Adam
Wow, this book is intense and long and horrifying and fascinating and brilliant. Incredible, vivid detail, fantastic set pieces, and intricate storytelling. How is the Haitian Revolution not taught in history class? Hard to follow the politics of the Haitian Revolution and the French one at the same time, and keep track of the wide cast of characters. The one drawback (besides the gruesome violence) is the doctor, who's a not-that-subtle stand-in for the author / reader perspective. But this book is well worth the effort – pretty much everything I want historical fiction to be.
Steinbeck plays the original Bill Bryson here, with fewer witty asides and a few more sweeping observations about America – “generalities”, he calls them. Writing at a time (1962) we look back on now as simple and stable, he drives a big loop around the country with a camper on his pickup and a poodle in the passenger seat.
I really liked the range of people whose stories he tells, and the characterization of Charley the poodle. Especially interesting are the parts where Steinbeck passes through your home states (praises flinty, forthright New Englanders; nostalgic, but gracefully self-aware about it, for the California of his youth).
Did he embellish some details and reconstruct some dialogue? Yep. Does it take away from the book? Not at all. A warm and wise chronicler of the country and its people.
Brain science has moved on, but nobody writes about science better than the man, Carl Sagan. This one's a quick read and a good intro to the evolutionary history of our brains, coupled with tasty philosophical nuggets and speculations on the future of intelligence and evolution.
Wow, this was razor-sharp. Smart and intense. Great language and insights on every page, with a few incredible set pieces (the escape from Saigon, the set of the “Apocalypse Now”-like movie) to break up the spy thriller / immigrant story.
Good pacing, richly drawn characters, and a well-developed setting. Really liked the biographical elements and the depiction of 20th-century anthropology in far-flung New Guinea, but I was constantly wondering what came straight from the life of Margaret Mead and what Lily King added or changed for the story.
Along with the romantic themes and central love triangle, Euphoria is a novel of ideas as well, with the three main characters representing their cultural attributes (English, American, Australian) in their approaches to science, and mapping neatly (a bit too neatly?) to the Sepik tribes they're all investigating.
Sunny, soapy vignettes of a different San Francisco. There's a refreshing openness about the social issues of the day here. It's easy to imagine a higher-handed literary treatment of the same place and time, but I liked the the serial-newspaper-column format and the present-day setting (at the time) – Tales of the City is free from the judgement and editing of hindsight.
The stories themselves are pretty pulpy, and wrap up a little too neatly at times, but that doesn't take away from the book as an entertaining snapshot of SF in the seventies. Easy reading, and a nice change of pace from serious or satirical historical novels, which seem to be the only flavors out there.
A terrific writer in top form. The descriptions and settings and prose are consistently great. Not all of these pieces hit the mark for me – some of them are just too concept-y and not enough story. But the ones that do land are five-star bizarro-world oddities. Read it for Proving Up, Reeling For The Empire, and The Barn at the End of Our Term.
Wry, perceptive, timeless, invested with feeling and humor. Set over the course of a Great Depression summer in a Montana forest-ranging and sheep-ranching family, this is part coming-of-age story, part family history, and part praise song for the western landscape. Ivan Doig's dialogue and descriptive writing is incredible, and the main character Jick's narration is peppered with clever, funny turns of phrase. No surprise, grandmother knows best.
It's a sharp picture of a time and place, and perceptive about teenage social interaction, but I didn't catch the fever.
Quick, bleak, emotional. The language is a simple, contemplative English – no names, sparse dialog, very little in the way of setting or plot. Just the story of a wife's slow decline, told by the husband, the stroke-stricken wife, and their grandson. It's a pretty powerful look at sickness, healing, hope, and (gulp) death, but the spare style kept me from being completely immersed.