Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope

In her 2005 book subtitled "A Guide for Mindful Eating", Jane Goodall proves she is more than just the chimp lady.

Goodall's lifelong study of chimpanzee behavior naturally led to her concern about their habitat and their dwindling population. The logging trade and the raising of cattle are causing the disappearance of the chimp's forest habitat. The bushmeat trade is causing the chimp's potential extinction. Chimpanzee meat is a delicacy in parts of the world. Imagine browsing in an African market and pawing through severed chimpanzee hands to find your dinner.

Gentle Jane's early chapters start with easy talk about animal diets and differences in human diets around the world. The reader is lulled by a seemingly basic primer on animals and diet. Chapter 2, "A Celebration of Cultures," is a happy chapter indeed.

Then Jane packs her punch.

Our happy, indulgent cultures encourage businesses to pesticide-proof crops with chemicals. As added bonus, we eat the chemicals too. Plus, we get bigger, stronger crop-eating pests. So now, companies like Monsanto, are modifying the DNA of the crops themselves.

Our lifestyles have also brought about the horrors of factory farms, the modern-day replacement of family farms. You don't need to accept that animals have souls, just that they suffer, to recoil at the treatment of the cows, pigs and chickens in these assembly-line hell-houses.

Chickens are crammed together so they can't stretch their wings, starved and denied water when egg production is down. Cows are branded, castrated, wallow in feces. Tailless pigs are shot up with growth hormones and weakened by lack of exercise. Sometimes their tiny legs break trying to carry their own weight off to slaughter.

If you are callous enough to not care about the animals' suffering, you might care that you and your family eat all the hormones and antibiotics the animals are injected with. (We've learned the consequences of too much antibiotics: super-bugs.)

Jane recalls the farms she knew as a child, where animals were loved and roamed free. Crops were rotated so that the soil remains fertile. These farms were compact ecosystems that worked without wearing out the land.

Jane's message: if you are going to eat meat, eat small-farm, local and organic. Better yet, don't eat meat and let people eat the grain that feeds the livestock.

Can you handle that? If not, then you won't know what hit you when the water crisis lurking around the corner appears.

Never Let Me Go

In Kuzuo Ishiguro's fictional world, human cloning has been going on in the UK since the 1950s or 60s.

The reader meets Kathy H., Tommy D. and Ruth as children, their story told in flashback by Kathy H. Something is unusual about these kids at Hailsham. Are the children in boarding school? Or are they orphans? Are they specially gifted children?

They live among kind, caring guardians who nurture their creativity. A mysterious Madame carts their best art away.

Gradually, the reader realizes the future that is set out for these special kids as "carers" and "donors". Even more gradually, you realize where they came from and why they were born. Despite the cynicism of others, their humanness is real.

Ishiguro illustrates this by focusing on the small misunderstandings between them, what's said and unsaid that changes the air between them. Feel the awkwardness of your own childhood in this story: the bullies, the leaders, the misfits.

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth grow up but remain children; childless, motherless children who dream little dreams and search for explanations with the little energy and will they have. They face final disappointment in the answers and face their fate with the resignation.

Why don't they try to escape? Because their bonds are the bonds of conformity, some of the strongest kind.

Tough Guys Don't Dance

I had never read a word Norman Mailer wrote; I only knew him as a celebrity hothead and occasional public embarrassment. I knew that Mailer got away with stabbing one of his wives. (He only stabbed the one--there were five others.)

Misogynist behavior and rantings are turn offs for me, so why would I ever pick up one of his books? If Mailer wasn't a good celebrity, why would I think he was a good writer?

Tough Guys Don't Dance changed my tune. The second of two books I bought for a buck each at the Lower East Side book fair (see A Widow for a Year post), TGDD turned out to be a great read.

Mailer passed away last November and according to The New York Times obit:

. . . Mr. Mailer said his favorite novel, if not his best, was “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” a mystery thriller he wrote, under extreme financial pressure, in just two months in 1984. He was in tax trouble, he explained, and needed to crank something out quickly. “I was prepared to write a bad book if necessary,” he said, “but instead the style came out, and that saved it for me.”

Mailer is beautiful writer, even when writing from the perspective of a "tough guy" who may or may not have committed murder during a drunken blackout.

Hell-Town

Anti-hero Tim Madden rattles around an off-season New England beach town. He is a man who doesn't seem to belong there.

Madden lives on the edge of "Hell-Town," a half-real, half mythical place where demons whisper in his ear. Madden fears his capacity for violence and a reader has every reason to believe he committed a murder or two when in the clutches of bourbon.

When Mailer introduces the Madden's fellow townies, everyone becomes a suspect. Through lyrical prose and raw violence, the events of the forgotten night are pieced together.

John Irving, A Novelist Among Novelists

This book has been around since 1998. I picked a copy up for a dollar at the Lower East Side book fair.

I like John Irving. Loved Garp and Owen Meany, but the title of this one, A Widow for One Year, sounded dry. (And A Prayer for Owen Meany didn't? Hmm.) Turned out the book was--as they say--a page turner.

The crux of this novel is novels and novelists. Writers writing about writers is not novel; writers write about writers all the time. But this book is writers writing about writers writing about writers and their writing.

All Irving's characters are writers of different types. Okay, there's one editor and one cop. But those two are window dressing.

Irving explores the question of whether one can assume that a writer is writing about herself. Eddie, does nothing but write about the same pivotal event in his life in book after dreary book. Hannah the journalist accuses best friend Ruth, the good novelist, of writing about their friendship over and over. Ruth doesn't believe this truth, but by the end of the book she does.

Ruth's father, a writer of children's books, writes very little, but is famous. Her mother, a writer of detective novels, is a mystery herself, leaving her family without a trace for thirty-six years. All Mom's novels are about the central tragedy of her life.

A Plot too?

All the musing about writing and exerts from the characters' books are wrapped around a compelling story that kept me guessing. Guessing way too late in the evening. Irving has a knack for making you think he is giving you a spoiler, but he is not. I kept wondering when the "spoiler" was going to happen and made assumptions about its effects. Wrong and wrong again.

A chunk of the book is set in Amsterdam's red light district and Irving makes the dingy area come alive for the reader. Many Dutch words authenticate it as well.

John Irving, the novelist, writes a little too much about breasts. Specifically, Ruth's breasts. For some reason, Ruth's "nice breasts" are mentioned over and over and over again. Her "nice breasts" (no other adjective is ever used) are the only thing some people remember about her. Somehow the nice breasts must have something to do with the lessons of the book.

But you'll have to I connect the dots on that one. I can't.

Who is the Charlie Browniest?

A fat biography of Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, fuels the long-standing hypothesis that Charles Schulz is Charlie Brown.

Schulz is indeed Charlie Brown with all Charlie's insecurities, fears and loneliness. How could this old hypothesis not be true? Don't all artists draw their characters from themselves and their own lives? Aren't all the characters in our dreams really us?

In detailing Schulz's childhood, author David Michaelis tries too hard to fault the parents. Schulz's parents were not your average PTA parents, but they seemed better than average. Schulz was an awkward kid, humble to the point of annoying and clean-living to the point of boring.

The Schulz offspring cooperated with the biographer but were miffed at the resulting portrait he paints. I can see why. For a different point of view, read the New York Times review.

The author over-emphasizes events and statements that demonstrate Schulz's low self worth and glosses over Schulz's many triumphs. Schulz's army service gave him a lot of confidence and pulled him from his sheltered St. Paul environment. His job at Art Instruction, Inc provided him with camaraderie and status. Those periods were two big chunks of his early adult life.

Draw Me!

Kudos to Schulz for seeking out employment and companionship with fellow artists, albeit at an unusual artistic venue. (Remember Art Instruction, Inc aka the "Draw Me! school? In the back of magazines, the school advertised, "Can you draw Binky the Skunk?")

Schulz's singular determination to become a cartoonist, his persistent submission of his work demonstrated atypical self confidence, not the reverse. Schulz impressed me when he turned down a job offer to work at Disney, because he did not want to become just a part of a pool of animators. (I might have taken that job.)

The biography is well-written, well-researched and sprinkled with strips illustrating how he used incidents in his own life as material. The strips bring the point home, helping the reader recognize or remember the simple brilliance of Peanuts.

Watch David Michaelis speak about Charles Schulz

Michaelis may be a Charlie Brown himself, always positioning what seems like normal events into a negative framework. As I rounded the corner into the second half of the book, the theme of "Charles is Charlie" turned into "Success does not make Schulz happy."

Around this point, I started to feel depressed myself. Maybe I had a few tough days, but I suspected the book itself might be making me feel very Charlie Brownie. I intend to finish the book, but for now, I have set it aside for a sunny day.

The Book Thief

The book thief steals books to steal back the words, the power, that has been stolen from a society.

Hitler stole the ability to speak freely, act freely, and so much more from the Polish, the Jews and the Germans themselves. That is, he stole their words.

Liesel, our heroine and thief, is a nine-year-old German girl at the start of this novel that opens in 1939 and spans five horrible years. She steal books, starting with The Gravedigger's Handbook, dropped in the snow by the boy who buried her six-year-old brother. She pulls books from crisp piles left from a Nazi book-burning party.

Liesel doesn't understand her compulsion to steal, but we learn she is taking the words back that had been stolen, words that she didn't know how to read at first. She learns to read them, learns their power and ultimately uses them.

Death's Tale

Using Death as the tale's narrator is a technique that works and doesn't at the same time. Death's voice feels heavy-handed in parts, but isn't that what Death is, particularly during the Nazi era? Death hits you over the head with foreshadowing, not just hints, but outright revelations of what's to come in bold, centered type. Oddly, it works.

It's not typical to read about WWII from the perspective of non-Jewish German citizens. I loved that characters reveal themselves to be different from my expectations. And not in that, oh the author knows you are going to expect so-and-so, so he makes the characters be the opposite. The book also makes you understand--even just a little--how a shadow, an evil force can overtake a society.

Plus, you learn a few good German swear words.

Polly Wanna a Craker?

The best dystopian novel, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, moved into second place in my opinion after I read Oryx and Crake. Surprise -- O & C is also by Margaret Atwood.

I was inspired to read Oryx and Crake after the recent death of Alex, the "thinking" African Grey parrot, who makes a cameo in O&C. Alex, like most parrots, talked. But his handler and many others argued that he didn't just parrot; he reasoned. When presented with an new object, an almond in a shell, Alex coined a new word for it: "corknut". Makes sense to me.

The protagonist of Oryx and Crake is a bit of a corknut himself. Jimmy/Snowman, apparently the world's sole human survivor, is the guardian of the creatures created by the genius-mad scientist, Crake. The offspring are known as Crakers.

Snowman, like Alex, got pleasure from making up words. Snowman snuck his invented words into advertising copy. (His job before everyone else went bye-bye.)

But the award for clever, linguistic hi jinks by an animal goes to Washoe, the famous, ASL-signing chimpanzee. An example: Washoe saw a swan and identified it by signing "water" and "bird" in American Sign Language. That's one smart chimp.

Water for Elephants

Animal lovers, Water For Elephants will break your heart.

Set during the 1930s Depression, the novel takes you to the the gritty side of a struggling circus. The bosses are cruel, the performers are exploited and the workers are sad and broken. But belief in the circus illusion still survives and the characters have their decent sides too.

The circus animals show the complexities of their characters as well. They can be vicious, like the hungry big cats or like Queenie, the clown-dwarf's companion. They are capable of mischievousness, loyalty, sadness and love. Like humans, they are emotional beings.

But the most tender moments are Rosie's, the Polish elephant. The author gets me right here when she describes a big tear welling in Rosie's eye after the circus trainer throws a lit cigarette in her mouth.

Throws a lit cigarette in her mouth!

It makes me shudder. Poor Rosie suffers her share of beatings too. I almost had to stop reading.

But this is a story of hope and perseverance and readers who persevere to the end are rewarded as are Jacob and Marlena.

Jacob, the hero and circus veterinarian, falls in love with Marlena, a performer who unwisely married the circus trainer. They band together against her husband's cruelty. Besides sleeping together, they are guilty of some pretty awful dialog. The dialog is awkward throughout the book but that is my only real criticism.

Tina & Diana: Separated at Birth?

With the publication of Tina Brown's book, The Diana Chronicles, the media is talking about how Princess Diana's rise and fall paralleled Tina's career.

As editor of Tatler, Tina emerges in the public's consciousness as Diana rises in popularity; Tina even gets married three weeks after Diana does in 1981. Tina reigns as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as Diana grows sophisticated and media-savvy.

And then in 1997, Diana dies in a Paris car crash. I won't Talk about any specific similarities, but what happened to Tina's career shortly after? What what about the more obvious parallel? Just how much did these blonde Brits look alike? A certain amount of the physical resemblance is genetic but the hairstyle they shared was no accident.

Bob Woodward: State of Denial

Bob Woodward gave the keynote speech at a conference I attended today and gave his insider point of view about what's been going on in Washington over the 1400-plus days since the Iraq War began.

Mr. Woodward made the White House sound like any other workplace, with rivalries, damage control and personnel strategies. The only difference: these employees sent the country to war.

Woodward described his one-on-one interview with G. Bush. Woodward said he spent 3.5 hours with Bush and asked him 500 questions. (Must have been yes-or-no questions.)

Mr. Woodward told a story about Colin Powell whom he interviewed as a general in 1990. Powell said then, never trust anything the CIA tells you and more importantly, never act on that information.

Thirteen years later, Mr. Woodward said, Powell would ignore his own advice.

I can't wait to read the book.

The Poetry of Rock and Roll

The third rail is a dangerous place to be (but better than a third wheel, which is an uncomfortable place to be). But how dangerous and risky is the book, Third Rail, the Poetry of Rock and Roll? The risky part: it's real poetry. I don't doubt that poets will eat it up, because they would like to be perceived as a little dangerous, I think. But will non-poet rockers take to it as well?

Last night, the Bowery Poetry Club along with MTV (now there's a combo) hosted a book-publishing party with readings from the anthology.

Admitted Queen-ophiles Daniel Nester and Gene Cawley stole the show (I will admit bias) with readings of two of Dan's poems and Gene's sing-along rendition of "Fat Bottomed Girls".

Dangerous, indeed.