Category Archives: 100 Books of 2011

April 20, 2011 · 3:39 am

Freakonomics: More Freak than Nomics

      Freakonomics proudly proclaims in its introduction, and again in its conclusion, that it is a book without a unified theme. This being the case, telling your reader there is no unifying theme (re: point) does not make this lack in any way… okay. While I enjoyed the disparate sections of the book for their confident tone, measured pace and didactic, (albeit sometimes overly hand-holding) explanations of everyday phenomena, I found the overall absence of an argument/organizing idea/central question to be frustrating and perplexing.

I am bothered by a book that claims to be about looking for relationships between far-fetched phenomena when it is really about an author having noticed two similar phenomena, having deduced plausible explanations, then grouped the two things together only to claim that the deductions came about as a result of novel questioning (questions like: what do a drug dealer and a sumo wrestler and an aborted fetus have in common?). Novel questioning might better be thought of as something like this: what makes this book without a theme, or apparent point, a bestseller?

Further minor complaints: “economists” are credited with doing much of the work of sociologists; cause-and-effect is not the same thing as “incentive” based decision making; causality and correlations often mysteriously swap when the given example requires.

Minor praise: a collaborative book always impresses me.

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April 17, 2011 · 12:20 am

Gorazde: Difficult

           War correspondent Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Gorazde, is difficult to read. It reports on the experiences of Edin, a Bosnian Muslim, during the siege of Gorazde and describes in text and image the atrocities committed during the siege of the city and of neighboring towns, and of the violence of diplomatic decisions that favoured political expediency over human life and well-being.

As I read the book (in a single sitting, it’s entirely captivating) I asked myself what made the graphic form so effective in expressing the individual and collective suffering as compared to text-based reportage. I’m not sure I have a good answer (again, see my comments on my new-to-graphic-novels) though I suspect that it has to do with pacing. Sacco does well to slow down the pace of reading in scenes of high tension and great suffering, and in so doing required this reader to pay – uncomfortable – attention to scenes I might have more readily surged through in a text-based version. With little choice but to read snippets of sentences set against black-and-white images of intense action, the graphic version demanded my investment in each character, and in each scene that I certainly wanted to avoid reading about.

While I found Sacco entirely effective in using graphics to describe and pace his narrative, I also admired the text of the book, which did an admirable job contextualizing the conflict, while also attending to individual stories and experiences (one two-page spread, in particular, featured a compendium of “interviews” which aptly captured shared and different responses to the return of Serbs to Gorazde).

I’m not sure I appreciated Sacco’s sometime self-congratulatory digs at other reporters who “only” came to Gorazde for one or two days, while he spent considerable time in the city and made multiple trips. I appreciate the difference such reporting experiences must effect in the kind and quality of writing produced, however, I nevertheless felt these comments were less effective in attacking the West’s apparent disinterest in the suffering and death of others (as was perhaps the intent) than they were in conveying Sacco’s confidence in his reportage expertise. While many of Sacco’s self-reflexive comments approach the difficult question of why he should be able to leave and return to safety with little trouble, I do not think the text goes far enough in interviewing the reporter himself.

That said, it’s an incredibly compelling story and one, oddly I suppose, made better still by the difficulty of its reading.

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April 16, 2011 · 1:41 am

The Madman and the Butcher: Better Butcher than Madman

                               Tim Cook’s popular history, The Madman and the Butcher tackles the biographies of Canadian WWI figures, Sir Sam Hughes and Sir Arthur Curries, respectively. For those of you not up-and-up on your Canadian history, Sam Hughes worked as the Minister of Militia and MP before/during/after WW1, and Arthur Currie served first in the war as a brigadier general and eventually as the Lieutenant General of the Canadian Corp (the first Canadian, rather than a British soldier, to command a corp of Canadian soldiers).

While Cook’s history purports to be about balancing the historical record in terms of the “reputations” of each man — Hughes and Currie, have both at various points between 1914 and the present been libeled as the titular ‘madman’ and ‘butcher’ respectively — it is tilted much in favour of redeeming, and in some respects resurrecting the fading history of, Arthur Currie.

I am not at all opposed to this move on the part of Cook, I just wondered whether the book might have benefited (a great deal) from making Currie the explicit focus, rather than including the oftentimes strained and repetitive chapters on Hughes. While I appreciate the desire to set up an opposition between the two men (an opposition mirrored by Hughes’s eventual and aapparent hatred of Currie), the chapters on Currie are by far the more engaging (particularly the section on the famous libel trial).

I admired Cook’s efforts to refract growing Canadian nationalism and the successes of the Canadian corps through biography. I’m not sure the effort was successful in the case of Hughes, as his nationalist vigour to mount an impressive Canadian civilian-soldier army is tempered by his imperialist vision and the relatively minor impact he played after 1916. In the case of Currie, however, Cook does well to demonstrate the parallel struggle of Currie to establish his individual authority and the Canadian Corps’s growing recognition both home and abroad as an identifiable (and formidable) unit.

I am less impressed by the repetition in the middle section of the book, in particular, (as mentioned) with reference to Sam Hughes’s ego, lies and slander. I do think that rather than describe each battle the Canadian corps participated in, Cook might have done better to select several battles that represented key points in Currie-cum-Canada’s development, rather than the (sometimes exhausting) description of each movement of artillery.

The last third of the book that deals with the libel trial is engaging and engrossing, and does a terrific job of getting at Cook’s purported intent of addressing the “war of reputations.” Again, this “war” has nothing to do with Hughes, and everything to do with Currie. Hence, a book that is far better at dealing with the butcher, than the madman.

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April 11, 2011 · 4:36 pm

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold: Death be Cause

       A good spy novel ought to have double agents, sacrificial women, and neat fight scenes. John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has these elements. It’s a really good read: well paced, brilliantly plotted, and smooth in the necessary transitions in narrative focalization that allow the reader access to pieces of information, but not quite enough (for me at least) to piece together the mystery before le Carre is ready to have it all out.

The novel grapples with questions of whether individual lives are worth sacrificing for the sake of the larger good, and then explodes this (somewhat banal) moral question by tackling whether there is such a thing as a “larger good” at all. These questions might sound overwrought, but the novel does a remarkable job of weaving these ideas into character and plot in such a way as to not read as clunky or melodramatic (with the one notable exception of Leamas’s and Liz’s conversation in the car).

A great cold war novel in its descriptions of tension along the borders and in its attention to the similarities between the two powers in both ideology and method. A great spy novel for its emphasis on plot, but with a suitable level of character development that allows the conclusion to by poignant and affecting.

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