Burning Lights: A Unique Double Portrait of Russia

#760
Title: Burning Lights: A Unique Double Portrait of Russia
Author: Bella Chagall
Illustrator: Marc Chagall
Publisher: Schocken
Year: 1988
Country: Belarus
272 pages

Belarus. Bella Chagall was Marc Chagall's wife. This is a volume of her little tales of Jewish home and religious life, as seen by a young girl in a prosperous family. It's sweet, sometimes ethereal and sometimes almost hallucinatory. It would be a good introduction to European Jewish life in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many line drawings by Marc.

Botswana Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Etiquette

#759
Title: Botswana Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Etiquette
Author: Michael Main
Publisher: Kuperard
Year: 2010
168 pages

This provides a basic introduction for the traveler to Botswana. At first I had high hopes, as the author writes more frankly than some in this series. However, I quickly became tired of the note of condescension toward Batswana that permeates the cultural sections.

There was too little discussion of how male and female travelers should interact with Batswana (a complaint I have about the whole Culture Smart! series), nothing about LGBTQ travelers (homosexual acts are illegal), and too little on HIV considering that Botswana has the second-highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. A few Setswana phrases are offered, but without stress or pronunciation notes.

From a production standpoint, the photos are in too dark a register and with too little distinction between tones, and there are multiple typos.

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History

#758
Title: Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History
Author: George Crile III
Publisher: Grove
Year: 2003
560 pages

A fascinating overview of US involvement in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, revealing a history quite different from what one was told at the time. It reinforces the impressions that


1. Governments are full of scheming narcissists and manipulable incompetents.
2. Narcissists do what they want, for their own gain and egos.
3. If you get in the way of a narcissist or its government, you will be destroyed.
4. You may be destroyed for trivial reasons.
5. The law is for hoi polloi only.
6. Governments lie and act angry and shocked when held accountable for their ilegal acts.
7. All explanations of behavior are rationalizations for aggressive primate pissing and grabbing contests.

Cf. the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This book will inform you, but it won't make you want to spend more time with humans.

Make Room! Make Room!

#757
Title: Make Room! Make Room!
Author: Harry Harrison
Publisher: Berkley
Year: 1978
153 pages

Well, okay enough for what it was, but A) these lunkheads don't collect rainwater during a water shortage? and B) nothing about Soylent Green being people? Really? That's all movie script addenda? Boooo. Leaving aside the movie, it's not very good as a novel (though fine as a polemic, and there's good world-building). As a plot, it's pretty basic, with no real twists (or at least, none that are really worked). The ending is pretty anticlimactic. Harrison doesn't seem to have wrested much from his story elements.

Limassol

#756
Title: Limassol
Author: Yishai Sarid
Translator: Barbara Harshaw
Publisher: Europa
Year: 2010
160 pages

I liked reading this but found much of the action implausible. For example, I don't believe at all that the protagonist would be released rather than charged and jailed after helping a mass terrorist escape. There's more, but since that's the climax, I'll stick with it as the most unlikely part.

Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia

#755
Title: Held at a Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia
Author: Rebecca G. Haile
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
Year: 2007
200 pages

A better book than it's getting credit for being. Part history, part family history, part travelogue, this is an elegant piece of work that speaks not only to what might cause a family to need to flee their homeland, but what it's like to come back. Haile balances the legacy of her family with the strange experience of being an expatriate tourist in her own land.

It was also fun to see Amharic words that are from the same Semitic roots as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

My Life in France

#754
Title: My Life in France
Author: Julia Child & Alex Prud'Homme
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2006
336 pages
Audiobook.

A lovely autobiography (mediated by Alex Prud'homme). The narrative is a mix of written and oral styles, with a tone distinctly Julia's that makes me miss watching Julia on PBS, a staple of my younger life. At the time, I just thought she was fascinating, funny, and frank. She wasn't afraid to say she'd made an error, which wasn't true of many authorities at that time. I had no perspective on how revolutionary Mastering the Art of French Cooking was; I just knew that the recipes made sense, even if I had no plans to prepare sweetbreads, say, or bread. Her cookbooks are still among the clearest and most explanatory I use.

The audiobook reader does a good enough job, with occasional mispronunciations, but she has a good reading voice. However, there is no PDF of the photos, so I'll still need to look at the book.