jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

This book alternates between a biography of the South American explorer Percy Fawcett and a first person account of the author's attempts to follow in his footsteps. Fawcet went missing when on a quest to find the "Lost City of Z," his version of Eldorado, deep in the Amazon. About 80 years later David Grann tells the story of his quest to follow the story of Fawcett -- from archives in London to the deepest Amazon -- in the first person.

Anyone who has read 1491 knows the ending of this book. But even with that minimal suspense, the book is riveting in parts but repetitive in others. The first description of bees that stung your eyes or maggots that buried in your flesh was chilling. The 100th, less so. Much of the book is clearly necessary and illuminates the end of the age of non-scientific explorers. But other parts of the book appear more like padding than an essential part of the narrative.

Overall, a quick read and recommended.

I thought Nicole Krauss' The History of Love was one of the best new novels in the last decade. Unfortunately, I didn't think Great House was nearly as good, but it was still a worthwhile read.

Great House is told through four alternating stories that shift back and forth over the course of five decades and four continents. The closest thing to a fixed point between the stories is a large antique wooden desk which makes it way from person to person. The other backdrop is history: the Holocaust, Israel's wars, Pinochet's coup, although we don't see any of these events, we just hear about how they have affected characters and the large desk that runs through all of them.

The disappointment was twofold: (1) the different overlapping stories don't come together in a satisfying resolution, in retrospect it clearly wasn't the author's intention that they do, but it still made it all feel less coherent and (2) there was something hollow and empty about the characters, again appears to have been the author's intention, but greatly at odds with the life-filled characters in The History of Love.

This novel marks Sturman's entry into young adult, although at times it is hard to see how Delia Truesdale is less mature than Rachel Benjamin (leaving aside whether that is a compliment to the former or an insult to the later). It's an exciting read from beginning to end, mixing the genres of classic orphan novels with young adult and mystery others. I won't spoil the ending for you. Then again, neither will Sturman.

Really quite stunning. I liked Manifold: Time but found it occasionally uneven and that it didn't entirely fit together. But this book was a lot better (and I recommend starting with it, there's no sense in which this is a sequel).

Manifold: Space is an exploration of the Fermi Paradox -- why we don't see life elsewhere in the universe. And the answers it gives are quite chilling but ultimately hopeful. It is as much about evolution as physics as it explores the adaptations of humans living everywhere from Mercury to Triton -- not to mention the other non-carbon based life forms the star travellers find throughout the universe, in many cases dead or dying from violent expansionary cultures and ultimately recurrent physical phenomenon themselves.

Highly evolved squid fly to an asteroid with a portal to other universes. Overall brilliant, but a little loose around the edges -- especially the last fifty or so pages traveling through the multiverse.

Overwritten, did not feel reliable, too much was repeating the standard story, develops fully the notion that genetic evolution is ongoing and has played a role not just in the origins of humans but in their prehistory and even history.

An outstanding book. A joy to read from beginning to end, learned an enormous amount, all processed through the lens of the history of Shakespeare authorship controversies. In particular, the book asks why so many people have come to believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays attributed to him but that someone else, like Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere of Oxford, did. This view was held by people from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud to several Supreme Court justices today and even the New York Times has written agnostically on the subject of who wrote Shakespeare.

Shapiro traces the history of Shakespeare studies from his death through the early 19th Century, documenting the twists and turns of how little fragments of evidence about Shakespeare's life emerged, dotted with several episodes of forgery, and culminating in a number of prominent Shakespeare scholars starting in the 1700s who viewed his works through the prism of psychology, autobiography, and other similar perspectives.

Shapiro argues that it was these well meaning attempts to fill in the gaps with other disciplines that also opened up the belief that the same person who was a moneylender and a grain merchant could not have written about courts and kings and the other aspects of Shakespeare. The first set of theories focused on Bacon, and comical ideas about elaborate ciphers in Shakespeare's work. This was followed by the view that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's works, a theory undeterred by de Vere's death in 1604, a decade before the final Shakespeare play.

Shapiro explains why these theories appealed to so many people (e.g., Twain was writing his autobiography, believed that all of his works were written directly from his own experience, and could not imagine someone else doing otherwise). And he also gives a compelling case for Shakespeare's authorship, although not one that would persuade any die-hard conspiracy theorists.

Ultimately, Shapiro writes a testament to Shakespeare's imagination and range, something that is the ultimate rebuttal of the attempt to reduce the plays to simple roman a clef's about court figures or simple ciphers.

What makes the book so interesting is not that it is worth devoting much mental evidence to the anti-Stratfordians but how much about Shakespeare's life, work, subsequent reception, and evolution of literature, is illuminated by looking at how this movement emerged and gained an increasing amount of strength.

A short graphic novel, the first installment of a trilogy. One cannot fully judge the merits of this volume when the other two come out. In many places, it is an elliptical, dreamlike tease. If the future volumes do more to tie all of this together, then this might be the beginning of a brilliant graphic novel. If not, then I would be somewhat disappointed.

The story is told in multiple drug/dream-like episodes of a young man taking pills, experimenting with performance art, having a relationship with a good relationship with a photographer and a bad relationship with his father, and flashbacks or dreams about the past or future

The Giver deserves its status as a classic dystopian novel. Probably best read as an adolescent but since it came out when I was 23 I didn't have that choice.

In some ways it is a pastiche of previous dystopian novels. The breeding, control and tracking of children is from Brave New World -- albeit without the hierarchy. The "sameness" that is the goal of the society is from Harrison Bergeron, although the society in The Giver has executed more effectively on it. The population control and euphemistically termed "release" is from countless places including Logan's Run. The lack of any books is reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451. And I don't need to say where the ubiquitous speakers and monitoring come from.

That said, The Giver fuses these elements together with a light touch that presents a creative vision of an alternative society, some interesting characters, a decent plot that keeps you engaged, and a somewhat stereotyped but still interesting exploration of the clash between ignorant bliss and the pains and rewards that come from knowledge and freedom.

One of the quotes on the back of James Scudamore's Heliopolis compares it to Great Expectations, which is usually a good reason to go back and actually read Great Expectations instead of the particular book in question.

Heliopolis didn't just fall short of Great Expectations, it also fell short of the rave review in the Washington Post that drew me to it in the first place.

The novel is reasonably good but doesn't come close to great and can be flawed and clunky at times. It is a black comedy tinged with bits of melodrama and thriller that tells the story of Ludo dos Santos who was adopted into the family of a wealthy supermarket magnate who travels everywhere by helicopter. Ludo is having an affair with his adopted sister, working in an absurd advertising agency that is promoting his adopted father's new "budget" supermarket chain for the favelas, and going through a sometimes reckless exploration of these favelas.

The novel alternates between a few compressed, eventful days in the present and extensive flashbacks to the past, as well as between comedy and tragedy.

It is hard to say what was so disappointing, but the alternations never seemed to work and the disjointed jumble of genres and actions didn't make psychological sense and made the book a little less appealing.

I would, however, read Scudamore's next novel... but in the meantime will re-read Great Expectations.