Every Love Story is a Ghost Story - DT Max

There must have been a temptation on the author's part to start this story in the middle (the making of Infinite Jest, the part we all want to read) or at the end (the suicide in 2008) but he starts the way most biographies do, at the beginning and this conventional style dominates the book, a rather standard troubled genius pulls it together to make great art and then fizzles out and it all ends tragically. (See: Kurt Cobain)

The revelations here are those that DFW kept hidden - his battles with serious mental illness and addiction, his fragile state and repeated breakdowns. In interviews he gave (most notably in 'Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself') DFW was able to create his own media persona, one stronger and better put together than what he really was. (Also notable are the admissions that he applied his fiction skills to his non-fiction work, making up his own facts and people in order to better suit the story)

The author mixes in some literary criticism, connecting points of DFW's life to his work (another surprise is how much his relationship with his mother played a role in creating Infinite Jest) and the fact that DFW and DeLillo shared a regular correspondence is a truth better than fiction.

The Taliban Shuffle - Kim Barker

I know what it's like to get a foreign country under your skin, to have it feel more like home than home does. For Kim Barker that place was Afghanistan - an odd choice, but after being sent there to report after 9/11 she falls for the place. She finds it so hard to leave that when she quits her job after the paper wants to recall her back to Chicago, she stays.
Anyone looking for a serious dissection of the West's role in this region should look elsewhere - this a memoir, but it does offer up some behind-the-scenes of a foreign correspondent in a strange country.

Griftopia - Matt Taibbi

 A dark and cynical look into the 2008 financial crisis. Based on a article Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs back in 2009 that caused a shit storm, the book fleshes out the argument with additional articles on how financial institutions have plundered the U.S., written in a frank style that offers up hilarious analogies.

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - Frank Brady

A straight ahead account of the chess prodigy's rise and fall, with the only thing lacking is a peek inside that mad genius brain. The author knew Fischer but never got the chance to speak to him the last years, and the book suffers for it. Still, an entertaining account.

Hemingway's Boat - Paul Hendrickson

We can all agree that something happened to Hemingway, sometime in the 1930's. It's hard to pin down exactly when and where, but he wasn't the same writer after A Farewell To Arms. He started to believe in his own legend, never a good move, especially when most of it he made up himself. This biography of Hemingway has a revealing letter that perhaps provides some clue as to what wrong - after getting his boat, the Pilar, Hemingway wanted to chuck the writing gig and become a fisherman.
Perhaps he should have. He might have been happier, and we would have been spared the slow descent of a great young writer into a mediocre old one. And, perhaps the people around him would have been happier as well - his wives (second, third and fourth) and his children, especially his youngest son, Gregory, who died in a jail cell in October 2001.

Game Change - John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

Only four years later it's hard to remember what Barack Obama's campaign for President was like. A virtual unknown with an unusual name and a bi-racial identity beat Hilary Clinton to to claim the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to become President. There's no hint in the book of the dark days ahead, but the blow-by-blow account of the campaign is heroin for political junkies. Perhaps our only consolation is that the U.S. didn't end up with President McCain and Vice President Palin.

Honor Thy Father - Gay Talese

The true story of a son of Mafia Don who finds himself regretting the life he chose as the bodies pile up around him. Instead of the glam and gals of the Movie Mafia, it's doom and gloom, sitting for long hours in a car and wondering if the next shot you hear is for you. New Journalism once shook the foundations of non-fiction, but these we expect our stories to seem as real and as fiction. Instead of a hail of bullets the Mafia Don's son is brought down by a credit card fraud case - an example of truth being stranger than fiction.

The Devil In The White City - Erik Larson

In 1893, Chicago held a World's Fair, an event designed to show the world that the United States could match any fair in Europe. Having mostly disappeared from memory, the event held many firsts, including the first Ferris Wheel and the first eight-hour work day contract, and was a focal point for the people who would play an important role in early 20th century history (Teddy Roosevelt and t Arch Duke Ferdinand, to name two)

It was also the backdrop for one of history's most chilling serial killers, H.H. Holmes. Using money he gained from killing people he took out insurance policies on, Holmes built a hotel specifically designed to lure in, trap and kill young women. There's also the unstable young man who believes his tireless (yet unsolicited) campaigning for the mayor guarantees him a cushy job in the government. All the stories build momentum to a conclusion that could only happen in non-fiction.

Flames Across The Border: 1813 - 1814 - Pierre Berton

The War of 1812 is perhaps the best example of the stupidity of war - after two years of killing and maiming, burning and pillaging, the two countries went back to they way things were. A point of contention between Canadians and Americans, or at least for those who care, is the result of this war, with both sides claiming victory. They're right and wrong. If Canada had won, most of Upstate New York would have become part of the British Empire, while if the U.S. had won, Ontario and Quebec would now be a state. (At least Toronto would have a better chance then at getting an NFL team...)

Berton is a master at making history come alive, and his skill at getting inside the heads of the players is magical. It reads like fiction, but for the people involved it was all too real.

Under The Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer

The detached journalistic tone serves Krakauer well in this book as he details how Ron and Dan Lafferty, Mormon Fundamentalists, killed their brother's wife and baby daughter after receiving instructions from God to do so. Krakauer avoids calling the brothers crazy, or even hinting at any level of snark, and presents the facts. Connecting the dots between Mormonism beginnings, the splinter groups that developed over disputes regarding polygamy and the events leading up to the night of the killing, Krakauer weaves a masterful tale.

Your Movie Sucks - Roger Ebert

There is an art to writing well about something bad, and Ebert is a master. Inspired by Deuce Bigalow: European Giglo (the only instance that phrase will be ever used) Ebert collects some of his lowest reviews. The collection starts with the aforementioned Rob Schneider movie, which receives special attention as Schneider called out another movie critic, in a letter sent to the media, for his negative review and not having any award credentials. Pulitzer prize-winning Ebert takes it on himself to bash Schneider around the head with his gold coin for the travesty that is the sequel to Deuce Bigalow. The next featured review is for Chaos, a horror movie I've heard of that took Ebert to task for his negative review.

Ebert is willing to change his mind, which he did with Brown Bunny. Seeing it at Cannes he wrote it was worse than watching his own colonoscopy, but after meeting a year later with the director/star and seeing a new cut, he offers a more positive review.

Of course there are some great lines - for Catwoman: The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project. 

Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson

It's a small surprise that this is his first collection of non-fiction, considering that he, albeit briefly, had the mantle of Chief Prognosticator, back when we thought the future would be delivered to us through VR googles and sensory pads. He explains his discomfort at non-fiction in the introduction, claiming that he wants to spend time writing fiction. Fair enough, and those most of the pieces in this collection slim, there are some excellent insights on Japan, eBay, and Borges. The best part is the author's comments afterwards, placing the piece in some kind of context. The piece on Singapore for Wired caused the magazine to be banned there for a number of years, a fact that I only knew through the comments. My favourite one is about Tokyo, also for Wired, which the author dismisses in the comments (saying that he feels guilty of using most of the good material he gathered on the magazine's dime for his novel Pattern Recognition) but to me conjures about Japan in a way that only those who have been there can fully understand.

The Snakehead - Patrick Radden Keefe

In the pre-dawn darkness of June 6, 1993, a ship named the Golden Venture crashed into the coast near Queens, and 300 illegal Chinese found themselves in The United States. How that ship got there is the central narrative of this well-written, well-researched book. The center of the story is Sister Ping, a Chinese shopkeeper who ran a multi-million dollar business bringing people from the Fujian Province to the US. She has trails all over the world, but it all comes undone after the Golden Venture crash.

Heavy on the facts, and told in a cold, detached journalistic style, the book could have benefited from more of a personal touch, but the power of the narrative pulls the reader along.

God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales - Penn Jillette

Part manifesto, part autobiography and part joke, the uneven quality in this book can be attributed to it not knowing exactly what it wants to be. Zooming out of the gate, Jillette lays out what it means to be an atheist (All you have to be able to say is "I don't know") and recalls a story about eating bacon with Hasidic Jews. His attempt to match the Ten Commandments with his own has some wings (even if Hitchens did it better) but it sags in the middle, bogged down in personal anecdotes about having sex while scuba diving and stripping naked on the vomit comet. It picks up again at the end, with Jillette offering atheism as the only hope against terrorism, that faith is the enemy that rational people must overcome:

"Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence... Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith."



 

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson - Hunter S. Thompson

I finished this book the same day a woman pepper sprayed people at a Wal-Mart to get at an X-box during a Black Friday sale. Thompson would have been at home in this madness. He also would have recognized the incident a few weeks at Berkeley when a campus cop causally pepper sprayed a line of student protesters.

This collection stretches from the beginning days at Rolling Stone all the way to a few months before his death - a piece about the Bush re-election victory in 2004, and Thompson's opinion that he would rather have voted for Nixon, his arch-nemesis, than Bush (perhaps the harshest indictment of the presidency of George W Bush ever given)
The cliche would be to say that we need a voice like Thompson now, but it could never happen. You can draw connections between Thompson's style and bloggers (personal, argumentative, opinionated, vitriolic) but Thompson put himself in the story by going to the centre of action (instead of sitting back and commenting on what's happening) and he wrote long, rambling pieces that required heavy editing and don't fit nicely onto the screen of an i-pad.

In-between the pieces are letters between Thompson and Jann Wenner, some of which hint at what might have been. One of the great lost books is Thompson's lost Vietnam novel. Some of the dispatches are collected here, with Thompson bunkered down in a hotel as the Viet Cong approach, collecting ammunition and trying to teach two other journalists how to to use a walkie talkie system for when the walls are breached. Vietnam was pure gonzo, and it takes a madman like Thompson to make sense of the madness.

Boomerang: Travels In The New Third World - Michael Lewis

If the end does come, it won't be zombies - it will be bankers. They brought us to the edge of ruin in 2008 and no doubt will lead us there again. Lewis starts in Iceland, where the fishermen came off the boats and into banking, and in 30 years bankrupted the country. In Greece he spends time in a monastery run by an order of monks that turned a land deal into a series of business deals that brought down the economy. It didn't help that no one in Greece pays taxes, and public sector employees make boat loads of money.  In Germany he tries to find out why the Germans kept pumping money into failing EU economies but instead comes away with insight about the German relationship to excrement. Last stop is California, where a state out of money still manages to be one the largest economies in the world.  Lewis is an excellent writer with a talent for getting out of the way and letting his characters tell the story.

Killing Yourself to Live - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with Chuck Klosterman, or at least Chuck Klosterman's writing, is that he knows that he's a writer, and he knows that you know that he's a writer. You have certain expectations, even if you don't know who Chuck Klosterman is, because as someone who would read a book about rock star deaths, you have a set of certain expectations about what a book like that would be about and what kind of person would write that kind of book. And Chuck Klosterman knows this, and he knows that you this. And he knows that you know that he knows this.

We could call it the Eggers effect, or perhaps the DFW effect. It's a bit maddening, really, this level of self-consciousness. We could blame reality TV as well, and maybe The Gary Shandling Show, for breaking the 4th wall and never putting it back together again.

This book is about a music writer doing a 20-day tour to all of rock's famous death spots - the Chelsea Hotel, a field in Iowa, Mississippi, and Seattle.  If you care about rock deaths (and why wouldn't you if you are reading this book) then you know about these places. You will probably also chuckle at the author calling the rental car Tauntan and get all of his other references. 

Instead of giving us the expected writer-on-the-scene reporting, the book takes a left turn and the author ruminates about three major relationships in his life.  Most of the novel is spent on these three women , rehashing the past, worrying about the future.  It's all fine and good, but it stalls the forward motion of the book.

But, the author knows this. He mentions that the main thesis of the book is underdeveloped and the cutesy sub-title shows his hand - we're not getting the full story, either about his relationships with these three women or about the rock star deaths. Not sure where to go, he ends with a phone conversation between him and a female friend who implores him not to write a book about women he used to be in love with it.  She cites the faults in such a novel (all of which are in the book that you just read). And that's the ending you're given, which is probably the ending you were expecting, if you are the type of person who would read a book like this.

The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

The Guardian lists the 100 Greatest Non-Fiction books of all time.

The Age of Wonder - Richard Holmes

Puts to the rest the notion that the Romantic era was filled with poets and not scientists with a passion and enthusiasm one doesn't usually read in books about science. Focusing on Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy and William Hershel, the book at times reads like a thriller. A thriller that informs - the balloon flight mania of the time is particularly engaging, as Banks' journey to Fiji.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

At this point a textbook on how to write non-fiction about the current mood. Title piece was the best, as was California Dreaming. Later half had a filler feel - mostly short pieces about small subjects.


"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."