I think it is safe to say I completely fell off the CBR wagon but as the year draws to a close, and my office currently has a total of five people in, I wanted to try and get caught up on reviews. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable task until I wrote out every book title I still needed to review and realized I was nineteen books behind while still actively reading two other books. So in lieu of complete, well thought out reviews here are some plot summary blurbs and foggy recollections on my feelings towards the below Non Fictions books:
The Library Book- Susan Orlean, 3 Stars
“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
In April 1986 the Los Angeles Public Library was set on fire, presumably by Harry Peak, destroying or damaging over a million books. Orlean focuses on the fire, its aftermath and the investigation into Peak as well as the history of the largest public library in America in The Library Book. The passages regarding the destruction of thousands of irreplaceable works were positively gut-wrenching but it was the detail paid to the history of the library itself that were most interesting- particularly the evolution of librarians being a female driven profession. I also learned that antique books with water damage should be refrigerated to stop the formation of mold. Overall, Orlean’s love of books and libraries is evident in every word and she is a fairly competent detective when it comes to the case itself. Orlean actually tracked down Peak’s sister, Harry died a few years after the fire, and receive a little insight into the man most likely to be behind the blaze. I believe, particularly in lieu of a more compelling suspect, it was Peak who set the fire.
“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”
Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant– Joel Golby, 2.5 Stars
“America, you only get ten vacation days a year, but you also have a far healthier pancake culture inside of you, and I’m still weighing up whether that means you come out ahead or behind”
I don’t think I knew enough about Joel Golby going into Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant and it most likely colored my opinion of his memoir. He is a bit crass but overall he is a pretty funny guy. I enjoyed his essay on camel pageants in Saudi Arabia as well as his fanatical essay on the merits of the Rocky franchise. I think the essay that gets lauded the most when discussing this book is the one focused on the loss of both his parents; this is apparently a reprint from a Vice article and was both touching and humorous. At this point I am so far removed from my reading of Golby’s memoir that I cannot muster another sentence on the subject… not exactly a ringing endorsement.
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo- and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up– Richard Lloyd Parry, 3 Stars
“The families of the missing are doubly burdened: first by the pain of their ordeal, and then by our expectations of them, expectations of a standard of behavior higher than we require of ourselves. As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back—the flattery of helplessness and of need.”
Winner of “longest titled book I read this year” goes to People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry which tells the true story of Lucie Blackman, an English woman who disappears in Tokyo and the man responsible for her death. Parry, who covered the case when it went to trial, writes a well rounded story of Lucie’s upbringing, what brought her to Japan and what ultimately happened to her when she got there. As the case of Lucie’s disappearance, and presumed murder, begins to take shape the main suspect, Joji Obara’s, past crimes against women come into full view for both the courts and the reader. One of the more fascinating aspects of People Who Eat Darkness was the depiction of the Japanese legal system which operates pretty differently than the US courts.
Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results- Josh Gondelman, 4 Stars
“I think you’re going to do really well in college,” he said, and then he paused again, as if considering whether to say the next part out loud or keep it to himself. “You know, when you started high school, I never told you this, but I was worried you’d be too nice and people would take advantage of you. I’m really glad that didn’t happen.”If I am being honest, I have to admit that I gave him good reason to fear for my safety and social well-being as I entered ninth grade. I’d always had a wet paint personality, bright and shiny and vulnerable to the elements. I was proud that he trusted me to go off into the world, or at least as far as Brandeis University.
I am a big fan of Josh Gondelman on Twitter, he is the right combination of sincerity, humor and self deprecation we need in 2019 and Last Week Tonight is one of my favorite shows (although I believe he has since left). He has also responded to me during one of his “6 minute pep-talks” so we are essentially Internet friends now. Nice Try is exactly what you would expect from Gondelman- sincerity, humor and just enough self deprecation to make each essay work. At his core Gondelman is a “Nice Guy” in a world where calling someone “Nice” is sometimes considered insulting but he is too nice to take offense! How nice is Gondelman? That man was literally a pre-school teacher before breaking into comedy!
I really loved the three versions of the story about how he met his wife as well as the essay on the shady adoption of their dog. This was the rare collection of essays that I fail to recall one that truly didn’t work. Overall, I don’t think you need to know much about Gondelman going into his memoir but I’d be surprised if you didn’t seek him out after getting this small taste.
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster- Sarah Krasnostein, 3.5 Stars
“The opposite of trauma is not the absence of trauma. The opposite of trauma is order, proportion. It is everything in its place. It is one long green couch in a sunlit corner, looking like it was built for the space and waiting for you. It is an act of wilful seeing, a conscious choice about perspective.”
File this one under “did not read the description before reading.” I was expecting this to be the crime scene clean up equivalent to Working Stiff but in reality this is a biography of a transgender woman whose previous occupation was as a sex worker before going “legit” as a funeral direction and eventually transitioning from there into a professional cleaner of crime scenes and hoarder houses. It is a fascinating look at someone whose transition took place in the early 80s and has lived half a dozen different lives both before and after her coming out. In between snippets of her personal life, first as the abused adopted son of an Australian family then as a successful brothel worker before settling down and getting married to a man decades older than her, are the stories of the people she has helped along the way with her work as a cleaner. While this was entirely different than I thought it would be it was still very interesting and engaging.
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple- Jeff Guinn, 4 stars
“In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts. The purpose of Peoples Temple was to offer such a compelling example of living in racial and economic equality that everyone else would be won over and want to live the same way.”
Ever heard the phrase “Don’t drink the Koolaid?” Well The Road to Jonestown delves into the religious cult that lead to the unfortunate mass suicide (and murder) that brought this darker than many people may know turn of phrase into the English lexicon. Jim Jones was the only son of Lynetta Putnan and her much older, WWI veteran husband James Thurman Jones; he was raised in rural Indiana during the Great Depression and was heavily influenced by the works of Stalin, Marx, Mao and Gandhi. Jones was a Communist who was pro-intergration and had many non-white adopted children. In all honesty it seemed like his church, the Peoples Temple, sprang from good intentions but unfortunately things turned sinister as Jones became more powerful. Everything Jones did was incredibly calculated including mystical “healings” and staging attacks on himself and the Temple to garner support from his congregation. Jones moves the Temple from Indiana to California and began committing atrocities such as stealing properties from members, having them turn over custody of their children and in one instance having a woman put her finger prints all over a gun and threaten to commit a crime with it should she step out of line! In the late 1970s, Jones settled on Guyana has the Promised Land for his people and broke ground on a self sufficient community for a few hundred of his followers- this number eventually swelled to nearly a thousand. In 1977 Jones himself fled down there to evade lawsuits and bad press but the damage was done and concerned relatives of Jones’ followers began to assemble. Unfortunately, as the pressure to end Jones and his reign of religious terror heated up as well as the stress of people defecting the commune with the aid of a Californian senator Jones had 900 of his followers inject their children with cyanide before taking lethal doses themselves. This story was absolutely crazy and Guinn does an excellent job of compiling all the facts together.
Stay tuned for my hopefully forthcoming review round up of fiction books!
