The Secret Life of Groceries
By Benjamin Lorr

I ran across the book on an The Atlantic article about "Summer Reads," I believe. Subtitled "The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket," it sounded like a book I'd enjoy.

Our library had it, so I checked it out and pounded through it pretty quickly - it is a summer book, after all.

Published in 2021 after what I can glean years of investigation, the book is a testament to the American grocery store, from General Stores through the first supermarkets to the brave new world of both big box grocers (think Walmart and Costco) and online grocers (think Amazon and - again - Walmart).

The thread that runs through the entire book is two-fold:

• How margins on groceries are incredibly thin. The figure repeated was ~1.5%.


• How the abundance of product - accompanying lower costs - has been a staple for the arc of American grocery stores.

All in all, a fun read with a lot of obtuse (but fun) detail. It's a relatively short book - approximately 280 pages - and there are some glaring omissions: Delivery and or order online/pickup in store are not mentioned that I recall. No mention of Peapod, which is odd (it does mention online grocers, specifically Amazon).

No mention of the trend toward self-checkout in stores, nothing about loyalty cards/programs or online apps. Not a peep about how liquor has changed grocers (has it? I know my local chain is putting in fancy, dedicated wine rooms. Why?).

But supermarkets have a huge story to tell; one book simply can't fit everything in. I get that.

I'll leave the reader with the centerpiece of Part III, about how to get a product into a store (legally, with bribes, pay for display ...), cost of shelf space, how a buyer decides what to buy etc.

One word: Slawsa.

Google it. It's a thing.

 - Originally reviewed: 07/02/2024, 6:57 pm

Ducks - Two Years in the Oil Sands
by Kate Beaton

Basically, the story is: the author, a Nova Scotia resident, graduates from college in the early 2000s with a non-viable degree and lots of student debt.

As Beaton notes, Nova Scotia, and the eastern Canadian maritime provinces in general, were first known for exporting coal. And then the coal ran out.

Then they were known for exporting seafood. And then that industry was depleted.

At the time she graduated (2005-ish), the area was known for a new export: People. Exiles who would help power industries in other provinces, such as the Ontario auto assembly plants.

After reflection, she took a different path: Working at the then fairly new Albertan tar sands, joining a variety of camp jobs in frozen (-50 in the winter) Northern Alberta, helping extract the oil trapped in those sands.

A young woman - in the middle of nowhere - in what was decidedly a man's club.

Well written, fabulously illustrated.

 - Originally reviewed: 06/09/2024, 3:19 pm

The Sum of Us
Heather McGhee

I had a hard time getting through it, to be honest - the book started strong, but it became repetitive and - to a degree - stretched its point a bit.

What is the point of the book? It's right there in the tome's subtitle:

What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Her best, clearest example is one she used in a TV interview I saw (which prompted me to buy her book). During the civil rights battles in the South, towns/counties were ordered to allow everyone - regardless of color - access to public pools. Many areas elected to just fill in the pools rather than support / tolerate desegregation.

Who wins there? No one. Everyone lost access to the pools, even those who had previously had access. Yes, private pools - which could discriminate - were built, but that came at a cost, as well (money to build, money to become a member).

And it still left out poor white folks, because they couldn't afford memberships.

Lose/lose. And probably not what many people thought about this issue at the time or even now. It was just an action by whites to maintain their status quo.

The author continues with other examples (redlining, public schools, subprime loans) and points out - with voluminous data and great anecdotes - how the "anti- black/brown" efforts actually hurts those (i.e. whites) who put these principles/laws/norms in place.

But for whatever faults I found in the book, the pluses vastly outnumber the minuses. I learned a lot, and that's an important yardstick for me.

Your mileage may vary.

 - Originally reviewed: 03/08/2024, 3:51 pm

Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison

The 1992 National Book Award for fiction went to Cormac McCarthy for his modern-day Western, All the Pretty Horses..

One of the finalists for that year's prize was Dorothy Allison gritty Bastard Out of Carolina, a book that's been sitting on the shelf of one of my bookcases for, well, decades. Not even sure when or where I bought it. Or why. I must have read a review.

Finally got around to reading it last week, and I really delayed my reading pleasure by 20-30 years. Gritty, sad, hopeful - just a snapshot of the human condition by a poor white extended family in a small 1950's North Carolina mill town.

Narrated by the titular character - Ruth Anne, AKA Bone - from the time before her birth until she's roughly 13 years old. It doest even seem hokey that she narrates the terms of her gestation (briefly) and birth - the way it's written indicates that her family has a strong oral tradition, and she's just passing on what she's heard from her relatives, colored by her own experiences.

The men are the main breadwinners - this is the 1950s in the South - but they are almost all damaged goods and get relatively little play in the book. Feared by townspeople for their tempers, they are drunks, self-indulgent and philanderers. They protect their families as needed, but that was not their focus.

It's the women who hold the families together - each is a vertebrae that form the spine that supports the entire group. And that even includes a young Bone, who is sent to a dying aunt's house to help the cancer-stricken woman until her help is no longer needed. The female children spend a lot of time at different aunts' houses - again, it's the women who are the glue. Sometimes it's the aunt helping the child, sometimes it's the other way around.

The main theme of the novel is the intrinsically unbreakable bond between mothers and their children, but also of the women and all their female relatives. The men and boys will endure.

Without airing any spoilers, when this primary bond slips even just a little near the end of the book, it upends Bone's entire world.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/22/2023, 4:28 pm

On Animals
Susan Orlean

All fifteen essays, all 235 pages. Several months...

I think you can see where this review is going....

The essays - all on animals in case that was unclear - are a collection (assuming "the best") written over the past twenty years, most originating in "The New Yorker." It's not laid out chronologically, so an essay from 2020 can be followed by one written a decade earlier. Many short story collections are chronological, so one can see the writer mature/themes change as the author ages.

While I'm sure Orlean has picked up a trick or two over the years, her writing is almost always brilliant - it's just that sometimes the essays missed the mark for me. Oft times it was just the overreaching that turned me off. Editors!

The introduction (written in 2021) really sucked me in, and it was followed by great first essay - from 2009 - about chickens. Delightful.

But I really got bogged down in a essay about tigers (too disjointed), and essays about show dogs and rabbits were just *shrug* - whatever. And while I learned a thing or two about oxen from "Carbonara and Primavera," the abrupt ending still baffles me. Read the last line on the page, turned to continue the essay and: nada. The story was over.

She seems to genuinely love animals - her last essay, updated for this collection - is an overview of her (now sold) upstate New York menagerie, giving her time to muse on hens, turkeys, Angus beef and cats (adopted strays included). Much to love.

My favorites are the previously mentioned essay on chickens ("The It Bird") and tale of donkeys in Morocco ("Where Donkey's Deliver"). In the latter essay, she kept asking the donkey owners the names of their animals. She assumed that the donkey owners, like Americans, name their animals.

They don't - they see the donkeys as tools; naming one would be like naming a wheelbarrow.

Overall it was a disappointment, but there was enough good in there to not mark it as wasted time. Just not up there with collections by E.B. White or Malcolm Gladwell, for example, and I thought Orlean could crack into their level.

 - Originally reviewed: 09/18/2023, 12:00 am

Corrections in Ink
Keri Blakinger

Keri Blakinger's meticulous and thought-provoking memoir starts off with the story of an unexpected and sensational crime: An Ivy League student (also a heroin addict) is caught with $50k of heroin (oh - she's also a drug dealer).

An English major (slash heroin addict) while she was in college, once out of prison Blakinger relies on words to slowly get into journalism and ends up championing prisoners' rights: She's now with The Marshall Project ("Nonprofit journalism about criminal justice"), going into prisons as fellow felon to find out what can be done to make the time more bearable. She's had some successes book drives, dentures, a rare success in a sexual assult case. The prisoners - current and former - talk to her because she's one of them - always a powerful tool.

A somewhat uneven but interesting memoir. Glad I stumbled upon it.

 - Originally reviewed: 09/08/2022, 4:23 pm

Annie John
Jamaica Kincaid

When I was in college, I read a very strange and impressive short story^* in the New Yorker. A half page long - the bottom half of the page was a very New Yorker-esqe cartoon.

A half page long, all one sentence with some magical writing: "The Letter From Home, " by Jamaica Kincaid, of whom I had never heard. Puzzling but lyrical. What to make of it?

I clipped the page (later had to copy the tattered page) and stuck it in this or that folder packed with, to me, interesting writing.

In 1985, Kincaid came out with the novel Annie John and whenever it was that I ran across it (before 1990, I'm sure), I picked it up. I recalled the magazine article, and the author's name was easy to remember.

It remained, on my bookshelf, unread. Until yesterday.

Clocking in at 148 pages with generous margins, it's closer to a novella than a novel, but no matter. The book traces - first person - the thoughts, joys, illnesses and mental gyrations of a young girl growing up, from 10 years old to 18, with her mother and father in Antigua.

Like the New Yorker story, it's beautifully written, hard to put down (I read it in three hours, almost uninterrupted), and difficult to decipher.

At heart, it's about growing up, learning to love, and learning to leave love - and other parts of your life - behind.

I remain puzzled by the ending, to come to grips with some of the decisions she makes, most only to herself (Annie John) without input nor sharing with others.

Incandescent.

^*April 20, 1981 issue, pg. 33

 - Originally reviewed: 04/10/2022, 1:16 pm

Unworthy Republic
Claudio Saunt

A National Book Award finalist in 2020, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, by Claudio Saunt, is a deeply researched look into the priorities and policies that led to the state-sponsored expulsion of U.S. Native Americans from east of the Mississippi River to the west of the same.

In his forward, the author lays out three key points he will attempt to qualify:

First [the book] argues that the state administered mass expulsion of indigenous people was unprecedented. [snip] The U.S.-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s became something of a model for colonial empires around the world.

The second and related point made by this book is that the state-sponsored expulsion of the 1830s was a turning point for indigenous people and for the United States.

The expulsion of the indigenous people was far from inevitable [snip] It is not difficult to imagine alternative history. Congressmen who were opposed to federal spending, against the expansion of slavery, dedicated to Christianizing native peoples, hostile to Andrew Jackson, or simply reluctant to overturn current policy might have found common ground to join together temporarily to block the expulsion of Native Americans.

The first point, to me, is the most curious. As long as there have been invaders, these interlopers - to the US or elsewhere - have long pushed aside the native inhabitants - by deceit, force or by a show of (potential) cooperation. This happened with Indians in Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere.

But in the south - where most of the mass expulsion took place - it took official government policy to remove the great number of Native Americans from that area. Not just some redneck with a musket. Official policy.

That was different. And not in a good way.

The book was not what I was expecting - I wanted to know more about why Indian reservations are sovereign nations and so on. Didn't get much of this here.

And the book is so well researched that it was a difficult read. Most histories will say something about what the good or bad guys did, and then give an example.

Saunt will lay out a dozen examples. Great research and reference, but too dense for what I wanted, which is more of a 10,000 foot view.

Glad I read the book, but it was a tough read.

And I still need to read a "Native Americans for Dummies" book so I can get answers to questions I have, but that's another day.

 - Originally reviewed: 04/05/2022, 7:45 pm

Disobedience
Jane Hamilton

Back in the day when I had time for reading (grade/high school, parts of college) I would binge-read authors - literary fiction - much like I'll today binge-watch a TV show on DVD/streaming.

Hemingway, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Joyce (no, not Finnegan's Wake), Faulkner and so on. Not all writings, but the bulk of the biggies, novels and (often) short story collections.

In the last decade or two, it's rare that I read more than one book - very rarely two - by a contemporary author (in the last 50 years or so). I no longer appear to have favorite authors, I now have favorite books.

Not that that's a bad thing.

Two exceptions to this rule are William Styron and, more recently, Jane Hamilton.

I just finished a fourth Hamilton novel: Disobedience. It happens to be the most recently published of her books I've read, but I've read them out of order. I'm not waiting patiently for her latest to come out and devouring it, I just read as I find this or that book interesting. Disobedience came out in 2000, and the previous Hamilton book I read, her first, came out in 1988: The Book of Ruth (brilliant, shocking and unexpected).

Compared to The Book or Ruth (a PEN/Hemingway Award winner) and my personal favorite, A Map of the World, Disobedience was a disappointment.

It starts off strong - the first graphs of Disobedience and A Map of the World are so strong, so encompassing that you just need to read the rest of the book.

Sadly, Disobedience doesn't hold up.

It's a story about the Shaw family, transplanted from Vermont to Chicago, and is narrated by the family's 17-year-old son, Henry/Hank. The gist of the story is that Henry finds, by accidentally(?) accessing his mom's email account ("Liza38" - it has to be an AOL account, as it does take place sometime around or before 2000), that his mom is having an affair. The book, narrated in past tense, describes the year or so that follows the initial discovery.

That's the main arc of the story - him snooping around the letters sent and received by his mom and her partner in disobedience, as well as his mother's emails to a female friend, where she more straight-forwardly outlines details of the affair: the good, the bad, the confusing. The guilt and the amour.

But there is an inordinate amount of time devoted to Henry's younger sister, Elvira, a high school-aged goth who is a Civil War Reenactor, and obsessed with all things post- and ante-bellum, as well. But mainly the War. Their father, a history teacher, is slowly (weirdly, why the delay?) revealed to be just as big a Civil War buff as his daughter. I was expecting some sort of issue between the two to suddenly emerge, but it never did.

The ending of the book really rotates around the daughter, which is odd given that the book is narrated by the son and mainly focuses on his reactions to his mother's choices.

At bottom, the book is about how each character in the book finds their own place in the world. It's about missteps, adjustments and acceptance.

It's well written and full of quirky details. For example, the narrator (the son, Henry) almost never writes about his "father" - he's just "Kevin" or "Kevin Shaw."

For his mom, she's "Liza98," "Elizabeth," "Liz" and so on.

There are some other interesting characters, notably a school friend (Karen) who is described in dress and conversation like she's an artsy thirty-some year old, but she's just a high-school senior. And there is a beautiful woman Henry meets at a summer camp whom he, of course, lusts after.

All in all, the book just didn't click, and the ending just did not resonate on any level. The narrator's tone was problematic, as well: He was writing in past tense, and it seems like he had already graduated college and film school, and Henry sounds like Holden Caufield, but with a solid grasp of literature and nuances of language. That's an odd mix.

Will I read another Hamilton book? Absolutely. She's a good writer and, as a bonus, sets her tales in or around Chicago (I'm from the burbs). So when a character thinks about getting a job as a lifeguard….at Fullerton Beach, it adds a little something.

And while she didn't quite pull it off here as well as she did in A Short History of a Prince, it's a gutsy move for a woman to write the novel from the first-person point of view of a male, and - in this case - a horny 17-year-old male.

So maybe one of her more recent books has something to say to me.

 - Originally reviewed: 11/09/2021, 12:00 am

Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald

This book, a collection of essays about nature (flora/fauna) was a disappointment - I had read great reviews about her H is for Hawk book, so I thought this book would be a good intro to her writing,

I guess it was, and it was not anywhere as good as expected.

The essays were more - to me - like diary entries than essays. Just didn't have the gravitas of EB White or James McPhee (who does?).

She writes well, and decidedly knows whats she's talking about - be it ducks or bugs (a favorite of mine - really) - it's interesting but not compelling.

Again, less than I expected.

I'm probably not going to read H is for Hawk.

Hmmm.....

 - Originally reviewed: 06/27/2021, 9:03 pm

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is a book about love - and it is NOT a love story.

About how love changes, how it may or may not fade (and sometimes return).

It's a story of how love ages - lustful love, trusting love, unrequited love - to be what it is now.

Started great; slowed a little in the final two-thirds of the novel, but the last section redeemed the power of the first sections.

Garcia Marquez - here - does not write literature - he is telling you stories as you read. A neat trick that works well.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/27/2020, 5:15 pm

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson

Fascinating examination of White/Black (poor) relations in the US.

It's not systemic racism; it's a Caste system.

Full review here.

 - Originally reviewed: 11/02/2020, 3:57 pm

Money
Jacob Goldstein

A quick, well-paced look at the history of money and banking systems over the history of money.

Goldstein's main premise - which he lays out well - is that money is fiction. Gold standard, IOUs or what have you: Money is what you - and others - trust. How is a bill money? Because the buyer and seller both believe it is worth (whatver that is...).

Full of fun facts and written in an accessible, light-handed manner, it's a good book to make you think - just for a minute- what money was, is, and what it might become.

Fun read.

 - Originally reviewed: 11/01/2020, 1:00 pm

The Book of Ruth
Jane Hamilton

I'm not quite sure how to describe this book: Mostly about the relationship of a daughter and her mother in a small rural town, and a cast of supporting characters.

Told from the point of view of the daughter, Ruth, whose name is never even mentioned until the last handful of pages of the book, at the tail end of the horrible, beautiful 25 final pages.

It's a book about choices - and the consequences of these choices. It's a very spiritual book, but not church spirituality (though that's presented, as well). It's about building your own version of faith, for both on earth and for whatever may lie beyond. A faith for yourself and those who you interact with.

Powerfully written, this first novel by Hamilton proves to me that her A Map of the World (a personal favorite) was no fluke.

Hint: The beginning of the book is a little confusing - a lot of names are tossed out; you don't know what is what. When you finish the book, read at least the first 2-3 pages again. Perfect foreshadowing but, on first pass, seems oddly disjointed. Hamilton sure knows how to frame a novel.

 - Originally reviewed: 06/19/2020, 4:16 pm

The Greatest Story Ever Told...So Far
Lawrence M. Krauss

A popular-science book on physics that traces how man - from Plato to the Large Hadron Collider - has attempted to explain not so much the "why" but the "how" our world exists.

Written at times over my head (fervions [half spin] vs. bosons [integer spin], gauge theory...) the author still managed to show how our understanding of the universe, very large and very small, has changed.

Part of this is due to better tools, years of some of the best minds tackling these issues, and much of what Newton described as "by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

Published in 2017, it manages to get in some of the most exciting physics in centuries: Experimental detection of gravitational waves, and the detection of the long-sought Higgs particle (and all that this discovery has entailed).

Well written; at a higher degree of difficulty than other pop-sci books I've read, but accessible.

Krauss seems to have crossed paths with some of the biggest names in 20th century physics, and some of his casual asides are both entertaining and help make these big, calculus-spewing character seem more human (not just brainiacs).

 - Originally reviewed: 02/02/2020, 1:14 pm

One Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley

King Lear in Iowa farm country during the Carter Administration.

Begins well, then stalls a bit in the middle, and then the last 75 or so pages upends everything.

Pulitzer Prize winner, and well deserved. Excellent writing and pacing. I did NOT expect the ending (SPOILER: No explosions etc., just...quiet).

It took me awhile to finish it, but worth the wait. Quite the finish!

 - Originally reviewed: 11/02/2019, 7:56 pm

What Truth Sounds Like
Michael Eric Tyson

Subtitled Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and our unfinished conversation about race in America - this spells out what the book is about.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s made everything equal, right? Racism is gone. Right?

Nope.

This book discusses how racism is still here - the book is never boring, but it needs an editor: It's all over the place (but nice places!).

I would not recommend this book simply because the book is so unfocused, while I love what he wrote about A or B.

And - when the writing is tight - he writes well, and speaks what are probably Truths (uppercase T on purpose).

 - Originally reviewed: 09/07/2019, 8:30 pm

A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway

I first read this book the summer before college - when I devoured most of Hemingway - and it made an impression on me.

I found a copy of the book recently, and I re-read.

It's a quite simple book: Hemingway writing about living in Paris in the 1920s with his first wife and the struggles associated with approaching the craft of an honest, serious writer (The Sun Also Rises was written during this period).

It's also a snapshot of the other exiles in Paris - Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach - and his interaction with them.

The book is very quiet, written almost as a diary (though it was written in the 1950s, 30 years later). It's a love letter to Paris, and an acknowledgement of his love for his first wife (whom he cheated on, as he admits in the book).

And I began re-reading this right before Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris caught on fire in 2019...

 - Originally reviewed: 06/29/2019, 4:13 pm

Our Towns
Jim and Deb Fallows

For more than four years, this husband and wife team crisscrossed the US trying to take the current pulse of America.

Guess what? We - communities - seem to be doing fine, despite the DC gridlock.

Longer review here.

Great read.

 - Originally reviewed: 04/07/2019, 5:11 pm

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an important book.

An epistolary non-fiction book, Coates writes to his son about what it was to grow up as a black person in West Baltimore, MD and beyond.

As a white person of certain privilege (white, male, not poor) it hit hard. It comes in the middle of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) protest movement, and the constant stream of news that is "...if he/she wasn't black..." news.

Coates is way smarter than me; he is also resentful of me (white, Ivy League), but balanced.

This book is - to totally trivialize it - the book equivalent of 12 Years a Slave. A slap in the face of what being black in America is. A reality check.

The movie focused on pre-Civil War norms; this book focuses on the post Civil Rights America, and how that has ... improved, but not at all fixed the life of the average black American.

Sigh.

 - Originally reviewed: 04/17/2018, 8:45 pm

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli

The first five chapters were pretty good, especially the first two (relativity and quantum physics). It's a book for the non-scientist; I get that.

But that last two chapters (1 - heat, explained weirdly; 2 - please love science!) didn't work nor give much understanding of science.

Still - a good overview of some weird shit that is physics...

UPDATE 4/7/2019 - Reread (Romy bought the book) same, and I have no disagreement with what I said before. Starts strong science-wise (good); devolves into philosophy and such (somewhat accurately, but not why we're here...). Still - the first four or five "lessons" are informative and well-written.

 - Originally reviewed: 11/29/2016, 7:58 pm

Lab Girl
By Hope Jahren

This non-fictioon book - released in 2016 - is the memoir of Jahren's life as a woman scientist.

But it's so much more - it's about her upbringing, education, her battles with depression and misogyny.

It's also about plants - written with passion and clarity. You'll never look at a seed the same way again; ditto for trees.

And it's also about her long, platonic relationship with her, well, "work husband," a strange but compelling character called Bill. She writes of him with empathy, affection, and an almost maternal love.

If you like botany, or even if you just like science, give it a spin. Hell, if you just enjoy a well-written book, this is just that. Pick up the book at a store or the library, and if the forward impresses, you'll like the rest.

 - Originally reviewed: 06/22/2016, 5:35 pm

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

I read a snippet of a review on this book on a site that I cannot find the actual review; it sounded interesting.

It was.

First published in 1980, it keeps getting good reviews and re-publishing.

To me, this was a "womans'" book - all the characters are girls/women (small asides for male hobos, principals and sheriffs..). But it's not as simple as that.

The book is about...abandonment, impermanence and identity - all told from a female point of view.

Strong writing throughout; the narrative started strong, then sagged (but writing was strong), but the last 50 or so pages (short novel) made up for the sag. I didn't see the ending coming.

VERY well written; I enjoyed (even though I'm a dude...).

The novel - told first person by a girl/later woman - was almost a dream description.

Maybe it was?

I don't think I'm doing this book justice - it was uneven but very well written. It told not just a story, but many stories. Some of which I'm still digesting (the end was the most interesting part, to me).

 - Originally reviewed: 06/02/2016, 8:14 pm

The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta

Imagine The Rapture - the ascension into heaven of all true believers - actually happened (without the end of the world). Or a Rapture-like event, when millions just disappear.

What would do to those left behind? How would they cope? Especially when many of the departed were non-Christians, or truly evil persons. And many of those left behind (the leftovers) consider themselves true, god-fearing Christians. What does that do to individuals, families, communities?

That's the clever premise of Perrotta's 2011 book. Great premise, and he keeps his focus on just one community - mainly just one family.

But the book - clocking in at 350 pages - should really have been a novella. Some good issues examined, but too much filler, too much of the same over and over again.

And the ending of the book is just bizarre.

Fun "what if?" but Perrotta just doesn't pull it off.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/24/2013, 3:57 pm

What the Dog Saw
Malcolm Gladwell

A collection of essays from The New Yorker magazine.

Awesome.

Read my full review here: What the Dog Saw.

Bottom line: Essays in the vein of the best of them, intelligent and makes ya think. Good.

 - Originally reviewed: 03/23/2012, 8:57 pm

The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold

A poignant, inventive and macabre tale told from the point of view of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl.

The book shows her watching the characters in her former life on earth cope with her loss; she looks down - and attempts to sometimes contact those on earth - from her perch in in-between: Not Full Heaven, but far removed from earth.

Made into a movie directed by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), the book is far better than the movie, and I liked the movie.

A fuller review of the book on my blog.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/27/2012, 9:29 am

Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell

Subtitled "The Story of Success," Gladwell takes the reader through a number of institutions/individuals and points out how those did or didn't succeed has very little to do with what is traditionally viewed as the recipe for success.

Fuller review on my blog.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/12/2012, 4:02 pm

The Seekers
Daniel J. Boorstin

Very good - Boorstin is brilliant - but not as good as his two earlier books in this unofficial trilogy: The Discoverers and The Creators.

Read my full review here on my blog.

 - Originally reviewed: 01/05/2012, 1:21 pm

Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant
Paul Clemens

This story - about the closing/taking apart of a large Detroit stamping press had such potential.

It could have looked - more deeply - at the people affected; it could have been a metaphor for the demise of industrial America; it could have woven the tale of, to some extent, the decline/end of unions and middle class existence.

Instead, is was just the story of the tearing apart of presses, told in a very non-linear fashion, all the while layers on top of a somewhat chronological progression.

Some good insights, but, dude, get an editor!

To be fair, this book would probably have meant more if I was from the Detroit area or was from a manufacturing background.

Still, I read the intro a couple of months ago and was intrigued: Very disappointing.

 - Originally reviewed: 06/16/2011, 5:16 pm

Just Kids
Patti Smith

Basically, an autobiographical account of Smith's time with Robert Mapplethorpe. They were lovers in the 1960s. In New York City.

But it's a book, primarily, about art - and the love of art shared by both Smith and Mapplethorpe.

This book won the National Book Award for non-fiction; I don't know what it was up against, but it's not that good a book. It's not what one expects for a prize-winning non-fiction book: No scholarship, let's say. Smith is a poet, and sometimes turns a good phrase.

Yet it speaks volumes to me.

Art and the pursuit of same.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/28/2010, 10:57 pm

A Man Without a Country
Kurt Vonnegut

A loose collection of writings (many previously published) that is as close to a memoir as we'll get from Vonnegut.

Light, funny, dark, deep and breezy all at the same time. Vonnegut has been through a lot, and he brings it all to the table here.

If you like Vonnegut, read it!

Never read Vonnegut? Read it (and you'll want to read more...)!

Vonnegut - like Twain - has one of my favorite literary voices. But we're all from the Midwest, so maybe it's a regional thing.

Nah...

Bottom Line: Vonnegut is a self-professed atheist (so no final judgment), but he is also a humanist.

And he can't believe what we're doing to the environment, other countries and so on.

How we're hooked on oil, how we love the Ten Commandments - and want to put them carved in granite in government buildings - but seem to ignore the Sermon on the Mount ("blessed are the peacemakers, for they..." - No one's pushing for an engraving of that on a plaque in the Pentagon). That's Vonnegut.

(Longer review of this book on my blog).

 - Originally reviewed: 06/20/2010, 12:57 am

Control of Nature, The
John McPhee

I purchased this book - in hardcover - around the time it was released (1990), but just now getting around to reading it.

McPhee is one of my favorite essayists, and this book - thus far (I'm not done) - does not disappoint.

The book is a collection of longish essays about how man attempts (in vain...) to control nature. The first essay, for example, describes how the Army Corps of Engineers has attempted/is attempting to control the Mississippi River.

In the aftermath of Katrina, more poignant and frightening than it was at the time of publication, I'd venture to guess.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/17/2007, 11:34 pm

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich's Thoreau-like adventure, with the world of manual, minimum-wage jobs as her Walden.

The basic conclusion of the book is simple: A job and hard work does not translate to a ticket out of poverty.

Update 6/2019 Reread the book; more compelling today than in 2001 (when the book was first published). It's a really scary time for those near the edge (of poverty), reality for those living paycheck to paycheck, and just another New Yorker article for those that don't experience what Ehrenreich encountered.

 - Originally reviewed: 04/04/2004, 5:34 pm

The Writing Life
Annie Dillard

A short (~100 pgs) book about the craft of writing.

Written in Dillard's signature style - introspective, non-linear, metaphysical - it's an interesting take on the life of a writer: Why we do what we do; how it happens; what are the results?

While not as satisifying as her other books (such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), it's still a difficult but rewarding read.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/25/2004, 11:09 am

The DaVinci Code
Dan Brown

Dan Brown's book about murders, codes and Christianity is not great literature, but it is a great read. An excellent beach or weekend read.

While the ending is a little disappointing - but it's really the only way it could end - the facts, theories and conspiracies he weaves within the plot are well done and give one pause. And makes one dig out old art books to re-examine some classic paintings. Mind candy, very nicely done.

 - Originally reviewed: 02/17/2004, 12:02 pm

Plainsong
Kent Haruf

Haruf's book was nominated for a National Book award, but the book - while well done and an interesting read - doesn't do anything special for me. Weaving together the disparate lives of a half-dozen or so inhabitants of a small agrarian Colorado community, the story never meshes enough to make it compelling.

 - Originally reviewed: 01/20/2004, 9:10 am

The Art of Unix Programming
Eric S. Raymond

I'm currently in the midst of reading Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.

Highly recommended.

The book is not a Unix programming book, and it's not a philosphy book.

It's both...and neither.

Good read; Joel Spolsky has an excellent and insightful review of this book, so I won't clog up the Blogsphere with my own idiotic ramblings and ruminations (wait! why should today be different?).

It's an interest book for what it says about Unix history, the art of programming - in general - and the art of programming in Unix, specifically.

As I'm not a seasoned Unix hacker, it was good to read some of the tenents Raymond puts forth (he did not invent them; he's just documenting them).

One of the more interesting ones - to me - was the concept that a routine/function or whatever should succeed silently. This is the opposite of what most users would expect - users want confirmation.

Programmers want silence, lack of clutter - only display when something goes wrong.

Which made me feel a little better (and smarter): I had just written a bunch of PHP functions and my decision was to return FALSE unless there was an error (then an error message will return). In this way, the program just keeps chugging along if all is well without any success echoes.

This is better for the program, but somewhat counter-intuitive: Return FALSE for a SUCCESS?

This book says that's a good thing.

Wow. I got something right.

 - Originally reviewed: 12/28/2003, 2:07 pm