher Hitchens has been cheated by life. His has been one of the more interesting ones of the 20th century and Hitch-22 proves it.
Rated at: 4.0
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The Finkler Question, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, focuses on one Julian Treslove, a man standing at the crossroad of life not at all sure about which direction he should turn. He is not happy about where he is standing, that much he does know – and he senses that, in order to salvage the remainder of his life, he needs a complete makeover.
Treslove, twice married, abandoned both wives so early in the marriages that he barely knows his two sons. He once worked as a radio programmer for the BBC but now resents the experience so much that he can barely stomach walking past his old building. Now he works, when the agency can find it for him, as a celebrity lookalike at parties, not exactly a step up from being a BBC producer. Treslove does not know who he is, much less who he wants to be. His life has lost its meaning.
Even Teslove’s oldest friendship seems to be based more on rivalry and competition than on companionship. Sam Finkler, popular author and television personality, makes his living selling shallow, but bestselling, self-help books. Finkler, a Jew whose wife has recently died, is so rabidly anti-Zionist that he helps form a group of likeminded Jews who meet once a week to declare their shame in public. When the Treslove and Finkler reconnect with elderly professor Libor Sevick, who has just lost his wife of more than fifty years, Treslove, as the single non-Jew in the trio, feels more disconnected from life than ever.
In his great desire to belong, and to create a new identity for himself, Treslove decides to recreate himself in the image of a contemporary London Jew. He immerses himself into the lives of his two friends, learns Yiddish, and even finds a Jewish lover who is in charge of the soon-to-opened Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture (located down the road from the Abbey Road recording studio made famous by the Beatles). Julian Treslove is determined to become “a Finkler,” and author Howard Jacobson uses Treslove’s quest to explore the whole “Finkler Question” and what it means to be a modern day “Finkler.”
Is The Finkler Question worthy of the Man Booker Prize? In the sense that a tragicomedy like this one can so successfully explore the meaning of identity to the offspring of a people who have been so misunderstood, and have suffered so much personal violence over the past 2,000 years, yes it does. That said, this is not an easy novel to like. Its two main characters, Treslove and Finkler, are equally unlikable and unsympathetic – both are, in fact, more fools than not. Too, despite Jacobson’s reputation as a writer who uses a good bit of humor in his novels, I found very little of it in evidence here. I suspect that might be because it is of the “inside baseball” type of humor that only those having grown up in the Jewish faith can fully understand and appreciate.
I do appreciate the insights Jacobson offers into contemporary Judaism as it is practiced and lived today, but I am yet to answer the “Man Booker Prize question” even in my own mind.
Rated at: 3.5
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Before it was over, the War Between the States would claim several hundred thousand lives. Sadly, a good many of those lives were given up by men who never saw a battlefield or by those who succumbed to secondary infections spread to them by the very doctors and nurses whose job it was to save their lives. Volunteers, especially at the start of the war, were thrown together in crowded camps within which little regard was given to sanitation. Young men from rural areas were suddenly victim to numerous infectious diseases to which they had never been exposed. Those from the city, not as likely to fall to the more common diseases, were still easy prey to the dysentery that ravaged the tent cities.
The war offered a unique opportunity to someone like Mary Sutter, the heroine of Robin Oliveira’s Civil War novel, My Name Is Mary Sutter. Already an accomplished midwife in her native Albany, New York, Mary desires more. With all her heart, she wants to become a surgeon. The local medical school, however, refuses even to consider the possibility of admitting a female and none of the doctors in the area will agree to teach her what he knows. When Mary hears that Dorothea Dix has convinced President Lincoln to allow her to recruit female nurses, she heads to Washington to offer her services to Dix – only to find out that she is too young to qualify.
But no one would accuse Mary Sutter of being a quitter. If Dix will not accept her as a nurse, she will find someone who will. A chance meeting with John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries, ultimately leads Mary to the Union Hotel Hospital and the job of assisting the hospital’s chief surgeon, William Stipp. Stipp needs Mary’s help as badly as she needs him to teach her, so the two form a partnership each of them will barely survive. Mary is shocked by what she sees: the hospital is short on supplies and long on patients, Dr. Stipp seems to be learning as he goes, and many of the wounded survive horrific amputation surgery in good shape only to die within days anyway.
My Name Is Mary Sutter is Civil War history as seen primarily through the eyes of the doctors and nurses who struggled, so often in vain, to save the lives of the wounded and sick soldiers placed in their care. Robin Oliveira vividly portrays the medical knowledge and limitations of the day, be it through her detailed descriptions of amputations or those of the potential terrors associated with childbirth of the period. She also reminds her readers of the great number of lives lost so needlessly to secondary infection, a medical problem that would not be solved until after the war.
All of this is tied together by the intriguing story of the Sutter family itself and how the war all but destroyed it. Some readers, I suspect, will find some aspects of the family story to be a little too strongly of the sort found in romance novels; others will find this to be the best part of the book. My Name Is Mary Sutter will appeal to a variety of readers.
Rated at: 3.5
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Yasmina Khadra (real name: Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former high ranking Algerian army officer who moved to France in 2000 after having witnessed some of the bloodiest and most brutal days in Algerian history (and that is saying a lot). Moulessehoul went into exile because he dared write about the fact that there were few “good guys” in the Algeria’s religion-based civil war, other than perhaps the countless civilians who were slaughtered in the process. The Algerian army was often as guilty of atrocity as the terrorists whom the military struggled to control.
That Khadra/Moulessehoul would leave Algeria with a jaded outlook on life is no surprise. That he would adapt his experiences into a classically noirish detective series would be more difficult to imagine – but that is exactly what he did with Morituri and the other Superintendent Llob books.
Superintendent Llob and Lieutenant Lino have been around long enough to understand the politics of police work in a city as politically corrupt as Algiers. They recognize the relationship between corrupt politicians, businessmen, and high ranking police officials. But those simple days are over. Now, policemen like Llob and Lino are being targeted for political assassination by groups trying to collapse Algeria’s governmental system. In order to speed up the cultural breakdown, policemen and their families are being assassinated alongside writers, singers, journalists, entertainers, and others deemed to be a threat to the Muslim revolution. Men like Llob and Lino take each day one at a time, thankful each time they make it to the office without incident.
In the midst of the turmoil, Superintendent Llob is assigned to search for the missing daughter of one of the more corrupt powerbrokers in Algiers. The search will force Llob and Lieutenant Lino into the underworld of Algiers that few Westerners would dream exists. Llob, ever the tough guy, uses his contacts to get himself inside some of the most decadent settings one can imagine, places where anything and everything can be had for the right price, including young women, little girls, and little boys. Llob pursues the search for the missing rich girl, crashing and bullying his way from scene to scene, despite what he learns about her and her father.
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| Yasmina Khadra |
The strength of Morituri is in how the novel so deftly captures the atmosphere of 1990s Algiers, a city in which paranoia and fear ruled the day. When I left Algiers in late 1993 (early in the evolution of the war), it was already a city of curfews, unreliable roadblocks, massacres of entire villages, beheadings, kidnappings, bombs, and assassinations. Drivers had to decide on a hunch whether a roadblock was being manned by real military personnel or by terrorists dressed to look the part. There was a shoot-on-sight rule for anyone caught on the streets after ten p.m. Villages, down to the last man, woman and child, were slaughtered within the sight and hearing of army posts but military personnel did not always bother to notice. Westerners were targets of choice for kidnappers and assassins. Army and police personnel seldom bothered to take prisoners in shootouts with terrorists they confronted in the middle of a long Algerian night.
The difference was I could walk away from Algiers, never to return. Superintendent Llob and Lieutenant Lino had to stay and to do their best to protect the streets of the city, an impossible task. Yasmina Khadra has written Morituri in a style that can be a bit difficult to read at times – characters come and go at a rapid pace and the plot veers from scene to scene like a runaway train – but he has done a magnificent job in recreating the atmosphere of a major world city that was eating itself alive in the nineties.
Rated at: 4.0
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Jack London, the man who several years before Mark Twain’s death unseated Twain to become America’s favorite author, was a man of contrasts. Illegitimately born into a poverty stricken environment, for much of his adult life London would employ a full domestic staff, including a personal valet. Even as an avowed and outspoken advocate of socialism, he saw nothing wrong with living the luxurious lifestyle his personal labor eventually earned him. He was a staunch defender of the rights of “native peoples” but is said to have been a “racialist,” believing that no good would come from a mixing of the races.
London’s era was one still very much influenced by the sexual mores of the Victorian Age but he was always sexually active, even when married, and made little effort to explain his actions to either of his wives. He enjoyed the company of children but was never close to the two daughters he fathered by his first wife, allowing them effectively to slip out of his life. Those who knew him considered London a “spiritual” man, but he detested the way that religion helped maintain what he saw as an illegitimate and unjust society and considered himself an atheist. He was capable of superb writing but was willing to do as much “hackwork” as it took to support his lifestyle.
Even in death, London was a mystery. That he died in his sleep at age 40 is not disputed; the cause of his death, however, is still open to discussion. Did London die of an accidental overdose of morphine or, as many suspect, was he so depressed that he decided to take his own life that night. He was known to be upset about his health and the shape he was in but adamantly refused to change the lifestyle that was rapidly killing him. Even had he not died as he did, it is unlikely that Jack London would ever have seen his fifties.
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| James L. Haley |
All of this is explored in Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, James Haley’s recent Jack London biography. Hayley approaches London’s life by dividing it into segments based on the various occupations that occupied him during his 40 years. Those occupations range from what London called “work beast” (when, as a youth, he worked in places such as a pickle factory for ten cents an hour) to pirate, seal hunter, hobo, student, gold prospector, writer, muckraker, war correspondent, sailor and rancher. Each of these jobs is given its own chapter treatment; other chapters include those on London the “lover” and London the “celebrity.”
Haley’s technique works well to explain how Jack London managed to reinvent himself as a world-class author. This approach also puts a human face on a man who has too often in the past been stereotyped simply as a socialist/communist who happened to write very good novels or as a man’s man who traveled to the wilds of Alaska and the South Seas in search of new topics for his books. The real Jack London, as it turns out was more motivated by finding a way to make a living with his mind rather than his back than by anything else. That he succeeded to such a degree is a tale resembling those stories that so enthralled London himself as a young reader in San Francisco.
The odds were heavily against Jack London, but he made it. James Haley tells how London did it in a very readable, and memorable, biography that is sure to please fans of literary biography.
Rated at: 5.0
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Does it seem a long time ago that Presumed Innocent (the hit novel and smash movie) transformed author Scott Turow into a household name? If so, there is a good reason for that; it was a long time ago. The novel was first published in December 1987 and the movie version starring Harrison Ford was released in 1990. Now, let’s call it 22 years later, Turow is back with a sequel that tells what Rusty Sabich has been up to since he was acquitted on murder charges all those years ago.
When last seen, Rusty Sabich had just been acquitted of the murder of his mistress, a fellow attorney, and had made the decision, for the sake of his young son, to try to keep his marriage intact. The evidence against Sabich was strong, almost overwhelming, but he was acquitted, in part because Prosecutor Tommy Molto was humiliated into admitting that his office had mishandled some of the physical evidence against Sabich.
It has happened again. Another woman close to Rusty Sabich is dead, and he is suspected by Tommy Molto of having caused her death. Barbara, Sabich’s wife of 36 years, is found dead in her bed but Sabich does not bother to report her death to anyone, including her son, for some 24 hours. Barbara’s death is at first attributed to natural causes, odd though Sabich’s behavior may have been. Molto’s chief deputy, however, is not so sure about the cause of death, and piece by little piece, he methodically builds a case against Sabich that will end with Sabich and his old adversary, Tommy Molto, locked in a rematch.
On the surface, it does not look good for Rusty Sabich – and that is his own fault. There is evidence of a recent affair that he refuses to discuss, his marriage has been shaky for years, and it becomes obvious that he has been seeking a way out of it. Turow uses alternating first-person narratives to tell the story with some chapters told through the eyes of Rusty, some through the eyes of Tommy, and others through the eyes of Nat (Rusty’s son) or Anna (Rusty’s recent lover). As in the first novel, Turow shows the good and bad sides of all the main characters, allowing the reader to judge the rightness or wrongness of what each of them does. The trial itself is a cliffhanger that offers the reader several opportunities to change his mind about Sabich’s guilt or innocence, and who committed the crime (if there was one) if Sabich is innocent.
The audio version of the book is read by Edward Herrmann and Orlagh Casssidy (who handles mostly the chapters narrated by the Anna Vostic character). Herrmann does a particularly fine job with all the male characters but I had a difficult time matching Cassidy’s voice to my mental image of the youngish mistress, Anna Vostic. That distraction was a minor issue, however, and I found that using separate readers based on the sex of the character narrating each chapter was a great help in keeping all the details straight.
Innocent will likely appeal most to those who have fond memories of Presumed Innocent, but potential readers should not be concerned if they are unfamiliar with that book. Turow brings enough information from the first book into this one, by having the prosecutors rehash the first case in preparation of the new one, that Innocent works very well as a standalone novel.
That one or two of the novel’s plot elements do not seem quite logical to me, causes me to rate this one at a 4.5 rather than at 5.0, but I did thoroughly enjoy it over the number of days I listened to it on my daily commute.
Rated at: 4.5
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One of my earliest memories is of watching the few toys I owned being destroyed in a barnyard fire set especially for that purpose. From what I have been told, the toys were burned in hope that I would not fall victim to polio, as had the little boy who had played with those toys and me only a few days earlier. My parents, I am sure, were terrified, and they felt that they had to do something. It was only a year or so later that I understood the whole story, but the experience is something that still crosses my mind every year or so.
Philip Roth’s latest novel, Nemesis, revisits those terrible days during which the general public had no idea how polio was spread and had to watch helplessly as countless children and young people were stricken. Set in a Jewish, Newark neighborhood in 1944, the book captures the feeling of panic and overwhelming despair that accompanied the regular arrival of that dreaded killer-disease.
Bucky Cantor, who was quite the high school athlete, is disappointed to find himself one of the very few able-bodied young men still walking the streets of his neighborhood. Even now, at the peak of World War II, Bucky’s eyesight is so bad that no branch of the United States military will accept him. As a way of serving his community, Bucky has taken on the responsibility of running the park where the neighborhood youngsters spend their summer days playing baseball or enduring rope-jumping marathons.
All goes well until one of those children is stricken by polio. That case is just the first of many and, before long, panic and finger pointing will begin. Bucky Cantor, a young man with high expectations of himself, will find himself torn between staying with the young teens who so much admire him or joining his girlfriend in employment at a prestigious children’s camp in the Poconos. His decision will change lives in a way he never imagined.
A chief strength of Nemesis is the vividness with which Roth recreates the impact of polio on the psyche of the country before Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine began to eradicate the disease in 1955. The book is, however, also an excellent character study of a young man who could never live up to his own expectations of personal behavior. Bucky Cantor’s high ideals, combined with the personal guilt he feels when he fails to match those ideals, make for a highly destructive combination of beliefs. Personal failure, always likely when the bar is set so high, would mean that, soon enough, Bucky would no longer have “a conscious he could live with.”
The inherent tragedy of Nemesis and a young man like Bucky Cantor is best summed up by another of the book’s characters who said about Bucky: “The guilt in someone like Bucky may seem absurd but, in fact, is unavoidable. Such a person is condemned. Nothing he does matches the ideal in him. He never knows where his responsibility ends. He never trusts his limits because, saddled with a natural goodness that will not permit him to resign himself to the suffering of others, he will never guiltlessly acknowledge that he has any limits.”
Bucky Cantor could not protect the park children from polio; even worse, he could not protect himself from failing to reach his own personal ideals.
Rated at: 4.0
