Books of the Month – October 2011

This month, I loved:

• Mice, a delightful, unpretentious little British mystery where murder becomes redemption
• Wendy and the Lost Boys, the sad biography of a complicated, lonely woman who seemed to be all success and fun
• Incognito, a celebration of our unconscious, or why our conscious, hard-working brain is not the star of the show

** One Day I Will Write about this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

One Day I Will Write About This Place is the author’s memoir, from his embarrassing Ugandan mother with her funny accent to the harsh tribal conflicts that mar his schooling progress (before the IMF’s policies terminate it completely, at least in Kenya) — but at the same time Maasai braids can strike Nairobi’s affluent teenagers as supremely chic. The story seems rambling, almost incoherent at first but strengthens as he gets older and the narrative focuses on his quest of himself as a man and of a career in South Africa amongst the post-Apartheid tumult, all the way to his first successes as a journalist and writer. The best part of the book for me was the juxtaposition of the personal and the political, whether it is a woman to whom he is attracted who seems to change personalities with the language she speaks or the writing assignment about Sudan that falls through because he cannot write the donor-funded “edutainment” that is expected.

 

** Your Creative Brain by Shelley Carson

Your Creative Brain is a rather curious amalgam of self-help and research on brain activity, but the awkward combination of brain diagrams and hands-on exercises works reads pretty well. What I found most interesting is the delineation between what the author calls the deliberate pathway to creativity (work actively on a solution) and the spontaneous pathway (set aside the problem and wait for a flash of inspiration), and her insistence that each of us tries the one that’s less comfortable to us, at least once in a while.

** Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness by Toure

Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? starts with a simple observation that, with 40 million Black Americans there has to be more than one way to be “Black” and proceeds to share stories from the author’s life and many others’ about experiences with racism and battling artificial limitations set by people both within and outside the black community. Throughout the book I felt that many of the situations and challenges would apply very well to women, and although the author argues that the situation is quite different I’m not so sure… One of the nice features of the book is the last chapter that contains a number of outtakes — leaving the rest of the book flowing well. Nicely done!

 

*** Mice by Gordon Reece

A delightful, understated novel, Mice is a story of school bullying cured by… murder! Its ambitions are modest and amply met. I don’t want to give away too much of the story but if you like British novels about quiet small towns with a mix of Agatha Christie detective work, this book is for you. A lovely, carefully exact narrative told in a sixteen year old’s voice.

** A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel

A More Perfect Heavenis the story of Copernicus, known for formalizing the idea that the earth moves around the sun rather than vice-versa, but along with his careful record-keeping we also learn about his military skills, his years administering the church’s property, and even his, shall we say very close relationship with his housekeeper, which provoked the ire of the bishop.

The center of the book is an entertaining but I thought stilted and time-consuming play showing the main event, Copernicus’s writing of his opus, which coud have been condensed in twenty pages — but perhaps a little levity is good?

* Luminarium by Alex Shakar

Another book with an ending better than the body? I found Luminarium to be a slog, with laborious descriptions of immersive computer games, psychically joined twin with one in a coma, and bizarre neurological experiments that would never, ever pass the ethics review board. It’s not all boring, I must say. interspersed with the boring stuff are tender observations of hospital life, cruel descriptions of birthday parties for rich kids, and realistic tales of collateral damage when big corporations swallow little companies. And in the end all the weird dead-twin communication resolve in a rather elegant way, but a little too late for my taste.

 

* The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard

Unlike the delightful How Bad are Bananas, The Story of Stuff is a Manichean, hectoring lecture on the evils of the consumerist culture. And while I wholeheartedly agree that buying for the sake of buying, buying junk, and trashing perfectly functional objects are very objectionable behaviors, it did not take me more than a few dozen pages reading this book to find myself actively looking for loopholes and counter-examples to escape its simplistic arguments, which can be summed up thus: multinationals are by nature evil and they are the ones frcing us to behave as headless chickens. O, and all of us should patronize our frindly neighborhood farmer’s market and corner stores instead, since by definition they are not contributing to evil consumption. Says who? Perhaps the evil multinationals know a thing or two about supply chain economies of scale and perhaps they do manage to bring some goods to customers in a more ecologically-frinedly manner than the much vaunted corner store. But we don’t get any clear-headed discussions about that, although, oddly, we get an ode to a specific carpet company that, granted, seems to be doing some good recycling, but is still pushing synthetic carpeting over other materials that might be more earth-friendly.

I’d like a little more reasoning behind sweeping statements, please!

 

*** Wendy and the Lost Boys by Julie Salamon

It’s always a little embarrassing to read about the life of someone who did not choose to share details, especially someone as exquisitely private as Wendy Wasserstein, but I thought this biography, Wendy and the Lost Boys, was excellent in showing the contrast between her public personality, all warmth and fun and wit, and her private persona, so surprisingly insecure, complicated, and achingly lonely. I imagine that the many stories about plays and the business of theater will be enticing to anyone knowledgeable about in the theater. For me, I was fascinated by how she was able to garner much success in the public eye while twisting her personal relationships into complicated knots that left her alone when she would have needed friends the most, when she was very ill and with a young daughter to care for. Why not  be more transparent with her friends and her family and eschew secrets and untold truths?  Sure, it seemed to have been a tradition started by her mother, but wouldn’t that have suggested to her to take another path, as she did in so many other areas?

* The Missing Martyrs by Charles Kurzman

You can skip reading The Missing Martyrs and just remember this: there are very few Islamist terrorists, as the title says. Sheer numbers would tell us this, of course, and the author adds many details and interviews with Muslims around the world that show that, no surprise, parents don’t particularly look forward to their children’s becoming suicide bombers, that majorities everywhere dislike violence against civilians, and that killing other Muslims does not endear terrorists to the larger Muslim  people public.

I think this might be the case of the good, insightful article ballooning into a not to interesting book. I haven’t been very lucky trying to read about Islamist terrorists…