Book Reviews
Okay folks, buckle up because I'm about to get VERY controversial here. You thought the last book review about the Israel/ Palestinian conflict touched on some explosive issues? Well, that's nothing compared to this book review. Some sacred cows are about to be gored. So be prepared.
Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" is a terrible book.
Yeah, you heard me. "A Wrinkle in Time" is terrible. As a book "A Wrinkle in Time" has some of the worst characters and some of the most miserable and unrealistic dialogue that I have ever read. The plot is okay-ish and there are some trippy scenes (the image of rows of children on a street bouncing their balls and skipping rope in perfect time remains with me ever since I first read "A Wrinkle in Time" when I was in 6th grade) ... but in the end the characters are awful and the dialogue is horrible. And frankly, if the characters are awful and the dialogue is horrible then the book is beyond hope of redemption. I have never known a book to succeed in writing itself towards greatness or even competence when it is saddled with bad characters and bad dialogue. Period.
So why is "A Wrinkle in Time"- widely considered a classic piece of children's fiction- such a bad book? Well, before I get into that in depth let me just give my own personal history of "A Wrinkle in Time." As I mentioned before I read "A Wrinkle in Time" in middle school. Indeed "A Wrinkle in Time" is not a self-contained book but the first part of a quadrilogy. There are four books, all of which I read in middle school. The first book involves Meg and her creepy-ass little brother and an unmemorable teen boy love interest traveling across space to rescue Meg's dad. The next two books are also not very memorable (one involved Meg traveling inside her creepy-ass little brother's mitochondria or something). The last book, "Many Waters," I remember reading and actually enjoying a little bit probably because Meg and her creepy-ass little brother weren't in that book at all. Instead Meg's older twin brothers time travel back to before the Great Flood where they meet Noah (of "He built the Ark" fame) and Noah's family. It was kind of interesting and ethically complicated too because the older twin brothers knew that Noah had to build an Ark before the Great Flood came but that Noah couldn't fit all the human civilization in his boat.... so a lot of good people were about to die. That was a lot more interesting to me than Meg and the creepy-ass little brother battling Nameless Cloud of Evil in "A Wrinkle in Time." Plus Noah and his family were about waist-high to modern humans and all the women were topless for some reason. I remember that.
Anyway, in the "A Wrinkle in Time" series the first book seemed to be the worst to my 12-year-old brain. Back in those days I tended to blame myself if I found a book to be difficult to like, especially a book with a respected legacy like "A Wrinkle in Time." Clearly I was too dumb to understand it or appreciate it. Now that I'm almost forty I've managed to accrue enough self-esteem to realize that no.... no.... 12-year-old me was right. "A Wrinkle in Time" really is a bad book.
So let's review the plot of "A Wrinkle in Time." It starts off strongly enough. Meg Murry, age fourteen, is being kept awake by a ferocious thunderstorm in the middle of the night. She creeps into the kitchen for a snack, where she meets her little brother Charles and their mother. The family settles down for a cozy little midnight snack of liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches and hot cocoa. So far so good. In fact, this intimate and sweet scene is probably the best in the book. When Meg says that she hates liverwurst and wants a tomato and cream cheese sandwich instead, Charles pulls out their last remaining tomato from the refrigerator. "All right if I use it on Meg, Mother?" Charles asks. "To what better use could it be put?" their mother replies. It's a beautiful exchange. Two sentences, awkwardly spoken (like all the dialogue in "A Wrinkle in Time") but nevertheless indicating that Meg's family is loving if a bit intellectual. Meg has a safe space to go to despite all her troubles at school and fighting with teens.
Anyway, don't let the beginning scene fill you with hope about the rest of the book because the story goes downhill fast. The Murry family's midnight snack is interrupted by a dotty old woman named Mrs. Whatsit. L'Engle obviously wanted to portray Mrs. Whatsit as an adorably eccentric woman but instead Mrs. Whatsit comes of as an insane old bag lady who's about as funny as Jar Jar Binks. Mrs. Whatsit makes Meg take off her wet boots and socks, stinking up the kitchen as everyone is trying to eat. Then Mrs. Whatsit demands sandwiches, falls off her chair (ho ho, how funny!), and lays on the floor, refusing to get up. "Have YOU ever tried getting up with a sprained dignity?" Sigh. At this point the Murry family should call the police and have Mrs. Whatsit bundled off their property. They don't though.
The book goes on. Mrs. Whatsit leaves. The Murry family makes breakfast before school the next day and the reader starts to get her first taste of the awfulness of the dialogue that marks the rest of "A Wrinkle in Time." Meg's older teen brothers scold her over the breakfast table and oh boy is the conversation badly-written! Not only is the dialogue unnatural and stiff and unlike anything a human being would say let alone a teenage boy.... it also seems to be about 60% mansplaining. As I reread "A Wrinkle in Time" I couldn't help but be amazed at how many of the scenes seem to involve some male figure mansplaining or acting in a condescending manner towards Meg. Her older teenage brothers mansplain to her and her mother. "You have a great mind and all, Mother, but you don't have much SENSE. And certainly Meg and Charles don't ... Don't take everything so PERSONALLY, Meg! Use a happy medium for once!" says Sandy, Meg's sixteen-year-old brother. And frankly if a sixteen-year-old boy has ever used the term "happy medium" naturally in a sentence then flying centaurs really do exist. Meg's creepy little 5-year-old brother Charles also mansplains to her ("You have to be patient, Meg") but some of the most problematic mansplaining comes from Meg's fourteen-year-old love interest Calvin. "Come on, Meg. You know it isn't true, I know it isn't true," Calvin says in one scene after Meg becomes understandably upset over the implication that Meg's dad may have disappeared because he fell in love with another woman. "And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go."
Wow. So many problematic ideas in that statement. Yes. It is impossible for a man to leave a woman if the woman is beautiful. Beautiful women never have unfaithful husbands. Oh, and dear reader, please read the sentence "And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man could leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go," and imagine those words coming out of the mouth of a fourteen-year-old boy. If you find that you can't imagine that at all, congratulations. You know how actual people talk.
Scene after scene in "A Wrinkle in Time" is filled with this horrible, unrealistic dialogue. I don't know when I started to realize that "A Wrinkle in Time" was just a flat-out terrible book. Maybe it was when Meg randomly made what was supposed to be a joke but comes out as weird word salad. "Mother, Charles says I'm not one thing or the other, not flesh nor fowl nor good red herring." (Meg, seriously..... what the fuck?) Or maybe when Meg and her mother have a conversation but they sound less like a mother and daughter and more like some 26th century robot actors trying to interpret ancient 20th century flesh-people plays for modern robot audiences. "I'm blessed with more brains and opportunities than many people," Meg's mom says casually to Meg, "But there's nothing about me that breaks out of the ordinary mold." Bravo Madeleine L'Engle! What amazing dialogue! *air kiss.* I have never read such natural conversation since that infamous bad Japanese video game translation: "All your base are belong to us."
The plot of "A Wrinkle in Time" is only marginally better than the dialogue. Meg, Charles and Calvin travel across space with the help of three witches so they can rescue Meg and Charles' dad. Oh, and they have to battle a Nameless Cloud of Evil. The Nameless Cloud of Evil doesn't really have a motive. It's just an Evil Cloud that consumes planets and turns civilizations into Orwellian dictatorships. Meg and Calvin rescue Meg's father from one of these planets but they have to leave Charles behind and Meg almost dies when they time-warp (or "wrinkle") off the planet. In another hair-tearingly awful example of Madeleine L'Engle's stiff, unnatural dialogue, we get a scene where Meg lies on the grass close to death. Meg's dad hasn't seen her since she was a little girl and Meg's dad also has been imprisoned in a hellish suspension for half a decade. Instead of weeping over his daughter or laughing in relief over his release from prison or screaming in horror over the fact that his youngest son is still imprisoned across space ... Meg's dad decides to chat about physics with Calvin. "Time is different on Camazotz, anyhow. Our time, inadequate though it is, at least is straightforward. It may not be even fully one-dimensional, because it can't move back and forth on its line, only ahead- but at least it's consistent in its direction." Yeah, sure, fine man. So are you going to start CPR on Meg? Or...?
Hope Larson adapted Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" to graphic novel format in 2012. L'Engle originally wrote the book in 1962. Larson's illustrations are competent but not very memorable. Larson frankly sacrifices too much of her own talent in order to remain slavishly faithful to Madeleine L'Engle's original text. The adaptation is bulky, retaining too many scenes that really should have been cut. "A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel" would have really benefited with a more ruthless editor. I would have loved an abridged version of "A Wrinkle in Time" with maybe an adapter who was unafraid to re-write some dialogue. A lot of the problems with Larson's "A Wrinkle in Time" adaptation have to do with the source material, however, so the graphic novel already started out with two strikes against it.
Because, as I have said before, "A Wrinkle in Time" is a really bad book.
Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" is a terrible book.
Yeah, you heard me. "A Wrinkle in Time" is terrible. As a book "A Wrinkle in Time" has some of the worst characters and some of the most miserable and unrealistic dialogue that I have ever read. The plot is okay-ish and there are some trippy scenes (the image of rows of children on a street bouncing their balls and skipping rope in perfect time remains with me ever since I first read "A Wrinkle in Time" when I was in 6th grade) ... but in the end the characters are awful and the dialogue is horrible. And frankly, if the characters are awful and the dialogue is horrible then the book is beyond hope of redemption. I have never known a book to succeed in writing itself towards greatness or even competence when it is saddled with bad characters and bad dialogue. Period.
So why is "A Wrinkle in Time"- widely considered a classic piece of children's fiction- such a bad book? Well, before I get into that in depth let me just give my own personal history of "A Wrinkle in Time." As I mentioned before I read "A Wrinkle in Time" in middle school. Indeed "A Wrinkle in Time" is not a self-contained book but the first part of a quadrilogy. There are four books, all of which I read in middle school. The first book involves Meg and her creepy-ass little brother and an unmemorable teen boy love interest traveling across space to rescue Meg's dad. The next two books are also not very memorable (one involved Meg traveling inside her creepy-ass little brother's mitochondria or something). The last book, "Many Waters," I remember reading and actually enjoying a little bit probably because Meg and her creepy-ass little brother weren't in that book at all. Instead Meg's older twin brothers time travel back to before the Great Flood where they meet Noah (of "He built the Ark" fame) and Noah's family. It was kind of interesting and ethically complicated too because the older twin brothers knew that Noah had to build an Ark before the Great Flood came but that Noah couldn't fit all the human civilization in his boat.... so a lot of good people were about to die. That was a lot more interesting to me than Meg and the creepy-ass little brother battling Nameless Cloud of Evil in "A Wrinkle in Time." Plus Noah and his family were about waist-high to modern humans and all the women were topless for some reason. I remember that.
Anyway, in the "A Wrinkle in Time" series the first book seemed to be the worst to my 12-year-old brain. Back in those days I tended to blame myself if I found a book to be difficult to like, especially a book with a respected legacy like "A Wrinkle in Time." Clearly I was too dumb to understand it or appreciate it. Now that I'm almost forty I've managed to accrue enough self-esteem to realize that no.... no.... 12-year-old me was right. "A Wrinkle in Time" really is a bad book.
So let's review the plot of "A Wrinkle in Time." It starts off strongly enough. Meg Murry, age fourteen, is being kept awake by a ferocious thunderstorm in the middle of the night. She creeps into the kitchen for a snack, where she meets her little brother Charles and their mother. The family settles down for a cozy little midnight snack of liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches and hot cocoa. So far so good. In fact, this intimate and sweet scene is probably the best in the book. When Meg says that she hates liverwurst and wants a tomato and cream cheese sandwich instead, Charles pulls out their last remaining tomato from the refrigerator. "All right if I use it on Meg, Mother?" Charles asks. "To what better use could it be put?" their mother replies. It's a beautiful exchange. Two sentences, awkwardly spoken (like all the dialogue in "A Wrinkle in Time") but nevertheless indicating that Meg's family is loving if a bit intellectual. Meg has a safe space to go to despite all her troubles at school and fighting with teens.
Anyway, don't let the beginning scene fill you with hope about the rest of the book because the story goes downhill fast. The Murry family's midnight snack is interrupted by a dotty old woman named Mrs. Whatsit. L'Engle obviously wanted to portray Mrs. Whatsit as an adorably eccentric woman but instead Mrs. Whatsit comes of as an insane old bag lady who's about as funny as Jar Jar Binks. Mrs. Whatsit makes Meg take off her wet boots and socks, stinking up the kitchen as everyone is trying to eat. Then Mrs. Whatsit demands sandwiches, falls off her chair (ho ho, how funny!), and lays on the floor, refusing to get up. "Have YOU ever tried getting up with a sprained dignity?" Sigh. At this point the Murry family should call the police and have Mrs. Whatsit bundled off their property. They don't though.
The book goes on. Mrs. Whatsit leaves. The Murry family makes breakfast before school the next day and the reader starts to get her first taste of the awfulness of the dialogue that marks the rest of "A Wrinkle in Time." Meg's older teen brothers scold her over the breakfast table and oh boy is the conversation badly-written! Not only is the dialogue unnatural and stiff and unlike anything a human being would say let alone a teenage boy.... it also seems to be about 60% mansplaining. As I reread "A Wrinkle in Time" I couldn't help but be amazed at how many of the scenes seem to involve some male figure mansplaining or acting in a condescending manner towards Meg. Her older teenage brothers mansplain to her and her mother. "You have a great mind and all, Mother, but you don't have much SENSE. And certainly Meg and Charles don't ... Don't take everything so PERSONALLY, Meg! Use a happy medium for once!" says Sandy, Meg's sixteen-year-old brother. And frankly if a sixteen-year-old boy has ever used the term "happy medium" naturally in a sentence then flying centaurs really do exist. Meg's creepy little 5-year-old brother Charles also mansplains to her ("You have to be patient, Meg") but some of the most problematic mansplaining comes from Meg's fourteen-year-old love interest Calvin. "Come on, Meg. You know it isn't true, I know it isn't true," Calvin says in one scene after Meg becomes understandably upset over the implication that Meg's dad may have disappeared because he fell in love with another woman. "And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go."
Wow. So many problematic ideas in that statement. Yes. It is impossible for a man to leave a woman if the woman is beautiful. Beautiful women never have unfaithful husbands. Oh, and dear reader, please read the sentence "And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man could leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go," and imagine those words coming out of the mouth of a fourteen-year-old boy. If you find that you can't imagine that at all, congratulations. You know how actual people talk.
Scene after scene in "A Wrinkle in Time" is filled with this horrible, unrealistic dialogue. I don't know when I started to realize that "A Wrinkle in Time" was just a flat-out terrible book. Maybe it was when Meg randomly made what was supposed to be a joke but comes out as weird word salad. "Mother, Charles says I'm not one thing or the other, not flesh nor fowl nor good red herring." (Meg, seriously..... what the fuck?) Or maybe when Meg and her mother have a conversation but they sound less like a mother and daughter and more like some 26th century robot actors trying to interpret ancient 20th century flesh-people plays for modern robot audiences. "I'm blessed with more brains and opportunities than many people," Meg's mom says casually to Meg, "But there's nothing about me that breaks out of the ordinary mold." Bravo Madeleine L'Engle! What amazing dialogue! *air kiss.* I have never read such natural conversation since that infamous bad Japanese video game translation: "All your base are belong to us."
The plot of "A Wrinkle in Time" is only marginally better than the dialogue. Meg, Charles and Calvin travel across space with the help of three witches so they can rescue Meg and Charles' dad. Oh, and they have to battle a Nameless Cloud of Evil. The Nameless Cloud of Evil doesn't really have a motive. It's just an Evil Cloud that consumes planets and turns civilizations into Orwellian dictatorships. Meg and Calvin rescue Meg's father from one of these planets but they have to leave Charles behind and Meg almost dies when they time-warp (or "wrinkle") off the planet. In another hair-tearingly awful example of Madeleine L'Engle's stiff, unnatural dialogue, we get a scene where Meg lies on the grass close to death. Meg's dad hasn't seen her since she was a little girl and Meg's dad also has been imprisoned in a hellish suspension for half a decade. Instead of weeping over his daughter or laughing in relief over his release from prison or screaming in horror over the fact that his youngest son is still imprisoned across space ... Meg's dad decides to chat about physics with Calvin. "Time is different on Camazotz, anyhow. Our time, inadequate though it is, at least is straightforward. It may not be even fully one-dimensional, because it can't move back and forth on its line, only ahead- but at least it's consistent in its direction." Yeah, sure, fine man. So are you going to start CPR on Meg? Or...?
Hope Larson adapted Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" to graphic novel format in 2012. L'Engle originally wrote the book in 1962. Larson's illustrations are competent but not very memorable. Larson frankly sacrifices too much of her own talent in order to remain slavishly faithful to Madeleine L'Engle's original text. The adaptation is bulky, retaining too many scenes that really should have been cut. "A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel" would have really benefited with a more ruthless editor. I would have loved an abridged version of "A Wrinkle in Time" with maybe an adapter who was unafraid to re-write some dialogue. A lot of the problems with Larson's "A Wrinkle in Time" adaptation have to do with the source material, however, so the graphic novel already started out with two strikes against it.
Because, as I have said before, "A Wrinkle in Time" is a really bad book.
After each Passover Seder my family would always enthusiastically exclaim "Next year in Jerusalem!" before finally- FINALLY!- getting down to the enjoyable task of eating dinner. We would say this phrase happily not because we actually wished to go to Jerusalem but because we were relieved that the hours-long seder was over. "Next year in Jerusalem!" was the ending bell. It was the phrase marking the end of an evening full of dull prayer and queasy justifications for God killing a bunch of Egyptian babies. We never really thought about what the phrase literally meant. Nobody at our seders in reality wanted to go to Jerusalem. And if any of us felt a little guilty about our lack of yearning for Israel, a quick read from Guy DeLisle's excellent comic memoir"Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City" would have quickly squelched it. In "Jerusalem" DeLisle demurely and amusingly portrays his year in Israel with his wife and two small children. DeLisle's Jerusalem is a city of hellish heat, awful traffic jams, frustrating bureaucracy, intimidating military presence, and seething anger occasionally boiling over into all-out war. Next year in Jerusalem? No thank you. I'm good.
Guy DeLisle is a French-Canadian cartoonist and self-described atheist with Catholic roots. His wife Nadine DeLisle is of similar background and she works as an administrator for the famous international medical aid group "Medicins Sans Frontieres" ("Doctors Without Borders" for us 'Mericans). When Nadine is transferred to Jerusalem for a year to assist MSF in the poverty-stricken Palestinian areas. Guy DeLisle and their two young children accompany her. The book opens with Guy DeLisle trying to calm his fussy two-year-old daughter on the 20 hour flight from Montreal to Tel Aviv. A stout elderly Russian passenger sitting next to DeLisle offers to calm the toddler despite speaking no English or French (the only two languages DeLisle speaks). The old man and the toddler play happily for hours. DeLisle notices, while watching the two play, that the old Russian has numbers tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. "Good God! This guy is a camp survivor." The rest of "Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City" is not at all a flattering picture of Israel so it is interesting that DeLisle chose to open his book with this reminder that Jews are very much the oppressed as well as the oppressors.
One in Jerusalem, the DeLisles settle in. Compared to some of Guy DeLisle's past abodes (Pyongyang springs to mind) Jerusalem is not too bad. It is nevertheless a grim place, full of cement apartment buildings, construction, armed military police, traffic, heat, daycares that close at only 1pm (boy did that part trigger me!) and grim little grocery stores that sell no beer, pork, or wine and are closed Friday through Saturday. DeLisle is tempted to shop at a nearby modern supermarket that sells all the forbidden foreign foods and is open all week. His wife's work colleagues forbid it. The supermarket is located in an area full of far-right Jewish settlers known for attacking and displacing impoverished Palestinian villagers. Supporting settler-owned businesses is a no-no. DeLisle refrains, regretfully. He can't help but notice ruefully, however, that plenty of Palestinian women shop at the same shiny supermarket. DeLisle enviously watches the women in their hijabs walking back to the bus stop with their bags full of Creamed Wheat and Campbells Chicken Noodle soup.
The constant clashes between Israel and the Palestinians are considered the Platonic ideal of "it's complicated." When it comes to the issue of Israeli settlements v. Palestinians Guy DeLisle is obviously biased since he receives most of his information from his wife and her MSF doctor colleagues who see the suffering of the Palestinians up close. DeLisle, however, wisely keeps his own views of the conflict confined to his physical observations. DeLisle draws the thuggish Israeli soldiers and settlers who tote massive automatic rifles on their shoulders everywhere they go, whether to the zoo or to a cafe. DeLisle draws his Palestinian art students at a women's college in Abu Dis. The women are all veiled, all thin, and shockingly under-educated about art even when they are majoring in artistic studies and drawing. DeLisle draws the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim where "Families average seven kids, and considering how exhausted I am with two, I can only imagine how the women must feel." (This observation of DeLisle's is accompanied by a quick sketch of an ultra-orthodox Jewish woman, pale and exhausted beneath her wig, surrounded by five children and noticeably pregnant with her sixth.) DeLisle draws the baseball-sized rocks that Palestinians hurl at Israeli soldiers, only to be met with tear gas in response. DeLisle draws the nets that stretch between opposing buildings in the city of Hebron. "(The nets were) put up to protect passersby from objects thrown at them by settlers living in adjacent houses. Now, they toss down all kinds of trash that hangs there disgracefully."
One aspect of Israel that comes as a surprise to DeLisle is how divided Israeli Jews are when it comes to politics in their country. The rest of the world sees Israeli Jews as a monolithic block fighting against the Palestinians. The truth is the exact opposite. The far-right Israeli settlers torment Palestinian villagers populations by expanding illegal settlements into Palestinian cities. The moderate Jewish population of Israel are appalled at the actions of settlers and criticize the right-wing Israeli government for turning a blind eye towards the abuses perpetrated by Israeli settlers towards Palestinians. A group of ex-Israeli soldiers founded a group called "Breaking the Silence" where they recount how the Israeli government forced them to block off Palestinian streets, board up Palestinian businesses and evict Palestinians from their own homes for no reason except to allow Israeli settlers to move in and take over. Horrified that they were being forced to do this, the Israeli soldiers give tours of settlements to foreign tourists, describing the oppression visited upon Palestinians by the Israeli settlers. According to the founders of "Breaking the Silence," far-right Israeli settlements are backed quietly (and illegally) by the right-wing Israeli government. The moderate Israeli media is likewise sympathetic towards the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of far-right Israeli settlers. Plus there are divisions between the ultra-orthodox and reform Jewish community in Israel. The Talmud forbids the ultra-orthodox men from working so ultra-orthodox communities live off the taxpayer money generated by working reform Jewish populations. It is understandable that reform Jews are resentful towards the ultra-orthodox populations. In one scene in "Jerusalem" DeLisle travels with a tour group of mostly women in the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. DeLisle notices one ultra-orthodox man yelling in Hebrew while tying his shoe. DeLisle doesn't understand Hebrew and assumes the man is just talking on a bluetooth. "He talks out loud, his eyes fixed on his shoes. In fact, he's talking to our group, asking us to leave the quarter. But since he can't be seen speaking with women, he's using this indirect approach.
It's not surprising that the Jewish population of Israel is so divided among itself. We Jews are a very argumentative sort. It's rather like the joke my grandmother recounted in a book she wrote. It goes, and I paraphrase, "There was a Jew who was stranded on a desert island. Fortunately he had a lot of resources so he built himself a farm and a house and a garden and a synagogue and a second synagogue. When rescuers came to the desert island, they admired all that he had built but they were curious. 'Why did you build two synagogues? You're the only person on this island.' The Jew replied, 'Oh, that's the synagogue that I DON'T go to.'"
DeLisle's own self-portrait seems to indicate his wish to at least appear unbiased. DeLisle draws himself rather adorably as a benignant, clueless, almost "Hello Kitty" type of observer. The cartoon face of DeLisle consists of two rather surprised, clueless and good-natured black dots for eyes and a stylized, pie-slice nose. One panel DeLisle drew struck me as particularly cute and perhaps the epitome of what it means to be an expatriate used to surviving long periods in the harshest corners of he world. When DeLisle wakes up one morning to find his driver's side car window smashed and the radio stolen, he has no choice but to drive the window-less car to a repair shop and get the window replaced. The portrait of DeLisle driving with his coat buttoned past his nose to protect his face from the highway-speed gusts of wind and sand blowing in through his broken window struck me as oddly hilarious. Just another clueless yet good-natured white expatriate adapting to whatever challenges a foreign land throws at him.
After a year Nadine's shift with MSF in Jerusalem ends and the DeLisles get out of Israel just in time. The Israeli government, perhaps annoyed that MSF helps Palestinian populations, targets the houses of MSF administrators with "demolition notices." The DeLisle's house is given a demolition notice. "They say it was illegally built." Some MSF administrators doubt this, believing that the demolition notices are an intimidation tactic by the Israeli government to keep MSF out of Palestinian territories. As the DeLisles head to the airport at Tel Aviv on their way back to Canada, Guy DeLisle stops by a house where a Palestinian family has just been evicted and a Jewish settler family is moving in. DeLisle sees a large bearded man in a yarmulke standing on the roof of the house. As the bearded man watches the DeLisle family leave to board the cab to the airport, he smiles. "It's my house now!" the bearded man yells. It's a depressing full circle. The oppressed have become the oppressors. It is why, in my opinion, the truly Jewish among us say "Next year in Jerusalem." Always next year. Always the next time. Not now. Let it remain a dream. If we go now, we will see it for the cruel reality it is.
Guy DeLisle is a French-Canadian cartoonist and self-described atheist with Catholic roots. His wife Nadine DeLisle is of similar background and she works as an administrator for the famous international medical aid group "Medicins Sans Frontieres" ("Doctors Without Borders" for us 'Mericans). When Nadine is transferred to Jerusalem for a year to assist MSF in the poverty-stricken Palestinian areas. Guy DeLisle and their two young children accompany her. The book opens with Guy DeLisle trying to calm his fussy two-year-old daughter on the 20 hour flight from Montreal to Tel Aviv. A stout elderly Russian passenger sitting next to DeLisle offers to calm the toddler despite speaking no English or French (the only two languages DeLisle speaks). The old man and the toddler play happily for hours. DeLisle notices, while watching the two play, that the old Russian has numbers tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. "Good God! This guy is a camp survivor." The rest of "Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City" is not at all a flattering picture of Israel so it is interesting that DeLisle chose to open his book with this reminder that Jews are very much the oppressed as well as the oppressors.
One in Jerusalem, the DeLisles settle in. Compared to some of Guy DeLisle's past abodes (Pyongyang springs to mind) Jerusalem is not too bad. It is nevertheless a grim place, full of cement apartment buildings, construction, armed military police, traffic, heat, daycares that close at only 1pm (boy did that part trigger me!) and grim little grocery stores that sell no beer, pork, or wine and are closed Friday through Saturday. DeLisle is tempted to shop at a nearby modern supermarket that sells all the forbidden foreign foods and is open all week. His wife's work colleagues forbid it. The supermarket is located in an area full of far-right Jewish settlers known for attacking and displacing impoverished Palestinian villagers. Supporting settler-owned businesses is a no-no. DeLisle refrains, regretfully. He can't help but notice ruefully, however, that plenty of Palestinian women shop at the same shiny supermarket. DeLisle enviously watches the women in their hijabs walking back to the bus stop with their bags full of Creamed Wheat and Campbells Chicken Noodle soup.
The constant clashes between Israel and the Palestinians are considered the Platonic ideal of "it's complicated." When it comes to the issue of Israeli settlements v. Palestinians Guy DeLisle is obviously biased since he receives most of his information from his wife and her MSF doctor colleagues who see the suffering of the Palestinians up close. DeLisle, however, wisely keeps his own views of the conflict confined to his physical observations. DeLisle draws the thuggish Israeli soldiers and settlers who tote massive automatic rifles on their shoulders everywhere they go, whether to the zoo or to a cafe. DeLisle draws his Palestinian art students at a women's college in Abu Dis. The women are all veiled, all thin, and shockingly under-educated about art even when they are majoring in artistic studies and drawing. DeLisle draws the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim where "Families average seven kids, and considering how exhausted I am with two, I can only imagine how the women must feel." (This observation of DeLisle's is accompanied by a quick sketch of an ultra-orthodox Jewish woman, pale and exhausted beneath her wig, surrounded by five children and noticeably pregnant with her sixth.) DeLisle draws the baseball-sized rocks that Palestinians hurl at Israeli soldiers, only to be met with tear gas in response. DeLisle draws the nets that stretch between opposing buildings in the city of Hebron. "(The nets were) put up to protect passersby from objects thrown at them by settlers living in adjacent houses. Now, they toss down all kinds of trash that hangs there disgracefully."
One aspect of Israel that comes as a surprise to DeLisle is how divided Israeli Jews are when it comes to politics in their country. The rest of the world sees Israeli Jews as a monolithic block fighting against the Palestinians. The truth is the exact opposite. The far-right Israeli settlers torment Palestinian villagers populations by expanding illegal settlements into Palestinian cities. The moderate Jewish population of Israel are appalled at the actions of settlers and criticize the right-wing Israeli government for turning a blind eye towards the abuses perpetrated by Israeli settlers towards Palestinians. A group of ex-Israeli soldiers founded a group called "Breaking the Silence" where they recount how the Israeli government forced them to block off Palestinian streets, board up Palestinian businesses and evict Palestinians from their own homes for no reason except to allow Israeli settlers to move in and take over. Horrified that they were being forced to do this, the Israeli soldiers give tours of settlements to foreign tourists, describing the oppression visited upon Palestinians by the Israeli settlers. According to the founders of "Breaking the Silence," far-right Israeli settlements are backed quietly (and illegally) by the right-wing Israeli government. The moderate Israeli media is likewise sympathetic towards the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of far-right Israeli settlers. Plus there are divisions between the ultra-orthodox and reform Jewish community in Israel. The Talmud forbids the ultra-orthodox men from working so ultra-orthodox communities live off the taxpayer money generated by working reform Jewish populations. It is understandable that reform Jews are resentful towards the ultra-orthodox populations. In one scene in "Jerusalem" DeLisle travels with a tour group of mostly women in the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. DeLisle notices one ultra-orthodox man yelling in Hebrew while tying his shoe. DeLisle doesn't understand Hebrew and assumes the man is just talking on a bluetooth. "He talks out loud, his eyes fixed on his shoes. In fact, he's talking to our group, asking us to leave the quarter. But since he can't be seen speaking with women, he's using this indirect approach.
It's not surprising that the Jewish population of Israel is so divided among itself. We Jews are a very argumentative sort. It's rather like the joke my grandmother recounted in a book she wrote. It goes, and I paraphrase, "There was a Jew who was stranded on a desert island. Fortunately he had a lot of resources so he built himself a farm and a house and a garden and a synagogue and a second synagogue. When rescuers came to the desert island, they admired all that he had built but they were curious. 'Why did you build two synagogues? You're the only person on this island.' The Jew replied, 'Oh, that's the synagogue that I DON'T go to.'"
DeLisle's own self-portrait seems to indicate his wish to at least appear unbiased. DeLisle draws himself rather adorably as a benignant, clueless, almost "Hello Kitty" type of observer. The cartoon face of DeLisle consists of two rather surprised, clueless and good-natured black dots for eyes and a stylized, pie-slice nose. One panel DeLisle drew struck me as particularly cute and perhaps the epitome of what it means to be an expatriate used to surviving long periods in the harshest corners of he world. When DeLisle wakes up one morning to find his driver's side car window smashed and the radio stolen, he has no choice but to drive the window-less car to a repair shop and get the window replaced. The portrait of DeLisle driving with his coat buttoned past his nose to protect his face from the highway-speed gusts of wind and sand blowing in through his broken window struck me as oddly hilarious. Just another clueless yet good-natured white expatriate adapting to whatever challenges a foreign land throws at him.
After a year Nadine's shift with MSF in Jerusalem ends and the DeLisles get out of Israel just in time. The Israeli government, perhaps annoyed that MSF helps Palestinian populations, targets the houses of MSF administrators with "demolition notices." The DeLisle's house is given a demolition notice. "They say it was illegally built." Some MSF administrators doubt this, believing that the demolition notices are an intimidation tactic by the Israeli government to keep MSF out of Palestinian territories. As the DeLisles head to the airport at Tel Aviv on their way back to Canada, Guy DeLisle stops by a house where a Palestinian family has just been evicted and a Jewish settler family is moving in. DeLisle sees a large bearded man in a yarmulke standing on the roof of the house. As the bearded man watches the DeLisle family leave to board the cab to the airport, he smiles. "It's my house now!" the bearded man yells. It's a depressing full circle. The oppressed have become the oppressors. It is why, in my opinion, the truly Jewish among us say "Next year in Jerusalem." Always next year. Always the next time. Not now. Let it remain a dream. If we go now, we will see it for the cruel reality it is.
Graphic novels and novelizations epitomize the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words." Straight-up novels can only convey so much through mere words. Graphic novels, especially well-drawn graphic novels like the graphic novelization of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," convey a massive amount of information in terms of detail and setting and emotion that simple words on a page can't show. Neil Gaiman's words are literally the same in the graphic novel as they are in his book, but like Shakespeare's words gaining new meaning when his plays are placed in different settings by innovative directors, Gaiman's dialogue and characters take on new meanings in the graphic novelization of "American Gods" that they definitely did not have in the book. Gaiman is aided by the extraordinary illustrators P. Craig Russell, Scott Hampton, Walter Simonson, Colleen Doran (expertly imitating 19th century illustrator Kate Greenaway's work in her graphic novel interpretation of Gaiman's short story about a female convict from Cornwall who is banished to the American colonies) and Glenn Fabry (whose masterfully-drawn and -ahem- straightforward illustration of a bashful plump Omani souvenir merchant who hooks up with a sexy djinn made me have to tilt the book a bit while reading at Starbucks).
In "American Gods" a man named Shadow, a guy who just served his time in prison for robbery, is offered a job by a "Mr. Wednesday" as a bodyguard. Shadow is at loose ends. He's an ex-criminal, his wife died while he was in prison and he has no job and nowhere to go. He is almost given no choice but to accept Mr. Wednesday's job. Mr. Wednesday turns out to be the personification of the Norse God Odin who, along with other pre-Christian Indo-European gods and various mystical figures masquerading as immigrants, is planning a war against various new gods such as the god of the internet and the god of television.
In the original novel "American Gods" Neil Gaiman is rather vague in describing Shadow physically. Shadow is a large, burly guy. "He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough(.)" Gaiman implies in the book that Shadow is rather swarthy, leading a white prison guard at the beginning of the novel to ask him "And what are you? A spic? A gypsy? Maybe you got n***** blood in you. You got n***** blood in you, Shadow?" This exchange does not translate well in the graphic novel since Shadow is drawn as unambiguously black.
Shadow's blackness in the graphic novel of "American Gods" adds dimensions to the story that are missing in the book. The scene where Mr. Wednesday an old white man, intimidates Shadow into being his bodyguard takes on an uncomfortable sheen. The fact that Mr. Wednesday turns out to be a Scandinavian god, a figure in a pre-Christian culture that is fetishized by white supremacists, only makes the situation more uncomfortable. When Mad Sweeney, a leprechaun who takes on the form of a 7-foot white trucker with a baseball hat, punches Shadow in a bar it's hard not to see a MAGA-era hate crime. Mad Sweeney's baseball hat reads "The only woman I ever loved was another man's wife.... my mother." Still, it looks a lot like a MAGA hat. When another old white god, Czernobog, talks to Shadow about "your master" Mr. Wednesday the phrase suddenly acquires a bad implication that is missing when Czernobog says the same thing to a racially-undefined Shadow in the book.
I generally liked "American Gods" as a book though it did rehash a lot of Neil Gaiman tropes, like the former-fertility-goddess-now-forced-to-be-a-sex-worker plot line, that he already covered in his "Sandman" series. I adore the "American Gods" novelization for its extraordinary illustrations and multiple dimensions it brings to Neil Gaiman's book. If I have any complaints it is mostly about how women are portrayed. Most of the old goddesses in the book seem to be either sex maniacs (Bilquis, Bast (yes, the cat goddess)), or motherly figures who stand at the sidelines of the male-initiated plot lines, dipping in only occasionally when Shadow is in a tight spot. Even Lucy Ricardo from "I Love Lucy" shows her breasts! The reanimated corpse of Shadow's wife also seems mostly sex-defined (she died while giving a blow-job to Shadow's friend) who makes a half-hearted pass at Shadow. Shadow turns her down. "You're dead babe," he says in one of the best lines of the book.
Only one woman, a white feminist college student named Sam whom Shadow gives a ride to, appears to avoid being defined by sexual activity. Nevertheless Sam is mostly a ham-handed stereotype of middle-class white progressives, a privileged young woman who enjoys living the rough adventurous life a bit knowing that she has a soft place to fall. "I figure you're at school," Shadow says, "Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women's studies, and probably your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffee house to help cover the rent." He's exactly right in his assessment too. "How the fuck did you do that?" Sam asks, shocked.
Sam seems to see poverty as something to experience as an adventure tourist rather than an inescapable life trap. After picking her up hitchhiking on a cold country road Shadow drops Sam off at her aunt's wealthy suburban house. Sam is basically me in my twenties, I have to admit. And frankly Gaiman's parody of white feminist college students with his character of Sam touched a few nerves. Her scene with Shadow is easily the most badly-written part of "American Gods." Even the fantastic P. Craig Russell adaptations can't rescue the scene entirely.
My views on the portrayal of women in "American Gods" aside, the graphic novelization of Neil Gaiman's book is amazing. It has some of the best illustrations I have seen in years. The pictures evoke a wonderful sense of place, emotion, character and wonder that stretches almost beyond the parameters of the original book. A definite recommend!
In "American Gods" a man named Shadow, a guy who just served his time in prison for robbery, is offered a job by a "Mr. Wednesday" as a bodyguard. Shadow is at loose ends. He's an ex-criminal, his wife died while he was in prison and he has no job and nowhere to go. He is almost given no choice but to accept Mr. Wednesday's job. Mr. Wednesday turns out to be the personification of the Norse God Odin who, along with other pre-Christian Indo-European gods and various mystical figures masquerading as immigrants, is planning a war against various new gods such as the god of the internet and the god of television.
In the original novel "American Gods" Neil Gaiman is rather vague in describing Shadow physically. Shadow is a large, burly guy. "He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough(.)" Gaiman implies in the book that Shadow is rather swarthy, leading a white prison guard at the beginning of the novel to ask him "And what are you? A spic? A gypsy? Maybe you got n***** blood in you. You got n***** blood in you, Shadow?" This exchange does not translate well in the graphic novel since Shadow is drawn as unambiguously black.
Shadow's blackness in the graphic novel of "American Gods" adds dimensions to the story that are missing in the book. The scene where Mr. Wednesday an old white man, intimidates Shadow into being his bodyguard takes on an uncomfortable sheen. The fact that Mr. Wednesday turns out to be a Scandinavian god, a figure in a pre-Christian culture that is fetishized by white supremacists, only makes the situation more uncomfortable. When Mad Sweeney, a leprechaun who takes on the form of a 7-foot white trucker with a baseball hat, punches Shadow in a bar it's hard not to see a MAGA-era hate crime. Mad Sweeney's baseball hat reads "The only woman I ever loved was another man's wife.... my mother." Still, it looks a lot like a MAGA hat. When another old white god, Czernobog, talks to Shadow about "your master" Mr. Wednesday the phrase suddenly acquires a bad implication that is missing when Czernobog says the same thing to a racially-undefined Shadow in the book.
I generally liked "American Gods" as a book though it did rehash a lot of Neil Gaiman tropes, like the former-fertility-goddess-now-forced-to-be-a-sex-worker plot line, that he already covered in his "Sandman" series. I adore the "American Gods" novelization for its extraordinary illustrations and multiple dimensions it brings to Neil Gaiman's book. If I have any complaints it is mostly about how women are portrayed. Most of the old goddesses in the book seem to be either sex maniacs (Bilquis, Bast (yes, the cat goddess)), or motherly figures who stand at the sidelines of the male-initiated plot lines, dipping in only occasionally when Shadow is in a tight spot. Even Lucy Ricardo from "I Love Lucy" shows her breasts! The reanimated corpse of Shadow's wife also seems mostly sex-defined (she died while giving a blow-job to Shadow's friend) who makes a half-hearted pass at Shadow. Shadow turns her down. "You're dead babe," he says in one of the best lines of the book.
Only one woman, a white feminist college student named Sam whom Shadow gives a ride to, appears to avoid being defined by sexual activity. Nevertheless Sam is mostly a ham-handed stereotype of middle-class white progressives, a privileged young woman who enjoys living the rough adventurous life a bit knowing that she has a soft place to fall. "I figure you're at school," Shadow says, "Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women's studies, and probably your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffee house to help cover the rent." He's exactly right in his assessment too. "How the fuck did you do that?" Sam asks, shocked.
Sam seems to see poverty as something to experience as an adventure tourist rather than an inescapable life trap. After picking her up hitchhiking on a cold country road Shadow drops Sam off at her aunt's wealthy suburban house. Sam is basically me in my twenties, I have to admit. And frankly Gaiman's parody of white feminist college students with his character of Sam touched a few nerves. Her scene with Shadow is easily the most badly-written part of "American Gods." Even the fantastic P. Craig Russell adaptations can't rescue the scene entirely.
My views on the portrayal of women in "American Gods" aside, the graphic novelization of Neil Gaiman's book is amazing. It has some of the best illustrations I have seen in years. The pictures evoke a wonderful sense of place, emotion, character and wonder that stretches almost beyond the parameters of the original book. A definite recommend!
I just wanted to write a quick book review of "Anya's Ghost" by Vera Brosgol. "Anya's Ghost" is a young adult graphic novel and a pretty decent little ghost story. In "Anya's Ghost," a sulky and disagreeable teenage girl named Anya tumbles down an abandoned well and meets a shy, polite ghost named Emily. Emily died in the 1920s after her family was murdered. According to Emily, the murderer chased her out of the house, whereupon she tumbled down into the same abandoned well, broke her neck, and died of dehydration. Emily's spirit languishes in the well for 90 years because she is unable to leave her bones. When Anya gets rescued, Emily is transported out of the well too because Emily's finger bone accidentally gets tangled in Anya's belongings.
The plot is decent but not too memorable. There are some twists that regular readers of thrillers and ghost stories will probably see coming a mile away (though the twists were a little surprising to me). More impressive however is that "Anya's Ghost" is a graphic novel told with NO narration boxes! Now that is very hard to do. In most graphic novels narration boxes are provided to give the artist a break. One quick narration box like "Later Emily and I went to the mall" and a panel showing Anya and Emily in a mall saves a whole bunch of drawing. Without a narration box the artist has to show a series of panels of Anya getting off her bed, Anya picking up her purse and Emily's finger bone, Anya walking down the stairs with Emily drifting after her, Anya walking out the door, Anya walking down the street, Anya walking to the bus stop, Anya sitting at the bus stop, Anya getting on the bus, Anya paying the driver, Anya sitting in the bus as it heads towards the mall, Anya getting off the bus, Anya walking inside the mall, Anya walking in the mall as Emily drifts beside her looking curiously at the shop windows.... all this to convey to the reader that Anya and Emily go to the mall. This type of purely visual storytelling can last pages and is a helluva lot of work to do for a graphic novel artist.... work that can be eliminated by one narration box of "Later Emily and Anya went to the mall." The lure of the narration box is strong with every graphic novelist. It's a great way to cheat a bit. Vera Brosgol resists the call of the narration box however, relying on dialogue and character as well as her own art skills to advance the plot in "Anya's Ghost." She pulls it off too! With no narration boxes the reader is able to get a much fuller view of Anya's world and Anya's character. This type of visual narration also helps stretch out suspense. Without going into too many spoilers here I will say that there are some GREAT, almost Hitchcockian suspense scenes going on at the end of "Anya's Ghost" that are magnified by the lack of narration boxes. I was on the edge of my seat watching Anya try to save her family and fix a frightening situation.
Another part of "Anya's Ghost" that I loved is the character of Anya. At the beginning of the book Anya is not a very sympathetic character. Even by moody teenage girl standards Anya is pretty nasty. She's in a bad mood all the time. When she falls down the well and meets EMily, she is very dismissive of Emily's tragic story and existence. Emily is such a polite and sweet little soul and Anya is very harsh towards her. Anya spends about two days down in the well. Then, while she is asleep, Emily hears two boys talking by the well. Emily wakes up Anya telling Anya that somebody has come and she needs to yell for help. Anya immediately does so and is rescued. Yet, as Anya is finally pulled up from the well, Anya makes no move or gesture to help Emily leave the well, like take a bone with her so Emily can finally leave the darkness and see the outside world. As Anya sees Emily's saddened face as the only person Emily has spoken to in 90 years leaves her behind...... Anya does nothing. Emily literally saved Anya's life and Anya doesn't do anything in return. When it later turns out that Emily DID leave the well with Anya, it was clearly through an accident on Anya's part and not through any intentional action where Anya wanted to help Emily in some way.
There is a really solid character arc with Anya. Throughout the story you see Anya slowly realizing how disagreeable and ungrateful she is towards her family and friends and how she needs to improve. It's hard to write a good character arc. It's even harder to write a good character arc in a graphic novel with no narration boxes! I was wowed by Brosgol's writing and pacing abilities. Her drawings are very attractive if a bit stylized. The pictures lay out the story cleanly. The dialogue and pacing keep the plot tight and pretty compelling. The characters are very well fleshed-out (with a few exceptions such as a silly subplot involving a boy Anya likes and the boy's popular girlfriend) and the book overall is a very satisfying read. If you have an hour to yourself (the story goes fast, you can read it in 45 minutes) and a hot cup of coffee do give "Anya's Ghost" a read.
The plot is decent but not too memorable. There are some twists that regular readers of thrillers and ghost stories will probably see coming a mile away (though the twists were a little surprising to me). More impressive however is that "Anya's Ghost" is a graphic novel told with NO narration boxes! Now that is very hard to do. In most graphic novels narration boxes are provided to give the artist a break. One quick narration box like "Later Emily and I went to the mall" and a panel showing Anya and Emily in a mall saves a whole bunch of drawing. Without a narration box the artist has to show a series of panels of Anya getting off her bed, Anya picking up her purse and Emily's finger bone, Anya walking down the stairs with Emily drifting after her, Anya walking out the door, Anya walking down the street, Anya walking to the bus stop, Anya sitting at the bus stop, Anya getting on the bus, Anya paying the driver, Anya sitting in the bus as it heads towards the mall, Anya getting off the bus, Anya walking inside the mall, Anya walking in the mall as Emily drifts beside her looking curiously at the shop windows.... all this to convey to the reader that Anya and Emily go to the mall. This type of purely visual storytelling can last pages and is a helluva lot of work to do for a graphic novel artist.... work that can be eliminated by one narration box of "Later Emily and Anya went to the mall." The lure of the narration box is strong with every graphic novelist. It's a great way to cheat a bit. Vera Brosgol resists the call of the narration box however, relying on dialogue and character as well as her own art skills to advance the plot in "Anya's Ghost." She pulls it off too! With no narration boxes the reader is able to get a much fuller view of Anya's world and Anya's character. This type of visual narration also helps stretch out suspense. Without going into too many spoilers here I will say that there are some GREAT, almost Hitchcockian suspense scenes going on at the end of "Anya's Ghost" that are magnified by the lack of narration boxes. I was on the edge of my seat watching Anya try to save her family and fix a frightening situation.
Another part of "Anya's Ghost" that I loved is the character of Anya. At the beginning of the book Anya is not a very sympathetic character. Even by moody teenage girl standards Anya is pretty nasty. She's in a bad mood all the time. When she falls down the well and meets EMily, she is very dismissive of Emily's tragic story and existence. Emily is such a polite and sweet little soul and Anya is very harsh towards her. Anya spends about two days down in the well. Then, while she is asleep, Emily hears two boys talking by the well. Emily wakes up Anya telling Anya that somebody has come and she needs to yell for help. Anya immediately does so and is rescued. Yet, as Anya is finally pulled up from the well, Anya makes no move or gesture to help Emily leave the well, like take a bone with her so Emily can finally leave the darkness and see the outside world. As Anya sees Emily's saddened face as the only person Emily has spoken to in 90 years leaves her behind...... Anya does nothing. Emily literally saved Anya's life and Anya doesn't do anything in return. When it later turns out that Emily DID leave the well with Anya, it was clearly through an accident on Anya's part and not through any intentional action where Anya wanted to help Emily in some way.
There is a really solid character arc with Anya. Throughout the story you see Anya slowly realizing how disagreeable and ungrateful she is towards her family and friends and how she needs to improve. It's hard to write a good character arc. It's even harder to write a good character arc in a graphic novel with no narration boxes! I was wowed by Brosgol's writing and pacing abilities. Her drawings are very attractive if a bit stylized. The pictures lay out the story cleanly. The dialogue and pacing keep the plot tight and pretty compelling. The characters are very well fleshed-out (with a few exceptions such as a silly subplot involving a boy Anya likes and the boy's popular girlfriend) and the book overall is a very satisfying read. If you have an hour to yourself (the story goes fast, you can read it in 45 minutes) and a hot cup of coffee do give "Anya's Ghost" a read.
Nice that Michael Wolff puts his libel lawyer at the top of his acknowledgements page. All in all, "Fire and Fury" is more about Bannon, whom Wolff seems to have spoken to most often, than Trump. Most of the juicy stuff has already been leaked. Less juicy revelations are pretty much self-evident (Bannon suffers from chronic heart failure and edema) or less self-evident but meaningless (Jared and Ivanka hate Kellyanne Conway and helped push her out of all meaningful White House roles). The most amazing stuff sounds like a Bannon-fed lie than what actually happened. (Jared and Ivanka, not Bannon, encouraged Comey's firing? C'mon. The "Let's tear down all the institutions" guy wanted Comey in place while the "Let's stay in the Paris Climate Accord and stay moderate" couple wanted Comey gone? Smh. Wolff should have been a little more dubious about that version of events.) If there is one over-arching theme to this book, it's that you cannot destroy and humiliate people without expecting them to fight back. People with a lack of empathy, like Trump and Bannon, spend their lives treating people with naked cruelty and then act surprised when their victims fight back. Why did Trump think Comey would just slink away after he got fired? Why did the White House think that Spicer, Preibus, Manafort, Bannon, Ailes, Flynn and all the rest wouldn't just go running to the nearest reporter or law enforcement officer after being tossed? Why was Trump surprised that after treating the Obamas like shit for years and women like shit for decades the streets would be flooded with anger and resistance instead of Trump-love after the inauguration? Trump shows why a lack of empathy is deadly for a politician. It not only makes him cruel, it makes him stupid. utterly adrift when his victims, instead of acting like victims, destroy him in the end.
It took me a long time to read this book because I really hated it. I loved Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" because it had a truly original premise. It was an alternate history where after WWII the Jewish state in Israel was established in a remote part of Alaska instead of the Middle East. Some problems in this history remain similar to our own (there are fights between Jewish settlers and Alaskan Inuit populations over land) and obvious differences (boy it's cold!). I love the book but the climax was unfortunately complicated and a little difficult to understand. "Summerland" has the same problems. It's too complicated in the way Chabon mashed up various mythologies and adventures and tries to make it all about baseball. He aims for a baseball-themed Neil Gaimon sort of story and instead gets a mess where any sort of forward momentum in the story gets held up by yet another game of baseball. Baseball is dull enough to watch but it's even more dull to read about. Even more annoying is that Chabon draws a lot on Native American mythology but the only Native American character, a truly interesting, touch, and competent young girl named Jennifer Rideout, has to step aside and let a very uninteresting and weak white boy named Ethan Feld save the day. it's the Hermione problem. "But Hermione is the better wizard! Why is it always Harry Potter saving the day?" Plus here again the climax is too complicated for me to understand, but the world is saved in a way that is supposed to be both mythic and cute. I guess. I didn't understand it. Ugh. Go read "Anansi Boys" instead.
I finished "We Were Eight Years in Power" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is not an easy book to read an not just because of the harsh subject matter. Coates has a stiff style of writing despite a few poetic turns of phrase (Coates calls America's jails "The Grey Wastes" and white supremacy "The Bloody Heirloom"). Nevertheless the book was not written for a reader's pleasure. It was written to show that America was founded on white supremacy and that has never changed, not even with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Coates shows that America tends to rely on black politicians to fix the country after it lies in tatters. This happened after the Civil War. Black congressmen were elected during Reconstruction after the South lay in ruin. After the South got rich enough to get racist again Congressman Thomas Miller sensed the dangerous shift in tides as the South shifted away from Reconstruction and towards the KKK and the Jim Crow laws He pleaded to the South Carolina constitutional convention: "We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed upon the road to prosperity."
Unfortunately Miller's speech fell on deaf ears. And the South turned once again to deepest racism after having benefited from black leadership during Reconstruction. Coates draw a devestating parallel between the "eight years in power" in Miller's speech where black congressmen were called upon to fix a country in ruins and Obama's election in 2008 where he was called upon to fix a country in ruins after the Great Recession and Iraq War. The backlash against Obama with the Trump presidency should have been as predictable as the backlash against Reconstruction in the 1890s. "We Were Eight Years in Power" is basically eight essays written during each year in Obama's presidency by Coates for the "Atlantic." Some are pretty mediocre like "American Girl" about Michelle Obama. Even Coates acknowledged the essay has not "aged well," but it really suffered from the fact that Coates was not able to interview Michelle Obama before he wrote the article. Insight is painfully absent.
Better is Coates' main tentpole essay about Reparations. While reparations for slavery is obviously impractical (though Coates argues that it still needs to be studied, praising Congressman Conyer's bill asking for funding for the issue of Reparations to be studied. Unfortunately "We Were Eight Years in Power" was published a month before Congressman Conyers was forced to resign for sexual harassment). Nevertheless the black communities and black homeowners who were devastated by the Federal Housing Authority's "redlining" of districts that purposefully denied mortgages to black homeowners are still very much alive. Unlike those who suffered from slavery, those who suffered from mortgage discrimination and their children are around today. The denial of mortgages to black homeowners torpedoed any chance for a black middle class to flourish alongside a white middle class during the sixties, seventies, eighties and up to the present day. Those abused by the FHA deserved reparations according to Coates and it's hard to disagree with his reasoning.
Most beautiful and heartbreaking of Coates' essays is his last one where he recounts several conversations he had with President Obama during 2016. Obama had been steadfast in his belief during that time that Trump simply couldn't win. It was impossible. Coates was more skeptical. Coates makes an interesting observation about Obama's upbringing and Obama's faith in the white electorate to make the right choice. Unlike the vast majority of the black experience in America when it comes to interacting with white people, Obama's experience with white America was kindness and love. His case was exceptional in every sense of the word. Obama's mother and grandmother and grandfather never gave him any sense that he was not a family member during his childhood. Obama's white family members, according to his autobiography, never once gave the impression that black Americans were lesser than white Americans. This is so at odds with the experience of the majority of black Americans that it gave Obama, perhaps, a dangerously naive attitude when it came to placing his trust in the ultimate goodness of white people. "America will make the right choice, don't worry." Coates remembers how he became suddenly nervous when he heard Obama say that. Really?
Unfortunately Miller's speech fell on deaf ears. And the South turned once again to deepest racism after having benefited from black leadership during Reconstruction. Coates draw a devestating parallel between the "eight years in power" in Miller's speech where black congressmen were called upon to fix a country in ruins and Obama's election in 2008 where he was called upon to fix a country in ruins after the Great Recession and Iraq War. The backlash against Obama with the Trump presidency should have been as predictable as the backlash against Reconstruction in the 1890s. "We Were Eight Years in Power" is basically eight essays written during each year in Obama's presidency by Coates for the "Atlantic." Some are pretty mediocre like "American Girl" about Michelle Obama. Even Coates acknowledged the essay has not "aged well," but it really suffered from the fact that Coates was not able to interview Michelle Obama before he wrote the article. Insight is painfully absent.
Better is Coates' main tentpole essay about Reparations. While reparations for slavery is obviously impractical (though Coates argues that it still needs to be studied, praising Congressman Conyer's bill asking for funding for the issue of Reparations to be studied. Unfortunately "We Were Eight Years in Power" was published a month before Congressman Conyers was forced to resign for sexual harassment). Nevertheless the black communities and black homeowners who were devastated by the Federal Housing Authority's "redlining" of districts that purposefully denied mortgages to black homeowners are still very much alive. Unlike those who suffered from slavery, those who suffered from mortgage discrimination and their children are around today. The denial of mortgages to black homeowners torpedoed any chance for a black middle class to flourish alongside a white middle class during the sixties, seventies, eighties and up to the present day. Those abused by the FHA deserved reparations according to Coates and it's hard to disagree with his reasoning.
Most beautiful and heartbreaking of Coates' essays is his last one where he recounts several conversations he had with President Obama during 2016. Obama had been steadfast in his belief during that time that Trump simply couldn't win. It was impossible. Coates was more skeptical. Coates makes an interesting observation about Obama's upbringing and Obama's faith in the white electorate to make the right choice. Unlike the vast majority of the black experience in America when it comes to interacting with white people, Obama's experience with white America was kindness and love. His case was exceptional in every sense of the word. Obama's mother and grandmother and grandfather never gave him any sense that he was not a family member during his childhood. Obama's white family members, according to his autobiography, never once gave the impression that black Americans were lesser than white Americans. This is so at odds with the experience of the majority of black Americans that it gave Obama, perhaps, a dangerously naive attitude when it came to placing his trust in the ultimate goodness of white people. "America will make the right choice, don't worry." Coates remembers how he became suddenly nervous when he heard Obama say that. Really?
I just finished Derf Backderf's excellent graphic novel "My Friend Dahmer." "My Friend Dahmer" is a memoir about Backderf's teenage years in Ohio during the late seventies. During this time Backderf was apparently good friends with classmate and future serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Backderf's memoir is compellingly drawn. Backderf, like his contemporary Allison Bachdel, has a real gift for illustrating the everyday details of suburbia in Jimmy Carter's America.
Backderf inserts actual photos of himself and Dahmer at Revere High School in between chapters. One especially chilling group photo shows the clean cut, smiling high school students of the National Honor Society posed in an orderly, tiered crowd. One student in the photo has his face blacked out. This student was Dahmer, a failing alcoholic "D" student, who photo-bombed the National Honor Society group picture. Dahmer had snuck into the photo on a dare from his friends. A teacher, furious that Dahmer was in the photo but unable to retake the picture, blacked out Dahmer's face with a marker. The result, which was printed in the '78 Revere High School yearbook, is truly creepy.
Backderf's recollections of Dahmer show a great deal of red flags.... though to be fair it is impossible not to see red flags since no reader comes into the memoir innocent of Jeffrey Dahmer's reputation. Backderf blames the teachers of Revere for not intervening in Dahmer's slow slide into alcoholism, truancy, sadism and eventually murder. Dahmer's first murder occurred shortly after Dahmer and Backderf graduated from high school. Backderf is also straightforward in how he and his friends would also occasionally torment Dahmer. The relationship between Backderf and Dahmer was never a friendship of equals. Backderf would patronize, tease and manipulate Dahmer frequently. The picked-upon Dahmer would put up with Backderf's ersatz companionship just to have any relationship in high school that resembled friendship.
In the end, however, there is really no one to blame for Jeffrey Dahmer's murderous fate except Dahmer. Though Backderf tries to lay blame on Dahmer's parents' messy divorce and the Revere High School teachers' lack of involvement in their students' lives for Dahmer slipping through the cracks... Backderf's explanation rings a little weak. There is only so much the teachers could have been expected to notice. Dahmer was very manipulative and oddly charismatic in his own weird way. In one amazing scene Backderf describes Dahmer managing to sweet-talk his way into a meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale during a class field trip to DC. Dahmer was very adept at hiding his alcoholism, necrophilia and mental illness from the people in his life. Whether it be smoothly manipulating Walter Mondale or distracting several traffic cops from the suspicious garbage bags in the trunk of his car, Jeffrey Dahmer was that most dangerous breed of psychopath: insane enough to murder and stable enough to meticulously hide his deranged crimes from even those obsessed enough with him to remember every detail of his life forty years later.
Backderf inserts actual photos of himself and Dahmer at Revere High School in between chapters. One especially chilling group photo shows the clean cut, smiling high school students of the National Honor Society posed in an orderly, tiered crowd. One student in the photo has his face blacked out. This student was Dahmer, a failing alcoholic "D" student, who photo-bombed the National Honor Society group picture. Dahmer had snuck into the photo on a dare from his friends. A teacher, furious that Dahmer was in the photo but unable to retake the picture, blacked out Dahmer's face with a marker. The result, which was printed in the '78 Revere High School yearbook, is truly creepy.
Backderf's recollections of Dahmer show a great deal of red flags.... though to be fair it is impossible not to see red flags since no reader comes into the memoir innocent of Jeffrey Dahmer's reputation. Backderf blames the teachers of Revere for not intervening in Dahmer's slow slide into alcoholism, truancy, sadism and eventually murder. Dahmer's first murder occurred shortly after Dahmer and Backderf graduated from high school. Backderf is also straightforward in how he and his friends would also occasionally torment Dahmer. The relationship between Backderf and Dahmer was never a friendship of equals. Backderf would patronize, tease and manipulate Dahmer frequently. The picked-upon Dahmer would put up with Backderf's ersatz companionship just to have any relationship in high school that resembled friendship.
In the end, however, there is really no one to blame for Jeffrey Dahmer's murderous fate except Dahmer. Though Backderf tries to lay blame on Dahmer's parents' messy divorce and the Revere High School teachers' lack of involvement in their students' lives for Dahmer slipping through the cracks... Backderf's explanation rings a little weak. There is only so much the teachers could have been expected to notice. Dahmer was very manipulative and oddly charismatic in his own weird way. In one amazing scene Backderf describes Dahmer managing to sweet-talk his way into a meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale during a class field trip to DC. Dahmer was very adept at hiding his alcoholism, necrophilia and mental illness from the people in his life. Whether it be smoothly manipulating Walter Mondale or distracting several traffic cops from the suspicious garbage bags in the trunk of his car, Jeffrey Dahmer was that most dangerous breed of psychopath: insane enough to murder and stable enough to meticulously hide his deranged crimes from even those obsessed enough with him to remember every detail of his life forty years later.
It's odd when a book detailing a medical breakthrough that has saved countless lives reads like a tragedy. But that's how Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" comes off..... probably intentionally. In Skloot's excellent, gripping and exhaustively- researched book the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells that miraculously survive and divide (in every sense of the word) to this day is laid out in full. Henrietta Lacks, a young wife and mother, came to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in 1951 because she felt a "knot" in her lower pelvis. She had cervical cancer, for which she was treated. Also (and herein lies the controversy), cancer cells were scraped from her cervix without Lacks' knowledge nor permission and sent to a medical research lab. The cells' incredible rate of growth led to many countless medical breakthroughs in cancer, blood pressure and heart conditions. Scientists previously could not test medications on human cells because cell lines tended to die off after a few cycles of reproduction. Not the HeLa line, as Lacks' cells were called. And thus medicine advanced by massive bounds in a relatively short span of time.
The history of Henrietta Lacks and the wounds felt by her family even now in the present day is hard to read but gripping. Would Lacks have been treated differently by the doctors at Johns Hopkins if she had not been a poor black woman? Her family says yes. Johns Hopkins says no. Skloot takes a more nuanced approach, acutely aware of her whiteness as she attempts to tell a black woman's story without being accused of appropriation. It's a very delicate line.
Skloot uses an interesting device where the medical boom in America that the HeLa cell line produced is told interspersed with chapters about Henrietta Lacks' family and the family's sad downfall after the death of Henrietta. The story of the Lacks family transcends medicine and even race. It is a story about the utter destruction that children experience when they suddenly lose their mother.
Not a single one of Lacks' four children escaped trauma after their mother died. Henrietta Lacks' widower husband married another woman who was extremely abusive towards their children. Their father never intervened or even seemed to care when his new wife beat and starved his children. The oldest child, Elsie Lacks, was diagnosed with "idiocy" and sent to an insane asylum. Judging from descriptions of Elsie by her contemporaries Elsie was probably a nonverbal autistic child. Elsie's sad fate in the "Hospital for the Negro Insane" is too awful for me to detail here. Suffice it to say that the "hospital" functioned as a de facto concentration camp. Elsie passed away at fifteen years old, according to records scraped up by Deborah Lacks and Skloot. Elsie's family never knew what happened to her.
Henrietta's oldest son emerged relatively unscathed, joining the army and marrying a woman who became a protector and mother of sorts to Deborah Lacks, a young girl who desperately needed a protector. Deborah herself suffered an adolescence filled with sexual abuse and outright rape from both a male friend of her father's and her male cousins. Deborah later endured an abusive marriage with a drug-dealing husband. When Skloot later meets Deborah Lacks, Deborah is a grandmother, divorced, and warmly surrounded by her community and her grandchildren. But it is clear that Deborah Lacks still bears the scars of her childhood abuse and the sudden death of her mother. Skloot describes Deborah Lacks suddenly suffering a psychotic break during a road trip, requiring a detour to the hospital. More sadly, Skloot describes to Deborah Lacks how the HeLa line cells are being cloned. Deborah Lacks asks hopefully if they can clone her mother and bring her back to life. Though in her sixties and a grandmother, Deborah Lacks still longs for her mother, wondering if Henrietta Lacks in her neat skirt, collared shirt and late-forties woman's suit jacket can somehow step out of a petrie dish and hold her little daughter once more. Skloot has to disappoint Deborah Lacks again. No. They can only clone the cancer cells. Not Henrietta Lacks herself. This sad exchange stuck with me far longer than the pages of medical successes in Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."
In the end the title "Immortal Life" comes off as a tragic irony. Henrietta Lacks was a matriarch and mother and a caretaker to many young black workers who left the South and moved to Baltimore for jobs. But she missed so much of her children's lives because of her early death from cancer. And her family suffers so much for it. Deborah Lacks passed away before Skloot's book went to press but her children and grandchildren remain to carry on Henrietta Lacks' legacy. If there is any hope to take away it is through the Henrietta Lacks Foundation (http://henriettalacksfoundation.org) where Henrietta Lacks' grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to college and starting businesses with help from the foundation's funds. It is small compensation for what Henrietta Lacks gave the world, but it's something.
The history of Henrietta Lacks and the wounds felt by her family even now in the present day is hard to read but gripping. Would Lacks have been treated differently by the doctors at Johns Hopkins if she had not been a poor black woman? Her family says yes. Johns Hopkins says no. Skloot takes a more nuanced approach, acutely aware of her whiteness as she attempts to tell a black woman's story without being accused of appropriation. It's a very delicate line.
Skloot uses an interesting device where the medical boom in America that the HeLa cell line produced is told interspersed with chapters about Henrietta Lacks' family and the family's sad downfall after the death of Henrietta. The story of the Lacks family transcends medicine and even race. It is a story about the utter destruction that children experience when they suddenly lose their mother.
Not a single one of Lacks' four children escaped trauma after their mother died. Henrietta Lacks' widower husband married another woman who was extremely abusive towards their children. Their father never intervened or even seemed to care when his new wife beat and starved his children. The oldest child, Elsie Lacks, was diagnosed with "idiocy" and sent to an insane asylum. Judging from descriptions of Elsie by her contemporaries Elsie was probably a nonverbal autistic child. Elsie's sad fate in the "Hospital for the Negro Insane" is too awful for me to detail here. Suffice it to say that the "hospital" functioned as a de facto concentration camp. Elsie passed away at fifteen years old, according to records scraped up by Deborah Lacks and Skloot. Elsie's family never knew what happened to her.
Henrietta's oldest son emerged relatively unscathed, joining the army and marrying a woman who became a protector and mother of sorts to Deborah Lacks, a young girl who desperately needed a protector. Deborah herself suffered an adolescence filled with sexual abuse and outright rape from both a male friend of her father's and her male cousins. Deborah later endured an abusive marriage with a drug-dealing husband. When Skloot later meets Deborah Lacks, Deborah is a grandmother, divorced, and warmly surrounded by her community and her grandchildren. But it is clear that Deborah Lacks still bears the scars of her childhood abuse and the sudden death of her mother. Skloot describes Deborah Lacks suddenly suffering a psychotic break during a road trip, requiring a detour to the hospital. More sadly, Skloot describes to Deborah Lacks how the HeLa line cells are being cloned. Deborah Lacks asks hopefully if they can clone her mother and bring her back to life. Though in her sixties and a grandmother, Deborah Lacks still longs for her mother, wondering if Henrietta Lacks in her neat skirt, collared shirt and late-forties woman's suit jacket can somehow step out of a petrie dish and hold her little daughter once more. Skloot has to disappoint Deborah Lacks again. No. They can only clone the cancer cells. Not Henrietta Lacks herself. This sad exchange stuck with me far longer than the pages of medical successes in Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."
In the end the title "Immortal Life" comes off as a tragic irony. Henrietta Lacks was a matriarch and mother and a caretaker to many young black workers who left the South and moved to Baltimore for jobs. But she missed so much of her children's lives because of her early death from cancer. And her family suffers so much for it. Deborah Lacks passed away before Skloot's book went to press but her children and grandchildren remain to carry on Henrietta Lacks' legacy. If there is any hope to take away it is through the Henrietta Lacks Foundation (http://henriettalacksfoundation.org) where Henrietta Lacks' grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to college and starting businesses with help from the foundation's funds. It is small compensation for what Henrietta Lacks gave the world, but it's something.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Mariko Tamaki at the "Queers and Comics" conference last May. I didn't know Tamaki was an LGBTQ cartoonist. Finding out that she was leading a panel at the conference was a wonderful surprise! I only knew her as the writer of the excellent comic book "This One Summer," one of the most beautifully drawn and written comic books I have ever read. "This One Summer" is not LGBTQ but Tamaki's other comic books ("Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me," "Skim") are part of the gay graphic novel genre. Mariko Tamaki as a writer has a beautiful, meditative and wonderfully human way of narrating the moments of people's lives. Mariko Tamaki in person is bold, loud, and funny as hell. When I sat down in the audience to listen to the panel which Tamaki lead, Tamaki, kicked off the discussion by turning to the audience, winking, and saying "Hello homosexuals!" The audience, almost entirely LGBTQ college students holding some form of sketchbook or freshly-purchased graphic novel, laughed loudly. I then realized that I was probably the only straight person in that room. Feeling deeply dowdy and uncool, I slumped down in my chair a bit. At that point Mariko Tamaki briefly made eye contact with me, shot me a skeptical glance, and then turned back towards the panelists. My only thought was "Oh shit! I've been made! They know I'm not gay!!!"
Fortunately I was not asked to leave. I felt a little guilty about invading an LGBTQ safe space, but the feeling soon passed. The panel with Tamaki and other panelists was a delight. During the panel Tamaki described how she went to her high school reunion after she wrote her first book "Skim." She described how all her former classmates and even former teachers eagerly asked her which teacher she was talking about in "Skim." Which teacher romanced her when she was an underage high school student?? Tamaki said that she was surprised at the questions because the book was not about her high school years. Tamaki states that the book is fictional. Still, after reading "Skim," I can understand Tamaki's teachers' curiosity. The story of "Skim" really does appear to be about Tamaki's own teen years. The eponymous main character resembles Tamaki strongly. "Skim" is a delicate, beautiful, uncomfortable, and quietly funny story about a year in the life of Skim, a plump high school girl and aspiring witch who finds herself falling in love with her female English teacher Ms. Archer.
Skim is a very appealing character. She is devoted to becoming a Wiccan while uncomfortably aware that witchcraft may be bullshit. She attends a witch's coven in the middle of the woods with her friend, only to find out that the "coven" is actually an AA group. She builds an alter full of Tarot cards and candles in her room. "I sprinkled some glitter over my alter and then realized it looked stupid. It took me an hour and two rolls of tape to get it off again." Skim is sullen, cynical, and is generally pissed-off at everyone but at the same time very likeable for the reader.... or at least to me. She's a pretty normal teen girl. Undercutting Skim's sour viewpoints is Jillian Tamaki's beautiful illustrations. Skim may be unhappy but she lives in a beautiful world. Jillian Tamaki is especially skilled at drawing those lovely, realistic touches of plants and leaves and trees crowding against 20th century clapboard houses that make up the Southern Canadian town where the story takes place. Weeds pop up against the porch of Ms. Archer's appealingly cluttered house. Silhouettes of oaks and maples tangled with long grass wave in the evening light as Skim and her friend Lisa walk home from school.
The generally unhappy and irritated way that Skim lives her life is interrupted when her teacher Ms. Archer discovers Skim smoking behind the school. Ms. Archer immediately lights up too. Skim and Ms. Archer start to meet regularly in the beautiful wood grove behind the school. Skim becomes infatuated with Ms. Archer and they share a romantic kiss. There is no indication that the relationship goes further than that but after the kiss in the woods Ms. Archer immediately starts to keep her distance from Skim. The reason for this is pretty obvious. Skim is underage and it is clear that the school is getting a little suspicious of their relationship. A new teacher appears in Ms. Archer's class. A school therapist asks Skim questions. Ms. Archer disappears from school entirely and coolly dismisses Skim when Skim finds her house and asks to visit. When Skim gets her term paper back at the end of the semester, Ms. Archer's words keep their relationship at the teacher-student level. "I'm glad to see you have developed an appreciation for Romeo and Juliet, as your work here clearly demonstrates. Excellent work. -Ms. Archer" Skim is heartbroken.
"Skim" is a story with many layers, emphasized both by Mariko Tamaki's words and Jillian Tamaki's drawings. Jillian Tamaki imitates the 18th century okiyo-e Japanese woodblock style when she draws Skim, however Skim is no demure beauty delicately clutching a fan. If Chobunsai Eishi were to draw a grumpy unhappy schoolgirl whose loveliness is finally revealed, his painting would probably look like Jillian Tamaki's two-page illustration showing Skim and Ms. Archer's first (and last) kiss. No worries though, "Skim" does have a happy ending. "Skim" may not be the amazing masterpiece that "The One Summer" is but as a debut graphic novel it is fantastic. I thoroughly recommend this beautifully drawn, romantic, and endearing story.
Fortunately I was not asked to leave. I felt a little guilty about invading an LGBTQ safe space, but the feeling soon passed. The panel with Tamaki and other panelists was a delight. During the panel Tamaki described how she went to her high school reunion after she wrote her first book "Skim." She described how all her former classmates and even former teachers eagerly asked her which teacher she was talking about in "Skim." Which teacher romanced her when she was an underage high school student?? Tamaki said that she was surprised at the questions because the book was not about her high school years. Tamaki states that the book is fictional. Still, after reading "Skim," I can understand Tamaki's teachers' curiosity. The story of "Skim" really does appear to be about Tamaki's own teen years. The eponymous main character resembles Tamaki strongly. "Skim" is a delicate, beautiful, uncomfortable, and quietly funny story about a year in the life of Skim, a plump high school girl and aspiring witch who finds herself falling in love with her female English teacher Ms. Archer.
Skim is a very appealing character. She is devoted to becoming a Wiccan while uncomfortably aware that witchcraft may be bullshit. She attends a witch's coven in the middle of the woods with her friend, only to find out that the "coven" is actually an AA group. She builds an alter full of Tarot cards and candles in her room. "I sprinkled some glitter over my alter and then realized it looked stupid. It took me an hour and two rolls of tape to get it off again." Skim is sullen, cynical, and is generally pissed-off at everyone but at the same time very likeable for the reader.... or at least to me. She's a pretty normal teen girl. Undercutting Skim's sour viewpoints is Jillian Tamaki's beautiful illustrations. Skim may be unhappy but she lives in a beautiful world. Jillian Tamaki is especially skilled at drawing those lovely, realistic touches of plants and leaves and trees crowding against 20th century clapboard houses that make up the Southern Canadian town where the story takes place. Weeds pop up against the porch of Ms. Archer's appealingly cluttered house. Silhouettes of oaks and maples tangled with long grass wave in the evening light as Skim and her friend Lisa walk home from school.
The generally unhappy and irritated way that Skim lives her life is interrupted when her teacher Ms. Archer discovers Skim smoking behind the school. Ms. Archer immediately lights up too. Skim and Ms. Archer start to meet regularly in the beautiful wood grove behind the school. Skim becomes infatuated with Ms. Archer and they share a romantic kiss. There is no indication that the relationship goes further than that but after the kiss in the woods Ms. Archer immediately starts to keep her distance from Skim. The reason for this is pretty obvious. Skim is underage and it is clear that the school is getting a little suspicious of their relationship. A new teacher appears in Ms. Archer's class. A school therapist asks Skim questions. Ms. Archer disappears from school entirely and coolly dismisses Skim when Skim finds her house and asks to visit. When Skim gets her term paper back at the end of the semester, Ms. Archer's words keep their relationship at the teacher-student level. "I'm glad to see you have developed an appreciation for Romeo and Juliet, as your work here clearly demonstrates. Excellent work. -Ms. Archer" Skim is heartbroken.
"Skim" is a story with many layers, emphasized both by Mariko Tamaki's words and Jillian Tamaki's drawings. Jillian Tamaki imitates the 18th century okiyo-e Japanese woodblock style when she draws Skim, however Skim is no demure beauty delicately clutching a fan. If Chobunsai Eishi were to draw a grumpy unhappy schoolgirl whose loveliness is finally revealed, his painting would probably look like Jillian Tamaki's two-page illustration showing Skim and Ms. Archer's first (and last) kiss. No worries though, "Skim" does have a happy ending. "Skim" may not be the amazing masterpiece that "The One Summer" is but as a debut graphic novel it is fantastic. I thoroughly recommend this beautifully drawn, romantic, and endearing story.
Okay, here's a question. What happens when two Harvard-educated lawyers who are making six figure salaries before the age of thirty meet? Who's going to become President and who's going to start a vegetable garden? Hint: Barack Obama does not have to brush up on his trowel skills. In Michelle Obama's memoir "Becoming" it impossible to feel anything but raw admiration for the achievements of the former First Lady. But if there is another emotion that peeks through occasionally while reading "Becoming," it is a limp, depressing realization that when an equally talented woman and man start a relationship together.... it will always be the woman who defers to the wishes of the man.
When Michelle Robinson met Barack Obama in Chicago in the early nineties, she was one of the youngest executives at the law firm where she worked. She later became an outreach director for the University of Chicago Medical Center, a necessary and fulfilling job. But Michelle Obama slowly gave all of that up as her husband's political career took off. Michelle Obama, executive director, became Michelle Obama, Senator Barack Obama's wife. Michelle Obama gently but straightforwardly admits that this was painful sacrifice for her. When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president (a decision Michelle Obama was not entirely happy with) on a cold Illinois winter morning, Michelle Obama chose the knit caps her daughters would wear for the occasion. "It was a small triumph but it was a triumph nonetheless, and it was mine," She wrote. Michelle Obama had no control over her husband or her life at this point. She had control over her daughters' hats though. Little had changed since 1964 when Michelle Robinson was born and the 21st century. It still hasn't changed much.
Throughout the second half of "Becoming," Michelle Obama describes the incredible hoops she had to jump through in order to keep her public persona within the ridiculous standards dictated by the US media. Michelle Obama referred to how her wearing an outfit exposing her upper arms created an idiotic scandal in conservative media. While I was reading this another stupid "scandal" hit Fox News when Michelle Obama, during her book tour, dropped the word "shit" while discussing the feminist "Lean In" theory during a speech. The dust-up over the former FLOTUS' use of an expletive only serve to grimly outline the pressures she and her husband faced while in the White House.
Michelle Obama never returned to her high end administrative position at the University of Chicago's Medical Center after President Obama's two terms ended. It would be stupid of me, however, to reduce her legacy as First Lady to vegetable gardens and school lunches. There was something truly inspirational about First Lady Michelle Obama that went beyond anything Laura Bush or even Hillary Clinton could achieve. It is an inspiration that is hard for me to put into words. I do know that after I read "Becoming," I lent the book to my coworker. My coworker has a wife with severe bipolar depression. According to him she had not left her bedroom in over a year. This morning he sent me an email. "Thank you so much for the Michelle Obama book. My wife has been leafing through it all morning. It's the first time I've seen her read a book or been interested in anything in months!"
Never underestimate Michelle Robinson Obama.
When Michelle Robinson met Barack Obama in Chicago in the early nineties, she was one of the youngest executives at the law firm where she worked. She later became an outreach director for the University of Chicago Medical Center, a necessary and fulfilling job. But Michelle Obama slowly gave all of that up as her husband's political career took off. Michelle Obama, executive director, became Michelle Obama, Senator Barack Obama's wife. Michelle Obama gently but straightforwardly admits that this was painful sacrifice for her. When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president (a decision Michelle Obama was not entirely happy with) on a cold Illinois winter morning, Michelle Obama chose the knit caps her daughters would wear for the occasion. "It was a small triumph but it was a triumph nonetheless, and it was mine," She wrote. Michelle Obama had no control over her husband or her life at this point. She had control over her daughters' hats though. Little had changed since 1964 when Michelle Robinson was born and the 21st century. It still hasn't changed much.
Throughout the second half of "Becoming," Michelle Obama describes the incredible hoops she had to jump through in order to keep her public persona within the ridiculous standards dictated by the US media. Michelle Obama referred to how her wearing an outfit exposing her upper arms created an idiotic scandal in conservative media. While I was reading this another stupid "scandal" hit Fox News when Michelle Obama, during her book tour, dropped the word "shit" while discussing the feminist "Lean In" theory during a speech. The dust-up over the former FLOTUS' use of an expletive only serve to grimly outline the pressures she and her husband faced while in the White House.
Michelle Obama never returned to her high end administrative position at the University of Chicago's Medical Center after President Obama's two terms ended. It would be stupid of me, however, to reduce her legacy as First Lady to vegetable gardens and school lunches. There was something truly inspirational about First Lady Michelle Obama that went beyond anything Laura Bush or even Hillary Clinton could achieve. It is an inspiration that is hard for me to put into words. I do know that after I read "Becoming," I lent the book to my coworker. My coworker has a wife with severe bipolar depression. According to him she had not left her bedroom in over a year. This morning he sent me an email. "Thank you so much for the Michelle Obama book. My wife has been leafing through it all morning. It's the first time I've seen her read a book or been interested in anything in months!"
Never underestimate Michelle Robinson Obama.
J. D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" is a very easy read. It can be read in a day. The prose is pedestrian and the best phrase of the entire book is the excellent book title. The words "Hillbilly Elegy" are so poetic with such lovely assonance and so applicable to the subject matter that you get hopeful about the rest of the story. Unfortunately Vance, while not a terrible writer, does not write in a very memorable style. The book isn't burdensome to read, however. Vance is straightforward, his subject matter is compelling and his message is so tied to current trends that the book zips by quickly.
Many people have already written about JD Vance's autobiography where he describes his difficult childhood in the nineties being raised by a heroin-addicted mother in impoverished southern Ohio. In the book Vance reveals his political affiliation (Republican) up front and early. Consequently Vance unfortunately advances a lot of myths about what's wrong with American workers today. People are lazy. Not willing to put in extra hours. People talk on cell phones while buying free food with food stamps. It's the usual smug complaint of white males in their early thirties who have no childcare issues. "I can work 60 hours a week, why can't you?" The problems of single mothers being unable to work due to the high cost of childcare doesn't even occur to him. The fact that cell phones have become almost as essential as clothes in modern society- and often cheaper than a lot of food- blows past Vance's tiresome GOP victim-blaming arguments.
Vance is on firmer ground when he describes his mother's struggles with addiction and the complicated feelings that he continues to have towards family members that failed him in many ways during his childhood. He describes one disgusting and infuriating scene where his mother, still a licensed RN, shoveled food into her mouth during a restaurant dinner while she was too stoned to close her mouth and swallow. She would wake up enough to spoon potatoes into her mouth and then nod out again, potatoes dripping out of her open jaw while her children and husband looked on in shock.
A few of Vance's opinions feel like gaslighting. Vance insists that his working class white neighbors' resentments of Obama was class-based against Obama's Harvard background rather than race-based. That simply doesn't ring true. Vance's downplaying of racial hatred continues in other passages. While describing his flirtation with liberalism as a student at Yale Law, Vance described how "I'd vacationed in Panama and England. I shopped at Whole Foods. I tried to break my addiction to 'refined processed sugars.' I worried about racial prejudice in my family and friends. None of these things is bad on its own. In fact, most of them are good- visiting England was a childhood dream; eating less sugar is good for your health." Ooo…. the missing items that Vance neglected to list as "good" are subtle but disturbing. The whiter habits of liberals (visiting England, cutting sugar in your diet) are "good." The more woke activities (visiting Panama, worrying about racial prejudice in your family and friends) do not make the cut as "good" in Vance's estimation. Bits of uncomfortably unaware phrases like the one I quoted above litter "Hillbilly Elegy" to a great extent.
Another unintentionally unaware passage in "Hillbilly Elegy" is a cameo by controversial Yale law professor Amy Chua. Vance describes Prof. Chua with great affection. Vance, understandably, had no knowledge that Prof. Chua was about to be investigated by Yale for allegedly grooming pretty female law students for Judge Kavanaugh. Nevertheless, Vance's descriptions of his conversations with Prof. Chua show that Chua seemed to get oddly inquisitive when it came to her students' romantic lives. "(Chua) got personal. She knew that I had a girlfriend and that I was crazy about her. 'This clerkship is the type of thing that destroys relationships. If you want my advice, I think you should prioritize your girlfriend.'" Vance, with this description of Prof. Chua's advice (which she apparently okayed prior to "Hillbilly Elegy" going to press), lends a great deal of credence to Chua's female accusers who described Chua requiring them to have "model-like" appearances before she okayed their clerkships with Judge Kavanaugh.
For all of "Hillbilly Elegy"'s flaws there is a strong and interesting theme. Young Americans tend to underestimate their own abilities in the 21st century. Young white men especially seem to undervalue their potential, spiraling down behind video game consoles and loneliness. Young white men are finding solace in alt-right chatrooms and incel online groups. (Vance doesn't mention "incel" groups in "Hillbilly Elegy" but the incel fuel of frustrated while male despair is a theme with which Vance is familiar.) Vance himself, a flabby internet troll in high school struggling to maintain a "C" average, decides to enlist in the Marines after graduation. When Vance gets accepted into Ohio State he has no way to pay tuition except through the GI Bill. Used to a sedentary existence of six hour video game sessions and pizza pockets, Vance surprises himself by managing to make it through boot camp. Vance morphs from fat teenage to US Marine able to run a 6 minute mile and complete a tour of duty in Iraq. Invigorated by his new sense of discipline, Vance throws himself into college life at Ohio State. Vance graduates with a BA in three years, gets accepted at Yale with a full scholarship, and is an Ivy League educated lawyer by the book's end. Not bad for an impoverished hillbilly child with a junkie mother. But Vance argues that he is not special and that most young Americans can pull off what he did if they had more faith in their potential. It's a good argument and one I find largely convincing with a few caveats. Vance was lucky that he was still childless when he applied for college instead of trapped in early motherhood or fatherhood. That played a large part in his success and Vance offers no real solutions to other who find their opportunities hamstrung by family responsibilities. Still, Vance's own personal story is inspiring and he should be applauded for his accomplishments.
Many people have already written about JD Vance's autobiography where he describes his difficult childhood in the nineties being raised by a heroin-addicted mother in impoverished southern Ohio. In the book Vance reveals his political affiliation (Republican) up front and early. Consequently Vance unfortunately advances a lot of myths about what's wrong with American workers today. People are lazy. Not willing to put in extra hours. People talk on cell phones while buying free food with food stamps. It's the usual smug complaint of white males in their early thirties who have no childcare issues. "I can work 60 hours a week, why can't you?" The problems of single mothers being unable to work due to the high cost of childcare doesn't even occur to him. The fact that cell phones have become almost as essential as clothes in modern society- and often cheaper than a lot of food- blows past Vance's tiresome GOP victim-blaming arguments.
Vance is on firmer ground when he describes his mother's struggles with addiction and the complicated feelings that he continues to have towards family members that failed him in many ways during his childhood. He describes one disgusting and infuriating scene where his mother, still a licensed RN, shoveled food into her mouth during a restaurant dinner while she was too stoned to close her mouth and swallow. She would wake up enough to spoon potatoes into her mouth and then nod out again, potatoes dripping out of her open jaw while her children and husband looked on in shock.
A few of Vance's opinions feel like gaslighting. Vance insists that his working class white neighbors' resentments of Obama was class-based against Obama's Harvard background rather than race-based. That simply doesn't ring true. Vance's downplaying of racial hatred continues in other passages. While describing his flirtation with liberalism as a student at Yale Law, Vance described how "I'd vacationed in Panama and England. I shopped at Whole Foods. I tried to break my addiction to 'refined processed sugars.' I worried about racial prejudice in my family and friends. None of these things is bad on its own. In fact, most of them are good- visiting England was a childhood dream; eating less sugar is good for your health." Ooo…. the missing items that Vance neglected to list as "good" are subtle but disturbing. The whiter habits of liberals (visiting England, cutting sugar in your diet) are "good." The more woke activities (visiting Panama, worrying about racial prejudice in your family and friends) do not make the cut as "good" in Vance's estimation. Bits of uncomfortably unaware phrases like the one I quoted above litter "Hillbilly Elegy" to a great extent.
Another unintentionally unaware passage in "Hillbilly Elegy" is a cameo by controversial Yale law professor Amy Chua. Vance describes Prof. Chua with great affection. Vance, understandably, had no knowledge that Prof. Chua was about to be investigated by Yale for allegedly grooming pretty female law students for Judge Kavanaugh. Nevertheless, Vance's descriptions of his conversations with Prof. Chua show that Chua seemed to get oddly inquisitive when it came to her students' romantic lives. "(Chua) got personal. She knew that I had a girlfriend and that I was crazy about her. 'This clerkship is the type of thing that destroys relationships. If you want my advice, I think you should prioritize your girlfriend.'" Vance, with this description of Prof. Chua's advice (which she apparently okayed prior to "Hillbilly Elegy" going to press), lends a great deal of credence to Chua's female accusers who described Chua requiring them to have "model-like" appearances before she okayed their clerkships with Judge Kavanaugh.
For all of "Hillbilly Elegy"'s flaws there is a strong and interesting theme. Young Americans tend to underestimate their own abilities in the 21st century. Young white men especially seem to undervalue their potential, spiraling down behind video game consoles and loneliness. Young white men are finding solace in alt-right chatrooms and incel online groups. (Vance doesn't mention "incel" groups in "Hillbilly Elegy" but the incel fuel of frustrated while male despair is a theme with which Vance is familiar.) Vance himself, a flabby internet troll in high school struggling to maintain a "C" average, decides to enlist in the Marines after graduation. When Vance gets accepted into Ohio State he has no way to pay tuition except through the GI Bill. Used to a sedentary existence of six hour video game sessions and pizza pockets, Vance surprises himself by managing to make it through boot camp. Vance morphs from fat teenage to US Marine able to run a 6 minute mile and complete a tour of duty in Iraq. Invigorated by his new sense of discipline, Vance throws himself into college life at Ohio State. Vance graduates with a BA in three years, gets accepted at Yale with a full scholarship, and is an Ivy League educated lawyer by the book's end. Not bad for an impoverished hillbilly child with a junkie mother. But Vance argues that he is not special and that most young Americans can pull off what he did if they had more faith in their potential. It's a good argument and one I find largely convincing with a few caveats. Vance was lucky that he was still childless when he applied for college instead of trapped in early motherhood or fatherhood. That played a large part in his success and Vance offers no real solutions to other who find their opportunities hamstrung by family responsibilities. Still, Vance's own personal story is inspiring and he should be applauded for his accomplishments.
Have you ever read a graphic novel and think "Damn! I wish I had drawn that!" That was exactly the feeling I had reading "Illegal." "Illegal" was written Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin and drawn by the EXCELLENT Giovanni Rigano. It is the story of two young migrants from Niger, Ebo and Kwame, who make the desperate trip across the Mediterranean in order to find a better life.
The story alone is fascinating enough. The book opens with Ebo and Kwame stuffed into an under-fueled, overstuffed rubber raft in the middle of the ocean. "Seahawk Inflatable Rubber Dinghy," the narration box states, "Maximum safe load 6 people. Currently carrying 14 passengers." How Ebo and Kwame, two young boys, managed to get from their rural village in Niger to out in the middle of the ocean is an odyssey in itself. The storyline is harrowing. Traffickers abandon them in the middle of the Sahara after taking their money. Street gangs in Agadez and Tripoli try to rob them as they use all their energy to earn money to get to Europe. And for all their suffering Ebo and Kwame are more fortunate than other refugees. They're teen boys and thus less vulnerable to rape. A small, self-contained novelette at the end of "Illegal" tells the story of one refugee woman who had to endure not just starvation and exhaustion on her journey but rape, pregnancy and miscarriage. Ebo and Kwame were at least spared that horror.
For all the terrifying parts of "Illegal" you can't help but admire the sheer resourcefulness of Ebo and Kwame as they make their way towards Europe. Ebo uses a box of wet wipes that fell off a truck to offer skin-cleaning services around the slums of Agadez. Kwame works as a day laborer. Ebo uses his beautiful singing voice to sing at weddings. In this way they collect a little more money each day.
There are a few parts of "Illegal" that made me scratch my head. Unlike refugees from Iraq or Syria, Ebo and Kwame are traveling to Europe for economic reasons only. They are in no immediate danger in Niger, which is a poor but fairly stable country. Why not simply stay in Agadez for a couple of years, earning money, maybe buying a small house, and then travel to Europe by safer means? Like a plane ticket? Why trust the brutal human traffickers who care nothing for your life once they have your money?
The best part of "Illegal" are Giovanni Rigano's illustrations. Rigano evokes a wonderful sense of place with his drawings. It's clear that he did a lot of visual research for "Illegal." Every setting is spot-on. A dusty village in Niger. The inside of a rusty, overcrowded bus going to Agadez. A slum in a North African city. A storm drain in Tripoli. The inside of a jeep filled with desiccated corpses in the Sahara sun. An overcrowded fishing boat filled with refugees. A peaceful underwater view of drowned corpses, small fish nibbling on their dead fingers. Rigano's ilustrations are masterful.
"Illegal" is an amazing book. I cannot recommend it enough.
The story alone is fascinating enough. The book opens with Ebo and Kwame stuffed into an under-fueled, overstuffed rubber raft in the middle of the ocean. "Seahawk Inflatable Rubber Dinghy," the narration box states, "Maximum safe load 6 people. Currently carrying 14 passengers." How Ebo and Kwame, two young boys, managed to get from their rural village in Niger to out in the middle of the ocean is an odyssey in itself. The storyline is harrowing. Traffickers abandon them in the middle of the Sahara after taking their money. Street gangs in Agadez and Tripoli try to rob them as they use all their energy to earn money to get to Europe. And for all their suffering Ebo and Kwame are more fortunate than other refugees. They're teen boys and thus less vulnerable to rape. A small, self-contained novelette at the end of "Illegal" tells the story of one refugee woman who had to endure not just starvation and exhaustion on her journey but rape, pregnancy and miscarriage. Ebo and Kwame were at least spared that horror.
For all the terrifying parts of "Illegal" you can't help but admire the sheer resourcefulness of Ebo and Kwame as they make their way towards Europe. Ebo uses a box of wet wipes that fell off a truck to offer skin-cleaning services around the slums of Agadez. Kwame works as a day laborer. Ebo uses his beautiful singing voice to sing at weddings. In this way they collect a little more money each day.
There are a few parts of "Illegal" that made me scratch my head. Unlike refugees from Iraq or Syria, Ebo and Kwame are traveling to Europe for economic reasons only. They are in no immediate danger in Niger, which is a poor but fairly stable country. Why not simply stay in Agadez for a couple of years, earning money, maybe buying a small house, and then travel to Europe by safer means? Like a plane ticket? Why trust the brutal human traffickers who care nothing for your life once they have your money?
The best part of "Illegal" are Giovanni Rigano's illustrations. Rigano evokes a wonderful sense of place with his drawings. It's clear that he did a lot of visual research for "Illegal." Every setting is spot-on. A dusty village in Niger. The inside of a rusty, overcrowded bus going to Agadez. A slum in a North African city. A storm drain in Tripoli. The inside of a jeep filled with desiccated corpses in the Sahara sun. An overcrowded fishing boat filled with refugees. A peaceful underwater view of drowned corpses, small fish nibbling on their dead fingers. Rigano's ilustrations are masterful.
"Illegal" is an amazing book. I cannot recommend it enough.
So I finally read "Birdbox" It's ….. not a good book. The characters are so cardboard that they make SpongeBob SquarePants look like Macbeth. The dialogue is mundane to the point of blankness. In fact, this whole book is forgettable. Just writing this review I assumed that the main character's name is Michelle. It's not. It's Malorie. Thank goodness I looked it up. That's how forgettable everything and everybody in this book is.
It is a scary book though. This book is meant to be a horror novel and it succeeds in bringing the horror. It checks that box. But it also makes me suddenly appreciate books like "World War Z" which is not only a horror novel but very well-written, full of great settings, characters and realistic dialogue... or realistic enough when combined with zombies that is. A horror novel that brings the horror and nothing else (and even the horror is not quite satisfying in spots for reasons that I will go into later) can come off being very depressing. Like just watching a four hour documentary about 19th century slaughterhouses. Bloody, horrifying, and in the end numbing with no real contentment.
In the beginning of the book "Birdbox" Josh Malerman tries to turn up the heat on the fearful atmosphere waaaay too early. The apocalypse starts in Russia. A mother in Siberia sees something, goes insane, and kills her family and herself. Then in the Ukraine a truck driver sees something, goes insane and chews through his co-worker's neck before killing himself. At this point the entire world is afraid. People in Michigan put blankets over their windows and blindfold their eyes when they go outside. The entire world is on alert, because a few people went nuts in Russia. That's just dumb, and not how things work in real life. Right now as I type this close to a thousand people have died in the Congo from an Ebola outbreak and as far as I know Americans aren't even washing their hands more often. If a rabies outbreak kills 200 in Belarus and Ivanka accidentally flashes her panties on Twitter, guess which story the evening news is gonna lead with.
In the book "Birdbox" a young woman named Malorie is shut up in a house with five or six (don't remember the number, don't really care) individuals while the world outside is stalked by mysterious "creatures." I don't really know who the other characters in the house are despite the fact that 60% of "Birdbox" involves the taut psychological atmosphere within the household v. the monsters outside. That sort of indicates how badly the book is written. There are guys in the house named "Jules" and "Felix" and "Don" and "Victor" (oh wait, Victor was the dog) and a woman named "Cheryl." Don't ask me what defines these characters. They're all pretty much the same. Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bofur and Nori in "The Hobbit" had more memorable unique characterizations than Jules, Felix, Don and Cheryl.
The monsters in "Birdbox" are called the "creatures." Nobody knows what these creatures look like exactly because anyone who sees them goes immediately insane and kills themselves and everyone around them. One character describes the creatures as "Infinity." "Creatures..... infinity... our minds have ceilings, Malorie.... these things.... they are beyond it.... higher than it.... out of reach."
As I said before, "Birdbox" competently brings the horror. It meets the minimum requirement for a horror novel. The writing, plot, and characters are so bad, however, that the horror is blunted in certain scenes and even kind of unintentionally hilarious. One man is determined to see a creature. He records a creature on videotape and then decides to watch the tape while tied to his chair to keep himself from committing suicide, like Ulysses tied to the mast while listening to the songs of the Sirens. This guy isn't as lucky as Ulysses, however. As his friend later describes: "He'd pressed so hard against the ropes that they had gone THROUGH his muscles all the way to the bone. His entire body looked like cake frosting, blood and skin folded over the ropes in his chest, his belly, his neck, his writes, his legs." Forgive me if I find that funny. It's just stupid because it's impossible. Ropes can't do that. Maybe if the guy were tied with concertina wire, probably, but not ropes. Speaking as someone who has seen seatbelted car passengers unclick their belts and walk away from a car accident where the car went from 70 mph to 0 mph in a hurry, restraints don't work that way on the human body. The restrained human body doesn't turn into "cake frosting." It's just physically impossible, insanity or not.
The concept of a force causing humans to spontaneously commit mass suicide was done already, and better, by M. Night Shyamalan's 2008 movie "The Happening." Now granted that movie had its share of silliness but trust me when I say that the movie "The Happening" is better, more visually amazing, and more original than the book "Birdbox." The fact that plants are releasing poison pollen to make humans commit suicide is at least a good concept. Saying that humans are committing mass suicide/ homicide through creatures that may be aliens or trans-dimensional beings or even just natural phenomena not encountered before (this is never explained in the book) is a half-baked concept. It needs to be reworked a bit more. Also, "The Happening" was released in 2008 and "Birdbox" was published in 2014 so I think M. Night Shyamalan may have decent grounds for a copyright infringement lawsuit against Josh Malerman here.
In conclusion, watch "The Happening." Watch the Netflix movie "Birdbox." Don't read the book. This is one of those rare occasions where reading the book will definitely make you more stupid than watching TV.
It is a scary book though. This book is meant to be a horror novel and it succeeds in bringing the horror. It checks that box. But it also makes me suddenly appreciate books like "World War Z" which is not only a horror novel but very well-written, full of great settings, characters and realistic dialogue... or realistic enough when combined with zombies that is. A horror novel that brings the horror and nothing else (and even the horror is not quite satisfying in spots for reasons that I will go into later) can come off being very depressing. Like just watching a four hour documentary about 19th century slaughterhouses. Bloody, horrifying, and in the end numbing with no real contentment.
In the beginning of the book "Birdbox" Josh Malerman tries to turn up the heat on the fearful atmosphere waaaay too early. The apocalypse starts in Russia. A mother in Siberia sees something, goes insane, and kills her family and herself. Then in the Ukraine a truck driver sees something, goes insane and chews through his co-worker's neck before killing himself. At this point the entire world is afraid. People in Michigan put blankets over their windows and blindfold their eyes when they go outside. The entire world is on alert, because a few people went nuts in Russia. That's just dumb, and not how things work in real life. Right now as I type this close to a thousand people have died in the Congo from an Ebola outbreak and as far as I know Americans aren't even washing their hands more often. If a rabies outbreak kills 200 in Belarus and Ivanka accidentally flashes her panties on Twitter, guess which story the evening news is gonna lead with.
In the book "Birdbox" a young woman named Malorie is shut up in a house with five or six (don't remember the number, don't really care) individuals while the world outside is stalked by mysterious "creatures." I don't really know who the other characters in the house are despite the fact that 60% of "Birdbox" involves the taut psychological atmosphere within the household v. the monsters outside. That sort of indicates how badly the book is written. There are guys in the house named "Jules" and "Felix" and "Don" and "Victor" (oh wait, Victor was the dog) and a woman named "Cheryl." Don't ask me what defines these characters. They're all pretty much the same. Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bofur and Nori in "The Hobbit" had more memorable unique characterizations than Jules, Felix, Don and Cheryl.
The monsters in "Birdbox" are called the "creatures." Nobody knows what these creatures look like exactly because anyone who sees them goes immediately insane and kills themselves and everyone around them. One character describes the creatures as "Infinity." "Creatures..... infinity... our minds have ceilings, Malorie.... these things.... they are beyond it.... higher than it.... out of reach."
As I said before, "Birdbox" competently brings the horror. It meets the minimum requirement for a horror novel. The writing, plot, and characters are so bad, however, that the horror is blunted in certain scenes and even kind of unintentionally hilarious. One man is determined to see a creature. He records a creature on videotape and then decides to watch the tape while tied to his chair to keep himself from committing suicide, like Ulysses tied to the mast while listening to the songs of the Sirens. This guy isn't as lucky as Ulysses, however. As his friend later describes: "He'd pressed so hard against the ropes that they had gone THROUGH his muscles all the way to the bone. His entire body looked like cake frosting, blood and skin folded over the ropes in his chest, his belly, his neck, his writes, his legs." Forgive me if I find that funny. It's just stupid because it's impossible. Ropes can't do that. Maybe if the guy were tied with concertina wire, probably, but not ropes. Speaking as someone who has seen seatbelted car passengers unclick their belts and walk away from a car accident where the car went from 70 mph to 0 mph in a hurry, restraints don't work that way on the human body. The restrained human body doesn't turn into "cake frosting." It's just physically impossible, insanity or not.
The concept of a force causing humans to spontaneously commit mass suicide was done already, and better, by M. Night Shyamalan's 2008 movie "The Happening." Now granted that movie had its share of silliness but trust me when I say that the movie "The Happening" is better, more visually amazing, and more original than the book "Birdbox." The fact that plants are releasing poison pollen to make humans commit suicide is at least a good concept. Saying that humans are committing mass suicide/ homicide through creatures that may be aliens or trans-dimensional beings or even just natural phenomena not encountered before (this is never explained in the book) is a half-baked concept. It needs to be reworked a bit more. Also, "The Happening" was released in 2008 and "Birdbox" was published in 2014 so I think M. Night Shyamalan may have decent grounds for a copyright infringement lawsuit against Josh Malerman here.
In conclusion, watch "The Happening." Watch the Netflix movie "Birdbox." Don't read the book. This is one of those rare occasions where reading the book will definitely make you more stupid than watching TV.
Robert S. Mueller III is, at the age of 74, starting his literary career a little late in life. His authorial debute, "The Mueller Report," is the most hotly anticipated piece of writing in decades, certainly since whenever George R. R. Martin last released a "Game of Thrones" novel. Indeed Mueller may not even have set pen to paper at all had it not been for his successor at the FBI James Comey. We have Comey to thank for the genesis of "The Mueller Report." Former FBI Director James Comey set us up deliciously for "The Mueller Report" with his breathlessly atmospheric descriptions in the famous memos that he typed in 2017 after meetings with President* Trump. Comey's descriptions of the "small oval table" where he and the President* sat alone for dinner (Comey and Trump are 6'8" and 6'4" respectively) and engaged in queasily erotic psychological warfare are pretty hard to top. "(T)he President said 'I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.' I didn't move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed." Like the pretty secretary who realizes with growing dismay that she will probably not be able to leave her boss's office without being molested, Comey sits wide-eyed with fear in front of the Commander in Chief*. Comey's entire future hangs in the balance, his position as the nation's top lawman gutted and his masculinity withered through this odd, sexualized encounter with the President*. Comey's description of his dinner with Trump is a clever and emotionally-taut inversion of the literary trope of female subjugation to masculine power. It would be hard for Mueller to top THAT!
Unfortunately Mueller does not top Comey. Not by a long shot. "The Mueller Report" is a far cry from Comey's excellent memos. While Comey's memos are concise and suspenseful, Mueller's report is flat, grey, endless, and achingly disappointing. Blocks of grey print interrupted by blocks of the purest black ink marked with the letters "H.O.M." or "Harm to Ongoing Matter." These redactions, put forward by Attorney General Bill Barr, are ridiculous. On the one hand the blocks of black give a nice visual touch to the otherwise unexciting "Mueller Report" and bestow a (probably empty) promise that more explosive material hides behind the solid black ink. Barr's bars, however, don't hide anything really in most instances. In one laughable instance of redaction, Barr inks out a portion of Trump's interview with the "New York Post " that was printed in November 2018. On page 128 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report," Trump is quoted as saying "Manafort, Corsi (REDACTED). It's actually very brave." Why is that redacted? Surely I can just look up the original interview online, and the original interview is probably uncensored. Sure enough, after Googling "Trump interview, new york post, november 2018," the original quote popped up on my phone screen. "Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone. It's actually very brave." Now why would Barr trouble to redact something that was so easy to find on the internet? I realize that Stone has an upcoming trial so technically everything Stone-related is an "ongoing matter,"..... but when the information can be found so easily elsewhere why bother to redact it in "The Mueller Report" in the first place?
"The Mueller Report" starts out with "Volume I" which deals with the investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016. The information widely released to the media was that no evidence was found linking the Trump campaign to Russian Intelligence's illegal attack on the DNC server where thousands of emails were stolen and then released publicly in an attempt to harm the Hillary Clinton campaign and help Trump. "No evidence," however, is not exactly the same as an exoneration. As Mueller notes on page 10 of Volume I of "The Mueller Report," "(T)he Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated- including some associated with the Trump Campaign- deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communication records." Later on in the report Mueller identifies the dirty deleters as Paul Manafort, Steven Bannon, and Erik Prince. Was there collusion? Who knows. A whole lot of stuff got deleted. In other words, but their emails.
Volume I details how the Russian reached out multiple times to the Trump campaign in 2015- 2016 and the Trump campaign eagerly accepted their help. Did the Trump campaign know about the coordinated hack on the DNC server? Mueller and his team don't manage to find a lot evidence. This is mostly due to the diligent deleting of Manafort and Bannon. At one point the Mueller team finds a promising lead when an associate of Michael Flynn's is found to have documents on his laptop that are the DNC hacked emails.... and they were downloaded on 10/02/2016 which was BEFORE the hacked emails were released by Wikileaks publicly. At last, the smoking gun! The Trump campaign DID coordinate with the Russians to hack the DNC! Alas, like every other plot point in "The Mueller Report," this story goes nowhere. The Flynn associate states that he downloaded the files after Wikileaks released them publicly but due to some weird quirk with his laptop all the downloaded files have the date 10/02/2016 regardless of when they were actually downloaded. The Mueller team takes his laptop and downloads their own files onto the computer and yes, sure enough, the newly-downloaded files are dated 10/02/2016 even though they were downloaded in 2018. The Mueller team is forced to return the laptop and look elsewhere.
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" details the sophisticated social media campaign of the Russian IRA (Internet Research Agency). It is peculiar to keep seeing the "IRA" referenced throughout this volume because you wonder "What? The Irish were involved too?" But no. The "Internet Research Agency" was a Russian agency affiliated with Russian military intelligence which weaponized social media against American voters. The IRA didn't just push Trump on voters. The IRA was also responsible for promoting dissatisfaction with the Democrats among "Bernie Bros" and black and Latinx Americans. Even when the IRA knew that they could not get minority voters to vote for Trump, the IRA did manage successfully to promote a "They're both equally bad" message to potential Democratic voters. The IRA pushed voter apathy and encouraged potential Hillary Clinton voters to just stay home. The IRA founded twitter handles like "TEN_GOP" (stands for the Tennessee GOP but is not actually affiliated with the Tennessee Republican Party) which tweeted anti-Clinton propaganda which was later re-tweeted by Trump campaign staff including Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. (Mueller found no evidence that the Trump GOP knew that "TEN_GOP" was a Russian-affiliated account and not just a pro-Trump account).
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" does have moments of comedy. The deeply stupid Michael Cohen had multiple phone conversations with a "Dmitry Klokov" whom Cohen assumed was a Russian Olympic weightlifter by the same name. Cohen's conclusion was not because Klokov told him so but because Cohen googled "Dmitry Klokov" and went with the first name that popped up on his search results. Actually, the man Cohen was speaking to was a completely different Dmitry Klokov. As Mueller dryly observes in a footnote: "During his interviews with the Office, Cohen still appeared to believe that the Klokov he spoke with was that Olympian."
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" also has moments of sheer fear, like when Mueller details on page 37 how "Officers from Unit 74455 (Russian military intelligence) separately hacked computers belonging to state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of U.S. elections." On page 51 Mueller once again states how Russia was able to "gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government." Statements like these makes the reader doubt the validity of the results of the 2016 election. How strange that the polls were reliable only for non-swing states like Illinois and Alabama.... but were unreliable for all the swing states like Florida and Michigan. Indeed other important elections like the Florida gubernatorial election where the top-polling anti-Russian candidate Andrew Gillum mysteriously lost to the pro-Putin candidate DeSantis despite polling ahead of DeSantis all year suddenly make a lot more sense when examined in context of Florida's hacked voting machines.
Volume II of "The Mueller Report" is a comparatively easier read. Volume II just deals with the President* trying to obstruct justice multiple times and failing because unsung hero Don McGahn (whom Mueller is clearly fond of) simply refused to carry out the White House's panicking orders. Unlike in Volume I, the evidence of wrongdoing (obstruction of justice) in Volume II is clear, obvious, and well-documented. One of the most heinous (and illegal) acts that Mueller uncovers is that the White House encouraged Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a crime that could land Trump with three to five years in the clink. The online newspaper "The Daily Beast" broke this news before "The Mueller Report" came out. Oddly, Mueller went public to dispute the story.... yet his report shows that "The Daily Beast" was right. The White House did on multiple occasions review and approve Michael Cohen's false testimony to Congress. As page 143 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report" shows, Cohen's phone records showed multiple phone calls before Cohen testified to Congress which corroborated Cohen stating that the White House had asked him to lie to Congress. "Cohen recalled that the President's personal counsel said 'his client' appreciated Cohen, that Cohen should stay on message and not contradict the President, that there was no need to muddy the water, and that it was time to move on....... (T)his Office sought to speak with the President's personal counsel about these conversations with Cohen, but counsel declined, citing potential privilege concerns." "The Daily Beast" got it right.
If there is any hero who emerges from "The Mueller Report," it is not Robert Mueller (who comes off as pedantic and weak, throwing down analysis after analysis about why Trump isn't getting charged despite ample evidence of obstruction) but White House counsel Don McGahn. It is clear that Mueller has a lot of respect for McGahn and after reading McGahn's interview with the Special Counsel it is hard for the reader to not be impressed by McGahn's moral character. On page 85-86 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report," Mueller states "McGahn was concerned about having any role in asking the Acting Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Bork and not "Saturday Night Massacre Bork." McGahn stood up to Trump in a way that not even the towering (in the literal sense only, alas) James Comey could not. After Trump repeatedly asked McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, McGahn refuses, offers to resign, and then gives his full testimony to Robert Mueller. When Trump later tries to gaslight McGahn ("The President asked McGahn 'Did I say the word "fire"?' McGahn responded,'What you said is "Call Rod (Rosenstein), tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the Special Counsel."' The President responded, 'I never said that.'" (page 117 Volume II of "The Mueller Report")).. McGahn isn't buying it.
In the end Mueller brings no charges against Trump or Don Jr. His reasons for not charging the president are frustrating. DOJ protocal is that a sitting president shouldn't be indicted. But the real reasons for Mueller not crossing the Rubicon with indictments is that Mueller is in his early seventies. Mueller served as a Marine in Vietnam and had a distinguished but stressful career as head of the FBI. Robert Mueller is also the father of two daughters with his wife of fifty years. One of his daughters is severely disabled with spina bifida and Mueller early in his career had to move around a lot in order for his daughter to get the treatment she needed. If anyone has served our country well, it is Robert Mueller. If anyone deserves a relaxing retirement, it is Robert Mueller. And yet Mueller was yanked out of retirement and made to head a long and exhausting investigation that spanned across the globe and entangled many powerful and dangerous individuals. Mueller worked his investigation while his name was dragged across the mud by the right wing media and Republican punks like Jacob Wohl conspired to smear Mueller with false rape charges. Also, and perhaps equally stressfully, the left put Mueller on a pedestal, portraying him as Captain American and Superman. "Save this country Robert Mueller, it's all on you!" Any man would crack under these pressures and it is a huge credit to Mueller that he kept it together and finished his work. But Mueller is tired. Bringing charges, well-founded though they may be, against a sitting President will take years more work and exhaustion, years more of Mueller being in the crosshairs of an increasingly power-mad and desperate President. Most frustratingly of all, the people who wish for Mueller to bring down Trump are the same people who refused to vote for the one woman who could defeat Trump in 2016. How many Jill Stein voters wailed for Mueller to bring down Trump? How many "Oh, I'm not voting. I can't vote for the lesser of two evils" were stated by people who then, without a single hint of irony, shamed Robert Mueller two years later for not going through the exhausting and possibly impossible process of bringing indictments against a president? If we could not do the minimum effort of voting for Hillary Clinton, why should we have any ground to stand on when we ask Mueller to sacrifice the rest of his retirement, maybe the rest of his life, fighting court battles against Trump?
And honestly, in the end, I think this is Robert Mueller's position too. He has done his job. Now it is time for America to do ours. You want Trump gone? Vote. Protest, Register voters, Raise funds. Get the word out. But for God sake leave Robert Mueller alone. He's done his work. Now it's time for us to do ours.
Unfortunately Mueller does not top Comey. Not by a long shot. "The Mueller Report" is a far cry from Comey's excellent memos. While Comey's memos are concise and suspenseful, Mueller's report is flat, grey, endless, and achingly disappointing. Blocks of grey print interrupted by blocks of the purest black ink marked with the letters "H.O.M." or "Harm to Ongoing Matter." These redactions, put forward by Attorney General Bill Barr, are ridiculous. On the one hand the blocks of black give a nice visual touch to the otherwise unexciting "Mueller Report" and bestow a (probably empty) promise that more explosive material hides behind the solid black ink. Barr's bars, however, don't hide anything really in most instances. In one laughable instance of redaction, Barr inks out a portion of Trump's interview with the "New York Post " that was printed in November 2018. On page 128 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report," Trump is quoted as saying "Manafort, Corsi (REDACTED). It's actually very brave." Why is that redacted? Surely I can just look up the original interview online, and the original interview is probably uncensored. Sure enough, after Googling "Trump interview, new york post, november 2018," the original quote popped up on my phone screen. "Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone. It's actually very brave." Now why would Barr trouble to redact something that was so easy to find on the internet? I realize that Stone has an upcoming trial so technically everything Stone-related is an "ongoing matter,"..... but when the information can be found so easily elsewhere why bother to redact it in "The Mueller Report" in the first place?
"The Mueller Report" starts out with "Volume I" which deals with the investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016. The information widely released to the media was that no evidence was found linking the Trump campaign to Russian Intelligence's illegal attack on the DNC server where thousands of emails were stolen and then released publicly in an attempt to harm the Hillary Clinton campaign and help Trump. "No evidence," however, is not exactly the same as an exoneration. As Mueller notes on page 10 of Volume I of "The Mueller Report," "(T)he Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated- including some associated with the Trump Campaign- deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communication records." Later on in the report Mueller identifies the dirty deleters as Paul Manafort, Steven Bannon, and Erik Prince. Was there collusion? Who knows. A whole lot of stuff got deleted. In other words, but their emails.
Volume I details how the Russian reached out multiple times to the Trump campaign in 2015- 2016 and the Trump campaign eagerly accepted their help. Did the Trump campaign know about the coordinated hack on the DNC server? Mueller and his team don't manage to find a lot evidence. This is mostly due to the diligent deleting of Manafort and Bannon. At one point the Mueller team finds a promising lead when an associate of Michael Flynn's is found to have documents on his laptop that are the DNC hacked emails.... and they were downloaded on 10/02/2016 which was BEFORE the hacked emails were released by Wikileaks publicly. At last, the smoking gun! The Trump campaign DID coordinate with the Russians to hack the DNC! Alas, like every other plot point in "The Mueller Report," this story goes nowhere. The Flynn associate states that he downloaded the files after Wikileaks released them publicly but due to some weird quirk with his laptop all the downloaded files have the date 10/02/2016 regardless of when they were actually downloaded. The Mueller team takes his laptop and downloads their own files onto the computer and yes, sure enough, the newly-downloaded files are dated 10/02/2016 even though they were downloaded in 2018. The Mueller team is forced to return the laptop and look elsewhere.
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" details the sophisticated social media campaign of the Russian IRA (Internet Research Agency). It is peculiar to keep seeing the "IRA" referenced throughout this volume because you wonder "What? The Irish were involved too?" But no. The "Internet Research Agency" was a Russian agency affiliated with Russian military intelligence which weaponized social media against American voters. The IRA didn't just push Trump on voters. The IRA was also responsible for promoting dissatisfaction with the Democrats among "Bernie Bros" and black and Latinx Americans. Even when the IRA knew that they could not get minority voters to vote for Trump, the IRA did manage successfully to promote a "They're both equally bad" message to potential Democratic voters. The IRA pushed voter apathy and encouraged potential Hillary Clinton voters to just stay home. The IRA founded twitter handles like "TEN_GOP" (stands for the Tennessee GOP but is not actually affiliated with the Tennessee Republican Party) which tweeted anti-Clinton propaganda which was later re-tweeted by Trump campaign staff including Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. (Mueller found no evidence that the Trump GOP knew that "TEN_GOP" was a Russian-affiliated account and not just a pro-Trump account).
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" does have moments of comedy. The deeply stupid Michael Cohen had multiple phone conversations with a "Dmitry Klokov" whom Cohen assumed was a Russian Olympic weightlifter by the same name. Cohen's conclusion was not because Klokov told him so but because Cohen googled "Dmitry Klokov" and went with the first name that popped up on his search results. Actually, the man Cohen was speaking to was a completely different Dmitry Klokov. As Mueller dryly observes in a footnote: "During his interviews with the Office, Cohen still appeared to believe that the Klokov he spoke with was that Olympian."
Volume I of "The Mueller Report" also has moments of sheer fear, like when Mueller details on page 37 how "Officers from Unit 74455 (Russian military intelligence) separately hacked computers belonging to state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and U.S. companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of U.S. elections." On page 51 Mueller once again states how Russia was able to "gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government." Statements like these makes the reader doubt the validity of the results of the 2016 election. How strange that the polls were reliable only for non-swing states like Illinois and Alabama.... but were unreliable for all the swing states like Florida and Michigan. Indeed other important elections like the Florida gubernatorial election where the top-polling anti-Russian candidate Andrew Gillum mysteriously lost to the pro-Putin candidate DeSantis despite polling ahead of DeSantis all year suddenly make a lot more sense when examined in context of Florida's hacked voting machines.
Volume II of "The Mueller Report" is a comparatively easier read. Volume II just deals with the President* trying to obstruct justice multiple times and failing because unsung hero Don McGahn (whom Mueller is clearly fond of) simply refused to carry out the White House's panicking orders. Unlike in Volume I, the evidence of wrongdoing (obstruction of justice) in Volume II is clear, obvious, and well-documented. One of the most heinous (and illegal) acts that Mueller uncovers is that the White House encouraged Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a crime that could land Trump with three to five years in the clink. The online newspaper "The Daily Beast" broke this news before "The Mueller Report" came out. Oddly, Mueller went public to dispute the story.... yet his report shows that "The Daily Beast" was right. The White House did on multiple occasions review and approve Michael Cohen's false testimony to Congress. As page 143 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report" shows, Cohen's phone records showed multiple phone calls before Cohen testified to Congress which corroborated Cohen stating that the White House had asked him to lie to Congress. "Cohen recalled that the President's personal counsel said 'his client' appreciated Cohen, that Cohen should stay on message and not contradict the President, that there was no need to muddy the water, and that it was time to move on....... (T)his Office sought to speak with the President's personal counsel about these conversations with Cohen, but counsel declined, citing potential privilege concerns." "The Daily Beast" got it right.
If there is any hero who emerges from "The Mueller Report," it is not Robert Mueller (who comes off as pedantic and weak, throwing down analysis after analysis about why Trump isn't getting charged despite ample evidence of obstruction) but White House counsel Don McGahn. It is clear that Mueller has a lot of respect for McGahn and after reading McGahn's interview with the Special Counsel it is hard for the reader to not be impressed by McGahn's moral character. On page 85-86 of Volume II of "The Mueller Report," Mueller states "McGahn was concerned about having any role in asking the Acting Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Bork and not "Saturday Night Massacre Bork." McGahn stood up to Trump in a way that not even the towering (in the literal sense only, alas) James Comey could not. After Trump repeatedly asked McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, McGahn refuses, offers to resign, and then gives his full testimony to Robert Mueller. When Trump later tries to gaslight McGahn ("The President asked McGahn 'Did I say the word "fire"?' McGahn responded,'What you said is "Call Rod (Rosenstein), tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the Special Counsel."' The President responded, 'I never said that.'" (page 117 Volume II of "The Mueller Report")).. McGahn isn't buying it.
In the end Mueller brings no charges against Trump or Don Jr. His reasons for not charging the president are frustrating. DOJ protocal is that a sitting president shouldn't be indicted. But the real reasons for Mueller not crossing the Rubicon with indictments is that Mueller is in his early seventies. Mueller served as a Marine in Vietnam and had a distinguished but stressful career as head of the FBI. Robert Mueller is also the father of two daughters with his wife of fifty years. One of his daughters is severely disabled with spina bifida and Mueller early in his career had to move around a lot in order for his daughter to get the treatment she needed. If anyone has served our country well, it is Robert Mueller. If anyone deserves a relaxing retirement, it is Robert Mueller. And yet Mueller was yanked out of retirement and made to head a long and exhausting investigation that spanned across the globe and entangled many powerful and dangerous individuals. Mueller worked his investigation while his name was dragged across the mud by the right wing media and Republican punks like Jacob Wohl conspired to smear Mueller with false rape charges. Also, and perhaps equally stressfully, the left put Mueller on a pedestal, portraying him as Captain American and Superman. "Save this country Robert Mueller, it's all on you!" Any man would crack under these pressures and it is a huge credit to Mueller that he kept it together and finished his work. But Mueller is tired. Bringing charges, well-founded though they may be, against a sitting President will take years more work and exhaustion, years more of Mueller being in the crosshairs of an increasingly power-mad and desperate President. Most frustratingly of all, the people who wish for Mueller to bring down Trump are the same people who refused to vote for the one woman who could defeat Trump in 2016. How many Jill Stein voters wailed for Mueller to bring down Trump? How many "Oh, I'm not voting. I can't vote for the lesser of two evils" were stated by people who then, without a single hint of irony, shamed Robert Mueller two years later for not going through the exhausting and possibly impossible process of bringing indictments against a president? If we could not do the minimum effort of voting for Hillary Clinton, why should we have any ground to stand on when we ask Mueller to sacrifice the rest of his retirement, maybe the rest of his life, fighting court battles against Trump?
And honestly, in the end, I think this is Robert Mueller's position too. He has done his job. Now it is time for America to do ours. You want Trump gone? Vote. Protest, Register voters, Raise funds. Get the word out. But for God sake leave Robert Mueller alone. He's done his work. Now it's time for us to do ours.
I have a bit of a confession. I am not a Neil Gaiman fan. He writes only one story. Don't get me wrong, Gaiman writes that story well..... but it's basically just one story. The central gimmick of a generic Neil Gaiman story is: What happens when an ancient god has to take a modern form? That's the plot of "American Gods," and "Good Omens" and "Anansi Boys" and most of the "Sandman" series. I loved a lot of the "Sandman" books.... but after a while I get the gist. When I opened "The Graveyard Book" I was half-expecting to read some story about "Paul" with the golden hair who works with solar panel technology. "a-PAUL-o," get it? Wink, wink? Nudge, nudge?
Anyway, I opened "The Graveyard Book" and found a Neil Gaiman story that I had never read before. Not only is the tale free of the usual Neil Gaiman tropes (well, mostly free)... but it is also a truly original fantasy tale. It's a story with an extraordinary setting that I have never seen in any other tale. The concept of "The Graveyard Book" is beautiful, sad, idyllic, loving, and strange. And very, very human. I loved reading every page of "The Graveyard Book."
When did I first realize that "The Graveyard Book" wasn't a typical Neil Gaiman tale? Probably by page 2. We are in a house late at night. A man and a woman lie in bed, their throats slit. Their five-year-old daughter lies nearby, her throat slit too. The murderer with the knife just has one victim left: the baby. He steps into the nursery, not realizing that the 14-month-old child has crawled curiously out the door that the murderer carelessly left ajar. Unaware of the danger or the fact that his parents are dead, the baby crawls down the street and into the gloomy graveyard at the end of the road.
Already this is pretty dark stuff, even by Neil Gaiman standards. Men killing children? Babies crawling alone down dangerous dark streets into graveyards? This is more Stephen King territory than Neil Gaiman. Gaiman himself realizes that he had better lighten the atmosphere quickly. As soon as the baby crawls into the graveyard, he's greeted by the ghosts. The spirit of a plump Victorian-era woman and her husband float out curiously to look at the baby. They are immediately enchanted by him. They are also curious as to why the baby is (unlike most living humans) able to see them. The ghosts themselves, though drawn with a blue hue by the amazing Kevin Nowlan and always-reliable P. Craig Russell, are solid enough. The are able to pick up and comfort the baby. And thus the baby is adopted by the ghosts, given the name "Nobody Owens" (his adoptive ghost parents are named Mistress and Master Owens) and raised in the graveyard.
A child growing up in a graveyard sounds grim but the amazing illustrators of "The Graveyard Book" make the ancient British burial grounds look like an idyllic Garden of Eden. Nobody "Bod" Owens has a childhood full of loving if rather old-fashioned ghost guardians, a home of beautiful ancient marble graves twined around with magnificent old trees, and (in a rather creepy touch) plenty of happy ghost children playmates courtesy of the 19th century's high child mortality rate. Bod's more practical needs are met too through the character of Silas, an austere paternal vampire who is able to leave the graveyard occasionally to pick up food for the child. Between the fussy, loving, old-fashioned ghosts and the vampire who feeds the human child instead of ON the boy, Neil Gaiman cleverly inverts supernatural tropes. Like his down-on-their-luck gods in "American Gods," Gaiman reverses and gently mocks ancient human fears of the supernatural.
I do have a few tiny quibbles. The graveyard Bod grows up in is HUGE! Acre after acre of picturesque ancient British landscape, gothically beautiful trees and marble statuary make up Body's graveyard and it appears to take more square kilometers than the city of London. It's beautifully drawn. The artistic license taken with the graveyard's size is forgivable, I suppose. Maybe it's drawn that way on purpose, seen as larger than it really is through a child's eyes. Certainly it looks idyllic and you can't help but feel a little jealous of Bod for growing up in such a gorgeous paradise.
In any case, "The Graveyard Book" is the most original fantasy story I have read in years. The illustrations are gorgeous and the characters of the ghosts and Silas and Mrs. Lupescu (Bod's firm yet protective werewolf tutor) are wonderful. "The Graveyard Book" is a very sweet, very warm, very human and very British story that is an utter delight to read.
Anyway, I opened "The Graveyard Book" and found a Neil Gaiman story that I had never read before. Not only is the tale free of the usual Neil Gaiman tropes (well, mostly free)... but it is also a truly original fantasy tale. It's a story with an extraordinary setting that I have never seen in any other tale. The concept of "The Graveyard Book" is beautiful, sad, idyllic, loving, and strange. And very, very human. I loved reading every page of "The Graveyard Book."
When did I first realize that "The Graveyard Book" wasn't a typical Neil Gaiman tale? Probably by page 2. We are in a house late at night. A man and a woman lie in bed, their throats slit. Their five-year-old daughter lies nearby, her throat slit too. The murderer with the knife just has one victim left: the baby. He steps into the nursery, not realizing that the 14-month-old child has crawled curiously out the door that the murderer carelessly left ajar. Unaware of the danger or the fact that his parents are dead, the baby crawls down the street and into the gloomy graveyard at the end of the road.
Already this is pretty dark stuff, even by Neil Gaiman standards. Men killing children? Babies crawling alone down dangerous dark streets into graveyards? This is more Stephen King territory than Neil Gaiman. Gaiman himself realizes that he had better lighten the atmosphere quickly. As soon as the baby crawls into the graveyard, he's greeted by the ghosts. The spirit of a plump Victorian-era woman and her husband float out curiously to look at the baby. They are immediately enchanted by him. They are also curious as to why the baby is (unlike most living humans) able to see them. The ghosts themselves, though drawn with a blue hue by the amazing Kevin Nowlan and always-reliable P. Craig Russell, are solid enough. The are able to pick up and comfort the baby. And thus the baby is adopted by the ghosts, given the name "Nobody Owens" (his adoptive ghost parents are named Mistress and Master Owens) and raised in the graveyard.
A child growing up in a graveyard sounds grim but the amazing illustrators of "The Graveyard Book" make the ancient British burial grounds look like an idyllic Garden of Eden. Nobody "Bod" Owens has a childhood full of loving if rather old-fashioned ghost guardians, a home of beautiful ancient marble graves twined around with magnificent old trees, and (in a rather creepy touch) plenty of happy ghost children playmates courtesy of the 19th century's high child mortality rate. Bod's more practical needs are met too through the character of Silas, an austere paternal vampire who is able to leave the graveyard occasionally to pick up food for the child. Between the fussy, loving, old-fashioned ghosts and the vampire who feeds the human child instead of ON the boy, Neil Gaiman cleverly inverts supernatural tropes. Like his down-on-their-luck gods in "American Gods," Gaiman reverses and gently mocks ancient human fears of the supernatural.
I do have a few tiny quibbles. The graveyard Bod grows up in is HUGE! Acre after acre of picturesque ancient British landscape, gothically beautiful trees and marble statuary make up Body's graveyard and it appears to take more square kilometers than the city of London. It's beautifully drawn. The artistic license taken with the graveyard's size is forgivable, I suppose. Maybe it's drawn that way on purpose, seen as larger than it really is through a child's eyes. Certainly it looks idyllic and you can't help but feel a little jealous of Bod for growing up in such a gorgeous paradise.
In any case, "The Graveyard Book" is the most original fantasy story I have read in years. The illustrations are gorgeous and the characters of the ghosts and Silas and Mrs. Lupescu (Bod's firm yet protective werewolf tutor) are wonderful. "The Graveyard Book" is a very sweet, very warm, very human and very British story that is an utter delight to read.
The graphic novel of "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born" was not a good book. It was as if the gods of my reading list decided that throwing amazingly good graphic novels like the adaptation of Neil Gaimon's "The Graveyard Book" was just too much of a good time. I had to be brought down to Earth. So the truly crummy adaptation of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" found its way into my hands and boy was it bad. Hoo boy.
So this book talks about the birth of the Gunslinger. He was once a 14-year-old boy named Roland who lived in some Old West hellscape that is probably a post-apocalyptic Earth. Bits of our time remain, most notably guns. Mankind has forgotten how most machines work but some old six-shooters still remain and the man who wields these guns achieves the holy status of "Gunslinger."
The plot is overly-complicated so I'll keep it simple. Roland and his band of teenage boys represent the Alliance. They are hunted by an evil man named Marten Broadcloak and his bad of assassins. Broacloak has figured out how the ancient weapons of the old times (clearly rusty tanks) can be brought back to usefulness by refining oil into gasoline and using the gasoline to get the tanks moving again. Roland stops Broadcloak from taking over by luring Broadcloak's profoundly stupid assassins into a box canyon where the assassins are munched by an extra-dimensional tentacled nightmare called the "thinny."
This book is awful. It's narrated in an irrtating cross between Old West jargon and ersatz Tolkien. The dialogue is thudding and humorless. The characters are profoundly unlikeable. The various alliances are too complicated and frankly too uninteresting to figure out. The male characters are interchangeable and the women are either witches, bitches or virgins who must die in order to give the male hero purpose.
The bad writing all on Stephen King. The terrible illustrations, however, are not his fault. Jae Lee and Richard Isanove need to take the responsibility for that. Each setting and character is drenched in shadow. The landscape is soaked in inky black in order to spare the illustrator the laborous task of having to draw backgrounds. Everyone is in silhouette so that I couldn't tell who was talking. Is Roland talking now? One of Roland's four boy companions? Marten Broadcloak? Someone else? Roland's girlfriend had blond hair so I could recognize her. Going silhouette is a stylish way to avoid having to draw faces (which is difficult to do in graphic novels) but everyone is so shadowy I couldn't tell one character from another. There were so many cheap illustrator cheats in "The Gunslinger Born" that the book is just generally visually ugly and hurts the eyes.
Crummy book. Please avoid.
So this book talks about the birth of the Gunslinger. He was once a 14-year-old boy named Roland who lived in some Old West hellscape that is probably a post-apocalyptic Earth. Bits of our time remain, most notably guns. Mankind has forgotten how most machines work but some old six-shooters still remain and the man who wields these guns achieves the holy status of "Gunslinger."
The plot is overly-complicated so I'll keep it simple. Roland and his band of teenage boys represent the Alliance. They are hunted by an evil man named Marten Broadcloak and his bad of assassins. Broacloak has figured out how the ancient weapons of the old times (clearly rusty tanks) can be brought back to usefulness by refining oil into gasoline and using the gasoline to get the tanks moving again. Roland stops Broadcloak from taking over by luring Broadcloak's profoundly stupid assassins into a box canyon where the assassins are munched by an extra-dimensional tentacled nightmare called the "thinny."
This book is awful. It's narrated in an irrtating cross between Old West jargon and ersatz Tolkien. The dialogue is thudding and humorless. The characters are profoundly unlikeable. The various alliances are too complicated and frankly too uninteresting to figure out. The male characters are interchangeable and the women are either witches, bitches or virgins who must die in order to give the male hero purpose.
The bad writing all on Stephen King. The terrible illustrations, however, are not his fault. Jae Lee and Richard Isanove need to take the responsibility for that. Each setting and character is drenched in shadow. The landscape is soaked in inky black in order to spare the illustrator the laborous task of having to draw backgrounds. Everyone is in silhouette so that I couldn't tell who was talking. Is Roland talking now? One of Roland's four boy companions? Marten Broadcloak? Someone else? Roland's girlfriend had blond hair so I could recognize her. Going silhouette is a stylish way to avoid having to draw faces (which is difficult to do in graphic novels) but everyone is so shadowy I couldn't tell one character from another. There were so many cheap illustrator cheats in "The Gunslinger Born" that the book is just generally visually ugly and hurts the eyes.
Crummy book. Please avoid.
I am an unabashed fan of the beginnings of scary stories. I love the slow build-up of fear in horror novels. I adore the first bump in the attic, which the nervous young couple wave off as "Oh, the house is just settling." Page 13 of the book is more satisfying than page 130 where people are actively dodging body parts. The zombie genre in particular is great at the slow build-up. We all love the beginning chapters where the disease, the contagion, starts out as a whisper. There is a mere news report, something strange in a small village far off in Russia or Lesotho that the main characters dismiss but we readers know with a thrill is merely the first sign of something more ominous. Then a few more news reports start trickling in. Then a few more. Then suddenly a small country stops accepting flights in or out. Then larger nations start putting forth quarantines. The main characters with gratifying stupidity reassure themselves that this is nothing, just a panic over a stupid sniffle, but we the readers squirm in delight over the mounting storm clouds. Some writers, like Max Brooks are fantastic at prolonging that delicious build-up in "World War Z." Some writers, like the utterly frustrating Josh Malerman, blow the whole beginning. In Malerman's "Bird Box" the mounting fear takes up three paragraphs before Malerman stuffs his main characters inside a house for the rest of the novel.
I love slow build-ups, which is why I loved the graphic novel adaptation of Volume 1 of Stephen King's "The Stand: Captain Trips." After the awfulness that was "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born" I approached my second foray into Stephen King graphic novels with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. "The Stand: Captain Trips" is far faaaaar better than "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born." "The Stand" is narrated in plain English instead of the god-awful fake Tolkien/ ye Olde Weste style Stephen King unwisely used in "Dark Tower." Secondly the misogyny dial was turned way down in "The Stand." Female characters are still pretty secondary in "The Stand" but at least they have actual character traits and aren't flat witch/bitch/virgin-who-must-die archetypes.
Thirdly, and best of all, "The Stand: Captain Trips" has fantastic illustrations. I was bowled over by the detail drawn by artists Mike Perkins and Laura Martin, two old hands at Marvel Comics. Like any good plague novel, "The Stand: Captain Trips" has a variety of locations so Perkins and Martin needed to accurately portray a whole bunch of difficult-to-draw locations like Times Square, a top-secret bio-research lab, a jail, a gas station in the middle of Texas, Washington DC, a nightmarish dreamscape of corn fields, and more. The illustrators handle each setting very well and with great professionalism, and thus are able to really show how the deadly virus "Captain Trips" was able to spread from a military biowarfare lab in Nebraska to across the entire United States.
The plot of "The Stand: Captain Trips" Volume 1 is all slow build-up and oooooo is it delicious! The book starts with the wife of a military commander being shaken awake by her panicky husband in the middle of the night. "We need to go! Now!" Unquestioningly she obeys. Her husband is fearful. Before they get into the car and drive off, he lifts up his forefinger, testing the wind. He is reassured by the direction of the wind. They have time. But before the couple drive off he starts coughing. First occasionally, then constantly. By the time the car crashes into a gas station in Texas, the couple are dead. Their lymph nodes are swollen to golf ball size and their throats are full of mucous.
The first volume of "The Stand: Captain Trips" details the spread of a deadly weaponized flu code-named "Captain Trips" that has been allowed to escape a military research facility in Nebraska. The government tries to restrict the spread of the disease while at the same time reassure the public to not be alarmed. Stephen King wrote "The Stand" in the early nineties before everyone had smart phones so there is a real anachronistic belief that the government can tamp down information on a spreading plague. The TV news gives soothing reassurances while government agents in biohazard suits burn piles of bodies with mucous-smeared faces. Even by nineties standards it seems a little unrealistic that people wouldn't realize that whole towns were dying mysteriously. Wouldn't someone wonder why they hadn't heard from Mom and Dad lately?
Finally someone is able to sneak a camcorder behind a quarantine line and is able to film government agents dumping bodies into a river. his footage is delivered to a TV studio and all hell breaks loose. The president is finally forced to appear on TV to reassure the American public that there is no truth to the idea of a deadly plague sweeping across the US. The book ends with the president then coughing, taking a drink of water, and telling his staff that he's going to lie down for a little bit because he doesn't feel well.
"The Stand" is a multi-part series involving pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse parts. I love the pre-apocalypse parts the best which is why I loved Volume 1 of "The Stand." I don't know if I will read the next few volumes. Maybe. I feel like I've read the best part already and it was loads of fun. For people like myself who think the beginnings of horror novels are the best parts of horror novels, I heartily recommend the graphic novel of "The Stand: Captain Trips."
I love slow build-ups, which is why I loved the graphic novel adaptation of Volume 1 of Stephen King's "The Stand: Captain Trips." After the awfulness that was "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born" I approached my second foray into Stephen King graphic novels with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. "The Stand: Captain Trips" is far faaaaar better than "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born." "The Stand" is narrated in plain English instead of the god-awful fake Tolkien/ ye Olde Weste style Stephen King unwisely used in "Dark Tower." Secondly the misogyny dial was turned way down in "The Stand." Female characters are still pretty secondary in "The Stand" but at least they have actual character traits and aren't flat witch/bitch/virgin-who-must-die archetypes.
Thirdly, and best of all, "The Stand: Captain Trips" has fantastic illustrations. I was bowled over by the detail drawn by artists Mike Perkins and Laura Martin, two old hands at Marvel Comics. Like any good plague novel, "The Stand: Captain Trips" has a variety of locations so Perkins and Martin needed to accurately portray a whole bunch of difficult-to-draw locations like Times Square, a top-secret bio-research lab, a jail, a gas station in the middle of Texas, Washington DC, a nightmarish dreamscape of corn fields, and more. The illustrators handle each setting very well and with great professionalism, and thus are able to really show how the deadly virus "Captain Trips" was able to spread from a military biowarfare lab in Nebraska to across the entire United States.
The plot of "The Stand: Captain Trips" Volume 1 is all slow build-up and oooooo is it delicious! The book starts with the wife of a military commander being shaken awake by her panicky husband in the middle of the night. "We need to go! Now!" Unquestioningly she obeys. Her husband is fearful. Before they get into the car and drive off, he lifts up his forefinger, testing the wind. He is reassured by the direction of the wind. They have time. But before the couple drive off he starts coughing. First occasionally, then constantly. By the time the car crashes into a gas station in Texas, the couple are dead. Their lymph nodes are swollen to golf ball size and their throats are full of mucous.
The first volume of "The Stand: Captain Trips" details the spread of a deadly weaponized flu code-named "Captain Trips" that has been allowed to escape a military research facility in Nebraska. The government tries to restrict the spread of the disease while at the same time reassure the public to not be alarmed. Stephen King wrote "The Stand" in the early nineties before everyone had smart phones so there is a real anachronistic belief that the government can tamp down information on a spreading plague. The TV news gives soothing reassurances while government agents in biohazard suits burn piles of bodies with mucous-smeared faces. Even by nineties standards it seems a little unrealistic that people wouldn't realize that whole towns were dying mysteriously. Wouldn't someone wonder why they hadn't heard from Mom and Dad lately?
Finally someone is able to sneak a camcorder behind a quarantine line and is able to film government agents dumping bodies into a river. his footage is delivered to a TV studio and all hell breaks loose. The president is finally forced to appear on TV to reassure the American public that there is no truth to the idea of a deadly plague sweeping across the US. The book ends with the president then coughing, taking a drink of water, and telling his staff that he's going to lie down for a little bit because he doesn't feel well.
"The Stand" is a multi-part series involving pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse parts. I love the pre-apocalypse parts the best which is why I loved Volume 1 of "The Stand." I don't know if I will read the next few volumes. Maybe. I feel like I've read the best part already and it was loads of fun. For people like myself who think the beginnings of horror novels are the best parts of horror novels, I heartily recommend the graphic novel of "The Stand: Captain Trips."
David Sedaris' "Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002" is delightful, hilarious and a very easy read. Like all of Sedaris' humor, however, every third or fourth joke in the book hides a barb. Sedaris will insert a deeply unsettling fact about his family amid an essay full of quirky humor, hoping that the reader is too busy laughing to notice. It's a little hard NOT to notice though. "Wait a second, did he just say that his sister committed suicide?" "Wait, did he imply that his neighbor's 6-year-old daughter is severely neglected and he's too mentally ill to do something about it?" "Wait, did his youngest sister just have a miscarriage and nearly bleed to death and then was kicked out of her mother's house two weeks later because the sister was still on drugs?" It often feels like Sedaris wants to make us laugh by telling stories about his family.... but his family has such horrifying problems that it's difficult for Sedaris to gloss over the sadness in order to bring the funny. Sedaris is better at being consistently funny than his sister Amy Sedaris though. Amy Sedaris' humor seems to barely contain a frightening insanity. Every time I see Amy Sedaris on TV, I'm always afraid that she's about to grab a knife and slit open her own throat, cackling in terrifying glee as she chokes on her own blood. No seriously, Amy Sedaris scares the shit out of me.
David Sedaris is very honest that his diaries from 1977-2002 is heavily edited, and understandably so. He describes the years between 1977 and 1983 as "the bleakest. I was writing my diaries by hand then. The letters were small and, fueled by meth, a typical entry would go on for pages- solid walls of words and every last one of them complete bullshit." Names have been disguised and content has been streamlined for clarity and entertainment. At times Sedaris' edits are a little clangingly obvious. One entry from October 5th 1997 has Sedaris complaining about having to sit through "another endless preview for 'Titanic.' Who do they think is going to see that movie?" Eyeroll. Clearly that last sentence was added on by 2017 David Sedaris for ironic effect. More intriguing is when mid-eighties David Sedaris comments on pop culture obsessions that we have now forgotten. One entry from September 28th, 1986 has this tasteless joke: "Q: How did they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? A: They found her Head & Shoulders on the beach." I had to do a quick "Bing" search. Christa McAuliffe was the teacher who died in the Challenger explosion. Apparently they were able to recover enough of her remains to bury her in her home town.
David Sedaris' diary entries are mostly a catalogue of his observations of the slightly quirky habits of everyday humans. "T.W.'s best hunting dog just died. He has her kidneys and her spleen in a jar in the front seat of his truck. After work he planned to take them to the vet." from 1981 is a typical entry. Another typical entry from 1990 is "Dad's been a real terror lately.... (H)e yelled at me for picking a meatball with my fingers. It was on a dish in the refrigerator and he accused me of touching a lot of them before deciding on the largest. I think he worries that I'm spreading AIDS." It really is unbearably sad that David Sedaris' father thinks Sedaris has a fatal disease and instead of being worried about his son, Sedaris' father only frets about catching the disease himself. David Sedaris' relationship with his father, like his sister Tiffany's mental health, is one of those aching, bleeding wounds that seep through the humor that David Sedaris uses as wound packing.
Despite the tang of inescapable sadness that bleeds through regularly in David Sedaris' humor, I have to admit that "Theft by Finding" is mostly light, hilarious reading. You also get to track Sedaris' path from mentally ill drug addict who is borderline homeless to a wealthy writer. It did not happen overnight. Sedaris started out being a mediocre artist who spent his evenings smoking crack and ignoring the domestic abuse going on in the neighboring apartments. He relied on financial help from his parents and occasionally construction jobs. In the nineties Sedaris got a humiliating job as an elf for a mall Santa during the holiday season. He wrote an essay about the experience, and it turned into a surprising success. Sedaris was offered a book deal and wrote "Barrel Fever." Suddenly Sedaris was getting offers from agents. He was being called by "The New Yorker" and asked for interviews by NPR. The rest is history. Sedaris (over a period of years, it must be noted) got sober, got a boyfriend, and became a well-known writer and humorist. The last few years of Sedaris' diaries are smooth sailing despite the fact that he overlaps with 9/11 at that time. Sedaris' life is stable and happy and his less-jagged humor reflects that. In an entry from 2002 Sedaris writes "We've gotten ourselves a mortgage broker named Marcus Paisley, a man we obviously chose for his name. Hugh spoke to him yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day imagining future calls. "I'm starting to see a pattern here, Paisley, and I don't like it." It's a silly joke, yes, but it's a happy silly joke. It's a Dad joke. It's an indicator of the long road from the late seventies meth-fueled diary entries from David Sedaris' youth. And David Sedaris lived happily ever after.
David Sedaris is very honest that his diaries from 1977-2002 is heavily edited, and understandably so. He describes the years between 1977 and 1983 as "the bleakest. I was writing my diaries by hand then. The letters were small and, fueled by meth, a typical entry would go on for pages- solid walls of words and every last one of them complete bullshit." Names have been disguised and content has been streamlined for clarity and entertainment. At times Sedaris' edits are a little clangingly obvious. One entry from October 5th 1997 has Sedaris complaining about having to sit through "another endless preview for 'Titanic.' Who do they think is going to see that movie?" Eyeroll. Clearly that last sentence was added on by 2017 David Sedaris for ironic effect. More intriguing is when mid-eighties David Sedaris comments on pop culture obsessions that we have now forgotten. One entry from September 28th, 1986 has this tasteless joke: "Q: How did they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? A: They found her Head & Shoulders on the beach." I had to do a quick "Bing" search. Christa McAuliffe was the teacher who died in the Challenger explosion. Apparently they were able to recover enough of her remains to bury her in her home town.
David Sedaris' diary entries are mostly a catalogue of his observations of the slightly quirky habits of everyday humans. "T.W.'s best hunting dog just died. He has her kidneys and her spleen in a jar in the front seat of his truck. After work he planned to take them to the vet." from 1981 is a typical entry. Another typical entry from 1990 is "Dad's been a real terror lately.... (H)e yelled at me for picking a meatball with my fingers. It was on a dish in the refrigerator and he accused me of touching a lot of them before deciding on the largest. I think he worries that I'm spreading AIDS." It really is unbearably sad that David Sedaris' father thinks Sedaris has a fatal disease and instead of being worried about his son, Sedaris' father only frets about catching the disease himself. David Sedaris' relationship with his father, like his sister Tiffany's mental health, is one of those aching, bleeding wounds that seep through the humor that David Sedaris uses as wound packing.
Despite the tang of inescapable sadness that bleeds through regularly in David Sedaris' humor, I have to admit that "Theft by Finding" is mostly light, hilarious reading. You also get to track Sedaris' path from mentally ill drug addict who is borderline homeless to a wealthy writer. It did not happen overnight. Sedaris started out being a mediocre artist who spent his evenings smoking crack and ignoring the domestic abuse going on in the neighboring apartments. He relied on financial help from his parents and occasionally construction jobs. In the nineties Sedaris got a humiliating job as an elf for a mall Santa during the holiday season. He wrote an essay about the experience, and it turned into a surprising success. Sedaris was offered a book deal and wrote "Barrel Fever." Suddenly Sedaris was getting offers from agents. He was being called by "The New Yorker" and asked for interviews by NPR. The rest is history. Sedaris (over a period of years, it must be noted) got sober, got a boyfriend, and became a well-known writer and humorist. The last few years of Sedaris' diaries are smooth sailing despite the fact that he overlaps with 9/11 at that time. Sedaris' life is stable and happy and his less-jagged humor reflects that. In an entry from 2002 Sedaris writes "We've gotten ourselves a mortgage broker named Marcus Paisley, a man we obviously chose for his name. Hugh spoke to him yesterday morning and spent the rest of the day imagining future calls. "I'm starting to see a pattern here, Paisley, and I don't like it." It's a silly joke, yes, but it's a happy silly joke. It's a Dad joke. It's an indicator of the long road from the late seventies meth-fueled diary entries from David Sedaris' youth. And David Sedaris lived happily ever after.
