Goodreads Roundup

Here's another set of books I've recently read, and the reviews I posted at Goodreads.


In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
by Erik Larson
(Four Stars)

In both the excellent Thunderstruck and The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson fashioned eminently readable and fascinating histories by intertwining two seemingly disparate narratives that, like magic, dovetailed at the climax—the twin tales of Marconi and the murderer Crippen, in the first, and the story of another murderer and the 1893 World's Fair, in the latter.

In In the Garden of Beasts Larson attempts to work the same magic with a story of innocents abroad in a time of ultimate danger and darkness: the stories of William E. Dodd, hapless U.S. ambassador to Germany during Adolf Hitler's ascendancy between the world wars, and of his daughter, Martha Dodd, a free-spirited girl adrift in a city of corruption, deceit, and political intrigue.

The result is fascinating and, like his previous works, both enticing and gripping stuff. Despite the atrocities of the era, however, ultimately the book is a little bit of a disappointment; the father and daughter's tales are not so disparate as the stuff of Larson's other works. Both Dodds are, in their own ways, equally branded and blinded by their own naivete, and neither seems to have made much of a mark on their landscape. They're helpless and ultimate passive flotsam in an unstoppable flood of evil . . . and honestly, how much investment can a reader really make in the end for the detritus that bobs along on the deluge?

I'm not even certain Larson himself much cares, for the stories peter out at the end without any real climax or resolution. Though the writer exquisitely and carefully documents everything that happens between the years of 1933 and 1934 in the Dodd household, the remainder of their five-year term in Germany is dismissed and glossed over in the book's final dozen pages, as if nothing interesting happened either to them or in Nazi Germany during those years. It's a disappointing conclusion.

The Dodds are a fascinating entry point to what should have been a truly remarkable look at a terrible era. Ultimately, however, they simply aren't the heroic protagonists he wishes them to be.


If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't)
by Betty White
(Three Stars)

To say that Betty White's latest book—I suppose we should call it that, as it's tough to deny that it got printed and appears on bookstore and library shelves—is a bit random and scattered, is an understatement. To imply it's a lot like listening to your aged grandmother ramble about the good old days when she's in a talkative mood, would be unkind. To suggest that it's not great literature, or even really readable. . . well, that's kind of missing the point.

I was able to complete this slight little tome in an hour. White's oddball collection of mini-essays reads more like a handful of dictated and unedited blog entries than any kind of memoir. She discusses her health (which is great for her age—she tries to maintain her weight, you know, and all those stairs in her home really keep her exercised!), her guest appearance on Saturday Night Live (it was fun!), and her pets (she had a lot!), and . . . oh damn, I've gone and given away the entire plot of the book. Whoopsie.

The photos of White throughout her long career really glue the whole thing together. They show a smiling, sweet and classy entertainer from her high school years to her dotage, and it's for those that I give the book three stars.

A Queer History of the United States
by Michael Bronski
(Three Stars)

A Queer History of the United States takes the Schoolhouse Rock approach to surveying queer culture in America. It's fast-moving, it hits all the expected high and low points, it's affirming, and it never explores its subject beyond cartoon depth. All it really lacks is a catchy tune.

Though the book alleges to cover a period of time spanning from before 1492 to the present, its pre-colonial and colonial history is at best sketchy—in fact, just about anything before the turn of the twentieth century is simply a quick run-down of the usual literary and political suspects (Walt Whitman might've been gay, y'all!). And by 'the present', Bronski means 1990, the year at which he unapologetically cuts off his narrative.

Bronski's gallop through several hundred years of history certainly covers a lot of territory, and for that it may be worth reading. Anyone expecting analysis or a critical eye may be disappointed to find that the read is a bit like attending a cocktail party and hearing all the expected names dropped, but not being able after to remember if anything interesting about them was said.


Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America
by Jonathan Dixon
(Three Stars)

Whether Tom Brown's Schooldays or the Harry Potter series, I'm a sucker for books in which a neophyte goes to school for the first time, endures its rigors and harsh realities, and emerges a better person after learning some hard-earned truths about himself and the limits of endurance. Ultimately the success of the story depends on the hero's transformation by graduation. While Jonathan Dixon's memoir of his education at the Culinary Institute of America follows the skeleton of the old schoolboy tale archetype, his overall character fails to improve, much less impress.

It's difficult to have such a sad sack as the focal point of a memoir. Dixon is a self-admitted slacker who wasted away his twenties and gambled his and his girlfriend's well-beings and limited resources in order to achieve a career change in his late thirties. (Throughout the book, he's morbidly sensitive about his age, to the point that his readers are embarrassed for his continual apologies for having lived longer than Methuselah. Dude, you're in your thirties. Not your seventies. Even if you were? Get the hell over it.) He's mopey, he's glum, he's continually worried and—let's be frank—obviously not the best student. And at book's end, sad to say, any confidence or mastery he may have achieved as a result of matriculating are squandered when he faces the future with the same aimless apathy as he's spent the rest of his allegedly advanced years.

It's a pity, because a great deal of his experiences at the CIA are interesting to outsiders: the rigid curriculum, the tyrannical and eccentric instructors, the obstacles to be overcome and the rigorous hoops to be jumped. The CIA has such a methodical and well-thought-out course structure, however, that it seems pretty obvious that any of the insights of which Dixon writes aren't his, but the school's—the exact realizations the institute wants its students to make at exact points in their training. Nor does it help that many of Dixon's class descriptions sound as if he's summarized his saved syllabi. The other students in the memoir are not much more than cyphers or personality tics who vanish quickly, like anything expendable. The instructors are a bit more fleshed out, but for most Dixon has precious little affection, and imparts a sense that he's settling some personal scores and grinding a few paring knives (if not axes) by giving himself the last word.

The book cured me of any vague wonderings I may have had of wishing for an alternative life path that might have involved the CIA, certainly. I'm just fortunate that, unlike Dixon, I never applied on whim and attended solely for the purpose of being able to host and cook for slightly snobbier dinner parties.

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir
by Dick Van Dyke
(Two Stars)

Dick Van Dyke's celebrity memoir, spanning his career of sixty years, goes down like mayonnaise on white bread--unobjectionable, but hardly interesting. Everything passes by without much impact or examination. His work on the groundbreaking The Dick Van Dyke Show was fun. Mary Tyler Moore was a sweet gal. Walt Disney was a heck of a guy. Martin Luther King Jr. sure was swell.

It's a little odd that the most emotionally-resonant scene in the book (moreso than either his divorce or the death of a beloved granddaughter, even) involves his relationship with Dinky, a trained chimp for the movie Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N. But hey, it's Hollywood, where every monkey gets a shot at the big time.


The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
(Four Stars)

Sarah Vowell's account of the puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is anything but a typical romp through early American history. She's got her own axe to grind, here—the ways in which modern-day politicians have appropriated (and in some instances, perverted) puritan idealism into something probably not what the small band of colonists had in mind. But along the way in this rambling narrative, which jumps crazily from political landscapes past and present to Vowell's own history, she manages to make very clear how deeply engrained many of the puritan ideals have become in the national dialogue.

The book's short. Whether or not one finds it readable would depend, I think, partly on how closely one's political agenda aligns with Vowell's, and partly on how much one can tolerate the current generation of self-referential hipster NPR commentators.


Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
by Julie Andrews Edwards
(Four Stars)

I confess that in the early pages of Julie Andrews Edwards' memoirs I began to fear I might be overwhelmed in trying to keep straight the names of all her aunts, dogs, and cousins. There seem, in my weary memory, to have been about a dozen of each. More electrifying, however, is the story that unfolds of the three men vying to be the star's father—her mother's first husband, whom she thought of as her dad, the alcoholic artist of a second husband whom Julie supplanted as a headliner on his own tour, and the man later revealed to have been her biological progenitor. Julie's mom kind of got around, basically.

The memoir really gathers steam when Julie's career takes off—which happened at about the same age that most of us hadn't yet finished sixth grade. The narrative of her rise to fame from vaudeville to London revues and pantomimes to the New York stage is fascinating, and the star manages to relate it with characteristic modesty and good humor. In a curious twist, I found myself actually rooting for her to get parts in Camelot and Mary Poppins and worrying that she wouldn't—even though I knew exactly how it would turn out. If that's not a sign of a well-told tale, I don't know what is.

The book concludes at roughly the time of the star's first meetings with Walt Disney: the perfect point at which to whet my appetite for a second volume.


The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie
by Wendy McClure
(Three Stars)

McClure's account of her lifelong obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder-penned Little House series culminates in a rambling journey through the nation's countryside, visiting all of the childhood homesteads Wilder mentioned in her popular books. McClure's off-kilter and occasionally profane individuality contrasts humorously with the heterodoxy of the many other Wilder enthusiasts she encounters along the way, resulting in an engaging and quick read.

However, the narrative is as meandering and out-of-step as the route McClure takes to her heroine's homesteads. It's ultimately about as pointless, too, as McClure really has no idea why she feels compelled to make the literary pilgrimage, or what she expects from each stop along the way.

That's a pity.

McClure nails her own dilemma fairly early on in the book: she wants to immerse herself in 'Laura World', as she calls it, in order to get a sense of its so-called realness—despite the fact that she's fully aware that the Little House series was written as fiction, is classified as fiction in bookstores and on library shelves, and took on a fictional second life as a television series in the nineteen-seventies. Her visits to the homesteads, amusing and blog-like as the recounting may be, all conclude with her missing and yearning for a certain lacking something—something upon which she is unable to put a finger.

McClure may glibly assert, as she does in her visit to the Almanzo Wilder childhood home, that something is as simple as pancakes. It's not. It's merely that spark of wonder and imagination she experienced upon reading the books in childhood. Attempting to chase that particular quality over the dusty back roads of Kansas and Missouri is hopeless; one would be as likely to book a modern-day bus tour of the principal sights of Narnia. It's a sense of looking within, and reconciling a childhood delight of reading and imagining with modern-day realities, that this particular book lacks. Watching the adult McClure trade in that delight for a long-range, expensive obsession may result in a glib and often funny memoir, but it's ultimately an empty experience for author and reader alike.