Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days #1)

#1055
Title: Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days #1)
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Feral Dream
Year: 2011/2012
247 pages

Young adult postapocalyptic fantasyish/science fictish, urban fantasy? Angels have invaded and they're not very nice. The love interest is pleasingly constrained, cosidering the genre, and there are some nice plot elements, like the protagonist's schizophrenic mother.

This has some potential; the question is whether the series will rise to it, or fall to its genre.

Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World

#1054
Title: Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World
Author: Paul Bowles
Publisher:  Harper Perennial
Year: 1957/2006
240 pages

Bowles manages to seem both prissy and racist in this half-century-old volume of travel pensees. Replete with noble and ignoble savages, the collection works best when Bowles discusses music or music and culture; it fares considerably worse when he pontificates on culture alone in what I assume was meant to be a jocular manner.

The One Minute Manager

#1053
Title: The One Minute Manager
Author: Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Publisher: William Morrow
Year:1981/2003
111 pages

Wildly popular (though already dated) in its day, a management allegory that really needs only 5 pages at most to make its point. I have my undergraduates writing updates and making it relevant, and must say, while giving credit to Blanchard and Johnson for the idea, that my students' adaptations are more interesting than the original.

Hunt for the Southern Continent (Great Journeys)

#1052
Title: Hunt for the Southern Continent (Great Journeys)
Author: James Cook
Editor: Philip Edwards
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1774?/2007
120 pages
Excerpted from Cook's longer work, this is one in a Penguin classical travelogue series. Cook's spelling is preserved. It's interesting to watch Cook diligently crisscross the South Pacific and Antarctic waters looking for a continent that must be there, but which eludes his efforts to find it. Read with Thompson's  Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story for two views of Cook's purpose and effects.

The First Christian: Saint Paul's Impact on Christianity

#1051
Title: The First Christian: Saint Paul's Impact on Christianity
Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Macmillan
Year: 1983
192 pages

Karen Armstrong's relatively early work on Paul. Armstrong usefully explains the different purposes of biography or hagiography (as she did in her life of Buddha) and articulates reasons why Paul was disinterested in the historical Jesus. She describes the role of his visions and mission to the gentiles, not neglecting his possible epilepsy but seeing it as a potential mechanism for sacred hallucination.

Useful for filling in around and at times for contrasting with Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Unfamiliar Fishes

#1050
Title: Unfamiliar Fishes
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Riverhead
Year: 2011
238 pages

Much better than The Wordy Shipmates. An often enjoyable, sometimes slightly tedious history of the US takeover of Hawaii. Especially poignant for the quotations from letters and documents written by Hawaiian royalty as they watched the inevitable unfold. Read with any of the James Cook books I've reviewed recently, and next time you're in Hawaii, visit the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.