The Fourth Queen

Synopsis
Helen Gloag leaves her small Scottish village for America, but her ship is captured by pirates and she ends up in the harem of the Moroccan emperor.

My thoughts
Debbie Taylor did a prodigious amount of research and it shows. She explains in the author's note that Helen Gloag was a real woman who did become a consort to the emperor of Morocco, but the story itself was a compilation of historical accounts of various similar kidnappings in the eighteenth century. (Apparently there were numerous fair-haired beauties who were captured at sea and taken to the emperor's harem.) Taylor invented her other main character, the dwarf Microphilus, who is the head of the emperor's household and who becomes smitten with Helen himself.

I couldn't help comparing this book to Empress Orchid, which I read a few months ago. Both feature a lot of scheming and focus on the jealousy and rivalries that sprout when you throw dozens of women together with only one man. I enjoyed The Fourth Queen more, simply because the narrative was a lot smoother. Somehow, Empress Orchid had to stop the action to explain court customs and international events, and The Fourth Queen did a better job integrating the explanations with the flow of the story. Some of this was because Helen was a complete outsider and everything was as new to her as it was to the reader, while Orchid was thrown into a new situation in her own world (but not a world a Western audience would implicitly understand). The Fourth Queen was also less concerned with politics and less prudish about sexual life of the harem. (Speaking of which, skinniness was considered a disadvantage in the Moroccan harem. That was a refreshing change.)

I enjoyed the fact that The Fourth Queen went beyond the typical fish-out-of-water struggles. Helen adjusts to life in the harem and gains the emperor's favor to become the titular fourth wife, but that's only the beginning of the story. The rest centers around a murder mystery, and then the plot thickens and there are two murder mysteries.

It's a wonderful premise, but one of Taylor's literary quirks drove me nuts. The chapters are written alternately from Helen's and Microphilus's views, which is a technique that I hate anyway because it leads to a lot of needless repetition as you see events from both characters' points of view. But Taylor makes it even more intolerable because Helen's chapters are written in the third person in the present tense and Microphilus's chapters are purportedly from his diaries and are written in the first person in the past tense. I just ... it made my head hurt, is all. (And now re-reading this review I see I've mixed past and present tenses, so I don't know what I'm complaining about really.)

The ending has a bit of choose-your-own-adventure flair to it. Helen and Microphilus each have a choice to make, but Taylor leaves you hanging. I didn't mind this; it left me free to end the story the way I wanted it to end.

Bottom line
It's an interesting piece of historical fiction about a place that doesn't generally get a lot of attention.

Fine print
The Fourth Queen, by Debbie Taylor
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Synopsis
A gossipy biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

My thoughts
I didn't know much about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life beyond the Kennedy years. She was John F. Kennedy's reluctant political asset in The Making of the President and the brave, stoic widow in Death of a President. She lived through remarkable events and I wondered if she was just as remarkable as a woman. I flew through this book and came to the conclusion that she sort of was and sort of wasn't. She wasn't a driving force in any of the political decisions of her day, but up until that point only Eleanor Roosevelt had shown any sort of political drive. She did mastermind the enduring Camelot myth, and the public face she showed after JFK's assassination was truly remarkable.

But by the end of the book I'd formed an opinion I didn't see coming at the outset. I went in expecting to like Jackie and ended up feeling like I couldn't. She was the product of a different time and a different culture - a time when women were subservient and dependent and a culture of debutante balls and grand European tours. She did become her own woman with a successful career, but she was unquestionably a high-maintenance diva.

This is an unauthorized biography written years after Jackie O died, and Sarah Bradford did a breathtaking amount of research and used her own interviews with many, many people to illuminate her subject. Even so, Jackie remains an enigma. She was an intensely private person, so it's difficult to get a sense of what she really thought or felt, which leads to quite a bit of speculation (that Jackie "must have felt" this way or "could't possibly have thought" that way). In addition, I couldn't help feeling that a lot of the people who were interviewed had their own agendas. And sometimes the book was unnecessarily voyeuristic. There are entire passages devoted to JFK's extramarital sex life - exploits that Jackie probably never knew about that just seem thrown in here to increase the scandal factor.

Bottom line
A thorough warts-and-all biography with a lot of dirty laundry.

Fine print
America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Sarah Bradford
Genre: Biography
Photo from Goodreads.
I borrowed this book from the library.

To End All Wars

Synopsis
The First World War, with a focus on the pacifist movement in England.

My thoughts
Adam Hochschild explores World War I as not only the first total war but the first war with a sizable anti-war movement. This was the war that changed everything - the scale of warfare, the way war was conducted, and the way it was viewed back home.

I liked the organization of the book. Hochschild uses the Boer War to set the stage for World War I. That conflict involved some of the same people, from the military minds to the nascent pacifist movement. It's an effective way to introduce some of the major players and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the profiles of two women, Charlotte Despard and Emily Hobhouse, who courageously and selflessly spoke out against the war. Less sympathetic are the Pankhursts, who come across as opportunistic, manipulative, and fanatical.



I was struck repeatedly by how different things were a mere hundred years ago. Hochschild describes a battlefield where commanders couldn't tell what was going on right in front of them because they literally couldn't see what was happening through the haze of battle and lines of communication were unreliable (telephone wires were often casualties of the fighting). Contrast that to 2011, when the president of the United States monitored the raid on bin Laden's hideout halfway around the world in real time.



I can never get over the arrogance of the major powers. As in The Guns of August, To End All Wars depicts European powers that enthusiastically prepared for the outbreak of war yet did not recognize the significance of Franz Ferdinand's assassination when it happened. England, for example, was preoccupied by growing unrest in Ireland, so that scene in the first season of Downton Abbey where Carson mentions that the folks below stairs can think of nothing but the assassination of the Austrian archduke probably never happened in any English manor ever.

To End All Wars also underscores the horror of the senseless loss of life in World War I. The numbers are simply staggering, but even more appalling was the attitude of the military brass. They showed concern when their own losses were lower than expected because they estimated that meant that they'd killed fewer enemy troops. Hochshild does a good job describing the impossibilities of trench warfare, from the logistics of gaining ground to the struggle to stay clean, dry, and sane from day to day.

World War I was a hopeless, futile exercise and the terms of the armistice meant Europe was doomed to repeat it in only a few decades.


Bottom line
I'd recommend it, but not as an introduction to World War I.

Fine print
To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild
Genre: history
Photo by Goodreads
I own this book

Big Book Challenge 2013

I'm trying something new. It's a Big Book Challenge over at Goodreads. The idea is to read books that are longer than 400 pages. I've set a goal of 10 books of 400+ pages for 2013. The folks doing this challenge are an eclectic bunch - you've got people who appreciate everything from thrillers to history to science fiction to literature.

Reading the boards at Goodreads is endlessly entertaining. That's where I picked up my favorite new term - "kitten squisher," used to describe any tome dense enough to crush your fluffy baby tabby.

Anna Karenina: Part II

I'm still plugging away at Anna Karenina. The movie is coming out on DVD tomorrow. At the rate I'm going, it will debut on network television before I'm finished reading.

Questions, once again, from Christine.

1. Kitty's health has deteriorated as a result of her heartbreak and so she travels to a health spa in Germany with her parents in hopes of reviving her health. It is here that Kitty befriends the young woman Varenka whose actions and beliefs Kitty admires tremendously. What is it about Varenka that has Kitty so enamored? At one point Kitty says she will never marry. Why do you think she says this?

Varenka represents everything Kitty isn't when they meet. She helps others while Kitty is dependent on others. Varenka helps Kitty see that you can help yourself by helping other people. Kitty starts to follow Varenka's example and, finally having a purpose in life, emerges from her depression. Varenka isn't married and instead devotes her life to others. I think Kitty feels she can live a full life without marriage based on Varenka's example.

2. Anna and Vronsky consummate their affair in this section. Do you think what they share is love? And if not, what do you think it is that they share? 

Anna and Vronsky don't think of love in the same way I do. In their culture and their time, marriage was more about partnership in a business sense than love in a romantic sense. Their world seems to be filled with superficial friendships and relationships. Marriage is not based on love. So I do think they love each other and their feelings are in many ways more true than any of the other relationships in the book.

3. Tolstoy writes to great length and detail about the steeplechase. Did you get the sense that these passages foreshadow events among the characters? If so, what?

Vronsky's horse, Frou Frou, is a magnificent horse and he is proud that she's his. But because of his mistake, she breaks her back during the steeplechase. Vronsky was overeager and overconfident and failed to take the race as seriously as he needed to. He's devastated, but I still don't think he'll change. This does not bode well for his relationship with Anna.

4. What are your overall impressions of the book after reading Part Two? Are you enjoying the story? Do you like Tolstoy's writing? 

The stakes have been raised significantly. The writing can be dense, but I am enjoying the story.

The Best American Travel Writing (2009)

Synopsis
A collection of 25 of the best pieces of American travel writing in 2009.

My thoughts
I love all forms of traveling, from armchair to actual. I have a bunch of these travel anthologies and I'd actually read a few of the pieces in this one before I decided to take it on a trip with me and read it cover to cover. It includes one of my all-time favorite travel pieces, Seth Stevenson's hilarious "The Mecca of the Mouse." Stevenson has been featured in other editions of the Best American Travel Writing series, but this piece remains my favorite.

2008 must have been a particularly strong year for travel writing because this book is chock full of absorbing writing. Strangely, there's a lot of water in this anthology, from a long-distance swimmer flailing around in frigid polar waters to a daughter wading through the river that her father fictionalized in Deliverance, from luxury transoceanic cruises to a maddening trip down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft. There are also excellent pieces on areas of the world that are off the normal tourist's radar - Sudan, Lebanon, Nigeria - and two other stand-out pieces deal with emerging tourist markets - ecotourism in Honduras and safaris in Rwanda. One of the things I love about this series is that the editors make a point of including a diverse array of pieces about all parts of the world from a variety of publications.

My favorites are the ones that make me laugh, and there are some real laugh-out-loud pieces in this collection. "The Mecca of the Mouse" is one, but Chuck Klosterman's "Who is America?" packs a lot of giggles into just a few pages. He asked students at the University of Leipzig to write an essay about which 20th-century American they found the most interesting. "I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong - they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans," Klosterman writes.

Calvin Trillin, superb as always, contributes a piece on the unknown Texas BBQ joint that came out of nowhere to take the top spot in Texas Monthly's coveted rankings. Not being a huge fan of BBQ, I was indifferent when I first started reading, but Trillin hooked me three paragraphs in with his assessment of exactly how hard this shook the world of Texas BBQ: "I felt like a People subscriber who had picked up the 'Sexiest Man Alive' issue and discovered that the sexiest man alive was Sheldon Ludnick, an insurance adjuster from Terre Haute, Indiana."

There were a few misses, though. One writer managed to use the word "dissemble" a record number of times in his retelling of a trip to his old neighborhood in Rome. The piece on James Bond might have been interesting if I had more than a passing interest in James Bond. And I could have done without the piece on airline terminals entirely.

Bottom line
There's something for everyone here.

Fine print
The Best American Travel Writing 2009, edited by Simon Winchester
Genre: travel
Photo by Goodreads
I bought this book

Joe College

Synopsis
A humorous account of the exploits of an Ivy League student from a blue collar background in the '80s.

My thoughts
I read Tom Perrotta's Little People a couple years ago and really enjoyed it right up until the end, a large part of which felt too contrived to me. He's written quite a few critically acclaimed books, including Election and The Abstinence Teacher, but I decided to read Joe College. One of my old college buddies recommended this to me shortly after we graduated. I wish I'd read it then; it would have been a whole lot funnier and I would have been able to relate more. It was still a fun read, but it's disappointing if you read it as anything but quick vacation filler.

Perrotta is at his finest when he's describing the everyday inanities of college dorm life. (One of my favorite scenes involves kids trying kim chee for the first time.) He's less successful when he tries to make his characters deal with issues straight from a teen soap opera. Jonathan Tropper is much better at this; his characters live in something that resembles real life, but he ramps up the absurdity and isn't so damn earnest.

That said, the characters are nicely fleshed out and flawed. Danny, the main character, is a Yale student who finds that his New Jersey working class background makes him a novelty among his privileged peers. But he's also a callow jerk, which made me kind of hate him. I wanted to reach through the pages and throttle him. And that's part of the beauty of the book - Danny is a typical selfish teenager who has mistaken his insulated collegiate bubble for the real world.

Final thoughts
Pass on this one, although Perrotta's worth reading. Little Children was better and I'll read some of his more recent novels someday.

Fine print
Joe College, by Tom Perrotta
Genre: contemporary fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library