Lost in Shangri-La - Mitchell Zukoff

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this adventure story set in the later days of the Second World War is the consequences for the natives of the secluded area called Shangri-La that three American soldiers crash into - living a lifestyle unchanged for thousands of years, the natives are yanked into the 20th century. In the epilogue the author finds a few still clinging to their traditional ways (penis gourds, bones through noses) to sell their souls by posing for photographs with tourists.

In May 1945 twenty American military personnel (including women) go on a pleasure flight over a secluded section of Papa New Guinea but bad weather forces the plane to crash. Only thee survive and they are helped by the natives, who believe the Americans with their white skin are spirits. A group of Filipino-American soldiers parachute in to set up a camp and help the survivors, and eventually a daring rescue plan is crafted involving gliders, a near-forgotten aircraft nicknamed "coffin boxes".  A good summer time adventure read.

Pastoralia - George Saunders

My second George Saunders book this year, I bought this one based on how much I liked CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Pastoralia is similar - a collection of short stories, all about sad sacks trying to survive in a world that has it in for them, a world where things go from terrible to even worse that you could have imagined.  In the first story, a man with a very sick boy has a job as a caveman in a history theme park, but his desire to do a good job is thwarted by his partner's tendency to speak English and act uncave-like when visitors come by.  The best one in the collection is Sea Oak, about a male stripper trying to support his extended family by working in a nautical-themed club. His grandmother dies during a break-in at their squalid apartment complex, but the cheap coffin they buried her in can't hold her and she comes back to tell them to start improving their lot and not wasting their life.  Her advice crumbles along with her corpse, leaving the narrator in the same place as when he started, except this time haunted by the bleak future before him.



 

Among The Truthers - Jonathan Kay

The most disappointing part of this book is the part that's not there - the refuting of the claims of 9/11 Truthers. Kay writes around it, mentioning it only once when he offers up an excuse for not including it  - "Debunking books don't sell". This hole transforms the book into a history of conspiracy theories, starting with The Truther Movement, rather than a book singularly about the Truther Movement, making the title a marketing ploy. Given the title a reader expects that the author spends time among 9/11 Truthers and reports back, but we are only offered truncated versions. (Better versions appeared in the National Post when Kay was writing this novel). This 'among the natives' approach was done much better by Matt Taibbi in The Great Derangement, who spends time with the religious right in the US and the 9/11 Truthers and draws connections between the two groups.

You can't go far complaining about a book for what it isn't. This book is a history of conspiracy theories, including the JFK assassination and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the two Rosetta stones of conspiracism.  The parallel between religion and conspiracism is drawn, as is the power of the Internet and video streaming. Overall very nice, but ultimately unsatisfying.

This Cake Is For The Party - Sarah Selecky

10 stories, remarkable for being even in their distribution of style, wit and a high degree of writing. All are about loss, and what comes before and what comes after.  The most skillful is the last in the collection, One Thousand Wax Buddhas, which plays with narrative structure and first-person perspective to tell the story of a candle-maker and his mentally ill wife. Hints of Munroe, suggestions of Carver, but Selecky makes these stories her own.