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This is the last, best novel you will ever read. The last you will ever need to read; you could just read it over and over again, filled with the crushing immensity of its hope, despair, and comedy.

You will read other fiction, eventually. And then you will feel guilty.

“Life is sad. Here is someone.”

Anagrams shows futility better than anything else I have ever read, and it shows why that futility is irrelevant. Or might be.  I loved this book, maybe not from the first page, but definitely from the second.

If you read the first page, you must read through to the last page, or you will be totally and completely crushed.  You’re likely to be crushed anyway, but it’s a good feeling, when you finish: warm, and awkward, and embracing.

Read this now.

Chuck Palahniuk ends up telling the same story over and over again in his books. What’s astonishing is how fresh and gut-wrenchingly surprising (sorry) his approaches are. Even in his most tired formulations (sorry, Haunt), it’s still worth reading till the end. It doesn’t hurt that the basic “story” Palahniuk tells over and over again is among the strangest, yet most basically fundamental, things scratched on dead tree.

Rant rates as some of his best work.

It’s not that his writing shines, because it doesn’t. It’s not that the book starts off auspiciously, because it doesn’t, particularly. Or: it does, but of course you’re too wrapped up in preconceived notions to understand how much it’s going to blow you out of the water, by the end. And it’s unfair to say that the writing doesn’t shine, because–preconceived notions.

It’s difficult to say more, or anything.

The basic structure of Rant is that of an oral history, the sub-title tells you. Though you could probably figure it out pretty quickly based on the string of names that pop up, the bold-faced names by occupations and descriptors. Also because Palahniuk spells it out for you on the second page. Just in case you aren’t good at figuring things out. (In which case, incidentally, this book’s probably not for you anyway.) Like any of Palahniuk’s writing, Rant is schizophrenic, with lots of things going on, rapid-fire details vying for your attention, trying to disgust, compel, impress. But Rant is schizophrenic in different sorts of ways than, say, Survivor, or Fight Club. There are the usual things put there to snag your attention, the things that make good soundbites for reviews, jacket copy, blah blah blah. Party crashing, rabies, spider bites, and so on.

Yes, but. These are distractions, mostly. Mind you, the distractions are their own commentary, but they’re not the main show. Figuring out where distraction ends and something else starts is the whole point, or at least part of it. You want the story? Read the book. Just don’t expect applause.

Who says you can’t craft a totally compelling story around a horned dog named after an imaginary card game?

Walter Moers’ 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was most excellent, and this book surpasses even that. It’s cartwheeling, free-associating, spectacle-topping, coincidence-breaking fun, pure and simple. Though of course it isn’t simple. Nothing in Zamonia is, really.

The story begins with a tiny horned puppy, raised by dwarves (a kind of dwarf called a Hackonian, in case you were interested). But of course it can’t always be crumpets and daisies; sooner or later, everyone’s carted off to a free-roaming island by one-eyed giants that like to eat their prey live (the livelier, the better). And it’s from there that the story gets its wings and flies well beyond the stratosphere of creativity.

The titular Rumo is, as we find out, a Wolperting–a horned, superquick, civilized warrior dog. Held captive by the one-eyed beasts on Roaming Rock, he’s given the name ‘Rumo’ by a giant, eight-armed semi-aquatic and bulbous Shark Grub called Smyke.

But let’s not give away too much. Curious, astounding things happen, fate is defied, and we learn a little more about Zamonia and all its bizarre inhabitants in the process. Rumo’s a born hero–that much you should know: if you were hoping for a book centered around a vain, evil, megalomaniac badger-creature with wings, this isn’t the book for you.

Rumo is an epic like not much else. A different kind of epic. There’s alchemy, fortune-telling, sentient weapons, talking trees, living fog. Journeys beyond death.  Rumo falls in love, learns cabinetry, and journeys into lands typically braved only by the criminally deranged and the dangerously brutish.

More than that, the story is wickedly, brilliantly paced.  It’s filled with comical (and occasionally frightening) illustrations by the author, who also happens to be a cartoonist.  You follow Rumo along through danger and excitement with an unshakable curiosity and sense of awe, and before you know it, you’re at the end of the book, wishing you were only getting started.

Maybe you can go back and re-read The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear.

Saw and read lots of things. Same old story. Here, let’s think. Watched Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, which I thoroughly enjoyed; was at times an uncomfortable enjoyment, but that’s I think what Cronenberg was going for, mood-wise. Excellent performances all around, with what you might call a tightly-crafted script. This is a movie that manages to navigate between heady theory and base physicality without ever letting you know quite where it is at any given moment; it’s a thoughtful movie that throws you around, basically.

Lots of quality but non-outstanding books on my recently-finished list as of late. The new Bret Easton Ellis novel, Lunar Park, was better and worse than some of his other writing. Better writing than the earliest stuff, but not superior to Glamorama or American Psycho. Lunar Park was extremely promising at times—mostly when bizarrely surreal elements began creeping in—but in the end the whole thing was basically self-deflating. Pffft. If you haven’t already read an Ellis novel, I don’t know that you’d want to start with this one.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, fairly excellent. It’s an ‘unauthorized autobiography,’ which should give you some idea of the tone. Yes, the movie of the same name is based on it. Good, crazy fun. The book, for those not in the know, is Chuck Barris attempting to recount his frenzied dual rise to prominence as a game show producer and CIA assassin. It’s generally a quick read, as long as you don’t get bogged down by the whole question of what’s real and so forth.

I picked up Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Repetition partly on the merits of its cover, and wasn’t disappointed. Though confused. There’s some weird stuff that goes on with the tenses and what-have-you—this is ascribed to Robbe-Grillet’s unique literary theories by someone inside the front cover—but none of it is in any way unreadably strange. Brain calisthenics, is all. The story, if you’re interested in knowing, is a sort of noir spy thriller sort of thing, but without much clarity as far as any of the spy details are concerned.

Alongside Repetition, I read another slightly off-kilter spy novel: Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess. Which certainly didn’t help with the whole confusion thing—I wasn’t actively trying to seek out spy novels—but did perhaps help to set the mood of the reading. Tremor of Intent is simultaneously serious and goofy, satiric and honorable, and/or highly detailed and generic. All these things are at least partly true. Generally speaking, if the vague mention of “theory” and “weird stuff” of Repetition sound like something you might not go for, you might still be able to enjoy Tremor of Intent. Imagine an older, vastly more cynical, slightly more cunning James Bond and place him on a wild last retirement mission, and you have a vague idea of this book (though you’ll probably have more misconceptions than you will correct assumptions… but oh well.).

All in all, a pretty good collection of entertainment media.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet, ends up being a disappointment, but only because the last few hundred pages pale in comparison to the incomprehensible brilliance of the first 250. Honestly, the beginning is outstanding, so it’s not really Millet’s fault that the rest can’t compare. Once you bring the three forefathers of the atomic bomb back from the dead, it’s a difficult proposition to know what to do with them, exactly. It’s one of those mediocre-by-comparison ordeals; if the start of the book were less spectacular, would the entire book perhaps seem more genius? Despite these misgivings, I’d tend to recommend this book, and heartily, at that. Lydia Millet manages to combine humor, drama, and social criticism in ways you wouldn’t think were possible. More impressively, she gives credible voices to the dead physicists, making Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer, and Enrico Fermi powerful characters in her work.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

In all likelihood you do not need me to tell you that this is a fascinating and well-written book, so I won’t dwell on the obvious. It’s a book I’ve been encouraged to read on numerous occasions and, having read it, I’m not disappointed. One thing I found refreshing was how on-target Diamond remained throughout the entire book; often, in anthropology/sociology/(etc.-ology) books that veer into or are targeted at pop culture, the author makes numerous departures from the main idea to relate entertaining or otherwise informative anecdotes that do not correspond directly to the thrust of the work. This makes the books fun to read (and imparts fun facts on the reader) but has the unfortunate side-effect of diminishing the strength of the author’s thesis. Diamond rarely veers, and somehow makes sure that all his anecdotes are highly germane to the GGS canon. For this reason, despite its length, Guns, Germs, and Steel is actually fairly straightforward and simple to understand.

Girl in the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender

This is as entertaining a collection of stories as any, and one of them is enough to get you hooked (or ought to be, anyway). The title is catchy—it’s what caught my attention—but is also interesting for the fact that the eponymous story is possibly the weakest in the collection. Which is to say that it’s quite good, but not brilliant. Good stuff. What’s to say? A fun, quirky mix of realism and fantasy, elements of the absurd and the totally expected mixed together expertly.

The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler is as proficient a thinker as he is a writer, so it comes as a surprise that his newest book doesn’t quite work. The topic—society’s reliance on oil, and the problem of what happens when it runs out—is certainly an important one. Part of the problem undoubtedly stems from the fact that the book covers massive grounds; from time to time, Kunstler steps out of his field of hsi realm of knowledge, sapping credibility from the entire book. Generally speaking, he does well when the issues are more down-to-earth and less speculative. Speculation needs to be done, but Kunstler somehow doesn’t manage to pull it off. Still, this is an important book, with important ideas worth discussing.

Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is excellent, as always. Dance Dance Dance is possibly a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, and one of the most entertaining aspects of it (though there are many) is how the main character offhandedly refers to all that happend in the previous book. There are about five or six consecutive paragraphs in the novel that disappoint, so on the whole you will not be disappointed. Murakami manages, yet again, to remain both morbid and optimistic. How, I don’t know.

Il Dottore
by Ron Felber

First things first: as an account of a true story, Il Dottore is fascinating. And it’s obvious that author Ron Felber had a blast writing it. (Seriously, though—who wouldn’t?)

But whereas Il Dottore makes gains based on the inherently fascinating story of mob connections, double lives, and what-have-you, it takes those gains and fritters them away in the area of the writing itself. If it were a rough draft, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. As a “finished copy,” it sucks.

(Also in the vein of considering Il Dottore as a rough draft, I noticed a higher-than-average incidence of typos. Sure, there’s the possibility that I was primed to be on alert based on my opinion of the book. But there’s also the possibility that Il Dottore could have used a few more edits.)

As is, Felber manages to take a true story and make it seem phony. Unless of course it’s not a true story and he’s just pulling our collective leg, which—who’s gonna know? Take a “true” story involving mob figures (many of whom are now dead), anonymous characters (including the title Dottore), and hearsay, and who can possibly know how much is invented, exaggerated, etc.? All this is wanton speculation, however, and not particularly relvant. The bottom line is: Il Dottore is mostly great, if you can ignore the writing. The ending is nice, in a testament to the “Good Guys Don’t Always Finish Last” adage, but it feels a little phony. Dramatic license? Who knows.

A fun, quick read, but definitely not one to put on your “100 books to read before I die” list.

Looking for Alaska
by John Green

Looking For Alaska is apparently a young adult book. That I had no idea of this fact until I checked some of the book’s details on Amazon is perhaps testament to the quality of the book, or to my own idiocy. As usual, the answer probably lies somewhere in between.

Looking For Alaska is a kind of coming-of-age story and existential dilemma that concerns Miles Halter leaving home for boarding school. Almost immediately upon arriving, Miles falls into the right (or wrong) crowd of characters; luckily for you, he and his newfound friends have just the right chemistry, and their rants, antics, and surprisingly intelligent philosophical discussions carry the first half of the novel.

Note that I said “first half.”

Sadly, when their focus changes in the second half, the novel suffers. Which is unfortunate, given that the first half essentially sets the stage for the second half. And that the book is based on the supposition that the questions raised in the second half are worth chasing.

A paradox, yes. But not one you need to resolve in order to like (or dislike) the book.

The writing itself is good, and the characters, if a little ahead of their time, are at least portrayed consistently. (You may or may not find them convincing boarding school students.) They all have interesting quirks—Miles is obsessed with last words, for instance—and are sympathetic sorts of people, despite their many flaws.

This, in a way, is a good description of the novel itself: a sympathetic sort of book, despite its many flaws.

Good stuff, for a debut novel.

Pages: 1 2

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber
by Julian Rubinstein

Attila Ambrus is king. True, he may not do so well with relationships. And his hockey goalie skills may leave much to be desired (though not his dedication), and he may have something of a compulsive personality when it comes to drinking and gambling.

But when it comes to robbery, he is the indisputable king.

(In Hungary in the 1990s, anyway.)

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber¹ is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read. Ever. Hands down. In fact, it’s one of the best non-fiction books I will ever read—it’s that good. By some outrageous fluke, Ballad marries truly excellent writing (that of Julian Rubinstein) to an outstanding true story (that of Whiskey Robber Attila Ambrus), a phenomenon that happens all too rarely.

Trying to find his way in the world and piece together a living, Attila Ambrus stumbles upon the fact that his quick mind is suited perfectly to robbing banks and post offices.

The story—by which I mean the true life story, i.e., the story on which the book is based—is itself nearly impossible to believe. When I say “nearly,” just think: impossible. At numerous points throught the book, I honestly turned back to the front cover to double check the whole “TRUE STORY” part, because I couldn’t believe it.

Everything fits together perfectly.

Mostly.

Julian Rubinstein is an excellent storyteller, and Attila Ambrus is a perfect story-maker.

This is a book that you must read.

Now.

Notes:
¹ full title: “Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A true story of bank heists, ice hockey, Transylvanian pelt smuggling, moonlighting detectives, and broken hearts”

The Memory of Running
by Ron McLarty

…is decent, and readable, but too calculating for my tastes.

(Put another way, the film rights to the book were optioned to Warner Bros. for 7 figures, and it shows.)

This is a book you’re supposed to like. The plot is strange, but not too strange. Some characters are likeable, but of course they have their human flaws. And then there are the undesirables, cropping up from time to time. Bad stuff happens. If it happens to other people, too bad. If it happens to the Narrator (Smithy Ide), it’s overcome with help from Good People.

Aw, shucks.

I don’t mean to disparage this book because, as I said, it’s not wholly incompetent.

Notice I said “not wholly”.

Here are the qualms I have:

Characterization is very stop-and-go — some characters central to the plot are poorly conceived caricatures, while others who make incidental appearances are brilliantly portrayed. It’s nonsensical. For some people, the good spots might overcome the bad. Not for me.

The narrator’s a simple man. This in itself is not a problem. That he’s simple is a fact he tells you time and again, and you can tell—from his diction, from his mannerisms, from his reactions to uncomfortable situations — that he’s telling the truth. So far, so good. My problem with this is that it’s too calculating, or feels too calculating, at any rate. This isn’t the good-natured homey (yet strangely complex) simplicity of a Wendell Berry character, but the cold, carefully weighed simplicity of a door-to-door salesman. It feels fake, and the book suffers as a result.

(I doubt this is a result of author Ron McLarty being sinister or anything like that; it’s likely a result of him not knowing any other way to create a simple character. It’s not the best way to get the job done.)

The dialogue is atrocious. It’s ridiculously, absurdly simplistic at times, while other times the conversation participants delve into lengthy, hearty exposition that you could excuse if not for the fact that it does little to make any kind of valid, meaningful point (aside from the basic triad of [1] there’s suffering in the world, [2] some people are bad, and [3] some people are good — and, let’s face it, nobody needs to be told this). Or maybe it does, and there’s something I’m missing.

All told, The Memory of Running is a book to avoid. Not “avoid like the plague” avoid, mind you. But stay alert.

Upcoming Book Reviews:

• The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr
• Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
• The Power Game by Joesph Nye, Jr.
• Walking the Big Wild by Karsten Heuer
• Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein
• Il Dottore by Ron Felber

Pete Hamill’s Downtown is billed as something of a historical and personal portrait of New York City, though that’s almost unfair. The book is historical—rooted in history—but it’s much more than that.

Hamill boils it down in his first sentence: “This is a book about my home city.”^*

Which, it is and it isn’t.

Downtown is well-written. Thoughtful. Insightful. Curious. Interested.

That it’s in any way a reflection of reality is a happy coincidence: Downtown would be just as interesting if it described a city that didn’t exist, or one that was destroyed centuries past.

(As it happens—you may have caught on to this fact—the book describes New York City. Past, current & future, and definitely extant. Anyone ordinarly held rapt in fascination by anything relating to the history of New York would obviously take issue with my saying the book would be just as interesting if New York didn’t exist; I hope you know what I mean.)

The history you’re exposed to is an interesting mix of the highly idiosyncratic and the broadly general. There’s the history of New York City—old, new, and ever-changing—but there’s also something more intangible. Which, as intangible things are wont to be, is difficult to describe. In between the people, buildings, dates, newspapers, trends, anecdotes, and geographies, Hamill brings in a broader perspective, simultaneously New York and Not. It’s this characteristic, mostly, that makes Downtown immensely readable, appealing not only to history buffs or devoted NY fans, but also to Ilda, Amos, and Malka (etc., etc., etc.) . In short: everyone.

It’s nostalgic but never saccharine, thoughtful but never stuffy or dry, and dark at times but never without hope.

So, if you get a chance, read it. I highly recommend Downtown.

Downtown: My Manhattan, by Pete Hamill
due to be released Dec 1, 2004 by Little, Brown

Note:
^* Actual quote subject to change pending release of finished book, etc., blah blah.

I thought maybe an immense review would be appropriate, but ultimately decided against it. My review of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is as follows:

Infinite Jest is an atrocious waste of space.

Atlantic City.

Ah, Atlantic City.

Boardwalk Empire, in telling the unlikely story of Atlantic City’s rise from unpopulated sandy dunes to highly populated, brightly flashing casinos, tells a story that’s quite interesting, if you’re into the whole beach development/political corruption/materialistic greed sort of thing. It’s a story of graft, but with a nostalgic tilt.

All in all, a pretty neat offering. Riveting? Maybe not. But not half-bad.

It’s interesting to watch a sleepy little non-town on a sandy island evolve into a mosquito-bitten would-be health resort evolve into an unusually accessible hedonistic seaside getaway evolve into the present day glitz and glam of casinos. You get to watch (figuratively speaking, that is) as political bosses establish themselves, reign in splendor, and finally fall under the hatchet. You see how the town, against all expectations, becomes a city. You see this history unfurl, the good with the bad. If this sounds like something you’d potentially take a keen interest in, then Boardwalk Empire’s the book for you.

Before you rush out and buy the thing, I have two light caveats to offer.

First, it’s obvious Nelson Johnson has a love for the subject. It’s also obvious NJ [Nelson Johnson, that is] is pretty competent in terms of his technical writing ability, i.e., he don’t write real bad. (I haven’t gotten to the bad part yet. Don’t worry, it’s coming up.) Despite these two factors—passion for Atlantic City’s history and general competence with the English language—certainly not minor details—the writing itself is not particularly creative. It’s not innovative. It’s not drop-dead brilliant. Of course, it doesn’t need to be these things: the subject material speaks for itself, more or less. When you have mobsters and political bosses and a city with open disregard for laws and social norms and casinos and railroads and power grabs and scandal and criminal trials, you don’t really need much else to make the reading interesting. Though you can’t help but think from time to time that it would’ve been nice to have a little extra flair. You also can’t help but be amused and then annoyed by the sporadic use of ill-advised metaphors (e.g., “By 1974 Atlantic City was one with Rita—a broken-down old whore scratching for customers.”). Things like this detract from the reading experience, but it’s still a neat story. Dig? Okay, with caveat #1 out of the way, let’s move on to 2.

See (here’s caveat #2), there’s the thing with quotes. Actually, it has to do with how Nelson Johnson uses them: that, 9 times out of 10, they’re simply spliced into a paragraph without any real introduction. “I thought it was pretty weird myself.” There are source notes at the back, which let you know who said what, but this only helps if you’re really interested; and let’s face it, most people aren’t going to bother running to the rear of the book every time they come across a quote that isn’t particularly illuminating.

With these two things in mind, Boardwalk Empire’s a neat trip down memory lane. There are some nice tidbits of information to be gleaned along the way.

(Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, by Nelson Johnson; Paperback: 300 pages; Dimensions (in inches): 8.75 x 0.75 x 5.50; Publisher: Plexus Publishing (NJ); (July 1, 2002); ISBN: 0937548499)

In Bad Comma, Louis Menand takes Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves) to task for her peculiar and highly idiosyncratic application of punctuation. The revelation of how wrong Truss is, by itself, is comical (at times), but it’s unfair to say that Menand writes about nothing else; the entire article is insightful, engaging philosophical questions and cultural norms along the way to developing a book review. Worth a read? I’d say so—particularly if you’re thinking of picking up East, Shoots & Leaves at the bookstore (or anywhere else).

By the sound of things, E,S&L might be entertaining, as long as you’re only looking for an outlet for your grammatical irritation (e.g., irritation at signs reading “The Albertson’s” hanging by the mailbox, what signs lead you to mentally ask the Albertson’s what?)

At any rate, I haven’t read E,S&L. I don’t plan to, though it’s always a possibility. If you’re looking for an entertaining and highly educational book on grammar, I can recommend the brilliant Deluxe Transitive Vampire (full title: The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed), which is ably authored by the irrepressable Karen Elizabeth Gordon. E,S&L sounds like it might be hit-and-miss. DTV is all hit and no miss. So there you have it.

(The New Yorker: “Bad Commas” by Louis Menand [June 28, 2004])

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is a fun romp by everybody’s favorite anthropologist, Marvin Harris. It looks at behavior that seems illogical to an outside observer—the sacred cow, the hated pig (and even the loved pig), the potlach, and so on—in an attempt to explain away the riddles.

There are numerous chapters (as there are in many books), and each deals with a different riddle—though the explications Harris provides are somewhat cumulative, building on each of the previous answers. Some of the answers, which right away Harris reminds the reader aren’t even answers so much as reasonable theories, are more dubious than others; on the whole, however, the book is amusing, interesting, and edifying. And, for all the complexity of the subject, Harris keeps his explanations low-key, straightforward, and simple.

Which, you have to admit, is a good thing.

What’s most interesting, maybe, is Harris’ rational for writing this book. His rational is basically that, as soon as you’ve answered one riddle, another pops up. In using a brute-force method of attacking riddles one after another, Marvin not only provides feasible explanations, he also begins to show the reader how to arrive at these explanations. Granted, CPW&W isn’t exactly a How-To-Become-A-Professional-Anthropologist (or anything else, for that matter) manual in all the gory detail. But by the time the reader’s gotten to the end of the book, she (he/it) has at least a sense of how to begin looking for answers.

CPW&W covers lots of topics, like I said earlier. It covers the sacred cow (Cows), various attitudes towards pigs (Pigs), and primitive wars (Wars). It covers phantom cargo and religious messiahs. It covers witches (& Witches). In short, there’s something for everybody. Even if you don’t buy all the explanations—and you’re probably not going to, would be my guess—it’s an interesting journey that’s bound to impart at least some kind of knowledge on your wearied brain.

So there you have it.

I made a pretty valiant effort to read Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places. It seemed like a good idea at the time; a book about all the wonderful things of the 20th Century, what’s not to like? Movies, literature, philosophy, war… seriously, what’s not to like? And plus, it was on sale dirt-cheap at Border’s. Win-win all around, right?

Not exactly.

I’m not going to try a review, since that wouldn’t be fair. After all, I didn’t finish more than 100 pages of the thing (which happens to be numerous hundreds of pages long). Maybe there’s an absolutely brilliant bit on pages 565 through 595, I couldn’t say. What I can say is that the parts I read weren’t any good.

They were well-written, kind of. My guess would be that Conrad’s a fairly proficient technical writer. He touches a million different subjects, linking them superficially together. And the introduction (or prologue or whatever it was called) was halfway decent, actually making me think I’d like reading the book. What Conrad does, however, isn’t so much a synthesis as a survey. A long-winded, short-sighted survey of all the wonderful powerful products of the 20th Century. He links them together, but in highly superficial, basically meaningless ways.

It would be difficult for him to do anything else, given that he rarely dwells on one particular work of art (significant historical figure, architectural structure, etc.) for more than two sentences. This style lets you know that Conrad is very intelligent, but it also gives the reader the impression of being led through a museum by someone with a severe case of ADD (in a very generic sense).

E.g., “Here’s a painting… oh, here’s another one. Look, they’re both red. Here’s a sculpture. Oh… over here’s something else. Now look at that, see the fine detail in the… here’s another painting… here’s… let’s just skip ahead to the dinosaurs… wait a minute, here’s the, see that window? It’s very skilfully crafted… here’s another…”

You cover a large amount of intellectual territory, but don’t really learn anything. And anything you do learn is learned purely by accident.

Which is why I gave up on the book after page 100 (or slightly before; I didn’t pay that much attention).

Maybe you’d like it. I couldn’t say for sure.

In The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler takes the subjects of urban planning, the American Dream, and cars, crafting from them a surprisingly witty, irreverent, and at times cantakerous assault on the state of place in modern society. These are topics, mind you, for which Kunstler is able to marshal no small amount of vitriol. What’s more, he covers impressive ground, beginning with the dawn of cities, surveying architectural trends, moving through the advent of the automobile, and watching, painfully, as small towns fall under the knife of what passes for Progress. TGoN is surprisingly informative, the body of its wisdom consisting both of curious anecdotal bits that, by themselves, do not do much good but are still fascinating trivia, and also far-reaching revelations that strike at the heart of the matter. (Like, for instance, the significance of housing starts to smart development.)

If you think the modern American suburb is high art, yearn for the day in which public transportation is abolished, and see nothing wrong with a landscape that is nothing more than a few permutations of cookie-cutter stores and fast-food restaurants and parking lots, Geography of Nowhere will doubtless strike your forehead with the force of a freight train; whether or not this will be out of the horror of realization or horror of heresy, I couldn’t say.

Kunstler spares no pain in making his point, and is at times wickedly sarcastic, though he does take pause from time to time to make a genuine, reasoned plea. Nonetheless, it’s the sarcastic bits that are the most brilliantly funny, and that give a certain bite to the book that might otherwise be lacking. E.g.:

“A free-standing brown anodized aluminum plinth topped by the company’s characteristic logo occupies an otherwise useless grassy median between the parking lot and the street—another little noplace. Presumably this is necessary because without the sign, visitors would not know whether the building was the county department of social services, a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, a minimum security prison, or a place of lodging.” (p. 139)

See what I mean?

Kunstler wanders around, intellectually (taking on the architecture of public buildings, administration of public works, and philosophy of living centers) and literally (he visits, in one instance, Henry Ford’s ‘Greenfield Village’ in Dearborn, MI, asking everyone what they like about the place and trying, to no avail, to get them to admit that part of it is the lack of cars).

Kunstler writes well, and writes with an obvious passion for the subject that goes far above and beyond mere interest. The Geography of Nowhere is a compelling read, and one that I’d recommend to almost anybody. It’s highly relevant, certainly, and unlikely to become any less relevant as time presses onward.

If anything, it’s going to become more critical.

How To Try A Murder (by Michael Kurland) is a lightning-quick overview of general courtroom conventions and the like. You got yer elements of th’ crime, yer arrest/indictment, yer trial preparations, and so on and so forth, on through to the verdict. Along the way you get general procedural info, neat anecdotal facts and historical tidbits, and a fictional story that’s supposed to help make things more clear. Also provided are excerpts from official court papers of famous trials (e.g., Timothy McVeigh, Menendez brothers, etc.). Its interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. It’s mostly nothing you wouldn’t get from watching Law&Order or Court TV (I’m assuming) or reading crime fiction (as long as said fiction involves more than vigilante justice). It’s only about 150 pages, and—like I said—a very quick read. I’m not going to disrecommend it, since it was mildly interesting and might be something you’d like to read, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a you-gotta-run-out-and-buy-it-right-now sort of book.