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Reviews Written by
The Sanity Inspector (USA)
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India
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by Michael Wood
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $26.60 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A celebration, not a history, August 26, 2008
This is a rich, affectionate travelogue of modern India. Among the best parts is its very good overview of recent fascinating developments in India's rich archaeology. The common tendency of archaeology to be used to gild Indian nationalism is noted, but not vigorously deplored.
There is some obtrusive and tedious self-loathing by this post-war British liberal. He writes as if it were the British who were the bloodthirsty, destructive invaders, and Muslims who were the reformers and modernizers. He might read his Will & Ariel Durant, who assert that the Islamic invasion of India was the bloodiest in history.
The pictures are stunning, and are worth the price of the book.
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A mildly thrilling thriller, plus an infomercial for the emirate of Dubai, June 18, 2008
By the author's own admission, this "biography" is a composite profile and composite account of people and doings connected with the Mercantile Exchange. It's literally impossible to know how much of it is fiction and how much fact. It could be accepted as a work of fiction, with a few more thrills thrown in.
It serves mainly to boost the image of Dubai as a paradise of capitalist extravagance and political stability in the war-torn Middle East. One wonders how much of a hand that country's boosters had in crafting these passages, as nothing is mentioned of the armies of "guest workers" there, indentured Indians, Filipinos and such, who keep the play palaces running.
One fair question that the reader might ask, in these days of $4.00 a gallon gasoline, is why is it a good thing for Dubai to host a petroleum trading floor? There's no answer here.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but..., February 26, 2008
...a book on West Africa that has a cover photo of the Masai--who live in East Africa--is definitely off on the wrong foot. The fact that the error hasn't been corrected in the intervening seven years speaks ill of the publisher's commitment to a quality product.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Yes, it's squirrel-proof, but..., February 17, 2008
...it's not dove-proof. Doves eat as much as squirrels do, and the ones around my house have learned how to alight on the perch without setting it off. So, regretfully, I'll be selling my Yankee Flipper in the classifieds soon, and replacing it with something more pressure sensitive. The feeder is as sturdy and attractive as advertised, I must stress, and it didn't take long for squirrels to give up trying to get into it. If you have no doves in your area, feel free to disregard this review.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Funny stuff, but...., November 20, 2007
...talk about biting the hand that feeds you. This is a celebration, masquerading as a denunciation, of all manners of news media excesses and idiocies. Fark is a legitimate internet phenomenon, and deserves a book-length profile. But, after reading the book, I couldn't really say why Fark is that much more different or special than some other big news satire sites out there. The founder just got there first with the most, I guess. The best thing are the comments from farkers, though, of which the author provides a generous sample. A fun three-evening read.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
"Would you stop the car? I'd like your help beating my son." , September 22, 2007
This is a searing, honest, and yes, fair account of a young man's reconciliation with his father, against the backdrop of a return to Vietnam.
The dialog Tom records is almost too good to be true, but it's coming out of his tape recorder, so there it is. The elder Bissell comes across as an ordinary, memory-laden senior citizen who happens to once have been a soldier. His drunken implosion, which the author unspools against the fall of Saigon, is a topnotch piece of psychological fiction, but is nothing that the reader catches first-hand from the rest of the book. At times it seems that Tom projects the gook-plinking hophead of media stereotype into his father, but none of that comes out in the dialog. Indeed, at certain points it's the father who has to point out to the son what a bloody horror the war was.
Had Tom been around during the war, he doubtless would have been a protestor. But at this late date, the historical record is in the books. He stitches together quite good second-hand accounts of the fall of South Vietnam, and of the strange career of Ho Chih Minh (though the latter is perhaps somewhat over-basted with "nuance."). An honest fellow, he frequently admits that the North Vietnamese and the NLF were as bad as advertised, and worse than the more conventionally corrupt South. He still refuses to swallow the old wartime lies, though he proposes no way that things could have come out right.
The end of the return tour, with his father raising a toast with a former ARVN his own age, ends the book on a touching and unexpected up note. Mission accomplished.
A fair-use sample:
"A lot of guys I went to basic with died in this place [the Citadel in Hue city]," my father said. "A lot of guys. Guys who joined up again. Guys who kept volunteering. All died right around here." He shook his head.
"Like who?" I asked.
"You don't know them."
"Well, what were their names?"
He looked at me queerly. "What do you care?" This was said with a brusque sort of inquisitiveness, not anger.
I got to my feet. "I'm sorry. You're right. Just morbid curiosity."
My father--the abrupt smile on his face false to anyone who knew him--turned to Hien [the guide]. "What do *you* think?"
Hien regarded his shoes, which looked like small leather noses peeking out from beneath his blue slacks. "I think this is a special place for many people."
My father said nothing and stood there in the wind, amid the grass. When he closed his eyes, it almost looked as though he were listening to someone.
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Grizzly Man
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| DVD ~ Franc G. Fallico |
| Price: $8.49 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
"I love that bee!", September 5, 2007
It's easy to sneer, I admit. Here's this fast-talking, ditsy Hollywood wannabee, capering around in the wilds of Alaska, foolishly risking his life out of a misplaced sense of kinship with dangerous wild animals. A Darwin Award winner, you might think, and on one level you'd be right.
But the sad thing is that there is really no place in our society for people like Timothy Treadwell to go, anymore. And it shows. Henry David Thoreau and John Muir may well have been reduced to spewing profanities at the U.S. Park Service, had they lived in the present. Sure, Treadwell got lost in over-identifying with the bears, with his cute names for them and everthing. Pure cathexis, concentrating emotional attachment onto a single, probably inappropriate object.
But he also achieved a cracklingly intense union with nature. Going ga-ga over bear scat, or a dead bee on a blossom, he truly saw "the world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower". However maladroit he may have been in human society, Treadwell nevertheless experienced nature with a joy and savor and depth that many a more conventional environmentalist could envy.
Of course he was never in a position to protect the bears. Indeed, being killed by one was a sure death sentence for the unfortunate mankiller--bears with a taste for human flesh could not be allowed to remain at large. In that respect Treadwell was unforgivably selfish. He should have known what would follow the event of his own death.
Director Werner Herzog mentions his own run-in with madness in the wilderness, alluding to the famous incident when he threatened to shoot Klaus Kinski during the filming of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God. He admires many of Treadwell's shots, for effects both intended and unintended, and see-saws between treating him as a crazy romantic, and a fellow cinematic artist.
The best thing about the film? The excellent folk-electric soundtrack by Richard Thompson is close to it. The rustic stylings of the ex-Fairport Convention guitarist suit the gorgeous natural setting to a T. The DVD has a nifty in-the-studio featurette with him, in the extras.
Animals can't tell you to buzz off and mind your own business, in so many words, which is why nature worship is so popular among busybodies nowadays. We are not all brothers under the fur. Some of nature's children are just plain old, unemployed, probably agnostic, wild beasts, into whom the lonelier of us project ourselves. On that account, Treadwell wasn't much different from the batty old maid with an apartment full of cats. But, for the transports of ecstasy he experienced in bear country, and filmed, and shared with thousands, he is someone whose memory will be long treasured. The gifted, sensitive filmmaker will be remembered, not the suicidal fool.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Lazy, August 20, 2007
It's just a sheaf of talking head transcripts, bound into book form. Dyson should have either worked this material into a real book, or posted podcasts of the original video on his website. No excuse for this, as it stands.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Living things that creep upon the earth..., April 4, 2007
An amateur naturalist's musings on the various vermin and mongrels he's studied over the years. The pieces are written in the style & tone of a monthly slickzine, which according to the flap copy is the kind of writer Prof. Grice is. He wisely stays away from attempting much actual zoology, instead confining himself to his own observations and philosophizing. These anecdotes make for the most effective pieces. A giant cricket devouring a frightened praying mantis; dogs being seized by bloodlust to kill rattlesnakes; and a whole, miniature cycle of rotating top predators in an old shed; all make for absorbing reading--if your tastes run to creepy-crawlies, that is. The chapter on pigs feels like makeweight, as he has little first-hand material in the way of predation to relate about that animal.
At the end, he cuts loose a sneer against scientists, behind which there's doubtless another book.
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House of Meetings
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by Martin Amis
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $17.25 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Moscow *still* does not believe in tears, April 2, 2007
This is the book that Martin Amis should have written, once the enormity of the Soviet evil caught his imagination, instead of the vivid yet pointless Koba the Dread. In the earlier book he was simply too late for the expose' that the book seemed to be trying to be. But now, in this work of historical fiction, he has more room to let his imagination--and talent--roam.
Amis returns to his Solzhenitsyn and, it sounds like in spots, his Vasily Grossman, for historical events in which to set his characters. His decision to tell the tale in monologue cuts down the prospect for much action--the gulag rebellion is much more thrillingly related in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
And what's up with the condescending footnotes? Does any likely reader of this novel really need to be told that "Josef Vissarionovich" refers to Stalin? Or is this for the benefit of us thick Americans, maybe?
However, Amis has convincingly created the atmosphere of spiritual degradation in modern day Russia, although religion is mostly absent. The school massacre of Beslan forms the background of the narrator's tale, and that atrocity is cast as yet another sounding in Russia's plunge into the abyss. Indeed, the thorough wrecking that Russian society suffered from Communism has piqued Amis' imagination mightily. He explores the personal cost of what Winston Churchill called the "asiatic mass liquefaction" of people under Soviet rule.
He also, through the voice of his narrator, ranges over various other subjects, from liberty to English poetry, in well-turned little asides. At one point he inserts a denunciation of the Chechnya war that could be read as a slap at the U. S. over the Iraq war. If so, it doesn't wash. (We're *fighting* the baby-killers, remember)
The structure of the book is expertly done, as a reader of Amis has every right to expect. If you are looking for a typical "sweeping historical novel", then you might enjoy Vasily Aksyonov's very good Generations Of Winter. But if you are an Amis fan, and can stand a stiff dose of hopelessness and despair, you'll get a brimful with this.
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(USA)
