Adara and the Pirates

Adara and the Pirates

of The Great Sand Sea

by Jerry Williston

ISBN: 1-4134-9207-X (Trade Paperback)

ISBN: 1-4134-9208-8 (Hardback)

Pages: 169

Pub. Date:

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Makin of Bahir is a Master Boatman. He’s entrusted with transporting valuable cargo across the Great Sand Sea. Piloting a wind-powered sand barge takes great skill and a thorough knowledge of the ever shifting and unforgiving desert. Added to those dangers is the plague of pirates that infest the Great Sand Sea. Makin’s young daughter, Adara, is on her first voyage and it soon becomes an unforgettable adventure filled with pirates, danger, and a desperate rescue attempt.

The premise of the story, ships in the desert, is an interesting concept much similar to Philip Jose Farmer’s Green Odyssey. Even though the author uses terms like, “seamanship” which one would naturally think of ships on water, the reader is quickly reminded that these sailing ships are on a vast desert filled with great danger. The storyline moves well and is fairly well written. There are a few too many typos for me, but the story is fluid and, for the most part, keeps the reader’s attention. The one draw back to this story is its predictability. There are no real twists and turns to capture the reader’s attention. All in all, it’s a good book that is entertaining.

— Stefanie Longwood

Taken Behind the Woodshed and Beat (part 2)- A Personal Review of "The Shack"

Yesterday we started into my review of the novel The Shack, with today being set aside to dissect what Young has written from a theological  side of things.  Now, it has been well documented that Young and his supporters are using the genre of fiction as a mask for any false teachings contained in this book, but since so many people think this story is of Pilgrim’s Progress standing I don’t think it is fair to evaluate the claims as anything less than what the author wishes for us to believe.  (And to be honest, I don’t know how comfortable I would feel attributing something to God, even God in my fiction novel, if I wasn’t pretty sure I believed it.)

First, I will say that not everything in this book is bad or disagreeable.  There are certainly points where the issues he raises or the statements he makes, though out of the evangelical mainstream, still carry more truth than not.  However, the sheer amount and magnitude of inaccuracy outweigh any positive that may exist.

So, let’s begin with the obvious, that being the author’s agenda in developing a Mother God (as well as a female Holy Spirit).  Of course it is true that God is neither male nor female, but that does little to change the fact that God is pretty much always presented as a father in Scripture.  Even taking the two places in the Old Testament where it is possible that God is represented as a mother (and not just being compared with a mother, which I think is more accurate), the overwhelming number of Scriptures about it, including the entirety of the New Testament, present God as father.  This is not just a product of male chauvinist society; it is biblical illustration.  Just because we have put so much value on feminism and egalitarianism does not mean that God gives a rip about being viewed equally as male and female.  Yet Young rides this image to death.  Again, in his elementary story writing technique, Young pushes this idea over and over and over until finally you want to yell “Enough!”  I mean, it’s almost too much constructing an excuse for calling a female God ‘Papa,’ but then to constantly remind us that the main character finds a female God hard to grasp is overkill.  Clearly this is in there for controversy, as a biblically defensible reason would seemingly fall on its face.

Next, consider the other image which Young beats to death in the book, that being the idea that both Jesus AND God the Father bear the scars from the cross.  There are two things wrong with this.  First, it is inaccurate.  It did not scar the Father to have his Son sacrificed.  In fact, it was the opposite.  Isaiah 53.10 says, “It was the will of the Lord (Father) to crush him (the Son).”  The Father was not tortured in doing this; through the sacrifice of his son, God was propitiated, which means that his righteous anger was satisfied.  God was satisified by the death of his son.  Obviously, this is not a popular message in the era of belief in the “divine child abuse” theory of the atonement, but it is Scriptural nonetheless.

The second reason why depicting scars on the Father and the Son is inaccurate is because this, along with the statement on page 101 that the whole Trinity made itself fully human and limited in the incarnation, advances an old, old, old heresy known as Sabellianism, or modalism.    This is the teaching that God exists in different modes as experienced by the believer.  It also historically teaches that God the Father suffered on the cross.  This heresy has been out of vogue for at least a good millenium and a half, but apparently is receiving a revival in the popular appeal of this book.  As a note, if a heresy is so false that it goes dormant for 1500 years, it is probably a good indication that it really is wrong.  Yet not only does Young present it, he goes back to it again and again by constantly retelling that the character of God the Father has scars on his wrists like Jesus.

The final issue that I would like to raise is the confusion in the book over salvation, how its accomplished, and who receives it.  Basically, from reading the passages on pages 161 through 166, page 184, page 194, and page 227, one must at least declare that Young is teaching to a very Arminian view of universal reconciliation, and is probably even promoting universalism.  In fact, on page 227 it says,

In Jesus, I have forgiven all humans for their sins against me, but only some choose relationship. . . .  When Jesus forgave those who nailed him to the cross, they were no longer in his debt, nor mine.

And then, a few paragraphs lower it says,

When you forgive someone you certainly relaease him from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established.

Now, in reading that, there is no way left that a person could find to say this book promotes a biblical view of judgment as is portrayed in places like Matthew 25, 2 Thessalonians 1.9, or Revelation 20.  The worst someone can end up with is not being in “real relationship” with God.  However, no judgment, no separation, means that these people would be allowed into heaven, the New Jerusalem.  But this is a place where “God himself will be with” the inhabitants, so how can a person be there and not be in “real relationship” with God.  Honestly, I think the author is so confused in trying to be hip and tolerant, but only succeeds in leaving us with a completely impotent, indecisive, and inconsistent God.  It’s surprising how whenever we try and help God, we wind up only making him look weaker; Young demonstrates this to a tee.

So, let’s revisit Eugene Peterson’s quote once more:

[The Shack] has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his.  It’s that good!

Really?  Do we believe this looking back over all we’ve just said?  Now, I haven’t read Pilgrim’s Progress myself, but I had always thought it was supposed to be a pretty solid work done by a theologically-sound Calvinist.  Maybe, and I believe this is actually the case, Eugene Peterson has absolutely no idea what is good literature and even moreso what’s good theology.  Of course, keep in mind, he is the guy who wrote The Message, so . . .

Anyways, I’ll close with four words: don’t buy the hype.  This is not a life changing book, unless of course you read it and embrace all that it teaches, in which case you have just become a heretic.  Maybe that is strong language, but when I see a wolf like this coming in and devouring sheep the way it has I can find no better word.  Well, maybe one: pathetic.  Try reading the Bible instead.  It has a lot more to say than this glorified dollar bin crap.

Flashpoint

Flashpoint

Book One of the Underground

by Frank Creed

ISBN: 978-1-934284-01-8 (Trade paperback)

Pages: 186

Pub. Date: June 2007

Publisher: Writers’ Café Press

The year: 2036. The place: Planet Earth. Yes, Charlotte, there is a global government at this time. It has a really cool name: One State. Very original, huh? No, Charlotte, this is not a spiffy place to live. Why? For starters, we have uniformed gorillas called peacekeepers lurking around with nothing better to done than ruin your day and arrest people. Who are they looking for? Oh, Charlotte, you had to ask. Those crazy Fundamentalist terrorists who think there really is a God and that Jesus Christ, a.k.a. the Liberator, has given all those who want a free pass to heaven. Let us not forget all those Neros out there who are really, really bad dudes and want to see you on the inside of a bug chamber. Pretty heavy duty cool! But not as spiffy as Calamity Kid and e-girl who dance a mean tango across the valley of death in order to spring their home-church from the coma inducing clutches of Nasty Nero himself and his Indwelling Demonic Move-Ins.

Flashpoint is a intriguing cyberpunk novel by Frank Creed that I found to be such a blast to read. I haven’t had this much fun with a book in a long, long time. Creed is a gusty writer who gets you into the story at light speed, builds a believable futuristic world that keeps you wanting to find out more. Flashpoint uses all the catch phrases of this current generation and moves one into a cyberworld where the techno-gizmos we’ve created take on new meaning. The characters are compelling and strong. As I was reading this book, I felt I was in a video game. Graphically portrayed with sensitivity to the reading audience, Creed writing style is both unique and daring. One only has to read a few pages before he has the lingo down and the techno-phrasing becomes and enhancing tool throughout the whole book. If you want something different, cutting edge, then pick up Flashpoint. You will not be disappointed.–Steven Macon, Y-30 Staff

The Sunday Salon/Weekly Geeks: Leave a link to your reviews of books I've reviewed

I am combining this week’s Sunday Salon with this week’s Weekly Geeks.

1. Write a post encouraging readers to look through your archives (if you have your reviews in a particular place on your blog, point them there), and find the books that they have also written reviews. Tell them to leave a link to their review on your review post. For example, I’ve written a review for Gods Behaving Badly and Jane Doe leaves a link to her review of Gods Behaving Badly in the comments section of my review.

2. Edit your reviews to include those links in the body of the review post.

3. Visit other Weekly Geeks and go through their reviews. Leave links for them.

4. Leave a note somewhere on your blog to let people know this is your new policy.

5. Write a post later this week letting us know how your project is going!

So to that end, here is a list of the books I read in 2008 and a list of the books I’ve read in 2009 (not updated yet). The books I reviewed are underlined and hyperlinked to the posts; most are archived on my Just A (Reading) Fool blog (which has since been combined into this blog along with two other blogs I had). See if there are any books that you have read and reviewed also. Please provide a link to your review on my review, and as your reviews come in, I will add them to the bottom of my reviews.

I also will be adding a note here on the sidebar this afternoon, letting readers know of the new policy, and will start visiting other Weekly Geeks this afternoon to cross-reference what we’ve both reviewed.

My 3rd book on Investing

Secret of Millionaire Investors

by Adam Khoo & Conrad Alvin Lim

My 3rd book is a book by our local self made millionaire Adam Khoo and his buddy Conrad Alvin Lim, who is the author of my 2nd book. I seriously recommend this book as the must have book for people who want to start to know more about investing. The practical approach in this book give investor the basic insight of investment. From value investing to momentum trading, to using basic Options strategy and leveraging to help boost your wealth. Things are explained in detailed with diagram and example. No wonder is the #1 selling author in most book stores. Motivating and Inspiring!

Desert Soul

The Desert is a place for reflection.

Why do prophets go into the desert alone?  What about the desert makes it a place for intense inwardness, not gained through the interactions with your fellow men?  It is silent.  It says nothing in return for your tears.  If you do not come to a conclusion, you will die and become dessicated like the white bones of cattle which are now the apartments of rattlesnakes and mud dauber wasps.

I have returned from the desert.  I no longer care.  I will go back again.

Monks have a period of “desert” during the day where they retreat inwards in contemplation.  I imagine the deserts surrounding Saint Catherine and the caves of the Sinai Peninsula, where man first contemplated god and the universe, were barren.  Even locusts and honey had to be gained through struggle.  That manna from heaven, the dates that proliferate in the oases, must have seemed a gift.  These deserts, the men that they made fertile in spirit have paid us all.

Go to your desert and remain there until you know yourself.  Stay there forever.  Remain until your worldly cares become bleached white.  Return stronger.  But share what you have gained.

“Desert Soul” composed with Leica M6 using Ilford Delta 100 and Leica Summicron 50mm lens.  Copyright 2009 Jeffrey M. Hopkins.  Taken in Arizona, United States of America.

Jeffrey M. Hopkins is a true photographer and adventurer.  He lives the experience, demanding no licensing fee.  He is the author of Broken Under Interrogation.

The Invisible Sex

Title: The Invisible Sex

Authors: J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page

Pages: 320

Genre: Non-Fiction, Anthropology

Rating: 5/5

The Invisible Sex retells human history with a focus on women since the role of women has long been forgotten and ignored. Scientists, historians, and archaeologists have instead preferred to focus on the image of men going out for the hunt while women stay home, pregnant and stupid. The Invisible Sex corrects this. It starts with the earlier homo species’, and goes through human migration and evolution while discussing major developments along the way.

The authors do write based on the assumption that evolution is correct, which is something I also believe. But it isn’t necessary to believe in evolution to learn from this book. It touches base on things like language skills, becoming bipedal, and even the evolution of the birth canal. The authors are great at putting everything into terms that any lay person can understand.

One big thing I found surprising was that women collected most of the food. Most people think that in pre-history, men went out and did the hunting and brought back food to feed everyone. While this is partially true - men did hunt - if the people relied on just hunting for their food, they would have starved and died out long ago. The authors also cite a paper that theorizes that it is possible women also participated in the hunt since some modern primate females provide a significant portion of the kills for the group. But 75% or more of the diet came from food that women collected.

What I liked most about The Invisible Sex is that while it focusses on women, it doesn’t put down men or their role in the process of “becoming human”. They are not ignored and pushed to the side. Their roles, contributions and skills are acknowledged as well.

I’m not normally a science person, and it normally takes me a long time to get through a non-fiction book, but The Invisible Sex is easy to understand and hard to put down. I learned a lot by reading this and would recommend it to anyone interested in any of the topics covered in this book.

In which I stumble across another bad book

I borrowed ‘Heart of the West,’ a book with 500+ pages, from the library just the other day. It was a historical Western fiction and I thought that I’d like to burrow into my couch to read what seemed to be a good book with a solid romance and an intriguing history about Montana. So, after finishing my school work, I began to read this book. I must admit that it was quite good at the beginning, and for the following hours I read for, my head was filled with cowboys, pistols, ladies in voluminous dresses…But the entertainment, the intrigue this book had first had, began to dwindle in the author’s attempt to make, what I came to realize by and bye, a Harlequin like romance into a historical fiction by shoving a lot of history in. It was like…’Thorn Birds’ meets ‘Gone with the Wind’ meets a smutty Harlequin romance. But I continued to read into the early hours of the morning on a school day. I don’t know why; I guess it was because I kept hoping the story would somehow develop and transcend its mediocre Harlequin-like plotline. But lo-and-behold, by 5 in the morning, I have finished skimming through, and resented each hour that had gone to waste. I have stopped reading Harlequin romance, I don’t like the way it influences my writing, but I picked up this book because the cover read that it was similar to “Thorn Birds” a classic I had loved reading when I had been young. This book really is an odd one. Had it been compressed into a 90,000ish word book, it would have been a decent Harlequin romance, but this authors attempt to turn it into a historical fiction didn’t serve its purpose.

Hunger: A GONE novel by Michael Grant

While shuttling back and forth on the train to TCRWP Coaching Institute, I had the opportunity to finish reading the ARC of Hunger, book 2 in the GONE series by Michael Grant. I always have great anticipation for a second book in a series after loving the original book, but with that anticipation also comes the worry that maybe I won’t think the sequel is as great as the first one. 

Well I need not have worried about Hunger. It is a great sequel to Gone, picking up where the first book left off. Things are still pretty horrible in the FAZE (Fallout Alley Youth Zone) with tensions between Coates Academy students and townies n0t as tense as those between  ”normal” and those who have “power”.

Now that the kids have figured out how to survive the big 15 birthday poof, new challenges to put off death come in the form of hunger, zekes, and each other. The first chapter pulled me in immediately (and made my stomach turn, but I am pretty wimpy) and made me want to read without stop, just as the first book did. 

You will want to read the first book Gone before Hunger is released so you are familiar with the well-developed characters of Sam, Lana, Diana, Caine, Computer Jack, Astrid, Edidlio, and Drake, as well as the meaning behind “Hungry in the dark”, “Nestor,” and “gaiphage”.  

The chapter titles of this book also count time in a countdown of  hours and minutes (example: 106 Hours 29 minutes).  Hmm…liked it in the TV show 24, like it here.  

The book is due to be released May 26, 2009 and Michael Grant has hit it out of the park again! Without doubt this book needs to added to your summer reading list.

Adopted into God's Family: Book Reflections

I recently read, 

Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor by Trevor Burke

and I thought it was a fantastic book.

Which is why over the course of several months I thought I could give you some brief summaries of what I learned from it. 

Brief Summary of Chapter One

The Bible uses many different words to describe the relationship between God and His people.   

One of the words that the apostle Paul uses to describe our relationship with God is adoption.  He speaks of it five times in three of his letters.  You will find it in Romans 8:15 and 23, Romans 9:4, Galatians 4:5, Ephesians 1:5. Paul is actually the only writer in the New Testament to use this term.

When he uses it, he uses it metaphorically.  

“Adoption” Trevor Burke writes “graphically and intimately describes the family character of Pauline Christianity and is a basic description for Paul of what it means to be a Christian.”  

This is an important idea to Paul. 

One writer explains, “for . . . Paul . . . adoption into God’s family is a key metaphor for the new status believers have obtained.”  And another adds, “Paul’s use of adoption terminology is . . . a centerpiece of his understanding of what it is to be a follower of Christ.”

Unfortunately his teaching on adoption has often been misunderstood.  Apparently, theologians have sometimes thought of adoption as simply a subsection of justification.  But the two terms are really distinct. 

J.L. Girardeau explains, “The Scriptures make a difference between justification and adoption.  They treat adoption as something over and beyond justification. . . justification . . . introduces the . . . sinner into the society of the righteous . . . adoption . . . introduces the sinner into the society of God’s family.”

Adoption is a legal term and it describes as Trevor Burke explains, “a transfer from an alien family into the family of God.”  Quoting Robert Peterson, “Adoption is a legal action, taking place outside of us, whereby God the Father gives us a new status in his family.”

Please, stay on the line

It is one of the most maddening ordeals of modern life. You are having a problem with a product or service, and so (fool that you are) you call a customer-help number, only to be greeted by a cheerfully inept or robotically indifferent voice at the end of the line — sometimes human, other times a simulacrum, and nearly always emanating from a source far from home. In “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us,” Emily Yellin strives to “seek out the humanity and reason behind the customer service experiences that many people find to be inhuman and nonsensical.”

Ms. Yellin, a Memphis-based journalist, mixes polls and studies with excerpts from published reports and her own insightful reporting from call centers and related businesses in the U.S. and overseas. Among the waking nightmares she comes across: that of New Yorker Junius Harris, who spends weeks trying to get his Verizon landline number switched to his new apartment. The previous tenants have not canceled their account with AT&T, and so Mr. Harris finds himself trapped in the limbo between two unhelpful phone companies as his moving date draws ever closer. His Kafkaesque struggle ends only when, in desperation, he takes a Verizon agent’s hint and impersonates his vacationing landlord during a call to AT&T — Greek accent, broken English and all.

Such frustrations are not new. According to Ms. Yellin, in 1882 the New York Times noted: “There is nothing that will so excite the irritability of a person, apparently, as the telephone.” By 1902, she tells us, “swearing at operators had become illegal in many places.”

Today rudeness is not an indictable offense — a good thing, too, given the negativity on both sides of the customer-provider equation. Companies naturally try to keep costs down, sometimes rating the performance of their harried call-center workers by the number of calls they log, not by how well they resolve callers’ complaints. Is it any wonder that few such employees stick around long enough to attain true competence? Or companies move their help desks to countries where costs are low but accents are impenetrable. Or they switch to computer systems that leave already unhappy customers shouting their responses at an unresponsive machine.

“The approximate cost of offering a live, American-based, customer service agent averages somewhere around $7.50 per phone call,” Ms. Yellin says. “Outsourcing calls to live agents in another country brings the average cost down to about $2.35 per call. Having customers take care of the problems themselves, through an automated response phone system, averages around 32 cents per call, or contact.”

Too often, Ms. Yellin notes, there is a disconnect between the customer-service line and a company’s product- development and marketing departments. Who better to flag problems, or to pass on suggestions for improvement, than the people who listen to complaints? But in too many places, these agents are not treated as a vital resource. Angry customers have found a work-around, taking their grievances to the blogosphere and often creating a public-relations disaster for companies that might have resolved a problem quickly at the front lines of customer service.

Ms. Yellin is at her best when she offers portraits of the normally invisible folks who toil at successful help desks. We meet Tom and Marlene Goudie, for example, a Mormon couple in Salt Lake City who work side by side in their spare bedroom resolving customer problems for JetBlue. Mrs. Goudie “says she knew she was in the right place when she answered her very first call.” It took 90 minutes, “but her supervisors didn’t complain. Instead, they understood they had hired the right person.”

We visit Buenos Aires, where Ms. Yellin comes face-to-face with Pablo, the supervisor at a TeleTech call center who, six months earlier, had given her a full order of toner and paper free after she called to complain that her purchase from Office Depot still hadn’t arrived a day after it was due. Pablo, who had majored in psychology in college, tries to put himself in the shoes of both the customers he serves and the agents he supervises. American complaints about deliveries that are, say, a half-hour late or about tiny price differences can be baffling to Argentineans. “We are very used to not having our deliveries on time,” Pablo says. “We’re very used to being overcharged.” He has come to admire Americans, though, for demanding “what they think is right.”

Back on U.S. turf, we land in Ms. Yellin’s home town, where FedEx, that paragon of customer service, is the largest private employer. Remember those “recordings for quality assurance” you are always warned about? FedEx uses them to spot rude and unhelpful employees. Ms. Yellin is there as a customer-advocacy team listens to the tapes of one such bad apple, a sour New Englander who presents “what everyone in the call center euphemistically refers to as ‘a coaching opportunity.’ ”

There are people devoted to making computers more humane, too. Robbie Kilgore, a former keyboard player who recorded with the Rolling Stones, now tries to make the interactions between customers and computers closer to a real conversation. It is reassuring, he tells Ms. Yellin, when a computer, instead of just repeating “I didn’t understand that” over and over again, acknowledges that it is responding a second time by saying “I’m sorry. I still didn’t understand that.”

Does “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us” keep its consumer perfectly satisfied? Well, it seems more like a series of free-standing magazine features than an unbroken narrative arc, and it sometimes bogs down in the detail. (We probably don’t need to know that most of Microsoft’s Portuguese-speaking customers are routed to a call center in Cairo but that calls from Brazil go to a center inside Brazil.) But Ms. Yellin is an illuminating guide whose conclusions are sound: “The intangibles at the heart of each positive encounter remain constant on all sides: trust, respect, empathy, caring, and even some fun.” Who would complain about that?

__________

Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785194159219179.html

Madness: A Bipolar Life

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher published April 1, 2009

I read Madness, and for the first time I understand — from the inside — what a precious member of my family has been going through for the past seven years. I will divulge that the madness in my family belongs to a male, but I will not say who or how close. That is hisjourney, his story to tell.

Madness: A Bipolar Life comes out in hardcover, and I interview Marya Hornbacher, and I feel swept in — her sharp intelligence, her charisma, her magnetic pain. Same as his. I suggest he go to her reading that night, and he goes. Goes up to talk to her at the end, says that’s his diagnosis, too, bipolar. Her cycles are wilder and more debilitating than his, but they read each other, know each other’s experience.

Now the paperback is out, and he refuses the doctor’s meds — chooses his own. Except in random moments, he refutes the diagnosis. Stays still. Barely moves inside his life. I cannot guide him. I can only love him. Breathe deeply and sigh out the pain I feel coming from him.

One day he says he feels anxious and has no medicine. I ask if I can hug him. He says yes. And, I hold him, letting my heart energy pour into his. I can feel this transfer, like a blood transfusion. When the transfer is made, we gently pull apart, and he is calm.

A lesson. Ideas I have, are not accepted. Only acceptance is. And Love. Marya Hornbacher writes raw — poetically — of the manically-high and numbingly-low swings. Of lost time. Moments of creative brilliance that are just stunning. In person, she seems calm and strong, also vulnerable. I recognize this in him. It is similar. The night a little over a year ago when he “became” Robin Williams doing Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. I forgot who he really was, and collapsed in laughter.

The next day he asked to go to the hospital.

I remember when my mother was taken to the hospital. I was a teenager and she had swallowed a bottle of pills. She was more pale than her white bathrobe. After I cried for help, an ambulance took her away, and I saw her in the hospital, her arms pinned by a straitjacket, her diagnosis schizophrenia, her complaint when they finally let her out that she couldn’t write poetry anymore.

Today, doctors say she is bipolar. She self-medicates with alcohol and travel. Her disowning me is not personal, I see, after reading Marya’s book.

Madness pulls back the curtain, and I am on stage with her, inside her character. Her journey is fearless and aware. This is what I hope for him.

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis -- Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs tells us in A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, that if we really love an author we will not shy away from his or her faults: that we will take the good with the bad, and exercise both charity and intelligence (“To read with intelligent charity” is one of the goals of Theology of Reading) in discerning between the two. This is an important point, as it leads one to wonder if many of the people who rely regularly on Lewis’s work have taken the time to learn about his life. Some evangelicals revere Lewis so much that when they hear that J.R.R. Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity they insist it must’ve been the other way around, as if, because Lewis made Christian apologetics a significant part of his writing he was somehow a more “solid” Christian than Tolkien, or must’ve been one longer!

But there is greater incentive than mere honesty to read The Narnian. It is a vivid, entertaining, informative and (to use a word from Lewis’s era) delightful book. Jacobs has a knack for combining insight and intellect with good prose, and does not seem to believe in good ideas badly expressed. His writing style stands out only because it is better than most writers’, when in reality the strength of his analysis easily matches the strength of his expression. Jacobs is primarily an academic writer, and has clearly had to adapt his prose for a popular audience. Some of its clarity is lost, especially in comparison to A Theology of Reading, a more academic work. But it is still clear, well constructed, and vivid, acting not just as a means of conveying information, but as a source of enjoyment and beauty for the reader. It is Jacobs’s prose style that pushes the book from one you’d read intermittently over a few weeks or months to one you don’t want to put down!

As a professor of literature, Jacobs is well equipped to bring Lewis’s writings to bear on a study of his life, and does so powerfully. The book, then, is not so much a strict, blow-for-blow account of Lewis’s life, but examines him in light of his writings, gleaning much of its information from Lewis’s letters, and the diaries and testimonies of his friends and relatives. Every writer’s work is affected by the events in his or her life, and every writer’s life is affected by his or her writing. Lewis is no exception, and Jacobs is a biographer qualified to examine those effects. There is a significant amount of exegesis (all done in his wonderful prose, for those who had begun to groan!) of Lewis’s works, fiction and non-fiction, and at the end of the book it is not just Lewis that the reader understands better, but his entire body of work.

Jacobs spends a great deal of time writing about Lewis’s “inner life:” his rejection of Christianity at fourteen, his time as an arrogant but extremely gifted prodigy, his feared loss of imagination, his service in the Great War, his friendship with Tolkien and the Inklings, his eventual re-conversion to Christianity from atheism, the period of fame that followed, and his late-life marriage to Joy Davidman. It is about Lewis’s character, not just about the events of his life, and this is one reason it is so engrossing a read. Jacobs finds the perfect blend of outward and inward life.

Jacobs has done anyone interested in Lewis a great service. I have not read any other Lewis biography, so I can’t comment on how it compares to what’s out there, but regardless, it is a fantastic read. The life of Lewis, inward and out, is as engrossing as any of his Narnia stories (or at least almost!), and Jacobs is the ideal writer to bring that life alive in prose.

Alix Kates Shulman's Memoir of Her Husband's Traumatic Brain Injury

Love and sex in the time of brain damage.

When someone’s personality is altered by a brain injury, has the person changed or has the incident brought out what was there all along? Alix Kates Shulman explores stimulating questions like these in To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 192 pp., $22), a memoir of her life with her husband after he fell nine feet to the floor from a sleeping loft and survived with limits resembling those of advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

Shulman tells how, in the months after Scott’s accident, she came to understand the Latin phrase amor fati, which means “to love what is” or “to love your fate.” She writes with insight of the physical and emotional complexities of her husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI), including its effect on their sex life. And she describes the incompetent care her husband received from mental-health professionals at a good hospital and her amazement on learning that she could fire them. That section alone might surprise  relatives of physically ill people for whom doctors have prescribed psychiatric care that the patients will have to pay for if their insurers won’t. Shulman has posted a generous amount of material adapted from the book on her Psychology Today blog, Love and Dementia, and the first chapter appears on her publisher’s site.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

BOOK REVIEW: Fault Line by Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler is arguably the best action thriller writer working today, though you’d never know it by Fault Line.  He’s better than Lee Child, Jack Higgins, Brad Thor, Kyle Mills, Vince Flynn, even Daniel Silva, who is his nearest competition.  Yes, he really is that good.  His plots are intelligent, his word building some of the best out there (that’s also Silva’s greatest strength) and his action realistic.  His characters have depth, his ability to paint an atmosphere with words rivals Silva and his action scenes are as good as anyone’s – maybe better.  That’s why this book seems like a more spectacular failure than it really is.  If this was Mills, Thor, Flynn, or Higgins I doubt I would judge it so harshly.  Child has slipped lately, just not as badly.  Sliva’s deterioration is much more subtle and involves his plots and lead character, so only his hardcore fans really see it.  This was the literary equivalent of a NASCAR wreck.

The premise of Fault Line is not all that original.  The whole concept of encryption that is nearly unbreakable is one that’s been done before.  Versions have even played out in the news over the years as the government has forced various encryption software manufacturers to turn over source code so they can break encrypted files, always invoking the argument that it a matter of public safety and national security.  Neither is killing off the creator of an encryption code.  Even Windtalkers had a version of ‘kill the source code’, in that case it was shoot the code talker as a key plot element!  Right from the start, the plot has no new ground, so Eisler set himself a formidable task: find a new take on a well explored area and make your characters different yet believable.

Next are the three key protagonists, again they’re predictable and shallow:  Ben Treven is the eldest son in a family of three and in some ways a misfit in his family.  He’s the athlete who became a soldier, not the academic his family wanted.  A former Ranger, he now works as an assassin for a black ops military unit.  He believes people should be grateful to him and others for protecting them and has a certain disdain for those ordinary people. Alex for   Alex Treven, the youngest, is a super smart kid who always showed off and acted like being smart somehow makes him better than others.  Now he’s clawing his way up to a partnership in a major law firm with a specialty in patent law.  His condescension toward others and scheming against his nominal boss is totally believable.  Richard Hilzoy’s encryption patent is his ticket to the coveted partnership.  Sarah Hosseini is a young first year associate at the firm and another smart patent lawyer.  The only child of Iranian parents caught in the US when the Shah was overthrown, she’s trying to make her parents happy by being a successful lawyer.  She’s smart and beautiful, but not all that happy or satisfied with her career.  Ten years younger than Alex, she hasn’t developed his arrogance or lust for the trappings of power.

Finally there is the inter-character tension, which Eisler built with a really old plot device of childhood angers and another round of clichéd tragic family events – a sister killed in a car accident, a father’s suicide - that shapes how the brothers interact.  Ben believes himself more virtuous and deserving of thanks for the dangerous and deadly work he does for ‘the nation’.  Alex believes himself the more virtuous because he was the one who stayed home and dealt with all the emotional fallout of their sister’s death, their father’s suicide and their mother’s cancer while Ben was off playing solider.  Frankly, I thought they both needed to just GROW UP and please, dear God, get over themselves.  (All that was missing was the Smothers Brothers doing their “Mom Always Liked You Best!” routine.)  Not to mention the whole thing plays out in flashbacks throughout the book like some new kind of psychological torture for the readers.

Eisler makes a half hearted attempt at examining some difficult issues by having the idealistic lawyer Sarah challenge the realist Ben about how covert operations run and how many laws get violated by our own government.  The arguments on the ethical, legal and practical aspects of national security aren’t truly explored in any meaningful or intelligent way.   It’s all just shallow sound bite sized rhetoric used by both sides of a very complex, important, rather uncomfortable issue.  It came off as a gratuitous bit of tired soapbox philosophizing on Eisler’s part.

Ben is constantly belittling his brother Alex and Sarah about being naïve about the risks and lack of observational skills and failing to take basic personal protection and safety seriously.  (It gets old fast.)  Bizarrely, it’s Ben who makes the most egregious mistakes – ones that an operator of his experience should never have made.  It’s Ben’s hubris that eventually exposes them.  Frankly, I would think most operators given to such judgment errors would have suffered a Darwinian fate fairly early in their careers, thereby ending them abruptly.

The last inevitably trite plot element - both brothers are attracted to Sarah.  Alex feels getting involved at work would be a ‘weakness’, compromising his goal of partnership.  Ben is suspicious because of her heritage, infuriating Sarah.  Gee, never saw that coming, huh?  OK – for another 20 points, guess which one manages to get Sarah in the sack.

The book starts out well enough with inventor Richard Hilzoy mentally gloating about the meeting with influential venture capitalists setup by Alex that will see him well on his way to the great wealth and personal vindication he so desperately wants.  A bullet ends his dreams and his life and maybe Alex’s as well.  After spending hours with the cops, Alex goes into salvage mode and next morning tries to contact his Patent Office insider to check on the status of the application.  Instead he learns that the man is dead of apparent natural causes.  That night, he can’t sleep, so he goes to soak in the tub to relax and think when he hears – something.  Once he’s sure it isn’t his imagination, he searches the bathroom cabinet for a weapon, uses an aerosol cleaner on the man who enters the room and then runs naked to his car straight to the police.  A visit to his house causes nothing but doubts by the cops as nothing seem out of place, nothing has been taken and there’s no hard evidence that anything at all really happened.  Next morning Ben calls the detective who took his statement on Hilzoy and the break-in at his house and listened to his concern about the death of the man at the Patent Office.  The only news was the autopsy was ‘inconclusive’.  Panic begins setting in.  He decides to contact his solider brother for help.

Meanwhile, in Turkey, Ben Treven is on an assignment to eliminate two Iranian nuclear scientists.  With the patience of a sniper he plans and awaits his chance.  The choice of hotels suggests the men plan on sightseeing while in Istanbul, so the popular spice market would be his best chance.   Sure enough, the two scientists and their security bodyguards head out in that direction.  Ben plays tourist, complete with camera and guidebook, at the sights, watching and waiting.  This is where Eisler does his best work.  (Dealing with the ins and outs of an operator in action is the one saving grace of the book.)  Ben does get the two scientists and their guards, but runs into a very unexpected operator when escaping and ends up killing him as well.  From the look of it, he’s a Russian.  Ben heads to Ankara till things cool off and reports in, including the accidental Russian killing.  Then text message from his brother and subsequent call to Alex brings Ben back to help his brother.  At this point, we’re 33% through the book!

Together the brothers go to Alex’s office and find all the files relating to the patent missing, the computer backups are gone. Calling Sarah to see if she has them, her files are gone as well.  Alex’s boss claims to know nothing about them.  Ben realizes he has to move both of them and that’s when the story should really roll, right?  I mean, we’ve waited through build up, so here’s the heart pounding part.  Nope.  They squabble like spoiled kids, and bits and pieces of their history are served up along with the action.  Boy is that annoying.  Everything is so choppy you can’t find the thriller for all the pathos going on.  Ben’s kills two more Russians, likely mafia contract hitters, before they move along – running for their lives – to the Ritz Carlton.

After endlessly reminding Sarah and Alex about staying away from all they know and might know them, what does this very experienced operator do?  He calls his boss, Col. Horton, Hort for short.   Now think back and who pointed out the people who would most want this creation to never see the light of day?  US Intelligence agencies.  And here Ben is, calling the very people likely to be tasked with the work.

No more spoilers.  Just suffice it to say the two lawyers figure out a way to thwart the government’s efforts to stifle the code by figuring out where Hilzoy hid the source code.  Of course, anyone who has read more than 10 thrillers knew way back in the beginning.  Is there a bigger offense for a thriller than being BORING?  Overall, very disappointing.  Forgivable for a first book, but not for a man with Eisler’s existing resume of publications.  It is my sincere and devout hope that Barry Eisler leaves this kind of both to Nora Roberts or Suzanne Brockman.

For those triva buffs, Rain gets a passing mention by Ben as a ‘legend’ of some mysterious assassin who specializes in natural deaths.

My Grade: D+ to C-

Who would enjoy this book:  Not Eisler’s fans, that’s for sure.  Maybe those who still read the recent Jack Higgins books.

Weekend Reading: Writer's Block and My Overflowing Bookshelf

Writer’s Block.  That terrible, ever-lurking antithesis to “the flow” of which writers speak is a very real thing.  To someone who does not write extensively, it may seem easy to cast the notion off as silly, and inextricably linked to ego, but in reality, it can interupt a writer’s work and frustrate the bejesus out of them.  Flow, on the other hand, is that glorious pace a writer can find where the words seem to come from the fingers (or pen) first and the mind later.  It’s a constant race to keep up with yourself before the next moment flutters out of your mind like a butterfly and is lost forever.  This can last four hours before the writer is broken from the trance and brought back to the reality of dinner that must be made, day jobs that must be worked, and bills that must be paid.

I don’t know what other writer’s do when they experience Writer’s Block.  I’ve found sites for writing prompts and ideas, but ultimately a prompt that says “write about a red ball” is unlikely to shake me out of reality, and back into that dream world that writers create for themselves.  Someone once told me to keep my head above the clouds.  My immediate reaction was that it was mis-phrased; it should have read keep your head out of the clouds.  I didn’t understand properly then what was meant by that, but I do now.  Above the clouds is where creativity flows, and sometimes it is impossible not to come down, into the clouds,  and subsequently back into reality where there is traffic, phones ringing, appointments, and all of the mundane practices that make up this thing we call life.

When I have Writer’s Block, I read.  I’m always reading something, and in fact, I can hardly remember a period of time where I wasn’t completely absorbed in one book or another.  For the year I wrote literally nothing, I was completely wrapped up in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a seven book monolith that makes The Stand look like a Sunday paper.

This may explain the current state of my bookshelf.  I’ve rationalized my Writer’s Block down to a few things, including the fact that I have my first short story making its rounds in literary magazines and contests, and somewhere deep inside me I am waiting for judgement/affirmation.  The second cause is related to research.  My book-in-progress is deeply rooted in religion, mythology,  psychology, and to some extent, sociology.  At 20,000 words I simply hit a point where the idea was no longer enough, I needed background knowledge to keep the train chugging along.

So, for a little change, I am offering my weekend reading list.

1984 by George Orwell

Until now, I hadn’t read this book.  Not only did I know that I must read it because it is a classic, but the subject matter interests me greatly.  I can hardly put it down and it has been dominating my reading for the last week. I plan to finish the last 30 or so pages today.  While reading it I have to constantly remind myself that it was written in 1949, and renew my admiration for Orwell’s construction of a future society.  As a sociologist at heart, this book is fascinating.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

I found Sebold during a seminar course on Ethnography in my undergraduate degree.  Our professor assigned Lucky, a biographical account of her rape while attending college.  The Lovely Bones was her next book, which also took me in.  I expect The Almost Moon to live up to my expectations of Sebold’s ability to capture me.

2009 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market

Otherwise known as the bible.  I am going through this volume painstakingly, absorbing all of the information about the publishing industry I can cram into my 26 year old brain.  What are agents, publishers, and editors telling me?  How can I use it in the future?  I know that I can break down countless boundaries if I am prepared, and I intend to be.

The Lilith Monographs Vol. I: Immaculata by Joshua Seraphim

This is directly related to my book, in which the main character is Lilith, or rather my version of her.

Lilith: The First Eve by Siegmund Hurwitz

See above.

Glimmer Train Spring 2009 Issue 70

Glimmer Train is the first literary magazine I have subscribed to.  The first issue arrived in my mailbox on Friday and since then it has been waiting patiently underneath 1984, waiting to be picked up next.  I’m reading it partly to learn what other writer’s are selling, to compare as objectively as I can, the quality of the work therein versus my own, and to absorb great literature from the future authors of classics that will come about in my life time.  As my writing income grows, so too will my collection of literary magazines.  For those who do not subscribe, I highly recommend it.

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

This is a slow read for me.  I can only keep my attention focused on congressional history and legislative process for so long.  I also feel this is a necessary read.  Obama is an eloquent and moving writer, and knowing full well that he will become known as one of the great thinkers of our time, I am compelled to read through the political jargon to hear the message behind it.

Defending the Damned by Kevin Davis

This was recommended to me by a friend who works in the legal system in the United Kingdom.  It focuses on a public defender in Chicago, named Marijane Placek, a “snakeskin boot-wearing, Shakespeare quoting nonconformist.”  Needless to say, she knows my taste.

What’s on yours?

Review: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.  By Alison Bechdel.  4.0 Stars

Years ago I was writing and drawing a graphic novel that is fiction, but is based loosely on a relationship I endured when I was 25.  I still hope one day to return to it and publish it, and I also hope that it has benefited from sitting on a shelf for five or six years, as with time (and maturity) I have found flaws in the way I chose to tell the story that I wouldn’t have been able to see at 25.  I think it is a love of that shelved project that sent me running to Alison Bechdel’s book Fun Home the second I learned about it.  Let’s not dwell on the fact that I should have known about the book at least a year earlier, and instead focus on the positive…I found out about it and went to buy it that same day, and then read it that same evening, cover to cover.

It’s a wonderful book and I have to commend Bechdel for being so unflinchingly honest in relaying her story.  I think in a graphic novel it’s even more difficult to be honest than in a prose memoir, because it’s not just words, but also pictures, which speak so loudly on their own.  And yet Bechdel is not only brutally frank in her portrayal of herself (hard enough to be non-biased as it is), but also of her relationship with her father, and her father himself, which is no small task, especially considering that her father died, likely a suicide.  I doubt I’ll ever be capable of such honesty in storytelling, but I’m always going to aim for it, and I think I’ll start using Bechdel as my benchmark.

First let’s talk about the art, which is sublime.  Check out this panel (from one of my favorite pages in the entire book) in which you get everything so clearly - who Bechdel is (was), who her father is, how their relationship works…all in the space of a single panel.  AND it’s funny.  Beautiful stuff. I can’t get over her perfect expression while dusting that frustrating chair.  This is the expression of dusting children everywhere.

Beyond the artistic achievement of Fun Home, it is also well written, though it’s less about beautiful language than it is about memory and reality and the rawness of all that comes with that. Bechdel is served well by the diaries of her youth, which are shocking in retrospect and so insightful about all that was happening to and around her as a child.  It’s a fascinating study of youth and relationships.

From a strictly shallow standpoint, the arc of Bechdel’s story has some slow points where the story really drags compared to the piece overall, which generally moves smoothly and quickly.  It’s a challenging story to tell in one piece as there are many elements from childhood through adulthood to address, most of which relate directly to her father, but some of which are tied more loosely to her father and require a bit of a stretch in her formatting of the story.

I’m not sure it’s a failing so much with Bechdel’s narrative as it is a failing of me as a reader, being the impatient video game playing generation that I am I became frustrated looking for the “resolution”.  Of course in reality, which Bechdel is very clearly dealing with here, life is rarely so “resolution-y”, and so I have trouble blaming her narrative.  I think in the end, whether a few areas dragged and took me off path or not, Bechdel was honest with the material, telling it in the most genuine way she could, a massive undertaking of which I think she is wildly successful.

4.5 Stars

Book Club Q & A with Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah's Key

In preparation for our book club meeting, we asked Tatiana de Rosnay, author of Sarah’s Key, reviewed here, if she would answer a few questions for us, and she graciously agreed.  But beware- there are a few spoilers!

Lisa’s questions: How did you originally find out about the Vel d Hiv roundup?  Did you know right away that you wanted to write a book about it?    Tatiana de Rosnay:  I found out through Chirac’s speech, the one I mention in the book. I knew very little about the round up. I was born in France in the 60’s and like many French people of my generation, we were not taught about this in school. However now, students are taught about it.   I remember Julia’s shock at being a 45 year old woman living in Paris who knew nothing of the events.  Are Parisians as unaware of the involvement of the French during WWII as they seem to be in SK?  Has your book changed that?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  Some Parisians are aware and other are not. I’m surprised at the amount of  emails I get from Parisians who are shocked at what they have learned through my book and others who say they knew, but not to that extent. I think and hope my book may have changed things as I now have a million readers world wide !   What has been the reaction to your book in France?

Tatiana de Rosnay:  It has been very good. Especially from the Jewish community, which warms my heart. Another surprise is how much teens enjoy it.   The details of the separation of the children from their mothers was horrific- the beatings and the water being thrown on them.  Being a mother myself, that was hard to read, and I cried for those mothers and their children.  Did you interview survivors of Vel d Hiv while researching your book, or were those details something you’d read about in your research?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  I met two survivors during my research, and three after the book was published. Wonderful moments that I shall never forget. They told me that they went through exactly what I describe in the book.   Do you have any idea how many children were able to escape the camps in the French countryside?  Is there evidence that some had help from sympathetic members of the French police, the way Sarah and Rachel did?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  No, I do not have a precise idea. However, France is the country where the largest number of Jewish children were saved and hidden by French people, like Sarah and Rachel were. These people then became «Justs of the Nation».   Why did Sarah’s part of the narrative stop after the discovery of Michel?   I missed her!   Tatiana de Rosnay:  That’s how I «felt» the story.  Julia’s quest to find her (or William) then becomes even stronger.   When will your new book be available?  What are you currently working on?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  I am about to publish Boomerang, my first love story ! It is out in France in a couple of weeks, and next year in the US. I am now researching a new book which takes place in 19th century Paris.   Valerie’s questions: The whole issue with the late age pregnancy and Julia”s reaction suprised me. One, that she would have even considered the abortion at all…why?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  I have not gone through this, thankfully, but my closest friend has. Her husband refused to have the child. She chose the husband over the child. She still regrets it, ten years later…    and then naming the girl Sarah? An attempt to give something back for such a great wrong being done or another reason?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  Because Sarah is dead and gone, bringing into the world another little Sarah is like lighting a candle for all the Vel d’Hiv children.   I felt like the ending alluded to a possible romantic relationship between Julia and Sarah’s adult son. Wishful thinking on my part or ??   Tatiana de Rosnay:  I did not want a  soppy Hollywood ending, and I guess each reader can make up her own mind ! ( I personally think they get together, but I’m not totally sure !)   Was there one particular story, memory or incident about the Vel’ de hiv and its aftermath at the camps that most profoundly influenced and/or effected you and subsequently the story line of the book? Thanks!    Tatiana de Rosnay:  I had all the book planned out in my head before I even wrote it. I wanted to share the horror and disgust I felt when I found out about what happened. The  worst part for me is how the children were separated from the parents at  Beaune. It makes me physically ill.   Sheri’s questions: How has the success of this book affected your life?  What has been the most positive impact of its reception and the most difficult?

Tatiana de Rosnay:  This book has changed my life. I had never written a best-seller before and I have published 8 books. I’m still trying to get used to the attention. I guess the most difficult part is finding time to answer all my readers !   Karen’s question: Since France has so much anti Semitism, have there been any problems with Sarah’s Key being sold in bookstores, since many citizens are wanting to ban the Holocaust teachings in the French public schools and universities?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  I don’t think France’s anti-Semitism is to that extent ! I visit a school per week meeting students and teachers to talk about Sarah and the Vel d’Hiv. All bookstores here carry my book.    From Orchid:   I‘ve visited France twice, and I thought based on stereotypes that the French might be rude, but I found them to be very helpful and kind to me, a tourist who didn’t know the language that well.  So my question is.. the French family in the book is portrayed as very private and somewhat arrogant.. did you embellish on stereotypes or did you find that to be actually true in your experience or research?   Tatiana de Rosnay:  The French family I describe is a typically high class, wealthy Parisian family, certainly not representative of all French citizens ! So are the Parisians that Julia pokes fun of! I am French myself, born in the Paris suburbs, and I think I know my country men well… Many thanks to Tatiana de Rosnay for her openness and willingness to answer our questions, and for writing this incredible book!

The Story of the Night

In this post I am going to write about a book I absolutely loved, a book written by an Irish writer Colm Tóibin - The Story of the Night.

It is a, most of all, a book about gay love. The main subject is not about being a gay, though, it is a story of a life, a touching story. The book is divided into three parts.

Part One

The first part focuses on the relationships with his mother… His

The Story Of The Night by Colm Toibin

mother is a British woman who gets married to an Argentine. They move to Argentina to live there. His mother is kind of odd - maybe traditonal and rather depressed. The father dies and she gets very depressed. It seems that his mother makes it rather difficult for him. He has his first gay experiences in a local sauna, where guys go to meet up and have sex. He becomes interested in one of his students (the main character is studying English and he becomes an Enlgish teacher). The guy he becomes interested in is straight and nothing really comes out of it…

Part Two

This part is talking about his career. He is working in a school as a teacher and finds it very boring, in fact, he hates the job. Through some friends he meets Americans who have come to Argentina to help to set up a democratic goverment. He quickly becomes useful to them because he can fluently speak both English and Spanish languages. He starts his own consultancy and makes quite a lot of money… Richard, that’s his name, is still quite unhappy about his love life… He has a few casual encounters, and he also meets a guy whom he very much likes…

Part Three

The last part focuses on his personal life… He falls a love with a guy who feels the same for him. They move in together… It is almost perfect - they desire and love each other, the sex is good… The book doesn’t really describe it much, but well enough to express how good they had it…

I will not tell you how it ends but I found it very … I don’t know, touching. I have to say that it is one of the most powerful books I have read in the last years. I woke up in the middle of the night being puzzled about the book. I read over 300 pages in just one and a half days. I wished it would have lasted longer. I very much recommend it to anyone - whether you are gay or straight, black or white. It is a good read.

Please leave your comment on what you think of the book if you have read it.

Jeremy Dufour

Economics in one unlearnt lesson

I recently found the time to read Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” (available online here). The book conclusively demonstrates that any attempts to coerce the free market can only result in the short term gains of special interest groups at the expense of everyone else and that even these short term gains are more than canceled out in the long term. The value to me in taking the time to read it was not in learning anything particularly new but in knowing that a detailed and very well-written explanation of a number of statist ideas exists in one place. Hazlitt writes that all statist fallacies essentially consist of considering only the immediate and visible consequences of a particular policy while ignoring the secondary and not-easily-visible consequences - an idea that was expressed by Bastiat long ago in 1850.

More than the book itself, what is interesting to me is the fact that the fallacies in statist ideas have been exposed long ago (Hazlitt’s book was published in 1946 and Hazlitt himself takes no credit for being original) and yet these ideas continue to be widespread among the general public as well as among trained economists and policy-makers. In fact, the financial crisis we are seeing at the moment is the inevitable result of some of these same fallacies (more on that in future posts) and the alleged cure is more of the same. The inescapable question then is: Are statist ideas really fallacies or mere rationalizations? Are they really held out of genuine ignorance and/or confusion or is there some other explanation? Hazlitt seems to think that they are genuine fallacies caused by the fact that the immediate consequences of interventionist and coercive policies are all too obvious while the secondary and long term consequences are not so obvious. I think that is a far too charitable view. It is inconceivable to me that simple arguments cannot be grasped by trained economists or intelligent laymen. Hazlitt also mentions how the paid spokesmen of special interest groups are able to drive out “dis-interested” writers simply because of their dis-interest (a mechanism also discussed by Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom). While this is certainly part of the reason why special interest groups can control the government, it does not explain the support for statist ideas among the dis-interested public.

As an example, a few days back, I had a long and futile argument with some colleagues about the ineffectiveness of statist policies. Now these colleagues are certainly intelligent enough to grasp the fallacies inherent in statist ideas. Moreover they have no reason to support such ideas for any special interest. Yet they continue to defend them. And inspite of any concessions they may have made during the argument, I am sure that the same points will come up in the next argument. As one of them put it, (paraphrasing) “I am not opposed to capitalism, but I am a socialist at heart.” To me, that is the source of the persistence of these fallacies. Altruism is totally incompatible with the working of the free market. But as long as it is accepted, no amount of rational argument (such as the ones in Hazlitt’s book) can genuinely convince a person that collectivist and socialist ideas always achieve the opposite of their stated purposes.

Hazlitt shows how raising prices of a particular product (whether by tarrifs or other methods) to create employment penalizes all the consumers of that product (the public interest?), how lowering prices of a particular product drives out all the marginal producers (the disempowered?) and also creates shortages so that only those with more purchasing power can afford the product, how minimum wages cause unemployment by preventing people whose services are worth less than the minimum wage from being employed at all (the most needy?), how rent controls raise the rents in new buildings enormously (housing for the poor?) while simultaneously removing all incentive for (or even ability to) improve/repair existing buildings, how inflation - necessitated by deficit spending to fund all the welfare programs - essentially acts as a tax whose impact is felt highest by the poor etc, etc, etc… not to mention that all these measures also reduce the total product of the economy (the public interest?)

But the point is that the cure suggested by all these fallacies - regardless of any evidence - the free market, where every individual is free to pursue his own interests and is not legally responsible for the “welfare” of others is morally unacceptable to the altruists, and no amount of merely economic arguments can change that.

Book review: 'Something Borrowed' by Emily Giffin

On the evening of her thirtieth birthday, Rachel White goes out with some of her closest friends to celebrate — and have a wee bit too much to drink. After her best friend Darcy is carried home, Rachel is left alone to while away the hours with Dex, Darcy’s fiance — and an old friend of Rachel’s. Feeling low and nostalgic, Rachel and Dex stay out talking and drinking until late in the evening. And Dex doesn’t quite find his way home that evening . . .

So begins Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed, Emily Giffin’s page-turner of a novel about friendship, love and honesty — and standing up for yourself. After decades of playing second fiddle to the exuberant, bossy and gorgeous Darcy, Rachel just wants to be out of her best friend’s shadow, though she can’t quite balance those rebellious feelings against the intense loyalty she still feels for her.

Which is funny, considering she’s cheating with Dex, Darcy’s longtime boyfriend and current fiance. And Rachel is the maid of honor. And she and Darcy are inseparable — except for the times that Rach is kissing Dex, of course.

It’s crazy how much I really felt for Rachel, not Darcy — Darcy is almost a wholly unlikeable character. Rachel is trying to assert herself, take control of her own life . . . and finds herself truly in love, perhaps for the first time. Her relationship with Dex develops apart from Darcy but is, of course, completely shaped by Darcy. Can it ever be anything more? And can Dex actually go through with this sham of a marriage?

I really loved this book — and as an avid reader of women’s fiction, I can say sincerely that Giffin is a master at describing the intensity of first love, the complication of wanting to please our parents but also ourselves, at being a good friend but still protecting your own heart and interests when needed. She moves quickly through each scene without letting anything get too weighty, but we still feel the emotional resonance of the story. I felt connected to everyone and everything happening, though Giffin never lets us get too mired down in guilt or sympathy. It would pain me to see this labeled as a “beach read,” though I can definitely enjoy both books immensely! This just has so much to think about and process, if you let yourself get totally absorbed (and you will — I don’t think you’ll have a choice!).

All of the subtle touches in Something Borrowed just made it feel real to me — the dialogue was realistic, the scenes all believable, the characters flawed but lovable. And I was floored when we got a detail like Rachel having to retreat home from a tryst for the evening because she didn’t have any contact lens solution — she couldn’t sleep in her contacts! Finally — it’s not all roses and passionate kisses and staring deeply into each other’s eyes. We have to take out our freaking contact lenses before sleeping, thankyouverymuch. And as a serious Anglophile, I was ecstatic at the change of scenery toward the end of the novel. Sold!

Insightful, moving and just highly entertaining, don’t hesitate to pick up this one if it sounds like a genre you might enjoy (or if you’re looking to branch out!). Can’t read to pick up the sequel, Something Blue, in the near future.

4.5 out of 5!

ISBN: 0312321198 ♥ Purchase from Amazon ♥ Author Website

Review - Glass Houses by Rachel Caine

Claire, a very bright 16 year old goes to college two years early. She attends college in a town called Morganville. After being bullied by her dorm mates she moves off campus to share a house with a  goth girl Eve and two boys Michael and Shane.  While living with her new friends she discovers that Morganville is a “Vampire Town”. The vampires offer protection to the humans but anyone who is not protected is in grave danger of becoming a vampire’s dinner!

I enjoyed this book although I did wonder why the humans didn’t just leave Morganville for somewhere nicer with no vampires. Perhaps I skipped over the part where this was explained fully!

Any fans of Twilight will enjoy this story. It is exciting, scarey and there is plenty of romance. A nice light read for anyone in Year 9 and up.

Daydreaming About the Perfect Garden Shed

I’m a terribly undisciplined reader, so working in a bookstore is the worst thing I could possibly do. Rather than sticking with the good novel I’m currently reading, I’m powerless against every shiny new book that catches my eye at work. As I’m currently working on various landscaping projects, my eye was caught by Debra Prinzing’s Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways, a beautiful book about people (including novelist Amy Bloom) who either built from scratch or transformed ramshackle outbuildings and sheds into whimsical yet practical buildings: greenhouses, writing sheds, chicken houses or outdoor living rooms.

While there are the usual couple of outlandish or completely over the top constructions, most of the “shed” are simple barns or old cottages transformed with love, effort and a good eye into what are likely the most used rooms in their respective homesteads. I have an old two-car garage that I just use for storage. This book has me eying it for other possibilities.

Links

Debra Prinzing’s garden blog: shedstyle.com

Book Review: <i>Night Work</i> by Thomas Glavinic

Virginia Woolf may have advocated for a room of one’s own, but what if you had a world of one’s own instead? Jonas, a thirty-something living in Vienna, inherits just that when he wakes up on July 4 and finds that he may be the last person on Earth. In Night Work by Thomas Glavinic, Jonas is not only the last person left, but also the last living creature. There is no one to be found in Vienna—not a person, not a dog, not a cockroach.

The crux of Night Work doesn’t rest on finding out what happened to everyone else. Night Work is an intense study of how one survives, though certainly not thrives, on one’s own. What happens when you are left to your own devices, your own thoughts—both of your conscious and subconscious mind?

Glavinic deftly and subtly conveys Jonas’s growing paranoia. When Jonas is confronted by such things as his conjured wolf-bear and an intensely creepy character called The Sleeper, his brain realizes he is only paranoid, but it is a constant struggle to keep that paranoia in check. “He must cling at all costs to what existed. To what was definitely verifiable and beyond dispute.” If Jonas can’t do that, there is no way to survive in this new world.

One of the ways Jonas copes with this new world is to examine his life through deeply existential questioning. As he goes through old photographs and visits places from his past, he constantly compares his past self to his current self. There is at once a longing to return to the past, as played out when Jonas recreates his childhood home, and an almost remorseful sense of fulfillment at what he has experienced and accomplished since that past time.

Night Work may leave many readers unsatisfied. Those looking for a resolution to what happened to the world will not find one. It is an existential book following one man into the depths of despair. If readers can keep that in mind, they will find Night Work to be a gratifying, if not deeply disturbing, read.

 

Review and Giveaway: Hope's Boy by Andrew Bridge

“Love may not be enough to wake a child in the morning, dress him, and get him to school, then to feed him at night, bathe him, and put him to bed.  Still, can any of us imagine a childhood without it?”  from Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge

Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge is a memoir of a childhood spent in foster care.  There are approximately half a million young people in foster care in the United States.  They are removed from their homes when the court decides that they’ve been abused or neglected by their parents, or when poverty, death, illness or other circumstances beyond their control make it impossible for their biological parents to properly care for them.  Such was the case with Hope’s boy, Andy.  

When the book opens, 5 year old Andy is living in Chicago with his grandma Kate, who is struggling financially but doing the best she can.  One day her daughter Hope calls from California, insisting Kate put Andy on a plane and send him out to her.  Andy barely remembers his mom, but Kate, feeling she has no choice, says goodbye to Andy and sends him to Los Angeles.

Life with Hope is unpredictable and chaotic.  She means well and loves her boy but isn’t prepared to take care of a child.  In their two years together Andy witnesses his mother’s rape at knifepoint, is woken up at 2am to burglarize a house with his mom and her friend, and eats from dumpsters.  Hope, plagued by voices in her head that tell her they are coming to take Andy, becomes paranoid and protective, insisting Andy not go to school for fear they will ‘get him’.  They are evicted from their apartment for nonpayment of rent, but Hope refuses to leave, smashing the front window so they can enter after the locks have been changed.  They briefly live with a pastor’s family who try to help, but eventually they wear out their welcome and move to a motel.  Finally, in a heart-wrenching scene, Andy is pulled away from his mother by a social worker as police shove Hope to the ground.  

Life with Hope is hard, but life without Hope is hell.  Hope’s Boy shines a light on the harsh realities of a broken system.   Taken to MacLaren Hall, more like a prison than a juvenile facility, nothing is explained to this frightened little boy.  After several months in that horrible place he is placed with a family that offers stability and food but lacks any semblance of nurturing, encouragement, or love.  He stays with the Leonards for the remainder of his childhood, hanging onto the scraps he has from his mother (”You are my boy”) and finding solace in school.   There is no effort to reunite his family, and the abuse and neglect in his foster home goes on unchecked.  He sees Hope only a handful of times, in one hour increments under the watchful eye of his foster mother.  But then the visits stop completely for nearly a decade, leaving Andy to worry and wonder.  Andy remains ever hopeful that she will somehow come back for him.  Like a child lost in a big department store, Andy believes that if he stays put, she will find him.

Against staggering odds, Andy goes on to college, later graduating from Harvard Law School and becoming a Fulbright scholar, without any assistance from family of from the foster care system.  This is miraculous as the majority of foster children never graduate from high school, let alone college.  In fact, 30-50% of children aging out of foster care are homeless within 2 years.  They crowd our shelters and prisons. Without the memory of his mother’s love to hang onto, who knows what might have become of Andrew Bridge.

In an impassioned plea for reform, Bridge wonders:  

“Did Hope’s visits to the Leonards’ house have to be so hostile?  Did she have to be limited to one visit a month for an hour?  Could someone have asked her what she needed to assume more of motherhood’s responsibilities, to assure her son that she was there for him, to ease her son’s unyielding loneliness?  Was it necessary to leave her boy to think that she had just disappeared?”  from Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge, page 295

You can check out the author’s website for more information about the book and the foster care system.

Thanks to Molly at Hyperion for sending me this emotional memoir and for offering a copy to one of my readers.  If you’d like a chance to win a copy of Hope’s Boy, please leave a comment here by Monday, March 23rd. 

Horror World reviews Little Graveyard

I almost forgot about this review at Horror World since I got to read it pretty far in advance. It’s a really nice one. Here’s a little snippet to entice you to read all of it. Oh yeah, and buy the book.

Little Graveyard on the Prairie flat-out ground my soul into a fine powder and left it to blow across the desert. My first taste of this author left me wondering why newer writers can’t be this literate, insightful, original and fresh. Wedel opens his imagination and lets it softly tiptoe into your mind with an ice-cube-down-the-spine first chapter and never lets the reader off the hook until the shattering conclusion. I was reminded of a Braunbeck or a John Little tale and if any of you good people have read these two writers you know what a high compliment that is.

Many thanks to Mark Tyree for reading and reviewing Little Graveyard on the Prairie.

Review: READING BY LIGHTNING by Joan Thomas [Savvy Verse & Wit]

Serena from Savvy Verse & Wit recently reviewed Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas.  Here’s an excerpt:

Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas, published by Goose Lane Editions, made its way into my mailbox from Mini Book Expo. It’s a coming of age novel at a time that the world is on the brink of World War II, particularly in England.

It took me a long while to get into this book, more than 100 pages, which was disheartening. In Book One readers will wander through Lily Piper’s musings and her interactions or lack thereof with her parents. The wavering narrative and tangents of Lily drag on for long stretches, and readers may have a hard time following along. Her relationship with her mother is cantankerous at times and Lily is often portrayed as a wayward child led by the sin in her heart. There are a number of instances where Lily wanders off with boys alone, which in many ways should ruin her reputation.

Read the entire review here.

**Attention participants:  remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**

American Gods

Time to write a book review. Like BigDog, I don’t read bad books, or at least I immediately put it down once I realize it’s bad. The last book I put down? Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the West. But that is a trick question, because I only put it down due to the fact that it’s a huge book and the library fines started rolling in heavy. Who knew that a guy name Meri could be such a sweet adventuring dude? Well that’s another trick question because everyone knows Meriadoc Brandybuck was a sweet adventuring dude/hobbit.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I picked the book as I do every book, by closing my eyes and throwing darts at the Nebula Award winner list. I’m closing in on double digits there so I figure I might as well keep going. A sidenote is that the British born author wrote the creepy children’s novel Coraline that I recently enjoyed in the theater.

So anyway, the book follows a guy just released from jail and is heading to his home in the Midwest. He gets mixed up with some extraordinary strangers who persuade him to work for them. Slowly he learns that he is following several modern day versions of gods from the old countries and that there are many more like him. Mostly they are based on intermingled versions of gods from Norse, Greek, Far East and Native American types. The old gods don’t fare well in America but they never-the-less battle for souls and power in a modern country who would rather worship technology than He who controls thunder. When the modern gods of the media and technology decide to put an end to the old gods once and for all, each god must take a side because the a war that has been building in this country is nearing.

“They’ll win”, said Whiskey Jack flatly. “They won already. You lost already. Like the white man and my people. Mostly they won. And when they lost, they made treaties. Then they broke the treaties. So they won again. I’m not fighting for another lost cause.” Then he said, “Paul Bunyan.” he shood his head slowly and he said it again. “Paul Bunyan.”

“Paul Bunyan?” Shadow said. “What did he ever do?”

“He took up head space,” said Whiskey Jack. He bummed a cigarette from Wednesday and the two men sat and smoked.

“It’s like the idiots who figure that hummingbirds worry about their weight or tooth decay or some such nonsense, maybe they just want to spare hummingbirds the evils of sugar,” explained Wednesday. “So they fill the hummingbird feeders with fucking NutraSweet. The birds come to the feeders and they drink it. Then they die, because their food contains no calories even though their little tummies are full. That’s Paul Bunyan for you. Nobody ever told Paul Bunyan stories. Nobody ever believed in Paul Bunyan. He came staggering out of a New York ad agency in 1910 and filled the nation’s myth stomach with empty calories.”          -pg 352

On the BigDog rating scale I give it a 5 to 8. Which I think means it is a 5 out of 10 for dificulty to read, and an 8 out of 10 for enjoyability. I gave it only a 5 for readability because while I kept it in my hand longer per day than any books I’ve read recently, it was 600 pages which I think puts it out of the sub 5 score range  (let the record show this rating scale needs some refining). I gave it an 8 for enjoyability because it has most everything I enjoy in a book: gratuitous sex scenes, god on god violence, and a protagonist with a penchant for gloomy social commentary.

The Great #QueryFail Debate

I sold my soul signed up for a Twitter account this morning.  I have resisted the beast until now.  I wanted to have a look at the phenomenon that is #queryfail.  A handful of literary agents, editors, and other industry “insiders” have been sharing reasons why query letters get rejected.  The query mistakes range from bizarre to simply ignorant (both equally unacceptable). #QueryFail Day on Twitter is the creation of Colleen Lindsay.  This is what she has to say about #queryfail;

Today is #Queryfail Day on Twitter, the first of what will probably become a monthly or semi-monthly experience. What is #Queryfail Day, you ask? * rubs hands together gleefully * A group of online agents, book editors and periodicals acquisition editors are posting about their queries in real time. The idea is to educate people about what exactly it is in a query that made us stop reading and say “Not for me.” We’re being very careful not to include personal identifiers of any kind. The idea isn’t to mock or be intentionally cruel, but to educate.

Here is a sampling for your reading pain/pleasure;

ChristianPubTip: It’s a handwritten manuscript with a note that says this is the only copy they have.#queryfail

danielliterary: Asks me how to go about submitting? Uh. If u have my email address, then u obviously

have my web site address with my guidelines #queryfail

danielliterary: Say you don’t know how to paste the first five pages of your manuscript into your email?

Please get your 3-year-old to teach you. #queryfail

angelajames: ONE sentence about the book. I don’t need to know your life history. I need to know about

the book. #queryfail

angelajames: “passion raging between two characters will burn right off the page” makes me think your

book is going to be overwritten #queryfail

Colleen_Lindsay: A headshot embedded into body of query email. #queryfail

Colleen_Lindsay: @bookavore I just delete all queries that come in addressed to Dear Sir, To Whom It

May Concern or Dear Agent. #queryfail

danielliterary: Call yourself a “published author” when what you really mean is “self-published”?

#queryfail

bostonbookgirl: Including a creepy photo of you clearly taken about 20 years ago? You have just taken

your first step on the road to #queryfail

Colleen_Lindsay: Three paragraphs, no plot, no hook, and lots of “me, me, me, look how wonderful I

am!” - #queryfail.

mattwagner: “My proposal is a work in progress.” Sorry, please finish your proposal before querying,

#queryfail

danielliterary: Addresses me “Dear Sir/Madam…”? #queryfail

I deliberately excluded the #queryfails for the BDSM photo included with the letter, the mothers who want to educate their daughters about pimps, and the con-men who are finally ready to tell their stories.  Self-explanatory.

I, like others, am incredibly interested in this debate.  Netta at WordWebbing.com had this to say;

I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what is done in public, what the hell goes on in private? But then, it’s private and I don’t have to know. I also wondered if these agents, who took time out of a busy day to skewer the hapless writer, ever took the time to contact the writer and tell them, in private and in a professional way, just what it was that made the query fail. Feel me?

I feel you.  Rejection is important.  It’s more important than succeeding, because succeeding doesn’t really teach you anything.  You already knew how to do it in the first place.  I can see where there would be concern over the feelings of some poor hapless writer venturing into the mysterious world of Getting Published. That said, not every writer (ahem) follows Twitter, so the personal contact offering constructive criticisms (to the honest mistakes, not the con-men and crazies) would be useful.  I would venture to guess though, that not every literary agent has the time to write a personalized assessment of my crappy query letter.  They have more bad query letters to read you know.

As a whole I think we have become too sensitive to rejection and failure.  No, I don’t like failure.  I’m not a complete idiot.  But, I learn from my mistakes and hopefully refrain from making them again.  No, I don’t want to be another hilarious #queryfail tweet, but I do want to know how NOT to write a query letter, so I learn from the mistakes of others. It seems that this would be common sense to most, but common sense seems to be about as common as horse-drawn buggies these days (see: Pimps for Dummies #queryfail).

Still, some are up in arms about the snarkiness that can come along with some of the fails, but honestly, they seem to deserve it.  Besides, telling an agent or an editor that they’re doing it wrong would be like telling God she built the universe wrong, and that, I suspect, would land you in the #queryfail pile.

Amy's Marginalia: Little Heathens

Lest you think that I only read Victorian Fiction or classic, great works of literature, I thought I’d mix things up this week and review a charming little memoir that my library book group read this month.

The book’s full title is Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and I admit, it wouldn’t be a book I’d choose if left to my own devices.  But one of the things I love about being part of book groups, especially community ones, is that they stretch you and force you to broaden your reading horizons.  Certainly, sometimes I read books that I can’t stand, but I often find new authors and perspectives that I find valuable and rewarding.

The author, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, grew up in a small, hard working Iowa farm during the Great Depression.  She lived with her mother and grandparents and near her cousins and other members of her extended family, who also farmed in the area.

Although the book is technically a memoir, it reads more like a topically arranged account of one family’s very typical Midwest depression lifestyle.  The chapters include “Religious Influences, Medicine, Farm Food, Wash Day, Outhouses, Gardening, and other mainstays of the Iowa life.  Her prose style is very informal and approachable, straightforward and relatable.  She’s everyone’s grandma, relating the simple conditions and facts of life from her upbringing.

The pictures that I’ve included are from some items one of the women in my book group brought along for “show and tell” (Thanks Carol!). She was born and raised in Iowa, and her family lived on a farm during the depression.  This particular one was of special interest to me because it was the hand-held school bell from the local one-room school house.

As we enter into our own economic downturn, which some have even dared to call a “depression,” I compare our relative abundance to the limited resources available to the families in the book, and I realize how vastly different our current situation is from where our country was in the 1930s.  These farmers lived off their land, and store bought goods were a rare luxury. You think you need to cut back these days?  Kalish lists what few items they purchased:”The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene.”  It’s true that the resourceful farmers produced some of the products that we city folk would be hard pressed to make on our own, such as butter and soap.  However, I can’t imagine going a week with such a short shopping list, let alone years, to feed a large family.

I never expected this little book to convict me of anything.  Sure, my daily Bible reading, that should convict me plenty, but a little memoir about the Great Depression?  But I can’t believe how many reproaches I felt about the wasteful way I live my life.  These people knew how to make the most of their resources.  They knew to scoop your finger inside an egg shell to scrape out all the egg.  So, yes, that might seem minor, but I started doing that and realized how much egg I had been throwing away.  And clothing always got mended, passed down, and recycled in very creative ways.  Nothing was wasted.  I’m not saying that I need to become a pack rat, but I also could be a better steward of my money and possessions.  After all, they are not actually MY money and MY possessions.  It all belongs to God, and he’s merely trusting me to manage them. (Pictured here is a flour sack that has been carefully embroidered to be a table cloth.)

I have to say that the home remedies did disturb me a little bit. I understand that without a doctor available and no money to pay a doctor, even if there was one, you relied on your own know-how to fix bumps and bruises.  But these people took it many steps further and came up with some very elaborate remedies.  I’m sure that some of them work fine and are safe, but a few of them seemed highly suspect.  Dr. Dan certainly didn’t approve of a couple that I read to him.  Actually, it was the look of horror on his face that told me he wouldn’t be incorporating those techniques into his medical practice.

No, I’m not saying we all need to move out onto a farm, cut our electricity, and live off the land.  But I do think it’s wise to look back to those who did it and the lessons they learned in the process.  And maybe, we could all use a little bit of that self-reliance and hard work ethic that those farmers embraced.

The Dowry Bride by Shobhan Bantwal

The Dowry Bride by Shobhan Bantwal

Kensington Publishing/Books

Published in 2007

ISBN 0758220316

343 Pages

Summary (Mine): Megha, a 21 year old Indian woman, is stuck in an arranged married to someone who is weak, selfish, and a “mommy’s boy”. After one year of marriage, she hears a conversation between her husband and her mother-in-law that will change her life forever or it will end it her life.

Running away from the evil plans that her husband and mother-in-law, she goes to Kiran, her cousin-in-law who has always been kind to her, for help and protection from his cousin and aunt. Only when the two of them are together their relationship blossoms into more than just family relations and friendship, will their feelings bring both of them to their doom?

Summary (Back Cover): In her first novel, Shobhan Bantwal takes readers to India and into the life of Megha who, overhearing plans for murders, is horrified to discover she is to be the victim. Her husband and his mother intend to kill her. Panicking, she runs for life, all the while knowing that eluding her would-be killers is impossible if she can’t find someone to help her.

Clinging to a memory of kindness, Megha finds her way to Kiran, the one man who has shown her friendship and respect. Hiding her in his apartment, Kiran becomes her protector. As their friendship grows, their relationship turns into something even more forbidden, more dangerous than Megha’s bid for life and freedom.

BOOK REVIEW: Stand By Your Hitman by Leslie Langtry

Stand By Your Hitman is the third outing for the Bombay family assassins after ‘Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy and Guns Will Keep Us Together, both immediately had a place on my ‘keeper’ shelf. In ‘Scuse Me we met the Bombays, an extended family of assassins who’ve been in business for, well, about as long as assassins have been around. Business is good, trust funds assure every family member is financially sound, and other than one or two hits a year, it’s the PTA, soccer, car pools and training the kids the best way to eliminate targets – you know, guns, bombs, poison, the usual family stuff.

Missi, short for Mississippi (every family member is named for a location) the family inventor and all around resident genius, has been raising her fraternal twin 17 year old sons on the isolated family island of the west coast of South America, Santa Muerta. Her peaceful existence – well, except for the new explosives she’s working on – is disturbed by a letter saying she had won a spot on the newest reality show – Survival – thanks to the wonder bomb disarming video she sent. Her sons are excited, and once she’s convinced that they hadn’t set her up, she just ignored it. It turns out though her mom set her up. Seems maybe one of the guys on the show is really an illegal arms dealer. Possibly. Not really sure. But he is a hunk.

Two days later, after forcing her conniving mother to take her sons while she was gone, Missi lands in Canada to find she’s a part of some cheesy, low budget Survivor knock off with a group composed of losers, a smarmy wanna be host Alan and his female producer, Julie, with the charm of a prison camp guard. The ‘remote location’? The beach by a 5* resort. The ‘challenges’? Well, the first two are real enough, but the lack of safety precautions have the contestants worried. Then things go downhill fast. It seems the show is running out of money and the challenges have pointless prizes. Would you believe charades?

After the first morning, Missi is out in the jungle looking for more food and her twin sons are up in the tree. Bless them. In true Bombay style, they lied to grandma about camping so she wouldn’t go looking for them, stole her credit card, and followed mom to Costa Rica to give her a hand. She puts them to work trying to find out more about Isaac, the Vic, because she needs an incentive to go against her instincts that say he’s a good guy. Will she or won’t she?

The contestants are ready to mutiny, the host is busy in the Presidential Suite running up a huge tab for booze and girls, the cameramen have sided with the ‘tribes’ and if fellow tribe member Cricket gets any more perky, she stands a very real chance of Missi Bombay offing her. Unless one of her fellow tribe members beats her to it.

Langtry’s books are quirky, very funny and a delight to read. Each of the three stories so far have been different, not just variations of the same theme. Unfortunately, the contrived plot that has Missi isolated on this survival show, though contrived it had all kinds of potential, begins working against the story as it runs out of steam even as the show runs out of money. Plus the romance between Missi and Lex has no real fire to it. About 2/3rd’s of the way through, Stand By Your Hitman starts to limp along and it ends with a whimper, not a bang.

In both ‘Scuse Me and Guns, Langtry had good plots, the feeling of a real, albeit off-beat, romance, plus an interesting back story involving the Bombay family. The stories worked on several levels. This story has the feel that half of it is missing and that is partly due to the ‘isolation’ the reality show format imposes. Parts are laugh out loud funny, but the book lacks the tension between the lead characters that make for a good romance and the mystery that makes for a good romantic suspense story. It came away unsatisfying on both levels which frustrates the hell out of me because I really wanted the book to work.

Langtry’s new book, I Shot You Babe, is due out this summer and it will be the one that determines if the Bombay’s have what it takes to go the distance as a series.

My Grade: C

Who would enjoy this book: Readers of Suzanne Enoch’s Sam Jellico series, those who enjoyed Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer and Crusie’s Getting Rid of Bradley.