Ms. Margie

I read this pretty much in one evening - it successfully drew me away from other things I needed to do.

I've never read something that so clearly gave me the sense of what it means to 'live and breathe food.' He's been working in the kitchen practically since he could walk, and started his apprenticeships about age 13. The book not only charts his personal history, but also some food trends, including how classical French cooking has been largely pushed aside in favor of nouvelle cuisine. Pepin moves quickly and breezily through his life story - he barely touches on his TV time with Julia Child - keeping the book a light, easy read.

I was amazed with Pepin's ability to remember dishes and food treatments from specific meals he cooked decades ago. Seriously, food is his life.

My only complaint is that I couldn't hear his wonderful accent as I was reading.

Disclaimer: this review is not authorized by Will Ellsworth-Jones, his agent, or his publisher (St. Martin’s Press). It is also not authorized by Banksy or Pictures on Walls, and has not been authenticated by Pest Control.

Seems like a lot of legalese to go through just to post a review, doesn’t it? The hoops one must go through to sell the wall Banksy painted for you when you were both up-and-coming street vandals is similarly rife with legal complications. Has it been authenticated by Pest Control? If not, many buyers won’t go near it. Did Banksy want it to be sold? If not Pest Control won’t authenticate it. There are so many complicated issues involved in buying, selling, and showing Banksy’s work. Will Ellsworth-Jones does a marvelous job of outlining these issues. He points out how almost ludicrous it is that Banksy’s ‘outsider art’ is shown at the Tate and brings in tens, if not hundreds, of dollars. Yet the author does so without being at all anti-Banksy.

Banksy (whose identity is a closely guarded secret) started doing graffiti in Bristol in the 1980s. He has since become known as a stencil artist, has started making prints of his work, and makes a fair bit of money. [b:Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall|15793236|Banksy The Man Behind the Wall|Will Ellsworth-Jones|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1357999948s/15793236.jpg|21515200] is not, though, an art book. There are a few photos, but they are very few. The book is about Banksy, his rise to fame, and how he straddles the worlds of outsider art and posh art galleries. It’s a delicate balance and many question whether Banksy is, or should be, straddling those two worlds successfully.

Banksy is currently an entire business machine. He has a business (Pictures on Walls), a manager/PR organization/authentication service (Pest Control), he puts on huge exhibits, and he makes a lot of money. What he doesn’t do, though, is make endorsements or design for corporations. Does this make him less of a sell-out, or does that fact that he has a business machine behind him guarantee that he’s a no longer an outsider? Ellsworth-Jones says of Banksy’s team,
”The more I examined this team, not just the team that is ready when he needs help with a big project, but also the more permanent team protecting his reputation, his commercial rights, his prices, the more it became clear that he functions in much the same way as any commercially successful artist would – albeit outside the traditional gallery system. And it is perhaps this fact, the fact that in many ways the outsider is now an insider, rather than any real worry about his identity, that this team – which makes very few mistakes – is so determined to hide.”
Even Banksy himself struggles with this issue. In an interview from Time Out magazine, he said,
“I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities. I do sometimes question whether I’m part of the solution or part of the problem…There’s obviously nothing wrong with selling your art – only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise, But it’s confusing to know how far you should take it.”
This selling-out issue gives Ellsworth-Jones plenty of fodder. He could have written an entire diatribe just around this issue. And people have. But he goes beyond that to give a balanced and nuanced portrait of Banksy, his work, and his genre. He certainly demonstrates an appreciation for Banksy’s art. He writes, “the images…make us admire him, make us laugh and make us think, not so much about what the painting means but about the subjects he as taken on.” For Banksy’s work is, indeed, protest art. It’s meaningful yet accessible (and as with poetry, there a great deal of heated discussion in the art world about “accessible” art). Kate Brindley, formerly of the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, says of his work, it’s “…smart, it’s intentioned. It’s political, it’s humorous. It’s current. It’s site specific. It’s universal. He thinks very carefully about it but there is also a lightness and playfulness which I really enjoy about it.”

These descriptions make me interested in Banksy’s work, but Ellsworth-Jones’ book succeeds in making me interested in the entire field of graffiti/protest art. Well done.

This is really scary.

Wright's book seems as balanced as possible. And by that I mean that anything negative about the church will be aggressively denied, and people who speak against the church will be hounded and sued. So it can be difficult to write anything that isn't glowingly positive. As a result, what you read about the church is going to be either very positive or very negative. This book falls into the negative category, while not going into the "they're flipping madmen! Stay away!" hysteria.

L. Ron Hubbard was a paranoid, narcissistic crazy person. His successor, David Miscavige, is a scary psychopath. They've created an incredibly powerful and extremely wealthy organization. You should be very scared.

Part of me appreciated Wright's efforts to tell us about Scientology. The book doesn't come across as an exposé. It comes across as an attempt to tell the story about the history, development, and current state of the church.

The other part of me was horrified and hated the story (but not the book). I think the book is important and worth reading - the more we know about Scientology, the better. Seriously - they're having a major impact on legislation especially tax laws. But it's not for the faint hearted. As LRH and Tom Cruise would say, this will blow your mind.

A brief interview with Raquel Cepeda:

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/05/01/new-book-being-latino-means-being-from-everywhere/

Terrific book. Cepeda's background in journalism shines; she's adept at storytelling, and uses it to great effect in this book, where she seamlessly shares her personal story and examines race in a more academic way.

Cepeda's personal story is both fascinating and horrific. Her journey toward a racial identity has a backdrop of living in both the Dominican Republic and New York, hip hop, abandonment by her mother, and abuse by her father. Her personal identity is a tapestry of many threads, and she creates another tapestry via this book - the story of the development of that identity. That alone would make for an important, relevant, and interesting book. But wait, there's more! The second half of the book focuses on Cepeda's search for her DNA roots. Her search leads her to Africa and to relatives she didn't know existed. Although this second section of the book has a different focus, Cepeda's ability as a storyteller and writer make it accessible and interesting.

I highly recommend the book.

I quite enjoy the Flavia books (well, the two I've read so far). She's both terribly precocious and rather naive.

I am falling madly in love with this series. Fortunately I don't feel the need to consume the entire series all at once, as with Harry Potter or Steig Larsson or [a:Jasper Fforde|4432|Jasper Fforde|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1350497674p2/4432.jpg]. The Harry Hole series is one to savor.

I'm kicking myself for reading these out of order. Unfortunately the first book in the series still hasn't been published in the U.S., so it's actually impossible to read the entire series in order, but after reading #3, I've got a near-irrepressible urge to go back and read those I've already read (#5 and #7). I may have to re-read the entire series once The Bat is published in English.

This book has a lot of characters to keep track of, and two different timelines/settings. After reading other folks' reviews, I understand how this might be problematic for some people. I didn't have a problem with it (much). Keeping a list of characters and relationships wouldn't hurt, though.

As I was reading this, the phrase "well-paced" kept coming to mind. Often we describe books as "taut" or "fast-paced" or "hard to put down". In my review for [b:The Snowman|9572203|The Snowman (Harry Hole, #7)|Jo Nesbø|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1355881478s/9572203.jpg|2697052] I used the phrase "edge-of-your-seat." This book, though, I would describe as being exceptionally well-paced. Slow when it needs to be, building in speed and tension when appropriate.

The protagonist of this series, Harry Hole, is deeply faulted. He can be really unlikeable, and I certainly understand why people would give up on this series. Reading several books, though, gives us a finely nuanced picture of a really well-crafted character. Troubled police officers or investigators are pretty much a cliche in the mystery/crime genre, but Nesbø makes Harry seem sui generis.

Now on to #4, [b:Nemesis|3522419|Nemesis (Harry Hole, #4)|Jo Nesbø|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1327312660s/3522419.jpg|3023538].

Four minus.
Sweet and short, in that order. I finished it in one evening.

Hoffman has a wonderful writing style. She wrote "Practical Magic," which was made into a movie. If you've seen it, you know that she's strong on female characters and the bonds between them.

Reading this book, I fell in love not so much with the characters themselves, but with their relationships, and the way Hoffman writes about them. Some of the characters are self-destructive or otherwise less than fully loveable, but Hoffman helps us find their loveliness because of the way their families and loved ones feel about them.

Okay: a parargraph without any form of the "L" word in it. Hoffman has a clear, true voice (I almost wrote "lovely", but then stopped myself). I look forward to reading more of her books.

Love,
-Margie

Three plus.

Some fun, interesting stories about the development of the periodic table and the people behind it. Some informational science, but just a bit over my head once we get to the sub-atomic level.

I wondered, while reading it, who he thought his audience is. It's a bit too focused on the fun stories to interest serious science geeks, but the science is a bit too in-depth to appeal to the light reader. I'm guessing it probably appeals primarily to those interested in the history of science.

An of course I always enjoy stories about Luis Alvarez. And I got to understand more about his bubble chamber, so I appreciated that bit.

Tesla is one of the most awesomest coolio scientists evah. Totally. Check out what The Oatmeal has to say: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla.

And if you're writing your dissertation on Tesla and need to know whether he was in New Jersey or New York on April 19th so that you can confirm that a conversation really took place, this is the book for you. It's great at that level of documentation. On the other hand, if you want to read about how awesomely coolio Tesla was, this book may make you want to gouge your eyes out.

I do not need to know which of his instructors at university was mustachioed and which had a full head of hair. Really, really do not. Do not care. Yet I really care about Tesla - I'd love to learn more about him. This book is not the means to that end for me. The minutia killed it for me.

I'd give it three stars because it obviously gives historical information that people want, but I'm mad about the way it made me feel. Admittedly I'm not an engineer and don't know a whole lot about electricity. But I'm not stupid - I read a lot of books about various branches of science. But this book was so overwhelmingly tedious that it made me want to read a picture book about Tesla. Or a pop-up book! That would be fun! I just wanted to get to the good stuff, and I felt superficial in the face of this dense collection of minutia. The emphasis on tiny unimportant (to my mind) details lessened the impact of Tesla's discoveries and inventions. The elevation of the unimportant made the important seem flat. I wasn't able to maintain my attention, and also was wearied by the effort required to sift through to find the interesting stuff.

So only two stars. Tesla, though: 17 stars.

Here's a trailer for the book:
http://www.upworthy.com/news-flash-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-normal-family?c=ufb1

What a great book. Solomon looks at families, which usually have vertical identities (shared family traits), where children have horizontal identities (characteristics they share with people outside of their families). Being a prodigy or schizophrenic or born with Down syndrome usually gives children an identity they do not share with their parents. It can be bewildering, heartbreaking, and sometimes richly rewarding for those parents.

Solomon did research and interviews for this book over the course of a decade. His depth of understanding of his subjects shows. His study is at once caring, understanding, and academically informed. He neither sugarcoats nor dismisses the struggles these families face, and one can often feel the respect he grows to feel for his subjects.

[b:Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity|13547504|Far from the Tree Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity|Andrew Solomon|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1363008433s/13547504.jpg|19112644] is bookended by Solomon's personal stories; growing up dyslexic and gay, and deciding to become a dad. He reflects meaningfully on his personal journey throughout the book, but does not make it a book about himself. I appreciated the extent to which he was able to share himself without turning the focus to his own story.

One of my favorite plugs on the back of the book is from Siddhartha Mukherjee: "This is one of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent times - brave, compassionate, and astonishingly humane. Solomon approaches one of the oldest questions - how much are we defined by nature versus nurture? - and crafts from it a gripping narrative. Through his stories, told with such masterful delicacy and lucidity, we learn how different we all are, and how achingly similar."

I highly recommend it.

I really enjoyed this. The first-person narration reflects the age of the narrator, Evelyn. At the beginning of the book she's 12, and 17 by the end. The sentences and thought patterns become longer and more nuanced as she grows older, reflecting Evelyn's growing maturity.

I thought Moriarty did a fine job of getting inside the head of someone at these various points along the way; struggling with beliefs and values and belonging (and longing). It rang true for me even though I didn't always share Evelyn's interpretations of or responses to the events of her life. Evelyn goes from being embarrassed by her mom to irritated with her to (somewhat) sympathetic - all sort of normal phases a girl might go through. Moriarty helps us experience Evelyn's growth in that regard, as well as in so many others.

There's a lot to chew on here. Moriarty gives us some universal themes to reflect on, without being preachy.

I learned some surprising things about myself while reading this. For one thing, I learned that I can deal with the seriously flawed rogue cop better than one who is just plain flawed.

This is very much a character study. The mystery is well plotted, though obvious. The psychology of the characters, though, is what makes this book shine. They feel quite real, even if we don't know anyone like them.

The descriptions of childhood were so poignant that I felt as though I had lived those same memories. Really evocative writing.

I recommend this book, but be aware that the ending is not the traditional wrap-up, and is rather unhappy.

I never read Dear Sugar on The Rumpus. I read [b:Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|12262741|Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail|Cheryl Strayed|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1354159655s/12262741.jpg|17237712] and enjoyed it, and had heard that the Dear Sugar book was good, but was pretty much completely unprepared for this book.

I'm having a hard time writing this review, because there are so many things I want to say. So, a few random thoughts:

I cried twice. At one point I had to literally put the book down and walk away from it. And stay away for a couple of days. My response was that visceral.

It's not a book to check out from the library. You need to read these pieces slowly, over time. It doesn't work well to read a bunch in one sitting, because the responses can start to feel a bit repetitive. They're all good responses, but the way she handles each can feel a bit repetitive when read in bulk. It can also start to feel like a bit too much to deal with. These are often really painful letters, and her responses can be really painful as well.

Sugar's responses distill down to Love yourself so fiercely that you can move past your deepest fear. Trust yourself. You think you'll never be loved ever again? So what. Love yourself enough to leave your abuser. You're worth too much to stay. You know that, and you need to act upon it even if it scares the baloney out of you.

She's fiercely loving and brutally honest at the same time. She tells stories that hurt. She uses them to illustrate some ugly, beautiful, life-changing truths.

I've read reviews that say she tells too many personal stories, but I would disagree. Again, if you read too many at once it can get to be a bit too much, so don't do that. I think her stories are useful and meaningful. And clearly, her readers from The Rumpus have appreciated them.

The other criticism I've read is that she's too simplistic. I would agree that in some instances she's not taking into account some of the finer details. While it's true that someone with an addiction can benefit from the group support of something like AA, I don't think she really understands what it's like to live in a small town. In small towns, you don't need to use the turn signal on your car because everyone knows where you're going. Not just at 8:30 on a weekday morning when you're going to work, but at 7:30 on a Wednesday night: everyone knows you're going to choir rehearsal at St. Mark's. That kind of familiarity means that going to AA is going to be public knowledge. Sure, tell the guy that he needs to get help with his addiction (as he knows, deep down, that he must), but there are complicating factors. In instances like the guy who's an addict, Sugar's responses are supportive and loving and beautiful to read, but perhaps a bit narrow.

Even with the minor faults, this is a beautiful, heart-wrenching and heart-healing book. It'll stay with you long after you're done reading, and you'll probably go back and re-read several times.

Warning: moderate use of F-bombs.

Utterly brilliant, like a diamond. Hard enough to cut glass and with enough laser-sharp brilliance to make you need to squint.

It's a novel of relationships. Lovers, spouses, friends, abusers, employees, neighbors - it's all in there. And all the dark and twisty bits of relationships are in there, too. The love and anger and disappointment and hatred and lust.

Rowling writes well about relationships. And about good and evil. And about trying to do what seems best, even if that thing is bad or dangerous or heart-breaking. We know that from *ahem* other books she's written. But this is an entirely different kettle of fish. Perhaps even an entirely different pond.

Do not go into reading this book thinking that you love J.K. Rowling, or that you loved those other books she wrote. Although some of the themes are similar, it might as well have been written by someone entirely different. And that, to me, is part of the brilliance. She's such an adept writer that it's very easy to forget that she is the author we thought we knew.

The book is dark. Dark, dark, dark. And at its core, in the place where it is darkest and hardest, it shines with a brilliance that's almost hard to bear.

When did fiction authors start writing extensive acknowledgement sections? If you're using, for example, a lot of Harry Truman's letters and need to spend oodles of time at the Truman library, then by all means thank the extremely helpful librarians there.

But your cat? You need to thank your cat? In print?

In Hollywood, I think thanking your agent is in your contract, as is thanking the Weinstein brothers. They're standing in the wings backstage, saying, "I made you. You're going to let everyone out there know or you'll never work in this town again!"

Somehow, I just don't imagine that going on in the publishing world. Your agent's secretary might be extremely helpful, and the junior copyeditor at the publishing house may really know her stuff, but I doubt they're going to drop you if you don't include an acknowledgements section singing their praises.

I was going to rant about acknowledgements in fiction books at some point - this book was the one that drove me over that edge.


The story's good. Twisted and ugly and suffocating and very readable. I'm not a huge fan of 1st person p.o.v., but it's appropriate to this book.

However...

If one writes a book which involves a lot of puzzles and clues and traps and falsehoods, readers are going to read quite closely, trying to detect same. So if the story isn't absolutely airtight, your readers will notice any little gaps in credibility or storyline or whatnot. So dammit, I should not be left thinking, "Yes but, what about..." at the end.

I know. I always find something to complain about.

If you enjoy Sarah Vowell's stream-of-consciousness, phobic, obsessive voice, you'll love this book.

Vowell is wacky, and I say that in the nicest way. She writes very honestly and openly, which I enjoy because she is so wacky - absolutely obsessed with the assassinated presidents, which kind of freaks her friends out. I loved reading about their reactions, and her inability to curb her enthusiasm.

But her enthusiasm is not just a wacky quirk. She's very well-informed. And that makes this book not just a stream-of-consciousness memoir, but an interesting look at the history of the assassinations of Garfield, Lincoln, and McKinley. It makes me want to add a new shelf just for this book: humor/history. It's a great combination.

Her style of writing reminds me quite a bit of Jenny Lawson - The Bloggess.