Archive for the ‘Conceptual: for grown ups’ Category

Book review: Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Nanci Kincaid
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:Fiction
Year of publication:2009

Sweet story having to do with making lots of money, holding friends, family, and even former spouses close, and continuing to be able to trust both strangers and those you love while spending freely.

Perhaps coming from a small town in Mississippi helps with that?


The story mostly takes place in the Bay Area of San Francisco, there's lots of Bay Area geography to parse.

Not at all deep, but I found it relaxing to read.

After all, how often do you read a story in which, after the warning music pulses and the protagonists steel themselves for a confrontation with danger, everyone (including the scary lurker) jumps in a metaphorical hot tub (actually, they go fishing) and has a heart-to-heart?

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

Book review: Poison: A Novel

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2007

Grown-up fairy tale about how the grown children and former lovers of a philandering novelist unite to defeat his widow, the children's evil stepmother, and secure his money and his legacy.

I guess that the point of the book, which is truly unpleasant to read, is that even folks who are not gifted can destroy lives, unless they are stopped. And that stopping them can take time and strategizing, even for gifted and deserving and creative people.

Or maybe, the book makes another point, which is that tremendously gifted people can so desperately hurt their less gifted spouses that they are driven to terrible evil.

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Poison: A Novel

Book review: The Great Perhaps

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Joe Meno
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:Fiction, parenting
Year of publication:2009

This novel is a deeply Confucian, metaphorical attempt to explain the outcome of the US Presidential Election of 2004. And the explanation is that many societies and ecological niches require a bully to be in charge of them in order to function well enough to survive. The bully may well shed some blood, and may often be wrong, but at least he (and it would always, pretty much, be a he), causes stuff to happen.

The metaphors here come fast and heavy-handed. The husband, Jonathan Casper, is a nerdy scientist who forgets his promises to his family as he quests after a "prehistoric" giant squid. In her off-hours, the wife, Madeline, chases a giant man-shaped cloud. At work, Madeline investigates the pecking order of pigeons by disrupting their power structures and witnessing the devastating results. (Perhaps like many academics, Madeline neglected, before she started her experiment, to understand what a pecking order is. How lucky she is to have an adviser to explicitly explain that pigeons NEED to be dominated by moderately violent males in order to avoid rampant rape and murder by the underclasses in their society.)

One of the two Casper daughters copes with her problems with excessive piety. The other responds to the chaos at home by building a bomb and ignorantly attempting to apply the Communist Manifesto to the running of her school.


Luckily, in the end, each of these characters acquires a male mentor who explicitly tells him or her what to do to solve all the problems. Just like the US got four more years of George W. Bush. Difficult problems; easy answers.

Neat. Overly neat. Well written. Psychotic.

Not for young readers, which is a shame. The book would be great for a beginner's game of "spot the metaphor".

-- Emily


If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Great Perhaps, The

Book review: The Wife

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Meg Wolitzer
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2003

First person fiction in which the wife of a famous author describes the events that lead to the end of their marriage.

Plot seems to describe a situation that I suspect is fairly common in pre-feminist societies.

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Wife, The

Book review: Oryx and Crake

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Margaret Atwood
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2003

Margaret Atwood's gift is to write entirely plausible nightmares that resonate to her readers' bones. Problem is, the nightmares she drags us into are so plausible that they do seem to be coming true.

The nightmare we inhabit in Oryx and Crake is an ecological one. Intense, violent, horribly sad. Just what we expect from the best of Margaret Atwood.

A must read.

A bit of a spoiler, below.


The germ of Oryx and Crake, and yes, in this context, that is a pun, is that at some point, pharmaceutical companies might worry if all disease were wiped out. After all, if no one ever gets sick, then, what would Big Pharma sell?

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Oryx and Crake

Book review: Midnight Champagne

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:A. Manette Ansay
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:1999

Romantic story with a spooky sub-plot, about the marriage day of a couple who know they are right for each other, despite the misgivings of the bride's family. If you want to validate someone who believes in love at first sight, then this is a book for them.

One of those "can't sleep until I've finished reading it" books. Not terribly deep, but involving.

-- Emily Berk


If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Midnight Champagne

Book review: Digging To America

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Anne Tyler
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction, historical
Year of publication:2006

How does Anne Tyler do it? When she describes a person in the context of his or her family, when she makes lips move and words emerge, we KNOW that person, everything about that person. And yet, we keep reading because we know that Tyler will continue to help us learn about not only each person in her story, but also about Life and about ourselves.

As Tyler helped us learn in The Amateur Marriage, most decisions made by anyone, especially in his or her personal life, are going to be made amateurly, and some better than others.

In Digging To America, we meet two families who adopt infants from Asia.

Betsy Donaldson, the aging, opinionated ex-hippie, is never as gentle or tactful as her wardrobe might lead one to expect. The Yazdans, a young Iranian-American couple, find themselves intimidated by Betsy's suggestions, but prove to be just as caring with their young child as Betsy is to her's.


After reading one of Anne Tyler's novels, we know so much about the characters that we feel that, if the character walked past us in a shopping mall, we might recognize him or her. And Tyler doesn't have to tell us much about each character to work her magic. This one wears a red coaoverallst; that 's hair is always perfectly coiffed. In this way are decisions made and in this way are people known, both in Tyler's novels and in real life.

Tyler's descriptions of the extended communities we build to help ourselves live ours lives are touching and absolutely real.

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Digging to America

Book review: A Beautiful Mind — The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Sylvia Nasar
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):Children 12 and up
Genre:Non-fiction, biography
Year of publication:1998

Biography of the brilliant mathematician, John Nash.
"How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.

"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."

In this workmanlike biography of the brilliant mathematician John Nash, Sylvia Nasar, a journalist, describes Nash's pioneering early mathematical discoveries, his decent into madness, and his eventual recovery and receipt of a Nobel Prize in Economics.

Along the way, Nasar describes:
  • How MIT and Princeton became celebrated research institutions.
  • How members of the mathematical community, many of whom had not been well treated by Nash, even when he was well, cooperated to make sure he survived when he was too ill to work.
  • The story of Alicia Nash, Nash's ex-wife who at tremendous cost to herself made sure that Nash was cared for throughout his life.
  • How the Nobel committee decided to award its prize in Economics to Nash (sounds like the process was as lovely as the making of sausage).
Nasar is much less successful at explaining the mathematics, Nash's as well as everyone else's. In fact, she seems to often resort to just listing mathematical disciplines and then saying that they are hard to do.

It reminded me of a visit to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit we paid a bunch to visit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry last summer. The exhibit consisted of quite a few obviously very expensively produced wooden models of sketches of machines that Da Vinci drew in his journals. Next to each model was a large poster explaining in text and diagrams what the machine was supposed to do. I think that the word "genius" was used at least once, possibly several times, in each of these posters. However, the posters never actually stated whether the machine would actually do what Leonardo intended it to do.

Yeah, so Leonardo was a genius. And with that and, what is it now, $1.50, you can get on the subway.

The cool thing about Nash was that he was a genius who did truly work at his craft. He specifically chose problems that people he respected labeled as being difficult. (Nasar seems to look down on Nash's problem selection process, or perhaps she felt that Nash's colleagues did.) Once Nash had chosen a problem, he worked on it diligently and only gave up if he realized that the problem had already been solved.

The not so cool thing about Nash was that for the first nearly 70 years of his life, he was downright nasty to pretty much everyone he met or interacted with.
  • Does meanness go with genius?
    Based on my experiences with some exceptionally brilliant people, I don't believe it has to.
  • Does madness go with mathematical genius?
    Well, Godel was certainly suicidally nuts. Turing was driven that way, but seems to have been pretty sane for most of his life. Nash's explanation, that his mathematical intuitions "just appeared" in exactly the same way as the voices in his head, makes a lot of sense to me.
    I often know things will happen long before they do. And I am often accused of "jumping to conclusions", or "being overly pessimistic", or thinking differently. And family members who think that my ideas are overly controversial are certainly quick to let me know they think I'm crazy to express them.
  • Can madness be overcome through sheer will?
    Seems like maybe Nash has succeeded in doing this, but maybe it's only because of his genius that he did. In explaining his recovery, he talks about how he now post-processes his thoughts and kind of throws away the ones that seem not-normal.

A Beautiful Mind is not a book for young readers. It describes a brilliant man's entire life (and if his mind was indeed "beautiful", it seems to me that it was beautiful in the way it processed mathematics, not beautiful in its humanity or generosity), including his homosexual experimentation, his fathering of a child outside of wedlock, his refusal to marry or even care for his mistress, and his neglect of his child. However, it gives interesting insights into the functioning of the intellectual community (and it most certainly is a community) and the advantages and disadvantages of being an unusually gifted person in our society.

Similar books

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Beautiful Mind, A: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

Book review: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Janna Levin
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:Fiction, biography
Year of publication:2006

What must it be like to be so intelligent that you can't trust anyone enough to believe him or her? So confident that you are right and that everyone else is wrong that you ignore the woman who loves you when she tells you that you must eat (and assures you that the food is really, truly not poisoned)? What must it be like to know that you are moral, that you have saved civilization, but to be convicted of immorality and forced to deny your true self?

Janna Levin (our madman who is not at all mad) worms us inside the minds of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and forces us to look out into the world through their eyes. When we hear Gödel's story, we may be tempted to think that paranoid insanity is part of terrific genius. But then what are we to think of Alan Turing (yes, he clearly was on the autistic spectrum, but he was not crazy and not harmful to himself or to others), who only wanted to solve very hard problems and love the occasional man and was forced to ingest hormones that destroyed his body and his self-respect?


A very sad, but important book. A reminder that we must, must, must help our gifted children find communities in which brilliant minds are nurtured and supported and cherished for their idiosyncrasies.

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, A

Book review: The Anansi Boys

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Tell your friends about this blog entry
Tell friends about this blog entry
Author:Neil Gaiman
Reading Level (Conceptual):For grown-ups
Reading Level (Vocabulary):For grown-ups
Genre:fiction
Year of publication:2005

Fairy tale for us grumps about two sons of Anansi, the Spider God.

The upbeat moral: We all have all we need inside us. We just need to know that to be able to find it.

-- Emily Berk

If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Anansi Boys, The