Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

#742
Title: Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf
Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: HarperCollins

Year: 1990/1989
208 pages
Audiobook.

I enjoyed this, as I enjoy all Sacks, and it's not his best. It's light on neurology. Given its 1989 publication, it's quite out of date. It predates baby sign language and both behind-the-ear speech processors and fully implantable cochlear implants. In addition (and since I read it as an audiobook, I can't easily double-check this), Sacks makes two errors of a sort I don't usually see from him. First, he treats Kaspar Hauser is a viable example of late language attainment. I believe that by the time he was writing, it was reasonably well-agreed that Hauser was a fraud. Second, he seems to believe that the "dumb" of "deaf and dumb" refers to intellect, when a cursory look at etymology shows that this is incorrect. "Dumb" means "silent" in this context ("dumbwaiter," "struck dumb").

Sacks provides an interesting history of education for the deaf (or lack thereof), the development of sign, and the cultural and political struggles around sign. I found the third section, on the 1988 student protests at Gallaudet University, most interesting, probably because I remember it well. 

The Exiled Queen (Seven Realms, #2)

#741
Title: The Exiled Queen (Seven Realms, #2)
Author: Cindy Williams Chima
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2010
586 pages

A gift from my nephew.

Chima better hits her stride in this second volume. The reference to a staff in the amulet that annoyed me in the first book here appears in an as-yet-explained old illustration, mentioned as foreshadowing (p. 431). Despite the existence of herbal birth control and some heavy smooching, Raisa apparently will remain a virgin until she's old enough for US standards. Pleasantly, same-sex partnerships exist and don't excite much commentary, though we're told that elsewhere in the Seven Realms they might. Yes, Han is a bad boy and Raisa is a kick-ass girl, but refreshingly, Han keeps trying not to be bad and Raisa can only sometimes kick ass. Their parallel need to assume new identities and behaviors in ultimate service to their beliefs about what's best for the kingdom is amusing.

Both main and secondary characters are sufficiently complex that they sometimes act in surprising ways that aren't out of character. They are sometimes stupid in their actions (as, Raisa sending a letter) and lack of critical thinking (as, Han's inability to instantly grasp what HRMAW probably stands for), but this is true of many teens as depicted in young adult novels.

On the down side, there are plenty of Harry Potter-esque references (such as "Abelard's army" and white-haired evil wizards).

On a personal note, this is the second book I've read this year with a mysterious character named Crow (the first being Murakami's Kafka on the Shore).

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

#740
Title: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Author: Steve Martin
Publisher: Scribner
Year: 2007
240 pages
Audiobook.

Enjoyable enough and a quick read, Steve Martin's memoir of his life to date in comedy includes events and examples that some of us remember, but touches only lightly on his romantic relationships. More than you'd expect about his relationship with his parents, however. 

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

#739
Title: A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Author: Mohammed Hanif
Publisher: Knopf
Year:2008
320 pages
Audiobook.

I thought this might give me a kick back toward Charlie Wilson's War. Hanif uses a fictional first-person narrator to explore the presumed conspiracy that took down Pakistan's General Zia-ul-Haq. Hanif's answer: Pretty much everyone wanted him dead, including an ill-fated crow. I listened to the book, so I may have missed it, but was the case of mangoes indeed implicated as well? The novel generally retains a slightly distanced, slightly humorous tone, and sustained my engagement with the characters throughout.

Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman

#738
Title: Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
Authors: Mpho M'Atsepo Nthunya & K. Limakatso Kendal
Publisher:  Indiana University Press
Year: 1996/1997
Country: Lesotho
187 pages


A volume of short autobiographical stories by a Basotho woman, aided by a US woman (who explains her involvement and her concerns about colonial/exploitative practices). These stories, loosely but not entirely chronologically presented, detail a complex, difficult life in a country changing over to self-rule. If I were training medical volunteers for Lesotho, I'd have them read this as a way to understand how people might be making health care, education, and economic decisions on the basis of beliefs and practical realities very different from those of the professionals.

The Unit

#737
Title: The Unit
Author: Ninni Holmqvist
Publisher: Other Press
Year: 2006/2009
272 pages
Ebook.


Aspects of the general conceit match Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, with an occasional dash of Schusterman's Unwind or Logan's Run thrown in. An important difference, however, is the protagonist's matter-of-fact acceptance of her fate, which inclines the tone more toward Ishiguro. The story around the edges was the more interesting piece for me--the staff of the Unit who clearly are troubled by their ethical scruples and lean toward disobedience. More exploration of their dilemmas (especially when the residents are so compliant) might have made this a 5-star novel.

As a woman of somewhere around 50, I found the notion that my utility to society might be complete laughable; on the other hand, as a person in a partnership not legally acknowledged by my nation, the idea that some kinds of relationships count while others don't cuts close to home. I agree with some other reviewers that [highlight for spoiler] it makes no sense that you'd waste organs by conducting medical experiments on the residents.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

#736
Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran
Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2003
 356 pages


"It is only now, when I try to gather up the morsels of those days, that I discover how little, if ever, we talked about our personal lives--about love and marriage and how it felt to have children, or not to. It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private." (p. 237) When I reached this statement about 2/3 in, I thought, yes, and that's why I just can't get into this memoir, despite repeated efforts over the last year.

I empathize with Nafisi (as a secular subject high school teacher in a religious school, I once had to buy or hand-expurgate 11 copies of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to keep my job) and, while I don't find her comments on literature very interesting, I'm at least in agreement with the idea that novels are a refuge in difficult times, or that they may illuminate sociopolitical contexts other than those in which they were written.

I think my inability to engage deeply with Nafisi is due in part to the lack of emotional detail; there's a reasonable amount of telling of emotion, but not much showing of it. Nafisi as narrator seems distant, somewhat authoritarian, and sometimes reactive in ways that seem guaranteed to get her sacked, beaten, or executed. These outbursts don't always make sense to me, though I can add my own speculation that she is keeping a tight lid on her feelings, or erupts when she can't stand it anymore, or is culturally less disclosive than an American would be. However, that's just my exegesis, and Nafisi comes off as more histrionic than repressed (that is, as if her emotions are shallow rather than that she's forcing them down). Again, that's not what she says, but it is what I take from what I actually experience as a reader. Despite being much more cued by words than images, I found Persepolis more immediate and moving.

I could now get into a long discussion of fiction vs. memoir and the intentionalist fallacy, but instead I'm just going to reitterate that for whatever reason, I never got to a point where this felt like a pleasure. That's an observation, not an indictment. I'm glad to have read it, but it was a long, hard road.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

#735
Title: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Author: Jon Ronson
Publisher: Riverhead
Year: 2011
288 pages
Audiobook.

At a certain point I stopped taking notes on problems and inaccurate statements. Instead of a formal critique, I'll just say that this has the depth of a magazine article, with all the problems of superficiality and inxorrect information inherent in that genre. If you're not familiar with psychiatric diagnosis, how US psychiatric/psychological treatment works, or the criteria for civil commitment now vs. during Rosenhan's era almost 40 years ago, check Ronson's assertions before believing they're factual. As a narrative, it doesn't hang together very well and its conclusion appears to be "don't think you can diagnose people without adequate training," which I or any therapist could have told you when Ronson tries to diagnose himself with the DSM, if not before.

The Planets

#734
Title: The Planets
Author: Dava Sobel
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2005
270 pages
Audiobook.

A lot of people love her prose style, but I didn't enjoy it. Some authors can blend personal reflections with non-fiction; I didn't think Sobel pulled it off. This would be a good introduction to the solar system for someone who isn't very familiar with it. In the absence of enjoyable writing, there wasn't a lot to it for me. For a more informative look at a planet (more or less) and recent astronomical history close to home, try Brown's How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.

Gulliver's Travels

#733
Title: Gulliver's Travels
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher: Audible
Year: 1726/2010
~318 pages
Audiobook.

Read by David Hyde Pierce. A good satire of both the travel writing genre and Swift's political milieu. Each of the adventures has its very funny aspects. It's clear why the journey to Lilliput is the most popular: It's a tight story with well-chosen "factual" details to support its claim to be non-fiction, plus a great deal of amusing scatology. 

The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide

#732
Title: The Birds of Costa Rica: A Field Guide
Author: Richard Garrigues
Illustrator: Robert Green
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Year: 2007
Country: Costa Rica
408 pages

Costa Rica.

Yes, I read all of it. I'm like that with some field guides. This one features somewhat larger illustrations than many. Our Costa Rican birding guide isn't taken with the color register (he blamed the printing process), but in many cases, I found it more accurate than the other guidebook I was using. The illustration of the keel-billed toucan, for example, was much more true to life.

The intention of this handbook is to omit information unneccesary for identification, and this it does, while bolding field marks and behavioral information that assists differentiation. I found it easy to use in the field.

Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!

#731
Title: Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!
Author: Bruce C. Morris
Publisher: Open Road
Year: 2008
248 pages

For a book whose big sell is that it only has what you need, it's amazingly, astonishingly repetitive. I'm not just talking about repeated information, but word for word, cut-and-paste repetitions, sometimes 3 or 4 times through the volume. I'd have rather bought a smaller book without repetition, or this length book with more information.

Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure

#730
Title: Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure
Author: Sarah Macdonald
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2002/2004
298 pages
Audiobook.

I enjoyed this more than I first thought I would, but less than I'd expect. I liked it precisely because it <i>wasn't</i> fun girl adventures in India. The author conveyed her fear and the harrowing nature of many of her experiences, which is useful for my teaching. What I liked less well was what seemed like a superficial tour of available religons. I assume that this was the great idea that sold the book, but I'd have liked more depth, whether or not this premise was real or constructed. 

The Filter Bubble

#729
Title: The Filter Bubble
Author: Eli Pariser
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2011
304 pages
Audiobook.

If anyone has told you recently that the information you want is in "the second link that comes up for X on Google," but it's not, you already know the first part of what Pariser is going to tell you. Much of this book addresses aspects of the issues of filtering, which means monitoring, and how our online behavior and data may be used not only to tailor what we see, but to commodetize us. Pariser does a good job of demonstrating that a filtered web does not flatten access to information, but compartmentalizes it. At the same time, he represents the necessity of some filtering, given the crush of data. If you read hard science fiction you'll find this confirmatory; if you tend to be naive about what you post on Facebook, it may usefully increase your paranoia.

The Sense of an Ending

#728
Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2004
144 pages
Audiobook.

What I like here is how Barnes sneaks in changes of genre within the fictional confessional memoir. I enjoyed attending to the structure of the novel. Less enjoyable was the story aspect, which was not terrifically interesting to me, perhaps because I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic.

The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)

#727
Title: The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)
Author: Cinda Williams Chima
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2010
528 pages

I almost stopped reading early on because the writing was so awkward. Example:
Using a stick, he lifted the amulet by its chain. It dangled, spinning hypnotically in the sunlight, a green translucent stone cunningly carved into a snarl of serpents with ruby eyes. The staff was topped with a brilliant round-cut diamond larger than he'd ever seen, and the snake's eyes were blood red rubies (18-19).
Well, which is it? A stone? A stone topped with a diamond? A stone topped with a diamond plus inset rubies? Isn't "ruby eyes" pretty much the same as eyes that are "blood red rubies"? Are there many serpents, or one snake? And what is this "staff" of which you speak? This is all made worse by the cover illustration, which shows one snake with a ruby eye, no translucency to the green stone, no diamond, no staff, and a metal setting. Fortunately, it picked up after that, though there are certainly tracts that cry out for basic editing.

The first volume introduces the protagonists and sets them on their courses. There are some enjoyable reveals (both in the story's frame and historical) and believable villains. This might turn out to be a quest narrative, but since Han acquires a pretty good Magic Thingie by page 18, the journey may be one of discovery rather than acquisition.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

#726
Title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2000/2001
530 pages
Audiobook + paperback.

Eggers captures the manic/anxious response to complex grief in a mostly-memoir that is evocative of the Snowden episodes of Catch-22 mashed together with the last chapter of Ulysses. I found it unreadable on the page, but almost unbearable (in a good way) as an audiobook, capably read by Dion Graham in a naturalistic and exhausting manner. I wasn't put off by the titring meta-self-scrutiny, though it tired me and I'm glad I read other work by Eggers first or I might not have done so. Bonus: I learned (from Wikipedia, not this book) that Dave and Toph write the delightful Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey books, notably Your Disgusting Head.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

#725
Title: In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language
Author: Arika Okrent
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Year: 2009/2010
342 pages

 As a college student I'd have given it 5 stars and learned Klingon. Now I just enjoyed it. Okrent begins with a tense writing style that makes me want to reassure her that anybody who picks this up is a nerd and will only find the sometimes arch tone offputting. We all know who we are and why we're reading it, so just relax.

Okrent presents a good range of artificial languages created by dissimilar means and to different ends. It's a nice overview and introduction, suitable for lay readers but with amusements here and there for people with a background in linguistics.

Star Trek [2009 Movie Tie-in]

#724
Title: Star Trek [2009 Movie Tie-in]
Author: Alan Dean Foster
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2009
274 pages
Audiobook.

Why yes, it is still my pleasure to read Star Trek novels. Sorry, ladies, I'm already taken.

Foster has always been a more-than-serviceable translator of Star Trek to novel. What I enjoyed about this movie and novel was the story frame, which asserts the inevitability of the Star Trek TOS timeline. George Kirk, a victim of this timeline, may not see it this way, but from the perspective of  the Trekker, important aspects of canon triumph over Nero's attempt to suppress it. That Spock is the witness to this bifurcation and rejoining is a nice echo of his status as a man between worlds and identities.

The novel follows the movie reasonably closely, occasionally providing a glimpse of material that was probably edited or compressed. Without the diversion the movie's bright palette and fast action, the parallels between protagonists' life stories (for example, the losses experienced by Nero, Spock, and Kirk) are more evident. Better with the movie, but could hold its own as a book.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

#723
Title: The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey [Notas de Viaje]
Author: Ernesto Che Guevara
Publisher: Ocean Press
Year: 1992/2003
175 pages
Audiobook.

This makes me feel old, but in a good way. I don't want to be carousing about drunk on stolen wine, ill, with no money, pitching off my broke-down motorcycle over and over, misrepresenting my credentials and trying to score with cute women. I mean, it sounds good on paper, but I've made different choices with my life.

What is interesting here is Che's discourse on class and opportunity. Otherwise, it's a mildly interesting travelogue by a guy.

Goliath (Leviathan, #3)

#722
Title: Goliath (Leviathan, #3)
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year: 2011
543 pages

A reasonably satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. While some plot points are attended to, there's a level of detail that isn't entirely resolved. For example, that the perspicacious lorises make connections and inferences before the humans do is an idea just left dangling. Still, a pleasing series with strong male and female teen protagonists. As in the previous two volumes, lovely illustrations.

Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

#721
Title: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
Author: Stephen Batchelor
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2010
302 pages

Batchelor's autobiography, which greatly enriches my reading of Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. Here and there he goes on at more length than seems necessary, but overall this was well-written and very absorbing. 

The Magician's Assistant

#720
Title: The Magician's Assistant
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 1997
368 pages
Audiobook.

This may be my last Patchett. The plots are quite similar in terms of odd coincidences, too-tidy wrap-ups of too many strands, and emotions at the conclusion that I don't believe. This one would have been okay enough as a quick read except that I'd just read another Patchett so while I couldn't guess the plot, I could guess the structure. Plus, I don't buy the ending.

Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way

#719
Title: Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way
Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2011
96 pages

 A useful companion to Mortenson's book, and perhaps one that raises the caution: People with a passion for humanitarian work aren't necessarily the best administrators, and certainly aren't the best accountants. That Mortenson is annoying to work with should be obvious to anyone who's read him, but isn't an indictment of his practices. However, Krakauer documents a number of problems that suggest we really need to attend to infrastructure and fiscal transparency in our non-profits and NGOs, as well as conduct adequate needs assessments and outcome evaluation.

What I Hate: From A to Z

 #718
Title: What I Hate: From A to Z
Author: Roz Chast
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2011
64 pages

Not Chast's best. She's usually hilarious; this inspired a smile or two but had no real zing.