A Reading Roundup

During the last few weeks of August, when the movies are inevitably of poor quality (No Escape and American Ultra I am looking in your direction) and TV hasn't yet come into the full glory of its autumnal bloom (I feel like I have been waiting forever for new episodes of You're the Worst) the life of a pop culture blogger gets a little dull. Given that, I spent that last several weeks reading books and listening to new albums. Tomorrow, I'll be doing an album rundown, but for today it's books. The following represents the stuff that I have read (for pleasure, work books, as always, don't count) during the month of August:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

As a piece of popular history I think it is fair to say that this book is more important (in that it helps to clear up common misapprehensions about what life was like in the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact) than it is "good." Mann has clearly done his homework, and as a summary of the findings of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists the book is sufficient. It does, however, occasionally lapse into what I consider a nearly unpardonable sin: the injection of first person anecdotes that explain to me why the story being told has personal stakes for the historian/researcher narrating. I hate this trope, and it will appear more than once on this rundown.

Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain by Edith Sheffer

While 1491 is a full decade old, Burned Bridge is hot off the presses and a masterpiece of a kind of mid-micro history. Nearly everyone with any understanding of post-war history, or who had a pulse prior to 1989, is familiar with the division of Berlin. But Berlin was not the only German city divided, after the war, between Western European interests and those of the Soviet Bloc. Sheffer's book looks at another location, the twin towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, separated by the titular burned bridge, and asks the question how, in a small community where there were strong pre-war ties, the differentiation between East and West was so effectively executed that violent resentments grew up among both populations. The method and analysis are as impeccable as the subject area is novel. A momentous piece of modern historical scholarship.

Cast a Yellow Shadow by Ross Thomas

One of Thomas's well known McCorkle/Padillo novels, Cast a Yellow Shadow follows Mac and Michael as they attempt to find Mac's wife after she is kidnapped by agents of the colonial interests of an African nation. These provocateurs want Michael to assassinate the head of their government, so that the crime can be pinned on a black American in order to drum of support for the colonial government. Thomas is a master of the hard-boiled prose style, and Cast a Yellow Shadow is clipped, declarative, rye, and fast-paced. Suitable for airplanes, beaches, or killing time waiting in the doctors office. There isn't a lot of interest here outside of the plot, both Mac and Michael are sufficiently amoral that their motivations revolve entirely around Mac's wife, but it's still worth checking out if you like crime novels or are one of those rare Ross Thomas completionists.

The Psychopath Whisperer: the Science of Those Without Conscience by Kent Kiehl

A dreadfully written book. Kiehl is a master of the trope for which I criticized Charles Mann, he is constantly injecting himself into the book. One of the worlds leading researchers of psychopath, Kiehl was the formulator of the paralimbic impairment hypothesis of psychopathy (which all the experimental evidence seems to confirm). When he is writing on the study of psychopath, or offering insight into the case studies of his long and storied career the book is fascinating. When he describes the negotiations with Siemens over the construction and price point of a mobile MRI unit...not so much. There is also a lot of text dedicated to descriptions of various institutions begging Kiehl to come work for them, making Godfather offers for the privilege of hosting his lab, etc. that I could, quite frankly, have done without. When it sticks to the science, though, its a top notch book.

The Summer Game, Roger Angell on Baseball by Roger Angell

A collection of Angell's columns. If you like baseball, you should read it. If you don't like baseball, probably best to skip it. Angell has always represented the hard right-wing flank of baseball writing, the side that argues for the priority of pastoralism as the American athletic aesthetic. It's a weird group over there comprised of the Rogers (Angell and Kahn) and the Georges (Carlin and Will), but sometimes you want Bernard Malamud's The Natural (a story of a ballplayer who sells his soul), and sometimes you want the Robert Redford version where Roy Hobbs blows the lights out with a miracle home run and ends up married and happy with a son. When the later is your mood, Angell is your guy.

The Martian: a Novel by Andy Weir

Soon to be a motion picture starring Matt Damon, The Martian traces the exploits of Mark Watney, and American astronaut accidentally marooned on Mars and forced to survive by his knowledge and skill for years awaiting rescue. Without enough food to last him, and with the barren soil of Mars unable to grow anything, Watney is forced to improvise. One gets a similar kind of satisfaction from reading The Martian that one gets from watching Apollo 13 (limited, of course, by the fact that Gene Krantz and the ground crew at NASA actually engineered their solutions with human lives on the line and Andy Weir works under no such pressure). There is something majestic in watching an engineer create, against all odds, a machine that works. If that kind of thing appeals to you, read The Martian. If you are the kind of person to whom the quality of the prose you read is important...this might not be the book for you.