Book Review: I am Charlotte Simmons

Just finished Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons, a disturbingly accurate depiction of modern American college life. The book is set in the fictional Ivy League University of Dupont, in Pennsylvania, and follows the first year of high school prodigy Charlotte Simmons. Charlotte, having won every award conceivable in high school, arrives at college with high expectations but finds herself overwhelmed by a world that cares more about social standing than academic achievement.

It is apparent that Wolfe did a lot of research for this book. His voice is clearly that of an adult looking in, but he captures the college-lingo perfectly. His depictions of how girls interact with one another in their unending quest for social status and boys is remarkably realistic. Frat boys and student-athletes come to life, and each of the four main characters has at least one thing we can all identify with. Their interactions all revolve around their relationship with Charlotte, who herself is undergoing a painful and eye-opening change in her values.

When Charlotte arrives at Dupont, she expects to fully immerse herself in the Life of the Mind, but quickly finds her academic success provides her with zero recognition and in fact compromises her social prospects, just as they did in high school. She is soon primed, through utter lack of real, fulfilling friendships, to undertake some pretty stupid risks to gain the attentions of some boys and thus status among her female friends. All the while, three boys, whose stories are intertwined in various ways, compete for her attention. There’s the geek, nerd, and dork, Adam, whose excessive concern and admiration for Charlotte prevent her from ever developing any real attraction towards him; Hoyt, the inconsiderate, vulgar, but irresistible frat boy; and Jojo, the rising star student-athlete whom Charlotte inspires to indulge his academic side to his own detriment.

One thing I was a little surprised by was that I am Charlotte Simmons turned out to be as much a commentary on male-female attraction and social dynamics as it did about college life. Probably college is the peak of this kind of competitive jockeying for position, when guys are constantly trying to establish themselves as dominant and girls are trying to establish their self-worth by attracting guys. Even Charlotte, whose mantra “I am Charlotte Simmons” was meant to hold her outside such petty concerns, eventually succumbs happily to a life in which worth and self-worth is determined by social approval and appearances.

The only problem I had with the book was that a lot of the ‘random encounters’ seems a little too convenient. The argument would be that the book just happened to be about the story that arose from these chance encounters; if the characters’ stories had not become intertwined as they did, no story worth writing would have arisen. To be fair, it made for an intricate, engaging plot, but I felt it was forced. Having gone to a relatively small school, and been at least as anti-social as Charlotte was, it was pushing my suspension of disbelief to accept so many conveniently placed accidental encounters among the characters. The college setting is so realistic while the plot is so dramatic, making these run-ins all the more noticeably convenient.

Wolfe’s mastery of language makes this book a pleasure to read just for the sake of following his prose and dialogue. He manages to poke fun at college slang in its excessiveness, while still bringing it across as realistic. His ability to get inside a character’s head is genius, and he does a great job of maintaining clarity as far as point-of-view is concerned. His descriptions are eloquent, capturing the feel and atmosphere of a place without weighing down the page with adjectives, and his characters seem very, disturbingly real in their aspirations, self-judgement, and human failings; when Charlotte neglects her academics, that thing that defined her as unique, in order to pursue a boy, we shake our heads, but we understand why she did it and how she got to that point.

Anyone who has gone to college will see a lot of their own experience in this book, whether good or bad. It will make you smile at yourself, nod knowingly, cringe in horrific anticipation, laugh at the freshmen antics knowing you yourself made the same naive mistakes. I am Charlotte Simmons is obviously not a real college story, but it takes everything about freshman college life, magnifies it about ten times, compresses it into one semester, and paints it in almost (but not quite) garishly bright colors. This exaggeration makes for a really enjoyable, really intense, trip back to whatever college campus you might happen to have come from and hopefully, like I did, you will gain some insight into your own college experience. I will definitely be reading more of Tom Wolfe’s works.

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Big Reread Update

I was a bad girl this week and I did not read any of my Reread Challenge books. This week I will definitely, definitely, definitely start on the Harry Potter books.

However, I did get through a Georgia Nicolson book (And Then He Ate my Boy Entrancers) and the newest Pretty Little Liars book, Heartless.

As far as teen mystery/suspense/thrillers go, I think the Pretty Little Liars series definitely surpasses the Private series. For one, PLL is a tad more realistic than Private. The Privateverse involves ridiculously exclusive, out-of-control parties and characters receiving death threats/getting murdered on a daily basis. The PLL-verse is a place you can envision yourself more easily in. The girls are being stalked and recovering from the death of their best friend…while trying to keep their grades up in AP Econ.

So I really did enjoy Heartless and it warmed ze cockles of my heart that some of the sadder loose ends were tied up (before becoming unraveled again in the end…The Hastings ignoring Spencer just gets to me). I loved the twists and turns it took and I never felt like the characters’ perspectives were whiny or boring (unlike Reed Brennan). It ended on a cliffy of course–every single chapter ends on a cliffy–and I’m a tad confused, but that’s typical. And now I’m dying for the next one to come out.

[Via http://findingmaddieland.wordpress.com]

Book Reviews

Now that I’ve got two kids reading, I’m always on the lookout for age-appropriate books that are also morally & spiritually appropriate. 

I’ll tell you, it’s been a bit of a challenge. 

I was happy to see that Focus on the Family has started to do some book reviews.  There aren’t a ton of books reviewed on the website, but at least it’s a start.

Here is a link in case you’re interested!

http://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/protecting_your_family/book_reviews_for_parents.aspx

Happy reading!

[Via http://ledbytheshepherd.wordpress.com]

The River and the Rain - The Lord's Prayer

Name of Book:   The River and the Rain – The Lord’s Prayer

Author:  Bijou Le Tord

Illustrator:  Bijou Le Tord

Publisher:  Doubleday

Audience:  Although this book is published for “all ages” and is one of Doubleday’s Books for Young Readers, I actually would not use this book with young children.  I would give it a “PG-13” rating due to: 1) the difficulty that I believe young children would have in connecting the words to some of the pictures, 2) the fact that it is a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, and 3) one illustration depicting a dead animal would possibly be disturbing to younger children (and I’m not sure how appropriate it is for this text in general).  I would use this book with teens and adults.

Summary:   This book is a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer that emphasizes stewardship of creation and awareness of environmental abuses inflicted by people.

Literary elements at work in the story:  The genre is poetic prayer and the overriding theme is the environment and our relationship with God and creation. The setting is the Amazon rain forest (as depicted in the illustrations).   The perspective is interesting as it incorporates both the familiar and the foreign.   Since it is a prayer it is, at once, first person (we are also praying) and communal as the body of worshippers, and, in this book there is an additional dimension because it appears to also be more specifically the perspective of someone indigenous to the rain forest.

Perspective on gender/race/culture/economics/abilities:

By employing the perspective of the indigenous forest people, it is the native Indians, who are portrayed as stewards of the land and wildlife.  The culture is tribal with the logger representing the “outside world” who brings destruction.

Scripture:      Genesis 1: 26-30, Genesis 9:  9-10, 13, 16-17, Matthew 6: 9-15 (various translations would be helpful), Deut. 20: 19 (These passages were selected to follow the emphasis on the environment that this books espouses.)

Theology:     We reflect God’s love and concern for all creation when we love and care for one another and for the plants and animals that are in our world.  God provides all that we need for eternal life – the things we enjoy daily (like food, water, and shelter) are not the ultimate gifts but are a means for us to participate in the stewardship of the earth – through them we can, for example, show hospitality to one another and compassion for living things.  This book would be particularly good to use in a study of environmental theology.

God’s love cannot be limited or stopped.  Although we continue to do things that are wicked in the eyes of God, we can pray for God’s assistance and strength to help us in our disobedience.  We are also accountable to one another in the things we do and say.  As Christians we are to help one another learn and follow the ways of God.

While we await the coming of the Kingdom of God, we can embody the Kingdom in the here and now by living into the commandments of God and the teachings of Christ as we know them from scripture and by the illumination of the Holy Spirit.  The Kingdom is not confined to the future, but can be experienced in Christ even now.  The Kingdom is both as far as heaven and as close as our back yard.

Faith Talk Questions:

A.  Questions on illustrations:

1. Where is God in these illustrations?
2. Why do you think the illustrator depicted “tempted/temptation” the way she did?
3. How would you “paint” temptation?  Does it look the same to everyone?
4. Do the illustrations represent the words that go with them?
5. Do these illustrations make you think differently about the Lord’s Prayer?

B.  Questions on Text:

1. Does the wording of this version of the Lord’s Prayer help you understand it differently than they way you learned it growing up?  In what way?
2. Which word(s) stands out most to you?
3. How do you understand the words trespasses/debts/wicked ways?  Which one do you think most fits this prayer?
4. Why do we pray for God to “let us not be tempted?”
5. Have you ever thought about what this prayer means to other cultures?
6. If you were paraphrasing the Lord’s Prayer for your school, how would it sound?  What words would you use in your version of the prayer?

Review prepared by Nadine Ellsworth-Moran,  MDiv/MACE, Entering cohort Fall 2004

[Via http://storypath.wordpress.com]

J.D.

“One other thing. And that’s all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row. And that’s right, that’s right–God knows it’s depressing. I’m not saying it isn’t. But that’s none of your business, really. That’s none of your business, Franny. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?”

…

For a fullish half minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: “I can’t talk any more, buddy.” The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed.

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

– J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

[Via http://stephendodson.wordpress.com]

Motion studies : Eadweard Muybridge and the technological wild west

Motion studies : Eadweard Muybridge and the technological wild west    London : Bloomsbury, 2003  Rebecca Solnit Chronophotography , History, Muybridge, Eadweard, 1830-1904 Hardcover. First edition and printing. 305 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-293) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In 1872 an Englishman photographed a running horse in California and succeeded for the first time in capturing an image of high-speed motion – the crucial breakthrough that eventually made movies possible. His patron, the philanthropist tycoon Leland Stanford, wanted to know if his trotter Occident ever lifted all four hooves at once – never suspecting what innovations Muybridge’s experiments would unleash. From Muybridge’s invention came Hollywood and from his patron Stanford’s sponsorship of technological research came Silicon Valley – two industries that have most powerfully shaped the modern world.

The story of Muybridge’s own life while he was making his motion studies is equally riveting. He became an internationally renowned inventor and photographer whose pictures of the war against the Modoc Indians and the monumental landscape of the American West have now become classics – and in a blaze of publicity, stood trial for the murder of his wife’s lover. Gripping and erudite, this is a fascinating biography of a true pioneer and the larger story of how time and space were revolutionised in the nineteenth century.

[Via http://oldsaltbooks.wordpress.com]

Baseball is America: A Child of Baseball

Victor Alexander Baltov Jr.

AuthorHouse, 2009

516 pages, Non-fiction/History/Politics

1 1/2 out of 5 stars

I love baseball. Have loved it my whole life. I was there when Kent Hrbek hit a grand slam in the 6th game of the 1987 World Series and I bit my nails all the way through the exciting 2009 post-season, which was preceded by an incredible one-game playoff between the Twins and the Tigers, forever dubbed in my home town by a simplistic and poetic moniker: Game 163. I also have a passion for political dialogue and love nothing more than an intelligent debate about elections, tracking polls and policy. I jumped at the opportunity to review a book by Victor Baltov’s that combined the two worlds and explained how one was the other. Baseball is America sounded like the perfect way to warm up for spring training.

I have not been this disappointed since Joe Nathan surrendered a ninth inning home run to Alex Rodriguez in Game 2 of the 2009 ALDS.

What could have been a provoking expose on the disappointment of baseball’s steroid era and its connection to America’s political landscape is instead nothing but a bitter, rambling journal overflowing with sarcastic and often mean-spirited hostility. It seems the author is trying to be funny and irreverent while showing off his intimate knowledge of baseball but it becomes a self-gratifying exercise. As if he’s writing in a diary, not to educate but to feed his own ego. This book is for people who are both die-hard baseball fans and far-right ideologues. If you meet both requirements then this book is filled with home runs but Baltov’s audience is limited to people who are exactly like him. Why do we need almost 500 pages? He could have done all this with a blog, which is probably a better option for material of this type.

His chief hypothesis, that a liberal, secular culture is responsible for introducing, sustaining and celebrating the use of steroids in baseball is never supported with any facts or data, and the connections he draws between liberalism and baseball’s steroid era are tenuous at best. His argument is more wishful thinking than scientific theory.

Writes Baltov on the steroid era: “The over-medicated, gadget addicted, sensory-deprived American fan base, indoctrinated into political correctness, metaphorically void of pitch recognition and unable to identify the curveball or change-up, is apathetic to the entire fix and continues to celebrate a crime that is immoral.” Hey baseball fans – this is you he’s talking about!

Where does he get off insinuating that baseball fans are not completely outraged at the steroid era? Head over to the fan forums at mlb.com and see if you can find a single person who applauds the use of steroids. You can’t find them. Everyone agrees that steroids nearly ruined baseball. This is not a political issue any more than the use of cocaine in the worldplace, or domestic violence, or drunk driving. We all agree that these things are wrong.

The structure is poorly organized and nothing seems to follow what came before it. The thoughts are not presented in any coherent fashion, it’s just non-stop raving. Here’s an example. After a prolonged exposition on the flaws of Communist Russia, he says this: “Rasputin, the Mad Monk or Black Monk, who was thought to have special healing powers, especially with respect to the tsar’s son, who was suffering from hemophilia, was really just another pervert trying to live the ‘seventy-two virgin’ life he imagined without the encumbrance of a suicide bombing act.”

What does this have to do with baseball or America??!! I found myself asking this question throughout the book.

When he moves away from ranting about Russia and sticks to baseball the book becomes more personal, except that he constantly insults baseball fans, and as a result, his readers. He refers to the current generation of baseball fans as “a generation of secular, unprincipled addicts packaged under a politically correct feel-good label of being a ‘forgiving people.’” For a man who repeatedly flaunts his devotion to God, one wonders what problem he has with a nation of forgiving people?

For some reason, he talks about Orthodox Christianity and says 1917 was the year that it was “out with the old and in with the new for the most Orthodox Christian country in the world after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire at Constantinople in AD 1453.” The Holy Roman Empire was a country? And how holy were they, really? On the very same page he accuses Senator Al Franken of Minnesota of committing voter fraud but gives no evidence. None.

He constantly refers to Barack Obama as the Black Lenin who is degrading the red, white and blue of America. Fair, but back it up with some examples please. Help us connect the dots, otherwise you come off as a nothing more than a narrow-minded ideologue. Taking swipes at the left every chance he gets, he often invents those chances from thin air, causing the book to read like a rant at times, like a diary or memoir at others. With plenty of red meat for conservatives, there is no much on the plate that you won’t know if your rare steak came from a cow or a horse.

He even goes so far as to trash the Boy Scouts and compare them to a pro-Communist youth organization while touting their godlessness, when every Boy Scout states during the Boy Scout Oath that they will “do my duty to God and my country.” I was a Boy Scout. I went to scout camp many times. We prayed before every single meal.

Seeing the world through the lens of baseball the author weaves baseball jargon into everyday life, equating elementary school grades to innings (4th grade = the 4th inning), sins to errors, good deeds to hits, the crucifixion of Christ to a sacrifice bunt, and death to the post season.  But he takes off on wild, undisciplined tangents hopping from his uncle to Joseph Stalin to the Iliad to the Dead Sea scrolls, all in the same paragraph, never tying any of it together. The tone settles during the second half but that becomes nothing but a very detailed and very wordy account of his amateur baseball career – nearly every game of it – and contains the consistent theme that Baltov could have been one of America’s greatest athletes, if not for our country’s secular, liberal sports culture.

This book about baseball reminds me not of The Unforgettable Season but of Mein Kampf: a disorganized collection of incoherent ideological rambling with plenty of typos (since you asked, on p. 3 & p.14, just to name two). At time Baltov’s opinionated and staunchly-political ravings are so intense that I wonder if this is what Hitler would have written had he been born a baseball fan with broadband access. Baltov compares Soviets troops surrendering to Nazis in World War II to Americans voting for Barack Obama.

One thing that will really bug a lot of people, no matter your political stripes: the author almost refuses to name pro baseball players by their real names, relying almost completely on nicknames. You can mention that Ty Cobb was the Georgia Peach and then refer to him as the Georgia Peach for the rest of the story but the author does not do this. Instead we have a hodgepodge of nicknames like Hammerin’ Hank, Bucketfoot Al, Goose, and Black Mike that would have sent me online to look them up if only there weren’t so many of them. I stopped caring pretty quickly. When he rattles off four or five nicknames in one sentence without any context he’s either showing off or assuming incorrectly that his audience knows who these people are. It gets old. Fast. Take this: “The hometown Reds were a hitting machine on the Senior Circuit, leading the league in six offense categories led by Susan Derringer’s future Hall of Fame grandfather, 48-Ounce Edd.” Does he expect you to know who these people are? When we don’t know who he’s talking about we don’t know what he’s talking about.

For a guy who openly deplores the secular, liberal powerbase of American pop culture (read: Hollywood) he sure does consume a lot of their product. He constantly trashes the liberal media and the destructive culture of Hollywood yet he frequently drops enduring movie references that show he has appreciated, even cherished, his time spent before the screen. It’s an absurd duality. Baltov shows a clear love for a medium he abhors. It’s like watching a chocolate addict bemoan the evils The Hershey Company while buying a case of Milk Duds with a handful of dollars bills glazed with chocolate fingerprints .

The book contains an almost fatal flaw: there are blank pages with missing text. How could a colossal error like this ever get though?? We’re not talking about one missing page, which would be colossal in itself, but several blank pages. Chapter 12 ends in mid-sentence on p.187 with p. 188 left completely blank. The next two pages have photographs followed by a pair of blank pages. The missing text never appears. This continues into Chapter 13 which starts on p. 193 but ps. 194, 195, 197, 200, 201, 203, 206, 207 and 209 are completely blank. The pages filling the gaps contain text, but only in portions, leaving an incoherent Swiss cheese chapter. This holey practice continues into Chapter 14 but there is no need to break it down. You get the idea.

I hope this book is sent back to the printer before it hits the mass market because this crucial error destroys all credibility.

If you want a great book about baseball and American history you probably can’t do much better than Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08, an amazing history of the 1908 baseball season. Yogi Berra said “It ain’t over till it’s over” and in the case of Baseball is America, I couldn’t wait until the final out of the ninth inning.

Strengths: a very strong point of view that never backs down, and an informed sense of baseball history

Opportunities: way too long, rambling, contains several major formatting errors

Will alienate:  just about every baseball fan, anyone who does not regularly attend Sunday Mass in a Catholic church, and anyone who has ever voted for a Democrat, especially Obama

Baseball is America: A Child of Baseball is available on amazon.

Reviewed by Mark McGinty, January 2010

[Via http://theboogle.wordpress.com]