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.