Stolen Blessings by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"'McBryde, you ever been around the world?'
'No,' he says seriously, 'but I've been to Europe twice.'
She giggles at such innocence."

Why so many people are interested in celebrities has always been a mystery to me. Why do people find events in the life of, say, a Kardashian more interesting than termite farts? So any book that satirizes the ubiquitous celebrity cult has my pre-approval. In addition, I have a soft spot for Lawrence Sanders, mainly because of his Archy McNally series. I love the McNally novels because of the purposefully florid language and light, whimsical touch in handling sexual themes. Alas Stolen Blessings (1989) is an unmitigated failure. I kept reading, pretending that this is not just a very bad novel but a well executed parody of one.

Marilyn Taylor, also known as The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, a famous movie actress and the owner of Marilyn Taylor Enterprises, Inc. with offices, branches, and stores all over the country, arrives in New York to submit to a procedure in a fertility clinic. Her eggs will be retrieved for use in vitro to help a childless couple conceive.

But we know what happens to best-laid (my pun is of as stellar quality as the author's) plans... etc. Eggs may be subject to eggnapping. In fact, several teams of bad guys compete attempting to conclude the egghheist. But wait, not only bad guys are involved! Since Marilyn is a top-shelf celebrity CIA gets interested and the agency calls its involvement Operation Soufflé (wow, now that's a pun!) Middle East-based terrorist group, Arm of God, is also involved and some events in the plot take place in Cairo. Agents named Ptolemy, Ramses, and Tut are involved and the reader will be likely laughing louder here than in the passages which the author did intend as comedic.

The life of the entire country is paralyzed by the theft: journalists, academicians, church officials, government figures discuss the case. Everybody is watching the crisis on TV. Well, in fact, the entire world is following the case. After all, these are celebrity eggs. A detective from the New York Police Department - the same one who failed the urban dictionary test shown in the epigraph above - plays a major role in the plot and the denouement.

Hilarious last sentence is one of the funniest passages in the novel. But the best thing in this failure of a comedic parody of a thriller is the following passage:

"They move together, hands busy.
'You have beautiful dangling participles,' she murmurs.
'Thank you,' he says, 'and I love to split your infinitive.'"

Anyway, I will still be reaching for Lawrence Sanders' novels, looking for McNally quality of prose.

One-and-a-half stars.


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Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us."

Finally I have begun to fill a huge gap in my Great American Literature education: I have just read my first novel by Saul Bellow - Ravelstein (2000). What a great read it has been! True, the first 20 or so pages are highly intimidating: the author assumes the reader's erudition and complete focus, and the text almost overwhelms with hyper-intellectualism. But having survived the beginning pages many readers should get accustomed to the challenges of the prose, like I did. However, I need to offer a warning: this novel may be better understood by older people, and by 'older' I mean people for whom death is no longer an abstract concept but a conspicuous event on the horizon.

The narrator, known as Chick, a seventy-something writer, is obviously an alter ego of Mr. Bellow himself (the author was in fact 85 when the novel was published). Professor Ravelstein, for whom Chick is the closest friend, is "a major figure in the highest intellectual circles," an internationally renowned professor of philosophy, and the author of a best-selling book that expounds his conservative views about the decline of American culture. The book made millions for Prof. Ravelstein and now he can afford flying to Paris to buy Lanvin jackets and custom-made silk shirts. He also happens to be gay and suffers from AIDS complications. He wants Chick to write his memoirs.

In his writings Professor Ravelstein captures "modernity in its full complexity" and the human costs of modernity. He criticizes the mass-market aspect of cultural modernity and juxtaposes it with culture of the olden days, writing about people who read "Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems", instead of sucking garbage flowing from TV, Facebook or Twitter. He recommends interest in Plato and Thucidides rather than current celebrities:

"I like to say when I am asked about Finnegan[s Wake], that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen."

Particularly sharp is Ravelstein's critique of the modern education system and the fact that the "liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point." The universities are excellent in sciences and engineering but a failure at liberal arts. At this point I realized that Mr. Bellow's Ravelstein is modeled on the real-life philosopher and classicist, Allan Bloom. And indeed I have found out that the author and Dr. Bloom were friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The life story of Ravelstein and that of Dr. Bloom are in fact parallel. Yet let us remember: this is a novel, not any kind of Dr. Bloom's biography. By it being beautifully written fiction I find the novel much more realistic than any non-fiction biography could be.

Scattered throughout the novel are wonderful morsels of truth about human life and especially death. We the geezers will appreciate the mention of one of the main problems of aging - "speeding up of time." We the geezers may also be able to understand the sentence I quoted in the epigraph above. It's a hard truth to swallow and very painful. Ravelstein is a great novel. My "to read" shelves will now gather other Bellow's works.

Four and three quarter stars.

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Jackpot by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] Pyramid Lake was there ahead - [...] pale blue, glass smooth, somehow unreal, so that in the first moment you saw it, it struck you as a desert mirage; surrounded by more of the stark brown hills, with a bare pyramid-shaped island [...]"

The above quote represents one of the few good things I can say about Bill Pronzini's Jackpot (1990). This installment of the famous series about an unnamed private detective directly follows Shackles which I reviewed a week ago. Indeed there are numerous passages in the novel that refer to the previous story. That's wasted on me since, unlike many readers, I do not particularly like continuity in plots. I have found this novel slightly weaker than not very strong Shackles.

A secretary in the advertising company where Mr. Unnamed's girlfriend works asks him to investigate the apparent suicide of her brother David. He just won $200,000 jackpot in Reno, lost it all betting on sports, and then took an overdose of sleeping pills. The police say it was certainly suicide, but the sister is not convinced; her brother was planning to marry his girlfriend soon and seemed very happy overall.

On the trail of David's best friend the detective travels to Lake Tahoe and visits a mountain cabin on Fallen Leaf Lake (a real-life beautiful lake located almost exactly on the California-Nevada boundary, one mile south of Lake Tahoe), where he finds first hints that the events might have been more complicated than they seem.

The detective joins forces with a Paiute Native American, John Wovoka - a noble, modern-times warrior for justice - to fight some very bad guys. The whole 'good vs. evil' shtick feels much overdone. The good guys are too good, and the bad ones too bad. Mr. Pronzini begins reminding me of John Shannon with his politically correct clichés, well-meant but inept. The denouement would be interesting if it did not rely on a tired literary device: finding a tape recording that clarifies the events. And the escapade where the detective and his sidekick mete punishment to the bad guys is over-the-top implausible.

The descriptions of mountain and lake vistas caught my attention better than the formulaic plot. When I first saw Pyramid Lake (located in Nevada, northeast of Lake Tahoe) I clearly remember the exact same impression as the author states in the epigraph quote: "pale blue, glass smooth, somewhat unreal." The "desert mirage" simile is particularly apt. More descriptions of nature would make the read stronger. Maybe I am just a little tired of Mr. Unnamed. Have to take a break for a month or two.

Two stars.

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It Chooses You by Miranda July
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The PennySaver sellers were so moving to me, so lifelike and realistic, that my script - the entire fiction [...] - now seemed totally boring by comparison."

My first contact with Miranda July's work was in 2006 when my wife and I watched her movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, which we both loved. A few years later, before my Goodreads days, I had read her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More than You, and again liked it a lot. Alas someone borrowed the book from us and never returned it so I have read It Chooses You (2011) instead. Quite disappointing! Gone is the enchanting whimsy of the movie and the stories.

The book is narrated by a 35-year-old, recently married woman, an independent movie director who enjoyed a successful film debut a few years earlier. She is now trying to complete a screenplay for her second movie, but struggles with a bit of a writing block, or maybe with the "sophomore curse." Of course, the description fits Ms. July herself, who indeed spent quite some time working on her second movie The Future.

In order to justify her procrastination with the screenplay and - ostensibly to gather additional material for the movie - she undertakes a seemingly fascinating project. She studies Pennysaver, a pre-Internet equivalent of craigslist, selects interesting ads and interviews people who sell strange stuff. We meet a retired man in process of transitioning to a woman, who is selling a leather jacket. We also meet a young man selling bullfrog tadpoles at $2.50 each and a woman who offers baby leopards and various birds for sale. In what I find the most fascinating piece of merchandise, we are introduced to a woman who is selling photo albums of people who have died and whose albums have been rescued from trash. The sellers tell the narrator - Ms. July - their life stories and she implies that she uses these stories as inspiration in her work on the screenplay. The written pieces are accompanied by documentary-style pictures taken during the interviews by a well-known photographer, Ms. Sire.

This is a very pleasant and absorbing read yet I suspect that the author is a victim of a common fallacy: she believes that by describing actual, real-life people, the prose becomes more realistic and is more likely to convey transcendent truths about life. Quite the contrary, the specificity of situations of actual people makes generalizations more difficult: the "real-lifeness" of an actual person strips the vestiges of generality. Nothing can be more realistic than well-written fiction.

I do not believe It Chooses You is literature; it is instead a sort of reportage, a set of feature stories about strange people, yes, interesting and smooth, very readable, yet the book does not contribute in a significant way to enriching the portrayal of human condition, which seems to have been the author's objective. In this sense I consider this effort a failure. I still admire Ms. July's other work and will look for her set of stories to be able to assign a higher rating than just

Two stars.


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Shackles by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I have a burial spot all picked out for you. And you mustn't worry - I'll dig your grave deep so the animals won't disturb you.

My fourth Pronzini read - and another one in his famous series about a private detective whose name is never mentioned - is a conventional revenge story in the tradition of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Instead of Château d'If in southern France, Central California provides interesting locations for the plot: the region roughly east of Stockton, Ca, and west of the Sierra Nevada range.

Shackles (1988) is the 17th installment in the series: it follows Deadfall that I have just reviewed here. The beginning of the novel evokes a happy and carefree atmosphere: the detective and Kerry, his love interest, meet Eberhardt's (he is the detective's partner) new girlfriend. The mood is so cheerful that it is obvious something bad is just about to happen.

It does. The detective is abducted, chloroformed, and driven to a mountain cabin in a remote area, where he is shackled with an iron chain to a wall. He is left to die there, but not quickly. So deep is the abductor's grudge that he has provided a lot of food for the detective: the idea is to extend his suffering and prolong the process of dying. Our hero even muses about sawing his leg off to escape but the lack of suitable tools makes the selfie surgery idea difficult to implement.

As stereotypical as the imprisonment part of the story is it made me think about it as a metaphor of human life: one is chained to a particular place, certain foods, radio stations, etc. for the remainder of one's given lifespan, with death the only thing to look forward to.

I am not going to spoil the story by divulging whether there is the second part of the story, the part that portrays the vengeance. Lame joke, sorry. However, while in a facetious mood I will quote a short passage that made me smile:

"Retirement is hell, so to hell with retirement."

That's the spirit! Only people in wrong jobs may want to retire! Anyway, reading the novel - other than the mentions of many Central California locations that I find familiar - has not been a particularly memorable experience.

Two and a quarter stars.


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The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Atul Gawande
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Money and politics taint everything"
(A pearl of wisdom)

About a year ago I reviewed here on Goodreads The Best American Science Writing 2005 , a marginally recommended read that includes unquestionable jewels such as Frank Wilczek's essay Whence the Force of F = ma or Small Silences by Edward Hoagland, a wonderfully lyrical piece about the beauty of nature. Here I am reviewing the next issue in the set, which presents the presumably best science essays from 2006. I like this set better, because not only does it contain fewer "meh" pieces, but mainly because it conveys a powerful and very scary message about the many ways science is manipulated.

Three essays in particular show the mechanisms of manipulation. The best essay of the set, The Tangle by Jonathan Weiner, is about attempts to solve the mystery of a neurological "disease that once afflicted people living on Guam." An outsider in the field, a botanist, developed a hypothesis that the illness was a result of the Guam Chamorros eating bats that fed on cycad seeds. The hypothesis, likely because of its simplicity, brought its author instant fame. However, it also resulted in government-supplied research money disappearing from other research projects on related topics, which in turn caused many other researchers to work on debunking the cycad-bat hypothesis. As of the essay's writing date, they have largely succeeded.

Neil Swidey's essay What Makes People Gay? is almost equally fascinating. It presents the research on connection between genetics and sex orientation, but what really stands out is the clear illustration of the role of advocacy groups in influencing the flow of research money and even in determining which research projects should be condemned before any work has been done. Money and politics are at their ugliest again!

Politics, and specifically the politics of race, is also the backdrop of Jack Hitt's Mighty White of You, an essay that reflects on the theory about pre-Clovis people in North America. The abstract of the article states it bluntly:

"...these new theories have less to do with science than with a distressing and not-so-subtle racism."

What I probably like the most about the three essays is that their authors do not take sides in the argument (first two are more neutral than the third one). Science should not take any sides. One of the basic tenets of science is cultivating doubt. Expressing doubts about currently prevailing societal beliefs and attitudes should be an important goal of science.

Briefly about three other essays that I like a lot. H. Allen Orr's Devolution, about the so-called "intelligent design" theories nicely debunks the arguments used by the debunkers of theory of evolution. Paul Bloom's Is God an Accident? posits that religion may be a natural result of the way humans perceive the world. The author talks about the dualism inherent in human understanding of ourselves and our world, and it immediately reminded me of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

Finally, the essay that could have easily been the best in the entire collection, Richard Preston's Climbing the Redwoods about the world of redwood canopy, the mysterious world over thirty stories above ground. But the author completely spoils the fascinating topic by focusing on climbing the tallest trees and by his utterly insane fetish for numbers, especially big numbers. What a waste!

Three stars.

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Deadfall by Bill Pronzini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"...crawling away, one hand clawing at the wood, the other crooked under him in a vain effort to stem the flow of bright arterial blood. Dragging sounds, crunching sounds: trying to crawl away from death."

Yet another item in my Pronzini mini-spree: Deadfall (1986), according to Wikipedia, is the sixteenth installment in the series that now spans almost half of a century. And yet again a quibble with the critics/reviewers who named the Pronzini protagonist "Nameless Detective." He uses credit cards so I strongly doubt he is nameless; he should rather be called "Unnamed Detective."

While on a stakeout for a deadbeat who buys stuff on credit and forgets to pay, the Unnamed Detective (UD from now on) hears two shots and sees a shooter escape. Then he finds a mortally wounded man who - in his dying words - utters "Deadfall." The victim's lover hires the detective to find the killer. In what seems too much of a coincidence it turns out that the victim's brother had died half a year earlier, apparently in a drunken fall from a cliff. Thanks to his contacts on the police force UD is permitted to conduct quite an extensive investigation of the case.

In a parallel and somewhat light-hearted thread UD faces trouble from his girlfriend's ex-husband. As a reverend in a cultish Church of Holy Mission the man does not believe in divorce and wants his woman back. The comedic motifs are welcome, but it is a pity that much of the fun is based on clichés. Also, while Kerry - the detective's girlfriend - is a vivid and well-drawn character, other female characters are quite one-dimensional and portrayed through the prism of pop psychology.

The denouement is logical and plausible and confirms the unfortunately banal observation that human weakness and potential for depravity have no bounds. Deadfall is not quite as good as Hardcase or The Vanished but it is a good read with an interesting story. I am still looking forward to more Pronzini.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks by Ed Viesturs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory."

Ed Viesturs' No Shortcuts to the Top begins dramatically with the account of the author's conquest - along with Scott Fischer - of K2, the second highest mountain on Earth, yet generally considered the most difficult one. In Mr. Viesturs's words that conquest remains "the biggest mistake of [his] climbing career," and throughout the book he continually reiterates the motto of his lifelong mountaineering adventure, so aptly expressed in his famous phrase shown in the epigraph above. I have reviewed here on Goodreads another book by Mr. Viesturs, K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain , dedicated in its entirety to the dramatic and tragic history of conquests of K2, the mountain which also claimed the life of the Polish climber and my friend, Dobroslawa Wolf, who perished on its slopes in 1986.

This book, also co-written with David Roberts, covers Mr. Viesturs' entire mountaineering career but also serves as a sort of an autobiography. Obviously, the focus is on climbing: the reader will learn about the author's fascination with Maurice Herzog's Annapurna - the book that, as he writes, "completely changed the direction of my life" - his years as a mountaineering guide in Washington State and in Alaska and his early mountaineering successes in Himalayas and Karakorum. But we also learn about the author's work with animals - he has a doctor of veterinary medicine degree - as well as about his personal life and his wife and children.

Mr. Viesturs is one of the very few climbers who summitted all fourteen "Eight-thousanders", mountains higher than 8000 meters, and one of the only five who achieved all these summits without the aid of supplementary oxygen. Yet he is adamant in insisting that he has never treated his climbing as a competition against other people:

"I don't think of myself as a competitive climber. Or if I am, I'm competitive only with myself."

Mr. Viesturs is modest about his phenomenal achievements: he stresses the role of intense preparation (for instance, running several miles every single day), team work, help of accomplished climbing partners, some luck with weather, and - perhaps most tellingly - the genetic basis of high-altitude abilities. From the pages of the book he comes across being a humble, affable, good-natured person. Unlike some other extraordinary high achievers he does not snipe at other climbers and makes sure not to criticize the dramatic decisions they often have to take, decisions that may mean life or death. I also like that the book is not too gossipy and almost completely devoid of titillating details, perhaps with one unfortunate exception in the case of a certain famous French climber - where the author provides "too much information."

A well-written book - probably due to Mr. Roberts' literary talent. Not exactly in the class of the same author's K2, mentioned above, or - say - Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air but certainly a good read and I recommend it without reservations.

Three-and-a-half stars.

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