Book Review: The Surgeon’s Mate by Patrick O’Brian

Author: Patrick O’Brian
Title: The Surgeon’s Mate
Publication Info: Blackstone Audiobooks (2005), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD
ISBN: 0786177845

Summary/Review:

The Aubrey/Maturin series picks up where The Fortune of War left off, and the surgeon’s mate of the title is not Stephen Maturin’s surgical assistant but his on again/off again romantic interest Diana Villiers. I’m always turned of by the Villiers storylines because she is a dull and disagreeable character.  Fortunately the Maturin-Villiers story is balance by some seafaring adventure and battles, spying and intrigue, and even our lead characters locked in a French prison.  I’m a bit thrown by the timeline as it seems this book takes place 4 years prior to The Fortune of War but it’s a rollicking good tale all the same.

Rating: **1/2

Book Review: The Happiest Toddler on the Block by Harvey Karp, M.D.

Author: Harvey Karp, M.D.
Title: The Happiest Toddler on the Block
Publication Info: New York, N.Y. : Bantam Books, 2008.
ISBN: 9780553805215

Summary/Review:

Karp’s follow-up to The Happiest Baby on the Block offers very practical advice to parents for dealing with the toddler years of 1 to 4 years old.  I think it’s an even better book partly because it avoids the “infomercial style” of writing and is a more practical manual.  The basic gist of the book is that when a child starts to throw a tantrum the parent should acknowledge what is upsetting by repeating back it back (“the fast food rule”) and to use a simple vocabulary of words called “toddlerese” that toddlers will understand most when they are upset.  This book doesn’t have all the answers, for example, what to say to your son when you have no idea what is making him upset.  Overall though I found it a book with useful advice and practically organized.

Rating: ****

Book Review: Made To Stick

Author: Dan Heath & Chip Heath
Title: Made To Stick
Publication Info: Santa Ana, CA : Books on Tape, p2007.
ISBN: 141593553X

Summary/Review:

This book is basically a guide for people who want to get their ideas across to other people and will be a useful managers, teachers, advertisers, and anyone else with a good idea who doesn’t know how to share it.  The Heaths discuss factors such as the Curse of Knowledge where experts know their field so well that they can’t explain it to outsiders.  There are also tips on creating stories, often with surprise elements, to capture the attention of your audience.  The best parts are the many examples such as teacher Jane Elliot’s “Eye of the Storm” method to teach children about prejudice, urban legends, Subway sandwich shops’ Jared campaign, the “Don’t Mess With Texas” effort to reduce littering and the best car commercial ever.  It’s a good, quick, and intstructional read for anyone needing to learn how to better communicate their ideas.

Recommended books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex by Jeffrey Kluger, and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
Rating: ***

Book Review: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Around The World For a Good Book selection for: Turkey

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Title: Snow
Publication Info: Vintage (2005)
ISBN: 0375706860

Summary/Review:

I found this book very challenging and it took me a long time to read it (and even longer to write about it) so this review may not do the novel justice. Snow is about an expatriate poet name Ka who returns to Turkey from Germany ostensibly to write about young Islamic women in the provincial city of Kars who are committing suicide in protest of the secular state’s rules against wearing the veil.  His ulterior motive is to reunite with Ipek, a beautiful woman he’s longed for over many years who is recently divorced.  In his time in Kars, the city is isolated by a snow storm and a military coup is staged to round up political Islamists.  Ka finds himself in the midst of much political maneuvering and finds himself inspired to write a cycle of poems ending a long dry spell.

There are flashes of humor in the book such as a newspaper publisher who writes stories before they happen (and is often correct) and the the theatricality of political movements is satirized by having an acting company stage the coup during a theater performance.  Much of this book though is fairly bleak, with a lot of emptiness, misunderstanding, intrigue, violence, and torture.  The symbol of the snow is exploited to make the reader feel trapped as well in the claustrophobic microcosm of Turkish politics and religion. People in this book never really speak or act like people would in real life but instead are often symbolic representations of particular point of view, probably one of the factors the made this a book to read slowly.

Pamuk also kicks the reader in the gut.  SPOILER ALERT: Midway through the book Ka finally realizes happiness by making love with Ipek.  The very next chapter flashes forward four years to Ka – alone and miserable – being murdered in Frankfurt.  Reading the rest of the book knowing that there’s not a shred of hope for Ka is all the more challenging. END SPOILER

I found this book an interesting means of learning about the complex nature of modern Turkey.  I appreciate Pamuk’s literary style, but I can’t say I “enjoyed” the book as much as I was unsettled by it.

Favorite Passages:

“The issue is the same for all real poets.  If you’ve been happy too long, you become banal.  By the same token, if you’ve been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers. . . .  Happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time.  Afterward either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.” – p. 127

 

Rating: ***1/2

Photopost: Autumn Color

Autumn in New England brings beautiful, crisp days and brilliant colors to the trees.  I think this year’s foliage has been particularly brilliant.  The past couple of weeks I’ve been taking photos around the city, mainly in Arnold Arboretum and collected them in a photo gallery called Autumn Color.

I also had the delightful serendipity of coming across a parade of animals on Charles Street as I was going to take the Boston By Foot Tour of the Month of Bay Village.  This was a reprisal of the Bay Village Tour of the Month I reviewed last year.  I added new photos to my Bay Village photo gallery with as special emphasis on capturing the autumn colors.

39th Annual Christmas Revels

I’ve promoted the Revels before on my blog because it is an organization that promotes song and dance, participation, community and tradition.  This is most apparent from the annual Christmas Revels productions at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA.

This year I have extra reason to be excited about the Revels as I’ve managed to get myself into the Revels Chorus.  Despite my little experience and trouble remembering my bass parts I’ve been warmly welcomed into the community of performers at the heart of the Christmas Revels.  Now all we need is you to come be an enthusiastic audience member.  I guarantee you will have a wonderful time.

There will be 17 performances between Dec. 11-27 and tickets are on sale now!

Related posts:

• Christmas Revels 2006
• Pub Sing

Book Review: The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton

Author: Alain De Botton
Title: The Art of Travel
Publication Info: Recorded Books, LLC (2002), Audio CD
ISBN: 1402545096

Previously Read by Same Author: The Architecture of Happiness

Summary/Review:

This book reflects on travel focusing on the little things such as the novelty of the commonplace in a new place, disorientation, the boredom of travel, and even ponders whether travel for pleasure is even a necessity.  Along the way he shows travel through the eyes of various artists: Van Gogh, Wordsworth, Flauber, Von Humboldt and others.  He even details how artists create the vision we have of the destinations we wish to visit.  This is all written in the intellectual vein of someone who attends a literary salon, so  if that’s not your thing, you won’t like this book.  I found it brain-teasingly good, but I think that de Botton is meant to be read more than heard so I don’t recommend the audiobook.

Rating: ***

Book Review: The Little Book by Selden Edwardse

Author: Selden Edwards
Title: The Little Book
Publication Info: Penguin Audio (2008), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD
ISBN:  0143143514

Summary/Review:

Wheeler Burden is a lot of things:

• son of a revered athlete and war hero
• a successful – if not ambitious – high school and college baseball pitcher
• a rock & roll superstar
• heir to a mentor’s collection of writings about fin-de-siecle Vienna which he publishes into a book
• a time traveler

I do love a time travel adventure and this is a pretty good one as the protagonist Burden suddenly arrives in Vienna in 1898.  Armed with the knowledge provided by his teacher “the venerable Haze” he successfully navigates a time half-a-century before his birth and becomes acquainted with the intellectual socialites of the time.  More surprisingly he meets quite a few people he already knows.  The novel jumps between Burden’s story in Vienna and biographical stories of three generations of the Burden family. Along the way, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Buddy Holly among others play a part.

It’s not a perfect book as Edwards’ dialogue and characterization is kind of weak, and there’s no end to the superlatives he lays on the characters we’re supposed to like.  But there’s enough of a cracking adventure to make it worth a read.  File it under intellectual brain candy.

Recommended books: To Say Nothing of the Dog; or, How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis, Time and Again by Jack Finney, and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  Also reminiscent of John Irving’s early works because of the New England boarding school and Vienna connections.   Said to be inspired by Fin-de-Siecle by Carl Schorske.
Rating: ***

Book Review: What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science

Author: edited by Max Brockman
Title: What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science
Publication Info: New York : Vintage Books, 2009.
ISBN:  9780307389312

Summary/Review:

This short book is a collection of essays about the future of science and was a nice illuminating read.  Oddly enough, much of the material was already familiar to a dilettante like myself which I guess shows the efficacy of listening to podcasts of Radiolab and Scientific American.  The title is a little misleading as the majority of this book is “what’s now” with the authors not speculating much about the future, which is good science.  Popular topics among the essays are climate change, neurology as it relates to memory, language, and morality, and human evolution.  Favorite essays include Lera Boroditsky: “How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?”, Nathan Wolfe: “The Aliens Among Us” (about viruses), and Katerina Harvarti: “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind.”  This is a good book to pick up if you’re interested in a quick overview of contemporary scientific research.

Recommended books: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science–From the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human by Chip Walter
Rating: ***

Photopost: Lake Wicwas

Some photographs from our recent weekend at Craig’s lodge by Lake Wicwas in New Hampshire.

Pinecone roasting on an open fire.

The bear explores it's grounds at the Squam Lakes Natural Sciences Cener.

A glass of Craig's homebrew with blueberries by the lake

Trouble the water

The Lake Wicwas Monster's eye view

All these photos and more in my online Lake Wicwas gallery.