Iron and Silk

#688
Title: Iron and Silk
Author: Mark Salzman
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1986/1987
224 pages

This is an easy to read account of Salzman's two years teaching in China. It was the 1980s, so his perspective on China (and the Chinese perspective on him) is different from that of Peter Hessler's in River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze in the next decade.

Salzman's encounters are charming and depict rural China very positively. One wonders when he found time to teach and prep his lessons, to say nothing of grading, between his various martial arts trainings, calligraphy lessons, and bouts of travel with fishing families. In all, a comparatively benign introduction to living and working in another country.

Abongui My People Cote D'Ivoire My Country America My Home: The Ethno-history of a Small African Kingdom

#687

Title: Abongui My People Cote D'Ivoire My Country America My Home: The Ethno-history of a Small African Kingdom
Author: Kouassi Pascal Soman
Publisher: iUniverse
Year: 2003
218 pages

Ivory Coast.

Soman chronicles his history from village boy to World Bank employee, using his own opportunities and obstacles to highlight some of the development issues faced by his community. More than many other memoirists, he draws attention to the role cultural values may play in community development, with the added credibility of his experience on both sides of the experience.

The initial chapters are more formal and somewhat stilted. My guess is that they were written last (and the number of word choice errors and typos supports this supposition). Bear with it until he gets to his own story, which is engaging and flows more naturally.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

#686

Title: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight 
Author: Alexandra Fuller
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2003
315 pages
 Audiobook.

Besides being an interesting memoir, it's a good example of how history can be conveyed and reflected upon through events and exposition by characters. Here, Fuller uses her mother's drunken soliloquies to hold the history of the end of colonial Africa.

Earlier sections were more compelling than those in the latter third of the book.

Nox

#685

Title: Nox
Author: Anne Carson
Publisher: New Directions
Year: 2010
192 pages

I'm not sure I'd classify this as poetry. It's really a collage/pastiche/construction. I found it absorbing and meaningful, but even though its linguistic/structural core is a poem by Catullus, mourning his brother's death (hence, Carson's brother's death), I found it poetic but not a poem. Read with Carol Maso's The Art Lover to compare two ways to constellate language and images as a memorial.

Place of Refuge: A History of the Jews in Cyprus

#684

Title: Place of Refuge: A History of the Jews in Cyprus
Author: Stavros Panteli
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
Year: 2003
192 pages

Cyprus.

If read in conjunction with other sources, a reasonably good introduction to the history of Jews on Cyprus. On the positive side, this was not a topic I knew much about from ancient history up to the halutzim. On the other hand, the author assumes that referencing some events without explaining them is sufficient, and compounds this problem by stating what happened but often not suggesting why it happened. There is some repetitive material that is verbatim or nearly so, particularly in the biographical appendix. 

I Curse the River of Time

#683

Title: I Curse the River of Time
Author: Per Petterson
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Year: 2008/2010
233 pages

Read as hardback/audiobook.

Not at all happy, and no resolution, but quite a poignant portrait of a young Norwegian man who is too wrapped up in shame and anxiety to connect with others. 

Down and Out in Paris and London

#682

Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Harvest
Year: 1933/1972
213 pages

Audiobook.

Orwell's first publication, one in which he has yet to find his voice. Since this is exaggerated/fake autobiography, the anti-Semitism, presumably Orwell's though articulated by other characters, is wearisome. The argument that the sentiments in this book aren't anti-Semitic because Orwell later wrote an essay about anti-Semitism is not convincing.

Here is Orwell as world-wise young punk, telling older people about the world he knows about but they don't. It's intended, I think, as expose, but doesn't manage to pull this off. Part of the problem is that though it has a moral theme, the action is picaresque, and since parts are fictionalized, it's reasonable for the reader to ask what the point was and why, if fictionalized, the ;point couldn't have been made through more compellingly structured action.

Read with anything by Anthony Bourdain to compare the life of a plongeur to  that of contemporary urban restaurant workers.

A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire #4)

#681

Title: A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire #4)
Author: George R. R. Martin
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2005/2011
1060 pages

Mistaken identities, misperceptions, and incorrect assumptions drawn from partial facts form the thematic core of this volume. There is some action, and some characters arrive at something like a destination. There is a sense of Martin shuffling his pieces into place. Violence, sex, and violent sex seem more frequent and offer less insight into characters. There is much here to invoke the classic exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Large Man with Dead Body: Who's that then?
The Dead Collector: I dunno, must be a king.
Large Man with Dead Body: Why?
The Dead Collector: He hasn't got shit all over him.

A Taste of Guam

#680

Title: A Taste of Guam
Author: Paula A. Lujan Quinene
Publisher: Infinity Publishing.com
Year: 2006
122 pages

Guam.

A cookbook of Chamorro and other Guamanian recipes, plus a handful of the author's favorites. Some look distinctly appealing, some include too many canned items for me to be very enthusiastic, and some are inexplicable because one or more ingredients are not adequately identified. The volume would benefit from photos or even line drawings of some cooking techniques that are more local than universal.

As with many self-published books, I wish the author had had this proofread better.

For an interesting look at the cultural context, see Oliver Sacks's The Island of the Colorblind. 


The author's blog, with helpful photos, is here: http://www.paulaq.com/atasteofguam.html

How to Cure a Fanatic

#679
Title: How to Cure a Fanatic
Author: Amos Oz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2002/2010
104 pages

Two essays on fanaticism, defined more or less as holding a rigid point of view. Though I don't agree with all of Oz's points, his perspective is interesting and his position at times refreshingly moderate.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

#678
Title: I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
Author: Douglas Edwards
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year: 2011
432 pages
Audiobook

Fine so far as it goes. Edwards chronicles (often thematically rather than chronologically) his adventures as an early employee in Google's start-up phase. I found it interesting to read about Google, and interesting for a while to read about Edwards's interactions with company personnel and culture. However, the latter topic can be summed up more often than not as, "I suggested something, it was/wasn't adopted, I turned out to be wrong." The moral of the story might be "Grit your teeth, don't see your family for years, go on mandated recreational trips with bosses who act like adolescents, and hang on until the IPO, when you can cash out."

Speak (10th Anniversary Edition)

#677
Title: Speak (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Speak (Penguin)
Year: 1999/2009
240 pages

This was okay for its genre, and certainly better than some of its ilk. The initiating event, and thus the outcome, was obvious early on, so my reading interest was less a matter of what would happen and more one of how Hulse would get there. I suppose I would have liked the protagonist to have more insight about how she also engages in stereotyping and writing people off; while she resolved the plot by addressing the problem, but this could have been an opportunity for more maturational self-reflection as well.

I was entertained by the protagonist's railing against symbolism, and the author's comments in this edition about not liking what she had to read in English class, when the symbolism here is troweled on like goth makeup. Perhaps this is one of the insights I'd have liked Melinda to experience. Ah, well. At least the attractive boy is a nerd, and at least there are no teen vampires. 

You Better Not Cry: Stories

#676
Title: You Better Not Cry: Stories
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2009
222 pages

Interesting to read as a companion to David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice. Where Sedaris's Christmas tales are absurd but restrained, Burroughs provides the more warped and damaged end of the spectrum (in the last piece, the warpage is literal). Some reviewers don't like Burroughs's sudden transition from weird child to problematic drunk, but I though it captured perfectly the nature of blackouts and traumatic memory suppression. Read Sedaris first, and imagine Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank creeping around the edges of both. 

Holidays on Ice

#675
Title: Holidays on Ice
Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Year: 1997/2008
172 pages

Not his most even collection, but generally entertaining. Sedaris does best with absurd autobiography that focuses on interpersonal dynamics; the fictional pieces don't hit quite as hard.

War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones

#674
Title: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones
Author/illustrator?: David Axe
Role unknown--illustrator?: Matt Bors
Publisher: NAL
Year: 2010
128 pages

I could see some uses for this book, say in an undergraduate class that looks at the difficulty of making meaning from trauma. However, it's not well-enough realized, and I wouldn't want to appear to endorse it. The introduction sets the tone, with his self-aggrandizing war junkie friend's assertion that middle class American life is boring and inconsequential. Not my middle class American life, buddy. My life is full of meaningful activities, love, relationships, vividness, and service, all in the context of my active awareness of my privilege as an economically secure person whose country is not embroiled in conflict. Generally I stop reading books that begin by insulting the general reader, but I figured, hey, it's not Axe's fault that his friend is a swaggering schmuck.

Sadly, Axe is little better, though he insults himself more actively and the reader more covertly. I'm sorry he's bored, and I'm sorry his life is never quite satisfying even when he's in a war, which is where he seems to want to be. I'm sorry that he lives with constant, simmering anger that he can't quite attach to anything. One shocking frame in this graphic autobiography expresses his dilemma when his girlfriend, another reporter, wants to travel to a war with him (when he's been calling his buddies and trying to get them to go to a war with him). He can't bring himself to tell her no, though he expresses this with an obscenity and hostility. So she's good enough to have sex with but it makes you angry when she wants to go with you because you'll have to behave better in the war? One hopes the girlfriend noticed this contempt and got out sooner rather than later.

As to Axe's musings about his reasons for wanting to be in war zones but not finding this satisfying, I found them not terribly coherent or compelling. Is it machismo? Existential emptiness? Unmentioned substance use troubles? Hard to guess. I don't know what Axe's in-person vibe is, but I imagine from this book that he's a person you edge away from at a party as he warms to his topic.

Whether he's a good war reporter/photographer, I don't know and I'm not moved to find out.