All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/14/2004]
I had never read Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME (ISBN 0-440-49805-8), but since there is to be a three-hour television movie of it soon, I decided it was time. The fact that I'm way over the target age for the book may have affected my opinion, or the fact that it is so overtly religious, but it isn't something that I personally can recommend. (On the other hand, I'm sure many people will find the religious content of the book just fine, and would happily give it to their children to read. I can't argue with that.)
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BOOKNOTES: AMERICA'S FINEST AUTHORS ON READING, WRITING, AND THE POWER OF IDEAS by Brian Lamb:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/06/2006]
BOOKNOTES: AMERICA'S FINEST AUTHORS ON READING, WRITING, AND THE POWER OF IDEAS edited by Brian Lamb (ISBN 0-812-93029-0) is a collection of brief extracts from the C-SPAN interview show of the same name. Each is only four to six pages, just enough time to get some information of the author, the subject, and the book. In the interview with Shelby Foote, for example, we learn that he took twenty years to write the three books of his Civil War history. 1,500,000 words in all. By hand. With a dip pen. And African-American Literary and art critic Albert Murray came to New York in 1962 not for Harlem, but for the Strand and the Gotham Book Mart. British historian Simon Schama responds to a review that said, "Schama stoops to low journalistic devices in order to arrest the attention of his readers," by saying, "That was a very wicked thing to do. How dare I? I'm trying to arrest the attention of my readers--it's much better if they fall asleep." And Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer James Thomas Flexner does not believe in word processors: "I think they make books much too long." (Of course, given that Foote wrote 1.5 million words with a dip pen, I'm not sure one can *entirely* blame word processors for this.)
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BOOKNOTES: STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY by Brian Lamb:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/11/2005]
Brian Lamb's BOOKNOTES: STORIES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY (ISBN 0-142-00249-6) is a collection of essays derived from the interviews on Lamb's show from C-SPAN, in specific with those authors who wrote books about American history. (Unfortunately, Lamb has decided to end the show.) Whoever did the editing did a reasonably good job, though at times the bracketed words and phrases used to cover elisions and references to dropped material get a bit obtrusive. Arranged chronologically by history (rather than by interview date), this book provides a way to dip into American history in small, conversational pieces. While it may seem superficial or skimpy at times, don't forget that these were interviews with authors of *books" about these topics, so the articles should be thought of as "free trials" for the books themselves.
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"Singing My Sister Down" by Margo Lanagan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
I cannot say very much about "Singing My Sister Down" by Margo Lanagan (BLACK JUICE; also THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY & HORROR [18th]) without giving away the premise, so I'll just say that while the idea showed some creativity, I did not find the story itself particularly engaging.
To order Black Juice from amazon.com, click here.
FLAMING LONDON by Joe R. Lansdale:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/17/2006]
FLAMING LONDON by Joe R. Lansdale (ISBN 1-59606-025-5) is another pastiche of Wells's WAR OF THE WORLDS. (2005 was definitely the year for WAR OF THE WORLDS: *three* new movies, and at least two new books.) From Subterranean Press, this is more aimed at the higher end of the market, like the Willis novella INSIDE JOB (which I reviewed in the 02/17/06 issue). There is supposedly a $25 trade hardcover edition in addition to the $40 signed, limited edition, which was not true of the Willis. However, it is also only 177 pages long, about 65,000 words. Considering how few words it has, it is a pity that so many are used to describe anatomical features of the nether regions. (It is not clear to me that we needed to read even once that the Martians generate gas through two posterior orifices. Telling us this four or five times is definitely unnecessary.) The language makes it clear that this is *not* intended as a young adult novel. And Lansdale's use of Mark Twain, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells is somewhat capricious--there is nothing in the story requiring them as opposed to any other characters. (But if he is going to use Twain, and if he is going to cite "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper", then he should at least spell it correctly.) Lansdale's writing shows more style--it is just that it is a style I do not like.
To order Flaming London from amazon.com, click here.
OUTWITTING HISTORY by Aaron Lansky:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/21/2005]
Aaron Lansky's OUTWITTING HISTORY (ISBN 1-56512-429-4) is the story of the National Yiddish Book Center from its origins in 1977 when he was just trying to collect Yiddish books for his classes in Montreal, through 1997, when the current National Yiddish Book Center opened. As Lansky has repeatedly said, when he started collecting Yiddish books to save them from being thrown out by people who didn't care about them, experts believed that there were no more than 70,000 Yiddish books in the world. So far, Lansky has collected, digitized, and re-distributed a million and a half. (Yiddish is the first language to have been completely digitized. All the NYBC's books are available as print-on-demand books, and will soon be available, free, on the Web.)
Lansky tells about some amazing stories about last-minute rescues, when people called in the middle of the night to say they had just discovered thousands of Yiddish books in a dumpster due to be hauled away the next day unless someone picked them up immediately.. But he tells other stories, such as being called by an old man in Atlantic City to come pick up some books. He arranged a few other stops in the area, then drove from Massachusetts to the high-rise where the man lived. He couldn't just pick up the books, though; the man insisted on serving him tea and telling him the history of each book. After a few hours, they finished and Lansky got ready to leave, but then the man tells him that he can't leave yet, because he told everyone in the twelve-story building about him--and they all have books for him. I'm sure some will see this as a very self-congratulatory book, but since Lansky has received (among other recognitions) a McArthur "Genius Grant", he's entitled. My main complaint is that there is no index.
(Disclaimer: We've been supporters of the National Yiddish Book Center for about fifteen years now, and even served as delivery agents, carrying a parcel of books to Vilnius University in Lithuania in 1994 because the NYBC could not trust the postal service there at that time.)
To order Outwitting History from amazon.com, click here.
JANE AUSTEN: THE WORLD OF HER NOVELS by Deirdre Le Faye:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/07/2007]
JANE AUSTEN: THE WORLD OF HER NOVELS by Deirdre Le Faye (ISBN-13 978-0-711-22278-6, ISBN-10 0-711-22278-9) is a delightful book that is divided into almost precisely two halves. The first, "The World of Jane Austen", is an overview of the England of the early 19th century: its society, its clothing, its transportation, its housing, and indeed every aspect of life of that time, with frequently references to how something specifically applies to Austen's novels (e.g. which characters drove which kind of carriages). The second half, "The Novels", is a summary of the plots of the novels, with elaborations on the topics discussed in the first half. This is a must-read for all Austen fans.
To order Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels from amazon.com, click here.
TALL, DARK AND GRUESOME by Christopher Lee:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/10/2006]
A lot of celebrity autobiographies are clearly written by ghost writers. Christopher Lee's autobiography, TALL, DARK AND GRUESOME by Christopher Lee (ISBN 1-887664-25-4), is not one of them. The style is so distinctive, so evocative of how Lee sounds when he speaks, that it must be written by Lee himself. Another sign is that it does not follow the usual "rule" of making sure the reader is clear on when things are taking place. Lee rarely gives a year for an event, although one can fix the dates in the later parts by what films Lee is talking about. However, none of this matters, because Lee's life is fascinating. For example, he was particularly interested in playing Rasputin, because of something that happened to him as a child: "I was once actually hauled out of bed to meet two men and shooed downstairs in my dressing gown, admonished to run the sleep out of my eyes because I would want to remember I'd met them. Well, I do remember them now--Prince Yusupoff and the Grand Prince Dmitri Pavlovich--though I was trundled back to bed without being told that they were two of the assassins of Rasputin." And when he was seventeen, a family friend took him to witness the last public execution (by guillotine) in France. Oh, yes, he talks about his movies too.
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THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD by Jennifer 8. Lee:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/13/2008]
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD by Jennifer 8. Lee (ISBN-13 978-0-446-58007-6, ISBN-10 0-446-58007-4) began in 2005 when the Powerball lottery had 110 second-place winners instead of the expected 3 or 4. Why? Because five of the six winning numbers were printed on thousands of slips in fortune cookies, and 110 people picked them in the lottery. Lee started out trying to find out the origins of the fortune cookie, and along the way also discovered the truth about General Tso's Chicken, what "chop suey" really is, why Jews like Chinese food (and at least something about the Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989), what the connection is between Chinese restaurants and illegal immigration, and why no one can agree on what soy sauce is. Eventually, Lee does track down the fortune cookie, but the digressions are actually more interesting than that particular search.
To order The Fortune Cookie Chronicles from amazon.com, click here.
BLAME IT ON THE RAIN by Laura Lee:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/10/2006]
BLAME IT ON THE RAIN by Laura Lee (ISBN 0-06-0833982-1) is subtitled "How the Weather Changed History", and it is a series of short pieces on how various historical events were affected by weather. There are the obvious ones (Napoleon's invasion of Russia) and the less familiar ones (Truman's defeat of Dewey), the short-term ones (the Challenger accident) and the long-term ones (the susceptibility of Native Americans to disease). While not all are interesting (and I am not sure I completely agree with some of her conclusions), it is probably worth flipping through at the library. (Mark pointed out that the cover art has a picture of Kennedy with the caption "Would JFK have been elected President if it had been sunny on Election Day in 1959"-- but 1) the election was in 1960, not 1959, and 2) this day is not discussed in the book.)
(Does it seem like every non-fiction book these days has a subtitle? This did not used to be true, but that was because back in my day they gave more meaningful titles to books, or assumed you understood the title. If you saw a book titled "Franklin Pierce", you assumed it was a biography of Franklin Pierce. You did not need a subtitle such as "The Unknown President" or "New Hampshire's Son" or whatever.)
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WARTIME PAPERS
by General Robert E. Lee:
RECOLLECTIONS AND LETTERS OF ROBERT E. LEE
by Captain Robert E. Lee:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/15/2005]
I read General Robert E. Lee's WARTIME PAPERS (ISBN 0-306-80282-1) and Captain Robert E. Lee's RECOLLECTIONS AND LETTERS OF ROBERT E. LEE (ISBN 0-914427-66-0) simultaneously, reading first General Lee's papers, and then his son Captain Lee's recollections of the war and of his father. (The son's volume covers Lee after the war as well.) For the serious student of the Civil War, I would obviously recommend General Lee's papers, which are far more detailed. But for the casual reader, Captain's Lee's book is probably a better overview that avoids the minutiae of troop movements and supply requisitions, while still providing enough extracts of Lee's letters to get some idea of his perspective.
To order Wartime Papers from amazon.com, click here.
To order Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee from amazon.com, click here.
THE FIRST TIME I GOT PAID FOR IT edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/08/2006]
THE FIRST TIME I GOT PAID FOR IT edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro (ISBN 0-306-81097-2) is a collection of short articles by screenwriters writing (mostly) about their first paying jobs (though some drift off-topic). Some are humorous, some depressing, and some merely informative. I found enough worthwhile to recommend the book to film fans, but I suspect that everyone will disagree on which the worthwhile ones are.
To order The First Time I Got Paid for It from amazon.com, click here.
CHANGING PLANES by Ursula K. LeGuin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/02/2004]
Ursula K. LeGuin's CHANGING PLANES sounded very promising in a review I read, about a woman who discovers how to travel to alternate planes of reality and visit unusual cultures. But I shouldn't have been surprised to find that rather than the Borgesian snippets (such as "The Babylonian Lottery") I had hoped for, what I got were stories very similar to most of LeGuin's other recent fiction, with a lot of "message" mixed in. They weren't bad, but I am seeing a certain "sameness" to her writing that makes me feeling I'm just reading the same piece over and over. (These are individual pieces, but thematically connected and all written specifically for this book, so some may consider this a novel that than a collection of short fiction.)
To order Changing Planes from amazon.com, click here.
"A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/06/2006]
"A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster (available in NESFA Press's FIRST CONTACTS: THE ESSENTIAL MURRAY LEINSTER, ISBN 0-915-36867-6) was recommended to Mark as very prescient. A home computer realizes it can tap the network of such computers (which Leinster calls "Logics") to help humanity in ways that had not been realized before. "Announcing new and improved Logics service! Your Logic is now equipped to give you not only consultative but directive service. If you want to do something and don't know how to do it--Ask your Logic!" So people start asking, "How can I get rid of my wife?" and "How can I keep my wife from finding out I've been drinking?" And they get useful answers. I tried these with "Ask Jeeves", the only search engine I know of that claims to take straight English-language questions; it did not give me anything useful. But the idea that someone could query the network for information about how to obtain a poison or build a bomb is very topical, and possible. Given that Leinster wrote "A Logic Named Joe" in 1946, or sixty years ago, that's pretty impressive. (KIRKUS REVIEWS calls it "the first computer-paranoia yarn.")
To order First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster from amazon.com, click here.
EDEN by Stanislaw Lem:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/06/2007]
Our science fiction discussion group's selection, EDEN by Stanislaw Lem (ISBN-10 0-156-27806-5, ISBN-13 978-0-156-27806-5), was written in Poland almost fifty years ago, yet one finds the following:
"Then you think it's impossible for us to help!" said the Chemist with vehemence.The Captain looked at him a long time before replying. "Help, my God. What do you mean by help? What's taking place here, what we're witnessing, is the product of a specific civilization, and we would have to destroy that civilization and create anew one--and how are we supposed to do that? These are beings with a physiology, psychology, and history different from ours. You can't transplant a model of our civilization here. And you would have to construct one, too, that would continue to function after our departure. . . . I suspected, for quite some time, that you had ideas similar to those of the Engineer. And that the Doctor agreed with me, which is why he kept discouraging us from making analogies to Earth. Am I right?"
"Yes," said the Doctor. "I was afraid that through an access [sic] of noble-mindedness you would all want to establish 'order' here, which in practice would mean a reign of terror." [page 219]
The odd thing is that I think that Lem was not echoing a common sentiment at the time. Indeed, one might claim it is an early example of cultural relativism, but it perfectly encapsulates our current problem.
To order Eden from amazon.com, click here.
THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS by Stanislaw Lem:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/03/2006]
"In the Rialto" by Connie Willis was nominated for a Hugo Award for 1989, and everyone talked about how the problems and situations at her "International Congress of Quantum Physicists Annual Meeting" were so like science fiction conventions. But no one seems to have commented on how similar the underlying ideas are to a book from 1974, THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS by Stanislaw Lem (translated by Michael Kandel, ISBN 0-156-34040-2). One can argue, I suppose, that the notion of a conference where things go very strangely is not an unusual one--BORGES AND THE ETERNAL ORANGUTANS (reviewed in the 01/20/06 issue) is set at a conference, for example. But the use of the word "Congress" reinforces my notion that Willis had read THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS at some point before writing her story.
As proof that everything fits together, the previous week our other discussion group read the Book of Job, and this week the science fiction group read THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, which refers to the Book of Job. It also has connections to the Philip K. Dick works we have been reading, such as when Lem has one of his characters say, "A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance."
It is, however, a translator's nightmare. I do not have the original Polish, but just the last ten lines on page 84 has the following words in English: locomotors, cyberserkers, electrolechers, succubuts, incubators, polypanderoids, multiple android procurers, high-frequency illicitation solicitrons, osculo-oscilloscopes, synthecs, gyroflies, automites, army ants, and submachine! Hats off to Michael Kandel (who has translated a lot of Lem's works).
I also love the Lem's inclusion of the quote from some (unidentified and possibly fictional) French philosopher: "It is not enough that we are happy--others must be miserable."
Arthur C. Clarke, in the early 1950s in CHILDHOOD'S END, thought that over five hundred hours of radio and television every day was an enormous number (it's the equivalent of about twenty full- time channels). Here Lem (in 1971) uses forty channels of television as an over-whelming number of choices.
To order The Futurological Congress from amazon.com, click here.
WORKING IX TO V by Vicki Leon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2008]
WORKING IX TO V by Vicki Leon (ISBN-13 978-0-8027-556-2, ISBN-10 0-8027-556-7) is about all the various jobs, professions, and occupations in the ancient world (Rome and Greece). The ones touted on the cover and in the advertising are orgy planner and funeral clown, but I found a note in one of the other entries more interesting. For town crier, Leon says, "To enhance his verbal communication in those unamplified times, the crier drew on 'chironomia', the laws of gesticulation also used by actors, orators, and demagogues ... which can be seen on series like HBO's ROME...." This confirms what I had thought while watching ROME, in which I found the system of gestures of the town crier (played by Ian McNeice) absolutely fascinating. There is apparently a standard treatise on this by John Bulwer, "Chirologia or the Natural Language of the Hand" (1644).
To order Working IX to V from amazon.com, click here.
MOVIES THAT MATTER by Richard Leonard, SJ:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/17/2006]
MOVIES THAT MATTER by Richard Leonard, SJ (ISBN 0-8294-2201-3) is not much more than a listing of fifty "inspirational" movies, or at least movies with spiritual and ethical elements. For example, the first film is GROUNDHOG DAY, and the "teachable topics" are "creation, conversion, and Lent." However, Leonard also claims that GROUNDHOG DAY repeated one day thirty-four times--and then he finds significance in this number. We may see only thirty-four different days, Bill Murray learns to play the piano very well in that time, and but it clearly must take him more days than that. Most of the films are set in the current time, with only a few of what we might call "religious" pictures (THE MISSION, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, THE EXORCIST, and THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST). And of these, Leonard strongly criticizes two of them (THE EXORCIST and THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST) on theological grounds. He is ironically much more favorable towards BRUCE ALMIGHTY and GLADIATOR. But the discussion of each film is very brief (really only about 500-600 words of text), and fairly superficial. (I note, however, that the lessons he draws from VERA DRAKE are very different than what I and many others drew.) It is interesting for the list of films covered, though. ("SJ" stands for Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits, and Leonard has a Ph.D. in cinema and theology.)
To order Movies That Matter from amazon.com, click here.