Anna
I feel as though a thick veil of ignorance has been lifted. A super-clear account of the exact chain of events and strategic mistakes that have led to the current mess in the Middle East.
This book has all the themes that I usually avoid: pathological families, unhappy marriages, numerous children; and yet, I'm so happy to have trusted Franzen's recommendation on this one. That Stead's been allowed to fall into obscurity is truly criminal — she's a writer in complete control, who trusts the readers' judgement and respects their intellect. Her prose is sublime; her ear for dialogue in particular is exceptional – she beats all of the writers I know with the exception of maybe Twain.
It's been several weeks since I finished this book and I'm still thinking about it — or more accurately, still absolutely seething over the steaming pile of garbage that was Sam Pollit, the titular ‘man who loved children'. Despite the fact that Stead's characters are very clearly the products of their specific era — the early 20th century — with lives largely determined by the strict moral order of that time, Sam Pollit is an immediately recognisable archetype of an absolute horror of a man. Transplanted to our day and age he'd be posting selfies with tigers and pictures of himself playing ball with little kids in Africa while ruining some poor girl's life and spending someone else's money. He might sound different now and have slightly updated ideas but he's still undeservedly winning at everything. Stead paints him fairly, letting him spout his hair-raising ideas with complete objectivity on her part, which only intensifies the horror of the reader. He's the type of guy your mother would've warned you about, if only she knew how to spot him.
It's insane that we as a society still not only give a total pass to men like Sam Pollit for the kind of immaturity and shortsightedness that is not at all accepted in women, but that we still actively reward them. Sam Pollit is allowed to run Henny's life into complete ruin, and still he emerges from it unscathed, and with no lessons learned. And as hard as it is to sympathise with a woman who repeatedly threatens to murder her own children and who calls them gutter rats, I'm so totally, completely Team Henny. The parts that deal with her intuitive, unspoken truce with Louie are some of the most touching and profound in the entire book — I kept rooting for their sisterhood to prevail.
Though I'm not a buddhist, I have to credit buddhism for keeping me sane over the past two decades. I'll be returning to this often, until it sticks.
It was bugging me that I didn't get it so I went back and reread the last few chapters. I admit that a lot of it went way over my head initially, including the meaning of the title. Might be a good reread one day. Adding an extra star.
The best way I can describe the way this book is written is: “if NPR producers wrote fiction”.
At first I was like: what the hell did I just read O_o
There's really nothing I can compare H&C to. It's like a book equivalent of the International Assassin episode of The Leftovers (incidentally my favourite episode of television in probably ever) but even that's a stretch because H&C is a hell of a lot crazier.
But it's also so good it almost made me pass on in-flight entertainment (I paused reading it only once about halfway through the 7h flight to watch Lethal Weapon, after which Dr Rubin had Gary Busey's face). This is the absolute pinnacle of compliments in my toolkit.
I would have liked this to be a lot longer – even more fun bird facts please!
The author really likes her bird puns but mercifully she dials them down a bit after the first couple of chapters.
It's great to see that the trend against anthropomorphism-phobia is growing strong among science writers (and some scientists). Observations based on the assumption that animal intelligence is likely different from human intelligence in degree rather than in kind have so much more explanatory power. Also, they're just a lot more interesting. Songbirds sing and bowerbirds build in order to attract mates, yes, but that tells us about as much about their psychology and is about as interesting as an analogous observation made about humans would be. Ackerman points out that the songbird gets a big shot of dopamine when he nails a song particularly well – and she's not afraid to surmise that this likely means that he gets a kick out of being awesome regardless of the outcome in the romantic department. She admits that it's not unreasonable to suspect the satin bowerbird of possessing a sense of artistry (I mean COME ON) given how much time he spends perfecting (admiring?) his own creation and learning his craft.
I like to ponder the fact that we're all robots programmed by evolution, trapped in the illusion of free will, and deluded about our own significance as much as the next person, but when it comes to books about animals I'd much rather hear from scientists who are drawn to questions and theories about animal internality and subjective experience.
If I could propose an alternative title for this book it'd have to be DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. Human Smoke is a masterpiece of presenting facts in a way that makes it almost inevitable for you to agree with the author (and he states his intention quite clearly in the afterword).
The whole book is a collection of factual snippets — letters, speeches, recorded conversations, missives, but mostly news — arranged in a hugely meaningful way. One might call it manipulative but honestly, if you have ever read an editorial or watched a particularly hard-hitting interview, you know when you're being led. This book will not brainwash anyone into pacifism. Though the author pushes the antiwar/quaker movement super-hard in the Human Smoke, it's in no way a foolproof argument, and I still have questions like: what exactly would've been the pacifists' solution to the Shoah and the annexation of Eastern Europe? Their actions seemed to consist of praying, signing petitions and refusing draft. Gandhi is extensively quoted, only his thoughts and speeches on non-violence are presented side by side with the Allies' politicians delighting in air raids on civilians (which makes him sound very reasonable), when they should've been presented against descriptions of the Warsaw ghetto and the first mass murders of Jews (try being a cheerleader for Gandhi and his talk on leaning into your oppression when your oppressor is calmly project-managing your annihilation).
There's plenty here on the horrors of war of attrition and the blood-chillingly asinine warmongering on all sides (Churchill was such a dick!) but I for one came out of this book unconvinced by the pacifist argument (then again I'm Polish, so good luck trying to convince me that a truce with Hitler would've been just fine because hey, cathedrals!) if not even more any-means-necessary minded than I already was.
But even though I might disagree with the central thesis of the Human Smoke, I found it incredibly moving. Would never have expected to find this method of writing about war to be more emotionally affecting than the usual human-interest-story but to me at least it was. There's a real feeling of witnessing the buildup of events and the chaos that ensued in a very unfiltered way — it's like watching a feed that shows you all the missed chances for peace. Heartbreaking stuff.
I found it thematically very similar to Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows: the ethics of suicide, genetic burden, transgenerational trauma are major themes in both. Imagine might lack the eloquence of Sorrows but I found it structurally more elegant. The fact that both books feature chronically depressed characters who are obsessed with music is interesting considering Michael's (the protagonist of Imagine) driving theory.
*EDIT
Changed to 5 stars because I still regularly think about it 10 months (& multiple novels) later.
A solid debut. Some imperfections here and there (a few cliches, an occasional mixed metaphor, weird inconsistencies of character etc) but ultimately it was
1. something I haven't read before
2. exactly what I wanted to read right now.
As cliché as it sounds, I didn't expect to like it — it's an old-fashioned dude book (as more than one of my friends noted upon seeing the hardback edition, it looks “like something my dad would read”) and written with the sensibility of an old-fashioned dude (that is to say, it's problematic af at times). Conroy's heart is in the right place though, and if you can look past the requisite myopia and non-PC language and read its more controversial tropes as an honest depiction of a complicated time (the 60s) in a very complicated place (the South), you'd find that it's a fascinating, unflinching look at masculinity, social stratification, tradition, the idea of “honour”, loyalty, rebellion and herd mentality.
Alternative reasons to read it: the plot (cadets! secret societies! immoral aristocrats! young love!); the Joker-from-Full-Metal-Jacket-like voice of the main character; a fun homoeroticism drinking game.
There were a few standout stories here (I liked all the animated corpses/skeletons doing things but it might just be my aesthetic).
For the most part though, reading this collection is like listening to someone recount their dream: hard to follow, generally boring, and most likely pointless to you.
So as not to spoil the delight of discovering the main theme of Trinity for yourself (it's expressly stated some two thirds into the book, by Robert Oppenheimer himself), I'd suggest not reading the reviews too closely.
It'd also be hard to explain how the character of Oppenheimer relates to the stories told in this book without leading anyone into conclusions that are best arrived at on your own.
(I realise that this is a non-review but just trust me on this.)
Relentlessly bleak and depressing. I'm not one for trigger warnings but this one could've used an advisory note.
I'm mildly uncomfortable with the fact that my new favourite female character was created by a man, but oh well. The female protagonist of Mating strikes me as rare because she's so clearly driven by both intellect and minutely dissected emotion working in tandem. Rush pokes fun at the pretentiousness of intellectualism without ever being smug, and writes about emotions with zero sentimentality.
If I had to choose my favourite literary sub-genre, “realism written by authors doing working-class jobs to support their writing” would likely be it, not just for the aesthetic itself but for how fantastical it now seems that this was ever a maintainable lifestyle.
Larry Brown was a fireman with only a high school diploma, and in his own words: Nothing but desire, no talent, and a love of the written word. What's so fascinating about this collection is how visible his progression is - each story is a hell of a lot better than the previous one. There's a recurring theme of writing against the current of constant rejections and the moods that this creates, which makes it all the more amazing that he nevertheless made it.
I knew nothing about this book and only picked it up based on the title expecting some light philosophy, so the heavy dose of Marx was unexpected (though I see how the author got from A to B and his argumentation seems airtight to me). What I don't quite get is the author's confidence in having figured out the solution when what he proposes is completely utopian. I wish I could be as idealistic as him, it's very Swedish.