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 #584 Title: A History of the World in 10 1/2 ChaptersAuthor: Julian Barnes Publisher: Year: 1990 320 pages This is my first Julian Barnes, and as I read I was very excited to have found him. I was all set to give this a five-star rating until I reached the half-chapter alluded to in the title. It's the only section of the audiobook I played at a faster rate so I could get through it more quickly. It's not clear to me whether it was an authorial intrusion or a fictive voice (either of which would have been fine); I kept wanting to yell at Barnes, "Don't wreck what you've made! It stands on its own! Don't bludgeon the reader with heavy-handed explanations that link the 10 stories!" In fairness, I shout this a lot at Chuck Palahniuk as well: "Trust your story! Don't undo it!" though, to be perfectly honest,. I've stopped reading Palahniuk after too many experiences of this type. Suggestion: Ignore the blundering exegetic half-chapter; read only the other 10 stories. Those other 10 stories are varied and delightful. I enjoyed Barnes's wry and acerbic narration, and really admired the resonance across the stories, which mirror,amplify, invert, distort, and corrupt each others' symbols and tales in a way that wonderfully exemplifies the central themes of redaction and redemption, awe and doubt, and cyclicity and free will. Yes, at times these chapters can get a bit meat-fisted as well, but nothing like the half-chapter which, if I were Queen of the Universe (or at least in heaven), I would excise for the good of the masses, telling only the history of the world in 10 chapters. Tags: fiction
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 #583 Title: Weeding the Flowerbeds
Author: Sarah Mkhonza Publisher: Xlibris Year: 2009 Country: Swaziland 180 pages I can't find a single review of this self-published memoir online, which seems strange given that the author is previously published and has been working at Cornell. Weeding the Flowerbeds provides a good look at the daily life of a schoolgirl at a religious boarding school in Swaziland while South Africa still practiced apartheid. These political events are sometimes referenced, but the focus of the book is on the details and recollections of the author. There isn't much contextual information, nor is there a plot or moral--she goes to school, has friends, likes some teachers and not others, and describes in sometimes minute detail the various facets of her mostly-cloistered days. The prose could use an editor's eye, as could the grammar, but one is reading for the account of living in Swaziland, not for literary style. Tags: books of the world, memoir
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 #582 Title: Heart of Fire: From Child Soldier to Soul SingerAuthor: Senait Mehari Publisher: Profile Books Year: 2006 Country: Eritrea 268 pages It's hard to know how much of this memoir is true and how much fictional. Often when an autobiographical work is denounced as fraudulent, at least one of the detractors provides an annotated list of errors, distortions, or misrepresentations. I've read everything on the first large number of Google hits about Heart of Fire without being able to find a clearly articulated account of what the purported fraudulent material is. There are some concerns about whether she was a "child soldier" by some definitions; she is accused of defaming or misrepresenting two people (there has been a hearing about this, but as best I can tell, she has contested it); she is accused of claiming that a school was a paramilitary training camp. These possible sources of concern are buried and confused with long diatribes that make vitriolic and rambling accusations about her mental derangement, drug use, and lying, but the most consistent concern seems to be that she has made Eritrea or ELF (the Eritrean Liberation Front) look bad by asserting that the party used children in warfare. A cursory look around the web finds reasonably good documentation that child soldiers have been used in the Eritrean conflict, which will not come as a surprise to readers aware of child soldiers in other conflicts in the region and elsewhere. Whether Mehari is accurate or not isn't something I can assess, but I can say that her detractors don't present their arguments in a way that is easy to make sense of. As to the book itself, it is interesting to read an account of child soldiers by a female, since most of the recent memoirs have been by men. Stylistically it's repetitive and awkward, so read this as a memoir (or fictionalized memoir). Tags: books of the world, memoir, war
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 #581 Title: Homer and Langley Author: E. L. Doctorow Publisher: Random House Year: 2009 224 pages Read this as an alternative history of the Collyer brothers. Not unlike Star Trek (2009), the main characters wind up where they were before and similar to themselves, though dislocated in time. I'm sure Doctorow had great fun coming up with explanations for the inexplicable--why so many typewriters in the house? Why the windows boarded up? As always, Doctorow's prose is lyrical and evocative.  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliabl e-source/collyer.jpg Tags: fiction
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 #576 Title: The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an ExperimentAuthor: A.J. Jacobs Publisher: Simon & Schuster Year: 2009 256 pages Contrary to the opinion of some of my otherwise right-thinking online book review friends, I thought this was better than Jacobs's previous two books. Perhaps this is because those challenges' massive scope and long duration (reading the encyclopedia and living by biblical precepts) were enormous, which introduced too many opportunities for inconsistency, intellectual shallowness, and general pronouncements that seemed to me to miss the point of the experiment. Here, the scale suits the experiments, which are reasonably contained and do not have such grand philosophical rationalizations. In this, the book seems much more honest. I particularly like the exploration of outsourcing one's life. It was interesting, humorous, and Jacobs's analysis of its implications seemed reasonable and appropriately scaled. The chapter on cognitive errors and distortions was highly-notated but, as my students would attest, clearly the work of someone outside the field of cognitive therapy. I mildly submit an addendum to the anecdote in which Jacobs's aunt sends him an e-mail about "God's Pharmacy," in which "the shapes of food contain clues from God about nutrition" (p. 89). Jacobs's informs his aunt that this is an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Good start. However, this only scratches the surface. The technical name for the underlying philosophy of the e-mail is the Doctrine of Signatures. Also according to his source, Wikipedia, "herbs that resemble various parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of that part of the body." This was also extended to foods (e.g., eat walnuts for your brain; don't eat potatoes because they look like leperous fingers), which I know from recently reading a book about the history of the potato. I realize Jacobs is a magazine writer and that the point here isn't depth or interesting tangents, but it does surprise me a little that he doesn't seem to be familiar with the concept, since it figured heavily (and still does today) in the medical practices of much of the world and therefore surely appears multiple times in the encyclopedia, and the logic it relies on is repeated over and over in Jewish law, which uses a different form of analogy than does English Common Law. Tags: essay
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 #573 Title: An Abundance of KatherinesAuthor: John Green Publisher: Dutton Books Year: 2006 227 pages Attention, geeks, dweebs, and pasty effete intellectuals: This lovely young adult novel is for us. My inner nerd is met and mirrored in this very enjoyable coming of chronological age novel. Speaking to the fears many smart young things experience, it also shows the (stumbling, awkward) progression to, well, being a big old nerd and a more or less serviceable young adult. It's got everything you need: Relationships plotted on the ordinate and abscissa, word play, Quranically-driven discourse, Archduke Ferdinand, and, as promised, an abundance of Katherines. Tags: children's/young adult
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