Actually, I finished this book right around December 27th or so but we're still in the thrall of home renovation and I continue to be behind in everytActually, I finished this book right around December 27th or so but we're still in the thrall of home renovation and I continue to be behind in everything else. No surprise there.
I came across this book after seeing it written up in The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" section back towards the end of November, and was so taken with that brief mention that I knew I had to have it. Before the book even arrived, I found myself doing a bit of research on Miriam Rodríguez, the woman at the center of it all, and came across a post on X (aka the old Twitter) that linked to another post by author Gary Shteyngart, who described the book to a perfect T. He called it a work
"about a personal tragedy set against the canvas of a societal one,"
and after finishing Fear Is Just a Word, I can't think of a better, more eloquent phrase to sum up this book.
On January 4th, 2014, Miriam received a 4 a.m. phone call that would quite literally dictate the direction of the rest of her life. She wasn't at her home at the time in the small town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas state of Mexico, but rather in McAllen Texas, where she had gone to put some distance between herself and her troubled relationship with her husband Luis. Two hours later she was in Reynosa, just across the Rio Grande, catching a bus to take her back to San Fernando, where she was picked up by her other daughter, Azalea. The news was the worst any mother could hear -- Miriam's twenty-one year old daughter Karen had been kidnapped, and her captors, members of the Zetas cartel, had demanded a ransom. Luis had taken out a loan from the bank to pay off the kidnappers, made the money drop, and was told to be in the cemetery twenty minutes later. The day passed, no Karen. Another day passed, same thing. Sunday another call came, demanding more money; a week went by, no word. Finally, after an agonizing two weeks, another call came in, saying that after Miriam paid "a small payment" in exchange for her daughter, her release was, according to the caller, now ready to happen. After a month, Miriam realized that "they are not going to bring her back to me," vowing that she would "find the people who did this" to her daughter and "make them pay." In Fear is Just a Word author and New York Times investigative journalist/bureau chief Azam Ahmed follows Miriam's "quest for vengeance" and in doing so, examines the wider "societal" tragedy, exploring how Mexico became a country where the rule of law is so dysfunctional that it ceases to function, leaving families of the disappeared with neither recourse nor justice from a government that is supposedly there to help and protect them.
As Miriam had said years earlier during a violent assault by the Zetas on her town in 2010,
"How can they just let something like this happen? ... What is the government doing? Why aren't they stopping this?"
The author takes on those very same questions, and he also explores how things in Mexico have come to the point where the country has become, for lack of a better word, broken.
A must read, for sure. It is beyond timely and relevant especially right now, and it is clear that the author must have put in years of research in putting this book together. Fear is Just Another Word is an outstanding example of great investigative journalism that puts a very human face on tragedy, revealing exactly what people are capable of in the face of the worst situations of indifference and hopelessness. It is one of the very best books I read in 2023, and I can't recommend it highly enough....more
An eye-opening book, but in hindsight I probably shouldn't have read this book at this particular time. Just before Ifor the moment, between 4 and 4.5
An eye-opening book, but in hindsight I probably shouldn't have read this book at this particular time. Just before I started reading it I was well into the last episode of a CBC podcast about the Kuper Island Residential School in British Columbia, and I was blown away once I'd started reading Ghosts of the Orphanage to discover that yet another institution run by the Catholic church (different dioceses, different organizations, of course) had within its walls people who were free to commit terrible crimes against children entrusted to their care. It's heartbreaking for sure.
I'll be back with more about this book very soon. I feel like I should go and have a drink now to settle myself after having finished it.
In the preface of this excellent, informative book, the author reveals that on her first day of work in 2010 as Associated Press bureau chief in Mexico City, she received news of a threat from a drug cartel. If a particular story was not published, they said, the bureau would receive a "special visit." Part of her job was to ensure the safety of "more than dozen correspondents and twenty freelancers around the region ... protecting the entire Mexico team of a U.S.-based international news agency." Having worked in Mexico by then for more than two years, she already knew what needed to be done, knowing that the press in that country was "under siege." Normally, the international media was left alone, but as she notes, "this was an epidemic," and it was only a matter of time until that would change. Although Mexico's constitution provides for freedom of the press, it is, as the author notes, "the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist, outside of a war zone," with some fifty-one journalists having been killed there since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping track back in 1992.
The death of Regina Martinez, a correspondent for Proceso, an "investigative magazine" on April 28 2012 captured the attention of Katherine Corcoran, who had admired her journalistic work over the years and had actually spoken to her on the phone once. Regina had been discovered brutally beaten to death in her home in Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz. This was only a few months after she had been away and had returned to find that someone had been in her house, leaving behind steam in the bathroom (as if they'd just taken a shower) and some open bottles of soap. She was used to threats and had always taken precautions, but the invasion of her space really rattled her. Despite friends' and colleagues' advice to contact the police, she refused, not trusting the justice system since she had firsthand knowledge of just how the system worked from covering the government in Veracruz, "a state known for corruption" and she had written "many exclusives" on the topic, preferring to avoid covering the cartels because of the danger involved for reporters who did. The overriding narrative in the cases of murdered journalists landed the blame squarely at their own doorsteps, as they were blamed by Mexican officials for their own deaths, implying that "they must have fallen into malos pasos, 'bad ways'." In Regina's case, the police decided that she had been the victim of a crime of passion, but, as Corcoran realizes after talking to Regina's friends and colleagues, there was absolutely no way that was the case here. On the contrary, Regina's work in investigating and exposing the betrayals of the Mexican people by the government is what ultimately became her "death sentence." But what was it exactly that she was working on that would have caused her to be so brutally killed?
Corcoran's search for answers in Regina's case also shines a light on corruption at the highest levels of the Mexican government, as well as the state of journalism in Mexico where all too often journalists are pressured to either say nothing under the threat of "plata o plomo," or they report the "facts" sanctioned by the state or other players, becoming co-opted and going along with the approved version of the news; some, as in Regina's case, are simply killed for daring to publish the truth. And yet, through all of her work in putting together this book, the author never loses sight of her subject, Regina Martinez, who paid an unthinkable price for trying to bring truth to the people of Mexico, to open their eyes as to what was happening in their country.
Truly eye-opening and amazing book -- one of my favorites of 2022 and one I can recommend most highly. ...more
Fifty Forgotten Books is, according to author and Tartarus Press co-founder R.B. Russell,
"intended to be a personal recommendation of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction."
If Fifty Forgotten Books had simply stopped there, it still would have been greatly appreciated, but it's within the discussions of these titles that the brilliance of this book shines through. Russell's idea here is
"not just to discuss the books, but to explain what they have meant to me over time, thus forming an oblique, partial memoir of my life."
He is overwhelmingly successful on both fronts.
I have had the great pleasure to have read more than a few fictional works written by this author (I'll be starting his Heaven's Hill here shortly), and I realized long ago just how very talented a writer he is, so I'm not surprised that he carries that quality over into this book. Each title the author includes in this volume elicits particular memories over different times in his life encompassing his reading, the joys of secondhand bookshops and booksellers, book collecting, the people he meets and more, recounted by someone who is obviously deeply passionate about all of the above. While I enjoyed reading about each book presented by the author in this volume, it's the autobiographical writing that makes Fifty Forgotten Books so engaging and in my humble opinion, exceptional.
I'm just a reader, not a critic, but I know when I have something extraordinary in my hands, and this book definitely falls into that category. Very, very highly recommended. ...more
It wasn't all that long ago that I read Colson Whitehead's excellent The Nickel Boys, a novel inspired by the stories of abuse from men who as children were sent to the real-world Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is also a story of the long reach of trauma that lasts well after the horrific events at the fictional Nickel Academy, and how an investigation headed by a team from a Florida university that uncovers a "secret graveyard" sent one man back to finally confront the past and his pain. As Whitehead wrote in his book, "Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but ... no one believed them until someone else said it." By the time he'd written his book, Dr. Erin Kimmerle, a professor at the University of South Florida and a leading forensic anthropologist had already been working at the Dozier School. She explains in We Carry Their Bones that she had been introduced by a friend to a "local reporter" who had been working on "a series of stories" about "the dark history" of the real-life Dozier School, including "brutal beatings and sadistic guards and mysterious deaths."
As she notes,
"The stories raised questions about a purported cemetery on the school's property, and the reporter had hit a dead end. He had found the families of boys who died in custody and were buried at the school, families that had never found peace, for they'd never been given the opportunity to properly mourn. No one could point to the location of the graves where their brothers and uncles were buried. No state official had stepped up to find those burials."
While there was a small cemetery on the once-segregated black side of the grounds known in the records and among the locals as "Boot Hill," Dr. Kimmerle and her team were not "confident" that this was the only burial site. Permission to explore all of the grounds was denied by the Department of Juvenile Justice (which had claim to the side of the school where white boys had been confined and which did not close until 2011), and in 2012, the reason given was "pending sale of the property and other liability concerns." Kimmerle understood that with the sale of the "220 acres of the boys' school land," the new owners might very well "pave a parking lot on top of the graves of little boys," and that time was of the essence.
We Carry Their Bones details the work of Kimmerle and her team in investigating the area while trying to discover not only an actual number of burials, but also in trying to identify some of the remains so that they could be returned to their families.
There was a surprising amount of resistance to the work, but Kimmerle would not be deterred in her quest, and with the support of the media, of many of the boys' families and of politicians to whom she appealed, her team would go on to not only excavate remains, but also to examine them forensically and to take DNA samples from relatives in her effort to match those remains to names. In the end, she would eventually carry some of the bones of the identified boys to reunite them with their families.
Colson Whitehead's blurb on the front of this book notes that "In a corrupt world, Kimmerle's unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice," and at every turn it is obvious that her objective was to offer any support and help she could to the families of the Dozier boys who never made it home. As she points out at the end, "the door was closed to us in the search for historic justice by many who had the power to open it," but Kimmerle's determination and that of all of the people involved made it so they would not and did not fail. It is a difficult book to read on several levels but on the other hand, it is a story that seriously needs telling, right now.
In the afterword of this book, the author notes that he'd started working on this project in 2016, having come to it "indirectly." While researching the Mexican drug cartels ("not just as criminal organizations but as businesses"), his research had led him to the "new emphasis, among the cartels, on heroin." From there, Keefe was led to OxyContin, and to reading Barry Meier's Pain Killer: A "Wonder" Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death and Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (an excellent book, by the way) by Sam Quinones, as well as articles published in the Los Angeles Times. He notes that he
"was astonished to discover that the family that presided over the company that made OxyContin was a prominent philanthropic dynasty with what appeared to be an unimpeachable reputation."
In an interview at Esquire in October of last year, the author explains what was behind the writing of this book, saying that he didn't want to write a book "in which the Sacklers felt like cyphers, in which they felt very remote." Since they would neither speak to or communicate with him, writing a book would feel "ineffective -- as though you were seeing them through a telescope, very, very distantly." But then litigation against the company and later the family resulted in a "huge body of documentation ... getting released in these lawsuits, including lots and lots of private emails" that offered Keefe a way to tell a "vivid and engaging" story, one in which "you feel like you really come to understand these people." A thoroughly compelling revelation of the lengths this uber-wealthy family would go to to avoid any accountability, Empire of Pain is also a story of a family that somehow failed to muster or pass on any sort of empathy through the generations, valuing their "good name" and their ongoing wealth above all other considerations.
And what a story it is indeed.
The dustjacket notes that Empire of Pain is "a portrait of excesses," as well as a
"study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world's great fortunes."
I don't know how anyone can read Empire of Pain and walk away unaffected. What struck me the most was the family's sheer lack of empathy, the lack of any sort of accountability, and the ease with which they managed to co-opt the institutions that are supposed to protect the public, including the FDA and the Department of Justice. The icing on the cake comes in watching the HBO documentary "Crime of the Century," which not only shows certain members of our government allowing all of this to happen, but also reveals how much Sackler money they'd received in campaign contributions. But read this book first.
The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey is a well-constructed and thoroughly engaging work of history which might best be described as narrative nonfiction, meaning that there is not only a story to be told here, but a central plot, if you will, with a young woman by the name of Lydia Harvey at its center. We learn in the first sentence of this book that in January, 1910, "just a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday, Lydia Harvey disappeared." That was her physical disappearance, but she also "disappeared again and again" in the stories told about her by others:
"She was no one. Who she was, what she wanted, what happened afterwards; none of this mattered. She joined a legion of missing girls, whose brief appearances in newspapers and books remained uncomplicated by their past experiences of poverty, abuse or their exploitation in other kinds of work."
While many of these women had stories told about them which ended
"condemned to a short life of misery, disease and degradation; they 'vanished forever beneath the slime of the underworld' and remained 'literally nameless and unknown,' "
Lydia, as we are told, "refused this story;" and did not, as the dustjacket blurb reveals, "vanish forever into the slime of the underworld" despite others' expectations.
At the outset the author reveals that there are "thousands of missing pieces to this puzzle," either lost, destroyed, or never made part of any historical record. Acknowledging that she had to weave "threads of imagination" into the information she discovered, she also notes that she has "followed careful rules" in doing so -- historical evidence exists for every detail offered in this story. Considering what she didn't have, she's done an excellent job here; not only is this book well researched, but the different perspectives that come to interconnect offer a more in-depth understanding of the individuals who made up part of Lydia's story as well as (quoting the dustjacket blurb) "the forces that shaped the twentieth century." I absolutely love reading history when it's written like it is here, in which an obscure figure from the past is given a voice and a life while all the while a clear picture of the world surrounding her takes shape. It is also amazing how much of this story continues to resonate in our own time, which I picked up on very early in the reading, but it is an idea runs throughout the book.
Very nicely done and very, very highly recommended....more
truth is, I was fascinated, even spellbound (cliche, I know -- please forgive) with the first part of this book, when Greene was in Haiti and the Domitruth is, I was fascinated, even spellbound (cliche, I know -- please forgive) with the first part of this book, when Greene was in Haiti and the Dominican Republic along with Bernard Diederich, the author; not so in love with the second part when he meets up with Omar Torrijos Herrera, the "benevolent dictator" of Panama. On the whole though, Seeds of Fiction is well worth the time I spent with it.
One of the main effects of reading this book was to put Ellroy's writing back in my head; once again he's crawled under my skin and I won't be satisfied now until I read more.
Last year I read Ellroy's LA Quartet, the opening novel of which is The Black Dahlia. In that book, as the author noted in his afterword, a "personal story attends the Black Dahlia," inextricably linking him to "two women savaged eleven years apart." One of these women was his mother, Geneva (Jean) Hilliker, who was killed in 1958, her murderer unknown and her case never solved. The other, of course, was the real-life Black Dahlia herself, Elizabeth Short, whose story Ellroy had read as a boy in Jack Webb's The Badge "a hundred times" and who not only became his "obsession," but also a "symbiotic stand-in" for his mother. My Dark Places tells that "personal story," which began when the author was ten and arrived home to discover that his mother was dead; it also explores his own unique relationship to her memory and how it changed over time. It was her murder that shaped who he ultimately became; here he lays his demons bare for all to see. Completely misquoting Bette Davis in All About Eve, fasten your seatbelts -- you're in for a bumpy ride.
I won't say I threw myself into this book; as was the case when I read his LA Quartet, it's more like I fell down the rabbit hole after getting sucked into it. It was impossible not to, actually -- even though this book is a work of nonfiction, reading My Dark Places had much the same effect on me as those four novels did. It is real, it is raw, and while it is beyond difficult to read, it is yet another fine piece of work by one of my favorite writers. Overall, though, it is, as the back-cover blurb so rightly describes, the story of a man who spent some three decades running from his mother's ghost, trying to "exorcize it through crime fiction," and a man hoping for some sort of redemption.
Definitely not for the faint of heart, but to Ellroy fans, a book not to be missed. ...more
for now: I liked this one. The Belgica expedition seemed destined for failure even before the ship arrived in Antarctica, but somehow much more soon.
for now: I liked this one. The Belgica expedition seemed destined for failure even before the ship arrived in Antarctica, but somehow made it there and back.
on the personal side:
I feel so stupid. I bought this book because I couldn't remember reading anything about The Belgica expedition, then realized after the author brought it up that I've had Frederick Cook's Through the First Antarctic Night sitting on my shelves forever (still unread). I really need to stop buying new books and start reading the old ones. ...more
I'm thinking about 3.7, rounded to a 4. I was absolutely glued to this book; on the other hand, I'm not sure I like some of the author's behavior here I'm thinking about 3.7, rounded to a 4. I was absolutely glued to this book; on the other hand, I'm not sure I like some of the author's behavior here. My real-world book group read this for February and ended up with a great discussion on a number of different topics.
Truth be told, there is nowhere I'd rather be than in the woods. We often make our way to a cabin in the Ocala Forest about four hours northwest from here, where there is no wifi, no television, lots of quiet, and at night sitting next to a crackling fire outside, time for mezcal or bourbon shots, holding hands, laughing together and watching the flames. Our stay generally consists of doing absolutely nothing except perhaps an occasional hike if it's not summer, and lots of reading. It's the place we go for mental battery recharging, reconnecting, and it works wonders. We go home and we're reset, ready to move on. Chris Knight, the subject of this book, also enjoyed being in the woods. One day in 1986 he parked his car somewhere among the forests in Maine, left the keys and walked into the wildnerness. Unlike us though, Chris never left. He stayed there for twenty-seven years, and other than the impersonal "hi" to someone passing by his location, never spoke to another human being.
And then came the day in 2013 when he came out of those woods, fully expecting to return to his solitude but finding himself instead arrested for "almost certainly the biggest burglary case in the state of Maine," the number coming to 1,080 "to be exact."
What drove him to do all of this? Well, that's the maddening part -- we never really find out.
That's not to say that the author didn't try -- in trying to understand the why, he ponders the possibilities of mental health/medical issues and family/personal background; he also delves into the world of hermits, historical and contemporary, contemplating what it is that has led many to leave the world behind and take up a solitary existence. But as one psychologist notes about the North Pond Hermit, in the end
"Nothing makes complete sense... Knight is like a Rorschach card. He really is an object for everyone to project onto."
Finkel's take on the matter is that Knight left "because the world is not made to accommodate people like him," while Knight says only that he'd found a place where he was "content." He also wished that he "weren't so stupid to do illegal things to find contentment." The truth is though that he did. He also caused pain and anguish to his victims. It seems to me to have been an impulsive decision to walk away from his car in 1986 and go into a life of self-imposed isolation; people who go off the grid generally have some long-term plan for how to do it. Chris Knight obviously did not and ended up having to steal for his survival.
The Stranger in the Woods makes for fascinating reading. Aside from Chris Knight's story, what I locked onto here really was the author's exploration of the natures of and differences between solitude and isolation. My only issue with this book comes toward the ending in the way that the author wouldn't let go, wouldn't respect the requested privacy of Chris or his family, and would not take no for answer. That just seems wrong to me somehow. However, the book as a whole is well worth reading, and as the title suggests, it is an "extraordinary story." ...more
Given that I have an intense passion for old ghost stories and weird fiction, it's surprising that I hadn't heard of Ghostland until I started seeing a number of reader reviews of it on Goodreads. It was so highly regarded that I knew I had to read it, and once picked up it was not put down. That's how very good it is. It is all at once a book of psychogeography, a chronicle of family, memories, travel, and nature; and at its very heart, a beautiful, moving memoir of grief. And if that isn't enough to whet anyone's appetite, in Ghostland Parnell also treads the ground walked by some of Britain's most famous writers of ghost stories and the weird. At one point at the beginnng of this book, the author is leaving after a visit to Livemere, childhood home of MR James, thinking about "the final words of James' last published story, 'A Vignette' "
"Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once upon a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them?"
As he makes his way around to explore the locations from the books, movies, television shows and short stories that he enjoyed so much as a boy and then later as a young man, he discusses these works and writes about the authors themselves, recalls childhood memories, and slowly reveals the story of his "phantom family -- a host of lives lived, then unlived" in an attempt to help him "reconcile the real and the half-remembered."
While I won't go into very much here, one of the key ideas that runs through this book is the link between landscape and the work of these writers -- and how awareness of their environment seemed to have been embedded within themselves as much as it has been embedded in their writing. There are more than mere traces to be found in, as the back-cover blurb notes, "the ancient stones, stark shores and folkloric woodlands of Britain's spectered isle," as well as the inland waterways (and I'm so happy he mentioned Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Three Miles Up" which is one of the most frightening stories I've ever read -- and beware, the film version is not quite the same), graveyards, and more, including the stone rings, hills, and other features found in Arthur Machen's work, or Ithell Colquhoun's wild Cornwall, to mention only a few of the many places he visits. But landscape, nature and place also have personal connections for Mr. Parnell -- they evoke memories of family, which he can now remember not in terms of "disquiet" but rather as "reassuring." His journey is related here much along the same lines as W.G. Sebald's Suffolk journey chronicled in The Rings of Saturn (another recent, excellent read) down to the photos embedded within the text.
It is one of the most beautiful books I've read, a poignant way in which the author finds a way to try to express "what is haunting him," as well as a way in which to try to "lay to rest the ghosts" of his "own sequestered past." I cannot recommend this one highly enough ... I'm sure I will go through it again many times. An absolute no-miss for readers (like me) who thoroughly enjoy old ghost stories, and especially for readers who (also like me) are lovers of weird fiction.
"... let our ghosts be real, let our ghosts be true, let our ghosts carry on the integrity of our ancestors."
I loved this book. I seriously do not remember why I bought it in the first place, but some time ago I chose it from my history shelves completely at random and started to read. I was instantly blown away and have recommended this book to any number of people. It's that good. It's that necessary.
In 2012 Professor Tiya Miles had gone to Savannah to work on her novel; after lunch one day, on her way back to her hotel, her attention was drawn to a woman waving at her. The woman asked if she would like to take "a historic tour" of the local Sorrel-Weed house, and Miles was "intrigued" enough by the idea of "being beckoned into history" to buy a ticket. As she was guided through the house, she learned the story of its owner, Francis Sorrel, a "cotton tycoon" of Haitian heritage, passing for white. Sorrel had lost his first wife to typhoid and then married her sister Matilda afterward. As the story goes, Matilda had committed suicide "by jumping off the second-floor balcony," because she had caught her husband and his "mistress," a "slave girl" by the named of Molly, in flagrante. A week later, Molly herself had been found "strangled, dangling from the ceiling rafters of the carriage house," and while Francis moved to a nextdoor townhouse, Molly and Matilda remained as resident ghosts. The author was told that if she wanted to visit the scene of Molly's death, she could come back that evening for the "Haunted Ghost Tour," which she did. In the "stillness of that night" Miles writes that she cannot say if she "felt Molly's presence," but she did feel a "kind of call," to
"search for evidence of Molly's life in the archival rubble of urban slavery, to tell her story and redeem her spirit from the commericialized spectacle of bondage I had witnessed" along with a pledge to "restore her memory and her dignity." Afterwards, going through historical records, she discovered nothing at all to indicate that a woman named Molly had been owned by Sorrel;
as she notes,
"Although many young women like her surely existed in antebellum Savannah and the torturous rice plantations of the surrounding countryside, this Molly was not among them. Someone had concocted her story of racial and sexual exploitation as a titillating tourist attraction."
And now, she writes, she wanted to know why Molly was "invisible in the historical record and hypervisible on the Savanna ghost-tourism scene. " She also was left with a number of questions she felt needed answering:
Why were ghost stories about African American slaves becoming popular in the region at all? And why were so many of these ghosts women? What themes prevailed in slave ghost stories, and what social and cultural meanings can we make of them? What 'product' was being bought and sold, enjoyed and consumed, in the contemporary commerical phenomenon of southern ghost tourism?"
To find the answers, the author took part in several ghost tours in the South, and the book takes us through her experiences and her conclusions based on three of these: the Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah, the New Orleans home of Delphine Lalaurie, and The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville.
It is impossible to miss the author's passion for her subject; writing it in the first person not only highlighted that particular aspect of this book, but also made the reading less daunting than a regular textbook and more like I was actually along for the ride as she made her journey. Tales of the Haunted South is not only an important, interdisciplinary study, it should be required reading for our time and absolutely should not be missed.
I'll do a full post on this book shortly but for now --
I really don't read "celebrity" type memoirs as a rule, but I've been a fan of David Chang sinI'll do a full post on this book shortly but for now --
I really don't read "celebrity" type memoirs as a rule, but I've been a fan of David Chang since my first issue of Lucky Peach arrived in 2011. It wasn't just the recipes that caught my attention (his tonkatsu-style ramen has been my go-to recipe for ten years now), but also his writing in the magazine left me entertained and informed. I wasn't "entertained" with this book (although I did laugh here and there), but most certainly informed. It takes guts for people to put their personal lives out there and I appreciate his doing so here. I found his discussions on depression inspiring for personal reasons, and the story behind his food and his success the same.
I don't remember quite how I stumbled upon this book but I had picked it up in August and sadly let it sit on my shelves for the next four months. I'd actually forgotten about it until as part of my end-of-year cleanout I rediscovered it, making it almost like a belated Christmas gift to myself. It took me about five days to read but I was completely engrossed throughout, since out of the eleven cases covered here, I was familiar with only three, and even among those I'd had little to no clue about the courtroom side of things.
As the back blurb says, "Court Number One recorded the changing face of British society, providing a window on to the thrills, fears and foibles of the modern age;" as the author puts it,
"This is a book about this courtroom, about some of the people who have appeared in it, whether as defendant, counsel or judge, and about the practice of criminal law. It is also intended to be about British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years. It is one of the contentions of this book that through the criminal trials that have occurred in Britain's foremost court there can be traced at least one version of social and moral change over the last century."
Mr. Grant takes his readers through eleven cases ranging datewise from 1907 to 2003, some familiar, others less so. What remains constant throughout is the idea that, as he says,
"the court is not a hermetically sealed space, divorced from the values and prejudices outside."
Setting each of these cases within its contemporary social, cultural and political contexts, it soon becomes clear that the "language of the courtroom is as much saturated in ideology as any other medium." These words come directly from his coverage of the 1923 trial of Marguerite Fahmy, but they are appropriate in each and every case in this book -- as times and cultural attitudes change, contemporary popular prejudices are also reflected in how the case plays out in court.
Court Number One is likely not for a reader who wants just a quick look at these cases, because it takes time for the author to establish the current cultural/social/political scene, to examine past cases that reflect directly or indirectly on the ones under study here, and most importantly, to try to offer a window on the changes from one period to another over the century that also had a bearing on the action in the courtroom. It is a job well done, an extremely interesting and informative book that makes for fascinating reading. ...more
As someone living in South Florida, about a third of a mile as the crow flies from the coast, reading this book during a very active hurricane season may not have been the brightest idea in terms of mental health. I needn't have worried: it was so well done that I found myself completely engrossed almost immediately. As it turns out, all is not doom and gloom here -- as the dustjacket blurb reveals, it is a melding of
"American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation's course."
It is also one of the most compelling and seriously educational nonfiction books of my reading year so far, combining history, personal accounts, the science of meteorology, the growth of forecasting/prediction technologies, politics, and a look at the very real hazards of climate change, which has the potential to bring ever more powerful storms into our lives. It's tough to do a broad history like this one, but Mr. Dolin's done a fine job here and the book makes for great reading even for people like me who aren't particularly gifted in the realm of science. Very highly recommended.
Truly an incredible bit of history and a story well told, very well researched. I will talk more about this book in days to come but for now, at one pTruly an incredible bit of history and a story well told, very well researched. I will talk more about this book in days to come but for now, at one point I was surprised that the enslaved rebels didn't actually send the Dutch colonials packing. Had that happened, these people just might have reached an independence similar to Haiti but much earlier.
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