The Next Right Thing

Posted by Kurt


I really didn't expect to finish this book. My impression for the first few chapters was, "Wow, this is like a regular bad airport paperback, but with added preachy Recovery jargon." Characters bounce around the various settings, not so much having conversations as quoting from the Big Book at each other. Even when they aren't spouting proverbs from 12-step programs, the dialogue is simply horrendous (for example, a young woman bursts into a scene to stop someone from hitting her friend, and when the potential aggressor asks if he knows her, she responds, "You should. Because a******s like you have been stepping on my feet and ramming pencils up my nose since before I knew what feet and pencils were. You've got a big f*****g truck where your soul should be, and you want to drive it over someone, but you can't because it's encased in flesh and you would die if you tried." I'm serious. This dialogue is presented as realistic for the situation. If you buy this book, then you are paying for this dialogue.

What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness

Posted by Kurt

Candia McWilliam is a supernaturally gifted writer, able to craft prose into unforgettable images and potent insights.  Her latest book contains breathtaking observations and crippling emotional honesty.  What a shame, then, that so much of it is a waste of her talent that makes the memoir as a whole such a chore to finish.

One for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900

Posted by Kurt

No one approaches drunk driving policy in a vacuum.  Each person has a background and a bias, and the most impressive part of this book is that Dr. Lerner is quite clear about his bias and then tries hard to craft a balanced history book that will help inform readers from other backgrounds.  Dr. Lerner is an expert in public health issues, and he writes a passionate story of the way that drunk driving (and public perceptions of drunk driving, from media coverage to legislation) has had an impact on public health in the last hundred years.  I had a hard time reading this book because of my own personal perspectives, but it does contain a wealth of information, organized in an effective way to tell the story of a nation that is failing to keep its people safe on the roads.

The Mirage

Posted by Kurt

Matt Ruff has written a novel that, in many ways, is a perfectly fine political thriller. Three government agents fight a terrorist plot and find themselves drawn into a world of political intrigue full of gangsters and corruption and gunfights. At that level, the book would be at home on a rack in an airport bookstore - nothing special, but a perfectly competent example of the genre. The central hook to this book, though, the thing that makes it a must-read, is that this is not our world - in this world, at some vague time around the turn of the twentieth century, the United States degenerated into a loose sprawl of squabbling states run by fundamentalist despots, and the Muslim world united into the globe's dominant superpower. So in this mirage world, the three government agents are named Mustafa, Samir, and Amal, they work in a Baghdad still adjusting to the loss of its World Trade Center towers (after Christian fundamentalists flew planes into them), and the leaders of organized crime and political corruption are Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions

Posted by Kurt

I went to a prestigious law school, and I've been practicing as a public defender for more than five years, and until I read this book, I thought I didn't like Constitutional law.  The big Constitutional cases tended to be confusing and dishonest examples of judges using implausible means to reach the ends they thought were most just (Wexler completely wins my heart again when he comments that Supreme Court justices like three-part tests almost as much as they like big corporations), and they tended to look much more like politics than legal reasoning.  Through these odd clauses, though, Wexler has made me respect the Constitution (and the history of its interpretations) much more.

Explosive Eighteen

Posted by Matt

Janet Evanovich writes a series of mystery novels about a Jersey girl who finds herself a job as a bounty hunter, using her charm to overcome her lack of any real talent at catching bad guys. Each book has a number in the title, and this is the eighteenth. On the one hand, the audience is built in - we've read seventeen of these adventures, the odds are we're still on board, even if she does phone this one in. But the book has its importance a little elevated. For one, this novel follows Evanovich's best cliffhanger yet, and for another, this is the last book published before Katherine Heigl attempts to embody lead character Stephanie Plum on the big screen this spring. I am pleased to report that the book is a success, with the mild annoyance of an abrupt ending. At the close of the last book, Evanovich teased a resolution to the series's love triangle - Stephanie was going on vacation with ONE of her suitors, and we weren't going to learn who until the next book. I was expecting this book to start by telling us who got that other ticket, and I thought we'd read about that couple solving a mystery in Hawaii instead of the usual Trenton haunts. Instead, the book opens with Stephanie sneaking back home, and for a hundred pages, the author drops clues about what happened without yet revealing. It was a great way to hold my attention, with pacing worthy of the best primetime dramas as they return from summer hiatus. The rest of the book was the usual enjoyable action, comedy, and romance. Reading it reminded me of how she described morning sex - satisfying and enjoyable, but not a marathon because everyone has something else to do that day. This woman has learned what works for this series, and I recommend new readers take a look at One For The Money. By the time you get to Explosive Eighteen, you'll be thanking me.

420 Characters

Posted by Kurt

This beautiful collection of hyper-minimalist stories is simply stunning.  Lou Beach presents himself with a simple challenge - make an impact in a Facebook status update, which means writing 420 characters or fewer - and succeeds in roughly 160 different ways.  Each page of this collection is one status update, each standing independently but some tracing faint connections through the volume in a vaguely Spoon River Anthology kind of way.  Some are complete stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and some are completely surreal images that don’t have an obvious surface-level connection, but most are single rich images that suggest much larger stories.  I have been madly in love with minimalism since reading a Chuck Palahniuk essay about Amy Hempel (and then devouring each of her collections), and most of Beach’s work compares well with the best of Hempel’s creations.  Beach clearly understands exactly how to cultivate just the most evocative details of a scene, like a cowboy realizing that all of his lover’s letters have taken on the aroma of campfires, a child absorbing the warmth of a small wooden bridge while dropping pebbles into the stream below, or three lines of dialogue that suggest the overall shape of a passionate argument.  

The Song is You

Posted by Kurt

This fascinating hipster love story isn't quite as charming as (500) Days of Summer, but I was enchanted by it anyway. The main protagonist (Julian) is a director with a self-consciously astounding collection of music on his iPod, and the novel is generally about his love for Cait, a young Irish rock star on the rise. Their courtship is truly unique, as he gives her hard advice to make her a better artist, and she begins writing the next steps of the relationship into her songs. As the love story develops, though, the book gets more complicated in unexpected but strangely inevitable ways. He follows her around like a man in love, and Phillips is a strong author who is able to subtly shift perspectives and introduce enough doubt to make the reader uncomfortably confront the idea that he may also be following her around like an unwanted stalker. What if, for example, an anonymous message was from some other admirer? What if he is creating his love's reciprocal feelings from inside his own head? It is occasionally nauseating and often creepy and kind of exactly how I think hipster love goes.

The Buddha in the Attic

Posted by Kurt

This lyrical, elegant, potent book is a completely worthy follow-up to Otsuka’s first book, When the Emperor Was Divine, and may be even more emotionally powerful.  It is not exactly a novel in the traditional sense, as there is no plot, simply a montage of images and simple observations about the experience of Japanese women who came to California before World War II as brides for men they had never met  The images flow like a dream that gets quietly more nightmarish until the horrifying and inevitable end at the time of the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942.  The chapters are loosely bound by topic (the journey by sea, shared experiences of childbirth, details from the day that the Japanese Americans leave their homes, etc.) and mostly told in the first person plural.  This narrative decision is beautiful, churning up history out of a collective experience, presenting contradictions without apology (something like, “We came from X background, and it made us like this.  We came from Y background, and it made us like this,” creates delicate tensions that make the story both communal and individual, and I love it).

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Posted by Kurt

I have recently had a hunger for the genre of "smart people writing about stupid things," and this book is my new favorite example.  While Klosterman may not deserve to be considered a subversive genius, he is a very smart person writing very good analysis of very shallow things, and I love it.  This collection of essays includes a comparison of Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe to examine the way our cultural attitudes toward sex have changed (nothing groundbreaking, but the essay is earnest and respectful, even as it touches on the pornographic), a reflection on the way The Real World has altered how young people see their real-life social groupings, a story of the author's time coaching Little League that made me laugh out loud to the point where I had to stop reading for a while, and more.  There is a traditionally journalistic portrait of a Guns 'N Roses cover band, which delves into what the cover band phenomenon says about music and our society, and one of the only respectable analyses of Saved By The Bell that I have ever read (it doesn't pretend that the show was good, or entertaining, or coherent - it just looks at the various pieces and how they fit together in a way that considered what fans wanted/needed).  There is also a haunting little essay about the cultural impact of serial killers, filled with impressive interviews and some soul-baring on the part of Klosterman.  I even liked the essays about sports, although my eyes glazed over while I skimmed through the sections with way too much detail about a topic I loathe.

Shot Through Velvet

Posted by Matt

This is the seventh book in a series by Elaine Byerrum where the mysteries get solved based on clues the astute Washington DC fashion reporter picks up. The series has been generally fun, with entertaining supporting characters and cute fashion articles between chapters. But the books have usually dropped in quality when the authors devotes more time to the sleuth's social life than to the mystery, and this book demonstrates that. It starts where Lacey is writing an article about how the economic downturn means that American fabrics like velvet are no longer being produced, and Byerrum builds an intriguing mystery around this dying little factory town, but around a hundred pages in, Lacey goes home to DC to spend a couple hundred pages killing time with her girlfriends, and by the time we get back to the mystery, I had forgotten the suspects and motivations. Overall, I did enjoy this entry, but I hope the writer will focus future books a little better.

Smokin' Seventeen

Posted by Matt

Janet Evanovich's series about a Jersey bounty hunter flourishes best when she focuses on the kooky support staff and the steamy romantic triangle, and with this eighteenth edition, Evanovich proves she knows what she's doing with that balance. The mystery at the heart of the book involves finding a few bodies and wondering if Stephanie Plum is a target or just a trouble magnet. Most of the book, however, has her spending quality time with her hot cop boyfriend and her hot mercenary temptation, justified by saying that her boyfriend's grandmother cursed her with hyperactive libido to try to punish her. It's cute, it's funny, and it's one of my favorites in the series so far.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont

Posted by Matt

I loved Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada, hated the follow-up, Everyone Worth Knowing, enjoyed the third book, Chasing Harry Winston, and came to this fourth attempt with some trepidation. Turns out I was right to be on my guard - it wasn't as awful as Everyone Worth Knowing's vapid spoiled popular girl fantasy, but it was close. The book starts with Brooke whining for a hundred pages about having to work two jobs to support her talented but undiscovered musician husband. Then, when he gets discovered, we spend a hundred pages of her calling in sick and being generally unprofessional as she decides to join him for everything despite being unable to contribute anything of value at any of his events. Then, we read about how outraged she gets when her husband dares to suggest that she quit one or two of her jobs and allow him to take his turn as breadwinner. She whines about not being allowed to have it all, like all the rest of us never have to make choices in life about how we spend a finite number of minutes we get each day. Did no one tell her that marrying a person who is not yourself means that you have to choose some things sometimes? The end does manage to redeem some of the whining, but the lead character is rarely less than insufferable. You have sixty minutes each hour - spend them on something better, and stop whining that you can't also use those same minutes to read crap like this.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Posted by Kurt

I didn't expect much when I impulse bought this book at a used book store.  I recognized Toby Young's name from his appearances as an occasional guest judge on Top Chef, where I didn't like him much but appreciated his shameless bitterness, and I found the book title very clever.  When I finally got around to reading the book, though, I was surprised to love it.

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

Posted by Kurt

Like many people born in 1980 or later, I grew up with a vague notion of Jonestown as a weird town in a jungle where a bunch of people in a cult drank poison Kool-Aid and died.  I use the term “drink the Kool-Aid” when I refer to someone completely buying in to an idea or a cause.  But until I read this book, I never really knew what Jonestown was all about.

Ready Player One

Posted by Kurt

This book is The Da Vinci Code for Swatch Dogs, Diet Coke heads, and guild leaders. For absolutely mindless entertainment, it's just fine, but everything here is about as shallow as a 2-D side-scroller like Super Mario Brothers (and not one of the sequels with a storyline, just the one about jumping and running).

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge

Posted by Kurt


I nearly gave up on this book shortly after I started it. I was born in late 1980, so I was only ten years old when Nevermind hit the stores and brought grunge into mainstream America, so during the years that grunge was vital and relevant, I was a little too young to connect with it. My friends’ cool older siblings liked Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam (although the fourth big grunge band is consistently listed as Alice in Chains, I have never had a personal relationship with anyone interested in that band), and I had a couple of Pearl Jam CDs on my shelf collecting dust (because my mom had heard somewhere that all the cool kids liked Pearl Jam, and she wasn’t going to tolerate a kid who wouldn’t even try to be cool), but I was never really an active grunge fan. I mean, I liked flannel because it was a style that was kind to fat kids, but I didn’t personally connect to the music. Even today, I generally reference Kurt Cobain when I’m helping people who want clarification on how I spell my name, but I’m certainly not a devoted Nirvana fan. And the first 100-150 pages of this book are largely concerned with the regional roots of grunge. Many vapid observations about bands you’ve probably never heard of: “Man, I went to that U-Men show at that venue, and I was sooooo drunk...” “Yeah, there was a dead cat at that one show, and it was crazy...” “Yeah, I met this member of my new band in my high school, and we smoked pot at his mom’s house, then I met this other member of my new band in my high school and we smoked pot at my mom’s house...” It was a bunch of people telling inane stories about when they used to be cool in their hometown. And with no connection, I was prepared to give up on the book and write a polite review about how it’s only geared toward those who are already intense grunge fans.

And then Courtney Love showed up.

Accused

Posted by Kurt


My dad gave me this book because it is set in Galveston, Texas, an area that is like a home to me. And the book does have plenty of nice local trivia and charming anecdotes about the history and culture of the island (and Bolivar Peninsula, and Houston). Unfortunately, the writing is so bad that this is the literary equivalent of someone filming porn (or a season of MTV's The Real World) in your hometown. 

Start Something That Matters

Posted by Kurt

This quick little book is a guide for socially conscious entrepreneurship for the Twitter generation, and there is no piece of that description that appeals to me as a reader. The Amazon Vine program offered me a free copy, though, and I decided to accept it because (1) I’m a big fan of The Amazing Race, on which Mycoskie appeared, and (2) my dad loves the TOMS shoes movement.

Personally, I haven’t been enthusiastic about the TOMS idea. I don’t really care for the aesthetics of the shoes, and I thought that, except for volunteers who participate in shoe drops, the charitable side of the company lets rich people feel good without actually having to touch poor people, which presents certain problems. Plus, I have been given my share of cheesy business books with vaguely inspirational quotes and a hollow you-can-do-it self-reliance message. So when I selected the book, I expected it to be a vaguely unpleasant experience that I could endure before loaning out my copy to people who fit what I saw as the intended demographic.

My expectations were completely wrong. I loved this book more than anything I’ve read in a long time.

Voluntary Madness

Posted by Kurt

I almost never give up on books without finishing, but after suffering through a little over sixty pages of this garbage, I tossed it aside. The basic idea of the book is intriguing - a journalist checks herself into three psychiatric facilities in an effort to get a close look at mental health treatment in the United States today. I bought my bargain-priced copy of this book because Matt is a psychiatrist, because I am a public defender who has many clients who spend significant periods of time in hospitals, and because I love investigative journalism works by talented authors like Barbara Ehrenreich, Ted Conover, Piper Kerman, and A.J. Jacobs.

This book, though, is just vile.