Kurlansky's Tasty History

The Big Oyster: history on the half-shell by Mark Kurlansky
New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007, c2006.
xx, 307 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm. 

What a fun way to learn about the history of New York City!  Kurlansky again finds a way to entertain and inform while presenting his discoveries about another item that humans put in their mouths.  He has tackled salt, and cod (which I reviewed here about a year ago).

Like his other books, this one is well-written, fascinating, and very informative.  In it you'll learn that for many years in the 1800s, New York City was the oyster capital of the world - but that in a short time ballooning population and industrialization led to the demise of the rich oyster beds of the New York harbor - due to pollution and and over-harvesting. Kurlansky does a great

There is a lot to The Big Oyster - it is a practical history of the early years of New York City, with a lot about the earliest European settlement of the area to the bustle of the 19th and 20th centuries.  But it is also a social history and a foodways history - including recipes from various eras.  Finally, it is both an environmental history and cautionary tale about the squandering of precious natural resources.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone curious about the history and culture of America's most dynamic city, New York.

Ka-Boom!

Ashfall by Mike Mullin
Terre Haute, IN : Tanglewood, c2010.
466 p. ; 22 cm.

The picture at the top of this post should give you pause.  Yellowstone Park [shaded in green], the US national treasure of hot springs, geysers, mountains, lakes and wildlife is basically the crater - or caldera [large red boundary] of an incredibly massive supervolcano that last had a major eruption about 640,000 years ago.  Ok, 640,000 years ago is a long time, but the problem is that it will erupt again in the future - probably not in our lifetimes (but it could).   It is the unlikely, but theoretically possible event of such a nation-shattering (about 2/3 of the US would be significantly damaged) and world-altering volcanic event that starts Mike Mullin's first novel off with a bang.

The novel is set far away (hundreds of miles) from Yellowstone,  - in Iowa - but not far enough away to escape the devastating noise, ash and ejecta of the eruption.  The event creates a cataclysmic environment through which the hero of the novel - 17 year old Alex - seeks to survive as he heads east toward Illinois where his family is.  His ordeal through this landscape - one that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy's The Road -  forms the plot of this thrilling novel.

As you might imagine this new, altered world brings out the best and definitely the worst in people and institutions that Alex is exposed to.  A bright spot is his joining forces with a remarkable young woman, Darla, whose skills and courage help Alex survive.  Not surprisingly the two eventually fall in love, in a rather believable, and touching way. 

The novel should appeal to all kinds of readers.  There is disaster, survival, action, romance, and some gritty violence and tragedy.  I really appreciated how Mullin allows his novel to really delve into the complex ways that individuals and institutions can trend toward good - and definitely toward evil in situations of grave social disruption.  I could easily recommend this book.  We also recently acquired the sequel - Ashen Winter.

An Addictive Novel

Crank by Ellen Hopkins
New York : Simon Pulse, 2004.
537 p. ; 18 cm.

Hopkins manages to pull you into the mind and world of a high school-aged good kid drawn into a downward spiral due to her growing addiction to methamphetamine (crank).  She does it with really nice verse that allows her to often have the main character's thoughts, spoken words, and dialogue from others all in one poem.

This book, and many of Hopkins very long novels in verse are very popular and I can see why. Her strength is that she deals honestly with the appeal of drug abuse - while at the same time illuminating the horrors and dangers of addiction.  It's a skillful balancing act that keeps her book compelling but not preachy.  Also the variety of poetic line structures works pretty well - allowing calm meditative poems, jumbled high-on-meth poems, broken blocks of verse to reflect multiple voices and perspectives, etc.

In a short "Author's note" at the beginning of the book, Hopkins reveals that much of the substance of her novel in verse is from her own life as a mother with a meth-addicted daughter, though she admits that many events, characters, etc. are composites based on real life experiences.

No need to recommend this book, as it remains very popular.  I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, so I can appreciate its many strengths.

Hi Tech Guilt

A version of Think Tank 1's cover from the Top Cow Website

Think Tank 1 by Matt Hawkins
Los Angeles : Top Cow Productions, Inc., 2013
1 v. (unpaged) : chiefly ill. ; 26 cm.

David Loren has a guilty conscience.  He is the main character of this new graphic novel series from Matt Hawkins and Rashan Ekedal, and he's begun to question his role as a super-intelligent weapons developer for a Pentagon think tank that recruited him with a full scholarship to Cal Tech when he was just 14.  

In the 10 years since that time he has begun to question the value of what he is doing (reflecting on the human toll that his lethal creations have) and he wants out.  Unfortunately for David, he's pretty much a prisoner on the high-security base where he lives and works.  But given his technical wizardry, he decides he's going to escape - one way or another.

The story is fast-paced, exciting, interesting and ends with a dramatic twist that sets the reader up for the next installment of Think Tank.  Not bad for a debut graphic novel.

I really appreciated the author's scientific and ethical depth.  The novel ends with a section that explains some of the terms and references found in the story (e.g. DARPA, Einstein quotes, etc.) and contains references to some of the real-world hi-tech weaponry currently being developed by the Pentagon and its private contractors.  A good read for the tech-savvy, current-events aware fan of graphic novels.

For more insight into Think Tank take a look at this interview with Matt Hawkins, or this review of Think Tank 1.

Homo Cursorius

Born to Run: a Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
New York : Vintage Books, 2011, c2009.
1st Vintage Books ed.
287 p. ; 21 cm.

For the past couple of months my son has been insisting that I had to read Born to Run - so I did.  He was right; it was a great read!  Not perfect, but pretty amazing!

The book is an exuberant introduction to the phenomena of ultrarunning, but it is more than that.  It is a celebration of human running, of adventure and determination, and the amazing - and often larger than life -  personalities of ultrarunners.  Even more, the book serves as a provocative look at human origins, evolution and the possibility that modern humans (all of us!) are born with the capacity to run far longer and farther than most of us have ever run - and to do it with minimal injuries.  This last aspect has McDougall casting a rather critical eye on the whole modern running shoe industry.

McDougall's hook for the book is his search for the enigmatic indigenous people of Northwest Mexico, the Tarahumara who survived contact with the Spaniards by avoiding engagement with them, opting instead to live in the very sparse, barren, and rugged terrain of the Copper Canyon in Mexico.  The Tarahumara also happen to be world class endurance runners, and McDougall's renewed interest in long distance running (which had hobbled him with injuries) is rekindled during his successful search for the Tarahumara.  His contact person, almost-mythical gringo runner and hermit called el Caballo, draws McDougall into his wildly ambitious plans to stage a race in the dangerous Copper Canyon pitting the greatest ultrarunners from North America against the greatest Tarahumara runners.  As you can imagine, the outcome is hair-raising and almost unbelievable.

I have to admit that when I first began reading the book, I was a bit put off by McDougall's overblown style and descriptions - every character is the most amazing, most awesome, most eccentric, most etc. etc., that one could imagine.  However, on Googling some of the characters in the book, they have in fact accomplished ridiculously grueling feats of running endurance - and often faster and more energetically than any other humans on the planet.  My only other complaint is that the book would have been much better with at least some photos - particularly of the characters who populate the book.


This book will definitely have you thinking a lot about running, whether you are someone who has never run before or are a seasoned marathoner. And it does it with fun, adventure and a true zest for the subject.  Not bad for a book on something as common as running from here to there!

Awesome Science, Awesome Earth

From the European Space Agency

The Story of Earth: the first 4.5 billion years, from stardust to living planet by Robert Hazen
New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 2013.
306 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. 

I love a good science book, and this one did not disappoint.  As Nancy Curtis of Library Journal writes, "Hazen has a gift for explaining science in lay terms."  He is able to convey a lot of rather intricate and tricky scientific knowledge and concepts about the formation of the earth and its features, but in ways that get the reader to visualize and contemplate the vast changes that our planet has undergone.  His book helps explain the way in which earth's familiar geology is intricately tied up with the existence of life - in other words, without life, the earth would be a very different place geologically. Specifically, Hazen posits that most of the minerals found on earth would not exist without the chemical changes in the land, oceans, and atmosphere that life sets in motion.

For me the most exciting part of reading The Story of Earth is how it provokes thinking and imagining the nearly incomprehensible stretches of time that make up both earth's history (that 4.5 billion years) and its future (about another 4 billion years).  I think I must be like most humans and feel that a lifetime of 75-100 years is a long time, or that ancient  history (human, that is!) 2,000-3,000 years in past is immense.  But the extent of deep time really is breathtaking - the thought that life was present by the 1 billionth year of earth's existence and yet carried on for another billion year before getting the knack of photosynthesis is really incredible. Of course it was the recognition of deep time that helped Darwin see the potential for truly radical changes of organisms - given only minute changes at any one time.

I will definitely be recommending this book for any students looking for a good science read.

Appetizer With Chopsticks

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral
New York : Razorbill, c2012.
1 v. (unpaged) : ill.(chiefly col.) ; 25 cm.

I really like a lot about this genre-blending novel.  It combines evocative photography/images/drawings, scrapbook-like formatting, links to YouTube videos, and IM shots to create a novel/pastiche of a teen piano prodigy's disappearance, mental troubles, family backstory, and passionate love affair with a mysterious and elusive teen from Argentina.  (The flavor of the book can be sampled at its Tumblr website.)  The story is told with sparse text and the "novel" can be read in about 30 min to 1 hour - and it is compelling.   So far so good! 

But for me the novel has significant shortcomings.  The idea of unreliable narrator is carried to the next level in this book by making the visual narrative itself (images of photos, plane tickets, menus, invitations) very unreliable.  After finishing the book and wondering about the ending, I found myself looking more closely at the visual text of the book.  Contradictions and incorrect documents and dates are taken to such a point as to render the very images potentially false.   At a point I came to be so aware of being manipulated by the authors that I couldn't really enjoy the narrative of the book.  Ultimately the book seemed more interested in its technique and appearance - and lacking in heart.

All this is in some ways all right with me.  This is a book that would be fun to have several readers read and then discuss (and argue about what they think happened - or didn't happen for that matter).  I also like that the book is easy to read and yet can really get readers to question what it means to trust the narrative of a book - fiction or non-fiction.

When I checked out reviews of the book, they seem to fall into two general camps: people love the book (see Kirkus and Reading Rants) or they like the book, but ultimately find it lacking (see Oops and Never Ending Bookshelf [note spoilers]).  I'd have to say I fall into the latter camp.  I find the novel to be more of a intriguing appetizer, but not a main course that satisfies.  Nevertheless, I'll be curious to see how students react to this book.