Book Reviews

Summary: Well written biography which is the inspiration for the broadway hit.

I am obsessed with the musical Hamilton (free if you have Amazon prime). Because of my obsession I decided to re-read Ron Chernow’s biography. I listened to the audiobook when it first came out, soon after I read John Adams.

This time I read the Kindle Edition. It has been eight years and a different format, there is so much that I had forgotten. Alexander Hamilton is truly one of the most fascinating characters of American history. And Lin-Manuel Miranda captures the spirit of Hamilton well.

As you would expect, the two hour musical glosses over a number of biographical issues, simplifies some storylines, changes some of the characters, distorts some of the history for tension building and simplicity. But for the most part it is pretty easy to see the reasons for the changes.

What is fascinating is the character study. Hamilton was incredibly gifted with huge reserves of energy. The line in the musical asking how Hamilton managed to rise to prominence so quickly after the war says, ‘the man is non-stop’. Which is almost an understatement.

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Summary: A novella about battle school at Christmas.

I have been using up the last of my audiobook credits at Scribd before canceling my subscription. So I have been listening to books that I wasn’t interested enough to purchase or are to short to justify the price.

A War of Gifts is short. It is 123 pages in paper, but most of the reviews comment about how few words are on each page and it is not quite 2.5 hours in audio.

The story opens with a fundamentalist preacher and his gifted son. The son has absorbed his father’s faith and while there is nothing he can do to stop being taken to battle school, he chooses to not participate. He fulfills basic requirements, learns to shoot and participates in the battles, but refuses shoot at another person.

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Summary: Spiritual insights from the author’s friendship with Mr Rogers.

There really are surprisingly few books about Mister Rogers. Outside of the books by Mr Rogers, I can really only find four. One I read and reviewed last year (The Peaceful Neighbor). One that I just found today, one that is self published (and very poorly reviewed) and this one, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers.

The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers recounts Amy Hollingsworth’s friendship with Fred Rogers during the last 8 years of his life. She was a young mother and writer. She asked for an interview and unusually, she was given one.

This started what seems to be a real friendship, although one that was mostly via letter and the occasional phone call. It is hard to tell whether Hollingsworth is being modest about her friendship or whether she is making more of the friendship than was warranted (as a few reviewers have suggested.)  My assumption is that the friendship was real and her stories are genuine admiration. The stories and quotes from letters seem to suggest a real friendship. But there is also a lack of new insight into Mr Rogers that seems odd. I have not read much about Fred Rogers, but there was little that was new here.

In attempting to make this about ‘spiritual insights’ instead of straight memoir or biography Hollingsworth over-uses uses the metaphor of ‘toast sticks’. When Fred Rogers was a boy, an older woman that lived near him would feed him sticks of toast. Not long before she died, she taught him to make the sticks of toast himself. So the central metaphor is Hollingsworth attempting to teach us the spiritual lessons that she learned from Mister Rogers.

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Summary: A humorous middle grade quest fantasy book from Lloyd Alexander.

When I was young, my favorite series was the Prydain Chronicles (Book of Three, Black Caldron, Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and High King). These books are a sort of middle grade/young adult Lord of The Rings. The only other books of Alexander’s that I read was the young adult Westmark Trilogy (Westmark, The Kestrel and Beggar Queen) .

The Arkadians has a lot of the best elements of the other two series. The two lead characters are reminiscent of the male and female leads from the other two series. There is a third character who provides a lot of comic relief (and a bit of content warning if you are reading this with younger children.) The third character is a man that has been turned into a talking donkey, a jackass in more than one sense of the word and the word play is used to its full extent.

There is a bit more upfront feminist empowerment in the Arkadians than in the other two series (although Alexander always has had a feminist bent.) The great ones have gone away because the Bear Tribe (men) unleashed chaos on the world and the women are attempting to keep the old ways alive in spite of oppression by the Bear Tribe.

The heroes are on a quest, or really a series of quests. The structure seems like it is in part a way to explore the concept of story telling. This book is full of stories, some of them re-workings of ancient myths, some are new (at least to me.)  But it felt a bit like Donald Miller’s book A Thousand Miles in a Million Years because there was constant discussion of how to tell a story and suggestions on how a story might be made better by adjusting the details.

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Summary: Told over a 60 year period as the world descends into dystopia, there is something more than what it initially seems.

The Bone Clocks has been highly recommended by a number of people that I trust. It is well written literary fiction with elements of science fiction and fantasy. I think I should have loved it, but I did not, although I did not hate it either. In the end, I am glad I read it, but the 24.5 hours of audiobook were more than I really felt worth the time.

The audiobook I think was the first problem. Due to my schedule, I have been relying on audiobooks lately. The quality of the audiobook  is excellent, but the structure of the book was not well suited for an audiobook. The Bone Clocks both moved forward and backward through time and in print there would have been more visual clues to the changes. In the audiobook I was frequently lost.

The structure of the book is six interconnected novellas, somewhat similar to the structure that Susan Howatch has used several times in her books.  The first section starts with Holly Sykes, a 15 old who decides to run away after a fight with her mother in 1984.  Once we grow to know and actually understand Holly, the story switches to 1991 to an unlikable Cambridge undergrad, Hugo Lamb. There is a connection to Holly Sykes eventually but again, once there is a stable place the story shifts again. The third section is a new narrator, Ed, a war correspondent and now Holly’s husband (it is long into the section before I realize that he is a minor character from the first section) speaking in 2004. Section Four is set in 2016 with a minor character from section two, a once famous novelist. The last two sections are narrated by Holly again in 2024 and then 2043.

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Summary: Cormran Strike is searching for an unlikable author that has disappeared.

Regular commenter Sheila Brennan said a few days ago that my opposition to mysteries seems to be diminishing.  She is right, I really have begun to like a certain type of mystery. Mysteries that are about characters and understanding people are interesting. Mysteries that are about violence and ‘who-dun-it’, not as much.

Silkworm is certainly more violent (and vaguely sexually violent) than absolutely necessary. But the point isn’t the violence, but creating the character that would also be violent. At some point the murderer has to be a person that would commit murder.  It is a weakness of the genre, either the books are about violence of some sort, or there isn’t a mystery. I thought that Silkworm was somewhat like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (at least in how it related to sexual violence).

About eight months have passed since Corman Strike solved case in the first book. Since then he is doing a bit better. His assistant Robin has helped him get out from under most of his debt and assisting him to work on paying cases. But Strike also hates working for pricks. And more to get rid of a prick of a client than anything else, he accepts a commission from a socially awkward woman to find her missing husband. That husband is a temperamental writer who disappears frequently, who openly has mistresses and who writes very odd books. Together they have a 26 year old developmentally disabled daughter.

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