Reviewed by JANET MASLIN
New York Times
This is what “a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning” was like for Werner Herzog during the Sisyphean miseries that plagued the shooting of his Amazonian epic “Fitzcarraldo” (1982): one of two newly hatched chicks drowned in a saucer containing only a few millimeters of water. The other lost a leg and a piece of its stomach to a murderous rabbit. And Mr. Herzog realized, for the umpteenth time, that “a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk.”
These and other good times have been immortalized in “Conquest of the Useless,” Mr. Herzog’s journal about his best-known filmmaking nightmare. Already published in German as the evocatively titled “Eroberung des Nutzlosen” in 2004, this book, translated by Krishna Winston, seemingly recapitulates some of Les Blank’s film “Burden of Dreams,” the 1982 documentary that captured the “Fitzcarraldo” shoot in all of its magnificent, doomy glory. When he spoke to Mr. Blank, Mr. Herzog used the phrase “challenge of the impossible” to describe his heroic, arguably unhinged struggle to complete his film.
But “Burden of Dreams” never penetrated Mr. Herzog’s rogue thoughts, at least not in the way his own mesmerizingly bizarre account does. That’s understandable: Mr. Blank could concentrate on such external diversions as hauling a steamship over a hill in the Amazon rain forest, which was the pièce de résistance of Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” scenario.
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Monday, June 29, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
'The Favorites' by Mary Yukari Waters
Reviewed By Janice P. Nimura
LA Times
True fluency in two cultures is a privilege -- and a burden -- granted to few. Mary Yukari Waters is one of these. Her Irish American father met and married her mother in Kyoto, Japan, where Waters spent her early years. At age 9, she moved with her parents to California, where she still lives, while remaining close to her Kyoto relatives. Strikingly Caucasian-looking to the Japanese, more Japanese at heart than Americans suspect, Waters is unusually able to explain them to each other.
Six years ago, Waters published "The Laws of Evening," a collection of quiet, precise stories that brought the submerged trauma of postwar Japan to agonized life. Each story was an intimate ink drawing, expressing volumes of pain and stubborn hope with a few eloquent strokes. They were exquisite, and complete in themselves, but to Waters, it seems, they were just a sketchbook.
"The Favorites," her first novel, borrows liberally from many of the stories, repeating images and characters in a larger format, one perhaps not as well-suited to her minimal style.
The novel's first half is an expanded revision of Waters' semiautobiographical story "The Way Love Works." In the summer of 1978, 14-year-old Sarah Rexford and her mother, Yoko, arrive in Kyoto from California for an extended visit with Sarah's sprightly grandmother, Mrs. Kobayashi.
After five years of expatriate unease, Yoko has returned to her natural element, and Sarah watches in wonder as her mother reclaims her place as charismatic "queen bee" of the neighborhood and apple of her mother's eye. Sarah, used to rolling her adolescent eyes at Yoko's cultural gaffes at home, is startled at the pleasure she now takes in her mother's reflected glory.
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LA Times
True fluency in two cultures is a privilege -- and a burden -- granted to few. Mary Yukari Waters is one of these. Her Irish American father met and married her mother in Kyoto, Japan, where Waters spent her early years. At age 9, she moved with her parents to California, where she still lives, while remaining close to her Kyoto relatives. Strikingly Caucasian-looking to the Japanese, more Japanese at heart than Americans suspect, Waters is unusually able to explain them to each other.
Six years ago, Waters published "The Laws of Evening," a collection of quiet, precise stories that brought the submerged trauma of postwar Japan to agonized life. Each story was an intimate ink drawing, expressing volumes of pain and stubborn hope with a few eloquent strokes. They were exquisite, and complete in themselves, but to Waters, it seems, they were just a sketchbook.
"The Favorites," her first novel, borrows liberally from many of the stories, repeating images and characters in a larger format, one perhaps not as well-suited to her minimal style.
The novel's first half is an expanded revision of Waters' semiautobiographical story "The Way Love Works." In the summer of 1978, 14-year-old Sarah Rexford and her mother, Yoko, arrive in Kyoto from California for an extended visit with Sarah's sprightly grandmother, Mrs. Kobayashi.
After five years of expatriate unease, Yoko has returned to her natural element, and Sarah watches in wonder as her mother reclaims her place as charismatic "queen bee" of the neighborhood and apple of her mother's eye. Sarah, used to rolling her adolescent eyes at Yoko's cultural gaffes at home, is startled at the pleasure she now takes in her mother's reflected glory.
Continue here...
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
'The Signal' By Ron Carlson
Reviewed By J.K.
Chicago Tribune
Mack's father has been gone from this Earth a good long time, but he's still a daily part of Mack's life. That gives "The Signal" (Viking), the new novel by Ron Carlson, special resonance on a Sunday devoted to dads.
They ran a guest ranch in Wyoming, did father and son, until the father passed away unexpectedly, at which point Mack's life fell apart: "At the ranch, everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there."
Yet as Mack divulges in the course of this uncommonly fine novel, his father lives vividly in his memories. Mack undertakes a mysterious trip in the wilderness, taking along his estranged wife, Vonnie, and his father's words and rules are often all that stand between Mack and disaster.
Carlson's writing is crisp and blunt, much like the very Wyoming landscape he describes. In his last novel, "Five Skies" (2007), he did the same thing: He echoed the raw topography with the simple beauty of his words. "I pay attention to every sentence," Carlson said in a recent phone interview.
"I work very hard in my book to make them about real places," he added. "In a lot of books today, we have a lot of general, floating life, life in apartments, urban stories. I'm much more interested in the West. I work from particulars."
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Chicago Tribune
Mack's father has been gone from this Earth a good long time, but he's still a daily part of Mack's life. That gives "The Signal" (Viking), the new novel by Ron Carlson, special resonance on a Sunday devoted to dads.
They ran a guest ranch in Wyoming, did father and son, until the father passed away unexpectedly, at which point Mack's life fell apart: "At the ranch, everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there."
Yet as Mack divulges in the course of this uncommonly fine novel, his father lives vividly in his memories. Mack undertakes a mysterious trip in the wilderness, taking along his estranged wife, Vonnie, and his father's words and rules are often all that stand between Mack and disaster.
Carlson's writing is crisp and blunt, much like the very Wyoming landscape he describes. In his last novel, "Five Skies" (2007), he did the same thing: He echoed the raw topography with the simple beauty of his words. "I pay attention to every sentence," Carlson said in a recent phone interview.
"I work very hard in my book to make them about real places," he added. "In a lot of books today, we have a lot of general, floating life, life in apartments, urban stories. I'm much more interested in the West. I work from particulars."
Continue here...
Monday, June 22, 2009
'Black Water Rising' By Attica Locke
Reviewed by JANET MASLIN
New York Times
On the day he is to meet with the Houston mayor, Jay Porter takes special care not to wear his best clothes. That’s because as he dresses, he is being watched by Bernadine, his very pregnant wife, and because the mayor, Cynthia Maddox, is an old flame.
The year is 1981. Eleven years earlier, as a student at the University of Houston, Jay wore a dashiki, a goatee and a militant air. Cynthia, Jay remembers, was a noisily outspoken member of Students for a Democratic Society, a white girl drawn to black radicals “as sure as if the Temptations had come to town.”
Now Cynthia has a stiff blond head of helmet hair, an important office and a politician’s survival skills. Jay has a struggling law practice and a deep, gnawing sense of self-doubt. If he often feels as if others might betray him, he can thank Cynthia for some of that; she fell right out of love with him when he faced trumped-up charges of conspiring to incite violence. She vanished when he stood trial.
Attica Locke’s “Black Water Rising” uses Jay’s unease as a determinative character trait, one that will shape much of his behavior during Ms. Locke’s atmospheric, richly convoluted debut novel. Her story begins on a dark and watery night. Jay has taken Bernie (as she is known) on a bayou cruise when he hears cries for help, dives off the boat and rescues a damsel in distress. Knowing full well that only suckers rescue such damsels and that this may be “the oldest con in the book,” Jay nonetheless saves an expensively dressed white woman about whom he knows exactly nothing. The false assumptions that he makes about her will add a layer of interest to Ms. Locke’s deeply nuanced story.
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New York Times
On the day he is to meet with the Houston mayor, Jay Porter takes special care not to wear his best clothes. That’s because as he dresses, he is being watched by Bernadine, his very pregnant wife, and because the mayor, Cynthia Maddox, is an old flame.
The year is 1981. Eleven years earlier, as a student at the University of Houston, Jay wore a dashiki, a goatee and a militant air. Cynthia, Jay remembers, was a noisily outspoken member of Students for a Democratic Society, a white girl drawn to black radicals “as sure as if the Temptations had come to town.”
Now Cynthia has a stiff blond head of helmet hair, an important office and a politician’s survival skills. Jay has a struggling law practice and a deep, gnawing sense of self-doubt. If he often feels as if others might betray him, he can thank Cynthia for some of that; she fell right out of love with him when he faced trumped-up charges of conspiring to incite violence. She vanished when he stood trial.
Attica Locke’s “Black Water Rising” uses Jay’s unease as a determinative character trait, one that will shape much of his behavior during Ms. Locke’s atmospheric, richly convoluted debut novel. Her story begins on a dark and watery night. Jay has taken Bernie (as she is known) on a bayou cruise when he hears cries for help, dives off the boat and rescues a damsel in distress. Knowing full well that only suckers rescue such damsels and that this may be “the oldest con in the book,” Jay nonetheless saves an expensively dressed white woman about whom he knows exactly nothing. The false assumptions that he makes about her will add a layer of interest to Ms. Locke’s deeply nuanced story.
Continue here...
Thursday, June 4, 2009
“Home Game” by Michael Lewis
“Home Game” by Michael Lewis
New York Times
Michael Lewis’s “Home Game” is meant for the man who has everything — including a grudging attitude toward raising his own children. Affecting a curmudgeonly stance that owes something to Professor Henry Higgins, Mr. Lewis writes of how he deigned not just to let a woman into his life, but also three children.
While his wife figures only tangentially in the book, is given scant credit for her efforts and is referred to as “incubator of the source material,” the children become the center of Mr. Lewis’s universe, much to his initial horror. “Maternal love may be instinctive,” he writes, with a touch of candor in a book that is otherwise gruffly facetious, “but paternal love is learned behavior.”
“Home Game” is about Mr. Lewis’s learning process. Based on a series of columns he wrote for Slate, the book frames a series of anecdotes about child rearing in terms well suited to Father’s Day. (Four years ago Mr. Lewis hailed that holiday with a conveniently timed book about his high school baseball coach.) No greeting-card saccharine here: Mr. Lewis manages to work business, baseball and golf references into stories about his children’s behavior. And no analogy is too manly to be out of place. When he takes his oldest child to school so that his wife and new baby can sleep, he writes, “I am the good soldier who has leapt on the hand grenade, so that others may live.”
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New York Times
Michael Lewis’s “Home Game” is meant for the man who has everything — including a grudging attitude toward raising his own children. Affecting a curmudgeonly stance that owes something to Professor Henry Higgins, Mr. Lewis writes of how he deigned not just to let a woman into his life, but also three children.
While his wife figures only tangentially in the book, is given scant credit for her efforts and is referred to as “incubator of the source material,” the children become the center of Mr. Lewis’s universe, much to his initial horror. “Maternal love may be instinctive,” he writes, with a touch of candor in a book that is otherwise gruffly facetious, “but paternal love is learned behavior.”
“Home Game” is about Mr. Lewis’s learning process. Based on a series of columns he wrote for Slate, the book frames a series of anecdotes about child rearing in terms well suited to Father’s Day. (Four years ago Mr. Lewis hailed that holiday with a conveniently timed book about his high school baseball coach.) No greeting-card saccharine here: Mr. Lewis manages to work business, baseball and golf references into stories about his children’s behavior. And no analogy is too manly to be out of place. When he takes his oldest child to school so that his wife and new baby can sleep, he writes, “I am the good soldier who has leapt on the hand grenade, so that others may live.”
Continue here...
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
'The Winner Stands Alone' By Paulo Coelho
'The Winner Stands Alone' By Paulo Coelho
Review By CAROLYN SEE
Miami Herald
I used to know a guy who hated daylight saving time. Every time it rolled around, he devoted a week to denouncing it, along with corporate greed, artificially fertilized lawns, the American highway system and white bread. When his wife bought a loaf to make the kids' lunches, he hung it out the kitchen window with a rope. He wouldn't have it under his roof. I agreed with him on principle. There are plenty of things to dislike about our culture.
This guy would have loved Paulo Coelho, although he might wonder about a novelist who deplores glitz and glamour even as he devotes more than 300 pages to evoking glitz and glamour in all its distasteful excess. Coelho takes for his subject the Cannes Film Festival, which, in his opinion, stands on shaky moral ground. ''In Cannes,'' an assistant remarks, ``there's no such thing as friends, only self-interest. There are no human beings, just crazy machines who mow down everything in their path in order to get where they want or else end up plowing into a lamppost.''
Coelho disapproves mightily of the human folly on display in Cannes: the unbridled ambition, the thirst for fame, the lure of haute couture and ostentatious jewelry. He hates dark glasses, because ''in a celebrity town like Cannes, (they) are synonymous with status,'' and he loathes cellphones, which are ''leading the world into a state of utter madness.'' He posits a small group of people whom he dubs the ''superclass,'' which has all the power, all the limos, all the private jets; those who dress in high fashion, swill champagne, drive Maybachs and who, if they're women, get regular injections of Botox. But he isn't fond of ordinary people either, who do silly things like wear neckties or eat three meals a day whether they're hungry or not. In short, while he compares Cannes to Sodom and Gomorrah, he's not prepared to let sinners of any social class off the hook, quoting Solomon's ''Vanity of vanities, all is vanity'' more than once and apparently meaning it.
So. Igor, a psychotic Russian phone executive with his own private jet, comes to the film festival in pursuit of his ex-wife, Ewa, who has run off with Hamid, an Arab clothes designer also with his own private jet. Igor aims to kill a few people and notify Ewa on her cellphone, hoping this will motivate her to return to him. Over a period of about 24 hours, he does indeed manage to suffocate a young street vendor using the Russian martial art Sambo and off an important movie distributor using a needle soaked in curare, which Igor blows through a cocktail straw. He spends the afternoon stabbing an independent film director and leaving a hermetically sealed envelope filled with hydrogen cyanide under an unknown person's door.
Several unsuspecting women move through this corrupt and glittering landscape: a 25-year-old model who yearns for a chance at the big time, a 19-year-old model from Africa and that director who has spent her entire adult life making a film for which she seeks distribution. Through them, the author visits the worlds of moviemaking. (Will it surprise many readers to learn that the writer is the least well-paid participant in any project?) And we are told that Los Angeles is ``really a large suburb in search of a city.''The world of fashion is also held up to scrutiny, its sins too numerous to mention.
Continue here...
Review By CAROLYN SEE
Miami Herald
I used to know a guy who hated daylight saving time. Every time it rolled around, he devoted a week to denouncing it, along with corporate greed, artificially fertilized lawns, the American highway system and white bread. When his wife bought a loaf to make the kids' lunches, he hung it out the kitchen window with a rope. He wouldn't have it under his roof. I agreed with him on principle. There are plenty of things to dislike about our culture.
This guy would have loved Paulo Coelho, although he might wonder about a novelist who deplores glitz and glamour even as he devotes more than 300 pages to evoking glitz and glamour in all its distasteful excess. Coelho takes for his subject the Cannes Film Festival, which, in his opinion, stands on shaky moral ground. ''In Cannes,'' an assistant remarks, ``there's no such thing as friends, only self-interest. There are no human beings, just crazy machines who mow down everything in their path in order to get where they want or else end up plowing into a lamppost.''
Coelho disapproves mightily of the human folly on display in Cannes: the unbridled ambition, the thirst for fame, the lure of haute couture and ostentatious jewelry. He hates dark glasses, because ''in a celebrity town like Cannes, (they) are synonymous with status,'' and he loathes cellphones, which are ''leading the world into a state of utter madness.'' He posits a small group of people whom he dubs the ''superclass,'' which has all the power, all the limos, all the private jets; those who dress in high fashion, swill champagne, drive Maybachs and who, if they're women, get regular injections of Botox. But he isn't fond of ordinary people either, who do silly things like wear neckties or eat three meals a day whether they're hungry or not. In short, while he compares Cannes to Sodom and Gomorrah, he's not prepared to let sinners of any social class off the hook, quoting Solomon's ''Vanity of vanities, all is vanity'' more than once and apparently meaning it.
So. Igor, a psychotic Russian phone executive with his own private jet, comes to the film festival in pursuit of his ex-wife, Ewa, who has run off with Hamid, an Arab clothes designer also with his own private jet. Igor aims to kill a few people and notify Ewa on her cellphone, hoping this will motivate her to return to him. Over a period of about 24 hours, he does indeed manage to suffocate a young street vendor using the Russian martial art Sambo and off an important movie distributor using a needle soaked in curare, which Igor blows through a cocktail straw. He spends the afternoon stabbing an independent film director and leaving a hermetically sealed envelope filled with hydrogen cyanide under an unknown person's door.
Several unsuspecting women move through this corrupt and glittering landscape: a 25-year-old model who yearns for a chance at the big time, a 19-year-old model from Africa and that director who has spent her entire adult life making a film for which she seeks distribution. Through them, the author visits the worlds of moviemaking. (Will it surprise many readers to learn that the writer is the least well-paid participant in any project?) And we are told that Los Angeles is ``really a large suburb in search of a city.''The world of fashion is also held up to scrutiny, its sins too numerous to mention.
Continue here...
Monday, May 4, 2009
'The Wikipedia Revolution,' 'Stealing MySpace' and 'Viral Spiral'
By Lizzie Skurnick
LA Times
When the history of the Web is written, in what form will our progeny receive it? Via grainy promotional YouTube videos from Google? By listening to dusty Jeff Jarvis podcasts? Perhaps annotated, crowd-sourced and pre-preferenced Wikistories will be delivered directly into their cerebrums. (Personally, I'm hoping for a tiny avatar of a young woman in a flowing white gown and side-buns, interrupted midway by gunfire.) Yet whatever the medium, it seems unlikely that it will be the one that's falling out of favor even as you read this: the plain old book.
Because -- why write a book about a website? Really. Why do it? It distances the reader from the medium in an awkward and inexplicable way. (Not quite dancing the book review, but close.) It abdicates temporal authority, since by the time of publication, most visitors will have moved on to faster-caching pastures. Any user wishing to know about any site is presumably equipped with the power to log on and experience it herself, while those of us curled up with Edith Wharton and a nice tumbler of single malt are unlikely to look at breathless dispatches on how the other half keystrokes. And, although the Web lives to be writ and overwrit, most print authors, naturally enough, resist the idea of instantly being made palimpsest. So what are they doing with their peskily immutable pages in this land of instant updates?
In the case of "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia," Andrew Lih's motivation, I think, is simply to spread the good word. This is less a thoughtful analysis than a movement handbook for would-be adherents, like "Black Power," say, or "The Moosewood Cookbook."
Hooray for them
"Imagine a world in which every person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That's what we're doing," begins the foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, adds the collective that wrote the first chapter by wiki, laying out their philosophy of collaborative knowledge, "is something by design that is pure, empowering and untainted by commerce." (Writing well, like achieving a perfect tremolo or getting a good scald on fried chicken, is one of those arts that stubbornly resists crowdsourcing.) That storied Wikipedian neutrality? Net only.
Like all movement manifestoes, "The Wikipedia Revolution" marshals an impressive amount of insta-hagiography. It starts with reeducation ("To understand Wikipedia's community, one must understand the robust online culture that directly preceded it . . .") before shifting into the story of Wales himself. "Doris, ever the educator, was optimistic too," Lih writes about the mother of the future Wikipedia founder, "buying a set of the World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman not long after becoming a mother. Jimmy, the firstborn, was not even three years old at the time. She didn't know it then, but she was planting a seed that would inspire a phenomenon."
Continue here...
LA Times
When the history of the Web is written, in what form will our progeny receive it? Via grainy promotional YouTube videos from Google? By listening to dusty Jeff Jarvis podcasts? Perhaps annotated, crowd-sourced and pre-preferenced Wikistories will be delivered directly into their cerebrums. (Personally, I'm hoping for a tiny avatar of a young woman in a flowing white gown and side-buns, interrupted midway by gunfire.) Yet whatever the medium, it seems unlikely that it will be the one that's falling out of favor even as you read this: the plain old book.
Because -- why write a book about a website? Really. Why do it? It distances the reader from the medium in an awkward and inexplicable way. (Not quite dancing the book review, but close.) It abdicates temporal authority, since by the time of publication, most visitors will have moved on to faster-caching pastures. Any user wishing to know about any site is presumably equipped with the power to log on and experience it herself, while those of us curled up with Edith Wharton and a nice tumbler of single malt are unlikely to look at breathless dispatches on how the other half keystrokes. And, although the Web lives to be writ and overwrit, most print authors, naturally enough, resist the idea of instantly being made palimpsest. So what are they doing with their peskily immutable pages in this land of instant updates?
In the case of "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia," Andrew Lih's motivation, I think, is simply to spread the good word. This is less a thoughtful analysis than a movement handbook for would-be adherents, like "Black Power," say, or "The Moosewood Cookbook."
Hooray for them
"Imagine a world in which every person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That's what we're doing," begins the foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, adds the collective that wrote the first chapter by wiki, laying out their philosophy of collaborative knowledge, "is something by design that is pure, empowering and untainted by commerce." (Writing well, like achieving a perfect tremolo or getting a good scald on fried chicken, is one of those arts that stubbornly resists crowdsourcing.) That storied Wikipedian neutrality? Net only.
Like all movement manifestoes, "The Wikipedia Revolution" marshals an impressive amount of insta-hagiography. It starts with reeducation ("To understand Wikipedia's community, one must understand the robust online culture that directly preceded it . . .") before shifting into the story of Wales himself. "Doris, ever the educator, was optimistic too," Lih writes about the mother of the future Wikipedia founder, "buying a set of the World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman not long after becoming a mother. Jimmy, the firstborn, was not even three years old at the time. She didn't know it then, but she was planting a seed that would inspire a phenomenon."
Continue here...
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