This is mostly a fluffy little point-of-sale book by the editors of Lonely Planet, the kind of empty, pretty, social-media-friendly nonsense that no oThis is mostly a fluffy little point-of-sale book by the editors of Lonely Planet, the kind of empty, pretty, social-media-friendly nonsense that no one ever buys for themselves, but is exclusively given as goofy little birthday gifts from one friend to another. But still, of the 50 ideas shared here about how to "be a tourist in your own home city," I found ten that were intriguing enough to write down and try out after the pandemic is over, including such concepts as pretending to be backpacker in your hometown for a weekend (complete with a stay at your local hostel), spending a day flipping a coin at every street intersection and letting the results dictate whether you turn left or right, and coming up with three common words that stereotypically describe your city and then the spend the day engaging in their antonyms. So in this, it was at least worth the time and effort it took for me to check out of my local library, although I'm not too sure whether it's worth the $18 it costs to buy it brand-new. It comes recommended in this limited spirit, a fun little book to check out when it belongs to someone else, but not one really worth purchasing on your own. ...more
Like most of the sailing memoirs I've read over the years, Douglas Fricke's Catamaran Crossing is a slight yet pleasant enough tale, in which we watchLike most of the sailing memoirs I've read over the years, Douglas Fricke's Catamaran Crossing is a slight yet pleasant enough tale, in which we watch our protagonist and his friends slowly travel from the coast of Spain over to the Caribbean islands, having the kinds of minimalist adventures that you would expect one to have under those circumstances. It's a languid story, told with competent but pedestrian prose, with highs and lows that aren't so much peaks as they are gentle rolling waves, sort of the literary equivalent of getting quietly drunk on a Key West beach while listening to a Jimmy Buffett album. I'm assuming that this was Fricke's whole point, so in this the book is quite successful, although your own results may vary depending on how much you too like drinking pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. ...more
In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets a study-abroad opportunity in Amsterdam and decides while he's there that he's going to write a journalistic expose about the prostitutes of the red-light district, not by doing anything sensible like taking out an ad looking for interview subjects or working with an existing advocacy group, but by walking around at midnights directly soliciting the women in their windows while they're in the middle of trying to work; then immediately "falls in love" with the very first prostitute who will give him the time of day, doing such creepy things as buying her jewelry to commemorate their first afternoon coffee, and non-consensually holding her hand on the sidewalk whenever they walk from one interview location to another, eventually insisting that they have a "special connection" when after three months of constant harassment he finally wears her down enough to agree to an afternoon interview in her apartment, then promptly throws the manuscript into a locked drawer for twenty years afterwards so that it won't create any problems for him in his new job as (of fucking course) an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles.
To be fair, David Wienir's book is actually better than what I just described, which at least has the virtue of being a clear-eyed historical document about the state of Amsterdam's red-light district in the late 1990s, a pre-EU, pre-9/11 age when everything was still cheap, Americans were still beloved by locals, and far-right conservatives hadn't yet taken over the Dutch national consciousness. I wanted to start my review the way I did, though, because if you find any of the above statements to be repulsive, there isn't a single chance you're going to like this often infuriating book, a culturally tone-deaf memoir that's a virtual blueprint for everything the #MeToo movement is complaining about these days. Wienir stumbles his way through the red-light district, committing gaffes left and right and then rightly assuming that his winning aw-shucks smile and his ownership of a penis will get him out of any trouble his frat-bro antics might get him into; then when his three-month slumming field trip is over, he goes straight back into the married suburban upper-middle-class no-repercussions life he knew all along was waiting for him, making a series of empty promises to all his new international vagabond friends and then promptly abandoning them the moment this intimacy parasite got what he was looking for from them. Those like me with an interest in learning how the mechanics of Amsterdam's red-light district actually work will find sections in this book that will scratch that itch; but all others are wise to stay far away from this virtual paean to oblivious white-dude entitlement....more
This just happened to come up to the top of my "check out at the library next" list a mere three days before it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for FicThis just happened to come up to the top of my "check out at the library next" list a mere three days before it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which is fortuitous because I would've never gotten my hands on it if it had been just a week later. And the good news is that all the hype you've heard about it is true -- I'm not exaggerating when I say that Less made even cynical ol' me quite literally laugh out loud in public at least a dozen times while reading it, which is the first time a Pulitzer winner has done so since A Confederacy of Dunces way back in 1985.
Of course, it helps that I happen to be the same exact age as our hero, poor put-upon gay author Arthur Less, who like all Gen-Xers is stuck between two generations that will ultimately be much more famous than his, anthropomorphized quite nicely in this story; originally a young chickenhawk lover in the '80s of a much older writer, who had become famous as a member of a school of Baby Boomer gay authors who came of age in the countercultural 1970s, at 49 he now finds himself recently ending a relationship with his own young chickenhawk boyfriend, a Millennial who seems to be going in fertile creative directions that our poor creatively stymied Less will never achieve. It's the Millennial ex's surprise wedding engagement that fuels the events of this book; for instead of bravely facing the impending nuptials, Less decides to finally accept a series of longstanding invitations to various international literary festivals, workshops, and guest professorships, essentially sending him on a trip literally around the planet, as he simultaneously deals with his looming 50th birthday, the catty gay literary community he left behind, and the mounting pressure to sell his letters from his former hippie lover to an academic library that is trying to build the world's largest collection of this group's papers.
To be clear, you don't have to be gay to be delighted by this book, even though it's mired mostly in issues having to do with that community -- Less is dismayed, for example, to discover that the politically charged LBGTQ generation younger than him consider him an "inauthentic gay author," because he doesn't write enough about "gay issues," news that our hapless narrator greets with confusion and a loving dry humor, a typical example of the types of subjects you'll see if you pick up this book and how those subjects are handled. But a big part of this novel is simply about the process of aging, no matter what your orientation, which makes it more relatable to a general audience than it might seem at first; and of course this is to say nothing of the complex and deftly handled interplay Greer pulls off here between the Baby Boomer, Generation X and Millennial generations, writing this at pretty much the only moment in history that such a story could ever be written, a masterful undercurrent to the absurdist proceedings that doesn't get the kind of credit from reviewers that it deserves.
One of the few academic award winners of recent years that I can sincerely say that I legitimately loved, Less's Pulitzer win says great things not just about the book but about the Pulitzer committee too, in a year when the Nobel Prizes literally had to cancel their own literary award because their nominating committee had turned into such a shitshow. Politically aware and sensitive to three different generations of concerns, Greer never lets this stop him from the regular dark jokes and bizarro plot turns that make this manuscript sing, the rare novel that can be loved both by the dour #MeToo college student and their Bachelor-watching suburban mom. It comes strongly recommended, one of the few titles from 2017 that you absolutely don't want to miss. ...more
Not much to say about this one, because it has a very simple premise -- it's simply a list of 111 interesting places in Chicago and the surrounding suNot much to say about this one, because it has a very simple premise -- it's simply a list of 111 interesting places in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, some of them more famous and some of them less. A publication that firmly fits in the "tourist books for locals" category, it makes a great gift for any Chicagoan in your life; although if you're buying it for yourself, better to simply check it out of the library and take 15 minutes to type the list into a Word document. ...more
Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018.Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018....more
DECLINED TO REVIEW. I don't quite know what it is that causes about a third of all expat novels I read to fall flat into complete unreadability to me,DECLINED TO REVIEW. I don't quite know what it is that causes about a third of all expat novels I read to fall flat into complete unreadability to me, like was the case with Rose McGinty's Electric Souk, with which I spent an entire month forcing myself through the first 100 pages before finally giving up. I suppose it's the same thing that makes expat travel diaries so unreadable to me as well, which is that so many of them are these lifeless logs of blase activities ("It was hot today; I visited a historic mosque; then my mates and I had an ale at an Irish pub") that the author thinks adds up to legitimate literature, but is really no more compelling than someone's discarded shopping list. This is exacerbated in McGinty's case by her decision to make the main "drama" of her book the administrative soap operas of a medical clinic in an (I think unnamed?) Arabian nation-state, which absolutely is not a substitute for a legitimately compelling narrative ("Oh no! The money for the clinic has been stolen by the corrupt medical board! Whatever will happen?"); she then alternates these scenes with ones of the expat staff getting drunk every night at an expat bar and bitching about all the administrative soap operas of their medical clinic, which is absolutely not a substitute for compelling character development. Based on the book's synopsis, I'm assuming the storyline gets a lot more exciting deeper into it; but that's worthless if you can't get through the pages leading up to the exciting part, like was the case with me. I no longer assign scores to books I don't finish, but it's safe to say that I don't recommended this. ...more
(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction (As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction listing there.)
So why should a serious book collector pay any attention to a volume that's less than ten years old, by an author who has otherwise not proven that she has any lasting power within the literary industry? Because Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love may in fact turn out to be the absolute perfect book to chronicle for future historians exactly what it was like to be a middle-class white suburban American female in the years following 9/11, a period that is bound to become a point of obsession for those in the future studying the US's rise and fall as a global superpower. A reluctant suburbanite who had just gone through a bitter divorce, the mid-thirties Gilbert found herself in the early 2000s mentally adrift, a confessed "self-help junkie" who was trying every gimmicky piece of advice that landed her way, being force-fed a diet of anti-depressive medication against her wishes but too afraid of the alternative to stop them. Within such a moment of mid-life crisis, then, she made the radical decision to sell all her things, get rid of her New York apartment, and spend a year doing nothing but traveling to what she called the "three I's" -- Italy (to indulge a random desire to learn the language), India (to delve more seriously into her recent conversion to Hinduism), and Indonesia (specifically to Bali, to spend four months as the personal assistant to a "village elder" she previously met during her job as a globe-trotting magazine journalist).
The results of this year-long trek are charming and infectious, and it's no surprise that the book remained on the NYT bestseller list for a whopping 187 weeks straight, later made into a high-profile movie produced by Brad Pitt and starring Julia Roberts. And that's because Gilbert cuts through the usual "chick-lit" filler here, having the courage to take a cruelly hard look at her mistakes and her weaknesses, and showing how spending a year letting go of every expectation she had had about life was ironically the best thing she could've ever done for that life. It's a call for simplicity, spirituality and anti-materialism that resonated profoundly with tens of millions of women in the same position as her, which says a lot about the point of runaway consumerism and moral bankruptcy the US had reached by the beginning of the 21st century; and it doesn't hurt that the book is also laugh-out-loud funny at points, moving sometimes to the point of tears, and just so happens to hit all the usual beats of a typical romantic comedy but this time in real life. A perfect gift for a fan of the book who wants to have a closer relationship with the original text, this first printing in flawless condition is being offered at a price specifically for young beginning collectors, those looking to add important titles to their library now when no one else is thinking of them, to ripen and age like a fine wine into the valuable commodities they'll one day be. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although I enjoyed Mark Kurlansky's newest nonfiction book Havana, I don't actually have a lot to say about it, simply because there's not much to it in the first place; not exactly a travel guide to this capital of Cuba, not exactly a history, and not exactly a memoir, it's instead a curious mix of them all, what you might call a "biographical sketch of a city" in the spirit of Peter Ackroyd's London. As such, then, it makes for pleasant surface-level reading, a book that has a general theme per chapter but then spits out random factoids within each of these chapters, full of interesting trivia (did you know that the Sloppy Joe sandwich was invented in Cuba?), but that never really digs down into a deeper or more meaningful look at this fascinating, complicated city. With the Obamian normalization of relations between the US and Cuba, now has never been a better time to read a light but engaging book like this, one that will give most Americans their first look at this most curious of Caribbean destinations; hopefully it will serve to whet your appetite for more.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Unbeknownst to readers of this blog, I've been spending this summer tearing through a bunch of books on Buddhism and especially Buddhist meditation; I've started practicing a secular form of meditation in my personal life over the last year, and the insights I've had about my life because of it was recently referred to by a friend as "accidentally Buddhist" in nature, so I thought it'd be interesting to learn a little more about actual Buddhism and to see why my friend made this comment in the first place. The books have generally been hit-and-miss, the natural side-effect of just grabbing a bunch of random titles off the shelf of my neighborhood library; but one of the best writers on the subject of Buddhism in America has turned out to be a local, Columbia College professor Stephen Asma who takes a decidedly blue-collar, rationalist, and no-bullshit approach to his interpretations of these ancient texts, and how they can be applied to the practical lives of contemporary Westerners, without needing all the hippie New Age accoutrements that have typically been carried with them into our country. And thus have I ended up making my way this summer through nearly the entirety of Asma's oeuvre, from practical guides to meditation to a "for dummies" style introduction to the philosophy.
His latest that I've read, though, 2005's The Gods Drink Whiskey, I thought was finally the kind of book that could be justified writing about here at the blog for a general audience; and that's because this is not just a hyper-specialized guide to Buddhism itself, but a sprawling and fascinating look at a year Asma spent in southeast Asia (headquartered in Cambodia but traveling extensively through the rest of the region), where he blends lessons about religion and philosophy with an engaging travelogue, a primer on the politics of these developing nations, and an astute sociological look at how Buddhism has been warped and changed by various local populations in order to fit what they've needed to get out of it. And indeed, by constantly comparing this process to the one Christianity has gone through in the Western world (think of prim Mormons in their Sunday finest, snake handlers in Texas, suburban liberals in New England, and Midwestern fundamentalists flailing about and speaking in tongues, all of whom are supposedly worshipping the same Jesus), Asma makes it easy to understand why there's so many different forms of Buddhism in southeast Asia, why they've been so influenced by the local culture of each area, and why there's so much disagreement between different sects over how to "properly" practice. (Just for one example, and probably the biggest surprise to Americans in the entire book, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism only comprises six percent of all practicing Buddhists worldwide, and is considered by most Buddhists to be an overly fussy, overly ritualistic form of the philosophy that relies way too heavily on mysticism and supernatural elements.)
All this would be interesting enough; but like I said, what makes this book truly spectacular is the way Asma weaves in his personal anecdotes about his travels there, and especially the ironic surrealism of being one of the most experienced veterans at the Cambodian Buddhist Institute where he was hired to teach, which is what brought him over there in the first place. (Although Cambodia is one of the nations where Buddhism was first cultivated thousands of years ago, the monstrous Pol Pot dictatorship of the 1960s and '70s systematically murdered nearly an entire generation of Buddhist teachers and practitioners, leaving an all-consuming gap in expertise after that radical Communist regime was defeated that has forced the nation to do things like hire Americans to come and teach their newest generation of Buddhist youths.) A funny, moving, eye-opening and always informative book, despite this now being a decade old it turned out to be one of the most illuminating and enjoyable travel journals I've read in years, which is why I wanted to do a writeup of it here for the main blog and not just my usual quick mention at Goodreads.com, like I've been doing with all the other Buddhism books I've been reading this summer. It comes very strongly recommended, as does Asma's other books, to anyone looking to get a better sense of what Buddhism is all about as a practical, secular philosophy, apart from the spiritual trappings it's picked up along the way from the various regional communities who have adopted it over the centuries. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although there's nothing particularly outstanding about Mike Robbins' The Nine Horizons, travel fans will want to pick up a copy anyway, simply because it's such a solid and strong example of a classic travelogue based on real experiences. Split into nine chapters detailing nine trips the British author made throughout the 1980s and '90s, this has the formal tone of an older travel writer like George Orwell, a certain primness to the proceedings that helps keep the sometimes outrageous stories about exotic locations in check; and I must admit, it's fascinating to read so long after the fact Robbins' political observations about certain areas of the world that were once hotbeds twenty or thirty years ago but no longer are (or are sometimes hot again for entirely different reasons, like his entertaining account of a pre-Arab-Spring Syria). Although not a genre-crossing "must read" even for people who don't particularly like travelogues, it certainly should go in your to-be-read list if you are, an illuminating and well-done series of vignettes that kept me quickly turning pages until I was done.
Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for fans of travel writing ...more
(In October 2015, my arts center had a chance to sell a first edition, first printing of Mark Twain's "Following the Equator." [Want to see if it's st(In October 2015, my arts center had a chance to sell a first edition, first printing of Mark Twain's "Following the Equator." [Want to see if it's still for sale? Visit http://www.ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter .] Below is the write-up I did of it for the eBay listing.)
By 1894 Mark Twain was already famous but was also almost completely broke, because of a bad series of investments in futuristic technology that would've never been able to work at the time they were being invented (he sunk what would now be eight million dollars alone into a machine that was designed to automatically set its own type like a computer); and so to get himself out of debt, he agreed to go on another of his famous worldwide tours, this time to far-flung locations all within the Victorian British Empire (including Australia, India, South Africa and more), not only to do a hugely profitable series of speaking engagements but then to write down his experiences into a third volume of darkly humorous foreign travelogues, after his insanely successful The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad. The aging Twain disliked the trip, lamenting that he couldn't just stay at home with his family; but the result is the exquisite 1897 Following the Equator, a grand return to his youthful irreverent form, after starting to get a little more high-falutin' in his themes and scope in his recent novels. (Huck Finn had been published less than a decade before, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a few years after that.)
For those who only know Twain through classroom assignments on these more famous novels, his travel writing is a real revelation, a series of grumpy and subversive dispatches on the idiocy of the human race no matter where they live, which essentially made him the Gilded Age's version of P.J. O'Rourke. Today's copy is an ultra-rare true first printing in great shape, commanding the premium price it deserves, and will automatically become one of the jewels in any Victoriana or American Humor collection that it's added to, appropriate even for acquisition by a historical society or small museum. Don't hesitate with your interest, for this is sure to sell before too long. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the originalFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
APOLOGIA: A deliberately all-positive critical essay, usually written in an effort to get others to believe in a specific thing the author believes
Why I Signed 'Historia, Historia' -- An Apologia.
I've read and reviewed 150 books a year, every single year, since CCLaP opened in 2007, which means that I should be crossing the thousand-title count any day now; and that means I've read multiple versions of just about every story type there is now, and am familiar now with every trope in all of them. And so that makes it very refreshing to come across a manuscript like Eleanor Stanford's Historia, Historia; because Peace Corps memoirs are surprisingly one of the most trope-filled story types out there, and it's always a relief to find one that takes a really unique approach to telling its story. And I say 'surprising,' of course, because stories about the Peace Corps always have so much adventure and intensity and life-changing lessons built into them, and they always feel like such unique experiences to the people who go through them; but much like one's first international backpacking trip, ironically these unique experiences tend to repeat in their details from one person to the next, diluting the enjoyment with each retelling until you're finally greeting each new Peace Corps memoir someone's given you with a resigned shrug.
What Eleanor does, though, is dispense altogether with the usual beats of the early-twenties journal-like autobiographical Peace Corps book -- there are no overly detailed descriptions of fellow hippie undergrads, no comic misunderstandings among the locals -- and instead delves straight into meaty stuff about the culture and history of the Cape Verde Islands off western Africa where she ended up, and about the Portuguese-derived creole language they speak. And that's because Eleanor is now a thirtysomething professional who's greatly admired in the academic community, whose previous book was published by the prestigious Carnegie Mellon Press, so she knows how to approach a book like this in a much more engaging and unique way; she has the fastidiousness of a journalist but the outlook of a poet, so can pen essays that are as moving as they are informative. And so as she drops us in the middle of this environment, we also learn about its colonial history and slavery legacy, how its history as a formerly uninhabited land that is still barely self-sustaining shapes the very personalities of the people who live there, and all kinds of other fascinating things about the sociology and geology of this often magical place. Granted, we see all this through the eyes of someone formally associated with the Peace Corps organization, and this story is as much about that process and all its ups and downs as it is anything else; but it's a case here of its total being bigger than a mere sum of its parts, a Lonely Planet guide mixed with a graduate thesis and blended with a coffeehouse poetry reading until reaching a smooth, cool puree.
But then the final kicker to it all, and the reason it passed that last hurdle and ended up getting signed, is that it's even more than all this -- it's also a gripping personal tale along the lines of Marya Hornbacher's Pulitzer-nominated Wasted (in fact, Ms. Hornbacher was kind enough to provide this book with a pre-publication blurb), about the sudden eating disorder Eleanor developed while in Cape Verde, despite never having a history with this subject at any point in her past. And this is an extremely difficult thing to pull off, to combine a very mainstream-friendly format like this with the intellectual finery of the academic side; because let's face it, a lot more of these personal-essay collections turn out instead like that Augusten Burroughs dreck I can't stand reading, a style which simply must be tempered with exacting language and finessed research to be palatable at all. Eleanor does that here, which results in a powerful and deeply rewarding reading experience; and both I and all of CCLaP's assistant editors immediately knew we had something special on our hands when we saw this, after arriving in our mailbox as a cold submission out of the blue back last autumn, part of that glut of submissions we got right after an extremely flattering profile of us ran in last fall's Poets & Writers magazine.
I think it's no coincidence that the last author we published, the fellow unique essayist and celebrated academe Kevin Haworth, turns out to have several common friends with Eleanor, and that they've ended up hitting it off; both of their books are very similar, I feel, attempts at combining several different types of storytelling to form a hybrid that traditional academic publishers don't quite know what to do with. And I love being able to put out books like these, because despite my well-known disdain for MFA programs and the like, I actually love writers who have a high knowledge of and a lot of creativity about language itself -- I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me my absurdist science-fiction bizarro comic-tragedies too (*cough cough* Mason Johnson's Sad Robot Stories coming this summer *cough cough*), but I get a special treat out of publishing the kind of extremely smart academic writer who many times falls through the cracks of the traditional academic presses. Eleanor is one of those people, and Historia, Historia is going to be the next great read in your life for people like me who love this kind of work, so I urge you to go download a free copy or order a paper edition right this moment. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Peace Corps memoirs are surprisingly tricky to pull off, for the same reason that all stories about young people going on international trips are tricky to pull off; because despite the apparent uniqueness embedded in that particular story, these "unique" elements in fact tend to repeat themselves from one story like this to the next, meaning that it's more important than ever that that author infuse that story with the kinds of great literary touches that mark a superior writer, unfortunately missing in most of these cases because of the young authors mostly being dilettantes who happen to have one interesting true story on their hands. And all of this is certainly the case with Eric Kiefer's disappointing The Soft Exile, which sets the wrong tone even from the very first page, in that the author decided to start this realistic story with a bit of absurdist humor, thus making it unclear what the overall tone of the book is supposed to be in the first place. (It's mostly the real-sounding story of a young man who spends two years in Mongolia; but the reason he makes this decision is because of calling a suicide prevention hotline one night in despair and being berated by a volunteer for being a worthless American douchebag, such a silly and unrealistic touch that it can only be treated as a bizarro comedy, making it difficult to figure out whether the rest of the ho-hum story is supposed to also be absurdist or a straightahead memoir.) Like many of these kinds of stories, huge portions of The Soft Exile read not like a three-act novel but rather as letters home to family, filled with the kinds of inconsequential details that someone's parents might enjoy learning but not a stranger reading a full-length book; and also like a lot of these kinds of stories, our main character often comes across as clueless about and sometimes even perversely proud of his douchebaggy white-middle-class behavior, making this ironically an anti-villain story* only without the author being aware that that's what he's writing. (*Anti-villain story: When a main narrator starts out as likeable if not strange, but slowly becomes more and more despicable as the book continues, done on purpose in such famous examples as A Confederacy of Dunces but often accidentally in Peace Corps memoirs and other "rah rah frat boys!" kind of books.) A valiant effort but a book that widely misses its mark, it does not come recommended to a general audience.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
For those who don't know, physicist and Early Modernist Albert Einstein did quite a lot of traveling as well as heavy thinking while alive; born in Germany, he moved to Italy for a time as a child, then studied in Switzerland, then moved back to Germany and then Prague, visited America, Britain, Asia and Palestine, then fled the Nazis to first Belgium and then New Jersey for the rest of his life. And it turns out that Einstein kept pervasive journals of his travels the whole time too, which have recently been analyzed and interpreted by Josef Eisinger for the book Einstein on the Road, put out by the mostly science-book-publishing Prometheus Books (albeit with this also being the parent company that owns the cutting-edge science-fiction publisher Pyr). But alas, I suspect that the journals themselves are not too scintillating of stuff; because this book is more like a journalist or historian using such material as a source for writing their own original tale, with Eisinger trying as admirably as he can to inject a sense of excitement and globetrotting adventure to these records, but with the few direct quotes he includes making it clear that Einstein simply wasn't a romantic vagabond, and that these journals are for the most part probably mere logs full of dry facts and figures. Interesting as a historical document, this is not exactly the NPR-friendly crowdpleaser that Prometheus is trying to sell it as, although will definitely hold a lot of interest to those who wish to know more about Einstein himself.
This is the newest book by my arts center, an anthology that looks specifically at the subject of settFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
This is the newest book by my arts center, an anthology that looks specifically at the subject of setting and how profoundly it can affect modern literature, the summer project of the center's 2011 intern, Traci Kim, and featuring a dozen writers from around the world. I have to say that I'm VERY happy with it, and thought that Traci did a great job with conceptualizing and then putting the stories together in a way that makes the entire thing always interesting and thought-provoking. I'm proud to have this coming out under CCLaP's name, and I encourage you to either download the electronic version or buy the paper version as soon as you have the chance (both at http://www.cclapcenter.com/amsterdamned )....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
To his credit, Charles Thompson obviously came from a place of sincerity when sitting down to write the Peace Corps novel Aralen Dreams, the storyline of which I suspect is at least partly autobiographical; and that's what makes it hard to even admit what the main problem is of this earnest yet misguided book, which is that it's essentially a portrait of the kind of clueless, boorish, slumming American frat boy who often dot volunteer and NGO programs like these, written from the sympathetic standpoint of the clueless frat boy himself, and painting the boorish actions of him and his cohorts as harmless at worst and noble at best, unfortunately making this novel's biggest enjoyment the ironic and accidental one of witnessing a morality tale as told from the viewpoint of the traditional villain, without him actually realizing that he is indeed the villain of the tale. I mean, take as a good early example the scene where our oblivious protagonist presents as a welcome gift to his Panamanian host family a basket of pineapples, only to find out that the family members are pineapple sharecroppers for whom the fruit is an overt symbol of their oppression and misery; and while in a smarter novel about this subject, such a scene would serve as a powerful metaphorical moment to show just how subsumed and subconscious the sense of entitlement and exceptionalism has even become in the average 21st-century American, Thompson wastes the opportunity and simply blows it off as a humorous "getting to know the locals" moment, not having his main character even once contemplate the fact that he managed to make it all the way to this Central American village without knowing even a basic region-defining fact like that.
That's the problem with the entire book in a nutshell, that all our main characters are virtual walking examples of post-9/11 U!S!A!ism gone horribly wrong, with Thompson wasting opportunity after opportunity to make larger comments about their behavior or its effect on the developing world around them -- a literal collection of ennui-filled 25-year-old stockbrokers and exotic dancers (yes, these professions specifically referenced by name in the book), who mistake the mere act of signing a volunteer sheet for actual personal growth, and who seemingly spend every moment of their time partying on overdoses of anti-malaria medication (where this novel's title comes from), spending their weekends at overpriced Western hipster resorts with names like "XS," trying and largely succeeding at sticking their dicks into anything that moves, and eventually coming to resent the backwards peasant locals for their lack of Protestant Work Ethic and nosy interference into good dope-smoking time. All this makes the "heroes" of Aralen Dreams the antagonists of more complex novels on this subject like Michael FitzGerald's Radiant Days or Chris Taylor's Harvest Season, which would've been brilliant if Thompson had done this on purpose, but is jarring and disappointing as it currently exists. A letdown from what had been a promising premise, it comes today with only a tepid recommendation.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers know that in the last several years, I've been giving myself a crash course of sorts all about the regions we in the West refer to as the Middle East and Southeast Asia, mostly because these areas are becoming more and more important by the day in world affairs, and like most Americans I don't know the least little freaking thing about any of them; but unfortunately, I've learned that most of the contemporary books coming out these days that purport to teach us Westerners more about these regions usually fail at one extreme or another, being either overly simplistic book-length Wikipedia entries that teach nothing about what it's like to actually live there right now, or glorified doctoral theses with a mainstream-friendly cover slapped on the front, full of obscure political theories and lots of demographic data but failing to give the reader a good overall look at the area. But not so with India Calling, an almost perfect balance of these elements by Anand Giridharadas, accomplished mostly by the circumstances of him being a youngish intellectual Indian-American who wished and then got a long-term job with the New York Times to cover the subcontinent, moving there permanently after an American childhood filled with old stories and frequent vacations, which allows him not only to be an outsider and insider at once, but also to simultaneously understand the culture and history behind all the 21st century "quiet revolutions" going on there right now and still be surprised and somewhat awestruck by it all as well.
And of course, it helps quite a bit that Giridharadas's job as a journalist specifically sends him into a whole variety of fascinating situations on a regular basis, where he uses his keen intellect to not only report on what he sees but interpret to Americans why it's so important; and so from his time spent with a former "untouchable" who has entrepreneurially transformed himself into a laptop-owning middle-class motivational speaker, to a day at a rural and largely improvised "family court" system, to his talk with one of the richest and most powerful media moguls in the country, Giridharadas brings a mesmerizing sense of place and society to each of the strange little things he examines, giving us perhaps the best overall "insider's" view of Indian life in the 21st century that English speakers have now seen. A huge recommendation whether or not you're specifically interested in India itself, precisely because you will be after finishing no matter what your attitude was before, India Calling absolutely makes me want to now seek out Giridharadas's newspaper columns on a more timely basis, in the same kind of exhilarated way that I felt about Malcolm Gladwell after reading The Tipping Point.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
As regular readers know, I'm spending the week finally making my way through a whole series of books currently in my reading list that I found only so-so, titles that in some cases have been in my queue for months now; and let's be frank, that these are the books most critics simply stop reading about halfway through and don't review in the first place. But because of my open promise here at CCLaP to review any book a person goes to the trouble to send me, there are simply titles here sometimes that I need to deal with in one way or another that most critics don't, and such a thing can sometimes result in an awkward situation, one where I don't have much to say about it but don't want to ignore it either. Take today's book under consideration, for example, Carlyle Thompson's Africa: A Photographic Safari, which I feel bad about panning because its intentions are so damn noble: it's the diary of a black American on his very first trip to Africa, what turned out to be a profound experience that brought him to a closer relationship with both his race and the god he worships. But, you know...it's a diary, with all the implications that come with that; it's a very dry, very factual, very detail-oriented account of Thompson's trip, interesting from the aspect of what happens next but not exactly a compelling piece of literature when all is said and done.
Ultimately I'm always glad that such books exist, because it proves again what's so great about the arts in this decentralized day and age; that nearly everyone now can put together some sort of cool, interesting, professional-looking creative project, based on an experience from their past that meant a lot to them, perfect to share with friends and family members or perhaps stick up on a blog for all to see. But there's a difference, a legitimate difference, between this and a manuscript worthy of being sold for 15 dollars to the general public, and creators of such projects owe it to themselves to be aware of that; what a shame, I many times think in these situations, that the author is trying to sell such a book commercially and will most likely receive almost no interest, when they could instead share their story for free online and have plenty of fans. It's for these reasons that I consider Africa: A Photographic Safari the very definition of a middle-of-the-road book, which is why today it's getting the very definition of a middle-of-the-road score.
the classic hippie travel tale of a shrinking rural america, far from feeling dated blue highways seems to become more and more relevant with each pasthe classic hippie travel tale of a shrinking rural america, far from feeling dated blue highways seems to become more and more relevant with each passing generation. heat-moon (a professor at my college, the university of missouri, in the '80s when i was a student) traveled the country in the 1970s taking only the "blue highways" of his antique road map -- the non-interstate back roads, that is. what he found was a cultural america rapidly disappearing, being replaced with the ka-chings of a million mcdonald's and wal-marts even then. an important book, one worth reading, that happens to be wickedly funny at points too....more
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