Bound to Last - Planet of the Apes

Yesterday’s review of Bound to Last got me looking around my own bookshelves to see which old favorite I would have written about had I been one of those selected to contribute to that collection.  And, just as many of the actual contributors did, I chose a book to which my strong emotional attachment has absolutely nothing to do with its actual contents.  The book is worthless now to everyone but me (and since its cover price was a whopping sixty cents when I bought it, brand spanking new, it never has had much value).  The pages are yellow and a bit brittle now, but my inscription in blue ink looks like it was written yesterday: “Basic Training, May 1968.”

In May 1968, I was a little over half way through Army Basic Training in Fort Campbell, KY, but had managed to earn a weekend pass that gave me enough time to take a bus ride of approximately fifty miles to Nashville for a much-needed two-day break.  Let’s just say that what happened in Nashville stays in Nashville.

But here’s the important part of the story.  Before I boarded the bus for the return leg to Fort Campbell, I spotted a rack of cheap paperbacks for sale.  Leisure reading material was forbidden to us in basic training, and I was well aware that I would have to lose the book before returning to the barracks area.  But I couldn’t resist the urge to read; I needed a book, any book.  That’s when I noticed the eye-catching edition of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes pictured here.  As you can see, it’s the movie-tie-in volume for the very first Planet of the Apes movie.  All I knew is that it was very short (128 pages) and that I might actually have a chance to finish it on the bus.

Of course, that didn’t happen because I fell asleep only thirty or forty pages into the book.  I decided, however, to take a chance on sneaking Planet of the Apes into the barracks so that I could sneak-read it later.  Those of you who have had military basic training know there are not many hiding places to be found in the few feet of living space allocated to trainees but, somehow, the book survived basic training and I eventually ended up bringing it home with me – where it still occupies a thin little slot on one of my bookshelves.

Looking at the cover now, I can’t help pointing out the quote from a New York newspaper saying that “This is easily Boulle’s best novel since Bridge over the River Kwai.”  That has to be one of the most bizarre comparisons I’ve ever read on a book cover.  But, as it turns out, I got way more for my sixty cents than I ever dreamed I would get.  You just never know.

Bound to Last

At the risk of offending some, let me begin by saying that a multitude of readers question whether an e-book can really be called a book at all.  In the minds of avid readers, those who simply have to read a certain number of pages every day in order to feel whole, e-books are little more than electronic files stashed somewhere on the drives of those little e-reading gadgets they carry when traveling.  And they only use those gadgets because they cannot figure out how to carry comfortably a dozen books while on the road.  They know e-books are a poor substitute for the real thing, but e-books, after all, do beat back pain.

If you recognize yourself in any of what I have said so far, you really need to get your hands on Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book.  This little volume, edited by Sean Manning, explains precisely why e-books can never compare to the real thing.  All of us, I suspect, have one or two favorite books on our shelves, books that we are as much emotionally attached to as anything else we own.  But, think about that for a second.  One’s favorite books, the ones carried around during a lifetime of relocations, are not necessarily favorites because of what is between their covers.  They are just as likely to be favorites because of all the memories attached to their acquisition, or where they were first read, or what family member owned them first, or because they were a gift from a favorite teacher, relative, or long lost friend.  As the back cover of Bound to Last puts it, we love this kind of book “because of its significance as a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable object.”

Following Ray Bradbury’s foreword and Sean Manning’s introduction, thirty diverse writers share their feelings about the one book in their lives they most cherish.  The actual book choices range all the way from The Bible to The Carpetbaggers, with stops along the way to hear about emotional bonding with copies of many of the classics, favorite children’s books, anthologies, a biography, modern novels, and even one cookbook.  Remember, it is not necessarily their contents that make these books so special to their owners.

For Philipp Meyer, author of one of my favorite recent novels, American Rust, that book is For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Meyer, a high school dropout, was fortunate to grow up surrounded by books.  He was lucky, too, that the books were hardbacks and paperbacks, books he could browse at leisure as he developed his reading skills.  Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time changed him forever.  Suddenly, he recognized the difference between popular novels and what the best books have to offer.  Meyer says that he “recently donated that copy to the library at my graduate writing center.  It’s forty-five years old, and tattered, but it continues to be read.  Whereas my Kindle, forty-five years from now, will be buried in a landfill under approximately eleven million other Kindles.”

For Jim Knipfeel the book is Mason & Dixon, not so much because of its contents but because it is the last book he “was able to read in normal fashion.”  Knipfeel went blind while reading Mason & Dixon and had to finish the last 60 pages of the book via its audio version.  For him, “it will always be The Last Book, in more ways than one.”

For West African Chris Abani, that book is James Baldwin’s Another Country, the book that inspired him to become the writer he is today.  Abani discovered the book on his parents’ bookshelf when he was ten years old and he still recognizes the coffee stain he placed on page 72 back in 1992.  Abani recently read this copy of Another Country for the twentieth time and he says that it was a struggle to keep it from falling apart.  Recognizing that it was time to acquire another copy, but not wanting to replace his relic with another paper copy, Abani searched everywhere for an electronic copy for his iPad.  He reports that his search was unsuccessful and that “this makes me sad and extremely happy.”

These are my favorite pieces in Bound to Last, but they are just the beginning of what this book has to offer.  This is one that book lovers will want to read more than once – a book that deserves a place of honor on their bookshelves.  Come on, you know who you are.

Rated at: 5.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Happy Birthday, Joan Didion

Joan Didion, born on December 5, 1934, turns 76 years old today.

At the risk of showing my relative unfamiliarity with Ms. Didion's work, I will admit to having read only three of her books, and that I read two of those something like 20 years ago (Salvador and Miami).  The third is Ms. Didion's strange, and unexpectedly touching, memoir The Year of Magical Thinking in which she very frankly discusses her mental reaction (breakdown) to losing her 39-year-old daughter and her husband (author John Gregory Dunne) in the same year.  That one will stay with me for a long time.

 Thankfully, Didion is still writing and word is that in 2011 Knopf plans to publish Blue Nights, her memoir about aging.  That promises to be an interesting book.

Beware, Nancy Pearl Has Written a Dangerous Book

Let me warn you guys right now.  Book Lust to Go is going to cost you some money, some research time, and hours of reading.  This little book of 271 pages will likely become one of your permanent desk companions, a book you will be mining for new reading material for years to come.

I am only half-way through the book right now - which brings me to the section on Liberia - so this is not meant to be a formal review.  But as I work my way through Nancy Pearl's hundreds of title suggestions for "travelers, vagabonds, and dreamers" (arranged, for the most part, alphabetically by country) my TBR stack or, in this case "lust list" is growing by the dozen. 

Already this morning, I placed three titles on my hold list at the county library, two of them from Pearl's Australia section: Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature (Tim Flannery) and The Broken Shore (a thriller by Peter Temple) and the other from the section on Arizona, Territory (a supernatural take on the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral by Emma Bull).  And those are just two of the "A" sections.  I'm afraid to count how many others I've already marked for future reading - and I'm having to force myself not to mark some others that are almost equally as tempting.

I'm probably going to be doing a formal review of Book Lust to Go one day next week.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Crime Beat

Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers is one of those books that work much better in theory than in execution.  It is based on what seems to be the rather clever idea of reprinting the newspaper articles Michael Connelly wrote as a young crime beat reporter in order to illustrate how he morphed into the respected crime fiction writer he is today.  Not surprisingly, Connelly carried away more from his reporting days than just a few plot ideas he could use later in his novels.  He also developed his writing skills and, most importantly, his observational skills.  The capability to see below the surface of the individuals he reported on (cops and killers, alike) that he picked up as a young reporter is what enables Connelly to create some of the most memorable characters in modern crime fiction. 

As Connelly puts it in the book’s introduction:

“There could not have been the novelist without there first being the reporter on the crime beat.  I could not write about my fictional detective Harry Bosch without having written about the real detectives first.  I could not create my killers without having talked to a few of the real ones first.”

Crime Beat features an interesting selection of newspaper articles written by Connelly during his crime beat days in Miami and Los Angeles.  Based upon their emphasis, the articles are divided into three distinct sections: “The Cops,” “The Killers,” and “The Cases.”  Fans of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will be quick to see a little of Harry in some of the detectives featured in the articles, as well as prototypes for the criminals with whom Harry does constant battle.  They will perhaps even recognize some of the crimes described in the articles as being the springboards for some of the stories themselves.      

All well and good - but the big problem with the book stems from the nature of the cases and articles featured.  Many of these cases were of the spectacular variety, either because of the nature of the crimes themselves or because it took law enforcement officers so long to solve them.  For those reasons, most of the featured crimes required Connelly to write an initial newspaper article and at least one or two follow-up articles, sometimes four or five of them.  Since none of the articles appear to have been edited for inclusion in Crime Beat, that means that details of the crime, including details about the killers and victims, are repeated several times within the ten or fifteen pages dedicated to each event.  A reader with even a minimum capacity for remembering details will quickly become bored, if not irritated, by all that repetition.

And that makes Crime Beat rather difficult to get through - I found myself skimming the pages of the articles to a degree I have seldom experienced before – and a bit disappointing because it does not work as well as it should have.

Rated at: 2.5

Mark Twain's Other Woman

During his lifetime, Mark Twain was arguably the most famous man in the world. As such, he was very conscious of the public image that guaranteed him a secure income stream on the lecture tour any time he needed to tap into it. And because Twain had a habit of losing money to unwise investment decisions, the money he earned from public appearances was crucial if he was to maintain the lifestyle to which he and his family had become so accustomed. Toward the end of his life, Mark Twain became increasingly concerned about how he would be remembered after his death, and he was determined that nothing would tarnish his image at that late date. He achieved that goal - until now.

Laura Skandera Trombley's Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years, a book some sixteen years in-the-making, gives a very different picture of Twain than the one with which fans of his writing are familiar. Twain's last decade, particularly after his wife's death, was not a happy time for him. He was lonely man concerned that the soon-to-expire copyrights on his earliest works would cause him great financial difficulty. One of his daughters, Jean, suffered so greatly with epilepsy that she spent months at a time living in medical facilities where she could be closely monitored and treated. His other surviving daughter, Clara, was a somewhat spoiled free spirit who often flaunted her disregard for the sexual mores of the times. Because in this period epilepsy was still considered to be a shameful and socially damaging condition to have in one's family tree, Twain was as concerned about the truth of Jean's problems becoming public knowledge as he was about Clara's behavior becoming commonly known.

Into this mix, came Isabel Van Kleek, a woman who first met Mark Twain as his whist partner but would eventually spend six years working for him as a personal secretary, manager, and confidant. Twain would, in fact, live for only one year after ending his relationship with Van Kleek. Trombley largely used Isabel Van Kleek's personal papers and letters to recreate the six years during which Van Kleek lived with the Twain family and became intimately involved in their affairs.

Isabel Van Kleek was an ambitious woman and she always believed that she deserved more status in life than she had been granted. There is little doubt that she attached herself to Mark Twain with the initial intent of bettering her place in life. She sincerely loved the man and would have gladly become his wife if Twain had been so inclined. She was, however, not above taking advantage of her relationship with him to secure some future revenue for herself after his death - having even been granted, at one point, full power of attorney on his behalf plus a royalty percentage in a book of Twain's letters she was to edit and have published after he died. Twain depended on Van Kleek to set his schedule, screen his visitors, decide his menus, purchase his clothing, arrange his travel, and to do everything else involved with his day-to-day world.

Laura Skandera Trombley

Van Kleek, though, managed to make a mortal enemy of Clara Clemens and that would be her downfall because Mark Twain, wanting to avoid public scandal at all costs, sided with his daughter in a campaign to intimidate Van Kleek into keeping silent about her relationship with Twain and his family. Twain, ever the master of fiction, even concocted well-developed lies with which to ruin the woman's reputation. The relationship between Clara and Van Kleek was so poisonous that Clara could not let go of it even after Isabel Van Kleek died in 1959, continuing to disparage Isabel's reputation right up to the time of her own death in 1962.

Mark Twain's Other Woman is a remarkably revealing book about one of the most fascinating writers and characters the world has ever seen. Realistically, the self-serving cover-up perpetuated by Mark Twain and his daughter taints his image far more than the truth of the situation could have ever done in the long term. Twain, however, was a man of his times and he did not believe the public was ready to hear the truth about a relationship that seems, in retrospect, so tame today. This is a "must read" for Mark Twain fans.

Rated at: 4.0