I loved Roald Dahl growing up and still regularly read his books. I had actually never read Fantastic Mr. Fox before now, but it did not disappoint. And of course, if you read any Dahl book, you have to read an edition with illustrations by Quentin Blake. For those unfamiliar with Dahl, he is best known for James in the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda.
Dahl has vivid writing and quirky/dark humor in his children’s books. Some examples are his headmistress who throws little girls with pigtails over fences, or his story where witches are plotting to turn every little kid in the world into a mouse, or his enormous giants who gallop to their favorite country at night to eat people - all delivered with humor. Yes, one must have a sense of humor to enjoy Dahl.
In Fantastic Mr. Fox, three farmers join forces to kill a fox that has been stealing from them, but at the end, the Fox is the victor with a feast of chicken, turkey, ducks, geese, and cider. It is a very quick read ,full of illustrations and child-sized font.
Amazon, DBRL, MOBIUS
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Fantastic Mr. Fox / Roald Dahl / 81 pp.
Musicophilia / Oliver Sacks / 347 pp.
Musicophilia is another “popular neurology” book by Oliver Sacks centering around, of course, music. From people who have a loop of three notes continuously playing in their head, to people for whom music makes colors, to people who are emotionally detached from music, this is an interesting book. I found the chapters to be shorter than other books by Sacks. This gave the book the feeling of being a collection of mini case studies. Instead of treating one case in depth, he summarized a myriad of them.
Chapter 15 really caught my interest. It discusses Clive, a man with severe amnesia who retained his musical abilities, still playing the piano and organ and even regularly conducting his old choir. I found the description of his type of amnesia moving.
“His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view” (188).
A Leg to Stand On / Oliver Sacks / 222 pp.
A Leg to Stand On is an early book of Sacks, his third. In this book, he tells the story of how, when mountain climbing, he severely hurt his leg and had to “row” himself down the mountain. The story focuses on his recovery, chronicling his difficulties and linking them to difficulties faced by many patients with similar injuries. For example, with his leg having undergone surgery and in a cast, Sacks experiences a disconnect from it - not believing it is his leg. Also, when his leg is well enough to walk on, his long bed-rest has caused him to forget how to walk until he hears a certain song. I liked how Sacks used his own experiences to validate the common but overlooked experiences of others in similar situations.
Amazon, MERLIN, DBRL
Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea / Barbara Demick, 314 p.
You can read all the facts and statistics you want about totalitarian regimes like the one in North Korea, but nothing puts you inside that Orwellian universe like having the lives of six different people narrated, year by starving, repressive, life-twisting year, by the L.A. Times reporter who interviewed them after all of them, in their own ways, managed to escape the troubled country of their birth. When you see how people meet, fall in love, marry, live in families and neighborhoods and cities, it is hard not to care what happens to them.
There are elements here of post-apocalyptic novels like Julian Comstock (reviewed earlier) or World Made By Hand, as lives previously lived in quiet, disciplined austerity descend into anarchy punctuated by brutality, as electricity, medicine and food depart and some rules of social and physical survival change...and others do not. The whole while, government street-criers, newspaper reporters, and eventually homeless orphans chorus on with paeons to the fatherly benevolence of North Korea's rulers, past and present. Of course, this book is nonfiction - the author has dedicated some ten years of her life to the book, conducting multiple in-depth interviews, finding documentary evidence and other corroboration under incredibly constrained conditions inherent to dictatorship. That simply makes it all the more compelling.
There are elements here of post-apocalyptic novels like Julian Comstock (reviewed earlier) or World Made By Hand, as lives previously lived in quiet, disciplined austerity descend into anarchy punctuated by brutality, as electricity, medicine and food depart and some rules of social and physical survival change...and others do not. The whole while, government street-criers, newspaper reporters, and eventually homeless orphans chorus on with paeons to the fatherly benevolence of North Korea's rulers, past and present. Of course, this book is nonfiction - the author has dedicated some ten years of her life to the book, conducting multiple in-depth interviews, finding documentary evidence and other corroboration under incredibly constrained conditions inherent to dictatorship. That simply makes it all the more compelling.
The Gift of Fear / Gavin de Becker / 420 p.
The full title of this 1997 nonfiction bestseller is The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence. I bought myself a copy because Carolyn Hax recommends it so often in her "Tell Me About It" advice column and online chats, especially when a letter writer shows signs of being the victim of domestic abuse, stalking or other potentially violent circumstances.
At first, I was not sure if I was going to like the book. Having read, and mostly agreed with, sociologist Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear (1999), which points out how much media portrayals of violence and other fear-inducing phenomena grossly distort people's perception of what they truly need to be afraid of, I thought this book would simply urge people to trust their every fearful instinct.
In fact, de Becker's and Glassner's books fit together very well. De Becker is the founder and CEO of a major personal security firm, Gavin De Becker and Associates. He is in the business of predicting and preventing violence, so he has no truck with what in the later chapters of his book he calls "manufactured" fears brought on by an eyeball-hungry media. Unlike Glassner, though, de Becker explicitly values the sensation of "true fear" as a valuable signal that can save one's life in a truly dangerous situation - a signal that is all too frequently suppressed. That observation will be familiar to reader's of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005), another book exploring the power of rapid cognition in situations in which one is forced to think fast.
Both Gladwell and de Becker recognize that intuition, like chance, favors the prepared mind - even the evolutionarily-honed survival instinct that de Becker believes resides in every one of us. De Becker's aim in The Gift of Fear is to bring his own expertise to bear on the ordinary and extraordinary instances of his readers' lives in which "high-stakes prediction" of violence is necessary. He does this through many stories drawn from his clients' experiences with crimes as unusual as assassination and as common as spousal abuse and stalking, interspersed with glimpses into his own process of judging the likelihood of violence in the situation at hand. He wants his readersto accept that violence is inherent to human society, to trust and act upon intuitions warning them of immanent violence, (here de Becker urges women, especially, to overcome their social conditioning toward "niceness") - but to reduce the intrusion of worries that can actually detract from one's ability to respond to "real fear."
This seems like a very tricky line to walk, but de Becker manages it, with authority. I would recommend this book to many people, for many reasons.
At first, I was not sure if I was going to like the book. Having read, and mostly agreed with, sociologist Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear (1999), which points out how much media portrayals of violence and other fear-inducing phenomena grossly distort people's perception of what they truly need to be afraid of, I thought this book would simply urge people to trust their every fearful instinct.
In fact, de Becker's and Glassner's books fit together very well. De Becker is the founder and CEO of a major personal security firm, Gavin De Becker and Associates. He is in the business of predicting and preventing violence, so he has no truck with what in the later chapters of his book he calls "manufactured" fears brought on by an eyeball-hungry media. Unlike Glassner, though, de Becker explicitly values the sensation of "true fear" as a valuable signal that can save one's life in a truly dangerous situation - a signal that is all too frequently suppressed. That observation will be familiar to reader's of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (2005), another book exploring the power of rapid cognition in situations in which one is forced to think fast.
Both Gladwell and de Becker recognize that intuition, like chance, favors the prepared mind - even the evolutionarily-honed survival instinct that de Becker believes resides in every one of us. De Becker's aim in The Gift of Fear is to bring his own expertise to bear on the ordinary and extraordinary instances of his readers' lives in which "high-stakes prediction" of violence is necessary. He does this through many stories drawn from his clients' experiences with crimes as unusual as assassination and as common as spousal abuse and stalking, interspersed with glimpses into his own process of judging the likelihood of violence in the situation at hand. He wants his readersto accept that violence is inherent to human society, to trust and act upon intuitions warning them of immanent violence, (here de Becker urges women, especially, to overcome their social conditioning toward "niceness") - but to reduce the intrusion of worries that can actually detract from one's ability to respond to "real fear."
This seems like a very tricky line to walk, but de Becker manages it, with authority. I would recommend this book to many people, for many reasons.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
I Feel Bad about My Neck / Nora Ephron / 137 p.
The subtitle of this book was "and other thoughts on being a woman" so it probably will appeal largely to the female gender. It proved to be a great airport read, helping the time fly by (hah!), as I read her witty chapters. These chapters include the one taking after the title, as well as others such as "I Hate my Purse," "On Maintenance," "Moving on," "What I Wish I'd Known," and "Considering the Alternative."
As someone who has catapulted over the big 4-0 and beyond, I identified with many of her observations on aging, but this book could appeal to any generation. For example, here are two classics:
On the plane back, I finished the book, expecting her last chapter of "Consider the Alternative" to be in the same light and humorous tone as her other chapters. However, she turned her penetrating eye toward the "D-word" and mused on the nearness of death as you age--"Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love..." The end of the book induced a contemplative mood that was quite a contrast from the light beginning. I'd highly recommend this book and she definitely has made my list of authors whose writings I want to read more of, whether in the airport or not.
MERLIN, DBRL, Amazon
As someone who has catapulted over the big 4-0 and beyond, I identified with many of her observations on aging, but this book could appeal to any generation. For example, here are two classics:
- "Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four."
- "Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five."
On the plane back, I finished the book, expecting her last chapter of "Consider the Alternative" to be in the same light and humorous tone as her other chapters. However, she turned her penetrating eye toward the "D-word" and mused on the nearness of death as you age--"Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love..." The end of the book induced a contemplative mood that was quite a contrast from the light beginning. I'd highly recommend this book and she definitely has made my list of authors whose writings I want to read more of, whether in the airport or not.
MERLIN, DBRL, Amazon
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wishful Drinking/ Carrie Fisher /163 p.
"Wishful Drinking" is Carrie Fisher's memoir about growing up as the daughter of "America's Sweethearts" Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and her subsequent battles with alcoholism, drug addiction, and bi-polar disease. The book stems from her hugely successful one woman show, and tends to take the form of quick one-liners. That sometimes disguises both her penetrating insights and the depth of her struggle to overcome mental illness. If you want long reminiscences about her days as Princess Leia or her marriage with Paul Simon, you'll be disappointed, although there are funny stories about such topics as her dad's philandering ways and having a phone intervention with Cary Grant (yes, THE Cary Grant). It's much more a look at how she sees the world she grew up and now lives in and how she ultimately survived it. Insightful, poignant, and frequently hysterical.
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