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Content by D. P. Birkett
Commentateur n° : 29,598
Votes Utiles:
27
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Reviews Written by
D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA)
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Arms of the Infinite
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de Christopher Barker
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 18.51 |
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After Grand Central Station, Sep 5 2006
This is primarily of interest to admirers of "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" and to those who, like me, got hooked on the soap opera/gossip angle by reading "The Chameleon Poet" and "By Heart." I understand that Rafaella Barker will be giving the story from her viewpoint shortly.
The author is even harder on George Barker than Fraser was. He even deprives Barker of the credit for suggesting the title of BGCSISDAW. I suppose that, as the son who had to defend his mother and sisters and baby brother, he was entitled to be judgmental. It's a wonderfully written account of a resilient personality surviving an appalling childhood and bitterness is remarkable by its moderation.
Why was Rose the only one of the fifteen Barker children to succumb? Most of the rest went on to stable lives and in some cases to distinguished creative careers. One point to be made is that she did not die from a straight drug overdose. Her death was due to liver failure resulting from the combination of paracetemol ( called acetaminophen or Tylenol in the U.S.) with alcohol. Such liver damage can occur with quite moderate consumption.
The photographs are blurry amateur shots, bracketed at the beginning and end by stunning ones by Michael Wickham of Elizabeth and by the author of Rose.
I hate reviewers who quibble about these points, but there is no index or notes and no bibliography except a perfunctory list for "further reading." (The provenance of some of the letters is stated as "Canada Box" whatever that may be). By way of compensation there's a list of "Principal Players" at the front and it's an interesting guide to who was who in the London literary scene of the fifties and sixties. Canadian literary figures are absent. Were Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Richler, Monro, Lemelin, Atwood, Gallant, etc anywhere around at that time?
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Out with forks, Jul 2 2004
"Within Arm's Reach" is a long four generation family saga about a New Jersey family whose self-defeating behavior is largely explained in terms of ethnicity (a nice Jewish guy comes along at the end to rescue them from all that Irishness). I was reminded at times of Brendan Behan"s "Lord help the Irish, if it was raining soup they'd be out with forks."
We are first introduced to a whisky-drinking lawyer who sends his children to single sex catholic schools, keeps getting his wife pregnant, and does not believe in co-parenting. He demonstrates his lack of co-parenting skills by dumping two dead babies in the garbage on the third page. (Sorry if that sounds in bad taste but the babies in the garbage are just a page after the comment about co-parenting and I thought at first reading that the bathos was intended, but there's no intentional humor in the rest of the book.)He's the patriarch and cheers things up a little by dying early on, griefstricken over the death of another child, so there's a high body count for the fertile family females to replace (sorry again).
Amongst other ethnic traits these lace-curtain Irish find it hard to express their feelings and the matriarch "has no idea how to carry on a normal conversation" which I found easy to believe. It's a characteristic she shares with the rest of the book's characters who are liable to intersperse long speeches in complete sentences with such phrases as "mark my words." A lot of them have second sight or complex visual hallucinations. They start hallucinating at the drop of a hat and it can be hard to tell hallucinations from flashbacks. An added complication is that different family members take up in turn as first person narrators.
The plot largely centers on the family's reactions to the unwed pregnancy of a promiscuous grand-daughter. Her parents each have mild extra-marital affairs but return to the fold. Another grand-daughter gets depressed (and drunk of course) and drops out of medical school.
There's curious lack of description of physical setting (Napolitano should read some Sue Grafton) although specific places in Bergen County (Mary Higgins Clark country)are named. One character is editor of the Bergen Record and another is mayor of Ramsey. Money is mentioned but we are never told how much anything costs or how much anyone earns.(She should read some Balzac).
This all sounds very negative but I suppose those who enjoy long family sagas will enjoy it. I probably wasn't the right reader. I just came to this from reading Fowler's "Jane Austen Book Club" where every line of dialogue sparkles and this pales by comparison.
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Ghosts Of Boyfriends Past
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de Carly Alexander
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 13.10 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks |
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Christmas chicklit, Jun 25 2004
It's Christmas in Mahattan and Madison is is her thirties, hanging out with friends and remembering the boyfriends she had on previous Christmases and why they turned out not to be Mr. Right. That's about it for plot (well one of the exes returns and guess what happens).
Anything with such a slight plot depends on good characterization, sparkling dialog and great writing but I wouldn't put Alexannder in the great category. There are nice contrasting descriptions of New York and San Francisco scenes (visual and social)and of her group of friends. Sex and Christmas ornaments and food are lovingly described. (She drinks horrible mixtures of booze).
There's a faint suggestion that her problems are due to her unsatisfactory and uncommunicating,workaholic father. He is poorly drawn. He's a cardiac surgeon but we're never given any detail. A recurrent (too recurrent) gag is that his beeper keeps going off but nobody says whether a child's life needs to be saved or a heart transplanted. When he has lunch with his literary daughter he studies up on some books (current bestsellers, the ignorant slob) but she doesn't bother learning about his job. He dies off stage of cancer, but we are not told of what kind, or how he reacted to it.
Anyway, let me not be Scrooge, and Carly Alexander had fabulous reviews on her Christmas list. It's mild,light,sexy, moderately funny entertainment with a few patches of (God bless us every one) great writing.
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The Discovery of Britain, Jun 13 2004
Native Americans and Pacific Islanders who get annoyed by stories of their countries being "discovered" might feel vindicated by this account of the first civilized explorer of the British Isles, where he encountered cannibals who "openly have intercourse not only with other women but with their mothers and sisters"which Cunliffe thinks may be "accurate anthropological observation."
No full copy of Pytheas's book survives so his voyage has to be reconstructed from quotations in other writers. These seem consistent enough and to contain enough valid observations about tides and sun movements to indicate that there was some truth in his story. The material is so sparse that in order to fill his book Cunliffe fleshes it out with a lot of speculation and archeological data. He is evidently an authority in many fields. For example he is able to detect that Polybius's attack on Pytheas "has all the hallmarks of intense academic jealousy." (Cunfiffe is a professor of European archeology at Oxford). An interesting speculation is whether Pytheas reached Iceland. Cunliffe thinks he did, and presents interesting evidence. It does appear likely that Iceland was inhabited before the Vikings got there.
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What's in a name, Jun 5 2004
It's a very comprehensive book directed at parents but containing a lot of technical information about neuroscience within its 440 pages. Part II "Inside the brain and mind" would be heavy going for anyone without a medical or scientific background although the writing is admirably lucid.
I did not find any arrors of fact but readers should be aware that the Papolos's extend the diagnosis of bipolar disorder beyond what is generally accepted. They may be right but at present there is no objective test like a blood test or an X-ray to prove the diagnosis. It is often suspected when a child is made worse by drugs in the Ritalin class, which is a tough way to make a diagnosis. A strong family history of classical manic-depressive illness as described by Kraepelin is another clue. Most diagnoses of childhood mental ilnesses are fuzzy. (The DSM criteria have aroused a lot of sharp satirical comment). One result is that that a lot of the medication use is empirical "let's try this and see."
The Papalos's also emphasize the possibility that treatment of depression with an anti-depressant drug can precipitate mania. This can happen in adults but its implications for treatment are controversial.
They tend to be over-optimistic about the effects of many anti-convulsant drugs and perhaps give too much credence to single reports of spectacular improvement.
I appreciated their harrowing but warmly sympathetic descriptions of life with a severely mentally ill child and how to cope with the well-meaning (or ill-meaning) critics who say things like "give him to me for a week and he'll be different child."
It's a very practical book for parents in the the United States in dealing with questions like the costs of treatment. The advice about gaming the system and the the complexities of IDEA and IEP etc is particularly good although it is so detailed and specific that it would not help much in other countires, even Canada.
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Jane or Miss?, May 23 2004
Some have criticized this for not being quite as good as Jane Austen. I suppose that's true, but only just. Should you have read all of Jane Austen to appreciate it? Well there are men who haven't. They have long arms, receding foreheads and a lot of body hair. No need to worry about insulting them because they're watching football on television, not reading Amazon.com reviews. Sanditon, The Watsons, and At Lady Susan's are not mentioned but otherwise each character and each episode bears a subtle relationhip to a Jane Austen book.
If you want to cheat a little and pretend (I don't know who to) that you know every character I might tecommend Glenda Leeming's "Who's Who in Jane Austen and the Brontes." To be prefectly (more or less) honest I kept Leeming by me as I read Fowler.
There's a character who has read The Mysteries of Udolpho but never read Pride and Prejudice, and someone serves red varietal California wine in thick facetted glasses, but otherwise no terribly shocking incidents or violence. I found myself critical of calling Jane Austen "Miss Austen" which would have been Cassandra's title, but then I found it was Karen Joy Fowler's character doing that, not Ms. Fowler (and then I remembered that Emma is Emma througout Emma). It's the sort of book that gets you mixed up like that, between what is reality and what is fiction and what is fiction about fiction.I think that's something to do with meta-fiction and post-modernism (or po-mo as a character calls it).
Je me defie de Prudie mais je ne crois pas que je m'en suis trompe (Should that have a subjunctive? Courier fonts have no accents).
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But for the grace of God, May 8 2004
Any psychiatrist reading this book must half hope to come upon evidence of some obvious malpractice, so as to be able to say "such a thing could never happen to one of my patients" rather than "there but for the grace of God go I."
Some of the professional errors O'Malley describes are defendable. Experts may reasonably differ, as did some of the experts she talked to, about whether the case was one of bipolar disorder or of schizophrenia. Treating a bipolar patient with anti-depressants alone is often stated to be undesirable because of the danger of precipitating mania, but the practice has its advocates. O'Malley does not make Dr Saeed sound like an empathetic character with good verbal skills but that may be a subjective judgment.
She skates over the decision by the Yates's to have a fifth child. Rusty Yates has been much criticized for this. Dr. Starbranch made a written note that a further pregnancy would guarantee another psychotic episode but we do not know what she said to Rusty Yates about it.
I cannot imagine tolerating the practices she describes at Devereux. Of course O'Malley's description is based on a a written record that may not have reflected all of what went on. The chart and treatment plan would normally have been reviewed by Magellan. In any inpatient facility I have known there would have been extended and worried discussions, involving social workers and nursing staff, about the fact that there were five small children at risk. On the other hand it is possible that even with such discussions the staff migh have been reassured by the fact that the husband was supportive and a grandmother was arriving who would be in the house while he was at work. (The killings took place between the time Rusty Yates left for work and the time Dora Yates was due to arrive in the morning.)
I do not feel qualified to cast the first stone.
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Disjointed, May 3 2004
It's really three separate books, or perhaps three magazine pieces. Each is an excellent piece of investigative journalism. He investigates the marihuana industry, migrant labor, and pornography, in each case using the stories of one or two individuals as a focus. There's a lot of gripping human interest, suspense-filled action, and crusading exposure of injustice.
He does have an unifying message, about the opressiveness of government, which is spelled out in a short afterword but really each piece stands alone and this affects readability. There are no cross-references between the three pieces. Taken individually each one is great. Advocates for marihuana legalisation will cheer through the first piece but yawn through the other two.If you're a First-Amendment-loving card-carrying ACLU member you'll enjoy the third piece best.
The other problem with constructing a book in this way is that each piece is too short to give full space to opposing viewpoints. If these had been articles in Atlantic Monthly or the New York Times we would have had an interesting extra dimension. Readers' letters would have come in, with corrections and counter-arguments, and Schlosser would have replied to them. We miss this in book form.
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Full House
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de Janet Evanovich
Édition : Mass Market Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 9.99 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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Sugar but no Plum, April 30 2004
Apparently Janet Evanovich wrote romances in an earlier incarnation and this is one of them. Macho men aren't supposed to read romances but there's only one new Stephanie Plum a year and my addiction is such that I had to scrape the barrel.
As regrards plot it has the one size fits all plot derived from "Pride and Prejudice". Elizabeth Bennett is played by Billy Pearce, a divorced 38 year old mother of two. Darcy is played by Nicholas Kaharchek,a millionaire newspaper owner and polo horse trainer There are some misunderstandings between them but then in the end you'll never guess what happens.
Are there any traces of the brilliance of the One, Two, Three ...Nine series? Occasionally - there's a good scene of buying a wedding dress with a salesperson whose previous job was IRS auditor. The writing is full of cliches. On one page we have"expert hands" "Thoughts into a tailspin""utterly confused""fresh-scrubbed look""simple nature""put on airs" and a man wonders "What was the power she had over him that made him desire her." I've read that romance writers deliberately stick to stereotyped plots and use cliches so maybe it's not all JE's fault. A lot of people like romances and many art forms use conventional formulas. (And Pride and Prejudice is a great novel.}
It's interesting from the point of view of Evanovichian scholarship and I'd love to know what the input of Charlotte Hughes was and to lay my hands on an unaltered early work.
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Happy Ending, Mar 25 2004
I'm always fascinated by this final phase. So much of the killing went on the last few months that, even though you know the ending, you read these narratives urging the Allies to hurry up. When they took Anne Frank they could hear the sound of the British guns in Amsterdam. Mysteries remain. I found no fresh revelations that were not in Trevor-Roper's "Last Days of Hitler." Trevor-Roper actually spoke to many of those who were there and was given full access by the Allied authorities. (I haven't read Gertaud Junge's book yet.) This has the interest of being written by a German, born in 1926, but gives no inkling of what his personal feelings were as a 19 year old German at that time. It was written for German audience. The translation by Dembo is seamless and having been from from the German translated sensations find we not. The last pages contain sentences like "Instead what dominated the entire sequence of events and cost countless lives was an undeterred will, locked in its own mad, delusional world on the one hand, and a deeply calculated obsequiousness on the other." I think that's the fault of the author's style not Dembo. An American would have said "these people were crazy."
I'm haunted by the thought of Frau Goebbels killing her six children. A poignant detail here is the evidence that the 12 year old struggled for her life. Even more thought-provoking is the Russian soldier coming upon the children's bodies and not able to bear to look.(Those details aren't in Trevor-Roper).
Compared with Trevor-Roper this gives more detail about what went on after Hitler's death, but you might turn to the other WWII histories for that. It doesn't have De Valera visiting the German ambassador in Dublin to offer his condolences
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