Walking on the Moon

When I read Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex, I found his treatment of Roosevelt’s presidency and the times surrounding them captivating.  I was happy to pick up where he left off with this final volume of Roosevelt biography.

Morris’s research and writing continue to be exemplary, finding the key facts and recollections that put the reader into the picture with Roosevelt.  It is difficult to imagine a better framing of a historical figure.

If the Roosevelt of Theodore Rex is puzzling collection of mismatched convictions that combine to be greater than their parts, the Roosevelt in Colonel Roosevelt shows how those internal contradictions take their toll.  This is the story of Roosevelt out of power, but not out of influence.  He remains a source of fascination to the country and the world, but with each turning page history seems to get further out in front of him.

History usually passes someone by because they ossify, but that’s not really Roosevelt’s problem.  He remains a source of dynamic shifting motivations.  He’s a man who knows that Presidents should step down before they become addicted to power, but cannot recognize the withdrawal symptoms in himself.  And even that simplifies the situation in that there are elements of a real desire to advance the progressive agenda that his successors are less aggressive in pushing.

Similarly one must respect his connection to the active life and principles of patriotism, but he seems to have no self-awareness of when to apply them.  It’s inspiring and amazing that he helped map a river in the Amazon between the 1912 and 1916 election cycles, putting himself at genuine risk of his life.  In fact, astonishing is probably a better word.  It’s a manly act in the best sense of that word; it’s balanced by how hard he pushes to get his sons fighting in World War I.  He works almost monomaniacly to get them into battle and basically all of them are badly injured or killed.  He’s consistent in that he did the same thing himself in the Spanish American War, but one has to wonder if the kind of fighting in WWI was the same test of individual mettle.

Virtually every major decision TR makes in this book invites the kind of searching questions that I allude to above, and Morris does an excellent job putting the reader into the situation and laying out Roosevelt’s thinking.  It invites thought, discussion, and argument at every turn.

The central character of all this – who is so much larger than life it is difficult to remember that he is not fictional – emerges as a brilliant, flawed, and perhaps tragic figure who shaped our times as much as his own.  He is an amazing individual and Morris’s presentation is everything he deserves.

Strongly recommended.

I love how the Kindle encourages reading classics.  In the abstract.  This is Sir James Knowles’s translation and packaging of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and while one can’t argue with the stories pedigree, they’re a little dull to modern ears.

There are some classic tales in here, but overall the stories seem to run together a bit, and few of the knights come across as individuals.  There’s also little overall dramatic structure to the stories as a group.  If you’ve heard some of the Arthur legends it is interesting to see the source material, but I cannot imagine anyone falling in love with the mythos from this.

Charles Yu’s How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe is the sort of interesting exercise that makes writers happy to create and a certain kind of reader happy to see done.  Generally I am one of those kinds of reader; I like to see an interesting idea executed well.  Here Yu takes science fiction tropes and uses them as the basis for a sort of magical realism.  It is an interesting idea, especially given how large these tropes loom in modern life.

He chooses challenging ideas and arranges them in intricate and illuminating ways.  He obliquely comments on escapism, regret, fixation on the past, and how modern technology and narcissism reinforce one another.  All this is clear without bludgeoning the reader very much.

The problem I had with the book is that it is relentlessly bleak.  While I can respect the work that goes into setting a powerful consistent tone, How To Live Safely felt like a dirge of a book to me, with brief moments of optimism coming only at the end.  To make it worse, those moments felt like a tacked-on Hollywood ending, unearned and unbelievable.

It is tough to critique an author for being too pure in their vision, but for me, this was too hopeless a world to enjoy visiting.  It is well built, though (despite the author’s repeated assertions to the contrary), so perhaps you fill find more there.

This is about Keith Richards’s book, Life, but there’s something awesome about the post title. Life is Richards’s autobiography. He’s the lead guitarist and a significant creative force behind the Rolling Stones – perhaps the rock and roll band – and has a life of debauchery and legend.

While I enjoy the Rolling Stones stuff I’ve heard – and I did go to school in the Midwest, where classic rock a required minor – I’m not a huge fan or student of the band.  I don’t keep track of all the personnel changes or who stole whose wife.  I do know that their music is consistently good rock and roll and that they’ve been doing it longer than I’ve been alive.  I’m sure scholars of the Stones will be fact checking this thing to death for the motivations for this or that decision or further insight into the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards in-fighting that’s been going on.  That’s not the perspective you will get from me.  I’m just listening to the narrative.

The narrative carries a unique voice.  It’s roughly chronological, but doesn’t pretend that the reader hasn’t heard of the Rolling Stones and know the outline of the story.  Most band members aren’t so much introduced as mentioned.  And if Richards remembers a good story, he just tells it.  The result is an engagingly rambling trip through the history of the band.  One suspects that this is a result of Richards sitting down to a series of interviews with contributor James Fox who turned the thing from interviews into a book that the two of them polished up for publication.  Whatever the process – for all I know Richards composed the whole thing and Fox fact-checked it – the resulting stumble through Richards’s life is engrossing and entertaining.

In much the way that William Shatner’s Up Till Now is the sort of autobiography I imagine Shatner writing, Life is the autobiography that my impression of Keith Richards would write.  Its a tale of mayhem and music told by an unapologetic and somewhat addled protagonist.  He’s clearly aware that his shenanigans are far outside the pale, but somehow finds ways to neither make excuses nor apologies for them.  It’s strangely endearing to hear Richards comment on his son’s recollection of a Richards-driven car crash with “I’m a good driver.  I mean, nobody’s perfect, right?”

It’s also endearing that he doesn’t remember significant events clearly – often admitting he was badly impaired for them and bringing in other eyewitness accounts.  I imagine that Stones scholars find this infuriating, but who could argue with it?  Richards’s reputation for indulging in intoxicants is a given.  It is similarly whimsical to hear the number of times he goes cold turkey or swears off one of his vices, only to have it reappear a few pages later.  These things aren’t a big deal for him, and it’s clear that he doesn’t think that they should be a big deal for the reader, either.

That style has a tendency to downplay his most outrageous actions or to gloss over bad behavior, but for me it didn’t really have that effect.  One gets the impression that when Richards talks to people he would downplay it, but that he is aware of his short temper and casual approach to child rearing.  While he talks with  admiration and respect about the capable women he knows, he also addresses women in general in some unflattering terms. He doesn’t hide much, but he does describe everything in his charming, roguish way.  It seems like he would be perfectly happy with the reader forming their own conclusions from that.

Overall its a diverting life story told in a unique voice.

Recommended.

I always enjoy hearing Mike Birbiglia tell a story.  They’re keenly observed with an eye to the absurd, paced perfectly to keep your interest, and often about more than they seem at the start.  Best of all, they’re funny.

Sleepwalk with Me is a collection of some of his stories in convenient book form.  The written versions share all the strong aspects of his storytelling.  His voice comes off the page very nicely and engages the reader well.  The stories are funny, poignant, and tie together well across the whole of the book.

All that said, I prefer listening to him. I came away with the feeling I’d heard a good album by a great live band.  The production values were great and the essence of the band came through, but I’d still tell my friends that the band is much better live.

Recommended.

I just posted my last capsule reviews for 2010, and looked back at the list of books I read this year.  I read 44 books this year, less than one a week, but still a fairly healthy number.  And it doesn’t count comics.

I wanted to pick a few that were particularly good and say a few words about them, but that’s proving to be hard.  I read a lot of really great books this year. I’m going to throw out a few links to some of the stuff I enjoyed the most.

In non fiction, this was the year I was blown away by Kevin Roose’s incredible The Unlikely Disciple, found out a ton about the recent Wall Street shenanigans in Michael Lewis’s excellent The Big Short, saw how a serial killer and the World’s Fair danced an abstract tango in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, heard a rational plea for coming to terms with our finite planet from Jared Diamond in Collapse, and became a Chuck Klosterman fan by Eating the Dinosaur.

I read more fiction than usual this year.  Partially this was because I discovered Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely) and renewed my interest in Dick (The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly) and Atwood (The Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake, and The Handmaid’s Tale).  I also got sucked into the Twilight thing, knocking off all four constituent books in pretty short order.  I also finally read The Grapes of Wrath, which is a towering work of literature, and found Lionel Shriver’s spectacular We Need to Talk About Kevin, a harrowing mirror held up to both the reader and the world.

That’s a pretty good year by my standards, and there are other fun things that didn’t quite make a mention here.

In some of his recent essays, David Sedaris has talked about how writing about his family has been a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, the stories are delightful and diverting; on the other hand, his family doesn’t seem to enjoy the notoriety.  I suspect that this pressure is part of the reason that his latest, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, is a collection of fables with illustrations by Ian Falconer.

A fable is a difficult thing to construct well.  The whole thing is short, the characters need to be vivid but believable, and there needs to be some kind of moral at the end, implied or stated.  Sedaris’s fables are enlightening and wicked; it makes me wonder if Aesop was as satirical to his readers.

Casting his characters as animals distances them from specific people and if this were a different author I would be tempted to say that it lets him unleash his darker views of people.  Sedaris has never shied away from depicting people as they are, but these iconic animals are some of his best creations.  No matter how much he needs a particular character to have a certain trait for his fable, they’re never forced or overcalculated.

In addition to his keen eye for the follies of people and society, Sedaris is an excellent writer structurally.  I have always been impressed with how his compositions flow in such a way that his point often comes dramatically clear only as the essay finishes.  That composition is on display here, as well as the skill with the telling detail that makes the cumulative effects more powerful.

And more than one of Falconer’s illustrations enhanced their story uniquely.

All that said, a fable’s a fable, and there are only so many one can read in a row.  I found Squirrel to be just the right length.  I suspect that another fable book is not forthcoming, and I’m looking forward to what Sedaris does next.

Strongly recommended.

Steve Martin released this novella, Shopgirl, in 2000 well before he wrote Born Standing Up, but there is considerable similarity between them.  In both cases, the work is thoughtful and well executed, but strangely unmoving.  However, Born Standing Up relates a particular man’s singular experience becoming a unique entertainer while Shopgirl sticks much closer to the everyday.  As a result, there is less to divert the reader from the inertia.

After saying that Martin has trouble building up an emotional punch, I cannot really lay my fingers on what is missing.  There are characters with motivations and back stories, a strong sense of place, clear economical prose with a distinct voice, observations on people from different times of life and how they relate.  This should rise into a nice cake; but it doesn’t, and I don’t know why.

I have read a lot of books that provoked strong dislike.  Shopgirl was not one of those. None of the characters grated on me; the arc of the plot seemed plausible; the messages and themes were fine.  When I caught Martin making a temporally unlikely connection between one character’s involvement in the Vietnam war and another’s upbringing, I was paying enough attention to catch it, and I just more or less let it slide.  The narrative was pulling me along well enough that I did not begrudge him a little missed math.

Still, when I closed the book, I did not care about the journey these folks had been through.

It is difficult to fault someone for writing a well executed novel that lacks an undefinable quality, but that’s what I have to do with Shopgirl.

Sam Harris wrote this short piece, Letter to a Christian Nation,  arguing with a strawman conservative Christian that, I guess, they’re wrong and hurtful in their beliefs.  It is frustrating on quite a few levels.

For me, Harris is attempting the easiest possible refutation – undermining a belief set that requires every word in a sacred text to be literally true – and not doing a great job of it.  You simply cannot argue with the viewpoint that the Bible (or the Koran or whatever) is literally true from the mindset of a scientist who is looking for contradictory evidence. If the person who believes every word of the Bible believed in those kinds of argumentation styles or held those axioms, you would not need to write out the rest of the argument.

Any kind of argument about such disparate viewpoints has to start for some common ground, some sets of basic beliefs and shared context that would make a discussion (or even a meaningful argument) possible.  Because he is arguing with a straw man, Harris does not really have any mechanism for that search.  He simply conjures someone with the same underlying precepts who has been tricked into adopting these beliefs and talks him out of it.  That does not convince me of much.

Even if I believed that he had successfully argued his strawman into the ground, he really does not address the more difficult and interesting case of people of faith holding more moderate views that are congruent with modern science, but that still lead to moral outcomes he disagrees with.

I do not mean to undersell the difficulty of the problem.  I think Harris and I share similar worldviews.  But holding a consistent (or even correct) worldview is not enough when one sits down to try to convince others that their foundations of belief are wrong.  You have to set out your arguments in forms and from axioms that someone with very different ideas of the source of morality and the value of evidence will still have to accept at some level.  It is a fantastically difficult undertaking.

Harris’s swing at this hard problem did not convince me of much.

I enjoy David Rakoff‘s writing a great deal, and was therefore pretty sure I knew what to expect as I dug into his latest, Half Empty. His usual erudite assessments of somewhat esoteric and interesting topics were there.  The meticulous organization of his thoughts and brilliant execution of his prose were on display.  Each chapter cum essay was deep and interesting, and I was enjoying everything without any large surprises.

I had forgotten that Mr. Rakoff writes books.

Many books that look superficially like Rakoff’s are collections of well executed or well received personal essays.  The chapters in Half Empty can easily masquerade as these kinds of essay, and, indeed many of these chapters have been published elsewhere. But it is a mistake to assume that these particular chapters appear just because it was time to bind a book.

As I was reading I did notice a tone that seemed unusual for the type of book thought I had in my hands.  It was more restrained and thoughtful than some of the other Rakoff I’ve read.  Rakoff is always in the center of the picture in his books, though often in a self-deprecating way.  And he is in the center of these as well, but more in a more subdued way – almost meditatively so.

The subtle shift of tone, as well as some of the continuing threads running through the chapters all crash together in the final chapter, which is surprising without being wholly out of the blue.  Themes and incidents from early chapters suddenly link in unexpected and holistic ways that make the events described in the final chapter vivid beyond even what Rakoff’s considerable craft could do without the groundwork.  To do all this in non-fiction is quite a remarkable feat.

Many people use their personal experience to make a point; Rakoff uses his to make a piece of literature, without fictionalizing it.  It is a powerful piece of writing that is not empty in any way.

Strongly Recommended.