[This first-hand account of life inside Sing Sing is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Ted Conover

Vintage Books, 2001

Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction

When Ted Conover wanted to write a book about the lives of prison guards, he started the way most journalists would: he asked the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) for access. They denied him permission.

Considering Conover’s methods as a writer, he probably wanted to be denied. He’s an immersion journalist—one who embeds himself in the lives he wants to chronicle. He becomes one of his subjects. So after the DOCS said no, Conover became a “Newjack,” or a rookie guard, at Sing Sing, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Newjack is the result of Conover’s experience.

At it’s core, Newjack reads like a travel narrative, and Conover’s experience is a journey. Conover guides us through the prison block, and shows us its inhabitants. He explains his training, and he points out how it left him mostly unqualified for what he would encounter within the walls. He tells us about Sing Sing’s infamous history—its menacing wardens, death chamber, and well-used electric chair—and he shows us how life inside is still just as nasty as it was when Sing Sing was the death penalty capital of the country.

…
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Author: Kurt Vonnegut

2005, Seven Stories Press

Filed Under Literary, Nonfiction

Calling these pieces essays would be misleading.  They’re more like rants, and, like most rants, they sometimes sound repetitive and oversimplified.  But these rants are backed by too much gravity and experience to be dismissed.  In tone and style, they offer everything fans have come to expect from Vonnegut, spare, humorous prose, overflowing equally with compassion and venom.  In content, A Man Without a Country offers an unfiltered look into the mind of a master craftsman with a hell of a lot to rant about.

When the book came out in 2005, Vonnegut already saw so much wrong with the direction the US had taken into the twenty-first century.  After everything he had seen and done in the twentieth century, he damn well wasn’t going to keep quiet.  From American exceptionalism in general, to the Bush administration in particular, Vonnegut decries the recent actions of a country which he feels has abandoned him and the principles he once went to war to protect. …
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Author: Mitt Romney

St. Martins Press, 2010

Filed under: Nonfiction, Memoirs

[Reviewer's note: As with my previous review of a political book, I want to be honest. I am not blind to the fact that my opinions of this book are skewed by my political beliefs.]

I wanted to like this book.

No Apology is Mitt Romney’s attempt to express who he is politically, and he makes that intention clear in the second paragraph of his introduction. Of his three political campaigns he writes:

each time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say…. This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign.

And the truth is, I believe him. It’s impossible to deny this guy’s qualifications. In 1994, he came points away from stealing a MA Senate seat from Ted Kennedy. As the CEO for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, he inherited a financially and politically disastrous situation and turned it into a success. And he more or less did the same as Governor of Massachusetts, turning Jane Swift’s mess into a successful, one-term tenure. Had he not decided to forgo a second term in order to make a serious run at the ’08 presidency, he’d probably still be governor. Politically, he had something special. He was Scott Brown back when Scott Brown was just some dude in the state chambers who once dangled balls for a Cosmo spread.

But that Mitt Romney isn’t the one who showed up to the ’08 primary. Instead, he came across as stiff GOP avatar who couldn’t distinguish himself from a pack of surefire also rans.

So I was rooting for No Apology, rooting for the likable and charismatic Mitt to resurrect himself. Instead, I got the ’08 stiff. …
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Author: Chris Jones

Broadway Books, 2007

Filed under: Nonfiction, Literary

Don Pettit—genius scientist and American astronaut—was a last-minute replacement for the space team “Expedition Six,” a three-man crew who would spend an extended stay on the International Space Station (or simply, as its residents call it, “station”). Expedition Six’s supplies and rations were sent to station before Pettit was named to the team, so he had to make due with the clothes and the menu of the man he replaced. The shirts were too big and there was no coffee. NASA allowed Pettit only the small ration of space coffee that he could fit with him on his shuttle ride to station. They weren’t trying to be tight-assed, it’s just difficult and expensive to send stuff into space. Pettit would have survived without coffee, but in space, it was important to have even that small ration, a reminder of life on earth.

Let me take a step back. Out of Orbit‘s flap copy will tell you the “harrowing” tale of three men on a fourteen-week mission in the International Space Station. The men must overcome the tragedy of the Columbia explosion, which killed seven of their friends and grounded the shuttle program. With no shuttle scheduled to relieve them, the men are stranded, orbiting the earth without a ride home. Eventually, NASA decided that the men must descend back to the earth in an outdated Russian Soyuz capsule, which was, “at best, a long shot.” The book jacket would have you believe that this is a tale Michael Bay would be happy to turn into a blockbuster.

Luckily for the reader, Chris Jones doesn’t write with the same hyperbolic tone his publisher uses to sell books. Out of Orbit is less about the tragic Columbia crash and the extended mission it created, and more about space coffee and space dessert and space toilets and what really accounts for living as far as a human being can live from home. …
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Author: Steve Almond

2010 (self-published)

Filed Under Literary, Short Stories, Nonfiction

(Note: to the best of my knowledge this book is only available through on-demand publishing via an Espresso Book Machine. There is one at the Harvard Bookstore)

This is a tiny little book, split into two parts of about 40 small pages each. It really won’t take but a minute to read, well, maybe an hour. One side is titled “Essays” and the other “Stories” and they are flipped 180 degrees, so neither (or both I guess) comes first. There are three separate covers to choose from, and Almond has already revised it once since the initial printing. I think I’m a fan of this new fangled on demand printing thing.

Seeing as I really only know of Almond as a fiction writer (I very much enjoyed his 2005 collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories), I opted to open with the “Stories” half first.  These are all short shorts, none longer than 4-5 paragraphs. There’s no plot thread connecting these and not much of a thematic line. Short shorts aren’t really a form I’m all that into. I read it like I do poetry, mostly for language and not so much for substance. I enjoyed these, but it’s not really the type of thing I tend to go back to. Almond is a talented writer, and the language is quite good:

This is where the cranes come to sleep, the ripped out yard-by-gravel mile between the bus terminal and the freeway still unconstructed, its fading gray ramps into nothing. They bundle here under night, clanking, steel thread and iron, the hard things of this world. Neglected by their soft owners, the cranes huddles and murmur old jokes, somber, worn, from the duties of lifting and sniffing on each other the perfume of oil going black. They know not to nod their giant necks, not to run their hooks against loose rebar. This is the hour of rest, when nothing is built or remembered. The wind through their loose parts is idle syncopation and notes whistle up, a song made with every measure of grace, as where honest labor has been done and fellowship means beast and machine. Sleep, good citizens, it is not yours to hear this sweet offering.

The “Essays” side of the book is the one I’d assumed I’d like less. Almond, however, surprised me with one of the best guides to writing I’ve come across to date.

Unlike the stories, Almond’s essays follow a sequence of questions and answers, almost as if he’s inserting his own responses into a writerly catechism.  It’s really written for students (enrolled in a program or otherwise) of writing. But anyone who entertains writing fiction or is interested at all in the writing process should defintiely give this a read. And, speaking from many dreadful workshop experiences: writing teachers should read this, as well as a few of the books I’ve suggested below.

Almond’s now-recognizable voice comes through especially clear in these essays. He reminds me a lot of George Saunders: biting and sarcastic and a little insane, yet undeniably wise. He writes in a funny yet serious tone that screams authority but doesn’t demand it. Writers should read this book, and everybody should read Steve Almond.

Similar Reads: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut), On Writing (King), Eats, Shoots, & Leaves (Truss), The Evil B.B. Chow (Almond), The Braindead Megaphone (Saunders)

This book has been chosen as  a Great Read

Author: Anthony Pagden

2008, Random House

Filed under Nonfiction, Historical

So I’ll say right away that I really enjoyed Worlds at War (I’ve nominated it a Great Read). I don’t have much experience with history books, so writing this review was a tad tricky. It would take 3000 words to summarize this book even cursorily, so I can’t do that.  Therefore, this review is pretty short, but please don’t mistake my brevity for disregard. …
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Author: Sarah Palin

HarperCollins, 2009

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoirs

This book was very tough to review. I have to be honest, I’ve started this review several times, and each time—after indulging fitful rants and political diatribes—I’ve had to delete the incoherent blather from my computer’s memory. It’s embarrassing, really, some of the emotions this book has elicited from me. I used to think I stood closer to the center of the political spectrum than to either of its poles. I used to badmouth elitists, and I used to believe that all of their derisive commoner-hating was just a mirror image of the populist movement that made Going Rogue possible. Yes, I used to believe that liberal elitists were just as bad for our collective progress as, say, the Tea Partiers. Then I saw some of the things I wrote, some of the hateful, bilious criticism of both Sarah Palin and her followers, and I realized that I sound like (gasp) an elitist asshole.

Has there ever been a more polarizing political figure than Sarah Palin? Not only do we all have an opinion of her, we all have a very strong opinion. She’s either the best thing to happen to this country, or the worst. So how, then, does one go about reviewing her book—a book that will only further calcify one’s strong opinion of its author?

Going Rogue is shit. It sucks. It is both literarily and politically a steaming pile of moose excrement. …
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This book has been selected as a Great Read.

Author: Mary Roach

W. W. Norton, 2008

Best ebook deal: Audiobook available at Seattle Public Library

If you’ve ever wondered about how a male chimpanzee woos a mate, how human pheromones function, or whether Viagra will work for women, this is the book for you. The study of sex has a long and harrowing history, which Mary Roach explores in an in-depth, but not overly technical manner. In other words, it’s a science book for non-scientists. My curiosity about Bonk was piqued when I saw Roach speak on the TED blog back in May. Her talk had a provocative title (10 Things you didn’t know about orgasm), and after listening to her for a few minutes, I had to know more.

Roach is extremely thorough with her research and it shows. In Bonk, she starts at the very beginning, at the foundations of the body of work on sex, when scientists were studying animals to try to figure out how humans functioned. She recognizes the important work of all of the players, from Kinsey (whom we’ve all heard about, thanks to the popular film) to Masters and Johnson, who studied laboratory sexual encounters for years and published their intriguing findings in 1979 – an article entitled Homosexuality in Perspective.

She explores behaviors from the 1500s, when a woman could sue her husband for impotence, and to prove the fact, a team of observers was required to enter his bedroom to verify the facts before granting a divorce. She looks at the trajectory of ED (erectile dysfunction), and the crazy lengths people have gone to cure it throughout the ages. She examines the machines that have been developed to aid in intercourse, and the orgasmic capabilities of people with spinal injuries. She is willing to participate in studies, attend talks, and go to otherwise great lengths to collect her data, and writes about these experiences very candidly. As someone hasn’t read a lot of nonfiction lately, apart from the depressing, the dry, and the painfully detailed, I found Bonk to be a breath of fresh air – it’s also full of fun trivia that you can use to wow your friends and family at the dinner table. …
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Author: Daniel Pinchbeck

Tarcher, 2007

Best ebook deal: eBooks.com

The title of Pinchbeck’s 2012 is an archeological artifact written literally in stone by the Mayans about a thousand years ago. In 2012—specifically, on December 21—the rising sun will mark the end of the 5125-year Mayan Long Count Calendar by achieving conjunction with the center of the axis of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Mayan prophecy on the completion of the Long Count is the return of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatal, translated as “Sovereign Plumed Serpent.” Quetzalcoatal is a supreme deity responsible for civilization and time itself. The Mayans believed that the end of the Long Count will mark the end of our present world civilization, when Quetzalcoatal will intervene to hand down another.

2012 is the high-energy, complex, fascinating tale of Pinchbeck’s personal pursuit of this prophecy. It’s a fun read, simultaneously a global treasure hunt, a mystical inner quest, and a personal redemption following the death of his father. It also has the ambition and scale of mythological revelation. …
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Authors: Robert Boswell and David Schweidel

Cinco Puntos Press, 2008

Best ebook deal: Unavailable

We all know the traditional arc of a story: beginning, middle, end; goal, obstacles in pursuit of goal, attainment of goal; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.

Same goes for any good treasure story. Boy discovers treasure map, boy seeks treasure, boy finds treasure.

The problem that Robert Boswell and David Schweidel had to wrestle with during the fourteen years it took to write What Men Call Treasure was this: how do you successfully tell a true story about buried treasure that doesn’t end with boy finding treasure? …
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