People of the Book

Synopsis
Creates a fictional history for the real-life Sarajevo haggadah.

My thoughts
I've wanted to read anything by Geraldine Brooks for a while. Her books are always well reviewed, and she writes about an appealingly diverse array of subjects.

For People of the Book, Brooks uses historical records of the Sarajevo haggadah as the scaffolding for her story (detailed in an article she wrote for The New Yorker in 2007) and then uses her imagination and formidable storytelling powers to fill in the blanks. The haggadah, which tells the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, has an extraordinary history. It was created in Spain and survived Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews in 1492. In 1609 a Catholic priest in Venice spared the haggadah from destruction in the Pope's Inquisition. And in 1894, the haggadah arrived in Vienna for conservation (which actually did more damage than anything else). During World War II, a Muslim librarian at the Bosnian National Museum risked his life to keep the book out of the Nazis' hands. The book was saved by another Muslim librarian during the civil war that tore through the Balkans in the 1990s. Brooks fictionalizes all of these historical events and strings them together with a present-day narrative in which an Australian rare book specialist is hired to preserve the haggadah. She finds salt, wine stains, hair, an insect wing on or within the pages of the haggadah, and Brooks uses these to flash back to various points in the book's past.  

People of the Book is a testament to what Sarajevo used to be before Nazism, communism, and civil war. It was a modern city where  Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted. It's also a timely reminder that all three religions share the same roots. And it's a book that celebrates the good in humanity in times of evil and oppression; one of the most remarkable things about the haggadah is that it survived. Many people risked their lives or their livelihoods to guard the book throughout the centuries.

My town just selected Caleb's Crossing for its 2015 One Book One Town program and I picked up a copy of Nine Parts of Desire from my library's used book sale, so I have plenty more Geraldine Brooks to look forward to.

Bottom line
Worth a reread in a few years.

Fine print
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

True Compass

Synopsis
Ted Kennedy's memoir. Speaks for itself.

My thoughts
I voted for Ted Kennedy once, shortly after I moved to Massachusetts. It's a mark of how popular he was that I didn't even know he was up for reelection until I got to the polling place and saw a campaign sign.  So I was interested to read more about him in his own words.

I generally stay away from books written by politicians because they're often more interested in laying out an agenda than anything else. I thought I'd be safe with a memoir written by a politician who knew he was dying and so couldn't run for office again. I was kind of right but kind of not. Kennedy does his best to spin events  like the tragedy at Chappaquiddick and his ill-fated 1980 presidential run. However, he does better explaining the cheating scandal at Harvard and how it forced him to grow up.

One characteristic I did admire was his ability to deal with harsh situations without self-pity. Life wasn't always kind to Kennedy. All three of his brothers died young and violently. Two of his children survived cancer, and he readied the book for publication knowing he was dying. But he plunged through life with a spirit of perseverance.

Kennedy's memoir is also an indictment of modern Washington politics. He was a master politician and he understood that you had to compromise to make things happen. And he did accomplish a lot in nearly five decades as a legislator. His fight for health care reform spans the book and he did not live to see the most recent iteration signed into law. In his memoir he candidly addressed the advantage of being born into a monied family and the responsibility he felt to fight for others who weren't as fortunate. His persistence in reforming the health care system bit by bit is a perfect example of that sense of responsibility in action.

Bottom line
Made me want to vote for him again.

Fine print
True Compass, by Edward M. Kennedy
Genre: politics, memoir
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library on my Kindle.

Queen Isabella

Synopsis
A biography of the extraordinary life of Isabella of France, who deposed and later possibly murdered her husband, England's Edward II.

My thoughts
Isabella was the lovely French princess who was sent to negotiate with William Wallace and ultimately fell in love with him in the blockbuster Braveheart. Unfortunately, that aspect of the movie was completely fictitious. Fortunately, Isabella's real life was even more dramatic (and much less cliched).

Isabella, the treacherous "she-wolf of France," is one of the most notorious and vilified figures in English history. Weir rightly calls this out as misogyny. A man who reacted as Isabella did would have been remembered as a righteous victor, but because Isabella was a woman who challenged her husband and king, history has been particularly unkind to her. Weir also points out that Edward II, far from being the spineless wimp from Braveheart, was actually a courageous military leader.

Isabella arrived in England from France at the age of 12 to cement a fragile peace between the two countries by marrying the future Edward II. Edward was a weak king who was easily controlled by his favorites, creating a toxic culture in the English court. Isabella allied herself with a faction that opposed Edward's favorite and lover Hugh Despenser, and she began to fear for her safety. Under the guise of a diplomatic mission, she returned to France, where she began to plot to overthrow Edward II in favor of their son, another Edward. With money and men from France, Isabella returned to England and successfully installed Edward III on the throne. She and Roger Mortimer, her co-conspirator and lover, were the powers behind the king. But when Edward III came into his own, he began to resent Isabella and Mortimer. He asserted his power and sent his mother into exile in the English countryside. As for Edward II, he lived as a prisoner in relative comfort until he was murdered, allegedly at Isabella's request or at least with her advance knowledge.

... Or was he? Weir argues that Edward II escaped to mainland Europe, lived out his life as a hermit, and even forgave Isabella and Edward III. So everyone lived happily ever after. Weir cites one letter as proof, but much of her case seems to be based on educated guesses and wishful thinking. She's had some success writing historical fiction and this twist would have been delightfully shocking in a novel, but there needs to be more evidence for a biography.

As with Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir does a marvelous job unearthing details of Isabella's life (always difficult with medieval queens because women didn't create much of a paper trail back then) and explaining what life was like in the fourteenth century. However, it can make for a very dry read at times as Weir catalogs the royal household's road trips, wardrobe expenditures, and grocery budgets.

Bottom line
Exceptional and enlightening. Definitely worth a read.

Fine print
Queen Isabella, by Alison Weir
Genre: history, non-fiction
Photo by Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

Zeitoun

Synopsis
A Syrian-American entrepreneur runs up against overzealous National Guard troops and a nonfunctioning bureaucracy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

My thoughts
This is a vivid portrait of a great American city devastated by a natural disaster and an American citizen victimized by law enforcement run amok. Dave Eggers won an American Book Award for Zeitoun. I'd never read any of his books, and now I see why he's lauded as one of the best writers of his generation. His writing style is fluid and eminently readable. He has a gift for bringing events to life and making it feel like you're experiencing the sounds, smells, and sights in his books, and that's especially powerful in Zeitoun. Eggers describes how silent the city was, how dark it got at night, how clear the water was in the beginning and how polluted it got as the days went by.

I was moving when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, so I didn't have TV or Internet and wasn't as connected as I normally am. Zeitoun made me realize the extent of the madness for the first time (nearly 10 years later). Eggers writes of National Guardsmen who refused to help rescue or evacuate people (what were they there for, if not that?), leaving civilians to help each other as best they could.

The first chunk of the book actually made it seem fun to be in New Orleans immediately after the hurricane struck. Zeitoun had weathered the storm at home, and after the city flooded he happily paddled around in his canoe, feeding the neighbors' dogs and checking on the rental properties he owned. But then the story shifts to his wife Kathy's point of view. She had evacuated the city with their kids and he had been calling her from one of the rentals, where the phones still worked. But then the calls stopped and she had no idea what had happened to him.

Eggers tells the story wholly from the Zeitouns' perspective. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans only four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the United States was fighting wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. 9/11 had shown the United States that it is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but it's difficult to excuse the arrogance and ignorance of the National Guardsmen who jumped to the conclusion that Zeitoun was a terrorist and insisted, "You're Taliban."

It was impossible for me to see the events unfolding in Ferguson and not compare them to this book. In both cases, people in power (the National Guard in Zeitoun and the police force in Ferguson) saw evil where none existed. In Zeitoun's case, the people who arrested him in a house he owned became convinced that he was a terrorist bent on exploiting the storm-ravaged city, presumably because of his ethnicity. In Ferguson, police responded with unnecessary force to perceived threats, arresting journalists who were just doing their jobs and presumably rounding up others who hadn't done anything wrong. This isn't to say there weren't looters in New Orleans after Katrina or in Ferguson during the protests, but in both cases law enforcement officials ended up hurting the people they were supposed to protect. Race and culture played an important role in both situations. When taken in this context, Zeitoun is all the more provocative.

Zeitoun was published in 2009 and at the end of the book Eggers suggests that the family lived happily ever after. They welcomed a baby boy and rebuilt their contracting business. I don't know how much Eggers knew about their personal lives or their relationship with each other, but the book depicted them as a loving couple who were fiercely devoted to each other. That was evidently not the case. The Zeitouns divorced in 2012 and Kathy claimed her husband had been abusive throughout their marriage, and in 2013 Zeitoun was found not guilty on charges that he tried to kill Kathy. That inevitably changes my perception of Zeitoun the man, but I think Zeitoun the book stands independently as an indictment of the situation in New Orleans immediately after the hurricane.

Bottom line
A thought-provoking account of religious and cultural tensions in the United States.

Fine print
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
Genre: non-fiction, current events
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

Bad Intentions

Synopsis
A young man named Jon Moreno drowns in a frigid lake. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was I supposed to care?

My thoughts
It was murder, and the weird thing about this book is that the reader knows it from the get-go, making this not so much a whodunit as a whydunit. This slim mystery took its sweet time meandering to the answer, and when it came it left me wondering, "that's ... it?".

I've never read a mystery novel like this before. It's billed as "Inspector Sejer #9," but the good inspector is merely a periphery figure. He shows up on the crime scene long enough to form the suspicion that Jon's friends, Axel and Philip, may have something to hide, but then he disappears and the main action (if you can call it that) unfolds mostly from their points of view.

Steig Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series made Scandinavia seem utterly depraved, but this book left me with the opposite impression. Bad Intentions was probably the tamest mystery I've ever read. Maybe I should have started at the beginning of the series so that I would have gotten to know Inspector Sejer and appreciated his brief cameos in this book.

Bottom line
A quick read but there are better mysteries.

Fine print
Bad Intentions, by Karin Fossum
Genre: mystery
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

Synopsis
Alternate history in which Lincoln survives the assassination attempt only to be impeached. Told from the point of view of Abigail Canner, an African-American law clerk who winds up on his legal team.

My thoughts
It's a rare author who can meld action with courtroom drama in a way that keeps the reader flipping pages. It's especially difficult with historical fiction. Stephen L. Carter is a law professor who's written both non-fiction and fiction (both contemporary and historical), and he manages his task well.

What would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had not been killed? It's one of the most intriguing questions in U.S. history (right up there with what would JFK's legacy have been if he had lived). Carter argues convincingly in an author's note that's almost as interesting as the novel that some of Lincoln's actions during the Civil War could potentially have been construed as impeachable offenses, and the postwar political climate could have swung against Lincoln.

Abigail Canner is a smart, dynamic protagonist, and seeing the story unfold from her point of view makes it all the more fascinating. She is uniquely placed to unravel the plot against Lincoln because of who she is. However, this also strains credulity. Would an African-American woman have been able to serve as a law clerk on the impeachment trial of the President of the United States? That would have been impossible in the 1960s, never mind the 1860s.

One minor quibble is a little romance that seems to be thrown in just because. It's alternately sweet and slightly irritating when it interferes with the main narrative.

Bottom line
Enjoyable alternate history.

Fine print
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, by Stephen L. Carter
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Synopsis
This is the first book in the Earthsea Cycle. It follows the adventures of a boy named Ged as he unleashes a dangerous magical enemy and then tries to defeat it.

My thoughts
This is technically a YA novel, but Ursula K. Le Guin's writing is sophisticated and neither the prose nor the plot is dumbed down for a young audience. The plot is actually fairly dark—Ged's arrogance leads him to attempt a spell that nearly kills him (and does kill one of his mentors). Humbled and wracked with guilt, Ged slowly recovers and becomes a full-fledged wizard. But he is pursued by the shadow he unleashed with his ill-advised spell and he knows he must eventually confront it and either defeat it or die trying.

It sounds exciting; unfortunately, it's not. There are lots of details of magewinds and maritime jargon and not enough adventure. It's a good thing it was less than 200 pages or I wouldn't have finished.

Bottom line
I really wanted to like it because the book's themes—friendship, coming of age, coming to terms with one's own limitations, the search for meaning in life—resonate with all audiences. But it was just too slow.

Fine print
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: YA, science fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book at my library's used book sale.

Turn Right At Machu Picchu

Synopsis
Mark Adams spends his midlife crisis trekking through Peru and recounting the explorations of Hiram Bingham, the first Westerner to see Machu Picchu.

My thoughts
I'm a little weary of the whole subgenre of "bored well-to-to Westerner quits his day job and jets off to find himself in a foreign country" travel writing. I couldn't bring myself to finish Under the Tuscan Sun, and I haven't even picked up Eat, Love, Pray. But when it's done right, it's really a joy to read, and my friend Sarah loved this book (yes, I'm linking to it even though Sarah is the only one who actually reads this blog). Adams isn't as superb as Bill Bryson, but this is still a worthwhile read.

Adams is good at what he does. I haven't been to Machu Picchu, but Adams is at his finest when he's describing his experiences there. But the book does slow down when he detours to the early twentieth century to describe American explorer Hiram Bingham's "discovery" of Machu Picchu. The backstory is interesting and I didn't know it, but it sounds all too familiar—Western explorer stumbles onto ruins the locals have always known about and announces his discovery to much fanfare.

Bottom line
This made me want to see Machu Picchu for myself.

Fine print
Turn Right at Machu Picchu, by Mark Adams
Genre: travel, memoir
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Dreams from My Father

Synopsis
Written before he launched his political career, Barack Obama describes his early life in Hawaii and Indonesia, his college career, and his days as a community organizer in Chicago - all influenced by the dreams of the father he never really knew.

My thoughts
I'm generally leery of political biographies or books by politicians in general, but I was interested in Dreams from My Father because it was written before Obama was elected to public office. I figured that meant it wouldn't be skewed by a political agenda. I'm glad I read it because it's a very honest, thoughtful book about a young man finding his place in the world and confronting some of the most divisive aspects of life in the United States.

Obama had a unique childhood. He was born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father. His parents divorced when he was young and his father pursued a doctorate at Harvard before returning to Kenya. His mother stayed in Hawaii before moving with her son to Indonesia. Obama returned to Hawaii to attend Punahou, the top private school in the state. From there he decided to attend Occidental College in California and pursued an office career for a while before he pursued his impulse to change the world by becoming a community organizer. Throughout his childhood and young adulthood, Obama struggled with his identity, and the book closes with his poignant trip to Kenya to visit his father's family.

It's an amazing journey, one that makes his subsequent career from community organizer to president of the United States almost mundane by comparison.

Bottom line
This is an important book to read if you want to learn more about Barack Obama, American race relations, or white colonialism in Africa.

Fine print
Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama
Genre: memoir
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book as a birthday present for myself ... in 2008 (and I just got around to reading it).

Steve Jobs

Synopsis
A thorough biography of Apple's mercurial co-founder, savior, and legend.

My thoughts
This biography was hugely entertaining and full of information. Not only did Steve Jobs live an epic life, but Walter Isaacson interviewed practically everyone Jobs ever met to research this book. Isaacson knows how to skillfully sift through all the gossip and other noise to present a well-rounded portrait of his subject. That said, he wasn't able to remain completely impartial. It's almost like he was in awe of Jobs (not that I blame him).

This is certainly a warts-and-all profile, and I came away with the impression that Jobs was a brilliant man but not someone I'd want to work for. He was stubborn, ambitious, and egotistical, and although those qualities translated into enormous success in the business world, they also pushed some of his co-workers and subordinates to the breaking point. It's ironic that these qualities also contributed to his early death. When Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he initially chose not to follow his doctors' advice. Defying authority and thumbing his nose at conventional advice had worked spectacularly in his professional life, but it had devastating consequences for his health.

One of the small pleasures of this book was that it gave me the thrill of discovering the inside story to many of the technological innovations that I take for granted. Jobs's magnetic personality inspired his subordinates and spurred them to come up with solutions to problems most people wouldn't even have realized existed. The revolutionary scrolling wheel on the first iPod was one such example. It's a relatively simple idea, but it elegantly streamlined the process of scrolling through a long list of songs on a small screen.

The book also made me appreciate Jobs's (and Apple's) dedication to aesthetics. He understood exactly what technology people wanted (a personal computer, a tablet computer, a multipurpose phone/music player/video game console), and he cared what it looked like. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he explained when he introduced the iPad 2. "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing." Jobs could give people what they didn't even know they wanted because he had a passion for the entire product, not just one aspect of it. That's an incredibly rare trait.

Bottom line
Compulsively readable.

Fine print
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

Where the Moon Isn't

Synopsis
The narrator, a young man named Matthew, struggles with schizophrenia and grapples with the long-ago death of his brother, for which Matthew feels responsible.

My thoughts
Matthew shares his experiences in a mostly irritating stream of consciousness. The stream-of-consciousness technique is brilliant when it's done right, but the problem here is that most of Matthew's stream of consciousness isn't very interesting. He's also self aware—but not in a good way. He has an annoying habit of going, "Well, I'm going to introduce you to this person and here are a bunch of inane details and this one thing will be important, but not for fifty pages." I hate it when authors try to build suspense by dropping hints and screaming at you to pay attention. It doesn't feel organic and disrupts the flow of the story.

The central hook of the novel is the death of Matthew's older brother, who had Down Syndrome. Simon died a decade ago and Matthew feels responsible. The answers to the questions "why?" and "what happened?" are strung out over several hundred pages, and there just isn't enough meat to the story to drag it out that long.

I was drawn to this book because the author is a mental health nurse and it was a highly regarded debut novel (you think I would've learned to be more cautious after my disappointing experience with Absolution). Between this and Sarah's Key I'm really starting to doubt my ability to pick a good book.

Bottom line
There have got to be better debut novels out there.

Fine print
Where the Moon Isn't, by Nathan Filer (interestingly, it's published as The Shock of the Fall in the UK, where Filer is from and the novel takes place)
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Sarah's Key

Synopsis
In 1942, the Vichy government forces ten-year-old Sarah and her parents from their apartment in Paris. Before they leave, Sarah manages to hide her little brother in a cabinet. In present-day Paris, Julia Jarmond, a journalist with a personal tie to the apartment, uncovers Sarah's story.

My thoughts
I'd heard a lot of wonderful things about this novel, so I grabbed it when I saw it at my library's used book sale. Sarah's story is undeniably moving, but it's not enough to save this predictable novel.

First, the good. When we first meet her, Sarah is a happy girl and it is heartbreaking to see her innocence taken away so brutally. I'd defy anyone to read her part of the narrative without crying. Tatiana de Rosnay does a good job exposing the brutality of the Nazi-compliant Vichy regime. She also doesn't flinch from depicting the indifference of many non-Jewish French citizens. (In college, I read a book called The Vichy Syndrome, which described how postwar France strove to whitewash its past and envisioned itself a nation where everyone was involved in the Resistance and the Vichy government was run by an unpopular minority.)

And now for the not-so-good. The present-day narrative is atrocious. Julia is an indecisive emotional wreck who's married to a stereotypically sleek, skeezy, hypersexual French guy. Together they have a teenage daughter who acts as Julia's conscience, not a teenager. After years of trying to have a second child, forty-something Julia finds herself pregnant, which triggers her husband's midlife crisis. There's a lot of drama that feels incredibly trite, especially when you contrast it with the other half of this double narrative—a child in the Holocaust, for heaven's sake.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on Julia's narrative takes over and Sarah's is lost. De Rosnay tries to build suspense by having Julia uncover Sarah's story layer by layer. This is unsuccessful largely because key plot points are so heavily foreshadowed that the reader can see them coming from a distance of fifty pages. Sometimes a double narrative works, but in this case it's jarring to switch gears between the two.

Bottom line
Read The Invisible Bridge instead.

Fine print
Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Wonder

Synopsis
Auggie has a rare craniofacial abnormality. ("I won't describe what I look like," he writes. "Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.") He's attending public school for the first time in fifth grade and he seems to bring out the very best and the very worst in some of his classmates.

My thoughts
When I checked this book out from the library, one of my friends spotted it in my pile and told me she'd loved it. The librarian who checked me out told me that the library had eight copies of the book and they were all always checked out (I'd snagged the last one off the shelf). Apparently that's pretty remarkable for a YA novel that was published more than a year ago (and that isn't Harry Potter). And now having read it, I'd say Wonder lives up to the hype.

Auggie is a rare gem of a character with an indomitable spirit and a can-do attitude. He's been homeschooled because he's had so many medical issues, and he's initially reluctant to attend school. People have gaped at him his entire life, but that doesn't mean he's used to it or somehow immune to it. His classmates react much as he expects them to—kids say insensitive things (whether they mean to or not) and some of them won't sit by him. But Auggie does manage to make a few friends who overlook his unconventional looks and genuinely like him for his sense of humor and intelligence.

R.J. Palacio does a good job writing from the tween state of mind. It's a really ugly stew of exerting and succumbing to peer pressure, attempting to forge your own identity, and learning to figure out right from wrong when there's not a clear choice. In their own ways, Auggie's friends Summer and Jack go out of their way to befriend Auggie when the prevailing attitude is to shun him, which takes an uncommon mixture of strength and self-confidence. There's a herd mentality in middle school that makes it extremely difficult to be your own person, and it's no surprise that two out of the three kids who act as Auggie's welcoming committee at the beginning of the school year drop him as soon as they can.

One of them is Julian, the child villain of Wonder. Palacio shifts the blame to Julian's parents for raising him to be the inconsiderate little monster he is. He simply follows their example. The scary thing is that I know people who are an awful lot like them. Like Julian's parents, they're French and they named one of their kids Julian. But they're also selfish, self-absorbed people who feel that if a situation inconveniences them or makes them uncomfortable, then others must make everything "right" for them.

The only problem with the book is that everything gets tied up a little too neatly. As much as I reveled in Auggie's triumph over his bullies and his peers' whole-hearted acceptance of him at the end of the book, his story probably wouldn't have ended that happily or that decisively in real life. It was a little disappointing for a book that had had such an authentic voice from the beginning, but it's a YA novel—best to savor the warm, fuzzy feeling it leaves you with.

Bottom line
Wonder has a wonderful feel-good message and I can see why so many schools are making it required reading. I'll keep an eye out for Palacio's next book, too.

Fine print
Wonder, by R.J. Palacio
Genre: YA fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Fast Food Nation

Synopsis
Fast food has revolutionized the way Americans eat and work—and not in a good way.

My thoughts
Is it bad that more than anything else I just wanted to eat the fries on the cover?

There was a lot of buzz around this book when it was first published 14 years ago, and I think I simply came too late to the party to be outraged by this book. The indictments of the fast food industry seem stale now. Big business discourages unions?! Well ... duh. Fast food chains use unskilled teenage workers?! Have you ever been to a McDonald's? They market their evil, anti-nutrition agenda directly to innocent, unsuspecting children?! Yeah, Happy Meals were certainly a part of my all-American childhood and I turned out okay.

Fourteen years is a long time and the world is a different place now—perhaps in part because of this book. There's a trend toward healthy fast food and away from putting Burger Kings in schools. Small, independent farms are certainly still an endangered species, but it's become trendy to eat locally raised food that comes directly from the source. If this book contributed to the recent focus on healthy eating and increased physical activity, especially for children, then I'm glad people have taken Eric Schlosser's message to heart. And Schlosser does raise some very important points about workplace safety and food safety that have not been addressed. Government oversight of the way our food is raised, prepared, and sold is hopelessly underfunded and ineffective. But I can't raise my own food and I have to eat something. So I will simply continue to do what I've always done—keeping my kitchen clean, washing my hands frequently, washing fruits and veggies carefully, and limiting the utensils that come into contact with raw meat. This book didn't scare me away from fast food, either. I don't eat it very often—just a few times a year—and that won't change.

Something about the way the book was written rubbed me the wrong way. The tone was very sensational—look at the downtrodden fast food worker! the victim of horrific food poisoning! the immigrant working in perilous conditions in a meat packing plant!—yet I was unable to connect to any of them emotionally. And that meant I wasn't able to get all worked up over the issues that were raised in the book. This was a heavily researched product, but I felt at times that Schlosser picked and chose his data and stats to make his conclusions seem more damning.

Bottom line
Underwhelming.

Fine print
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Genre: current events
Photo from Goodreads
I owned this book.

The Big Short

Synopsis
A few savvy investors realized that they could potentially make a lot of money by shorting subprime mortgages.

My thoughts
I don't have a background in finance, but Michael Lewis makes a very complicated topic easy and entertaining for laymen to follow. I read this as a follow-up to Lewis's Boomerang, and both have whetted my interest in other books on the financial meltdown. I'm a bit late on this—after all, the market crashed in fall 2008. But the fact that it was so long ago gives me some added perspective. I know what happens next, even if my memories of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing chaos are a little hazy. The real treat of this book is getting into the meat of what happened before all hell broke loose.

Lewis has become one of my favorite non-fiction writers, and it's because of the way he can take boring, complicated topics and make them relatable and funny. He does this by writing about the eccentric men who independently clued into the impending crisis. He gives you someone to root for—if not an everyman, then an underdog. It's not a blow-by-blow account from the financial institutions' point of view, but it's interesting to read about the people who accurately predicted the crisis, especially since some of them were denounced as crazy or were not taken seriously before it happened.

Looking back, it's easy to wonder who thought the doomed financial model was a good idea, but Lewis reminds us that it was so large and complex that it was hard to see the whole big picture. It's also scary that—apparently—no one broke any laws. Since 2008, there has been some legislative action (in the form of Dodd-Frank), but there hasn't been much else—or much demand for it. So there are some new safeguards in place, but they are limited and they still leave Wall Street to police itself and show restraint.

One note not about the book itself: I read this on my brand new Kindle and liked it quite a bit. I was annoyed that I was constantly turning pages, but I did like how light it felt in my hands (and in my purse). I used the Kindle Owners' Lending Library to borrow the book and I'd definitely do that again.

Bottom line
A compulsively readable account of the spectacular failure of the financial system.

Fine print
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
Genre: non-fiction, current events, finance
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.

Boomerang

Synopsis
The versatile author of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short travels to Germany, Greece, Iceland, and Ireland to explore the origins of the recent financial crisis - and then he brings it back home to the United States.

My thoughts
This is a whole new genre of travel writing. Each chapter is dedicated to a different country and its dysfunctional economic system (they started as individual articles for Vanity Fair). Michael Lewis first travels to Iceland, where clueless Icelandic fishermen-turned-bankers ran their national economy into the ground. In a chapter titled "And They Invented Math!" he turns his attention to Greece and recounts how a projected budget deficit of 7 billion euros had to be revised upward to 30 billion because "until that moment, no one had bothered to count it all up." (There is also the bizarre story of a group of monks who managed to get the Greek government to give them land, which they turned into a real estate empire whose worth can be measured in the low billions.) Lewis's next stop is Ireland, whose Celtic Tiger had been transformed into a Celtic Garfield and whose citizens seem oddly complacent about their country's financial collapse. And then there's Germany, which finds itself suddenly responsible for the rest of the Eurozone's financial mistakes.

Lewis highlights every absurdity with a gleeful how-could-they-not-see-this-coming tone. But the brilliance is evident in the last chapter, when Lewis turns the same voice on the United States. Lewis travels to California, where he goes on a memorable bike ride with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and talks to a fire chief about the tough decisions he's made regarding pensions. The bike ride is fun to read about, but Lewis makes sure the impact of the financial crisis hits home when he takes the conversation to a municipal level.

Lewis paints a truly horrifying picture of an unethical, under-regulated financial system driven by the bottomless greed of American bankers. Bankers were rewarded with large salaries and even larger bonuses, leaving them absolutely no incentive to think beyond short-term gains. This ruined the financial markets - and everywhere else in the world, it was seen as a completely unconscionable way to conduct business. At one point, Lewis interviews a lifelong German public servant and asks him whether he ever thought of going into private practice and making a fortune. "But I could never do this," is the shocked reply. "It would be illoyal!" This neatly sums up the difference between America and the rest of the world, and it explains how so-called financial experts were mislead into making disastrous decisions - they were playing by a different set of rules that the Americans disregarded.

The Big Short, Lewis's in-depth study of the causes of the U.S. crash, has catapulted to the top of my reading list.

Bottom line
A quick, hilarious, and terrifying read.

Fine print
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis
Genre: nonfiction, finance, travel
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.