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.

Say You're One of Them

#1049
Title: Say You're One of Them
Author: Uwem Akpan
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2008/2009
358 pages

This collection didn't work for me in many ways (not even including the very accented readers for some selections on the audiobook). There was entirely too much telling and not enough showing. Several of the narrative child voices seemed contrived and overly expository. Overall, this seemed like a writing workshop thesis. That's a fair place for a writer to start, but it feels like it got big play because it's about how terrible life in Africa is, not because it's written well.

Passage through India: An Expanded and Illustrated Edition

#1048
Title: Passage through India:  An Expanded and Illustrated Edition
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: Grey Fox Press
Year: 1983/2009
152 pages

A delightful and sometimes deep travelogue of Snyder's visit to India. Spare language and targeted details make this narrative, which was written more or less as a letter based on his journals, both insightful and poetic even when the prosaic is being described. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky figure, as do a certain number of drugs and a reasonable amount of gastric upset. There's one photo of a Buddha statue that I could look at for hours--and have.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

#1047
Title: The Island of Doctor Moreau
Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 1896/1994
160 pages

Fascinating less for the story (which is entertainingly horrifying and must have been quite scandalous in its day) and more for the pseudoscientific tone, including the disclaimers and apologies of the narrator. This might be usefully compared to Atwood's Oryx and Crake as a cautionary tale about how humans paradoxically degenerate when they play god.

Sadly, as with Paolo Baccigalupi's halfmen, I can't help but picture McGruff the Crime Dog at times.