Author Archive
Here in the Midwest, that is, where, as Garrison Keillor would say about Lake Wobegon, “the women are strong, the men are handsome, and all the children are above average.”
We may have all that going for us, but a different view of the Midwest and the coming economic and social challenges it will face in the next few years is presented in Richard Longworth’s Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. Longworth shares the details of his recent travels around the Midwest (including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and the northern halves of Illinois and Indiana), relating grim stories of small towns that are dying and cities once made great by manufacturing that are now crumbling.
It’s a thoughtful book, although I can’t really call it a light read. Particularly eye-opening (for me, at least) were the chapters in which Longworth spoke with town mayors and leaders who admitted that people in their communities struggled to accept immigration–while they also admitted that their immigrant populations were helping to keep their towns more alive and vibrant than most.
Sure, the coasts might be more exciting.  Mountain regions more scenic. But for me? Give me the Midwest any day. Unless, of course, we have any more winters like the last one…Â
Editor’s Note:  I’m sad to say that this will be the last of Sarah’s reviews. She has left the building and moved on to bigger and brighter things - though what could be better then this little blog is a puzzler. All of us MADreviewers and readers will miss her and we wish her very, very well.
June 25th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Even for a day.
Every now and then I read nonfiction books which just make me shake me head and wonder at the authors who write them, as well as how and why they do. Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets is one such book.
While a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, Venkatesh was repeatedly told not to venture into certain neighborhoods around the campus (for safety reasons). Confused because the neighborhoods didn’t look all that dangerous to him, he started exploring his surroundings…which eventually led to his walking into the projects (specifically, the Robert Taylor Homes) to “study urban poverty.”  This is what happened, after he was taken to meet J.T., one of the project’s gang leaders:
“I explained the project as best as I could. It was being overseen by a national poverty expert, I said, with the goal of understanding the lives of young black men in order to design better public policy. My role, I said, was very basic: conducting surveys to generate data for the study. There was an eerie silence when I finished. Everyone stood waiting, watching J.T.
He took the questionnaire from my hand, barely glanced at it, then handed it back. Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful.
I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled. How does it feel to be black and poor?”
If you want to know the answer to that, and to many other questions as well, you’ll just have to read the book.Â
June 13th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
I don’t often read mysteries. But when I do, you’d better believe I want a mystery–I want real hard-boiled, hard-livin’, hard knocks, hard drinkin’ (think Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe)-type stuff.
This is why it was a lot of fun to find a series by J. A. Konrath called the “Jack Daniels” mysteries; the “Jack Daniels,” of course, referring to tough-as-nails Chicago policewoman Jacqueline Daniels. The first book in the series is titled Whiskey Sour; I myself started with the second book, Bloody Mary, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The friendship between Jack and her police detective partner Herb was a lot of fun, and if you don’t mind some unsettling bits in the mystery where victims’ arms turn up in the morgue and a crazed psychopath sets out to murder his victims to ease his headaches, this might be the mystery series for you.
In the meantime? All I can say is, I’m glad I don’t have to be a Chicago cop. That sort of thing is definitely better left to women with Bogartesque names like “Jack Daniels.”
May 27th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Everyone ready to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when it opens on May 22?*
If you can’t wait, or you’re waiting for it to come to the cheap seats (see you there!), consider picking up a copy of The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Old Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark, by Tudor Parfitt, to hold you over.
Billed as a “real-life Indiana Jones,” Parfitt is a professor of Jewish studies and an intrepid explorer in his own right. In this book, he details his lengthy search for the artifact Indiana Jones first sought: the Ark of the Covenant, which once contained the hard copies of the Ten Commandments.Â
It’s an adventurous read, much of it set in Africa, and filled with a wide variety of characters (some trustworthy, some not). And how does it end? Do they find the Ark?  Or does the book have the same ending as the original Indiana Jones movie? You’ll just have to read it to find out…
May 17th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
When’s the last time you read a book about all three?Â
A lot of people assume that people who read nonfiction only do so because they’re interested in the subject. Well, a lot of times, that’s true. But sometimes, you get lucky and chance across a book that isn’t about anything you’re truly interested in, and yet…and yet…it looks interesting.
This is what happened to me recently with Gregory Gibson’s Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus. I think it originally caught my eye because of the words “book dealer” in the title, but it’s only tangentially about Bob Langmuir, the book dealer in question (who chanced upon a stack of rare and valuable photographs by Diane Arbus). Just like it’s only tangentially about photographer Diane Arbus’s life and art, a man named Charlie Lucas who worked as a “talker” (front man) for a New York City sideshow, and that sideshow itself (complete with headlining flea circus act). Each plotline on its own probably wouldn’t be enough to carry the narrative.
But taken together? Wowza. The best novel out there’s got nothing on this sweet, sweet nonfiction.
May 7th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
I’d been underwhelmed by Sloane Crosley’s book I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays, and was all ready to return it to the library. But then, for some reason, I decided to read one last essay, and settled on the one titled “You On a Stick.”
First, I have to ask: any women out there who have been in weddings that they didn’t particularly want to be in? Ever attended a horrible bachelorette party where the mothers of the happy couple tried to act young and inappropriate with gag gifts, lingerie, and “naughty” pastries? (If you haven’t: it’s horrible.) Ever come up against a friend who was being a total Bridezilla, and then made it worse by telling you how she WASN’T being a Bridezilla?
Then you are ready for Sloane Crosley’s* essay “You On a Stick.” Even if it’s the only essay in this book you read, you’ll have gotten your money’s worth.Â
*Plus, you kind of have to like a woman who is proud of having written the cover story for the worst-selling issue of Maxim magazine ever.
April 29th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
For a couple of weeks in March, PBS suspended their weekly screenings of Jane Austen movies (which are now over, sadly) in order to have a pledge drive, and while I support their right to garner support, I missed my Jane Austen fix.
So I tried yet another Austen-esque novel, this time by an author named Amanda Grange: Mr. Knightley’s Diary. For those of you in the Austen know, of course, Mr. Knightley is one of the main characters in Jane Austen’s novel Emma (for those of you further in the know, you’ll remember the 1996 film Emma; it starred Gwyneth Paltrow and the dreamy Jeremy Northam as Mr. Knightley). This is Austen from the guy’s point of view, and because it is in diary form, you get a daily dose of Mr. Knightley’s thoughts.
Which, I think, is one of the reasons why this was not one of my favorite Austen Imitations (or Austen Lites, as I think of them). The diary form is just too limiting, and it’s very hard to do it well. I now have a whole new appreciation for Helen Fielding, whose own homage to Jane, Bridget Jones’s Diary, was also written in diary form, but succeeded.
But? If you desperately need something Jane-esque, here’s another one to try. And who knows? Grange is also the author of Mr. Darcy’s Diary (from Pride and Prejudice); maybe I’ll try that one.*
*My obsession clearly knows no bounds.
April 14th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
…it’s a helluva town!
Pet subjects. We all have them. Some people like to read everything they can find about the Founding Fathers. Others can’t get enough science books, or memoirs. For others, novels set in the Wild West is what it’s all about. For me? I’ll read anything you give me about New York City.
New York City is just one pet subject for me among many, but it’s a rewarding one, not only because a lot of novels are set there, but also because so many writers themselves live in New York City and write nonfiction about it. One such example is novelist Colson Whitehead, best known for his titles John Henry Days and The Intuitionist; he’s also written the short prose poetry book The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts.
Those readers looking for a story or guidebook-like information about New York City will not find what they’re looking for in this book. What they will find is beautiful, evocative writing:
“Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next. We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too.
Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us…” (pp. 9-10.)
I’ve never lived in New York, only visited. But I think I became a little bit of a New Yorker when I read that.
March 31st, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Who knew? Evidently Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and billionaire, throws a fabulous shareholder meeting.
Now, if you’d never thought to put the word “fabulous” together with the phrase “shareholder meeting,” you might want to check out the book A Weekend with Warren Buffett and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures, by Randy Cepuch. Financial writer Cepuch, wild and crazy guy that he obviously is, decided to learn more about a few companies in which he owned stock. Five years and fifty shareholders’ meetings later, he was able to write this amusing and actually quite informative review of their meetings.
Cepuch visited all the companies you’ve heard about: Berkshire Hathaway, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Playboy; and a few you probably haven’t, including Otter Tail and the Chalone Wine Group). In addition to providing the inside story on these meetings (”At 9:40 Christie Hefner breezes in. You can’t miss her: She’s wearing a brilliant white suit and has the bearing of someone who knows she must be ‘on’ at all times”), he also grades their informational content, their entertainment value, and their freebies.Â
I can promise you that going to an open stockholder meeting is not my idea of a good time (I just barely understand the concept of compounding interest, after all), but reading about them was surprisingly festive.
March 19th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
I was feeling lousy last week. Sick of the winter, sick of Decision 2008, then sick of this winter some more.Â
So I was desperately in need of something, anything, to bring a little levity back into my soul. And I’ll be, if the comic collection This Is As Bad As It Gets from Voutch didn’t just hit the spot.
It’s a thin book, with one comic and line of text to a page, and many of the comics are quite strange. But there’s also quite a few that are so wonderful, so surreal, so funny, that they should be good to remember and giggle about long after you’ve returned the book to the library.* And the artwork’s beautiful too; stylized people, rich color-drenched illustrations. It was definitely good for what ailed me… especially since the winter isn’t over yet.
*Which one am I still laughing about? Definitely the Viking standing on a rock addressing a crowd: “As your leader, I will be harsh but fair. To be perfectly honest, I will be much more harsh than fair.”
March 13th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
The books I’m about to suggest are not, I repeat, NOT, books that can be viewed as “pleasure reading.” They are sad, they are graphic, and they will make you wonder about the whole human race in general.
Still with me? Okay. The books in question are titled Machete Season and Life Laid Bare. They are oral histories, gathered by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld (and translated into English by Linda Coverdale), and they are about the Rwandan genocide. In the first volume, Machete Season, Hatzfeld interviewed ten Hutu individuals who were either standing trial for or were already in prison for their parts in killing Tutsis; in the second volume, Life Laid Bare, he interviews a number of Tutsi survivors.
I read Machete Season about two years ago, and just finished Life Laid Bare. That seemed about right; I don’t think I can recommend reading them both at the same time. Although that might prove interesting too; I don’t know. What I do know is that, taken together, they provide a pretty intense oral history of what people are capable of (both in terms of violence, and in terms of survival). And they deserve to be read, even if it’s not easy.
March 6th, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
Wanna read about how the other half (or, more accurately, the other top 1%) lives?
Then I would highly recommend the surprisingly interesting All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make–and Spend–Their Fortunes, by Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan. Even if you don’t feel like reading it, it’s jam-packed with sidebars, charts, and lists of factoids such as:
- The percentage of wealth controlled by women on the list slipped from 16.4% in 1982 to 13.2% in 2006. Of the thirteen richest women on the list over the last 25 years, only one didn’t inherit her money from a family or spouse (p. 7);
- In 2006, the average net worth of 400 members without a college degree exceeeded the average net worth of those with a degree by $2.8 billion (p. 31); and
- 46 men and 9 women who appeared on the Forbes 400 list in 2006 are reportedly unmarried (p. 268).
My favorite part about that last item is how the authors conclude their thought: “That, of course, doesn’t mean that they are looking for a partner; but perhaps some of them are.” Leaving me with only one question: How did they know what I was thinking?!?!?
March 1st, 2008
Sarah - Alicia Ashman
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