Review Date: 10/2/2010

Helpful Score: 5

Await Your Reply is a brilliant novel that awaits your reading enjoyment! Three equally captivating and seemingly disparate stories are woven together in a tale of suspense. Each involves someone on the road: Ryan, his severed hand, and his recently found father racing towards a hospital; Lucy leaving town with her high school teacher in a Maserati; Miles again searching for his disturbed identical twin at the edge of the world. Given Dan Chaon's technique—starting off with a dramatic image, then creating scenes and characters, working with no overarching concept—it is a testament to his storytelling abilities to pull off such an intricate plot. The stories unfold slowly; what seems to be the truth shifts ever so slightly with each installment. How did Ryan's hand come off? Why did George Orson take Lucy to a lighthouse-themed hotel on the edge of a dried Midwestern lake? Is Miles's brother a paranoid schizophrenic or a sociopath with far-reaching powers? These will all be answered in an entertaining story that explores the ethereal nature of human identity and sense of belonging.

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Review Date: 7/6/2009

Helpful Score: 5

Iran for many Americans, myself included, is a black box with occasional outputs such as: "hostage crisis," "nuclear power," "Axis of Evil," and the "2009 elections." The Ayatollah Begs to Differ offers an illuminating glimpse into the inner workings of the only Shia theocracy in the world. Hooman Majd, the grandson of an Ayotollah and the son of an Iranian diplomant, is uniquely qualified to hold the torchlight as "100% Iranian and 100% American."

Some might not like the rambling style in which Majd intersperses social and political analysis with his travels through Iran, but if one imagines him as a goofy uncle taking you on a tour of the country and explaining the culture in context, it's a pleasant journey. Majd has insider access to places most wouldn't see as a tourist in Iran--the presidential offices, the middle-class home with an opium-smoking patriarch, swank parties among the Westernized set, and the residence of the Iranian ambassador to the UN in New York. However, due to his family ties he is closest to former president Khatami and the upper class in north Tehran. There's no mention of Mousavi. But there are glimpses of everyday life in contact with female taxi-drivers and a pretty female government employee asking if he's had sex in the last year before he can donate blood during the holy month of Moharram.

Taken together, Majd describes Iran as a Muslim country, as well as a Persian one. Majd's desciption of ta'arouf, an exaggerated complex social Art-of-War-esque ritual of self-depreciation in favor of the other, and haq, the concept of rights, makes seemingly bizarre political moments more interpretable. The author's exploration of the Persian concept of privacy, with much permitted behind Persian walls in the pairidaeza (Old Persian for cloistered garden, origin of the word paradise), show how the people actually live in the private sphere. In short, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ makes Iran and Iranians seem less foreign, more familiar, and more nuanced. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the context in which current events are developing, Shia Islam, and the history and culture of a very ancient part of the world.

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Review Date: 5/2/2010

Bachelor Party Confidential is a fun quick read about one of the last bastions of male-only bonding. The subtitle is accurate -- a "peek" is all that is offered. David Boyer, a gay man who acknowledges he has "no horse in this race," points out that no groom-to-be acknowledges personally cheating throughout his two-year research. There is no profound anthropological methodology or analysis, only a mash-up of anonymous interviews, internet forum transcripts, and factoid sidebars. However, Boyer does venture beyond the various participants of the stereotypically smutty alcohol and stripper-laced affair to bring perspectives from the entertainers, grooms from other cultures, religious backgrounds, and eras. In short, a light playful PG-13 look at a social ritual.

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Review Date: 12/8/2009

Helpful Score: 3

Bangkok 8 packs enough punch to hit many types of literary taste receptors. It is foremost a hot mystery thriller, which begins with two Thai policemen trailing an American marine to his death by drug-crazed snake bites in a bolted-shut car. Having lost his partner, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep is on a mission to find the perpetrators and avenge his soul brother's death. Sonchai's devout Buddhist beliefs takes the story to another dimension, as his reflective meditations bring intuition into crime-solving, balanced with reason and technology supplied by the FBI, represented by the sleek blond Special Agent Jones. Even though he is probably the only cop not on the take, as the half-farang son of a former prostitute and long gone American serviceman he is a credible and amusing guide to this lush, exotic locale and its under-culture of drugs, sex, and other illicit trades. Finally, it is a deeply meditative social commentary on the West by realistically presenting Sonchai's and indeed all of Thailand's on-the-ground modus operandi as not necessarily an inferior but different way of going about life, written in vivid and accessible language. So dig in.

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Review Date: 3/29/2010

Helpful Score: 1

Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep returns in full form in this third installment of the Bangkok series. Five years after Bangkok 8, Sonchai calls FBI Special Agent Kimberley Jones into town when he receives a high quality snuff film featuring his one time lover, the bewitching prostitute Damrong whose spirit now plague him--and most of the male suspects for orchestrating her death on film. Unlike the Sonchai of Bangkok Tattoo, he is less disparaging of farangs (perhaps because he is working with 'the FBI' again?) but as deeply meditative as ever. His intuitive investigating again leads the reader through Bangkok's underbelly, this time with a focus on the porn industry, with some diversions into Cambodia and the supernatural realm. Burdett again delivers enough local character to make the supernatural angle possible to Western minds--along with enough insight to elevate Bangkok Haunts to a guilty pleasure above a mere Third World police procedural.

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Review Date: 12/23/2009

Helpful Score: 2

Sonchai Jitpleecheep returns from Bangkok 8 to narrate another thriller set in the title city, but this story has a considerably different feel. As before, it starts with a bang: the top sex worker in the Old Man's Club (jointly owned by his mother, boss, and himself) returns from a call bloodied and stoned on opium. The murdered client turns out to be CIA, and soon we find ourselves following Sonchai to Thailand's porous southern Muslim border as a part of a cover-up that involves drugs, al-Qaeda and American spies. We are reunited with a cast of colorful characters, but Sonchai functions as a slightly more jaded narrator to his farang audience, coordinating the telling of his beloved prostitute Chanya's story rather than bringing us along for the action. Nonetheless, a fun continuation with Sonchai whose title will eventually make sense.

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Review Date: 9/5/2011

Bar Flower is a memoir that is more about its author than Japan or the Tokyo hostess bar scene. American Lea Jacobson, having studied Japanese and East Asian studies in college, lands a job as an English teacher in Japan immediately after college. Eventually she is fired from this job, and drifts into hostess work in the upscale Ginza district of Tokyo. During these years, she parties and drinks excessively. I had to put the book down several times in the beginning because of her love-Japan-but-hate-the-Japanese attitude which I've also noticed in other American authors who are quick to notice and criticize differences between Japanese and Western culture. Having previously read about Japan and hostess bars, I don't think I learned anything new. Nonetheless, Jacobson is an edgy writer with keen retrospective insight into her mental health and gender roles who narrates an entertaining story in short chapters.

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Review Date: 6/26/2010

Beat the Reaper is as improbable as a medical intern's dream: both are satisfying and damn rare. Peter Brown is a medical intern at a fictional Manhattan dysfunctional hospital. It's going to be another brutal, surreal day of medicine until the signet cell gastric cancer patient recognizes him as "Bearclaw," former top mob hitman presently in the Federal Witness Protection Program. In order to save himself, he has to save the patient, and even practice some medicine along the way. In alternate chapters our protagonist describes his upbringing and initiation into the mafia to avenge his grandparents' home invasion homicides to his fallout with the bad guys, and how he tries to keep them away in the present day. Both storylines are peppered with informative yet cynical footnotes dispensing interesting medical information. It's a bit of House of God*meets the Sopranos written in edgy masculine text by a young doctor, so the medicine is real enough to one who has been in the trenches. Be warned, though, that there's some gruesomeness which is hard to stomach towards the end.



*a cult classic among the MD set, written by Samuel Shem.

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Review Date: 2/6/2013

The title character, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, is not the central character of this meditative novel. Irma Seidenman is a Jewish widow of a radiologist with blond hair and blue eyes trying to survive outside of the ghetto in 1943 Warsaw. Her existence allows author Ardzej Szczypiorski to write as an omniscient narrator zooming in on the lives of loosely connected characters in wartime, sometimes weaving in and out of chronological order to describe their ultimate fate. It reads as a tribute to Polish identity and nationalism, an interesting read on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

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Review Date: 5/1/2011

Originally published as an anonymous blog, Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl chronicles approximately six months in the life of a £300 per hour escort in London. It centers on her social life, with her working life mentioned in passing (but with lots of detail). The action centers around a coterie of exes referred to as N and A1-4, and her attempts at finding love with various aptly nicknamed prospects. Billed as a college grad without any promising job prospects who turns to her non-mainstream sexual interests to make a living and support her addiction to lingerie, this bio is not far from the truth: in 2009 Belle revealed herself to be Dr Brooke Magnanti, a biostatistician who worked as a prostitute for 14 months after submitting her PhD thesis. The writing was an engaging look at one woman's sexuality, although it started to falter at the end.

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Review Date: 3/9/2013

Like a good curry, Beloved is a taste of powerful storytelling. Toni Morrisons poetic language immerses the reader in the story of Sethe, a slave who escaped to Cincinnati, Ohio but not free from slaverys haunting effects. The house she shares with her sole remaining child Denver born during the escape is haunted by the ghost of her baby. Things come to a boil when Paul D, a fellow slave and escapee from Sweet Home, and a mysterious young lady named Beloved arrive. Rather than chronological exposition, the characters experiences in slavery are related through twists and turns of flashbacks, amplified by the prism of what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, Toni Morrisons fifth novel was a great choice for Black and Womens History Months from the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

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Review Date: 8/25/2011

Nancy Friday's Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age is a bit of a disappointment. Known for her prior compilations of (mainly female) sexual fantasies, here Friday offers sexual fantasies submitted by both men and women in addition to Craigslist and other online ads. As the title implies, one of the themes is that as women achieved more equality though the feminist movement, more fantasies became centered on giving up control as the source of sexual pleasure. The internet has made fantasies more risqué. However, these new ideas seem at odds with her usual psychoanalytical bent, i.e., much of our sexual desires develop under the influence of Mother, before we are consciously aware of them, which is still very present here. There also seems to be much more of her editorializing relative to actual material submitted by others than in previous works. Thus Beyond My Control didn't meet my expectations.

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Review Date: 8/1/2011

I have to be careful not the conflate my feelings about the hardboiled genre and this example of it. Raymond Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, is undoubtedly a classic hardboiled detective story. Chandler introduces Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of several more novels, as a more fleshed-out and likable character than those in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, another recent read in this genre. Chandler's prose, while still succinct and edgy in a masculine manner, has more attitude. Although a new plot twist at the end of every chapter is standard, I felt there was a place in the middle where the plot could have resolved, and subsequent developments were merely to prolong the story. Nonetheless, I'm glad the list of 1001 books you must read before you die led me to The Big Sleep.

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Review Date: 7/13/2009

Helpful Score: 1

Having only read Murakami's novels beforehand (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun), his short fiction took some getting used to. I read this second collection of short stories -- The Elephant Vanishes being the first, after the quake considered a "concept album" by the author -- in chronological order as detailed in Murakami's introduction to the volume. I found the earlier stories to be too short, too impressionistic to suit his deeply symbolic, lyrical style. Murakami wants you to think, and a few pages wasn't enough to clue you in on what he wanted you to think about. As the writing progressed, the familiar themes of depersonalization, alienation, and a hint of un-reality came back into view. As always his language is beautiful. I don't think I prefer his short stories to his novels -- they are like a different course in a banquet -- but I would recommend this collection as a more easily digestable appetizer of his style to Murakami virgins, and of course his ardent fans. Two short stories here are the prototypes to Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood, respectively.

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Review Date: 11/30/2014

The dust jacket pretty much outlines the entire plot. I think the lack of quotation marks and the invisible passage of time confused me a bit. I didn't see it as an allegory for how Germans fared between the two world wars, more the story of a woman who had a hard life, not necessarily due to economic circumstances. Please note that there are some adult themes. This was a sad but well-written book on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

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Review Date: 6/8/2012

Helpful Score: 4

Like President Clinton, I was inspired by parts of The Blood Sugar Solution, which I read after hearing Dr. Mark Hyman on the Charlie Rose show. I was inspired by the whole-system approach to address the root causes of chronic illness and the public health bent. This seems to align with the philosophy of Eastern medicine. In this book, Dr. Hyman argues that insulin resistance is behind most of the "diabesity" epidemic, which is driven by lifestyle, and can be reversed by extensive lifestyle modification, as outlined in this book. However, I became a little more skeptical when I reached the nuts and bolts of the 6 to 12 week plan. Besides the Michael Pollan-like prescription for real, unprocessed foods and the exclusion of gluten and dairy, Dr. Hyman suggests everyone take a whole host of supplements, including some relatively exotic ones on the advanced plan. Natural does not always mean safe, especially in pharmacological doses. Finally, in the Resources section almost all the entries lead back to his website. Despite taking pause at any health book with "Solution" in the title, and not to mention the entire series of "Ultra" materials Dr. Hyman has developed, I think he has outlined a comprehensive plan which takes into account social and psychological aspects to seeking wellness, and is on to something with functional medicine. Read with an open mind.

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Review Date: 9/14/2009

Helpful Score: 3

Don't believe the subtitle -- this book is no instruction manual for vices, defined by the author as activities with social disapprobation, actually experienced pleasure, and shame afterwards. Best known for his NPR radio show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell me!, Peter Sagal offers instead very witty and psychologically astute insight into the world of sex (swingers clubs, strip clubs, and pornography studios), eating, lying, consumption, and gambling. The self-professed vanilla author visits places where such vices take place, interviews its participants, and writes up why people indulge in such behavior. With footnotes. Albeit a tourist's view of very naughty behavior, one can't help but be entertained by the tour guide.

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Review Date: 10/7/2011

Helpful Score: 1

Plants as subjects, humans as bees: The Botany of Desire is an interesting, thought-provoking look at the relationship of humans and plants. Michael Pollan focuses on four plants (apple, tulip, cannabis, and potato) and how they relate to the human desires of sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control, respectively. The PBS documentary of the same name focused more on the scientific aspects, perhaps because those were more visually appealing and less controversial. In book form, Pollan proceeds in a more reflective mode, for example discussing the Apollonian and Dionysian duality throughout. His intelligence, grasp of evolutionary biology and its implications, and love of gardening shine through. The idea that plants and humans co-evolve—that we humans may have done the evolutionary bidding of plants— gives The Botany of Desire paradigm-shifting potential by inviting the reader re-evaluate the proper role of humans in the natural order.

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Review Date: 12/21/2014

Breakfast at Tiffany's is a classic that was easy to read on a plane ride back to New York. Holly Golightly lives in New York of a different era, but Truman Capote makes the young heroine come alive as a self-made, other-worldly existence as her neighbor reminisces long after she's gone. I also especially enjoyed the last short story in this volume, "A Christmas Memory," which celebrates the important things during the holiday season. I was moved by the friendship between a boy and his elderly relative as they made fruitcakes together and Christmas presents for each other. A short, enjoyable read from the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

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Review Date: 1/10/2012

Brideshead Revisited is a charming, lyrical novel. The title evokes a strong sense of place, but that is really only a trigger for the story which focuses on an aristocratic English family. Charles Ryder is billeted at the Brideshead estate during WWII, urging him to reminisce about his association with the Marchmain family who owns it. Starting with his friendship with Sebastian at Oxford, Charles' life is linked with this Roman Catholic family from the 1920s until the start of WWII. Charles is an intelligent narrator through this story where Catholicism and the decline of the aristocratic class play prominent roles. Evelyn Waugh's language is elegant, precise, and moves the story along. This was a wonderful read on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

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