Isham Cook
A leftist Australian acquaintance of mine who despises the U.S. trashed this book as he felt it hadn't explained the full extent of U.S. violence in Vietnam. A U.S. citizen myself, I'm no fan of the U.S. Government either, and I've read Chomsky & Herman's After the Cataclysm, which should also be required reading for anyone learning about the Indochina War. I found Hastings' a worthy, balanced account and far from being U.S-biased, would enlighten many Americans about the extent of racist genocide carried out by their government, while retaining for the public record the significant violence carried out by the North Vietnamese toward civilians in both the North and the South.
It's been called one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century, and rightly so, for its literary sophistication, biting comedy of manners, and the tragic implications of social relations in 1930s China. There is no happy or sentimental resolution to the slow-motion collapse of the failed university-lecturer protagonist's failed marriage to a dull woman. Qian's observations are keen and details telling, such as this concise portrait of a woman sitting in a restaurant filing her nails (substitute Chinese woman in Starbucks today fiddling with iPhone): “She raised her head, her face filled with an expression of solemn unapproachability, as though having been wronged by men in a previous life, she was still keeping her guard up in this one. She looked him over a moment, shot her red lips over toward the left, then lowered her head and continued filing away at her nails.”
Megalomaniac billionaire C. Linus Maxwell invents a dildo that enables him to control women's bodies remotely - and cause them to go sexually insane or kill them as he wishes. Comic-book satire that completely flouts the plausible yet nonetheless gets one thinking and is disturbingly reminiscent of real-world technofascists such as Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palantir.
Miller's vulgarity fetish and absence of coherent narrative are welded into a solid and memorable whole by his relentlessly inventive and gorgeous English. And you can see how Jack Kerouac picked up where Miller left off.
Reporter Thomas Fowler's fraught love-hate relationship with American spy Alden Pyle during the First Indochina War is wrought into poignant literature by Greene's wise decision to have Fowler tell the story in the first person, as he struggles to relate their tortured love triangle over the beautiful Phuong in detached journalistic reportage.
Classic political novel and satire against the Spanish-controlled Catholic Church that fired the public and was instrumental in sparking the Philippine Revolution (1896-99). Only 26 years old when he wrote it, Rizal's erudition, powers of observation, and sophisticated sense of irony are startling for his age.
First read this when it came out and I was thirteen. I stayed up the whole night to finish it. Revisiting the novel over fifty years later was a completely different yet no less satisfying experience. The author captures the unnamed first-person teenage girl's voice convincingly, and it's fascinating to see how her expressive powers evolve and grow over the course of the narrative a la Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, as she gets involved with, and is profoundly influenced by, a variety of shady, hippie characters introducing her to powerful drug experiences. The book was meant to frighten teenagers away from drugs, but it had the opposite effect on me.
A novel that unfolds like scenes in a play, told in close conversations among a few friends or relations in private domiciles in the author's utopian setting, where the islanders have achieved a self-sustaining communist community, under imminent threat from the capitalist antagonists surrounding them. More prolix in parts than the jeweled conciseness of Brave New World, it takes a while to see the forest for the trees and understand what's going on, but the final impression is intriguing, inviting a second reading. I was especially taken with one character who makes tantalizingly brief appearances early in the novel to engage protagonist Will Farnaby in a few witty dialogues before her untimely disappearance from the narrative for good, the self-described “precocious and promiscuous” teenage Nurse Appu, “dressed in a blue skirt and a short buttonless jacket that left her midriff bare and only sometimes covered a pair of apple-round breasts”:
“What is it?” Will asked, and was told that it was an extract from a mountain plant related to valerian.
“It helps people to stop worrying,” the little nurse explained, “without making them sleepy. We give it to convalescents. It's useful, too, in mental cases.”
“Which am I? Mental or convalescent?”
“Both,” she answered without hesitation.
Will laughed aloud. “That's what comes of fishing for compliments.”
“I didn't mean to be rude,” she assured him. “All I meant was that I've never met anybody from the outside who wasn't a mental case.”
Brilliant account, equally scientific and emotional, of the Pompeii tragedy, with parallels drawn to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (the physics of the WTC downblasts resembled a mini volcanic eruption). Some will complain Pellegrino goes on far too many religious and other digressions, though some of these serve to contextualize and get into the heads of those living in 1st century Italy; the spiritual philosophizing also follows from the author's own harrowing coincidences relevant to the story. Without the digressions, the tome would be halved in length and considerably more concise, but Pellegrino is such a fine writer that it all sort of comes together in a worthwhile way.
From her perch on a sofa in her favorite cafe, reporter Judy Vernon witnesses a man outside on the sidewalk yelling angrily into his cellphone before collapsing with a heart attack. He stares hopelessly at her as he dies, and his shocked gaze haunts her. She investigates. As she learns more about Frank Farrington, she proceeds to do a story on his intriguing life. She soon becomes involved with his family, and the complications of her new social web begin to affect her own life–in a good way.
This odd yet endearing book, which began with hints of a crime novel, turns out to be a species of comedy. Not in the modern sense of gags and humorous situations but in the traditional sense of the opposite of tragedy: instead of all going horribly wrong, it all goes horribly right; couples get matched up with their ideal partners and everything works out a la Shakespearean comedy.
The setting is an unknown location in Any City, USA (or Australia?) with fictionalized restaurants, bars and coffeehouses, surely based on real establishments lovingly known to the author. Atmosphere and texture are provided not by suspense and drama but elaborate descriptions of food and sex; the former almost pornographically described and the latter, well, what saves the narrative from the “erotica” category is its investment in interesting, well-rounded characters and their unfolding relationships, the central focus.
The heroine gets matched up with the handsome, well-to-do Myron. Here's where things get on shaky ground. This fawning, insipid milquetoast of a mate challenges our patience and we wonder why he doesn't challenge Judy's. We're waiting for her to grow bored with him so she can get on with her budding lesbian infatuation with the hot Ali she met in Frank's familial network; we fear she's seduced only by his money. Thankfully, however, events are wrapped up in the end not wholly as predicted.
Fifields' The Great Successor picks up where Demick's Nothing to Envy leaves off to lay out all the bizarre developments and shenanigans of the Kim Jong Un regime, from his obsession with amusement parks and nuclear weapons to basketball. The Dennis Rodman affair, the Trump meeting in Singapore, the execution of relatives and top officials with anti-aircraft guns, and the assassination of his brother Kim Jong Nam by having two women smear his face with deadly chemicals in Kuala Lumpur airport (who thought they were participating in a reality show contest), are all laid out in dour and delicious detail.
Perhaps because the author's surname was the same as my pen name, I picked up this memoir in a secondhand bookshop. I soon discovered the prosaic cover belied its gory contents: a most grim, challenging, and disturbing read, as any good book should be. As far as my experience of memoirs goes, only Susan Blumberg-Kason's Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong (2014), about the tortuous breakdown of a marriage, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007), the New Agey bestseller about an American woman's postmarital redemption in the East, recently come to mind. Cook's memoir, by contrast, was written almost a half century ago in 1981, before the redemption memoir became its own genre. Far from the feel-good sentiments memoir readers seem to demand today, there's not much redemption in this memoir; the unrecounted “second life” of Cook's title follows upon the book's conclusion.
Her first life, covering her first three decades, is a case study and object lesson in modern patriarchal dominance, from her father's sexual fiddling with her as a child to her misdiagnoses by an elite cohort of physicians as a young woman, who repeatedly dismiss her suspicions of grave illness as mere psychosomatic griping (what in an earlier age was known as woman's “hysteria”). Most of the memoir is taken up in hospital rooms. In her stark reality reduced to blank walls and IV lines, like Beckett's sucking stones, all dissolves into pure language, a wry, deadpan, unstoppable voice absorbing every detail around her in disciplined, stylish prose; a female Beckett, a modern Everywoman. It also conjures up those Renaissance paintings of a body dissected before an audience of rapt medical students of the time:
“In the hospital of rare diseases I am still rare enough to be the subject of a number of presentations by aspiring doctors on rotation....Each presentation requires that the resident or intern who is doing it examine me from top to bottom, inside and out.....And sometimes, somehow, these nervous, bright-eyed medical boys inspire in me lubricious fantasies....I climb up onto their tables and lie down, buckling my dumb wig [for hair loss due to chemo] as my head falls back on the fresh, waxy paper, and surrender myself to their probing and poking.”
As her choriocarcinoma (a rare cancer of the placenta) metastasizes throughout her body and she turns gaunt and her flesh discolored, they finally begin to take her symptoms seriously. Yet she is still misdiagnosed and persuaded to undergo a hysterectomy, an oophorectomy, open-heart surgery, and other unnecessary treatments, before they finally hit upon it–cancer!–and she's thrust into multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Amidst all of this, she has an affair with her main doctor, and true to form, holds nothing back in her unflinching account of how sex and medicine mingle inexorably in the very hospital room, exposed genitals and all.
Cook pulls through in the end, only to be thrust into a new domestic crisis, the unraveling of her marriage. Here she wrestles with fundamental questions of self-autonomy upon which the book concludes, if somewhat inconclusively. We want to know more about her stints working as a fashion model and abortion clinic assistant (before her illness) and as a sex therapist and psychologist (after her illness)–experiences that would surely be all of a piece with the rest of the book.
It's hard to imagine a celebrated socialite at the center of more storied personages than American Bernadine Szold-Fritz was in 1930s Shanghai. Gravitating to her salons and theatrical extravaganzas (Anglo-Chinese collaborative dramas) were the cream of the International Settlement and French Concession elite - the tycoon Victor Sassoon, writers Harold Acton, Emily Hahn and Vicki Baum, renowned scholars Hu Shih and Lin Yutang, artists Mei Lanfang, Sinmay Zau, and Miguel Covarrubias, the Soong sisters (can't be more connected than them), and passing through from abroad, Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong, Jean Cocteau, and George Bernard Shaw. After fleeing Japanese hostilities in Shanghai, in subsequent decades in the U.S. her salons in LA attracted such luminaries as Gary Cooper, Frank Capra, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and many more. In Blumberg-Kason's hands, we have a sympathetic and compelling portrait which, next to firsthand accounts by Acton, Hahn, and Baum, and recent histories such as Taras Grescoe's Shanghai Grand and Ken Cuthbertson's Nobody Said Not to Go (on Emily Hahn), sits nicely on the Shanghai history bookshelf.
Szold-Fritz's life was exciting and depressing in equal measure. She had a knack for marrying the most unpalatable men, and it's also hard to imagine a more thoroughly unlikable husband than Chester Fritz, her fourth and final marriage, during her Shanghai sojourn. For all his wealth and social charm, he could be miserly with money when it came to his wife, and he was so constitutionally lacking in kindness to those closest to him that he refused to even speak with Bernadine's teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Rosemary Carver, when she came to stay with them in Shanghai. Bernadine was also terrified of revealing to Chester that she was having a mastectomy for fear he'd dump her. (In fairness, I'd like to have a look at his memoir, Ever Westward to the Far East, just to see what he has to say.) Given Blumberg-Kason's own turbulent marriage to an empathy-challenged Chinese national, fascinatingly anatomized her memoir, Good Chinese Wife, I'm guessing the author was drawn to research and write about Szold-Fritz for the many parallels in their domestic lives.
My one criticism of the book is aesthetic. With such a motley and extraordinary cast of characters, and with all the documentary material we have at hand on Szold-Fritz, her family and her social circle, even the most competent biography comes off as a bit dry, when the material could have taken more dramatic form as a dialogue-driven novel, told in turns by the respective protagonists and antagonists. Someone will have to do that down the line.
Aesthetically perverse in the way only the Japanese can be, this precision-tooled psychological thriller published in 1929 would have benefitted from more explicit lesbian sexual description, admittedly impossible at the time. The story really boils down to an attempt by a married couple and a hot beauty insinuating herself into their life to work out a polyamorous arrangement which they and Japanese society generally were far from conceptually ready for. The result instead was pretty grim.
This history of the Taiping Civil War in China (1850-64) has to be one of the most harrowing accounts of warfare I've ever read. The U.S. Civil War was child's play by comparison. Augustus Lindley was an ex-British naval officer who joined the Taiping cause, lived in Taiping-controlled Nanjing, and fought on their side. His 2-volume, 800-page magnum opus alternates between shocking, cliffhanger adventures and battles and outraged polemics against the British Government, which intervened on behalf of the Qing Imperial forces (allegedly to protect British business and trade interests), thus turning the tide against the Taiping with superior weaponry that the Qing forces lacked. According to Lindley's own estimates (meticulously gathered from numerous contemporary accounts), as a result of this intervention alone in the final 2 years of the war, the combined British (and French) and Imperial forces were responsible for directly slaughtering 372,550 Taiping and non-combatant civilians; another 2,500,000 civilians were starved to death by deliberately blocking their access to food (total casualties for the war range between 20-30 million, overwhelmingly civilians). In walled city after city in the Yangzte River delta region, the Brits set up their heavy guns (cannons and howitzers) and bombarded everything inside - mostly non-combatants, women, and children whose only crime was happening to live there - fully aware they were killing many thousands. Any remaining survivors were driven out into an execution grounds for decapitation and dismemberment by Qing forces.
Tangled analysis on a timely topic; remembered almost nothing after finishing the book.
Merged review:
Tangled analysis on a timely topic; remembered almost nothing after finishing the book.