Tuesday, January 26, 2016

PV Reads

I'm going to start chronicling the books I read again.  I had gotten away from that activity because I was busy trying to write my own books and I have also been spending some time taking care of Franny's kids.  So I guess you could say the main reason I haven't been writing about books is because I haven't read very many lately.

I'm ashamed to admit to being childish and petulant, but since literary agents haven't been beating a path to my door trying to sign me up I've had a hard time reading any fiction at all.  That's a pretty startling admission for a retired literature teacher.  The thing is, if the piece of fiction is great, I just get depressed because I evidently can't write anything that would compete.  If the piece is mediocre and filled with pedestrian sentences, I get mad because my stuff is better and the stupid agents of the world are just too blind to see that.  Maybe I'll grow up some day, but I doubt it.

So I've been reading non-fiction instead and as long as I stay away from partisan political rants, I'm a happier man for it.  I read three such works in the week we were in Puerto Vallarta.

Between The World And Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love this writer.  He writes more powerful stuff than Baldwin at his best.  This book is a novella sized letter to his son that serves as the story of a young black man trying to survive in America and a brilliant analysis of the current state of race relations in our country.  As such, it is not your typical beach read.  I had to stop every five or ten minutes either to force Katherine to listen to me read a powerful passage out loud, or to wipe away my tears over the sheer beauty of his prose.

There isn't much more to say.  At the risk of sounding like a pompous ass, I didn't really learn anything new here.  Instead, I was reminded on every page of the injustices that occur daily in this "exceptional" country of ours.  I particularly like Coates' take on the idea of being exceptional.  He says that if people who insist on self-identifying themselves as White continue to stand by their claim of Exceptionalism, then they need to also hold their precious country to an EXCEPTIONAL moral standard, a moral view that doesn't systematically ignore some of our more disgraceful historical moments.  Until we can do that--and we never have--we will never be EXCEPTIONAL.  Bill O'Reilly take note.

David And Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell dispels the myth of the underdog.  In point of fact, underdogs emerge victorious about 50% of the time.  When the underdog defies accepted practices, he wins 67% of the time.  One need go no further than the war in Viet Nam or the current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc. to see the truth of that.

Of course, the story of David and Goliath serves as a controlling metaphor for the entire work.  When you examine the terrain, the history of warfare at that time, and the arrogance of the Philistine giant, you discover that poor Goliath never had a chance.  David possessed the better technology and anyone who witnessed the "fight" knew that David was going to kill the clumsy oaf the minute he took out his sling.  Slingers, it turns out, were accurate within a hair's width at distances of over 100 yards!  A slung stone had a velocity of about 180 mph and the stones in the valley of the battle were particularly dense (don't ask me why).  One of those stones flung at that speed would certainly penetrate a giant's exposed forehead.  Death would be the only result.  Even Jack in INTO THE WOODS knew that.

The book does make an inescapable political point.  All those folks yelling about launching a full-scale attack on ISIS, ISIL, or whatever other acronym we're using these days, clearly don't understand history.  Of course, they don't understand the constitution either, but that's another story.

The Boys In The Boat - Daniel James Brown

This is one of those books I was talking about earlier that made me mad.  It tells the fascinating story of nine relatively poor guys from the Northwest who tried out for crew at the University of Washington and ended up winning the 1936 Olympics right in front of a chastened Adolph Hitler.

The problem with the book is that it contains one awful sentence after another and the transitions from one scene to the next sound like something out of a travel book.  I got pissed every other page.  BUT the story of Joe Rantz and the rest of the crew told under the backdrop of the lead up to WWII was impossible to put out of my mind.  I read it in one day at the pool and the plane ride home.

It has the same feel as SEABISCUIT or CINDERELLA MAN in that it uses the story of a small group of individuals to illustrate an entire historical era.  If  you can get by the dreary sentences, it is well worth the read.

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