Walking on the Moon

Brendan Koerner has found an amazing corner of history to explore and does it with verve.  The corner is the rash of skyjackings from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s, and it’s amazing to the point of unbelievability. I’m old enough that I remember comics using getting skyjacked to Cuba as a punchline, but even in the late 70’s it seemed stale and overblown. Skyjackings always seemed rare to me, and air travel simple and safe.  Mentally disturbed people shot public figures to get in the news; they didn’t reroute aircraft.

But, oh, things were not always thus.  If I were 10 years older, skyjacking punchlines would not seem like “take my wife” lines, but like the edgy references they were. The golden age of skyjacking was short lived – about a decade – but spectacular.  Before the airlines finally began using metal detectors, skyjackings were a weekly occurrence – if not more frequent.  Koerner uses a particular 1972 skyjacking as a case study/framing story and there were 2 skyjackings that day.

It is a fascinating and alien world where the airlines are fighting metal detectors as impractical and intrusive in the face of armed passengers frequently commandeering aircraft.  And the skyjackers are an amazing lot as well.  Some want to get the attention of the media, some want the money, some want to leave the country.  One fellow flees to Italy and becomes a celebrity and movie star based on the skyjacking notoriety. As, I say, fascinating.

Koerner’s framing story captures the spirit of the times by following a specific case.  A troubled veteran and his hippy girlfriend carry out a less-than-precision operation that takes them to Algeria to  join a set of Black Panthers in exile.  The original plan was homesteading in Australia after a stopover in Vietnam, but improvisation is apparently a hijacker’s best friend.

Koerner follows them as they appear and disappear, joining Paris society and eventually (for at least one of them) wending their way back to the US. It’s a remarkable story, and the backdrop and snippets of other skyjacking tales capture a nigh-unbelieveable period in American history with clarity and style.

Highly recommended.

This is the first novel I have read by John LeCarre, and it is excellent. He’s well known as one of the grandmasters of spy fiction – a genre I have some affection for – but I’ve never picked one of his works up before.  I won’t hesitate to pick one up in the future.

Unlike many spy novels I’ve read, Truth draws the reader in from the first sentence.  I was expecting some scene setting, and then the intricate plot coming into focus.  Instead, LeCarre drops the reader in media res with taut, suspenseful writing that amps the tension up immediately.  And he does that in a description of an older diplomat pacing the floor of a motel room.  That bit of writerly craft is awesome to behold in and of itself.

From there we get a tangled web of deceit and compromise that ensnares disparate characters.  There are a few who are moustache-twirlingly evil, but not many really.  By and large we get to see a set of reasonable, even virtuous, people who construct an undeniably twisty set of circumstances and actions that lead to a tragedy.

Conscience and other forces crack the uneasy and distributed alliance, and much of the book is how and how much that collusion cracks.

The characters and their lives are believable, as is the technology and the machinations that are the problems.

Many spy/adventure novels are very much escapism.  Good guys make last second escapes, and the bad guys go to prison or the grave as punishment.  The world is saved and laurels are passed around.  Truth is not like that at all. These characters live in a world that is real enough that none of that is automatic. LeCarre shows us a world where what is right is abundantly clear, but where doing what is right costs more than a sane person would pay.  Often more than one can pay. It’s  not so much a world of shades of grey in morality, but of the compromises one faces because everyone seems to be making compromises.

One is left with a thrilling, well-written adventure yarn that shows a realistic world of moral appeasement.  It’s tough to do better than that.

Strongly recommended.

When I talked about Eating The Dinosaur, I said:

Klosterman is a man who takes ephemeral and sometimes frivolous things seriously, and then subjects them to a meticulous dissection under the light of a strong intellect.  Then he composes those thoughts in a way that is compelling and diverting.

That’s an apt a description of I Wear The Black Hat as it is of Dinosaur. These essays are somewhat more thematically related, as they are all about villainy in one form or another, but I wouldn’t say that they cohere into a book-long discussion of the topic.  That doesn’t trouble me much.  I’ll pretty much read a pack of Klosterman essays for any reason at all.

Strongly Recommended.

Dead Pig Collector is a novella or short story or some form of short fiction from Warren Ellis.  He should call it whatever he gets paid most for writing. Whatever one decides to call it, Collector is an excellent one.

Ellis paints the picture of a man doing a very distateful job very well. As with many undertakings that make the average person queasy, Ellis has thought through the details carefully.  More to his credit, he has created the sort of character would realistically do that job for a living and brought him to life for us.  He’s not likeable, really, but he is believable.

The action follows our realistic character through a – nearly every adjective I considered here was an unfortunate double entendre – complicated day.  It’s a day worth checking out.  If you have never read any of Ellis’s fiction, this is a pretty good starting point.

Stongly recommended.

Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century  is a self-consciously literary novel. Its characters all serve clear symbolic roles, the central romance is carried out in an intellectual salon, and the main plot follows the seasons. Such a set-up can easily turn boring and pretentious; for my money, Neuman manages the opposite.

From the beginning Neuman engages the reader by not giving anything away.  Even the setting in mid-1800s Germany slowly peeks out of comments and allusions rather than beng dropped in some exposition bomb. The characters similarly reveal what they reveal about theselves slowly.  The titular traveler is a point-of-view character whose mysterious nature remains in the shadows for quite some time. That’s true even though we spend some time falling in love with him.

Neuman is not shy about using his characters and the salon setting to take the reader down some intellectual side trips. The romance at the center of the narrative is explicity a romance of the mind, and Neuman makes that work by taking us through the arguments and mental jousting that makes up such a romance.

The salon and the romance also provide a backdrop for Neuman to talk about literature and writing in the novel itself. This is all nicely metafictional – commenting on setting inside his setting at the same time he’s explaining how and why setting affects a work, for example. Neuman finds the right tone to make this interesting. He winks enough to show the reader that he knows he’s commenting on himself, while also keeping the analysis and literary argument sensible and engaging.  Even that has two levels: the argument makes sense in the abstract, and also in the setting coming out of the mouths of the characters. It’s not an easy thing to pull off, and he does it while keeping the whole thing engaging.  First rate work.

An important sidelight of that is the amount of time and space his characters spend talking about translation, which is because they’re translators.  Of course I read the work in translation, which adds aother nice loop.  The translation discussions are some of the most diverting in the book, even without realizing that I was reading them in translation.

There are some places where the plot rambles a bit, and some bits that one could read as extraneous. It’s not a maximally tight tale.  I found the diversions more interesting than distracting, but I can clearly see the other position.

In many ways, how much a reader likes this work is going to depend on how well the  reader thinks Neuman has executed this writing.  I think he’s written a very engaging, multi-layered work that lives up to the literary aspirations it wears on its sleeve.  I can easily imagine a reader being less charmed than I was.  But they’re wrong.

Strongly recommended.

I know Scott Meyer from his excellent webcomic, The Basic Instructions. Instructions showcases Meyer’s snappy dialog, so when he published a novel I checked it out.

Off To Be the Wizard shares Twilight‘s strong wish-fulfillment component. Wizard is about nerds who learn to control reality with their cell phones and become medieval wizards and Twilight‘s about a teen girl who falls in love with a magical brooding vampire.  Clearly these are authors giving their audience a world they want to live in more than a literary experience. I enjoyed both Wizard and Twilight, so maybe I’m a target for this stuff.

It was a fun story.  There were twists and turns, and the characters were all likeable and reasonable as well. There’s even some commentary on the social dynamics of the tech world.

Basically, it’s a pretty well done fantasy story for nerds, heavy on the wish fulfillment.  It’ll make an airline flight more pleasant.

You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me is kind of hard to get a handle on.  It’s not quite the sort of travelogue that it seems like it might me from the title/blurb. Nathan Rabin does take us on a tour of both Phish sub-culture and Insane Clown Posse sub-culture with interviews and first person accounts, but somehow neither the bands nor the fans take center stage for long.  It’s not completely a memoir, because the whole narrative is viewed from the viewpoints that these sub-cultures come to represent.  It’s a strange book to put a label on.

It’s also a difficult book to put down.  Rabin underwent a reluctant transformation during the time he put this thing together, and those personal experiences are the core of the book. This is the kind of transformation that ends with “and what the hell’s coming next?” not “and we all had a good laugh looking back.”  Rabin does an excellent job telling his story honestly, neither trivializing the small personal moments nor generalizing for false universality.  While I think many people will be able to relate to his journey, it is very much his journey.

Rabin’s writing supports this unusual narrative.  When he is introspective and analytical about what he has experienced, his thoughts are clear on the page.  When he’s spinning a yarn that happened to him on a Greyhound somewhere his descriptions are vivid and memorable.  Both of these make the story work.

Overall, an unlikely melange of memoir and reporting that is intelligent, diverting, and honest.

Recommended.

Gilbert King won the Pulitzer Prize for Devil In The Grove, and it’s easy to see why.  This is a well written, meticulously researched history of a horrifying miscarriage of justice in a 1949 rape case.  King collects a dizzying array of facts and testimony that make clear just how badly America treated its black citizens.  It’s the kind of sobering history that makes you worry how much has changed.

The case is cut and dried by any reasonable standard: several of the men convicted had never laid eyes on the woman they were alleged to have raped, all were beaten until they confessed (or it was clear they wouldn’t), the trials were all overshadowed by mob violence, and defense attorneys nearly lynched.  When a new trial was ordered by the Supreme Court, the sheriff simply shot the two defendants on the way to the court house (one miraculously survived).  No charges.

King makes it clear that it was also cut and dried by the unreasonable standard of the day: a white person claimed rape by blacks, so they were guilty.  A lot of the impact of Grove is how well King brings that standard home.  The case was the kind of media circus that happens with alarming frequency today – as I write this the Trayvon Martin case is the analog – but the lynchings and shootings were considered expected.

Understanding central Florida’s history here makes people’s reaction to the modern case much clearer.

Grove is harrowing and essential reading.

Strongly recommended.

Unnatural Creatures is a collection of fun stories loosely organized around interactions with mythical or imaginary creatures. It is organized by Neil Gaiman, who in addition to his skills as an author, shows off his taste in the fantastic.

The stories in Creatures cover a remarkable period of time.  The oldest, Frank Stockton’s “The Griffin and the Minor Canon” was first published in 1885, and others were produced for the collection in 2013.  While there is probably a slight statistical bias toward recent stories, the publication dates spread out rather well.

The broad range of times and tellers never feels like a stunt.  If one skipped the tale introductions, it would be difficult to tell which stories came from which decades.  This is partially the nature of fantasy stories about unnatural beasts, of course.  More often than not such things take place in Jane Austen-y English heaths, making it as easy to write one looking around in 1885 as looking back in 2013.

As if anticipating that criticism, Gaiman not only picks stories from the past, his setting varies.  Larry Niven’s “Flight of the Horse” was published the same year as the moon landing, but blends science fiction and fairy tale creatures in thoroughly modern ways.  The versatility and inventiveness of many other writers is similarly on display.

Creatures is the kind of collection a kid would do well to stumble across in a school library or other unexpected place and have their ideas about the power of storytelling expanded.

Recommended, even if you already have an open mind on the power of stories.

I feel confident that Roger Ebert titled his memoir Life Itself partially so there would be a bunch of reviews titled like this one.

There are a lot of ways to look at Life Itself, but I think I’ll take Ebert’s own tack in assessing it: how did it affect me when I read it? I came away feeling that I’d spent time talking with someone who was colorful and interesting.  The book convinced me that I would like the opportunity to meet Roger and get to know him better.  He seems honest, interesting, and intelligent.

Honesty is necessary for a great memoir.  A writer who spends a couple hundred  pages making press releases or excuses may as well just write fiction.  Ebert doesn’t do this, nor does he write whatever he thinks at the moment.  The book is full of genuine sentiments, arrived at after a lifetime of consideration, and expressed with verve and polish.  That can rob them of some immediacy – his discussion of his personal theology is intentionally measured rather than ecstatic – but overall seems consistent with the man’s character.  I also think an examined, joyful, life clearly and honestly expressed is the best we can hope for.

It also helps to have an interesting life to talk about.  Intellectually, I agree with Scott McCloud that everyone has a story to tell, but in my heart I believe that some people’s lives are just more interesting than others.  Ebert’s clearly done a lot; pulitzer prize winning journalist, television star, leader in the film community, and cancer survivor.  In addition to living a full life himself, he’s interviewed a lot of other standouts.  Life Itself tours all this interesting space.

Finally, he thinks about things well.  Some intellectuals come off as cold because their drive to analyze the world drains their intensity.  Ebert tells you what he thinks without ignoring how he feels.  Few people can think well and maintain both intensity and civility while they explain it.  Ebert is one of them.

If one wanted to be critical of Life Itself, one could point out that it is episodic and lacks overarching structure.  And this is so; it has clearly coalesced from blog posts, rather than being a literary undertaking.  But, so what?  It’s a well-written distillation of a man’s beliefs and the path that lead him to those beliefs.  That’s a pretty good definition of a memoir.

Strongly Recommended.