What are You Reading?
Take some time and tell us what you are reading or have read recently. Maybe you have read a good book lately that I would like, or have read a book we should stay away from. Here is the place to share your reading experience.
posted by Holly @ 6:21 AM
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3 Comments:
A couple of weeks ago I read Kite Runner by Khalid Hossieni for the book club that meets at the library in the evening. Since there was so much buzz around it, I was looking forward to reading the novel.
I got involved in Amir's, the son of a popular and wealthy businessman, life quickly. The story revolves around Amir and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant.
This is a story about friendship between two boys of a different social class, about the influence a father has on his son's life, and how a person's life can be affected by childhood events for a long time.
I found this novel to be a good read, because it touched on many aspects of life. It also showed me another culture.
A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 6 GLASSES FINAL REVIEW by Tom Standage
Reviewed By Jack Kline
With a quick wink and a twinkle in his eyes, Tom Standage proposes that the history of the world lies corked within the bottles of six beverages. Cloaked in an Englishman’s sophistication, Standage figuratively produces six glasses, places them on the table, uncorks the bottles, and with flourish pours one glass each of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. These beverages changed the world, he claims, and advanced civilization. But these glasses, with their sparkling rainbow of colors, stand only half full. Often he leaves us smacking our lips, nearly sated, wanting more. At other times, his offerings seem dry and insipid.
Standage, technology editor for The Economist in London, has also written for several British newspapers. His writing style, though not quite pedestrian, facilitates his story rather than enhances it. When he delivers strong content, which is often, his “just the facts” training serves him well. But when content is weak, or when he dwells too long on a point, his style begs a shot of prosaic Tabasco. Explaining how beer, once discovered, helped propel Mesopotamians from hunter/gatherers to farmers, Standage writes: “They not only hunted animals and gathered edible plants but collected the abundant cereal grains growing wild in the region. Such grains provided an unexciting but reliable source of food” (p.12). “Unexciting but reliable” also describes Standage’s prose. When he injects humor, it too often misses the mark: “The story of tea is the story of imperialism, industrialization, and world dominance, one cup at a time” (p.177). Humor does flow throughout, but the humor rests in the content, not in the author’s wit.
Considering the daunting challenge Standage takes on, convincing his audience a handful of drinks changed the world, he fares well. His most convincing writing explains how spirits, especially rum, became the driving force behind African and New World slave trade, and how rum propelled the American Colonies towards The Declaration of Independence. Standage provides an authoritative argument that Coca-Cola became the first modern worldwide corporation. “It is not Coca-Cola that makes people wealthier, happier, freer, of course, but as consumerism and democracy spread, the fizzy brown drink is never far behind” (p.265). Coca Cola bottling plants followed American troops as they advanced through Africa and Europe. They remained after the war, making Coke the world’s soft drink.
What sets History above its occasional dry material and tedious passages lies not with the premise of these drink’s importance to our world, but with the amazing stories and anecdotes that keep popping up as Standage drags the reader, cup in hand, forward through history. For example, he explains symposia; the Greek’s private drinking parties, where philosophical discourse planted the seeds of western civilization and democracy. The Greeks used wine to sharpen minds and loosen lips. They soon learned a little wine enlivens debate, but too much leads to trouble. He quotes Greek philosopher Euboulos on symposia:
“‘For sensible men I prepare only three kraters [a large wine vessel] … After the third one, wise men go home. The forth krater is not mine anymore – it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is
for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness’” (p.61-62).
The Greek’s concern regarding excessive alcohol consumption seems to have been turned on its ear 2,000 years later. Describing the importance of spirits in Colonial America, Standage tells a tale on the father of our country. George Washington, in his 1758 campaign for the Virginia House of Burgesses: “handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty–four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider – in a county with only 391 voters” (p.118). Although Standage doesn’t verify, we assume Washington was elected.
Standage spins an early Cold War story. Following the fall of Berlin at the close of World War II, Russian war hero General Georgy Zhukov fell in love with Coca-Cola during meetings with General Eisenhower. Afraid to be seen by apparatchiks with the decadent capitalist beverage, Zhukov asked if there were a clear version. At Eisenhower’s and President Truman’s request, Coke devised a colorless version. In order to make it appear as vodka: “It was shipped to Zhukov in special cylindrical bottles, sealed with a white cap and labeled with a red Soviet star” (p.256). These stories and dozens more flavor the book.
A History of the World in 6 Glasses, though far from spellbinding, is worth picking up. The patient reader will quickly learn to breathe the varietal bouquet of each glass, to skim, or pass over entirely the more tedious vintages, while savoring the fine ones. A better understanding of historical effects created by the evolution of pleasurable beverages will be gained, along with some really good stories. Armed with this full carafe of great tales, the reader will become the life of the next symposia.
THE KING OF KINGS COUNTY by Whitney Terrell
Reviewed By Jack Kline
Whitney Terrell’s The King of Kings County sticks to the ribs like a Plaza III porterhouse and potatoes dinner. The story doesn’t dazzle. Nothing much happens: a son struggles with his father’s foibles, with a love above his class, and the evolution of a city from centric to suburban sprawl propelled by subtle racism. But it’s the story’s seasoning, the way Terrell tells his story, that provides nourishment far beyond the tale itself.
Although short on action and suspense, Terrell does weave a credible tale that takes on racism and relationships, love and longing. Jack Acheson, growing up on the fringes of Kansas City privilege in the 1950s, is the book’s narrator and flawed moral compass. Jack’s father Alton lives a life of schemes and dreams. Alton longs to emulate his hero Tom Durant, a railroad robber baron from the 1800’s. He possesses the brains and a plan (“the biggest land grab since Tom Durant stole half of Iowa for the Union Pacific” Alton calls it) but not the means. Alton must seek financial aid from Prudential Bowen, the most powerful man in Kansas City: a man who demands and receives his pound-of-flesh in every local deal. Alton is a good man who cheats, a moral man who makes immoral choices. He uses race as a wedge, yet Elmore Haywood, the man who becomes his closest friend, is an African American. Alton walks and breathes contradictions.
Ultimately, the father/son relationship, Alton and Jack’s, provides the thematic flavoring for Terrell’s story. Alton frequently embarrasses his son, who is obligated to actively participate in his father’s real estate cons. The son is alternately amazed and abhorred by his father’s audacious dealings. Of Alton’s scheme that initiates Kansas City’s steamrolling white-flight, Jack recalls: “my father’s effort to sell these people homes in white neighborhoods of the city’s east side was simultaneously the best and the worst thing he ever did for the Alomar Company” (p. 113). Alton soon learns he can neither best, nor even match the demagogue, Prudential Bowen. At the same time, high school aged Jack falls for Bowen’s granddaughter Geanie, occasioning an on-again, mostly off-again love that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Jack’s story spans more than 40 years of Kansas City suburban sprawl. His story tells of life in the “last heat” group at the elite Pemberton Academy Prep School: the group, present in every school, that exists as the brunt of taunts and worse for the school’s popular and powerful. Terrell portrays some poignant, excruciating moments in the lives of those unfortunate “last heat” kids. Jack’s story describes the death of the inner city he loved at the hands of men like his father, the racism that fueled it and the mob that facilitated it.
Terrell’s style, enhanced and refined from his capable first novel The Huntsman, provides joy and surprises. His characters are fully dimensional real humans, deficient and redeemed. Even Prudential Bowen, his son Henry and mobster Bobby Ansi, all of whom beg for stereotyping, become complex characters capable of empathy in Terrell’s hands. Terrell has a knack for combining seemingly incongruent words and phrases into something that delights and makes perfect sense. Fat, lazy pheasants become “winged basketballs”(p.43); Elmore walks down the street: “a dapper, gray suited apparition”(p.237); Geanie “was in her peak form, a great appreciator”(p.129). Following a death in the family, Jack and his mother ransack the house: “It was a curatorial mugging, our form of grief”(p.335). Terrell’s imagination inhabits King with “looted dinner tables,” characters possessing “steamed lobster face(s),” “hair as shiny as a cricket’s back,” and “bacon colored freckles.”
Terrell’s writing layers meaning and descriptive force. Describing two funerals, years apart, becomes a vehicle for contrasting surface success with the underlying depth of individual worth for men with similar goals and dissimilar outcomes. As with these funerals, a cursory reading of the book serves sustenance enough to make King work. But Terrell gives us more here to chew and savor. For example, after one of the funerals, Geanie, many years separated from the group, talks with Alton, Elmore and Jack. Jack recalls Alton asking Geanie:
“’Have you been in touch with my boy, Jack?’ The timing of this question was a minor work of art. The fact that Geanie and I were out of touch had remained a primary characteristic of our relationship ever since I’d dropped her off next door, the night of Lonnie Garaciellos’s death – a long silence that could not have felt more visible and grotesque to me if I’d been carrying it on my shoulders, like The Genius of Victory. But then I’d forgotten that it was my father’s own genius to stumble directly onto such grotesqueries and discuss them” (p.240).
Without subtlety, Terrell blasts the senses with a description of painful silence carried like a weight on Jack’s shoulders, and with his father’s ability to flesh the pain out into the open. He repeats forms of the word grotesque for stark emphasis. Yet, the passage has additional subtle repetitive undercurrents. Early in the passage, Alton’s timing “was a minor work of art.” Terrell returns to art as Jack carries the silence “like The Genius of Victory,” a Michelangelo sculpture depicting a victor weighing down the shoulders of a vanquished foe. Terrell then circles back to Genius by referring to Alton’s genius of observation and openness. Subtle touches such as these cry out for a careful reading.
Whitney Terrell’s genius, his rich characters and dialogue, sustain long after the last bite of King’s feast of words. Perhaps they will sustain us until he writes another.
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