Book Reviews

 

A BIG CHUCK GREEN TOAD BOOK REVIEW

Last Call by Daniel Okrent

Totally fascinating!  It is still hard to imagine that forces in this nation convinced the US to write a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT prohibiting the sale or purchase of alcohol in the US!  Prohibition?  It made a lot of honest people, from day laborers to high ranking politicians, do illegal things to "catch a sip." Unreal!  Called "America's Mistake," this book chronicles how the fifth largest industry in the US could be legally shut down by the government.  The speakeasies, the bathtub gin, Carrie Nation, organized crime, prostitution, Temperance leagues, stills and moonshine and many other phrases that we have read about come alive in Okrent's excellent story of prohibition.  I give it 4 shots of whiskey, my highest rating!

 

 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Safran Foer

   

 One of the dust jacket critics for Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close compares the writer’s young protagonist to Holden Caulfield, Harriet the Spy and Huck Finn. Comparisons like that are helpful, but in this case a little misleading. Foer’s nine-year-old Oskar Schell exhibits a quirky personality and distinctive voice similar to the above mentioned stock characters in American literature. However, there’s an element of naiveté and innocence in Oskar that bring readers to feel parentally protective of him in contrast to how Salinger’s readers might feel chummy or slightly annoyed at Holden. Nevertheless, Foer has managed to develop a strong, unforgettable character—one worthy of both dinner table and classroom conversation—in merely his second novel.

     If readers manage to get past the somewhat busy (see: distracting) cover, they will find that ELIC bares extremely lurid and incredibly comfortable writing within. Foer crafts a tender story about how the search for one’s identity can only be discovered with a greater understanding of one’s family. Using tri-voice narration, Foer employs a circular plot structure as he gingerly unfolds one family’s story over three generations. Oskar is on a search for information regarding his father’s tragic death in the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. This search takes Oskar over a year and leads him around to the pockets and corners New York City with help from some intimate strangers he encounters. Oskar’s quest comes to a close in a similar way that President Bush declared America’s “War On Terror” concluded with the capture of Saddam Hussein: questionably ambiguous. However, readers may have a bit more sympathy for young Oskar Schell; the boy may not have found what he was looking for but he certainly grew in peace of mind.

     Using 9/11 as more of a frame story rather than a narrative centerpiece, Foer seems to understand much the personal and cultural significance of war and suffering in human history. As a parallel story to Oskar’s, the voices of his two grandparents re-tell their own experience with death during the Dresden bombings at the end of World War II. In one section of an extended letter to her grandson, Oskar’s grandmother talks about losing her entire family to the war. She imports the fragility of time to Oskar, the idea that time is but a tracking device and not something to be taken as authority. “Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life,” she solemnly writes to her grandson.

     With a heavy—almost stillborn—tone, the words of Oskar’s grandmother will cling to readers the most as they encounter the story. Several phrases and images are repeated throughout the book and for Oskar’s grandmother, the reality of intimacy becomes central. She asks frequently, “why does anyone ever make love?” when thinking back on her atypical marriage. Yet perhaps her most poignant quote comes in the part of her story right before her husband leaves for 40 years: “I regret that it takes a life to learn to live, Oskar.” In this character-centric novel, one-word explanations for characters may be helpful in organizing situations. For Oskar’s grandmother, that word is love.

     Compared to the simple yet contemplative nature of his grandmother’s words, Oskar himself converses with direct and matter-of-fact sentences. With a knowledgeable vocabulary to match any other nine-year-old genius’ Oskar’s personality is displayed in his words. He is grounded, rational, and rather fatalistic for someone who hasn’t even hit adolescence. In a distressing argument with his mother, Oskar demands that she verbalize they buried an empty casket (because Mr. Schell’s body was never recovered):

“His body was destroyed…It’s just an empty box…Dad didn’t have a spirit, he had cells…and now they’re on the rooftops, and in the river, and in the millions of lungs of people around New York, who breathe them in every time they speak!”

     Oskar’s way of trying to get closer to his father is by admitting the fact of the situation, no matter how grave or harsh the words. This doesn’t make it easier for readers, who sympathize with his mother in trying to soften the devastation for her young son. In the end of his quest for answers, Oskar learns that there is a difference between truth and fact. And that revelation comes with understanding the familial ties that hold us together.

     Foer encountered a paternal search similar to Oskar’s when, in 1999, he went to Ukraine seeking information about his grandfather’s life. That experience turned into creative fodder when writing his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, published in 2002. Living in Brooklyn with his wife, Foer wove his second novel with a cultural genuineness that only a true New Yorker can accomplish.

 

War by Sebastian Junger

 

WAR by Sebastian Junger

      WAR by Sebastian Junger follows in the footsteps of his bestseller The Perfect Storm.  Like Storm, this book is breathless, gritty, impossibly tense, inspirational and heartbreaking all at the same time.  Writer Junger got himself embedded with a group of young soldiers at a dreary, Mad Max-like remote outpost in Afghanistan.  From their aerie in the high mountains these American soldiers are witness to some of the most brutal and incessant combat of the now nearly ten-year long war.  Junger writes with obvious affection for these soldiers with whom he was welded together with for fourteen months  The battle descriptions are enough to become a game-changer (I believe) for many unsure about their position on our combat mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.  You cannot help but feel "embedded" yourself while reading this book from the comfort of your easy chair.  With each combat fatality (and there are many) you feel saddened and grief-stricken over the death of somebody you came to know.  It is a page-turner and a head scratcher all at once.  When this war ever ends and people look back at the great book written about it, Junger's combat diary may just be the one.  This is a difficult but a great read.