5 posts tagged “book review”
I read about this on The Language Log, one of my favorite non-personal blogs. Ever since Al Franken's books got way more mad (Lies and the Lying Liars. . .) than funny (Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot), I've avoided the political shelves in the bookstore, where the ubiquitous images of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly and George Bush annoy me from the covers of both rightwing and leftwing tomes. The books all depress the hell out of me, either by warning me that the forces in power are shaping my society into nothing I want it to be or, you know, just showing me. But this one I couldn't resist, since it's all about rhetoric and how words can take on politically charged meaning. Like how the word "values" became so strongly associated with conservatism and the Republican party, and how, by co-opting such a semantically vague term, the right has been able to redefine the word as a story of what it means to be an American. Nunberg also talks about the shift in connotation of the word "liberal," which used to be a positive thing for most Americans, regardless of their party. I don't know when it became a negative label, but I was really shocked when reporters and pundits kept pointing out how Kerry avoided the word "liberal" in his campaign. I haven't read far enough yet to give the book a comprehensive review, but if you have any interest in semantics, you won't be disappointed.
I read Running With Scissors some years ago because critics had compared the writer, Augusten Burroughs, to David Sedaris, whom I'm crazy about. I found the comparison superficial. They're both gay men, they both write stories about their families. But they have very different personas in their writing. For me, David Sedaris is the epitome of the snarky, yet self-deprecating humorist, and I get this feeling of genuine affection for the people he writes about, even as he makes fun of them. In the end, he's usually laughing at himself more than at any other victim of his wit. Augusten Burroughs, especially the first time around, struck me as less funny and more mean, although the story of his childhood was absolutely fascinating and worth the read. Magical Thinking is a collection of autobiographical pieces and much lighter reading than the first memoir. The stories entertained me but didn't leave me pondering any insights or laughing to myself over remembered bits. I did like the pieces he wrote about his boyfriend - I'm a sucker for romance.
This book is the best of the three, by a long shot! I'm not even a history buff, but I'm learning all kinds of stuff I never knew about the history surrounding African Americans in the pre- and early post-Civil War period. This book is about a small community in Michigan - it was one of several, if not many - where blacks and whites lived integrated lives, intermarrying, serving together in elected offices, etc. The book talks about how they got away with it despite the Black Codes that tried to prohibit that sort of thing. Another community they mentioned was Salem, Iowa, a Quaker community of abolitionists. In the first chapter, there's a story of a slave named John Walker who escaped from Missouri and then went back for his wife and children and a friend's family. With help, they got almost to Salem, and then a pair of slave hunters found them. One went into town to get help to bring the slaves back to Missouri, "and when he returned, he found [his partner] and the fugitives surrounded by more than a dozen men from Salem, who made it clear that [the slave hunters] would not be able to take their human bounty away. One member of the group said he was 'willing to wade through Missouri blood' in order to keep the fugitives safe in Iowa." The ending of that story was a little more complicated than a Hollywood ending, and eventually some members of the group were recaptured, but John Walker and his family survived to freedom.
Bob bequeathed me all of his books when he died, and he collected all the volumes of this series, for me, after he knew he was never going to read them. I've had moments of really missing him lately, and unpacking this book was one of them. It's a really quick read - big print, and there's even pictures! Actually, I loved the pictures! Why don't more grown up books have full-page, color illustrations? I used to read a lot of Stephen King, and the original version of The Stand is one of my favorite novels. Reading the uncut version kind of ruined it for me, though, and the cruelty of some of those wisely cut scenes really put me off of his books altogether. But it's been awhile, and he's given me a lot of entertainment over the years so . . . This book was interesting and left many questions unanswered, so I don't think it'll be long before I unpack volume two.
This was the first book I read in the car on the way to Jekyll Island. I picked it off the "new books" shelves at the library because, well, just look at the title. I opened it up not really knowing what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised. It had a Lifetime movie kind of plot - a domestic drama - and it really drew me in. The characters were believable and I cared about all of them by the end of the story. They weren't realized with as much depth as they could have been, and the peripheral characters were pretty superficially drawn, but the main characters and plot were worth reading.
