The River of Doubt

If you think the prominently placed mustache on the cover of the book is a sign of good things to come, you're right. Millard's nonfiction book gives a riveting account of Teddy Roosevelt's daring journey down a previously unexplored river in the Amazon jungle. After a crushing defeat as a third party candidate in the presidential elections, Roosevelt was feeling down and decided an adventure was in order. What was originally meant to be a simple cruise through some well known but exotic Brazilian rivers snowballed into a full-fledged expedition, co-headed by Candido Rondon, Brazil's most famous explorer, to map a 400 mile long river that eventually empties into the Amazon River. Along the way, the expedition was beset by poor planning, piranhas, French poetry, and murder. Roosevelt nearly died on the river, and the toll the journey took on his health is thought to have contributed to his relatively early death several years later at the age of sixty.

This is an ideal summer book--it reads like an adventure novel and is packed with fascinating information about the people, history, geography, and insects involved. Millard doesn't mess around when it comes to her research, either. According to the book's endnotes, as part of her preparation for the book, Millard traveled to the Brazilian rainforest herself to interview a reclusive tribe that the expedition probably encountered. The information she gleaned from her research is woven nicely into the main narrative, offering useful tidbits at just the right moments. After reading this book, I had a full arsenal of anecdotes and trivia that would be ideal to share at a dinner party, if I went to dinner parties, or ever left my house. This book is suspenseful, riveting, and well researched.

Talent Is Overrated

This book, like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, bases the core of its argument on a study done in a German music school several years ago. The findings of the study were that three main factors separate truly great performers (musicians who had potential for successful solo careers) from good performers (musicians who could probably make a living on their music but weren't going to blow anyone away) from decent performers (musicians who were more interested in teaching than performing); the factors are amount of time spent practicing, level of family support, and involvement of somebody like a coach. Both Gladwell and Colvin focus on the first of these factors, boiling it down to something called the Ten Thousand Hour Rule. If you practice any skill for twenty hours a week for ten years, you will become a genius at it.

This is basically Colvin's argument. Of course, the quality of the practice matters, in addition to the quantity. The practice time needs to be designed to improve performance, should be repeatable, should be mentally demanding, shouldn't be fun, and continuous feedback should be available to the practicer. Colvin calls this Deliberate Practice, and it's the key to success. The book invokes Benjamin Franklin at one point in an anecdote in which Young Ben learns to become a brilliant writer by translating essays he admires to poetry and then back to prose; the book and its argument fit nicely into the tradition of the American Self-Made Man. It's a more sophisticated version of the Horatio Alger scenario, where grit and determination will get you where you want to go.

I liked this book. I think hard work is important, and I like the idea that working diligently and working effectively are the ingredients of success. What I wonder about, though, is what makes the difference between geniuses and the very successful. I'm convinced (in part because of this book) that genius can't occur without hard work, but that concept doesn't seem to fully account for people like Shakespeare or Einstein or Mozart. In other words, I think all geniuses work hard, but all people who work hard aren't geniuses, and why is that? Overall, though, the book did a solid job of making the case for necessity of deliberate practice. 

The Grifters

Jim Thompson (nicknamed the Dimestore Dostoevsky) is possibly the hardest-boiled of all the hard-boiled fiction writers. He wrote ugly, fascinating, uncomfortable novels. The Grifters (written in 1963) is no exception. It begins with Roy Dillon, a small-time con artist, getting slugged in the stomach with a baseball bat and spending the next several days vomiting up blood before his mother Lilly (also a con artist, unbeknownst to Roy) finds him passed out in a hotel room and gets him to a hospital just in time, where during his recovery, Lilly and Roy's girlfriend Moira (also a con artist, unbeknownst to both Roy and Lilly) face off.

The thing I liked most about this book was that it devotes most of its energy to developing the characters. Not much happens, plot-wise, for much of the book, especially considering the fact that the three main characters are all con artists at the end of their ropes. The novel catches Roy Dillon at a crossroads. He's been a very successful small-time con artist and now has to decide whether to go straight or move on to bigger cons. That decision is complicated by the arrival of his long-estranged mother, and his stomach injury. Although all of the characters are pretty repugnant, they're not entirely unsympathetic. Very small glimmers of humanity show through their cruel, ruthless actions.

Unfortunately, the book overall feels sloppy. An entire novel's worth of action is unconvincingly packed into the last thirty pages or so. There's also an incongruous subplot involving Roy's seduction of an innocent nurse that seems significant for the first half of the book and then all but disappears. If you're interested in Thompson's work, I would recommend the much more consistent (and very, very disturbing) The Killer Inside Me (although be warned, it's a book that's unpleasant in just about every way imaginable).

What the Dog Saw

Malcolm Gladwell is at his best when he's questioning conventional wisdom, making compelling, seemingly counterintuitive arguments that the way we look at a certain issue (genius, viral trends, decision making) is not the only way or the best way to look at it. Several of the essays in this collection do just that--they point out the dangerous similarities between criminal psychological profiling and small-time magician mind reading tricks, argue that plagiarism may not be as bad as we act like it is, or that precocity and genius don't necessarily go hand in hand.

The book is divided into three sections. The first features profiles of various minor geniuses, like Ron Popeil of infomercial fame. I thought this was the weakest section of the book. In each of the articles, it seems like Gladwell would rather be writing about the theories connected to these people than the people themselves. All of the people he profiles seem like they should be fascinating, but come across as only mildly interesting.

The second section focuses on miscellaneous theories. A few of these were quite good--the essay on plagiarism, one on homelessness, one about the way we process intelligence. But a few of them felt underdeveloped--Gladwell caught my attention and left me wanting more, like in an article on the difference between panicking and choking.

The third section is devoted to theories on how we evaluate people. Again, this section had some terrific articles, and some so-so ones.

Even though I thought this collection was a little uneven, and possibly a little long, it did what all of Gladwell's books tend to do--pulled me into issues I didn't think I had any interest in and made me question, and often agree with, the surprising claims that Gladwell makes.

Made to Stick

I secretly love advice books. Especially business advice books. This is probably mainly because I am not a businessman, have no real connection to the corporate world, and as a result, the whole culture seems foreign and exotic to me. Business advice books are my escapist literature. I had heard good things about Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick so I decided to check out a copy.

The book begins by asking why urban legends are so pervasive, so sticky, to use the terminology of the book. Maybe you've heard the one about a man who meets a strange woman in a bar, takes her up to his room, and the next thing he knows, he comes to in a bathtub of ice with a note from the woman telling him she's stolen his kidney so he'd better call 911. This story, and others like it, have been passed around by word of mouth and by email until they are fixtures of our culture. The Heath brothers argue that we could all take a lesson in communication from things like urban legends, and that we can make even the most mundane-seeming messages fascinating and memorable to other people.

Their argument is convincing largely because they practice what they preach--the book is filled with entertaining anecdotes (like a press conference that singlehandedly changed the way movie theaters make popcorn),  insightful analysis, and an overall accessible tone, making a book on what could be a very dry subject (effective communication) into a bit of a page-turner.

Made to Stick is actually more broadly aimed than many business books, tailoring its arguments to businessmen, teachers, and anybody who needs to communicate effectively. The Heaths outline their findings with the acronym SUCCESs: effective communication requires a Simple message, an element of the Unexpected, Concrete details, Credibility, Emotion, and Stories. The detailed advice they give for each element of the acronym is practical and helpful; they make recommendations that I can actually see myself putting into practice. Overall, this book does an impressive job of taking complicated ideas and conveying them in a way that's both entertaining and useful. 

The Lonely Polygamist

Sometimes when I recommend a book that I've enjoyed, I worry about talking it up too much, getting people's expectations impossibly high, but that's not something I worry about with Brady Udally's The Lonely Polygamist. This book really knocked my socks off--it was a book I couldn't put down while I was reading it, and can't stop thinking about now that I've finished it.

The novel is about a large polygamist family (redundant?) circa 1978 that is spiraling out of control. The narrative mainly focuses on three characters--Golden Richards, the patriarch of the family who is secretly working on the construction of a brothel in Nevada, but telling his family it's an old folk's home; Trisha, the fourth and newest wife, who has recently lost a child; and Rusty, the one kid in the family who can never do anything right, who has tragically smelly feet and a secret penchant for trashy romance novels.

When I heard that Brady Udall was working on a novel about polygamists, I was skeptical. I enjoyed his first book, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, but thought that a novel about polygamists would either be really creepy or really condescending. This book is neither. The characters are sympathetic and endearing, in spite of their many flaws, and the polygamy thing ends up being a really smart, backdoor way to write about Mormon experience--families, faith, and belonging to a socially weird religion all taken to their most extreme manifestation. It also has the gravitas of a Great American Novel--at six hundred pages, it covers a lot of ground, from nuclear testing to disco fever.

In the way it was structured, the book reminded me a bit of Catch-22. The first half of the novel is very, very funny. I laughed out loud in parts. The second half of the novel, though, becomes more and more serious as it progresses, without becoming heavy-handed. The book ends up being heartbreaking in the best possible way, with just a hint of hope.

I highly recommend this book. It was an immersive, captivating reading experience. This is a book on par with such 21st-century masterpieces as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Ransom by David Malouf

This book had couple of strikes against it before I even read it. First of all, it’s a work of fiction closely based on another work of fiction—always an iffy move, in my opinion. Second of all, the work of fiction it’s based on is Homer’s Illiad, a story that should be exciting but then spends fifty pages describing a shield. When I ran across the book at the local public library, however, I saw that not only was it pretty short, but it also had a mysterious, shadowy picture of a donkey on the front. So I decided it was worth a shot.

To recap the episode from the Illiad: the Greeks have been laying siege to Troy for the past nine years without making a whole lot of progress. Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, has been refusing to fight because Agamemnon (commander of the Greek forces) has insulted him. Things are looking bad for the Greeks without Achilles, so one day, Patroclus (closest friend of Achilles) wears Achilles’ armor into battle in hopes of striking fear in the Trojans. Patroclus is killed, Achilles is devastated and goes on a murderous rampage, ultimately killing Hector, a Trojan prince and their greatest warrior. Not satisfied with merely killing him, Achilles spends the next eleven days tying up Hector’s dead body behind his chariot and dragging it around just outside the walls of Troy, much to the dismay of the Trojans. Priam, the king of Troy, personally approaches Achilles with a large amount of treasure in exchange for the body of his son. Achilles is touched and gives the old man the body of his son.

Malouf’s novel begins its narrative around the time of Patroclus’s death, and ends after Hector’s body has been returned to Troy.

I like the strong sense of the physical in this book. It makes sense thematically, with Achilles’ shocking daily abuse of the dead body of Hector serving as the inciting incident, and that physicality comes into play in each of the book’s five sections. The middle section, possibly my favorite, depicts the journey of King Priam, accompanied in buddy-comedy fashion by a simple mule cart driver, from the palace of Troy to the camp of Achilles. Along the way, the two men discuss the deaths of their respective children, cool their feet in a stream after a long day’s ride, and share a stack of pancakes together.

It’s the pancakes, and the mule cart driver’s lengthy discourse on how to cook them, that prompt a realization in Priam—“that the food that came to his table so promptly, and in such abundance, might have ingredients. That a griddlecake or pikelet might have some previous form as batter. That batter might consist of good buckwheat flour and buttermilk, and that what you experienced as goodness might depend on the thickness of the batter or the lightness of the wrist. Or that ingenious arrangements might need to be made before a thing as simple as a pikelet could make its entry into the world. Or that one of the activities a man might give his attention to, and puzzle his wits over, was the managing of these arrangements, the putting together, in an experimental way, of this or that bit of an already existing world to make something new” (Malouf 128).

On the flip side of these mundane physical pleasures are the reminders throughout the book of the violent deaths that await both Priam and Achilles. We are shown the death of Priam in a flash-forward—a messy, awkward killing at the hands of Achilles’ son. As he watches the body of Hector being prepared for its return to Troy, Achilles himself reflects that these preparations will soon be performed on his own dead body. In spite of its fixation on impending death, though, this is not a mopy, angsty book. It moves quickly, and Malouf’s economical writing style is impressive. The book is only 200 pages long, with large print and small pages, but it uses the space to create vivid scenes and engaging characters. It’s an ideal summer read—a book that’s hard to put down, but will stick with you once you’ve finished.