Mysteries by Donald Westlake and Michael Chabon

Westlake, Donald. What's So Funny. NY: Warner Books, 2007.
Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policeman's Union. NY: Harper Collins, 2007.

Submitted by Mark Schneider

I'm a sucker for mystery novels. I find having a light read going is a good thing especially during the summer. Unfortunately, after you have read a number of mysteries, they can get a bit predictable, so it is nice to have a twist. That is why I have long been a fan of Tony Hillerman, but it seems cranking them out has become more of a business for him than a labor of love, and I have found his recent works lackluster at best. However, there are a couple of great novels I have read recently that nicely combine the twist with a good yarn.

What's So Funny by Donald Westlake puts the small time thief in the lead role. In one of his Dortmunder novels (and the only one I've read so far), Dortmunder is a talented criminal who just wants to make a [dis]honest living. He's got a heart, he's modest, he doesn't want to push his luck. He ends up getting drawn into some big time white collar crime as a tool of folks trying to right a decades old wrong involving misappropriated treasures from WWII. Dortmunder wants nothing to do with it, but he and his buddies end up having to be tools of the "good guys" or end up going to jail for their much more small-time misdeeds. Lots of interesting characters, and enough twists to keep you guessing.

Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in an alternative world where the survivors of the holocaust end up in a settlement in Alaska rather than the Holy Land (don't you remember the catastrophic collapse of the state of Israel in 1948?). Meyer Landsman is a troubled cop with a troubled life, and his best friend and fellow cop Berko Shemets is half Jew, half Tlingit. Prominent is an ultraorthodox sect that plays the role of the local Mafia. Chabon manages to combine the real and the imagined in such a skillful way that the reader is often left wondering: "did he make that up or is that real?" The novel tends to sputter out a little at the end, but even so, I found it the sort of novel I was sad to finish--I just wanted a little more.

Visit the Stewart Library to find books by Donald Westlake.
Both Burling Library and Stewart Library have Michael Chabon's books.

For the Yiddish Policeman's Union stroll over to the 1st floor Smith Memorial PS3553.H15 Y54 2007 at Burling Library.

One's Company

Holland, Barbara. One's Company: Reflections on Living Alone. Akadine Press, 1996.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Holland considers all of the aspects of living alone and devotes a chapter to each one. Chapters cover the importance of food and its proper preparation, finding the right place to live, the importance of connecting with other people and making merriment part of your day-to-day life, surviving depression, keeping anxiety at bay, and finding appropriate work that suits you. She is practical as well, providing recipes for certain kinds of days, detailed instructions for changing a lock, advice on how to fix your own toilet, and a survey of hobbies and activities that can be used to stave off couchdom (my word) and television addiction.

Holland is a fantastic writer and I have been sharing different parts of the book with anyone who will listen as I've been reading it.

Sadly, the Akadine Press was part of the Common Reader which is no more. But you can find copies of this and other books by Barbara Holland at your favorite used book site.

West of Kabul, East of New York

Ansary, Tamim. West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

In this memoir, Ansary tells the story of his childhood in Kabul, the son of an American woman and an Afghan father. Published before The Kite Runner became the run-away favorite book club read, Ansary shares his impressions of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion and three decades and counting of devastating war. Ansary's father worked for the government, and his childhood was colored by this fact, which determined both how and where he and his family lived. At the age of 16, in the mid-sixties, Ansary moved with his family to the United States. His father eventually returned to Afghanistan to be with is extended family and to continue his government work. Ansary describes the different ways he and his siblings responded to their Afghan identity. During the late 1970s, Ansary travels throughout South and Central Asia and the Middle East coming as close to Afghanistan as possible with the thin justification of writing an article about his travels. Later, after his return, he attempts to navigate the intricate networks of the Afghan community in exile. Ansary writes with humor and humility. His book is enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable.

For Kite Runner fans, Ansary mentions Khaled Hosseini toward the end of his book, describing him as a "young Afghan doctor whose passion after work was writing--not ghazals, not quasidas, not even rubaiyat, but horror stories in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft (p. 284).

Burling Library 2nd Floor E 184 .A23 A57 2002

I Don't Believe In Atheists

I Don't Believe In Atheists

Hedges, Chris. I Don't Believe In Atheists. NY: Free Press, 2008.

Reviewed By T. Hatch

Chris Hedges has produced another concise volume dealing with a contemporary moral issue. Hedges who can be described as a left of center philosophical skeptic has attacked head on what he sees as the squalid utopianism of the new or “fundamentalist” atheism of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins.

It was quite recently that this writer heard the word atheist modified with the adjective fundamentalist. That was one afternoon on NPR and the speaker was coming from a right wing perspective. Perhaps, I thought, the speaker meant any atheist who had the temerity to publish was a fundamentalist. Hedges though is quite specific in defining what he sees as atheistic fundamentalism. “The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels and divine intervention.”(p.13)

At no point in the book does Hedges attempt to make an argument that God actually exists. He argues that “Utopian dreams are always psychotic” and the culprits on the secular side of the ledger were Descartes, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. Accordingly, Utopian violence together with industrial and bureaucratic power culminate in totalitarianism. His argument in this respect is a little too direct and the net he casts is a little large. Rousseau is no more responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz than Augustine was for the Inquisition. He specifically cites the Atlantic slave trade as an example of this kind of terror produced by these aforementioned Enlightenment dilettantes. This act of inhumanity was well under way before “the age of reason.”

It is also interesting to note that Hedges repeatedly references Reinhold Niebuhr and contemporary British philosopher John Gray to make his case. There is coherence in this but he also is fond of employing Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to make the same series of points. Talk about a couple of legendary misanthropes!

Despite these inconsistencies, the hang-ups Hedges has with the Jacobins as the first totalitarians (as a technical point and still a stretch why not Napoleon?), his notion that all ethics begin with religion, and his (or my) semantical quibbling with the terms “sin” and “evil,” on balance, it is a solid argument. Indeed Utopian fundamentalists be they religiously or secularly inspired represent the same danger. In fact they can in some instances make common cause and come up with fetching schemes such as the “war on terror.”

A more felicitous title for Hedges' book might have been “Why All Utopians are D#$*%*B@#s (Especially Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins).”

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

Jennifer 8. Lee. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Twelve, 2008.

Submitted by Jennifer (Wheeler) Rothschild '02

In this book, Lee explores three major things: the history of fortune cookies (they're actaully Japanese and internment had a big role in making them a Chinese restaurant favorite), the phenomenon that is Chinese-American food (as opposed to authentic Chinese food), and how Chinese-American food shapes the Chinese immigrant experience and vice versa.

Fascinating and extremely readable, Lee's journey starts with what happened when an unexpectedly large amount of people got 5 out of 6 numbers right on the Powerball lottery. It turns out they were playing fortune cookie numbers.

Lee traces Chinese restaurants around the world, sometimes following the cookies, sometimes the workers, sometimes the food. She has essays on the evolution of Chop Suey and General Tso's chicken (both very American dishes, while Kung Pao chicken is "authentic" Chinese.) She talks about the advent of delivery and the quest to find the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world. Lee delves into crimes committed on Chinese deliverymen in New York, and how most Chinese restaurants in the states are staffed from an agency under the Manhattan Bridge. She also has great examination on why Jewish people love Chinese food and the story of the Great Kosher Duck Scandal in 1989.

Some random facts from the book:

There are two Chinese restaurants for every McDonald's in the US.
Almost all fortunes are written by just two guys.
Cheap Chinese restaurants in South America are called chifa (chee-fah) which is derived from the Chinese words chi fan (chir fan) which means "to eat food"
Almost all of those little soy sauce packets are made by one company and don't have soy in them.

The writing is engaging and accessible, but well-researched. I highly recommend it, but plan on having Chinese food for dinner.

Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move

Katherine Lanpher. Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move. Boston: Springboard Press, 2006.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Lanpher is a newspaper journalist and radio host. She was born and raised in Illinois (across the river from Iowa) and worked in Minneapolis for most of her career and in 2004 moved to NYC to co-host a new radio program with Al Franken. In this book, she writes as much or more about her childhood and career and how she came to make her move from her spacious St. Paul house, friends, and career, to a small (but lovely) Greenwich Village apartment in New York City, than she does about her actual move and transition, her work at Air America with Al Franken, or what she is doing currently. Although she has since left her radio show at Air America, she continues to live in New York City, suggesting that her transition is complete.

The Bookseller of Kabul

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Ingrid Christophersen. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Submitted by R. Stuhr

Seierstad has been a journalist Chechnya, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She got to know "Sultan" and his family and asked if she could live with them to write this work. She has written it in the form of a novel and changed all of the names. Seierstad provides a lot of interesting detail about daily life for one family in Kabul, but she layers this with her own point of view. One doesn't know whether to blame the author or the translator for the condescending tone. Still, I think we need to know as much as we can about these countries that the United States has invaded and is occupying. We need to read widely just because much what we have available to us is written in a highly subjective manner and by Westerners.

Burling 1st Floor CT 1877.5 .K48 S45 2003

Martin Stuhr-Rommereim '14 recommends . . .

Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006.
Once you start you don't want to stop reading this super-special-awsome book. It is set in New York City six weeks after a zombie epidemic. The surviving population fights for survival.

Blood Fever by Charles Higson (based on the Ian Flemming character, James Bond). New York: Hyperion, 2006. This is the second in a series of books that feature a young James Bond. He is a member of the Danger Society. Even as a youngster, Bond is clever and manages to foil Count C., who is fascinated with ancient art, in his plot to become the next emperor of Italy.

Little Brother

Little Brother

May 29th, 2008

Little Brother. by Cory Doctorow. New York: Tor Books, 2008.

Review by John Stone

Summary: A high-school senior in San Francisco happens to be near the site of a catastrophic bombing that appears to be the work of terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security arrests, interrogates, imprisons, and mistreats him and several of his friends. After most of them are released, they become underground activists for civil rights, organizing various kinds of demonstrations and protests over an ad hoc pirate network of repurposed Xboxes. Their loose-knit organization becomes powerful enough to prompt a renewed attack by the DHS, which underestimates the resourcefulness of teenagers and, in particular, their ability to use modern communications technology effectively.

The author intended this novel for “young adults,” a category that in this case seems to run from precocious eleven-year-olds to recent high-school graduates. It is set in a dystopian near future in which the consequences of Americans’ willingness to trade liberty for security pervade society. For instance, the protagonist’s high school has security cameras everywhere, running gait-recognition software in a particularly inept attempt to track the movements of students and visitors to the school. DHS officials are portrayed frankly as villains — goonish, occasionally sadistic bureaucrats.

Doctorow uses this somewhat melodramatic coming-of-age plot as a framework into which he can pack quite a bit of information about how to resist and circumvent governments’ attempts to intrude on citizens’ privacy and violate our civil rights. This is less didactic than it sounds. Doctorow establishes the protagonist from the first page as someone who comfortably inhabits a high-tech world and has spent most of his childhood figuring out ways of breaking the ridiculous rules that authorities try to impose, so instead of a lecturer’s drone we hear the voice of a teenage enthusiast explaining to his friends how to beat the system.

The full text of the book is available for free download in many formats at author’s Web site. It’s under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)

This review was previously published on John Stone's Web log, _The free thinker_ (http://grnl-static-01-0198.dsl.iowatelecom.net/free-thinker/). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, and is reprinted here, with the permission of the author, under the same license.

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

By Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Oberlin College '09

This book probably isn't news to many people. The Corrections was published quite a few years ago now, in 2001, and received a lot of attention. I, however, just recently read it for the first time. The first and most obvious fact about The Corrections is that it is fat—almost 600 pages. The novel is ambitious in scope as well as physical size. The narrative mixes timelines and perspectives, jumping from character to character and managing to make it all the way to Vilnius and a chaotic post-Soviet Lithuania. Though The Corrections reaches far across space and time, the core issues of the narrative are quite every day, dealing with one family and its members' (relatively) typical travails.

The Lamberts are a well-educated, upper middleclass family from St. Jude, Kansas, a small city that greatly resembles Franzen's own hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. The novel covers aspects of each of the three Lambert children's childhood and adolescence, but focuses on Denise, Gary, and Chip's adulthood—all in various states of crisis.

Throughout the novel, I had a sense that Franzen was trying to fully capture the spirit of the present day. He covers all the issues of the 1990s: a booming stock market, Post-Soviet nation states struggling to build a national identity and a functional economy, psychotropic drugs, and the angst of average people in a successful, ostensibly untroubled nation. Franzen succeeds, but his book was published in 2001, and everything in the United States and the world in general has come to feel much more unstable since then. The problems that at one point were burbling under the surface are now acutely visible. It is a small tragedy that this clearly great novel about life in America, a novel that seeks to capture a time so completely, was written just a little too early. It doesn't contain a vision of what was to come.

However, The Corrections is a story about family as much as it is the story of a nation. In this aspect, it is both heartbreaking and astute. I frequently found myself crying during passages about Enid's sadness, frustration, and helplessness. As a 21 year old about to finish college and facing years of difficult decision-making, the book seemed to point out how sad life can be for everyone, even when nothing monumental happens. The problems of the Lamberts are cutting because they are problems that everyone will have.

For additional reading, try Franzen's collection of essays How to be Alone, which cover similar territory to The Corrections and reveal much of Franzen's thinking about writing in general and The Corrections in particular.

Burling 3rd Floor PS3556.R352 C67 2001

How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
Burling 3rd Floor PS3556.R352 H69 2002