Book Reviews

We overuse adjectives such as luminous, dazzling, incandescent, stunning, shimmering, sparkling, glittering—always the light references! Or there are what I like to call “the natural disaster adjectives:” devastating, searing, powerful, shattering, explosive, epic, electrifying…One wag on social media recently compiled a “glossary of terms” for book blurbs, including “Enchanting: there’s a dog in it. Heartwarming: a dog and a child. Moving: child dies. Heartrending: dog dies.” We laugh because we know it’s true…that these words act as a code of sorts.

            from Blurb Your Enthusiasm

Like others at the time, Burton and Speke were unapologetic in their racism, with all of its attendant arrogance and ignorance, but they were sickened by the slave trade, which, Burton wrote, “had made a howling desert of the land,” and took great pride in their country’s efforts to end it. But […] little had changed in East Africa, where the shackling and selling of human beings was still a common occurrence. “Zanzibar is a peculiar place,” Burton wrote a friend. “An admirable training ground for damnation.”

            from River of the Gods

(Damon Thruff looking through Mama Z’s files of lynchings since 1913)

“You did all this?” Damon asked.
Mama Z poured the tea. “Yes.”
“It’s incredible,” he said.
“I have chronicled the work of the devil.”
“The devil?”
“I don’t believe in a god, Mr. Thruff. You can’t sit here in this room, touch all these folders, read all of these pages, and believe in a god. I do, however, and I’m certain you do, too, believe in the devil.”
“And hell?”
“This is hell, Mr. Thruff. Haven’t you been watching?”

            from The Trees

John (Wilkes Booth) wandered down to the caravan, where he found an old woman to tell his fortune. “Ah, you’ve a bad hand,” the crone commenced. “Trouble in plenty everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts. They’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young and leave many to mourn you, many to love you, too.”

Taken aback, John asked if his destiny was unchangeable.

“You’re born under an unlucky star,” she informed him. “…A fast life, short but a grand one.”

“It is a good thing it is so short as it is so bad a fortune. For this evil dose you expect me to cross your palm?” asked John.

“Young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it…”

       from In the Houses of Their Dead

We’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: (…) Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently cooperative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil? Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity—as moral and social beings—to negotiate between such alternatives.

            from The Dawn of Everything

“Do you see what ah mean?”
Mungo had been working hard at seeing what people really meant. Mo-Maw and his sister, Jodie, were always nagging him about that. Apparently there could be some distance between what a person was saying and what you should be seeing. Jodie said he was gullible. Mo-Maw said she wished she had raised him to be cannier, less of anybody’s fool. It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.

                      from Young Mungo

At its best, literature can surprise and move us, challenge our certainties, and goad us into reexamining our default settings. Books can jolt us out of old habits of mind and replace reflexive us-versus-them thinking with an appreciation of nuances and context. Literature challenges political orthodoxies, religious dogma, and conventional thinking (which, of course, is why authoritarian regimes ban and burn books), and it does what education and travel do: it exposes us to a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices.

                      from Ex-Libris

[Japanese American internees are watching a newsreel about the war.]

The screen showed a fierce battle scene. An American bomb hit a Japanese ship, and Thomas stood up and cheered. He raised his fist in the air, his shadow on the screen.

At his side, George pulled at his arm. “Sit down. Sit down, Thomas.” George tried to shush him, but his little brother didn’t listen.

“Yah! Take that. And that!” He was yelling at the top of his lungs…“I hate the damned Japs!” He looked around at the others. “Look what they’ve done to us!” Trembling, he slowly sank into his seat.

          from A Shrug of the Shoulders

How-to (write) manuals are preposterous. You learn to write by reading deeply…to read (a favorite book) over and over, and see how it’s put together and what it means. It’s like a movie that you love. You’re blown away by it. There it is—the music, the sound, the color. But then when you see it the second time, then you see this camera angle or this shot or how this is done—then you see a larger way into it. And I think that’s how you learn to write. By doing that with texts.

   T. C. Boyle from The Writer’s Library

He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life, you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

            from Cloud Cuckoo Land