All reviews copyright 1984-2011 Evelyn C. Leeper.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/05/2009]
I own a few books published by AIG. I mention this because I'm hoping to find out they're incredibly valuable, but I suspect they are only marginally more valuable than AIG itself, given that they were distributed in the New Yorker magazine. One is a selection of Aesop's fables, one is Gracian's "Art of Worldly Wisdom", and one is "Well-Versed: Poems for the Road Ahead". All are sixteen pages long and consist of advisory tales, maxims, or poems. The poetry book has such poems as Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Rudyard Kipling's "If". What's great is the blurb on the back: "In life, there is no substitute for experience. The same goes for your money. 85 years of helping families and businesses worldwide means you can rely on the AIG companies. Over 50 million customers know that for long-term financial solutions, the AIG companies can help steer you and your family in the right direction." Right. It doesn't make you eager to trust their choice of literary advice either.
DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS by Edward Abbey:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/23/2008]
We recently visited Arches National Park in Utah. Edward Abbey is the author of many novels and non-fiction books set in and about the West. At one of the book sales a couple of months before the trip, I picked up his book DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS (ISBN-13 978-0-671-69588-0, ISBN-10 0-671-69588-6), a collection of essays about his time as a Park ranger in Arches National Park. If this is true, I think the Park ought to have gone after him for dereliction of duty, since he seems to have spent a lot of time helping a near-by rancher herd cattle, rafting down the Colorado, and doing a lot of other things having nothing to do with the National Park Service. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that although he calls it *a* season, the book actually covers a couple of years or more.
Anyway, the most pertinent chapter would be "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks". In this chapter, Abbey complains that the National Parks are effectively being destroyed in the attempt to make them more "accessible". Now, Abbey worked in Arches in the 1950s, and wrote the book in 1967, so by "accessible" he does not means wheelchair ramps and such, but paved roads and plumbing.
Abbey's suggestion was to close the Parks to all motor vehicle traffic (except for shuttle buses and other vehicles owned and operated by the National Park Service). All visitors would have to leave their cars outside the entrance. They would be issued a bicycle (or horse) for use inside the park. Their tents, bedrolls, etc., would be transported by shuttle bus to the campgrounds. (He even accepts that those "too elderly or too sickly to mount a bicycle" might be allowed to ride the shuttle buses.)
Something like this has been done in the bigger Parks (e.g., Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon). Cars are allowed in the Park, but they are barred from the most scenic parts, and people wanting to see those parts must walk, bicycle--or ride shuttle buses. This is not quite what Abbey suggested--he did not want shuttle buses running constantly up and down the roads every seven minutes. But it is vastly better than bumper-to-bumper cars and RVs.
Abbey then suggested no new roads be built in National Parks. This follows fairly directly from the first suggestion--if cars are not coming, why build roads? And rangers should be spending more time outside, guiding people on hikes, helping them with camping (in tents, since no vehicles are allowed in the Parks), and so on. All this--ranger service, bicycles, horses--should be free to the public. Abbey claims that by not building new roads or spending money to maintain the old ones--let them revert to unpaved roads again if necessary, but lack of traffic will probably lower the maintenance cost a lot--the Parks would have more than enough money to finance his proposals.
The major obstacle that he sees to this is that "Industrial Tourism"--motels, restaurants, tour companies, road-building contractors, etc.--are going to fight this tooth and nail. Well, maybe, although as I said, Abbey's suggestions have been implemented somewhat.
The real problem (as I see it) is that there is a feedback loop. Abbey bemoans the changes in Arches that the paved road brought. Tourists have to camp in the campgrounds rather than wherever they want, and must bring charcoal or their own wood for fires-- there is not enough dead wood around for the numbers of campers that now arrive. But these changes were made because of the numbers of tourists. Are there lots of tourists because the paved road was put in, or was the paved road put in because there were so many tourists that an unpaved road could not support that many people? In the 1950s, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get even as close as the entrance of Arches. Now one can fly to Salt Lake City or Denver, rent a car (or even 4-wheel-drive vehicle) and be there in a day or two. (Admittedly, this may change with global warming and/or the increase in gas prices.) So if thousands of people show up at the entrance, the question is, what can the Park do? One option is to limit the number of people who can enter the Park on a given day. This, understandably, they are reluctant to do. The other is to figure out how to support this many people. The easiest way has been to build better roads, create campgrounds, open a Visitors Center to provide an orientation, and so on. Oh, and the campgrounds need plumbing, because the sort of backcountry camping where one digs a latrine fails spectacularly long before one reaches the numbers of tourists the Parks are currently getting. However, at some point even those changes doesn't work, and the Parks have switched to shuttle buses in the more congested areas.
A reasonable approach for the future is to consider before building a road whether this road is going to be a real solution or something that will be equally congested in ten years. If the latter, put in a dirt road for non-motorized traffic (and possibly Park buses) rather than a much more expensive paved road.
On the other hand, Abbey does make a logical error in his argument. He describes the people who visit the bottom of the Grand Canyon and other remote places in the mountains, or raft down rivers, as being "not consist[ing] solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children." Yes, and Theodore Roosevelt was a weakling before he headed west. The point is that just because *some* old folks can climb Mt. Whitney, and some fat folks can raft down the Colorado, and some children can horse-back through the Smokies, does not mean that most, or even many, can. The existence of a few professional basketball players under six feet tall does not mean that the profession is as open to shorter people as it is to tall ones.
The irony is that he has an entire chapter about "The Dead Man at Grandview Point". In it, he describes the search for him: "Learning from the relative--a nephew--that the missing man is about sixty years old, an amateur photographer who liked to walk, and had never been in the Southwest before, we assume first of all that the object of the search is dead...." So much for Abbey's argument that anyone can explore the wilds of America on their own.
Abbey makes other logical errors. He says, for example, "To refute the solipsist or metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head; if he ducks he's a liar." This sounds reasonable, but in fact this does not refute the solipsist at all, because if the solipsist is right, he is merely a figment of *your* imagination, and there is no one to refute. All you have proved is that if solipsism is correct, you can create an imaginary person that does not believe in it. And similarly for metaphysical idealists, because though they believe that the external world exists, they also believe that it is still filtered through their own senses and mind.
Well, that last part had little to do with Arches (unless you are a solipsist, in which case, you have imagined the entire Park). The book itself had an interesting journey, having been bought originally in the bookshop at Capital Reef National Park, traveled to New Jersey, traveled *back* to Utah, and then back to New Jersey.
To order Desert Solitaire from amazon.com, click here.
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/11/2008]
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (in the anthology LOGORRHEA) was apparently written as part of a project to write one story for each National Spelling Bee winning word. A cambist is an expert in foreign exchange, and the cambist in this story is asked to set a monetary value on some peculiar "currency" indeed, starting with ornate bills from the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat and getting progressively stranger. It seems to be a tale pulled from a classic fairy tale, but it is of course entirely new.
To order Logorrhea from amazon.com, click here.
THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/31/2006]
Our general discussion group chose THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe (ISBN 0-385-47454-7) for this month's discussion. I had intended reading this ever since college--almost forty years ago. (Well, some books stay on the queue longer than others.) I can remember seeing it in the college bookstore in 1968 and thinking that here was something unlike what we had been reading in school or seeing in the library. (The library I frequented was an Air Force base library that emphasized more bestsellers and genre-- science fiction, mysteries, and so on--than literary fiction.) Nowadays, of course, with the emphasis on diversity and book superstores dotting the country, finding literary novels by African authors is not a big surprise. (In fact, one reason the group chose it was that it was a book on the high school summer reading list, so the library had a lot of copies of it.)
So after forty years, what about the book? Frankly, I do not know what the fuss is about. The main character is described by critics as being made sympathetic, but I did not find him so. Critics do seem to agree that Achebe's portrayal of Ibo tribal society is unsentimental, but I would go further and say that I found it hard to work up a lot of distress that someone was trying to end such traditional practices as killing twins at birth, or beating one's wives. [How appropriate. See my editorial this issue. -mrl] And the writing is very spare (someone compared him to Hemingway), which is a very tricky style to carry off.
To order Things Fall Apart from amazon.com, click here.
THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH by Amir D. Aczel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/25/2003]
And on a more technical note, Amir D. Aczel's THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH tries to tie together infinity, transfinite numbers, and the Kabbalah. He is only moderately successful, even if there were serious religious concerns with the whole notion of infinity. But his description of the lives of the various mathematicians who worked on this question is less dry than usual, and you get to find out who didn't get along with whom, and yet another explanation of why there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. (Actually, he presents two possible explanations.) And in addition, Aczel talks about Georg Cantor's mental aberrations, including that he would leave his work on transfinite numbers for long periods of time in order to try to convince people that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. Synchronicity! [-ecl]
To order The Mystery of the Aleph from amazon.com, click here.
THE RIDDLE OF THE COMPASS: THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Amir D. Aczel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/29/2011]
THE RIDDLE OF THE COMPASS: THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Amir D. Aczel (ISBN 978-0-15-600753-3) is a bit lighter than his earlier books (FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM, THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH, PROBABILITY I, and GOD'S EQUATION). Aczel starts in Amalfi, home of Flavio Gioia, cited by the Amalfis as the inventor of the compass. But since the compass seems to have been invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier, and since Flavio Gioia seems not even to have existed, the amount of time Aczel spends on this seems excessive. He also talks about Marco Polo, but barely mentions the current controversy about whether Polo actually made the trip himself. Given that I think there is considerable support for the view that Marco Polo got most of his information about Asia from other travelers and did very little traveling himself, this is odd. There is also a lot about navigation before the compass in this book and surprisingly little about the compass itself.
To order The Riddle of the Compass from amazon.com, click here.
THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/20/2009]
THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (ISBN-13 978-0-345-41891-3, ISBN-10 0-345-41891-3) was the choice for the joint meeting of the general book discussion group and the science fiction book discussion group this month. (The science fiction book discussion group normally meets the fourth Thursday of each month, a problem in November.) This time through I noted all the cultural and literary references. For example, Chapter 10 ends with Arthur Dent saying, "Ford! There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for 'Hamlet' they've worked out." Or in Chapter 5: "He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick."
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2010]
The book-and-movie science fiction group chose THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (ISBN 978-1-400-05292-9) for this month, and the film (rather than the radio play, the record, or the television series) for the dramatization part.
Even though the work is very familiar, there are still new comments to be made. "They still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea"--nowadays I think digital watches are in decline, as more and more people are using their cell phones as their timepiece. "Small green pieces of paper" made no sense in a British context--it was only American money that fit that description and even American money seems to be moving away from it. (The movie also seems to be Americanized, with American billions, and "zee" rather than "zed").
[As Keith Lynch pointed out in the 03/19/10 issue of the MT VOID American billions have been the same as British billions since 1974. That is, in both countries a billion is 10^9. That is called the "short" scale. Prior to 1974 as in Britain and in many other countries all along a billion was/is 10^12. That convention is called the "long" scale. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales. -mrl]
The actual "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" seems to be an early example of an ebook in fiction.
Was the eponymous character in the film FORD FAIRLANE inspired by Ford Prefect?
One of Adams's distinctive stylistic touches is the use of positive adverbs (e.g., totally, exactly) paired with negative verbs or prepositions (e.g. failed): "more or less exactly failed to please the eye" or "almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea".
[This is distinct from litotes, which is exressing a positive by the use of a double negative of sorts, e.g., "not a bad dinner."
Adams wrote about Prosser being a direct male-line descendent of Genghis Khan well before a geneticist discovered the Genghis Khan Effect, which is that there are approximately 15,000,000 direct descendents of Genghis Khan alive today (though not all in the direct-male line). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Descent for details.)
Adams claims that in space you asphyxiate and taking a lungful of air before being ejected helps. Actually, that's backwards-- expelling the air from your lungs is what you want to do.
And I found Alan Rickman's voice far too familiar to use for Marvin; I kept thinking of Rickman as walking around in the Marvin suit.
To order The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from amazon.com, click here.
WHY WE READ WHAT WE READ: A DELIGHTFULLY OPINIONATED JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY BESTSELLERS by Lisa Adams and John Heath:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/14/2007]
WHY WE READ WHAT WE READ: A DELIGHTFULLY OPINIONATED JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY BESTSELLERS by Lisa Adams and John Heath (ISBN-13 978-1-4022-1054-9, ISBN-10 1-4022-1054-X) tries to analyze the bestsellers of the last couple of decades. While bemoaning the lack of depth in most of what made the bestseller lists, Adams and Heath skim over a lot of books, dismissing them with quips and zingers. Yes, it is fun to read, but in the back of my mind is the thought that they are not raising the level of discourse. Adams and Heath do find books of depth on the lists, though not in the numbers they (or we) might wish. And even if books sell, are they read? Adams and Heath claim that 92% of Americans own at least one Bible, yet fewer than half can name the first book of the Bible. (Then again, all they know is that 92% of Americans *say* they own at least one Bible.)
The book is amusing and entertaining, and the authors do pinpoint recurring themes and trends, but whether there is any more depth to it than to many of the books they skewer is a matter of dispute.
To order Why We Read What We Read from amazon.com, click here.
TRAVELLER by Richard Adams:
[From MT VOID, 1991]
At first glance, this sounds like a pretty silly idea: to tell the story of the Civil War from the point of view of General Robert E. Lee's horse. But then, Adams's first book, WATERSHIP DOWN, was rejected by dozens of publishers because it was a "bunny story." When Penguin finally published it, it went on to become their best-seller ever, and was recognized as an adult story told with non-human characters, rather than "just" a children's story. Adams followed this up with SHARDIK, the story of a bear revered by a primitive tribe, and PLAGUE DOGS, a dark tale of animals used in medical research. So Adams has a history of taking unlikely approaches to fiction and making them work.
And it does work. Clayton Cramer said, "I can see it now. 'Hmmm. Today we went to a place with very tasty grass. Spent much of the day walking slowly past thousands of boots, standing on lovely green grass. Had my shoes replaced today. Nice blacksmith -- very gentle on my hooves.'" This is not far off the mark, at least as far as style goes, but it misses the point of the book. Traveller (Lee's horse in real life, by the way; many of the events recounted in TRAVELLER are based on documented events in history) does see things from a horse's viewpoint, but he sees more than just eating grass and getting new shoes.
One of the things that struck me when reading TRAVELLER is that what we have here is a different point of view (in the technical sense) than one usually has. We have seen third person omniscient, and third person non-omniscient, and first person, but what we have here is first person "reader-omniscient". That is, because the story is based on history the reader knows what is coming, and what is really going on, in a fashion not normally encountered. Well, perhaps other historical novels would have this, but the ones I can remember are either third person omniscient or first person, but with the narrator finding out everything of importance in the course of the book. This is not true here. As is mentioned on the dust jacket (so I fell it's not a major spoiler), Traveller never realizes Lee *lost* the war--he thinks Lee *won*! But Adams does this in such a way that the reader finds herself asking whether that is really so unreasonable a conclusion. Certainly many people have asked of World War II whether we really won, or whether the Germans and Japanese won in the end, for many of the same reasons. So do we really understand what is going on in the world better than Traveller? (Adams does help out the reader a bit by interspersing historical summaries every few chapters, so that we can keep track of what is going on in terms *we* can understand.)
Adams does a good job of giving his characters individual personalities. His animals (in other books as well as this one) are not the usual caricatures, but real individuals. His horses act like horses, not like "humans in horse suits," and his rabbits act like rabbits, and so on. He manages the dialects well in TRAVELLER, balancing readability with accuracy of sound. The only quibble might be that his animals can communicate inter-species (he talks to cats and other non-horses), but not with humans.
Some of the techniques in TRAVELLER parallel techniques Adams used in previous novels. For example, there is a prescient horse (Sorrel) in TRAVELLER who seems patterned after a prescient rabbit in WATERSHIP DOWN: both see vague hints of what is to come, but not specific events.
The use of an animal as a narrator also allows Adams to make some strong statements about slavery. Traveller's constant comparison's of his life to that of the slaves ("always saying goodbye") brings home the reality of slavery more than writing it from a human point of view might. And again, Traveller's incomplete understanding of reality leads him to believe that Lee's black valet Perry is the most important man around other than Lee himself, because Perry is so close to Lee.
Traveller sees things from a horse's perspective. This leads him to conclude, for example, that there are fewer guns at some point because there are fewer horses around to pull them, rather than that there are fewer horses around because the guns have been damaged and so the horses aren't needed. When Lee talks to himself, Traveller naturally assumes that Lee is talking to him, and when Lee says, "Lord God, why is this happening?" Traveller naturally assumes that Lord God was a previous horse that Lee had, and Lee is just confused about who he is talking to. And all this talk about "the War" makes Traveller think "the War" is a place with glorious soldiers and fine grass and a big white house. When all is over, his one regret is that they never got to this place called "the War." We laugh at this naivete, but is this so difference from our preoccupation with the glory of war and our tendency to brush over the ugly reality?
Yes, maybe Traveller is just a horse. And maybe he is a little dense. But he's no more dense than we are at times, and maybe seeing things through his eyes can help remove the blinders from our own.
To order Traveller from amazon.com, click here.
CATO by Joseph Addison:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/26/2003]
Somewhere I had read that Joseph Addison's CATO was a favorite of John Adams, and one can see why. While Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR concentrates on the treachery and in-fighting of the conspirators against Caesar, Addison looks at the situation from the point of view of those who genuinely feel that Caesar is becoming a dictator and destroying Roman freedom, but who don't necessarily want to assassinate him. That someone like Adams, concerned about American liberty, would like this play is not surprising. (It's a bit hard to find; I got it in an anthology edited by Richard Quintana titled 18TH CENTURY PLAYS.)
To order 18th Century Plays from amazon.com, click here.
OUTWITTING SQUIRRELS by Bill Adler, Jr.:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/04/2006]
OUTWITTING SQUIRRELS by Bill Adler, Jr., (ISBN 1-55652-302-5) is subtitled "101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels". (The whole book is only 188 pages long, which makes it a bit title-heavy.) In addition to suggestions (most of which he admits do not work very well), Adler provides a lot of information about squirrels and their biology. It's of interest even to people like us who *want* to feed the squirrels.
To order Outwitting Squirrels from amazon.com, click here.
The Oresteia by Aeschylus:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
I was listening to the Oresteia on CD recently, and I noted that one character tells Clytemnestra that "nothing happens except through the will of Zeus"--and then proceeds to criticize her for killing Agamemnon! Wasn't that through the will of Zeus by his own argument? Also, the only reason I can come up with for Electra and Orestes being so bent on vengeance against their mother for taking revenge on their father for his sacrifice of their sister is some sort of patriarchal bias. After all, shouldn't they be angry at him for murdering their sister, and grateful to their mother for exacting revenge?
MIDWINTER NIGHTINGALE by Joan Aiken:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2004]
Much of what I read this week were middle books of alternate history series as part of my responsibilities as a judge for the Sidewise Awards. The main thing I can report is that they do not stand on their own. The first was Joan Aiken's MIDWINTER NIGHTINGALE, the tenth of her young adult "Wolves of Willoughby Chase" series, set in a world in which the Stuarts won the Jacobite Wars and werewolves are real. (I don't think there is a cause-and-effect relationship here. :-) ) It seemed like the sort of book that children who had been reading all the others would like, but I can't say for sure.
To order Midwinter Nightingale from amazon.com, click here.
AS TIMELESS AS INFINITY: THE COMPLETE TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS OF ROD SERLING, VOLUME ONE edited by Tony Albarella:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/28/2005]
Tony Albarella is editing a series of books of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" scripts. The first is titled AS TIMELESS AS INFINITY: THE COMPLETE TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS OF ROD SERLING, VOLUME ONE (Gauntlet Press, ISBN 1-887368-71-X); the next volume is due this February. At $66, this is even more expensive than the Christopher Lee bibliography I reviewed last week. The commentaries here adds some to each episode, but not appreciably more than Marc Scott Zicree's TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION of several years ago (still in print, ISBN 0-553-01416-1). So the main reason for buying this would be for the scripts themselves. Included are the scripts for "The Time Element", "Where Is Everybody?", "Third from the Sun", "The Purple Testament", "The Big, Tall Wish", "Eye of the Beholder", "A Most Unusual Camera" (two versions), "The Mind and the Matter", and "The Dummy". By my count, Serling wrote 78 scripts, so we're talking about at least eight volumes. What I don't understand is why Albarella is not doing the stories sequentially--the first volume selects from the first two seasons, but seemingly at random. This is the same objection that people had to the initial release of the shows on DVD--they were assembled in sets at random, rather than "Season 1", "Season 2", and so on. (They have since been re-issued by season.)
To order As Timeless As Infinity from amazon.com, click here.
TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE by Mitch Albom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
Mitch Albom's TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE is the story of the author's visits with his old college professor, who is dying of ALS. I suspect it was chosen for high school students because it does deal with old age, and serious illness, and death. The advice his professor gives is good, but hardly new, and the work is too overly sentimental for me.
To order Tuesdays with Morrie from amazon.com, click here.
BURY MY HEART AT W. H. SMITH'S
by Brian Aldiss:
THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE
by Brian Aldiss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/25/2003]
Brian Aldiss has written a couple of autobiographies. One was BURY MY HEART AT W. H. SMITH'S. Another, dealing more (from what I know of BURY) with his earlier years, was THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE. I found the latter in a used bookstore and tried it, but it somehow failed to grab me the way other literary autobiographies have. (It's possible a greater familiarity with all of Aldiss's work might have made a difference.)
To order Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Twinkling of an Eye from amazon.com, click here.
GREYBEARD by Brian Aldiss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/02/2007]
Spurred by comments from various readers about books similar to CHILDREN OF MEN, I read a novel that has been compared to CHILDREN OF MEN, GREYBEARD by Brian Aldiss (ISBN-10 0-755-10063-8, ISBN-13 978-0--75510063-7). The reason for sterility here is a series of atomic tests in the atmosphere that interfere with Earth's shielding from damaging solar radiation. (At least here it seems to be an equal opportunity disaster--in both D. F. Jones's IMPLOSION and the film CHILDREN OF MEN, it appears to be only the women who are affected. I am told that in P. D. James's original novel CHILDREN OF MEN it is the men that are sterile.) This is even more "English" than D. F. Jones's IMPLOSION, with characters fairly stoically slogging along in a world without any children for decades. The story gradually unfolds (backwards, with flashbacks to more recent events first and the explanation of what originally happened last), and Aldiss manages to include all sorts of settings: England, United States, market town, college town, rural village, etc. The ending, which seems a bit unlikely, is the novel's only weak point.
To order Greybeard from amazon.com, click here.
THE ADVENTURES OF MENAHEM-MENDL by Sholem Aleichem:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2011]
Having just watched a documentary on Sholem Aleichem, and a Russian silent film, JEWISH LUCK, which was based on one of his Menahem- Mendl stories, I decided I should read THE ADVENTURES OF MENAHEM- MENDL by Sholom Aleichem (translated by Tamara Kahana) (no ISBN). Menahem-Mendl is the ultimate schlemiel--everything he puts his hand to turns to lead. He tries to speculate in currency, and loses everything. He dabbles in stocks, and loses everything. And so on. All of these are very topical--he writes long explanations of buying stocks on margin to his wife, to whom it makes no sense, and frankly, it is not clear it makes sense to us either. And his description of speculation on houses sounds distressingly familiar: "You probably imagine that in Yehupetz you buy a place to live in, the way you do in Kasrilevka. Well, you're mistaken. When you buy a house here in Yehupetz, you immediately carry it over to a bank and get money for it; then you mortgage it and again get some money; then you rent the apartments and get some more money. In short, you buy a house without spending a single penny, and you become a houseowner painlessly." Or as Qoheleth says, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
To order The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl from amazon.com, click here.
TIME AFTER TIME by Karl Alexander:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/16/2007]
I recently watched the film TIME AFTER TIME and have a couple of comments. First, the "vaporizing equalizer" on the time machine is similar to the planetary ignition switch in FORBIDDEN PLANET-- both of them seem like amazingly bad designs. (In Karl Alexander's book TIME AFTER TIME, the plot purpose served by the "vaporizing equalizer" is handled in a more realistic manner.) Also, it is often said that some people are too dumb to live, and I would say that anyone who knows they are in danger and has to leave in an hour and still takes Valium and brandy together may fall into this category.
THE MEZUZAH IN THE MADONNA'S FOOT by Trudi Alexy:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/21/2004]
Trudi Alexy's THE MEZUZAH IN THE MADONNA'S FOOT: A WOMAN DISCOVERS HER SPIRITUAL HERITAGE (ISBN 0-06-060340-2) began as an examination of the phenomenon of Fascist Spain as a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis, among them Alexy's parents. It covers this, of course, with stories both of the Jews and of the people who helped to save them, but it also expanded to include the stories of Marranos in Spain and the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest as well. This was a wise decision, I think, because the original idea was not all that different from many other books. It's true that Alexy does attempt to explain why a country that expelled its Jews five centuries earlier, and persecuted any suspected Jews for another three hundred years, and was friendly with Nazi Germany, would make such an effort to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Her conclusion--that because the Spanish had no experience with Jews for so long that they had no basis for any anti-Semitic feeling-- is intriguing but not entirely convincing or encouraging. But her experiences dealing with Marranos and Crypto-Jews, and their reactions to her research, are far more interesting from a psychological point of view.
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MY AFRICAN MILLIONAIRE by Grant Allen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/09/2010]
My copy of AN AFRICAN MILLIONAIRE by Grant Allen (ISBN-13 978-1-6164-6014-3) is one of those books for which Dover used to be known: a facsimile edition of an older mystery long out of print. In this case, the original publication was in 1897, and the Dover price in 1980 was $4.50. (Now it costs $12.95 from Coachwhip Publications; Dover no longer publishes it.)
This is a collection of twelve stories, which really form a continuous story (so I guess this might be considered a fix-up novel, though this was no fixing up involved). The stories are narrated by Seymour Wentworth, secretary to Sir Charles Vandrift. Vandrift is the title character, and he is the target of confidence trickster Colonel Cuthbert Clay, which appears in the stories under different names and with different disguises. After a while, the stories become predictable and the reader can figure out what is going on well before Vandrift--in fact, soon enough that the reader begins to think that for a millionaire, Vandrift is pretty dense.
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SIDE EFFECTS by Woody Allen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/21/2008]
SIDE EFFECTS by Woody Allen (ISBN-13 978-0-345-34335-2, ISBN-10 0-345-34335-2) was this month's discussion group pick. At first it seemed like a tough book to review, or discuss, because the first few pieces were primarily one-liners strung together. They were supposedly "stories", but had very little plot or characterization. In his movies, Allen manages to have a plot, because he does not have the other actors delivering the jokes-- he saves those for himself. So these were like taking a movie and removing everyone except Allen from them. Even one short story at a time could be too much of a good thing.
But then some of the later pieces were stories, and fairly interesting ones, though often for strange reasons. For example, "The Kugelmass Episode" could very well have been the inspiration for Jasper Fforde's THE EYRE AFFAIR: in both, characters use a machine to propel themselves into the world of a classic novel. (It was a jolt, however, to realize that when Emma Bovary says to Kugelmass, "Tell me again about O. J. Simpson," she means as a football player and actor--the book was published in 1979.) "The Diet" is a parody of Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL. So while some pieces are fairly non-descript, there is also some content here.
To order Side Effects from amazon.com, click here.
THREE ONE-ACT PLAYS by Woody Allen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/11/2005]
Woody Allen's THREE ONE-ACT PLAYS (ISBN 0-812-97244-9) was published only recently (2004) but the plays seemed older. "Riverside Drive", for example, seemed to be a work that he later expanded into one of his movies. (I won't say which one, though I suspect you'll recognize it about a third of the way through.) Well, checking on it, I discovered that "Riverside Drive" was apparently written *after* the movie, and could be considered a condensation of it--not the usual direction a writer takes. "Old Saybrook" is an Escher-esque sort of work that examines whether life reflects art, or art reflects life, or maybe neither. And rounding out the set is "Central Park West".
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THE KING'S ENGLISH by Kingsley Amis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/26/2007]
THE KING'S ENGLISH by Kingsley Amis (ISBN-13 978-0-312-20657-4, ISBN-10 0-312-20657-7) is a follow-on book to FOWLER'S MODERN USAGE (and who knows what either of them would have had to say about the word "follow-on"?). Two samples:
"-athon" and "-thon": "... Competitive events demanding comparable endurance were quickly set up, like the so-called 'dance marathon' in the USA. This institution may have been in doubtful taste but at least its name and nature were clear enough. Not as much could be said for what followed, when the second half of the word 'marathon' was taken as a sort of verbal building-block when devising names fir less edifying activities ... [telethon, sale-a-thon, walkathon-talkathon]. Not every Americanism deserves to have its credentials carefully examined. Some ought to be shot on sight."
"Twice two": "Whether you should say twice two *is* four or *are* four was the sort of 'argument' people interested in words were sometimes asked to 'settle'. All right, then: either is correct, and the two have been so for a half dozen centuries. The 'was' and 'were' in the first sentence are in the past tense because the problem involves some acquaintance with multiplication. Next question."
I cannot say I always agree with Amis, but he does make many good points, and also realizes that languages evolve and that there are perfectly good American usages which do not pass muster in Britain (though obviously not all of them, as evidenced by the passage above!). Even if you do not agree with his conclusions, his style is full of wit and intelligence, and well worth reading.
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LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/17/2006]
Last week, I reviewed LEAVE ME ALONE, I'M READING by Maureen Corrigan. In that book, Corrigan recommended LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis (ISBN 0-140-18630-1) as the funniest book about academia she had read. And the blurb on the edition in the library says, "No one has been so funny in this vein since Evelyn Waugh was at his best." [Arthur Mizener] Well, add this to the list of books that I tried, but could not see the point in finishing.
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THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING by Steve Amsterdam:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/18/2011]
By contrast, THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING by Steve Amsterdam (ISBN 978-0-307-37850-7) is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 2010. The apocalypse here is less well-defined than in EARTH ABIDES; at first it appears to be a Y2K breakdown (making this an alternate history, I suppose), but then there seem to be climate disasters (e.g., areas of never-ending rain), virulent epidemics, killer bugs from Brazil, and a host of other problems. Hence, I suppose, the title: THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING--not just one thing, but many. And it is told as a series of vignettes/short stories, each one with a different explanation for the problems that are besetting our protagonist in that story. In classic post-apocalyptic fiction, the reason for the break-down of society is given, and usually some lesson is supposed to be learned from it. Amsterdam has a much more nihilistic approach: *something" is bound to get us, and there's nothing we can do about it, and everything will be a meaningless struggle. Amsterdam may be more accurate, but it does not make for a better story.
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