The Help

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by Kathryn Stockett, 2009, Amy Einhorn Books, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York

This book is really a great read.  It’s basically about black maids in Jackson Mississippi back in the late 60’s and early 70’s and how it was working for white families.  The book captures these situations well and the characters are well developed.  The only negative I can think of regarding this book is the somewhat unsatisfying ending.

As I read the book I sometimes felt that the foremost racist “villian”, Hilly, was somewhat unbelievable.  Then I thought of some of the persons and situations I had observed when I was a kid during that time, and she became much more real.  Just recently I watched a PBS documentary regarding the civil rights movement in Mississippi.  I was struck by the faces of some of the whites throwing rocks and yelling at the blacks who were marching, participating in lunch counter sit-ins, or trying to enter all-white schools.  The sheer hatred evidenced in their contorted faces was a vivid reminder of the intensity of their racist feelings at that time.  Hilly instantly became much more real to me.  I wonder, however, if some of the younger generations can generate the same feelings and understanding that I was able to muster.

Maybe the less than satisfying ending provides the stage for a sequel?4 1/2 stars

Northanger Abbey

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by Jane Austen, written in 1798-1799, revised by the author in 1803, and first published (posthumously) in 1803, Audiobook narrated by Flo Gibson, Recorded Books, LLC.

Jane Austen, what can I say?  It is horribly dated by our standards, the characters are very stereotyped, and the story seems to take forever to unfold.  Despite all that, I enjoyed listening to it very much.  The author just has a way to hold the reader’s (listener’s) attention.

It was interesting to listen to Austen’s language, written over 200 years ago, and to marvel at how modern it seems.  I did, however, catch a few dangling participles that would make any Midwestern American proud.

A fun experience. 3 1/2 stars

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

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by Jamie Ford, 2009, Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks, New York

This book is a good story about childhood sweethearts (one Chinese, the other Japanese) in Seattle during World War II and afterwards.  The story focuses on the Japanese internment and it’s affects on the relationship between the two individuals and those around them.

The story is tinged with sadness and nostalgia by the primary character, Henry for his Japanese friend, Kieko.  While the novel is good, it seems to drag a bit in places and the characters don’t become as alive as they could have.  One negaative aspect that I noticed is that the author overuses physical traits of his characters.  Examples are his constant references to Mrs. Beatty’s cigarette and Keiko’s “beautiful, chestnut brown eyes”.  While these physical traits may be endearing and tell us something about the characters, their overuse begins to detract.  I was somewhat reminded of Jan Karon’s use of this technique in her Mitford series when describing Father Tim’s girlfriend Cynthia’s trait of tilting her head to one side as she talked.  It was endearing at first but by the end of the book, it was really annoying.  Contrast this technique to the example of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird where the characters are defined so well simply by the dialogue and their actions.  An example of using this technique much more effectively, however, might be The Caine Mutiny, where Captain Queeg began shaking the steel ball bearings in his hand whenever he began to evidence his paranoia. 

As I mentioned, a good  book, but somewhat flawed. 3 stars

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society

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by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, 2008, Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, Random House, New York

I enjoyed reading this book a great deal.  From a literary standpoint, it is probably not a great book and the characters are even a bit stereotyped.  But it is a great read.

The book is a series of letters written to and from individuals on Guernsey Island, which was occupied by the Germans during World War II.  The letters attract the attention of a writer who is looking for the subject of her next book.  The rest I will leave to anyone who wishes to read the book.

The structure of the book is a little unusual in that it is simply a collection of letters.  The author does not intervene with any prose of her own other than in the acknowledgements at end of the book.  Some individuals who have read the book did not like this format, but it didn’t bother me.  What surprised me was the power of the emotion that struck me as I read the book.  There is definitely something there that grabs at the heartstrings.  The characters in the book reminded me of Jan Karon’s  Mitford series  of books, but it’s sad that Mary Ann Shaffer died shortly before the book was published so it is doubtful that this book will be a prelude to a series.  In a way that’s a good thing, because it would be difficult to replicate this, her first book.  Her niece, Annie Barrows, rewrote the book at the request of the editors.

I would have given this book five stars had it not been for the somewhat stereotypical characters.4 1/2 stars

Rasputin’s Daughter

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by Robert Alexander, 2006, Viking, The Penguin Group, New York

This story is about Rasputin and his assassination, told from the perspective of his daughter.  The author does a pretty good job of telling the story and what it must have been like witnessing her father’s actions and ultimate death.  The story seems a bit fanciful, however, and I, as the reader, sometimes wondered how much of it could have been true.  It appears that the author did a great deal of research, but also had to fill in the blanks himself much of the time.

I would classify this book as an interesting read, but not spellbinding by any means.3 stars

The Sellout, How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System

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by Charles Gasparino, 2009, Harper Business, New York

This book (lent to me by one of our friends in Florida) portrays the steps that led to the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008.  The tale is pretty fascinating as it traces the development of the original mortgage-backed securities back in the 1980’s to the crisis in the financial system they eventually caused.  The causes of the crisis, however, are complex and there is plenty of individuals who must share the blame.  What started out as a valid strategy using perfectly sound investment instruments eventually became what is now known as “toxic assets”.  How did this all happen?

Gasparino traces the greed and poor decisions of Wall Street executives, compounded by a well-meaning, but misplaced government policy (home ownership for everybody as a way to climb the economic ladder), that led to the meltdown.  What was surprising to me is that the big meltdown was preceded by many similar, but smaller meltdowns that seemed to occur with the Wall Street firms every few years.  As Gasparino cited the many instances of over leverage and poor decisions over the decades, the line from the song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, kept coming to mind: “When will they ever learn?”

In October of 2008 we were in Europe on a Danube River cruise.  I recall watching the TV at night as the meltdown went global.  This book, along with those memories, continue to remind me just how bad the situation was and how close we came to going into a deep depression, the likes of which we had never experienced.  I often wonder how there can be so many vocal critics of the “TARP” program, the bailouts, and the subsequent stimulus program.  There can be no question that some of these steps managed to avert a total meltdown.

I took over two months to read this book and it was tough read for me, not because of the actual writing, but, I think, due to the subject material.  It was just hard to read so much bad information and about such stupidity that led us into this situation.  If I had one criticism of the book, I would say that it was somewhat repetitive.  I felt as if I had already read some of the information several times before I finished the book.  Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest as to what caused the collapse of our financial systems.four stars

WordPress Custom Field List Widget

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I would just like to thank Tim Berger for the work he has done on the WordPress plugin to enable sorting and quick retrieval of posts using custom fields.  WordPress has the capability for creating custom fields and entering the appropriate data into those fields for each post.  The difficulty is in finding a way to easily utilize that information to find and retrieve various posts.  Tim’s plugin allows the use of widgets to easily accomplish this task.  Without this additional capability, it is difficult to recommend the use of WordPress as a full content management system.  With this plugin, WordPress can easily be used for that purpose.

Way to go Tim!

American Gospel, God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

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by Jon Meacham, 2007, read by Grover Gardiner, Random House Audiobook.

I got this audiobook from the library last fall to listen to in the car when we made our annual trip to Florida from Rhode Island.  I finally got around to finishing it.  I downloaded it onto my MP3 player and I listen to it while I walk.  The reason it took so long to listen to it is that I haven’t been doing a very good job of keeping up with my walking.  I will strive to do better in the future.

I was pretty harsh in my assessment of Meacham’s book on Andrew Jackson (Review), but he does a pretty good job on this one.  He apparently spends a lot of time observing the American scene and those observations on current religious practice and tone, coupled with his research on American religion, ring fairly true.  His contention is that we do have a “public” religion in the United States that is a part of the fabric of American society and that it is essentially a good thing.  Furthermore, despite the concept of separation of church and state, it is not about to go away.  On the other hand, this public religion is a very watered down kind of religion and is definately not the kind of religion that evangelical Christians would like to impose on our government and schools.

Meacham walks us through the use of religion throughout our history to provide some perspective on this view of religion in the public sector.  The examples he cites are interesting, even though the points that he makes seem to be a bit obvious.  I left the book thinking that if only more individuals would accept the premises that he outlines and not attempt to take it further, we would certainly have a much more tolerant society than that which we seem to encounter these days.  Some persons feel that Christianity is under attack in our country and their response seems to be to try to insert it into our government and schools.  Meacham makes the case that a form of public religion exists in our government institutions and has been there from the inception of our republic.  In his view, there isn’t much need to extend it further.

As I mentioned above, the book sometimes seems to state the obvious, but it is interesting nonetheless.  3 1/2 stars

The Lacuna

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by Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, HarperCollins Publishers, New York

I was disappointed in the format of this book as it reads as a collection of journal pages, letters, and other assorted excerpts from the life of an individual.  Because of this format, the novel lacks the flow of Kingsolver’s previous novels as well as her incredible prose style.  Despite these shortcomings, the book has merit … but not the high praise that her other books attract.

The book is the story of Harrison Shepard and his life as told through his journals, letters, and the writings of his close friend and stenographer, Mrs. Violet Brown.  The story starts in Mexico where he is living with his mother, a native-born Mexican.  The story migrates back to the Washington, D.C., area where he is in boarding school.  He then travels back to Mexico where he becomes Leon Trotsky’s cook and secretary and friends of the painters, Diego and Frieda Rivera.  He then returns to the U.S. where he writes some very successful novels about the struggles of the Aztecs against the Spanish conquistitor, Cortez.

Shepard is then accused of being a Communist and is summoned to appear in his own defense before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The novel presents the Red Scare of the early 1950’s in vivid, if somewhat heavy-handed detail.  On reading this part of the book, it caused me to ponder the current hysteria targeting socialism.  While nobody has been indicted or executed for his or her socialist viewpoints and the hysteria is evidenced primarily by the party that is out of power, the level of acrimony seems to be rising.  Could we, perhaps, be on our way back to the mentality of the 50’s?

While this book is not as enjoyable to read as her previous novels were, it is, nevertheless, worthwhile if you can stick with it.3 stars

Southern Exposure, A Solo Sea Kayaking Journey Around New Zealand’s South Island

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by Chris Duff, 2003, The Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT

I was interesting in reading this, not because I am a kayaker, but because my son who is gave me the book to read.  Also, I spent a considerable amount of time on the South Island of New Zealand back in the 70’s.

The book proved to be worthwhile, although a little bit slow in places (somewhat like paddling).  The parts I found the most interesting were those that had to do with encountering the people in New Zealand.  These individuals who lived in remote places around the island invariably had stories to tell and Chris Duff did a good job retelling them.

The author was obviously looking for a deeper meaning to this endeavor.  When he got into that aspect the book became less interesting.  I did, however, develop a great deal of respect for his resolve to keep going, even after he wrecked his boat.  I guess I developed some of the same resolve to keep reading, even when the going was a bit tough.3 1/2 stars