en-US Sat, 05 Apr 2025 18:05:51 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7465590987 Sat, 05 Apr 2025 18:05:51 -0700 /review/show/7465590987 Dan gave 3 stars to The Writing of Fiction (Paperback) by Edith Wharton
Wharton is the Hank Aaron of American letters. Just as Aaron never had an OMG year at the plate, Wharton never wrote a superlative novel ala The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby. Yes, The Age Of Innocence is pretty damn close. But what she did do is churn out a stunning number of 5-star novels over a long career. F. Scott Fitzgerald churned out one fantastic novel and a few woulda-coulda-shoulda efforts that, although excellent in themselves, never come close to Gatsby-ian brilliance. Hemmingway's influence on prose style of everyone who came after him cannot be understated. But too often his self-importance kept him from hitting it out of the park. He did hit a lot of singles and doubles. (Is Ernest Hemmingway the George Brett of American Letters? Discuss.)

Wharton's saves her self-importance for her nonfiction. She often comes across as a snooty aristocrat who's deigning to spend her precious time with her reader. Wharton is a Euro-snob who seems to think that France is the center of the literary universe, although she does have nice things to say about Tolstoy, and to a lesser extent Austen. Perhaps I would feel differently if had read all the French authors of whom she assumes her readers are well aware of.

Wharton spends most of her time in this book explaining why she thinks this or that author is great. Wharton is an important writer, and it's good that we find out what she values in prose. But this is not a "how to" book ala Stephen King's On Writing. That said, there is one thing that I did get out of it - Wharton's notion of "the insightful incident." Maybe she was making a play on "the inciting incident," the event that propels the action of a novel. For Wharton, "the insightful incident" is an incident that shows a character's true nature. To me, this is a much more useful phrase than the vague, "show, don't tell." I have now started reading Wharton's "The Glimpses of the Moon," and I am struck by how it's overflowing with wonderfully trenchant insightful incidents. Maybe that's why I love her fiction so much. But her nonfiction? Meh. ]]> Review7465537468 Sat, 05 Apr 2025 17:39:40 -0700 /review/show/7465537468 Dan gave 2 stars to James Wilson: The Anxious Founder (Hardcover) by Michael H. Taylor
The author, Michael H. Taylor, makes it clear from the beginning that this is not a "cradle to grave" biography. Since that was what I was looking for, I was probably going to be frustrated by this book. Even still, I think this book can only appeal to historians. It feels like a bunch of essays that were published in academic journals that were cobbled together to make a saleable package.

Taylor's prose is fine, and his history is rock solid - it's on a par with other historians, and much better than the mediocre biographies that non-historians tend to churn out. But his subject matter can be pretty damn obscure.

The opening essay on Wilson's re-interment during Teddy's Roosevelt's administration really tried my patience. He tries to justify it somewhat at the end by claiming that Wilson's theory of a strong executive was brought to the forefront because key people saw Wilson in a new light at the time. Maybe, but I'm of the mind that strongmen like to be strongmen because being a bully is jolly good fun. Strongmen will use whatever theory they need to justify their fascism. They'll just as soon use Batman as a founding father.

The other essays are extremely deep dives into different milestones of Wilson's life. These are interesting enough, but I was frustrated by the author's treatment of Wilson's financial troubles. The author seems to assume that the reader knows all about it, so there's no need to delve into the details. If you're a historian, maybe you already do know about it.

If Taylor ever decides to do a "cradle to grave" biography of Wilson, or any other founding father, I'll be among the first to buy it. But if he writes another book like this, I'll probably need to several dozen other books before I can fully appreciate his essays. ]]> Review7366396206 Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:10:50 -0800 /review/show/7366396206 Dan gave 2 stars to Running with the Buffaloes: A Season Inside with Mark Wetmore, Adam Goucher, and the University of Colorado Men's Cross-Country Team (Paperback) by Chris Lear
Chris Lear’s “Running with the Buffaloes� chronicles the 1998 season of the Colorado University Buffaloes men’s cross country team. I first heard about this book because an article on Marathon Handbook listed it as one of the �5 Best Running Books to Inspire You.�
In June of 2024, Colorado University announced they would not be renewing the contract of longtime Cross Country coach Mark Wetmore. Cindy Kuzma of Runner’s World reported on 6/25/2024 that

The announcement comes less than a year after the school released the results of an independent review into practices associated with the program. The investigation, launched after 14 athletes submitted complaints, was conducted by two staff members of the University of Colorado Audit Department and an outside attorney.

Their report—based on interviews with nearly 50 former and current team members, plus a dozen staff members—found that the program’s use of body composition analysis “negatively impacted a significant number of student athletes� and that for many members of the women’s team the program “had an unhealthy environment.� Several medical staff members, in particular, said they’d expressed concerns about body composition testing and the resulting risk for low bone density, eating disorders, and other mental and physical health problems.

The only question I have is why the hell did it take over twenty years for this guy to get fired? Yes, he was wildly successful, but anyone who reads this book could clearly see that his success was built on overtraining extremely talented runners and hoping enough of them emerge relatively injury-free at the end of the season for the national championships.

The science of running has advanced considerably in the last 25 years. Still, it’s glaringly obvious that Wetmore has a very limited set of tools. His runners ran many miles, sometimes over 100, per week. That this is pretty standard now but might have been cutting edge back in 1998. But his notion of “easy� versus “hard� doesn’t match best practices of today. What he calls “easy� is “hard�, even for top athletes, and his frequent “hard� workouts required maximum effort. Little wonder that so many of his runners end up having stress fractures. At the end of the season, Wetmore somewhat questioned his training regimen, but it’s doubtful he significantly changed his approach the next year.

The book serves as a damning indictment on Wetmore’s obsession with body weight.

From the book:
In Wetmore’s opinion, the emphasis on weight is not overrated. “Leanness is underrated, he says. “I tell people ‘Go look at Track and Field News. See what those people look like. You should look like a skeleton with a condom pulled over your skull.�

From the book:
Goucher never eats lunch. If he is hungry, he will have a granola bar or another light snack. The guys, especially Reese, kid him that he does not eat enough. He used to eat more. Standing 5'9" to 5 10", he weighs in at just under 140 pounds. At the Olympic Trials in Atlanta in 1996, he weighed 145. After the 5000-meter final, where he finished a disappointing ing fourteenth, Wetmore told him he was fat. Goucher was livid. When he calmed down he realized Wetmore was right, and he has made a conscious effort to lose any excess weight since then. He feels the difference. “My chest was bigger, my arms were bigger. Losing the five pounds has helped me thin out, and it’s cut me more. It’s made a big difference.�

From the book:
The injuries gnaw at him. He [Wetmore] knows as much as anyone, this was CU's best shot at winning it all. He blames himself. "If we weren't hurt, we should have won. So I have to look critically at my own work and see what misjudgments I made." But Wetmore cannot bear all of the responsibility. Batliner, for instance, could have prepared himself better. "The day we found out he got hurt, I said, `I'll save a spot for you, but don't get fat,' and he gained ten to fifteen pounds. When you're a fifth-year senior in the last-chance saloon, how could you not check? Every day!" He attributes the weight gain simply to carelessness. "He wasn't careful, that's all. On a macro level, his inattentiveness hurt him. He was 25 to 30 seconds behind where he could have been just because he had an extra ten to twelve pounds of weight.�

From the book:
The injury looks bad, but it does not affect his running. Wetmore sees him coming around the course and smiles while shaking his head. "Every year Sev manages to screw it up," he says. But Wetmore knows he is a diligent worker. "He's doing alright. If we can just melt the fat off of him we'll be okay."

From the book:
Sev is more excited about Wetmore's comments than about his performance. "That was the first time I've ever heard that from him. I only hear, ‘you're looking fat.� I guess I'm getting in shape, huh?"

From the book:
In terms of leanness, Goucher also sets the standard. After practice yesterday, Wetmore reached out and pinched Slattery's stomach. "Pretty good," said Wetmore. Slattery has lost ten pounds since arriving in Boulder. Then Wetmore held his hand out, rubbing fingers. "Goucher" -he paused- "he's like paper."

My theory is that Wetmore emphasized weight because it was something that he could see and easily measure. Runner’s World reported that there were complaints from women runners that Wetmore mandated that they have no more than 12% body fat, and that he pressured women who were over that percentage to mimic the faster runners who had a lower percentage.
I should note that several of Wetmore’s former athletes defended him, including the above-mentioned 140-pound Adam Goucher, who won the national championship that year. So too did Goucher’s wife, Kara Goucher, who also ran at Colorado. She later wrote “The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team.� She deleted an Instagram post that defended Wetmore and questioned the accusers after she received pushback for perceived hypocrisy.

The author of “Running with the Buffaloes,� Chris Lear, is all-in on Wetmore being a super awesome coach. Everything Wetmore says is treated as gospel. Lear all but ignores the women on the team. Early on it’s mentioned that the girls are nationally ranked, but after they do poorly in an early race they are almost never mentioned again. Toward the end of the season, Wetmore concocts a race where the slowest women are teamed up with the fastest men, who berate them for not being faster.

In the book, Coach Wetmore rarely talks to women. On one memorable occasion, at a morning practice he decided to embarrass a freshman woman in front of the whole team:
Wetmore launches into a story: "I saw an article in the paper this morning. Only ten percent of all non-human species are monogamous. Of those ten percent, only two percent are really monogamous. I guess the point of the article was to forgive our president. What I want to know is, of that ten percent, how many lie about it?" He looks at Mary Baretto, one of the freshman women. "You think many lie about it, Mary?" She shrugs her shoulders. She, like the others, is not nearly awake enough for this.

Apparently, it never occurred to author Chris Lear that a young woman could be utterly mortified to be singled out and asked a question about sex by her male coach in front of her teammates.
Lear deserves credit for chronicling an obscure collegiate sport —I would say an “Olympic sport,� but while the Olympics feature 5K and 10K races run on a 400-meter track, it doesn’t feature an actual cross country race. Lear shines in his descriptions of the big meets. But his meticulous notes on every practice quickly grows tedious.

Lear spent a lot of time with the runners, but the reader doesn’t really get to know them. They’re just a bunch of names and mile splits. When one of the runners dies in a freak bicycle accident, their emotional range is exceedingly narrow. This is probably a reaction to Wetmore, their coach, who demanded stoicism, even to the point of discouraging them from wearing black armbands. ]]> Review7260514301 Sun, 26 Jan 2025 17:19:56 -0800 /review/show/7260514301 Dan gave 5 stars to Cecilia (Paperback) by Frances Burney
In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, she writes:

“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda�; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

I gave Maria Edgeworth's Belinda 3 stars (/review/show...), and Burney's Camilla 3 stars (/review/show...). Cecilia is head and shoulders above the others, and frankly better than her most famous novel, Evelina. Cecilia weighs in at 940 pages in the excellent Oxford World Classics edition. (Warning: don't read the introduction until you've finished the novel, because it contains spoilers. But do read it, because it is very good.)

Cecilia has a killer hook - A charming young woman from the country travels to London. She will inherit a fortune when she turns 21. But whomever she marries must change his name before he can receive her fortune. Otherwise, her fortune goes to a distant cousin. She has been assigned three guardians - an absurd skinflint, a profligate spender, and an overly proud aristocrat. Each treats her poorly in their own unique way. For advice she turns to a trusted married man from her rural community. But he's just waiting for his elderly wife to die so that he can get his hands on Cecilia's money.

Burney's universe is so much expansive than Austen's. It's not just the range of locales but also the types of characters. With Burney, one gets a better sense of the zeitgeist of the times. There's more action, too. But Burney's characters lack the psychological depth of Jane Austen's. Austen will always provide better insight into the human psyche and more empathy with one's fellow man. But that doesn't mean that Ceclia isn't a banger of a novel. ]]> Review7028961056 Sat, 23 Nov 2024 17:53:57 -0800 /review/show/7028961056 Dan gave 3 stars to John Laurens and the American Revolution (Hardcover) by Gregory D. Massey
This could be titled "History of a fuck-up." He got himself killed in a pointless skirmish at the end of the war because he was hell-bent for glory. His military career was notably undistinguished. He was reckless in all his battles. When given a command, he continually put his men in needless danger, earning him the enmity of his troops. His personal life was a mess. He knocked up some girl in England before the war, then spent his life pretending he wasn't married. When in France on a diplomatic mission, he couldn't be bothered to see her because he was too busy pissing off the French. His claim to fame nowadays is being a bit player in the musical Hamilton.

The author, Massey does a workmanlike job on Jonn Laurens's career. But because his achievements were so scanty, he pads the book with a history of his father, Henry Laurens, who was a president of the Continental Congress. Massey has a bad habit of further padding by sprinkling pedantic psychological commentary throughout the text.

In the first edition, Massey strongly denies the possibility that Hamilton and Laurens could have had a homosexual relationship. It's an understandable stance. Dudes back then wrote about their friendships in effusive language that strikes the modern reader as pretty damn gay. In the second edition, Massey wrote an introduction in which he basically says, "I suppose it's possible that Laurens and Hamilton got it on. Your guess is as good as mine."

Massy spends a lot of time on John Laurens's attempt to arm South Carolina slaves to bolster his home state's defense. Laurens does deserve credit for being more forward-thinking than other slave owners. Yeah, that's right, he's yet another slaveowner who hates slavery. To Massey's credit, he does note how Laurens treated his own personal slave very shabbily, dressing him in rags while he constantly wrote Dad for more money so he could look good in front of the troops. Massey seems too credulous to Henry Laurens's insistence that his own slaves would rather be enslaved than free. Historians just don't do well when dealing with immorality. Their profession disdains intemperance and moral outrage in their prose. It's a good stance to have - without it, historians would be indistinguishable from talking head on cable news. Even still, it does get tiresome to read biography after biography of slaveholders where historians say, "yeah, this guy I'm writing about was a slaveholder, oh well." ]]> Review176960295 Sun, 10 Nov 2024 17:24:57 -0800 /review/show/176960295 Dan gave 3 stars to Frankenstein (Paperback) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I elevated my rating from two to three stars after I read this book for the third time after enmeshing myself in gothic novels that predated it. I am willing to forgive the pointless reveries about mountains and arctic climes, and the absurdly romantic subplot about the Turkish woman who is the blind man's son's fiancé. These are par for the course for gothic novels, and Shelley's contribution to these tropes is probably slightly above average. And I must admit that the creature/monster's monologues are poignant in a Calibanistic point of view.

Unfortunately, the monster is extremely problematic. Shakespeare in The Tempest puts a narrative straightjacket on his monster, Caliban. Over the centuries, productions have grappled with how to portray him. Yes, his dialogue is noble, but he openly fantasizes about raping Miranda. Plus, he's kind of a dumbass who is easily duped. Modern directors like to emphasize Caliban's noble character and downplay his shortcomings, which are uncomfortably similar to racist stereotypes.

Unlike directors of The Tempest who are constrained by Shakespeare's text, Shelly is free to give her monster the star treatment. This aligns with the modern tendency to flesh-out minor characters, whether it be the reimagining of one-trick ponies like Pride and Prejudice's Mary Bennett or giving extended airtime to Brotastic Klingons.

Frankenstein's monster is thoughtful and noble in spirit. But he's also a cold-blooded killer, because if he isn't, then there isn't a novel. Shelly does precious little to explain this dichotomy. He's noble until the plot requires that he kill somebody. Once that nasty business is done, he's noble again. Forty years later after the publication of Frankenstein, Dostoyevsky would wrestle with the complexity of how good and evil can coexist in human nature in works such as House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment. Shelly limits herself to the shallow pool of human emotion.

If Shelly had given the monster a more nuanced personality, it might have been more believable. I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief that an early nineteenth-century mad scientist can create a living, breathing, thinking monster. But I'm not buying that it developed a noble spirit, not to mention a wide-ranging vocabulary, in a matter of weeks. In the movie "Poor Things," Emma Stone's character goes through a rapid period of infancy to adolescent. There is no such transition in Frankenstein.

I have always found it infuriating that these defects are blithely ignored by English professors who have made Frankenstein one of the most assigned novels for undergraduate literature classes. It's easy to understand its appeal to academia. It's written by a woman. Yes, she's a white woman, but that's better than yet another white dude. It probably wasn't assigned in high school, so students will have to read it. The movie adaptations, which clean up the novel's deficiencies, differs enough from the novel, so students can't watch the move and fake that they read it. The novel is short, so students can't complain about it being too long. It's not a mushy love story, so dudes can't complain. But most importantly, it deals with Big Issues that cry out for a million mediocre essays: man's hubris, man's cruelty to man, man's relationship with his creator.

Some claim that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel. The only problem with this is that there ain't nothing sciency about it. Shelly's vagueness about how the monster was put together borders on the absurd. There's a lab where Victor Frankenstein does some kind of magic with chemicals. There's vague talk of using dead bodies, but that is only obliquely mentioned. But to Shelly's credit, she does have Victor Frankenstein contemplate the possible ramifications of monsters taking over the world. Speculative Fiction is a more nebulous category than Science Fiction but one that better fits Frankenstein. And one can definitely see that Frankenstein, with its self-promoting style that draws the reader in, and its sophisticated narrative techniques. has left the eighteenth century behind. The result is a book that more closely resembles modern novels than anything written by Richardson and Austen. But the cost of this showmanship is a lack of real human emotion. ]]> Review6947171741 Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:09:57 -0700 /review/show/6947171741 Dan gave 1 star to The Old English Baron (Paperback) by Clara Reeve
The Old English Baron, written in 1778, is heralded as an early and influential gothic novel. What they fail to mention is how boring it is. The author's preface notes that it is modeled after The Castle of Otranto. In my two-star review of that book, I wrote: "The first gothic novel, published in 1764.wooden characters, implausible plot, not that scary. But at least it's short." But in Otranto, there at least is action and some suspense. The Old English Baron reads as if it were written by a team of accountants who were more focused on the minor titles of the characters than any of the action within its pages. The characters are poorly introduced. There is no suspense. In the preface, the author complained of the implausible supernatural that is found in Otranto. Her answer is to limit the supernatural in her novel to a pair of ghosts who only make a cameo appearance.

Why on earth has this book been preserved? Surely there are other early gothic novels written by women that are more entertaining. ]]> Review6947149689 Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:09:40 -0700 /review/show/6947149689 Dan gave 3 stars to The Monk (Paperback) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
Written in 1796 by Matthew Lewis when he was 19, this book has sex, rape, incest, and violence. Its narrative style is strikingly modern. So many gothic novels of its day are halting and tentative. But The Monk is confident in its storytelling. The story it tells is misogynistic to its core - yeah, sure Monk is bad, but it's a hot chick makes him go crazy. There's a second plotline that isn't nearly as interesting, and the reader can't help but be disappointed when the second plot is reintroduced.

The novel was scandalous when it was introduced., and the author's reputation took a severe hit because of it. But it was widely popular, and highly influential in the gothic genre. Unfortunately, later gothic writers didn't try to imitate the author's confident narrative style. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by all of the salacious material to take notice of how the story was told. ]]> Review6947149689 Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:58:18 -0700 /review/show/6947149689 Dan gave 3 stars to The Monk (Paperback) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
Written in 1796 by Matthew Lewis when he was 19, this book has sex, rape, incest, and violence. Its narrative style is strikingly modern. So many gothic novels of its day are halting and tentative. But The Monk is confident in its storytelling. The story it tells is misogynistic to its core - yeah, sure Monk is bad, but it's a hot chick makes him go crazy. There's a second plotline that isn't nearly as interesting, and the reader can't help but be disappointed when the second plot is reintroduced.

The novel was scandalous when it was introduced., and the author's reputation took a severe hit because of it. But it was widely popular, and highly influential in the gothic genre. Unfortunately, later gothic writers didn't try to imitate the author's confident narrative style. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by all of the salacious material to take notice of how the story was told. ]]> Review6932284665 Wed, 16 Oct 2024 16:43:39 -0700 /review/show/6932284665 Dan gave 4 stars to Bitter Freedom: Ireland In A Revolutionary World 1918�1923 (Kindle Edition) by Maurice Walsh
In the movie "The Banshees of Inisherin," characters on an island off the west coast of Ireland hear distant guns from Ireland's civil war. I remember thinking, "dang, I really should know more about that conflict." But after reading "Bitter Freedom," I now realize that the civil war wasn't a land battle. It was basically a bunch of internecine tit-for-tat terrorist attacks from two rival factions. The author does a good job of explaining the conflict in the context of the wider world. The book's marketing oversells this point. Yes, there is talk about Woodrow Wilson, the Treaty Versailles and all that, but the book spends more time contextualizing the conflict by giving a sense of what life in Ireland was like during the time period. Sometimes the author falls a bit too much in love with his research, but most of the time the period details are crucial. The police force play heavily in the period's history. Well then, what was it like to be a policeman? These are the sort of details that make this book more than just a retelling of the simple facts. ]]>