Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos *** (of 4)

 Asia, Book Reviews, NON FICTION  No Responses »
Aug 312014
 

ambitionEvan Osnos has been living in China for the last eight years and reporting for the New Yorker for much of that time.  Age of Ambition is his compilation of perceptions of a country undergoing transition from the third world to the first at the speed of a bullet train.  For the record, China is constructing more bullet train railways, and highways, more quickly than any country ever has in the history of the earth.  That rush to modernity has been accompanied by graft, kickbacks, errors, phenomenal success and total government control.  Throughout this book the government’s secret management of the internet, publications, journalism, freedom of assembly, and religious thought remains omnipresent and mysterious, just like one of the large, unmarked buildings on Tiananmen Square occupied by government censors.  Osnos’ focus remains on Chinese intellectuals that dance on the edge of permissible thought in China, sometimes exciting millions of followers and at other times paying for their transgressions with jail terms.  It isn’t the whole story of China, the country is too large, diverse, and dynamic, but it is an interesting one.  Makes you wonder what an analogous analysis of the U.S. might look like.

11/22/63 by Stephen King *** (of 4)

 America, Audio Book, Book Reviews, FICTION, Suspense  No Responses »
Aug 202014
 

11-22-63The premise is a standard trope of science fiction: time travel.  And each time the main character, Jake Epping, closes his eyes and taps with his toe in the back of a dark closet to find the rabbit hole that will transfer him from the year 2011 to 1963 you have to be much better than me at suspending disbelief and suppressing a giggle.  Nevertheless, once you’ve cross the threshold, you will find yourself fully enveloped by Stephen King’s prodigious talents as a master story teller.  Epping has the chance to go back in history and uses his opportunity to undo injustices he knows will be forthcoming.  He saves a friend’s friend from a crippling hunting accident and protects a work colleague from a father so abusive that in the late 1950s the drunken father murders his wife and most of his children with a sledge hammer.  Then Epping takes on Lee Harvey Oswald with the aim of preventing the assassination of JFK.  The reader is asked to overlook the fact that Epping’s primary means of preventing bad stuff from happening is to murder criminals before they commit their acts.  Hmmm.  If you get that far, then you can wrestle with what additional impacts a change in the past will have on the future and whether it makes more sense to devote yourself to the woman you love or, because there really isn’t any other option in this book, protect President Kennedy and the future of the world.

Bread and Wheat

 Sourdoughs and SCOBYs  No Responses »
Aug 202014
 
Still warm, all ready for dipping in white bean hummus.

Still warm, all ready for dipping in white bean hummus.

Here is a wheat combine. Sue and I got to ride along for the early August wheat harvest on the farm of Karen and Joe Sablyak. Crawford County, PA.

Here is a wheat combine. Sue and I got to ride along for the early August wheat harvest on the farm of Karen and Joe Sablyak. Crawford County, PA.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr **** (of 4)

 Book Reviews, Europe, FICTION, FOUR STARS ****, History, Nazis, Suspense, World War II  No Responses »
Aug 112014
 

0905-All-the-Light-no-carsTwo parallel stories.  In France, a teenage girl, blind since the age of five, has her life turned upside down when the Germans invade Paris.  She flees with her father to Saint Malo on the coast where she lives under German occupation in further darkness when, for her safety, she is secluded in an uncle’s house.  The uncle, a veteran of WW I, suffers from PTSD and never leaves the house.  Her father, as any solo parent of a blind girl would, does everything in his power to protect her.  He constructs miniature wooden models of Saint Malo in case his daughter ever needs to learn to navigate its streets.  Concurrently, a German orphan, also a young teen, faces a grueling life in the mines when he reaches the age of 15.  Except, he is immensely adept at working radios, yet another means of communicating with the world without really seeing.  His skills are so great he is drafted into the Nazi army, where he blindly follows orders, but worries that the orders are illogical, if not immoral.  The book is aptly named.