Updates

This post has nothing to do with another book I read. It has to do with books from the past few months.

1. The Oliver Stone book, "A Child's Night Dream". I passed it on to a friend. He also read chapter one and quit, saying it was stupid. Then he passed it to another friend....guess what. I say three strikes!

2. "The Iron Tracks" by Aharon Appelfeld (my 2nd book of 2009) still creeps into my thoughts. I may have to go back and read that one again at some point. it has obviously made more of an impression on me than I gave it credit for.

3. I forgot to mention that Sherman Alexie used the word somnambulist in "Ten Little Indians".

19. Partisans

Partisans by Alistair MacLean

I picked up this book because it was written by the author who wrote the books that inspired the movies "The Guns of Navarone", "Force 10 From Navarone" and "Where Eagles Dare". He also wrote "Ice Station Zebra". I remember these stories. I watched the films when I was young. I recall them fondly. I decided the read this book for that reason.
It took me a while to think this story was any good at all. I read about 75 pages and kept telling my daughter that the book stunk. Then things started happening in the story that made it better. I can't put a finger on it exactly, but I not longer thought it was a crappy story.
I don't find anything special in MacLean's writing abilities. This book was not anything wonderful, but it was not poorly written either. Just average.
This is a spy/war story that takes place during World War II. Most of the action takes place in the Balkans (Yugoslavia, Bosnia, etc.) and involves Yugoslavian Partisans fighting against the Italians and Germans. It is supposed to have all kinds of twists and turns that surprise the reader. So many twists that it made it hard to follow at times, but it has the obligatory fairy tale ending.
I could not help thinking the same thing over and over while reading this book. The group of "heroes" in the book just seemed too self-assured all the time. It just didn't seem real. I kept thinking of a mixture of two famous characters. One of them being Sherlock Holmes. The other being James Bond. Why those two?
James Bond was always so cocky and self-confident. No matter what happened or what situation he was in, he was always so freaking cool about it. It was like he had some divine insight where he knew he was going to escape and everything would be just fine, so why worry about anything.
Sherlock Holmes was irritating in a different way. He always seemed to have things figured out before anything happened. He was always pointing out to others how he would take some obscure thing and turn it into an "obvious" deduction that solved a crime. He always saw things others missed and when he pointed it out the other people had to feel like they were stupid.
The characters in Partisans repeatedly got into situations where they should have been stressed or worried, but never were. They were too cocky and would say the stupidest things to the guy with a gun at their heads. When the guys were piecing together the twists it was done through conversations with others that always left the other character looking like a moron for not figuring it out themselves. The other characters must have thought these guys were super geniuses.
Something I did like about the story was that in had two main characters that were supposed to be very good looking females. So what, right? What I found interesting was that there were no romantic sections or the obligatory sex scenes that find their way into all kinds of stories. Were there opportunities? Yes. Those opportunities came and went without being utilized. I was glad because usually they have absolutely nothing to do with the story and are thrown in for no good reason at all.
I did find it irritating the way the characters were much too confident and overly convenient the way events unfolded. Does that mean the book sucked? I guess not, because I enjoyed it in the long run despite it's shortcomings.
I read this book expecting to read something like the old WWII films "The Guns of Navarone" and "Force 10 From Navarone". The first was made in 1961. It starred Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn and others. I loved that movie. It had a small band of allied soldiers facing tremendous odds against an impregnable German fortress. This book came nowhere near my memory of that film. Then again, maybe my memory is glorifying something from my youth. It really doesn't matter much anyway. :-)

18. Ten Little Indians

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie

I found this book an the shelf at a Goodwill store. I remembered Mike's reviews of some of Alexie's work and decided to spend the ninety-nine cents. :-) I am glad I did.

Sherman Alexie's style is very interesting. This was a collection of short stories. All the stories have Indian main characters and families. There is a ton of humor and sarcasm in the writing, and much of the humor is of the self-deprecating type. Alexie is an Indian himself. He would understand what it feels like to be an Indian in today's society. He understands the problems faced by these people, how they view events of the past, and how they "fit" into the culture. Who better to poke fun at it than an insider.

Why is it interesting? The humor I mean. I learned from it. Why are these jokes funny? Normally I would not chuckle at someone saying the things Alexie wrote. The difference is that I think he wrote this book, and maybe his other works, to show me that I am not aware of the problems faced by these folks and the perceptions of the "white" people.

For instance, he mentions how people think that all indians are somehow more spiritually connected to the earth, water, animals and the wind than other people. He points out that this, and I must admit my own prejudice in this way, is not true. Indian people are just people. Some spiritual. Some not. Some smart. Some not so much. Just like everyone else. The stereotypical drunken gambling reservation living unemployed guy wearing black and a cowboy hat is used in the book. It is used to point out that there are people who fit that sterotype, but most do not.

These are short stories. I really enjoyed a few of them. "The Search Engine", "Can I Get A Witness?", "Flight Patterns" and "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above" were all excellent and eye-opening.

He covered a wide array of topics through these stories. Politics, religion, sexual-orientation, alcoholism, adultery, racism, relationships between parents and children, life on a reservation, and many more. Each story tackled different subjects. Some better than others, but always revealing more in the story than the events of the story itself.

I really liked how one Indian mother had instructed her 11 year old son. She told him that when a public school teacher said "Christopher Columbus discovered America", that he should run up to the front of the class, jump on the teacher's back, and yell "I discovered you!". See what I mean? It is wicked funny. It is sarcastic. It is actually quite hilarious. The problem is that the mother is correct. That is what I kept finding throughout this book. I was shown a few pieces of the world looking at it from a different angle. It could be a very different world.

I will read more Sherman Alexie works.

(Mike... If you want I will mail this one to you.)

17. Big Fish

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

It is an interesting story full of the recollections of a son concerning his dying father. The stories are pure fantasy. The fairy tales of a child. Things that are not physically possible that make a child think of his father as something akin to god.

Anyway, the book was OK, but it never really was able to grab me and hold me. It seemed choppy and had no real reason for the events being described. It was fun and whimsical, but also disconnected and random.

Maybe I missed something. I don't know. I don't care. It was good enough for someone to make a movie out of it, but I never heard of the movie either. Could it have been very good? Probably not something I would want to watch anyway.

Samantha liked this book enough to read it twice in her life. Maybe she will comment and tell me what I am not seeing. Maybe I am just too old to understand? LOL

17 down...so the book served it's purpose. :-)

I forgot. This book used the word somnambulist. There it was, right near the middle, clear as day. It made me smile. That is the third book that had the word this year. It was used to describe the way the wife was walking while entering the room where her husband was waiting to die. This was a small but powerful positive for Big Fish. :-)

16. The Man Who Moved A Mountain

The Man Who Moved A Mountain by Richard C. Davids

This book is the biography of a man named Bob Childress. The time was the early to mid 1900s. Bob grew up in Appalachia,a part of western Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The people and the culture was very rough. Moonshiners were everywhere. It was a violent place where people fought and killed each other as normal day to day activities. It was much like the old west I guess. Lawless in a way.

Bob Childress was raised in this culture. He was a drinker and a fighter. He was a man that many feared in the Blue Ridge area due to his physical prowess.

Bob grew to realize that the way the people were living was self-destructive. He understood why it was the way it was, but he also wanted to change it. he wanted to bring the people out of poverty and give them self-respect. He wanted them to be educated and god-fearing.

He moved away and became a Presbyterian preacher. He then returned to the Blue Ridge area and settled on Buffalo Mountain. He spent the rest of his life caring for the people there. Setting an example for them. Fighting for them. Fighting against them. Doing it in the mountain man way. He spoke out against many things that were ingrained in their culture. Drinking being a big one, and a dangerous one to take on, because moonshine was a highly profitable business. One thing that is for sure is that Bob Childress was a very bold and gutsy guy who cared very much for other people.

The book is not the best written thing I have ever read. It is just a biography. It is story after story of the things Bob Childress did. Much of it is from recollections of friends and family. Some of it is quite hard to believe, but may be true in some exaggerated sense.

Even if the stories are exaggerated, Bob Childress did a lot of good work in them thar hills. He helped the people there and the entire region changed. Good for him.

A pleasant read with some insight into an area that is steeped in tradition and superstition. It was fun to read about an area that I consider one of the most beautiful places in our country I have ever seen.

One thing I found especially interesting was the Primitive Baptist Church in this area. This church thought the preachers should be ignorant and uneducated. The stupider they were the better. These people couldn't even read the Bible that they were preaching about. Why? The people believed that if someone was that ignorant then whatever they said MUST have come from God. They were too ignorant to learn it and too stupid to make it up. Ugh. Needless to say, the stuff they preached was far from biblical at all.

This is a decent book if you run out of things that you really want to read. I enjoyed it, but I can't say I would put it at the top of any lists.

15. One Thousand White Women

One Thousand White Women, The Journals of May Dodd - Jim Fergus

I took a while to read this book because life happened. It had nothing to do with the book. I really enjoyed reading it.

The story is formed mostly through a series of journal entries. The protagonist is a white woman from Chicago. She has volunteered to take part in a two year government program where white women are to become brides to Cheyenne Indians, live with the Cheyennes, and to have mixed race babies. Does that sound far fetched and stupid? It sounded pretty darned stupid to me.

Then I found that the way it was all stitched together made the story believable. Not probable, but believable anyway.

I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the author's note at the beginning of the book says the inspiration for the novel was from an actual historical event. He says that "in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the US Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to the mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world."

The author took liberties with and greatly expanded upon that incident. I can imagine the laughter from the Army at the time. No way in hell would that be allowed to happen.

Well...it does happen in the book. May Dodd is one of the brides. Her story is fascinating. The descriptions of the "savage" way of life is quite revealing. Yes, they repeatedly call the Indians savages. It is not a politically correct book. That is on purpose.

I found this book to be very interesting. The interactions between the different brides, the brides and the warriors, the brides and the squaws, the Army and the Cheyenne people, all very interesting. The relationships between Catholics, Protestants and others were interesting.

Some of the characters were a real pisser. The Kelly twins and their Irish accent and street wise ways. Gretchen, a large and very strong Swiss woman with another heavy accent who marries a lazy and fearful guy who she "controls" in some humorous ways. Euphemia, a black "white" woman who is an escaped slave and is an amazing story in her progression to becoming a warrior herself. There were more than a dozen different characters that were well developed and I got a sense of who they really were.

I very much enjoyed this book. Some of the subject matter, the events of the book, are pretty unsettling (war, raids, racism, sexism, etc) but the book was a lot of fun to read.

I think the thing I liked the most about the book were the descriptions of the land, the wildlife, the places. I could see it. I could smell it. I could imagine it. It made me long for it...and made me wonder if that was the place Chris McCandless was seeking. I imagine it was.

14. Lolita

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This is a very well written book. The words flow brilliantly and the vocabulary is tremendous. The descriptiveness of so many details is amazing. I am thoroughly impressed, especially since English is not Nabokov's first language.

Then...I am disgusted. You see, I have a 12 year old adopted daughter who happens to be quite beautiful. I have a 19 year old and a 4 year old also, but I will use the 12 year old as my example because Lolita was 12. Anyway, is my daughter a nymphet? I am quite sure there are people out there that think exactly that. That thought is revolting to me and in turn makes this book very hard to stomach.

I have seen the blurb that says it is a love story. I think that is total bull. This was not love. This was obsessive animal instinct in a man with zero self control and no idea what a father is. He is a very smart, cunning and calculating individual who deludes himself into thinking he is in love. He just pretended to be a father in order to corner his conquest in a situation where he was the authority, the provider, the security, the safety net. He used those to take advantage of this young girl.

I have seen where others have said that the words somehow make them feel sympathy for or empathetic toward the plight of Humbert Humbert. I never felt any of that. Then man was making conscious decisions and actively pursuing a self-proclaimed deviant lifestyle. From the moment he kissed Annabelle as a young man he was looking for a situation exactly like he was able to form with Dolores. Even when Dolores was under his control and after she was gone he was still watching and making comments about other little girls. He saw Dolores crying every night and did not care except for his own will and wishes. She would continually say "Oh no" when he made his advances. She flat asked him when they could stop traveling, stop doing disgusting things and live like normal people. She was just a little girl who was all alone and being used.

I also read a comment about moral relativism. What is done in other societies and during other periods of time does not make any difference. Nabokov was alive in the 19th century living in Europe and America. The book was set in America in the 1940's. I read this book in America today. That framework is what is relevant to this story, not some 15th century aboriginal tribe in New Zealand that says it is OK for a father to rape his 12 year old daughter.

I am thankful that Nabokov chose never to write about the actually sexual actions that the reader is left to imagine. This book is in no way pornographic.

One last thing, I don't speak, read or understand french. It is used so much that I feel that part of the story was lost on me. Do I care? Not very much.

I loved the writing but the subject matter is repulsive to me and therefore I cannot say in good conscience that I recommend this book to anyone but a die hard literature lover. I will say it is good because it is so well written.

I am glad I am finished with this one.

13. The World According to Mister Rogers

The World According to Mister Rogers; Important Things to Remember by Fred Rogers

This book is a collection of quotations from Fred Rogers. They are from his famous PBS TV show, interviews, speeches and his writings. It was a very quick read and is full of nice guy wisdom...exactly what I would expect from Mr. Rogers.

Some short examples:

"Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing."

That reminded me of something my father said once when he was trying to show me the difference between being lonely and being alone. They are very different.

"All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said "You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you have ever been."

"Children who have learned to be comfortably dependent can become not only comfortably independent, but can also become comfortable with having people depend on them. They can lean, or stand and be leaned upon, because they know what a good feeling it can be to feel needed."

"There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth."

"Peace means far more than the opposite of war!"

Lots and lots of quotes.

12. The Jungle

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

This book is categorized as political and historical fiction. There are good reasons why.

The book is credited with being a catalyst for real change. It is very rare when a work of fiction creates a real-world problem to be corrected. Published in 1906 and revealing the "wage slavery" and corruption within the meat packing industry, this book literally caused an uproar in America. This book put the disgusting practices of the industry in a public form and people reacted. Sales of American meat took a nosedive following publication. People were scared of eating diseased meat. The meat packing industry ended up lobbying the federal government to help them show the world that the meat was safe. This lobby and the public outcry are why President Theodore Roosevelt initiated an investigation that led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (which later became the FDA).

"I aimed at the publics heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The quote above is what Mr. Sinclair says about the reaction to his book. Why did he say this? Upton Sinclair was an outspoken Socialist Journalist. He was a muckraker extraordinaire. He had an agenda and he pushed that agenda all of his life (into the 1960's). His point in writing this book was not to fix the meat packing industry. His point was to show the ungodly working and living conditions of the people. His goal was to have the workers organize and promote a Socialist agenda. The public reaction didn't really care about that at all. They cared deeply about the meat on their own tables being safe. I think the quote is very appropriate.

The story itself is about a Lithuanian immigrant family that comes to Chicago in pursuit of the American dream. The story is a never ending stream of misery and misfortune. Try as they might, these poor people keep falling down again and again. The system is designed to make them feel like they have a chance. Just enough of a chance to try. To try very hard. The problem is that they really never have a chance from the very start. It is made for them to perpetually lose.

From the very beginning I felt bad for these people. Time after time I would think, yes, that is the direction you should take...do that...and they would. Time after time there was something that happened and caused them to be even worse than they were before. There were times when I physically had a tear in my eye. (Damn you Upton Sinclair!)

So, life sucks repeatedly, until Jurgis (the main character) is exposed to and joins the Socialist party. Well, isn't that just amazing how nothing goes bad from that point. Life is wonderful and everything just happens to fall in place. Yeah, right. The last 80 pages or so of the book is really a very ling dissertation about the strengths of Socialism. Amazingly, while reading it I thought it sounded really good. What a wonderful idea. Yes, that makes sense. But, I know it is missing parts that are really needed for the system to work.

Mr. Sinclair wrote this whole misery and agony novel in order to show the reasons why Socialism was a better option. He exposed more than just bad business policy in the meat packing industry. He showed the real truth about how the businesses, governments, big company trusts (oil, railroad, coal, etc) colluded to hold men down, and much more. The American people got pissed about dirty meat, acted on that, and then chose to mostly ignore the rest.

The book was a good read. Sometimes, I felt like I was reading a very long article in a newspaper. That makes sense because Sincalir was a journalist for the now defunct Socialist paper Appeal to Reason. It went into very graphic detail throughout the entire book. It was descriptive enough to give me a mental image of everything described.

My only problem with the book (besides the conclusion dragging on and on about the benefits of Socialism) was all the Lithuanian names (Jurgis, Ona, Elzbieta, Marija, Jokubus, Jadvyaga, Tamoszius, etc etc). They were difficult to follow because they were unfamiliar. It took a while to get them all straight. Other than that it was a damned good book and I am glad I read it.

PS...I am not going to argue the pros and cons of Socialism in this blog.

11. Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry by Gail A. Eisnitz

The second book I read recently that has to do with the U.S. meat industry, slaughterhouses, the USDA and the failures of all of the above.

This author came from a different angle than the fast food book. Her concerns are based on inhumane acts and animal rights. She does not feel that cattle, hogs, chickens, sheep, etc, should be tortured before or during the butchering process.

To tell you the truth, I did not care all that much about the animal rights part of the book that she emphasized. Yes, I would prefer that a cow was "stunned" properly and was not conscious while being slaughtered. It is the "law" that is should be that way. I would rather the animal did not feel the pain. On the other hand, I also understand that the business is there to make a profit. Stopping the line costs money. I understand not stopping the line for an animal. Call me a heartless bastard for that if you like.

On the other hand, when the company does things that cause the animals to be alive, I have a problem with them. The "knocker" is supposed to stun the animal. When you use a smaller bolt in the stunner or turn down the air pressure/current it will not function as advertised. When this is done on purpose to increase throughput it puts us all at unnecessary risk.

An animal hanging from the hook alive is thrashing and kicking. That makes it difficult to get a clean cut. That causes things to get cut that shouldn't. That causes things to fly around that normally wouldn't.

Also...it creates a very dangerous work environment. If you are supposed to make a cut on 1200 bulls each day and 25% of them are alive, well, that is an awful lot of wrestling huge animals, with razor sharp knives in your hands, in tight quarters, on slippery surfaces, under intense managerial pressure to perform. That is where I really start to care. Those are people taking those risks.

And then there is the USDA/FDA angle to the story. It opened my eyes to a few things. Under Reagan and Bush this industry was deregulated. The USDA already had minimal authority to do anything, now they had even less and had bigger problems. Clinton made it even worse because he was in the pockets of the Tyson guys who helped get him elected. All kinds of laws are passed. All kinds of new standards are initiated.... but none of them work. They don't work because the meat packing companies are running the show.

It is a very interesting read. I sat down at my mother-in-laws dinner table last night. She had a steak on my plate. Normally I would have just ate it and enjoyed. This time I looked at it and thought... "Was this cow alive when they pulled off it's hide?" "Did this piece of meat come in contact with manure?" "Was the person who cut this steak an illegal alien who is afraid to speak up about the horrors in his workplace?"

I am not a big union supporter. I think they have passed the period when they were most useful and create problems in many instances. Some unions are different though. Some are needed. Is one needed here? Should the AFL/CIO be representing these people? Yes! Yes, they should be.

Meat packers used to be unionized. They got broken up. Most shops now have employee turnover rates so high that the people are not around long enough to organize. That and many are the type of folks who are "non-persons" as far as wanting any attention.

The USDA is a joke also. Talk about a fox in a hen house. The USDA leadership came from the meat-packing industry. What the hell should we expect? We put the guys in charge of inspecting the work when the same guys are in charge of maximizing profit.

No wonder the rates of infection have increased dramatically in the last 25 years.

Fast Food Nation convinced me there is shit in your meat. Slaughterhouse showed me there is not only shit, but worms, maggots, abscesses, puss, urine, and countless other things that are definitely not "meat".

I doubt I will look at a hamburger the same way again.

Gail Eisnitz now works for the Humane Farming Association. See their site for more info.

Next book: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Both Fast Food Nation and Slaughterhouse state that this novel created such a stir in 1906 that President Teddy Roosevelt investigated and made wholesale changes to the U.S. meat packing industry. I am wondering what that novel said. Then I will move on and get away from the whole meat and animals stuff for a while.