I am a teacher (who is a little burned out) going on a road trip this summer to the National Parks…my mentor teacher told me I HAVE to read “Take Me With You” by Katherine Hyde. It’s about a burnt out teacher who is taking a road trip to the National Parks.
I’m not that far in, but I’m interested.
That’s cool, are you going to any of the same parks?
Finished Room for Improvement by Stacey Ballis. I didn’t think it was nearly as good as the last book I read by her, Wedding Girl. It did have a few funny moments, all about various home improvement disasters. Actually, **Wedding Girl **was much better when it was about her work, not relationships, too.
Just started Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while.
Finished Lost City of the Incas, by Bingham, which was about his discovery of Machu Picchu. Interesting, if somewhat dry.
I’ve now started Jungle of Stone, by William Carlsen, which is the story of the 1839 discovery of the Mayan ruins. It was the most significant find in the Americas, as it proved beyond a doubt that a great unknown civilization existed concurrently with Rome and Greece.
I finished reading The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories by E. M. Forster. It’s a collection of short stories each of which features a “free spirit” character or a spiritual awakening of some kind. Personally, I would lose interest in dancing barefoot through a forest (say) sooner rather than later, but there was enough cynicism and humour in most of the stories to prevent them from being too schmaltzy. And he has an excellent way with words. I quite liked it.
Finished Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow. An excellent read that I enjoyed thoroughly. As mentioned above, I lost a lot of respect for Thomas Jefferson, not to mention James Monroe and James Madison. It also makes me glad they did not bump Hamilton from thr $10 bill after all and are bumping Andrew Jackson instead. Although with Trump’s love of Jackson, I wonder if he’s going to try to stop that.
Have started Cujo, by Stephen King.
Oh, and one final note on Hamilton. The book mentions the personal physician of both Hamilton and George Washington in New York was a Dr. Samuel Bard. I wonder if we’re related. My paternal grandmother was a Bard, she came from the Albany area, and her family was there since the 1600s.
That’d be a cool family connection, if so. May I next recommend Chernow’s equally good Washington: A Life? And I see his next bio will be of U.S. Grant.
Rothfuss writes fun stuff that makes my eyes roll. Wise Man’s Fear gets so bad it’s hilarious.
I think I saw that in a used-book shop recently. May have to go back and check it out.
Also, from the Hamilton book the 1790s reminded me a lot of the present political turmoil, what with the Alien and Sedition Acts and whatnot. It’s been awhile since I’ve read McCullough’s Adams biography, and I knew Adams was deeply unpopular at the time, but I don’t recall him being quite the flake Chernow portrays him.
I haven’t read the Chernow book, so I don’t know for sure that this applies, BUT it’s very common for biographers to develop strong positive feelings toward their subjects. Makes sense–after all, they’re practically living with these folks for extended periods of time.*
In some cases the biographers wind up fighting the same battles that the biography subect did. In college I read a biography of Andrew Jackson; Jackson was no fan of Henry Clay’s, and the biographer wasn’t either, making Clay out to be practically the Antichrist.
More recently I read a biography of an abolitionist–it may have been the big one about William Lloyd Garrison, but don’t quote me–and the author seemed convinced that his subect had eliminated slavery almost single-handedly, diminishing or dismissing the contributions of Douglass, Weld, the Grimke sisters, etc.
It’s not just politics, either; seems like I’ve seen the same thing in bios of sports figures, literary people, explorers, though of course I can’t think of any examples just now.
Anyway, if Chernow is writing things that paint Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams all in a bad light, and emphasize the things that make the reader lose respect for them, I’d wonder if some of that is going on.
*I was once assigned by a history magazine to do a combination book review/author interview of a born-and-bred Southerner who had written a bio of General Sherman. He told me that–much to his surprise–he had come to see Sherman as a rather sympathetic character when all was said and done, likable and even admirable at times. I always figure, if he can come to have that response to “someone [he] was taught to hate,” how easy it must be to come to identify with practically any biographical subject.
Starting Monday on Paula Hawkins’ Into the Water. Paula Hawkins wrote The Girl on the Train, which I liked fine though I don’t remember it much. I guess I’d better read this one before people start calling it “the next Gone Girl!” which annoys me no end.
I finished THe Resurrection Man by Charlotte MacLeod. The book is a bit wince worthy as it was wrtten nearly 30 years ago and some of the language, particularly the repeated use of Oriental, is considered racist these days. But if you can give it a pass for a different time, then it’s a good solid mystery with an interesting twist at the end.
You’ll be happy to know that this morning I sold a load of books including Alexander Hamilton to my favorite used-book store in Honolulu, Idea’s Music and Books, for $9.50, then turned around and gave the shop that back plus $6.15 for a used hardcover edition of Chernow’s Washington bio that’s in good condition.
Still reading Cujo now though, by Stephen King.
John LeCarre’s 'Mission Song". I haven’t read anything by him in maybe 30 yeas, he was still writing as recently as 2006, but his style is dated. Still a good wirier, way above the hack formulaic writers, but he doesn’t have any lines that you read over again just to savor them.
Excellent! Hope you love it. He earned his Pulitzer, I’d say.
Just zipped through David Travis’s Karsh: Beyond the Camera, about the great photographic portraitist. Striking B&W photos and interesting back stories on how the pics were taken. Two funny stories in it:
Frank Lloyd Wright, asked to identify himself in court as a witness, said, “I am Frank Lloyd Wright, the world’s greatest architect.” His lawyer said afterwards, “You didn’t really need to add that last part, Mr. Wright.” He responded, “But I was under oath!”
Karsh, making small talk with Pope John XXIII before taking his picture, asked, “How many people work in the Vatican?” The Pope smiled and said, “About half.”
I also recently finished Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered, a 1977 collection of interrelated sf short stories about a distant-future interstellar spy. The secret agent becomes more and more unhappy with the awful things he is asked to do for the common good, and also begins losing his own sense of identity after repeated personality overlays. The book is a bit dated now, and not Haldeman’s best, but still well worth a read.
I finished the books on my last entry, and have moved onto Dashiell Hammet’s The Continental Op, a collection of short stories by the author of The Maltese Falcon. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, and finally stumbled upon a copy. Not at all what I’d imagined, and very much in the mold of Sam Spade.
Also The Nepal Chronicles by Dan Szczesny, my sometime editor (and guy who has stories in two of the anthologies I do) It’s about his marriage to his Nepalese wife (who he met in the US) up near the base of Mt. Everest.
I’ve also picked up a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Francis Gordon stories which I didn’t have.
Regarding Boardwalk Empire – it’s well-researched (Johnson, the author – no relation to Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, who inspired the Steve Buscemi character in the HBO series – is a judge in the AC area, and personally interviewed many people who knew the main figures), but it has curious lapses. Certainly he concentrates on the legal and financial doings of the key figures in Atlantic City history, but he also has little vignettes about human stories, and tells about the social events and cultural landmarks that those people caused or responded to. So it seems weird that he doesn’t mention standout items in the towns pop history. He never mentions the Miss America pageant, for instance, although you’d think that something focusing so much attention (and so many opportunities for graft) would stand out. Likewise, he doesn’t so much as name the Steel Pier – that’s kind of like writing about Manhattan and never talking about Times Square. Neither item appears in the index, nor in the text. He does mention one early pier, but there were several of these - Steeplechase Pier, Heinz Pier – that were important draws. Nary a peep.
Similarly, he depict Atlantic City as wallowing in a decrepit slumhood in the 1960s and 1970s. Prohibition had ended, gambling wasn’t what it was. The glory had faded. The 1964 Democratic Convention there had been a disaster. It’s as if this period was simply an awful interregnum until casino gambling was legalized in 1976.
Only it wasn’t – I visited Atlantic City in the late 1960s and early 1970s before legalized gambling. It had more Boardwalk space than just about any other Jersey Shore community, with the possible exception of Seaside. And that Boardwalk was well-attended and prosperous, lit up every summer night, with crowds shopping and seeing the attractions. And, of course, there was the beach. The Steel Pier showed two movies and at least one major act throughout this period. I saw the Supremes, Herman’s Hermits, and the Cowsills there. The only reason the Beatles didn’t play the Steel Pier was because it was too small – they moved them to Convention Hall the same year as the Democrats, and they filled it to capacity. The Stones played Atlantic City in 1966.
I don’t doubt that the money was down in that period, and that big patches of the city had become slums, but many resorts suffered in the region away from the beach itself. If you want to see an image of a Jersey Shore beach at the end of its tether, look at Asbury Park in the 1990s until very recently – the Boardwalk itself was drying up, with few people in attendance and empty shopfronts. AC was never like that.
I don’t deny that AC pretty much needed the gambling, and it certainly recovered significantly after that (although it wasn’t the magic cure people sought – even years later, Time magazine could run a story about how AC away from the Boards was still a slum, illustrating it with a cover photo of the homeless sleeping on the beach). It’s gotten better since, but it took a long time, and a lot of turnover in casino ownership. Who would’ve thought that Trump’s Taj Mahal would end up a losing proposition? Or that Playboy would pull out of the casino game so early?
How so? The dispute over the seating of the Mississippi delegation, or something else?
It was a disaster for Atlantic City. Many of its hotels were antiquated, to hear (read?) Johnson tell it – rooms didn’t have their own bathrooms, so attendees had to share facilities on each floor. People were crowded together. Theodore White, in his book about the election, said that it would have been better for AC if they’d never had it there – it simply showed how far behind the times Atlantic City was.
Finished The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, which is an excellent book. It should have won the Newbery Award in 2007, but considering how some people reacted to the word “scrotum”, used in its correct anatomical sense in that book, some of the language in Alexie’s book would have caused vastly more of an uproar, and I suspect that was why it wasn’t even one of the Honor Books. Just checked and it wasn’t given the Michael L. Printz Award for YA fiction either, even though it’s YA, in my opinion.
Just started Corpse in a Gilded Cage, a cozy by Robert Barnard