August 2002 Book Reveiws
These aren't really all the books that I read in Aug 2002, it's just the ones that I recorded between deciding to do this and the site going live in September. -- Adam
[Red Earth, White Earth] - [Word Freak] - [Maconochie's Gentlemen] - [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis]
Red Earth, White
Earth
Will Weaver
Red Earth, White Earth is an excellent book marred with a weak ending. Prodigal Son Guy Pehrsson returns to the family farm to find chaos erupting - his grandfather dying, his parents separated, the farm lost to creditors and/or the reservation headed by his childhood friend. And, and, and, and. Will keeps piling on problem after problem for Guy - so many that I lost my suspension of disbelief rather soon. Guy continues to soldier onward through it all, long after most of us would have simply given up on at least one issue.
It's saved by the strong writing - the clear, well-written style kept me coming back long after I wanted to put the book away and end poor Guy's suffering. The ending is a calamitous event that we're supposed to believe solves (or at least solves via running out the clock on) all the existing problems. It's a weak way to wrap up all the thread - not as weak as a Homer Hickham ending, but still tough to swallow.
Word Freak
Stefan Fatsis
Just for completeness, the full title of the book is: Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. This actually speaks volumes as to the book and the writing of the author cum Tourney Scrabble player. Factual, precise, wordy, and a little overblown, Stefan Fatsis is a journalist who sets out to write about the world of competetive Scrabble and becomes a player himself. This happens so early in the book that I was dubious that he had any intention of remaining an objective observer. I hear he's chomping at the bit for the wife-swapping expose being planned. (rimshot)
The book is less about those that play the game competetively and more about the author's quest to improve his ranking. He touches briefly upon the strikingly inverse proportion of men to women with respect to ratings but spends much more time navel-gazing about his inability to crack the 1600 rating level.
Still, it's an entertaining read, if just for the cavelcade of dysfunction displayed by the top-ranked players, though it might be blown a little out of proportion due to the magnification of a few cases over others. Normal rarely makes for interesting profiles. I enjoyed every page.
Postscript: Not long after finishing the book I came across a little report that one of the players featured, "G.I." Joel Sherman, had won the 2002 World Championships. A better coincidental ending I could not have hoped for.
Maconochie's Gentlemen: The
Story of Norfolk Island & the Roots of Modern Prison Reform
Norval Morris
In retrospect, I don't know what I was hoping for when I selected this book. What I got was a fictionalized first person account (Think Dutch) of Prison Reform in Australia in the 1800s. I didn't know that it was in a first-person style (something I don't care for), but I thought that something like this would be a nice departure from the norm; hopefully I would learn something, but at the very least I would get something akin to a 19th century Weekly World News of prison tales.
Instead I got the book that is the definition of turgid. I barely made it through a single chapter and after reading a sentence supposedly thought by Manonochie's teenage daughter (something akin to "I find it reprehnsible that young men of my generation consider it impudent for a young lady to blah blah blah...") I snapped the book shut, never to reopen it. Any writer who would pen something like this and any editor that would allow it through promise nothing but torture for the reader throughout.
Avoid it.
A Heartbreaking Work Of
Staggering Genius
David Eggers
This is one of the infuriating self-deprecating books that is always right. Is it good? Told ya so. Is it bad? Told ya so.
I didn't make it past the second or third chapter - but this is much further than it seems - the intro and preface and what have you weigh in a 50-some snarky pages. Then the story hits and it's a few smug chapters about his mother slowly dying (and of his father dropping dead in the driveway).
The thing that really killed it for me was the much-remarked 'picture of a stapler' that occurs at the end of end of the intro. It's very PoMo, and as Moe Szyslak would say: "Weird for the sake of being weird". But it's not good at all - very derivative. Good would be the self-aware whale in Hitchhiker's or just about any chapters in Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes.
The thing is that this book came very highly recommended to me from several trusted sources. Perhaps if I had slogged further onward things would have changed, but since I found the good stuff to be bad and the offensive stuff to be offensive, I decided that I had better things to do with my time.