jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

I thought this was a perfectly good story, well worth the hour spent reading it, and nicely packaged to boot. It didn't have anything especially magical or interesting over any other well-done retelling (or inventing) of classical mythical tales, in this one set with the Norse gods.

An indispensible biography of Charles Dickens. Aptly subtitled, "A Life Defined By Writing" -- this biography focuses on Dickens' writing, not just his novels but also his short stories, journalism and editing. The process of writing just about every number of every novel is detailed (the major ones were released in 19 monthly installments -- with the final one being a double issues), often down to where Dickens was living, who was visiting him, and what time pressures he was under. In contrast, the death of Dickens' sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, which might get a chapter in a more psychological or personal treatment of Dickens, initially gets just a single paragraph that a less-than-fully alert reader might miss. But then Slater returns to Hogarth's death multiple times as Dickens writes it into books from the Old Curiousity Shop to David Copperfield. Although Dickens' relationship with Ellen Ternen gets more space, Slater refuses to delve or speculate -- and again seems mostly interested in Ternan as a model for some of the women in Dickens' later novels as well as in the geographic pull she exerts on him.

The process by which novels and other writings were composed would not be of interest for most writers. But for Dickens, it is integral. Whether he was sending back letters from America to support his trip there or resuscitating his latest periodical by contributing a novel, the process was an important part of the end result. Great Expectations, for example, would have been a different had Dickens written it in monthly installments as originally planned rather than the weekly numbers he ultimately utilized to help promote his publication All the Year Round.

Slater is an excellent writer and an authority on Dickens who lets his subject speak for himself through extensive excerpts. Although I would not recommend this for casual or light reading (Peter Ackroyd's Dickens would be a better choice for that -- notwithstanding it's 1,000+ page length), there isn't a better book for those who are interested.

A consistently entertaining and enlightening book about "Operation Mincemeat," the British World War II deception that planted a dead body with forged papers claiming (contrary to reality) that the Anglo-US forces were going to invade Greece, not Sicily. In large part due to this deception, the Germans reinforced Greece over Sicily -- contributing to the success of the first Allied attack into Western Europe.

The book is exhaustive but not exhausting, tracing every aspect from the initial idea, the complications associated with locating a suitable body, what to put in the pockets to make it look genuine (theater tickets from what was meant to be his last night in London), how to insert it in the water (by submarine, but faking a plane accident), where to leave it (cost of Spain, so it would fall into German-sympathetic hands), how to reinforce the deception, etc. The amount of work that went into it on the British side is extraordinary, for example going through dozens of drafts of the forged letters to get them just right.

What is also extraordinary is how despite, or in some cases even because of, all this work how much of it was done carelessly and ended up succeeding through a combination of luck, German ineptitude, and possibly even fifth columnists in key positions on the German side. From the sound of it more than one hundred people were in on the deception which, from my experience, is about ninety more people than can be counted on to keep a secret. Most surprisingly, the body lay in a London morgue for two months before being delivered off the water

This short story cycle is set in what I believe is a fictional street, Red Dust Lane, in Shanghai. The stories are each labeled with a year -- starting in 1949 and ending in 2005. They all begin with prefatory material "This is the last issue of The Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year XXXX" which serves as a frame for the story that follows, generally a simple story of the local residents, often with their daily lives shaped by the massive events around them.

By themselves, none of the individual stories are outstanding. But the whole is greater the sum of the parts and collectively they form an enchanting social history of modern urban China. They have a certain rhythm and repetition that grows on you, with a few repeated characters and, in at least two cases, a follow-up story set several decades after the original.

This beautifully illustrated graphic novella is set in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe, as modern mass production is beginning to displace traditional crafts. It tells the story of a young Jewish man's attempts to sell his carpets as he travels from his tradition market to a new store and ultimately attempts to return home. The story unfolds in a single day, from early morning until late at night, but captures and entire world in flux. The story is simple, the dialogue relatively minimal, but it has a certain simplicity and power to it.

Fantastic conclusion to the story that began in And Then Everything Unraveled. This book follows Delia Truesdale from New York to Buenos Aires as she resolves the mystery of her missing mother while advancing on her relationship with her boyfriend and still managing the occasional bit of homework.

Not nearly as good as his biography as Cicero, maybe because this book was not meant to be a biography. It tells the history of Rome from Vespasian through Hadrian, with about half of the book being focused on Hadrian's rule. Unfortunately, the underlying sources are relatively sparse and the book is filled with perhaps and maybes that link Hadrian to the world and events of his time. You don't feel like you know Hadrian and to the degree you do he doesn't seem particularly complex or interesting, unlike Cicero.

That said, overall the book presents a good history of the Roman empire at it's peak -- about 50-150 years after the well chronicled period of the end of the Republic and first series of Emperors. The portrait of that time through the lens of a relatively tranquil and consolidation period was interesting and worth reading -- although lacking in the drama and excitement of the end of the Republic.

The book begins: "To the rocket scientist, you are the problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix."

The remainder of the book is just as good. It deals with the human aspects of spaceflight -- most of them a function of being in a confined space, zero gravity, and outside of you the void. The chapters focus on different issues. One is on going to the bathroom in space, which turns out to be remarkably complicated -- gravity is both how your body knows you need to urinate and also how excrement makes it's way out. Another is one eating in space -- and the problems of crumbs floating around in zero gravity, getting in people's eyes, noses, and fouling up equipment. Other chapters are isolation chambers on earth where people train for space, the Japanese method of psychologically screening potential astronauts (they examine their origami), the careers of famous chimp astronauts, the role of cadavers in crash tests, and training for ultra-high altitude escapes.

The limitation of the book is sometimes it is overly "reported," with extended descriptions of how the author visited such and such facility, who she met, what she found, etc. The author at times seems too taken by her own humor and riffs. Some of the tangents are interesting but there are too many of them for my taste. But these are minor flaws compared to a fascinating book that will forever change the way you see space travel.

A beautifully translated play, as usually, by Richard Wilbur. The play alternates between comedy, farce, fantasy, romance, and tragedy -- without falling in to any of the conventional classical forms. I preferred both Corneille's The Liar and El Cid (each of which have only some of the above qualities), but this one is also enjoyable.

The sequel to The Hunter is nearly as good. In this story, Parker continues his revenge on The Outfit (a seemingly more upscale version of the Mafia), organizing caper after caper to hit them where it hurts, in their pocketbooks. It is only nearly as good because it lacks some of the novelty you get with the introduction of a new character and also some of the closeness of the betrayal and revenge depicted in the previous book.

Darwyn Cooke, the illustrator/adapter of this book, is evidently doing two more over the next two years. Should be time in the interim to read at least one of the 24 original Parker novels that Richard Stark (the pen name for Donald Westlake) actually wrote.