en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:21:32 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9368144829 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:21:32 -0700 /review/show/7070786121 Edward finished reading Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank
]]> Review7529430358 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:51:57 -0700 /review/show/7529430358 Edward gave 4 stars to The Postcard (Hardcover) by Anne Berest
Berest’s novel is autobiographical, recounting the lives of her Jewish grandmother, her grandmother’s brother and sister, and their parents as they experienced World War II. Four of the five died in Nazi camps; only her grandmother survived. The book seems convincingly detailed about what conditions were like during that period, and I found this aspect as gripping, if not more so, than the front story which involves Anne’s (a character based on the author herself) search for all of this back story.

The title of the book refers to a mysterious postcard which is received in 2003 and contains four names, Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, and Jacques. That’s all. Ephraim and Emma were the names of her great grandparents, Noemie their daughter, and Jacques, their son. Myriam is the name of a second daughter, Anne’s grandmother, not mentioned on the card. Where did this mysterious postcard come from and who sent, begins what is a long detective’s hunt, finally solved.

The novel raises question about how much we know of such relatives. Anne realizes that her mother, Lelia, Myriam’s daughter, has told her very little about family history, perhaps because it was too painful. The silence is penetrated, first by learning the circumstances this family, originally from Russia, then moving to Latvia, Palestine, and eventually to France. Ephraim did everything he could to become assimilated into French society, all of which failed in the end, and reveals the extent of anti-Semitism in France at the time. Not coincidentally, Anne becomes involved in this search for her past as she sees troubling signs of anti-Semitism that still exist.

The two parts of the novel that are most disturbing take place when the two children, Noemie and Jacques are apprehended and disappear. The frantic parents do everything they can think of to find any news, and then they are apprehended as well.

After the war is over, the surviving daughter, Myriam, clings to a faint hope that members of her family will be among the few survivors of Auschwitz who are repatriated to France, all of whom are in terrible emaciated shape. Finally, she has to accept that her entire family is gone.
It's a novel that combines past and present, authenticated facts and fiction which fills in the missing emotions that individuals felt. What happened nearly a hundred years ago becomes convincingly alive. ]]> Review6530954572 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:46:50 -0700 /review/show/6530954572 Edward gave 3 stars to The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Hardcover) by David Grann
I ask myself why I like these books about shipwrecks, whether fictional, MOBY DICK, or real, as is THE WAGER. That is the name of the ship that left port in 1740 and failed to make it through the always treacherous Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of Sou th America. I suppose it’s a combination of reading about humans at their most resourceful, best, and worst behavior. Then, too, these disasters took place in the past, so a reader has a certain distance from them. The outcome is known, but exactly how it came about is the fascinating part.

Conditions there were exceedingly dangerous. The basic act of navigation routinely introduced errors and risks. Sailors relied on “dead reckoning� � dropping a knotted line into the sea to estimate a ship’s speed and using a sand glass to estimate time. The weather was always menacing with powerful currents and waves that could reach 100 feet in height. It was not surprising that this was a graveyard of ships.

The “Wager� was part of a group of warships determined to seize Spanish gold. It was captained by David Cheap, a conventional and rigid captain who failed as a leader for the shipwrecked men as he insisted on shipboard rules that no longer worked. The more natural leader was the ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley, more adaptable to horrific conditions of cold and starvation on a isolated and uninhabited island.

Most of the 145 survivors from the ship were not in good shape when the ship entered the Straits. Due to scurvy and typhus, sailors “began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. Their bloodshot eyes bulged. Their teeth fell out, as did their hair. Their breath stank. Their bones rattled in a literal sense. The cartilage that glued togetheer their bodies seemed to be loosening.�

Incredibly, the two principal figures, Cheap and Bullkeley, make their way back to England and have different stories to tell. For Cheap, it was an issue of mutiny, for Bulkeley, it was a question of doing what was necessary to survive. In the end court proceedings provided no clear answers and there were no severe punishments. A more thorough investigation would have included looking at reports of murder and cannibalism, embarrassing and sensitive, to naval officials, and as time passed, the story of the “Wager� faded from public concern.

It’s to Grann’s credit that he not only describes the shipwreck and its physical aftermath of survival but raises questions of who, if anyone, bore responsibility for this tragedy.









]]> Review7529401686 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:39:56 -0700 /review/show/7529401686 Edward gave 4 stars to Three Roads Back (Hardcover) by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
These losses were the deaths of close family members. , For Emerson it was the loss of his younger brother, and just a few years later, the loss of his young son, Waldo. For Thoreau, it was the sudden death of his brother, John, and for James it was the death of a cousin, Minnie. Each responded differently, but what they had in common was a determination, haed and painful as it was, to get on with their lives, the business of living.

Emerson was at first a Unitarian minister, but he began to dismiss conventional Christianity, and found his way to “redemption� through “action proportioned to nature,� Nature for him had a power and wonder that always included death, as well as life. He came to see that his losses were part of a universal experience that all living creatures go through; death for some comes sooner than for others.

Thoreau was greatly influenced by Emerson’s thoughts, particularly as expressed in his NATURE and as he began to recover from his despondency and depression over his brother’s death, he was able to write in one of his journals; ”Death is beautiful when seen to be a law and not an accident � it is as common life. . . every blade in the field, every leaf in the forest, lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. Interestingly, and no reason is given except to suggest that each person is different, Emerson’s full recovery took more than a year while Thoreau's recovery was much faster, possibly because he had obviously been thinking about these matters before his broter’s death.

William James, the pioneering psychologist, as well as his novelist brother, Henry, were both devastated by the death of their 24 year old cousin, a sparkling young woman whose intelligence and cheerful outlook they found irresistible. James� reaction, after a relatively short period of deep mourning, was to throw himself into his work. He would will himself to recover, and wrote in his diary, “My belief can’t be optimistic, but I will posit it, life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built on doing and creating and suffering.� He is suggesting that while it may be natural to be sadly pessimistic, the individual can overcome t his tendency by force of will and effort.

This very short work (99 pages) is a good introduction to how three 19th century New England seminal figures reacted to these tragedies in their lives, how they were swallowed by grief, but managed to emerge from it, stronger and wiser men.

]]> Review7529385267 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:31:15 -0700 /review/show/7529385267 Edward gave 3 stars to Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (Paperback) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
This book, picked by a member of my book group, prompted me to ask, “How did you happen to select such an obscure author?� Obscure to me, I learned, but certainly not obscure in Japan where he is known as the “author of the Japanese short story�; one in particular was “Rashomon� which was adapted into Kirosawa’s famous film of the same name.

Akutagawa wrote well over a hundred short stories, so one question that arises is why these seventeen were selected to be included in this collection. As far as I can tell, they seem to be representative of different phases of his life, or at least different phases of his mental outook. They range from impersonal (in the sense that there is an omniscient author) “Rashomon�, “The Nose�, and “Hell Screen� to the autobiographical final “Spinning Gears� where the author is tormented by ill health and fear that he is going mad, as his mother did. In fact, Akutagawa did commit suicide, foreshadowed, I’d guess, by the words found in a posthumous manuscript, “I don’t have the strength to keep writing . . . isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?�

What makes Akutagawa stand out as a master of the short story? I think it has to do with his ability to describe characters who are trapped, in one way or another, by circumstances, and their efforts, often futile, to extricate themselves from those circumstances. In “The Nose�, for example, a man hates his grotesquely misshapen nose brings about because people laught at him and it ruins his self-esteem. But when he manages to correct it, people still laugh at him, but in a different way. They had gotten used to his original nose, and this new nose brought about disappointment that he had overcome his misfortune, as if they were unable to, and they continue to cruelly mock him. He is so miserable that he returns to his old nose.

This element of cruelty can be found in many of the stories. In “Hell Screen� a painter insists he can only paint his realistic masterpieces when he sees them happening, and in a carefully constructed masterpiece, he succeeds but at the expense of sacrificing his daughter for his art. In other stories, illusions are shattered as in “Green Onions� when a young girl’s romantic illusions burst in an sudden epiphany in which seeing bunches of onions, ordinary boring reality of everyday existence. Life becomes the “very real stink� of green onions. In “Memorandum� a supervisor dryly observes the absurdity of a Christian sect who believe in the “resurrection� of a man who had died. Its followers abandon such notions, and a crowd of spectators, rather than being glad that they no longer believed such nonsense, were disappointed that there was no burning at the stake.

All of the stories in this collection are rendered realistically and a reader ends up being convinced that Akutagawa knew his subject well, that subject being the nature of Japanese society and his own mind.

]]> ReadStatus9337637716 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:01:55 -0700 /review/show/7508489409 Edward wants to read Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann
]]> ReadStatus9335572250 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:17:35 -0700 /review/show/7507071901 Edward wants to read Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
]]> ReadStatus9335568792 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:16:42 -0700 /review/show/7507069451 Edward wants to read Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr.
]]> Review7486086968 Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:07:46 -0700 /review/show/7486086968 Edward gave 3 stars to The Path of Centering Prayer: Deepening Your Experience of God (Kindle Edition) by David Frenette
]]> ReadStatus9251744063 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:22:36 -0700 /review/show/7448857425 Edward wants to read The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change by Tomáš Halík
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