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By Marc Velasquez, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Deborah Baker
2011, Graywolf Press
Filed under: Biography, Nonfiction
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
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Deborah Baker’s The Convert is billed as a biography of Margaret Marcus, an American Jewish woman who became an influential voice in the radicalization of Islam and fueled the modern understanding of Jihad. Baker builds Convert on extensive (but not quite exhaustive) research, primary source material, and interviews with living key players.
Even so, it’s a stretch to suggest that Convert reads like a typical biography. Excluding notes and acknowledgement, the book checks in at a relatively slim 223 pages. Those pages are packed tight with information about Marcus and her new Pakistani environment. But in the end, those pages don’t possess a firm sense of the truth. Nor does it feel like the truth is entirely unknowable. In many ways, the absence of such a conclusion could make a biography feel hasty, as if the writer had simply given up on knowing her subject. In this case, The Convert takes an interesting turn: it becomes a clever and well-written meditation on the relationship between a writer and her subject. …
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By Sambath Meas, on June 22nd, 2011 Author: Joel Brinkley
2011, Black, Inc.
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
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8 |
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In his foreword to Marie Alexandrine Martin’s Cambodia: A Shattered Society, Jean-François Baré wrote, “At the head of the list of vanquished, I would obviously be inclined, as would Marie Martin, to place the Khmer people, a martyred people. But the Khmer people also produced the Pol Pots, the Ieng Sarys, the Khieu Samphans, the barely adolescent yothea who, under their leaders’ directions, used methodical and murderous obstinacy in applying Bertolt Brecht’s sorrowful aphorism: ‘If something about a country is wrong, you have to change the people and choose another one’–this same Khmer people, imbued among other interacting factors with a concept of hierarchy (neak chuo, knowing one’s place) that worked both to help make Cambodia so peaceful and to make the Khmer revolution so terrible when ‘the children were in power,’ through an astonishing and terrible structural reversal.”
Forget about the tribes (whose countries are now called Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam) that migrated from their ancestral home in southern China to Southeast Asia and engulfed the lands of Mon, Khmer, and Malay. Forget about Thailand and Vietnam’s tug-of-war for supremacy in this region, using Cambodia as a rope, the ironclad colonization by the French, the American bombings, or Vietnam and China’s influences. Disregard the fact that the Khmer Rouge leaders consisted of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese and studied Marxism in Paris. What Jean-François Baré is driving at in his foreword is: there’s no one to blame for Cambodia’s weakness and demise but the Khmers themselves.
No one revels in this sentiment more than Joel Brinkley in Cambodia’s Curse. He devotes his entire book to show how the Khmer leaders (psychopathic, autocratic, and kleptocratic) and people (ignorant, stupid, lazy, foolish and gullible) are a hopeless case and therefore, can’t be saved. Basically, the donors should not give Cambodia’s government any more money and should pack up and go home.
In fact, the premise of Cambodia’s Curse is to debunk those who attributed the American bombing to the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ultimately killed almost two million of its own people and destroyed its entire nation. …
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By Aaron Block, on June 8th, 2011  Author: Bob Mould
2011 Little, Brown
Filed under: Memoir
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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If you aren’t familiar with Bob Mould, listen to Hüsker Dü’s cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”—the breathtaking speed, anger, and emotional muscularity of that performance will give you a good idea of the cultural shorthand that’s been attached to Mould’s name since the mid 80s. Not that he didn’t earn his reputation for peevishness and volatility honestly—he admits as much in this autobiography (note the subtitle: The Trail of Rage and Melody).
Mould and co-writer Michael Azerrad clearly haven’t set out to dispel the image of Mould as a temperamental rocker, but they do argue that the black-and-white image—a 21-year-old wailing his anger and frustration, throttling his guitar as he fronts a legendary post-punk band—that’s just one slide in the carousel. The Bob Mould of See A Little Light is candid and self-effacing, and eager to come to terms with his every incarnation. In fact, Light has more in common with Mould’s songwriting, which is often aggressive but just as likely to be tender and vulnerable. …
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By Sean Clark, on June 3rd, 2011 Author: Jonah Keri
2011, Ballantine Books
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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As a Red Sox fan, I don’t really savor the recent success of the Tampa Bay (née Devil-) Rays. Thus far in 2011, it appears that for the third year running, the three best teams in the American League will play in the AL East, meaning no matter what, they can’t all be in the postseason. Before the Rays’ ascendance, I loved when the Sox played the Rays. It sometimes got a bit feisty, and the Sox would almost always take home 2 wins. Tampa was seriously a joke. Then came 2008, and with it mohawks and 9=8, etc. Now, as a Sox fan, I see Tampa as a bigger threat than the aging, overpaid Yankees.
In The Extra 2%, Jonah Keri starts with a team that was a perennial doormat and follows them as they scramble out of the gutter hand over fist. He is probing, funny, and critical, all of which make for an engrossing and revelatory read. I particularly like the angle Keri takes on the business side. His love for the sport is readily noticeable on every page, but his contempt for the league is almost palpable. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 18th, 2011  Author: Wilfred Santiago
2011, Fantagraphics Books
Filed under: Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Biography
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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5 |
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| Art Style... |
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My father loved baseball. When I was young, he told me stories of his favorite players as if they were superheroes. He held none in higher esteem than Roberto Clemente. As a result, I believed Roberto Clemente had superpowers. I believed he floated through the outfield and flew between the base paths. I believed the ball exploded off of his bat and that he had a cannon for an arm.
In the years since, I have read as much about Clemente as possible. And while each article or book reinforced my belief that Clemente was both an incredible ballplayer and incredible human being, none of them seemed to satisfy the childhood fascination I had for him. I should have known, given the superhero aspects of the image in my head, that I needed a comic book. With his graphic novel, 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Wilfred Santiago delivered exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
Take, for instance, one of the book’s first pages: …
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By Marc Velasquez, on May 5th, 2011  Author: Jon Krakauer
2011, Byliner
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Literary
[Only available as an ebook from Amazon]
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Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit excites me for a couple of reasons. First, I’m a big fan of Krakauer’s work. I find his writing entertaining, enlightening and accessible despite it being so heavily founded on in-depth research. Not many writers can make fact-reporting as exciting as Krakauer continually does. But I’m also excited by Deceit because I’m a huge fan of long form Journalism. At a lean 20,000 words, Deceit is longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book; it’s sort of like a nonfiction novella, and it’s the perfect length for its subject.
What excites me most is that Byliner, the company that published Deceit, has promised 20 similar projects in the near future. Unfortunately, Deceit and Byliner’s second title—Into the Forbidden Zone, William T. Vollmann’s first hand account of the nuclear disaster in Japan—are only available from Amazon as “Kindle Singles,” and if Byliner releases future titles with that sort of exclusivity, it could be pretty annoying. However, I have to admit that the exclusive release of Into the Forbidden Zone did force me to download the “Kindle for PC” deally, so they might know what they are doing.
If you follow news about books, or news about Afghanistan, or maybe just news in general, you know that Three Cups of Deceit is Krakauer’s fact-based gut-punch to Three Cups of Tea and it’s philanthropist author, Greg Mortenson. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 29th, 2011 [This entertaining baseball memoir is a C4 Great Read. Get The Bullpen Gospels and other Great Reads from our Powell's Bookshelf.]
 Author: Dirk Hayhurst
2010, Citadel Press
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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| Language..... |
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| Entertainment..... |
10 |
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Dirk Hayhurst was a pro baseball player. A long reliever in the San Diego Padres’ farm system, he was mostly a career minor leaguer. This memoir is an honest and quite fun look at a life that is often not fun. Hayhurst is slightly eccentric, a not-that-jocky dork (just google “Garfoose”). For much of the book, he is more an observer than a participant, which would feel weird if we didn’t know he was a teetotaling, twenty-something virgin during the majority of this story–not at all the type of guy you imagine in a farm league locker room.
Although the book opens with a minor league postseason series and a few key games and plays punctuate the book, the majority of the memoir occurs off the field–sitting in the bullpen, in a team hotel, or aboard a cross-country bus. Near the beginning of the book, we see Hayhurst in the off-season after a bad year in a AA league, living on his curmudgeonly grandmother’s floor and working at a local batting cage in order to afford time to work on his slider. Throughout the Gospels we learn more about Hayhurst’s unenviable home and family. His father is disabled and emotionally unresponsive; his brother is an abusive drunk; his mother is a frazzled victim caught in the middle. Mostly estranged from them, Hayhurst struggles though the minor leagues with middling success and a craving for his familial approval seemingly his only motivator to keep trying.
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on April 15th, 2011  Author: Andre Dubus III
2011, Norton
Filed Under: Literary, Memoir, Nonfiction
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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I had well-defined expectations about Townie before I’d ever actually opened it. I’d read too much about it going in, about the violence and the street fighting, the one-punch knockouts that sent men to the hospital choking down their own teeth. Even the cover and the flap copy will lead you to believe that this book is about a street-tough kid punching his way through the world.
But Andre Dubus III’s memoir is much more than a fighter’s tale. It’s about filling the voids in one’s life, voids left primarily by absent parents. It’s about the wounds violence creates; about the emotion, or lack of emotion required to be violent towards another human being. It’s about the difference between creativity and destruction. And ultimately, it’s about redemption, not only for the memoirist, but for his father as well.
In other words, it wasn’t at all what I expected, but it turned out to be a whole lot more. …
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By Sean Clark, on April 14th, 2011 Author: Robert Weintraub
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Historical.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Here’s a good reading choice for the start of the baseball season (although I can’t help think that I’m partially to blame for the Red Sox’s abysmal stumbling out the gate by reading a book about the Yankees’ first world series win. Oh well, at least we took 2 out of 3 in the NY series.). Ostensibly about the creation of Yankee Stadium, this is a book about a changing of the guard in baseball, when small ball National League play fell second-fiddle to the power-hitting American League. Weintraub writes like a Yanks fan, but I can’t begrudge him that, since the team is the star of his show. This is a fun and accessible book that takes a look at a just a few years in the long history of baseball. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 11th, 2011 Author: Sean B. Carroll
2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed Under: Nonfiction.
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| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Remarkable Creatures is a somewhat deceiving title. It’s not about ancient creatures, but rather the men and women–geologists and paleontologists, naturalists and anthropologists, chemists and geneticists–who have strived to uncover how life works. This is a popular-science-angled history of evolutionary science.
Carroll aptly depicts a universal desire in humans to understand the structure of the larger world around them. The question of human origin has always been buried in that desire. Religions have been fielding this question for millennia and, for almost that whole time, faith has violently monopolized the official answer. And so, the study of evolution has required cautious steps. Carroll begins his story with Darwin, and with those who inspired him (Humbolt, et al). From there he travels through eras and schools of thought, documenting how our knowledge of the world and of ourselves, well, evolved over the past 150 years. …
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