Walking on the Moon

Sarah Vowell is fun to watch as a writer.  She has consistently had interesting things to say and said them in a unique voice. Her personal essays have always been brilliant, and watching her develop the techniques to keep that intimate tone while extending her work to a book has been exciting and enlightening.  Her latest, Unfamiliar Fishes, marks another point in that evolution.  It is a also a fascinating, readable study of the Hawaiian monarchy from Captain Cook’s time until the islands became a United States territory in the Spanish American War.

When I read The Wordy Shipmates I thought it was somewhat unanchored and wandering.  I thought more attention to a theme would tie the book together more.  Unfamiliar Fishes doesn’t have this problem, though it is superficially similar in structure.  The difference is a mastery of tone and narrative voice; this is another story about how people’s ideals of how to live and the reality of a government of people collide.  The difference is that Vowell ties the book together with her personality, nerdy love of history, compassion for people, and personal history.

Mixing history with one’s own life and personality is beyond difficult.  Put too much of yourself, or the wrong parts of yourself, into the story and you come across as condescending or arrogant.  Put too little of your feelings into it, and you can come off as a smartass or dilettante.  Vowell gets the tone perfect here, after perhaps finding her way in Shipmates.

With that tone, Fishes takes a leisurely, deep look at Hawaii and how it collided with Western Civilization, starting with the missionaries, then the capitalists, and finally the soldiers.  It’s a sad story, really, and while Vowell has certainly picked a side, she remembers that all the players are human beings.  She consistently reminds the reader as well.

It’s a very personal kind of history, and hearing it told well and felt deeply is well worth the time.

Strongly recommended.

Mark Twain’s Autobiography was conceived as a bit of a publishing stunt, with its publication delayed until 100 years after his death.  The manuscript (in a couple versions) has been available to scholars for some time, but it’s being released to the public now.  The packaging is a three volume set with each heavily annotated with Twain scholarship.

From what I can tell the scholarship is exemplary.  Each detail and anecdote is researched and cross-referenced.  Each of the several earlier edited versions that were published are noted, and material that was compiled during the creation of the Autobiography attached and put in context.  If you are a Mark Twain scholar, this is a great collection of information.  I confess that it was too dry for me.

The Autobiography itself is very unorthodox and enjoyable.  Mark Twain decided that the best way to build such a thing was to dictate it from his bed in daily bursts.  Rather than a chronological remembrance of his life with reflections interspersed, he presents a rambling daily discussion on either his life history, or something his daughter wrote about him in her biography, or whatever else strikes his fancy.

The whole thing is basically a collection of Mark Twain blog posts from the last few years of his life.  It is completely charming.  There are certainly dry parts. I find that Suzy’s biography wears thin, and he includes whole newspaper articles in there so he can go off on a rant.  Still, the posts – er, entries – themselves are intelligent, insightful, and entertaining.  It is a series of blasts from one of our most cantankerous and compassionate men of letters wandering where his fancy takes him, bounded very loosely by the cord of autobiography.

It Twain were alive today, he’d be blogging and I would be following him.

Strongly recommended; I’d skim the scholarly stuff unless you’re a scholar.

Gibson’s Zero History ties up a lot of the loose ends from Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, perhaps concluding his Big Ant stories.  Characters from Recognition and Country run through it, none more so than Hubertus Bigend, CEO of Big Ant, the hipper than thou advertising agency at the center of the stories.

Gibson’s beautiful turns of phrase and illuminating details guide the reader through the almost contemporary world of Blue Ant.  The only place his skill for the telling detail seems to fail him is that he seems obsessessed with the iPhone.  If Gibson didn’t get some product placement money out of this, Apple got a great deal.  The only non-iPhone used by a protagonist is a trap, and nearly everyone gushes whenever they touch one.  It’s almost out of place.

Thematically it is interesting that what appears to be the conclusion of this trilogy takes as its theme the rebirth of characters.  Virtually every character’s life is pivoting through the course of the novel, though at different rates.  Like the grooves on a phonograph some characters are turning slowly as their lives rearrange, while those on the inner groove are turning more quickly.  The different characters and different rates make the thematics powerful without being overly obvious.

It makes for an interesting read even if you have not picked up the earlier works in the series, but knowing who’s who makes the changes more resonant.

Recommended.

The FAA’s Instrument Procedures Handbook is a well respected reference for IFR training.  I picked up a copy primarily because it was available inexpensively on the Kindle.  I was hoping for a good refresher for the technical details of the instrument rules.

The Handbook turns out to be something like an IFR-centric Aeronautical Information Manual.  That’s what I expected, but a little less than what I hoped for.  There’s a lot of good information in here, and I would say it is more readable than the AIM, but overall there are much better places to learn this information from.  As a refresher and a reference, it is solid.

Player Piano is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, and it is interesting both as a free standing novel and as a look at Vonnegut’s writing before he had completely found his voice.  As one moves through the novel, many of the touchstones of decent 1950’s science fictionrise out of the fog.  There is a theme of machines supplanting people who don’t quite see it coming leading to a distopia that comes on as if boiling the frog slowly.  There are the arguments for and against progress and its effect on the human spirit.  There is the future society that still looks a lot like 1950’s america in its gender and ethnic roles.  A couple chapters in and the reader has a pretty good idea where the book is going.  It never quite goes there smoothly.

Though Vonnegut has created a 1950’s SF world straight from central casting, he has filled it with proto-Vonnegut characters.  They aren’t quite people yet, but they’re full of heart and quirks and they never carry out their tasks as characters without bridling at the artifice of it.  There is a life in this world that makes every set piece a little messy and every plot twist a little bumpy, in all the ways that make the story and the point stronger.  These folks are not Kilgore Trout or Billy Pilgrim yet, but they are fleshy and confounding enough to feel real.

This is not my favorite Vonnegut novel by a long shot.  He has much more interesting things to say and more interesting ways to say them coming.  And this is still tied up in the world of 1950’s science fiction, rather than the richer places Vonnegut will take us.  Still, it is remarkable to see a great writer trying out his wings within the constraints of genre, and if not remaking it, showing how much room there is for life to show through.

Strongly recommended.

The Downhill Lie is Carl Hiaasen’s memoir about returning to golfing after 20 years off.  Now, I’m not much of a golfer, but I do think Hiaasen‘s a very entertaining writer, and when I heard him talking about the book on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, it sounded like a hoot.

Hiaasen’s got the golf bug bad.  If I were going to try to pick up a sport I had not played in two decades, I would ease into it pretty slowly.  Hiaasen tries that, but it’s really not his nature; 20 pages or so in and he’s reading all the golf magazines and buying new clubs and half-baked mojo enhancers.  And hiding them from his wife.

And, as many amateurs have found, none of it is particularly effective.  Golf is hard, and he’s hysterically critical of his game even as he savors the occasional ray of false hope that lures him back to the course.

For a writer who’s normally as inviting as Hiaasen, this is actually somewhat dense with golf jargon.  It’s never enough that a non-golfer will lose the thread of his story, but it is certainly enough to make you raise some eyebrows.

Probably the best thing I can say about the book is that it made me consider taking up golf.  If you’ve already done that, I expect you’ll enjoy it even more.

Strongly recommended.

A couple weeks ago a was griping to my friends that I could not seem to lay hands on a reasonably objective summary of scientific consensus on climate change.  This is the kind of thing that always ticks me off, because it is clearly an important issue to get hold of, but all the popular books either take the position that we will be up to our neck in melted icecaps and polar bear blood or that even thinking about the changes is to be duped by a cabal of self-serving environmentalists who cook all their data to a light golden brown.

All I want to know is enough to form an opinion, not to be recruited to imaginary team or another.

Imagine my surprise when I found Kerry Emanuel’s What We Know About Climate Change.  It is exactly what I was looking for.  It is  reasoned description of the current state of climate change knowledge, enough history to see how and where the schisms formed that the media has stoked, and enough background to make the information accessible to someone with much less scientific background that I have.

This is apparently one of a series of short books from Boston Books covering essential topics of the day, and if they are all as well done as this is, Boston Books is doing the world a great service.

Strongly recommended.

Eddie Rickenbacker‘s Fighting The Flying Circus is another book that I cannot pretend to objectively review.  I first read this in 7th grade in study hall, and then again the following year.  It’s Rickenbacker’s story of being a fighter pilot in World War I, and it’s a very thrilling read for a boy who wants to fly, full of comradeship, derring-do, and courage and decency in the face of danger.  Rickenbacker comes across as a responsible, daring guy who wanted to do his best for his country in a war.

I’m older now, and I can see where he’s filling pages, and how there are places where I wish Rickenbacker had written more of a memoir than a briefing.  It was still a thrill to revisit it again, though.

Then there’s the gung-ho side of the book – which is to say most of it.  Rickenbacker is honestly happy to go out strafing German soldiers, which he calls great sport.  He and his men treat shooting down Germans as a game at which they want to be better than anyone else.  There’s an unapologetic jingoism that’s hard to ignore; and of course one shouldn’t ignore it.

I think Rickenbacker wrote honestly, and so I’m sure that these were exactly what he and his men talked about, and probably believed about the war.  And he honestly describes the enormous relief that the Armistice brought them.  One pilot just keeps repeating “we won’t get shot at anymore.”  These men had been in combat less than a year.

To see the losses that they suffer in that year, and coming off reading about how hard this brief, brutal war affected others, it’s easy to wish Rickenbacker had been more thoughtful about the barbarism of what he experienced.  That’s probably a lot to ask of a young patriot six months after the experience, though.

It’s a good book in a lot of ways, and much more readable than von Richthofen‘s autobiography.

Recommended.

Even though the fine folks at Amazon listed Trouble Is My Business as a novel, it is really a collection of 4 longish short stories from Raymond Chandler.  I kind of like Chandler, so my disappointment was bounded.  And really, the title alone is so excellent that it’s tough to imagine dissatisfaction.

The stories are all good fun.  Chandler’s voice, skillful plotting, and tough guy poetry are all displayed proudly, and the stories have enough literary meat to be thoroughly enjoyable.  Marlowe remains his own worst enemy, though he gets the usual run for the money in the person of manipulative clients, corrupt cops, and random lowlives.  These are all something of Chandler in a microcosm.

Still, I prefer the novels.

There are a fair number of writers who can sustain a story with Chandler’s strengths for the length of these stories, but watching him hold a taut mystery and interesting novel together over 4 times the length represents a difference of kind.  And rather than just being the same thing longer, the novels get deeper and richer.

That said, these are all worthwhile stories in their own right.

Strongly recommended.

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.