The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Not sure this is a review so much as " thoughts on" the novel. If you don't want spoilers, don't read past the ****

I finished this one last night and am still not sure how to evaluate it. I didn't respond as positively as I did to Middlesex but I initially liked it much more than I liked it later. The characters, however, were very well done--believable and recognizable and their issues were not only real but often quite touching.  One reviewer, comparing the novel to Franzen's Freedom, found this one  "sweeter, kinder, with a more generous heart".

The "marriage plot" refers to a course in 19th century novel the main character, Madeleine (think of the Ludwig Bemelmans' heroine with whom she identified as a child) Hanna takes at Brown. The marriage plot, in which novels end with the suitable marriage of the heroine (a la Jane Austen) or later in which the heroine marries, is unhappy but has to stay married (a la Henry James) is posited as the  raison d'être  for the novel itself and the question is whether the novel can survive its loss. The theory is that the "marriage plot" was essentially the definition of a novel until social conditions between men and women changed and marriage was no longer the defining moment in the life of a woman. Did the novel languishes without the marriage plot? Madeleine writes a senior thesis on the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides adapts a marriage plot to the late 20th century.

The novel takes place in the late seventies/early eighties when Madeleine goes to Brown. Her background is important to the novel: her father was president of a small college in New Jersey and her mother the epitome of upper middle class East Coast society. Financial and social security was important to both of them. Madeleine is the typical Ivy Leaguer. And while many of Maddy's friends at Brown come from a similar background, the two men who figure as main characters do not. Leonard comes from the west coast and from an arty but fractious family: both parents drink, the father is an antique dealer and eventually leaves his wife to go live with a former client in Europe. Mitchell comes from Detroit, also not from the comfortable middle class. He half identifies with the Greek side of his family (we remember the Greek society in Detroit from Middlesex and there's a bit of that in Mitchell's background--and in Eugenidies').

I'm a generation (or close to a generation) older than the characters (and the author) but was finishing an advanced degree and becoming an asst prof during the time period--in an English department--so I was fascinated by the introduction of deconstruction theories into the literary department conversation. Like most of Madeleine's profs I was schooled in the New Criticism but fascinated by semiotics and structuralism (and deconstruction)--Barthes, Derrida, etc. and with the whole idea of "literary theory" as a discipline (before that there were schools/fashions of literary criticism but nothing so formal as a theory, with philosophical and sociological underpinnings). All three of the main characters study these ideas though Leonard is a biology major and Mitchell in religious studies and they both take it more seriously than does Madeleine who decided eventually on a Victorian lit focus. But it's these ideas that "invalidate" (if that's what you want to call it) the very idea of the marriage plot--or any other plot for that matter. Eugenidies doesn't take it further than that except that clearly he's trying to write a novel with a marriage plot in a time when that plot would seem superannuated. Mitchell has a half-baked theory (discussed with others at Brown) that you can divide people up into first stage (married early, right out of college), married after establishing a career, and others....

The novel is told mostly from Madeleine's point of view, though the two male characters' back stories and aspirations as well as current experiences take the forefront some of the time, Mitchell (clearly a stand-in for the author) gets more center stage than Leonard. Madeleine impulsively invites friend Mitchell home with her for Thanksgiving freshman year. He's in love with her; she considers him a friend. There's an opportunity for a sexual encounter which both in their way back away from. Madeleine meets Leonard in the literary theory class and falls hard. Mitchell (like Knightly in Emma) remains in the background, supporting her when he can and suffering in silence. The perfect marriage plot. And not nearly as different from Emma or The Portrait of a Lady as one might expect, despite Madeleine's grad school plans, her prenup and the possibility of easy divorce, none of which were available to the 19th century heroines.

****

Maddy falls for Leonard, has a whirlwind affair with him till he breaks it off. She's devastated and Leonard seems to drop off the map--not coming to the class where they met and she doesn't see him anywhere else either. On graduation day, she discovers he's in the psych ward--he hadn't been taking the medicine for his bipolar condition. She misses graduation and rushes to rescue him. Mitchell, still in love with Madeleine, goes off to India as planned with Larry (who deserts him for male lover in Athens) and continues to explore his spirituality, volunteering for Mother Theresa and traveling to Indian shrines. He writes a long letter to Madeleine which he concludes with a plea that she not marry Leonard. She of course does. (This may be the rescue plot rather than the marriage plot--or the marriage as rescue plot.) Her parents are supportive but WASP-conventional when Leonard, experimenting with his meds, goes off the deep end. Mitchell appears out of nowhere to be a support to Madeleine. There is no Jane Austen ending, but the marriage plot seems to have worked quite as well as it did in the 19th century, even with quite a different ending. Or at least that's how I saw it. The novel isn't dead because women have alternatives they didn't have in Jane Austen's time. The marriage plot isn't entirely dead either--it's just different because marriage isn't "final" for the woman either. Whether or not she stays in the marriage, her options are much broader than those in Austen or James

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

1Q84 s a book about parallel universes. Not in the SCIFI sense so much as in the moral and a human sense (though there are SCIFI elements). A book about what happens to people (in this case, Aomame and also Tengo) who get off the track in their lives and have to go through some scary stuff in order to get back. It starts with Aomame in a taxi on a freeway in a traffic jam (listening to Janacek's Sinfonetta--which becomes a theme) choosing to get out of the cab and climb down an emergency access stairs to the surface. When she leaves, the cab driver tells her to remember that appearances to the contrary there is just one reality. 

But soon it appears that's not true and the world she climbs down into seems different. Her first clue is that the police have different uniforms and are carrying heavier fire power than she remembers. Eventually the icon of the "alternative world" dubbed 1Q84 instead of 1984 (references to Orwell intended) is the second moon in the sky, smaller than the "real" moon, slightly lopsided and green. 

Aomame is a serial killer ... of sorts. She happened into that line of work though an elderly rich woman who becomes a client (Aomame is a physical therapist and trainer). Together they target men whose crimes (often but not always crimes against women) that seem not likely to be addressed by the legal system. Aomame's work with the body has put her on to a spot on the back of the neck where she can kill someone instantly leaving no marks. Her job often calls her out to use her skills to help busy people relax which gives her opportunity. She's devised a weapon--a thin needle she keeps in a pouch in her purse. The Dowager identifies the targets and arranges access. Aomame is convinced once the Dowager coaxes her that the men they target deserve to die. 

Tengo was a math prodigy in school but has lost interest in math and is playing around with being a writer. He's not published anything yet, but he writes on his days off from the cram school where he teaches math, though on one day a week he frolics with his married lover. He as no friends and few others he sees or talks to. He lives in a old, slightly run down apartment building, cooks for himself and writes in his spare time. When the novel opens, he has been working with Komatsu, the literary editor of a periodical that awards a prize for young and new writers. Tengo has contributed in the past and impressed Komatsu but has never won a prize. This time Komatsu shows Tengo an unusual manuscript which has caught his attention and which he thinks might win not only this prize but a bigger, more prestigious award if it's edited some (actually re-written). The author is a 17-year old girl. Komatsu wants to make into a "star" out of her which will bring money to his publishing house--and to himself and Tengo. Tengo is more that a little skeptical--after all it will be fraud--but he's a relatively passive young man and Komatsu is compelling. Besides Tengo is fascinated by the manuscript of Air Chrysalis. 

So we have two basically decent 30-year-olds who have been drifting and two determined and manipulative adults who influence them. It's important that neither Komatsu nor the Dowager is particularly evil. Each has a strong sense of morality and a determination to take matters into their own hands. Both demand (and in most ways deserve) loyalty. Both are loyal in return. 

Finally, there's a religious cult called Sakigaki that professes just to be a farming community in the countryside. No one knows much about them, but we learn from Professor Ebbesuno, who's informal guardian to the girl who wrote the manuscript, that she evidently ran away from Sakigaki at age 10 and came to live with the professor who was a friend to her parents. She will not talk about Sakigaki or her parents who have never tried to contact her. 

The major portion of the novel consists of sections devoted to Aomame and Tengo alternately. Not exactly first person narratives, mostly third person with the first person (thoughts mainly) printed in italics. We assume after the early chapters that there's some connection between the two but it's a long way into the novel before we learn that Tengo once held her hand when Aomame was a 10-year old girl ostracized in school because her family was associated with a strict religious group. Neither has ever forgotten that. Both somehow assume that the other (if they can find the person after 20 years) is the only person they can be close too, can love. And we learn that Aomame left her parents and their strict Seven-Day-Adventist-type religion at age 10. Tengo believes his strict father is not his real father and has only one enigmatic memory of his mother.

Both eventually discover that they are living in an alternative world, one with two moons and a few others things askew. What happens in this alternative world (in 1Q84) can be impossible in the reality that we know and that they have known. Aomame first and then Tengo seem to recognize that they must meet in the present before either can escape back to the "real world". 

It's a multi-layered story which is at once a page turner and a story to contemplate. 

Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederick Morton

My budding interest in the Habsburgs comes from two friends, one I went to grad school with and writes me about her investigations--also suggesting that we go to Vienna which I'd love to do--and one whose mother was Austrian and is trying to capture that side of her heritage.

Two things really struck me while reading this book:
(1) How little I know of European history outside of the UK and Russia (which I know pretty well) and Germany and France (about which I know something) and Sweden and Norway (about which I learned some doing genealogical research). I have Norman Davies 1135-page Europe: A History and maybe it's time to start reading it.
(2) How little I knew about Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassination is commonly believed to have started WWI. I didn't even realize he was the heir to the Habsburg emperor. I think I thought he was an obscure Archduke of no real significance and that fact made the role usually assigned to his assassination particularly pathetic.

I must say here that I grew up a monarchist. Not only did I have all the princess fantasies that my granddaughters now enjoy, but my interests focused pretty squarely on the British royal family way beyond princess fantasies--and later on the Russians. There's no doubt that Queen Elizabeth (the first one, of course) was my hero and role model--vain and sexy but also a scholar and most importantly, a woman who thrived in a man's world. These days my politics are liberal and egalitarian, but that's the real world of today. I'm still fascinated by the royals of the past. I just don't know why I never paid much attention to the Habsburgs before. I even speak German--or did years ago and I don't think it would take much practice to get back to it. I have read some about the Prussian monarchs, but never had much interest.

Morton's book is fascinating because (1) he accepts the judgment that in the late 19th and early 20th century Vienna was splendid, aristocratic, artificial, decadent--the very essence of fin de siècle--and narrates the events leading up the the assassination and to the World War in that context and (2) because he doesn't focus exclusively on the major players, but builds a wider picture of the Vienna where Freud, Trotsky, and Hitler lived at the time and he sets the scene with the artists and musicians of the day (among whom were Koskoska and Schöneberg). He also puts the reader in touch with the "people" who had they had our sensibilities would have been establishing Occupy Vienna and Occupy Budapest movements.

Morton's focus on the major characters is grand. Franz Ferdinand who always scowled and wasn't at all popular but who cared about the people in a modern sense and, ironically, wanted to give the Serbs a greater role in the Empire. Emperor Franz Joseph, the longest reigning monarch in Europe, who was in his 80ies and somehow controlled some of the more off-the-wall of his advisors. (It was an age after all when monarchs were beginning to reign but did not rule, but that transition was not complete.) General Conrad, the army chief of staff, whose main goal was to punish Serbia (even though personally he was glad to see Franz Ferdinand gone since he knew the Archduke would dismiss him when he succeeded the Emperor). The  Kaiser (Wilhelm II), characterized beautifully as vain and self-centered and foolish if still  powerful and to be appeased since Germany was Austria's main ally. Ditto, the minor characters from Freud and Hitler to the ministers of Britain and France and Russia whose fate hung in the balance as well. There are a lot of minor characters, many of whom are quite memorable in this book.

Morton sets up the assassination that almost fizzled dramatically, with bathos as he describes Franz Ferdinand (with is interest in the "people" and his championship of Serbs which the assassins did not know of) and his wife (a whole other story is connected with his marriage to an "inappropriate" countess with no royal blood who always had to walk behind him), with the sense of how nearly the plotters failed and how successful they were, at least in the short run, at disguising the involvement of The Black Hand, which financed them from within the Serb government.

This is a popular history but is very well researched and well documented, with notes on each chapter and an extensive biography. Morton is always reaching for rhetorical highs, which I both love and hate. There's no doubt that he's over-dramatic, but it's a dramatic story he's telling and I'm not after all one who insists that history be dry or  boring or unappealing to anyone not an academic historian. I suppose what I don't like is how heavily he depends on rhetorical flourishes and how predictable they become. I searched for an example, but some go on for pages, as when he sets up a set of parallels which end in an ironic "Hurrah!" and go one for pages and pages.

For me it was a great introduction to an era, a family and a place I want to read more about.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

I found this book fascinating though I'd probably label it as a book intended for teens or young adults. I read it and immediately sent it to my teen-aged granddaughter. I suppose you'd call it a coming of age story. Not that those can't be great novels. 

What's good about this novel is first of all its point of view. Sections focus on different characters and the reader pieces together the plot by accretion. Early on Rachel talks about herself as a "new girl". She's the daughter of a black GI serving in Europe and a Danish woman she calls Mor (Danish for "mother") whom she loved and who is now gone, evidently due to some tragedy, one that left Rachel injured and in the hospital. Recovering at the beginning of the book, she is going to live with her grandmother--her father's mother--in Portland and is determined to put the past behind her and be a "new girl".

The grandmother is pretty traditional: living in a black neighborhood and going to a black church which is a huge part of her life and philosophy. She clearly hates the very idea of Rachel's mother and wants her to forget. What happened to her and to her parents only becomes clear in bits and pieces as the reader gets more into Rachel's experience as well as the experiences of others around her in the past and in the present. She's never been asked to choose which heritage she'll follow, but conventional ideas of race and class demand that she do so now.

But even though Rachel determines to embrace a new life, it's not that clear what direction she should take and how to get there. And so much is beyond her control.  She 

has trouble at school. Her experience doesn't fit her for a US school. The white girls consider her black and the black girls think she behaves like a white girl. Rachel herself is dark skinned with startlingly blue eyes, advertising not only the fact that she's biracial but that her experience and world view don't fit her for either group.

This book won the Bellweather prize in 2010, a prize started by Barbara Kingsolver and which rewards writers who handle issues of social justice. I suppose I don't quite approve of this kind of a prize, disliking the ideal of fiction (any are really) subordinated  to or used primarily as a tool for ideas. Kingsolver is a talented novelist, and if I look at her oeuvre I can see the theme of social justice, but she always made her way in the amazingly competitive world of fiction as a "serious novelist" not as an advocate for social causes.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

This was a reread and I listened to it. Surprised again how good a story it is. Bought copies for my kids to read to their kids. I'd forgotten how the rabbits made friends with other animals, particularly the gull who speaks with a Scandinavian accent. Rabbit behavior is pretty accurate I think--he uses a book on rabbit behavior as a reference-- and human psychology is not only good but uplifting. 

Hazel is the self-abnegating hero, the popular "chief rabbit" on the new warren on Watership Down (a real place in Hampshire--don't think I knew that before) and Fiver is the prophet/seer/Cassandra-type character whom Hazel learns to trust. Bigwig is the muscle, not as smart as the leaders but a warrior with a heart. Woundwort is the rabbit scared from his upbringing who knows nothing about controlling rabbits except force. 


The plot is an heroic one. Fiver predicts disaster for their current warren but the leaders don't listen so they leave. Gradually Hazel grows in his leadership position. They find a warren that welcomes them but it's "unnatural" in that they survive on the leftover veggies a farmer leaves. They find a good place to build but then need to get some does--warren won't last with no babies. But then they come up against Efrafa, a huge warren that is run almost like a prison camp by General Woundwort. Knowing Efrafa has too many does, a party goes to request immigrants from among the females. Of course, that's not allowed. Trickery ensues. Rabbits are after all traditionally tricksters and at night in the warren a favorite pastime is telling and listening to trickster stories. 


Kehaar, the gull. plays an important role in their escape from Efrafa, but the rabbits save themselves when a battle party from Efrafa comes to their new warren, led by Woundwart and bent on destruction. There's a lovely chapter near the end where a little girl on the nearby farm rescues Hazel who's nearly killed by the cat and he's returned home in the hrududu (motor vehicle). Woundwort is shown as clearly mad and disappears, assumed dead. 

Strange, but the only character I remember clearly from my first reading was Woundwort.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Berlin by Erik Larson

I just finished this one and continue to think that Larson hasn't ever come up to his first book (Isaac's Storm). I enjoyed the one about Chicago and the Columbian Exhibition but didn't think the big subject (Columbian Exhibition) and the little one (murder) were well integrated. In Isaac's Storm, the larger issue (1900 Galveston hurricane) and the smaller issue (the weatherman who didn't predict the storm) were inextricable since Isaac himself had harrowing experiences in the storm. But in all of his other books (I'm not sure I read the one before this one) he struggles with the two stories he's trying to tell, this big historical one and the small one about individuals.

On this one I thought initially that Martha Dodd was the major focus. I looked her up on Wiki and found she was supposed to have been a Soviet spy and indeed spent her last years outside the US. So I expected a spy story and perhaps an embarrassed father. But it turns out that really Dodd is the "hero" of the the book, recognizing early that Hitler's regime is dangerous and also rebelling against aristocratic tendencies in the US State Department. There's an epilogue on what happened to Martha, which give less credence to her spying than did the Wiki article. But I found her relatively unlikable and certainly not credible as an effective spy or even as thinker about political realities. 

Larson's documentation of the growing threat of the Hitler regime, though, is well drawn as Larson follows Dodd's willingness to give the Germans the benefit of the doubt at first (he's gone to school in Germany and was initially predisposed to like the people and support its government) to his gradual realization of the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi regime. One question I had was what happened to the Jewish owner of the house on Tiergarten Strasse which the Dodd's rented. The owner lived on the 4th floor of the house, evidently thinking he'd be safer living upstairs from the US Ambassador, but the last we hear of him is when he brings more of his family to live with him and it gets noisy. Dodd has second thoughts. That's still relatively early, 1934 or so, but Larson never mentions him again. I would have assumed he'd follow that through and at least say so if no information was available.

I listened to this book on Audible. The reader is a good one but impossible at foreign pronunciation. He got the German right in short common phrases, but over and over again he blasted through passages in German he couldn't handle at all. He was no better with the Russian. 

Aside: One of the things I really hate about recorded books is readers who get the pronunciation wrong. There's a reader of Dickens novels who's great at dialects and really performs the novels superbly, but he can't pronounce English place names. On the other hand it adds a great deal when a reader knows the language of the original or of the place that's the focus of the book. I listened to Bolaño's 2666 and also The Savage Detectives and loved that the reader (readers? not sure if they were the same) was clearly also a Spanish speaker.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

Finished this one last night. I read it because I was in Berlin--the only time I've been there--in the summer of 1961. I was a student in a summer program for foreign students in Bonn and the week-long trip was part of a program where the Federal Republic wanted to influence foreign students to care about reunification. As I understand they paid for the trip. Makes sense though as I read this book.They particularly wanted the US to be for reunification and after being fed all the propaganda including lunch with Willi Brandt at the Rathaus Schöneberg where we each got to shake his hand, we generally did. I don't remember what Brandt said, but I liked him and believed him right. The trip was the last week in July 1961, two weeks before the wall. I remember getting up on the morning of August 13 and reading about "die Mauer" in the paper. Kempe says that no one called it "the Wall" until several weeks later but I remember distinctly that the word was used in that morning's Bonn paper. And somehow I got the impression it was a brick wall and struggled to make sense of what seemed so stupid in the nuclear age, a brick wall to keep people in. Of course, we knew about the flight of the East German population. That had been evident everywhere that July. We had people come up to us and ask if they could trade East Marks for West Marks. We usually did. A bit of help for the refugees since their currency was worth far less than the East German exchange rate--might not even have been convertible. But also gave us currency to use when we visited East Berlin as we did every chance we got. At 19, I was excited seeing "real" Russian soldiers (with their knee high black boots and slick gray uniforms, they were far more impressive than the wrinkled Volkspolitzei). There was a Russian memorial just outside the Brandenburg Gate, on the West Berlin side actually, and the crowds of tourists (mostly American I think) harassed the soldiers guarding it. Americans at the height of the Cold War were excited to see the "great enemy" up close.

The book paints a pretty dim picture of Kennedy in the tilt with Khrushchev and suggests that had he taken a stand against the wall, we might have been able to end the Cold War earlier. After all, Khrushchev had responded to Kennedy's election by printing his uncensored inaugural address in the Russian papers sending his a personal letter. Kempe is pretty down on Kennedy, though he does credit him with learning enough about dealing with Khrushchev to weather the subsequent Missle Crisis--though he suggests that that wasn't really the scary  confrontation the public thought it was. (I remember being too worried about a History test and my need to show that prof I wasn't a dolt to worry much about getting blown up.)

It also shows how little I understood about politics and world affairs at the time. I thought getting even close to the Communists was great fun. I came home with stories about the bridge where they exchanged prisoners, about headlines routinely in red type in East Berlin, about the dearth of goods in the GUM department store (and how it contrasted with the lavish display windows--including some glass stands out on the sidewalks--on the Kurfürstendamm), about the people who would get on our bus as we toured the East and regale us with stories--and then politely ask to be left off at the border crosssings. There were crossings then where you had to show papers (anyone with an allied country passport was not hassled) but no wall. Often you could cross without being stopped. The East German border was more dramatic (we traveled by bus), with the searchlights and plowed strip just like in the spy movies.

But I didn't understand anything at all about the politics and saw both the refuge problem and the border closing as mainly concerning the people of the East. I didn't expect the US to do anything. I suppose I thought we could do something if we wanted to. I didn't even think about why we'd want to. I understood that our trip was financed by the Federal Republic so we'd support Wiedervereinigung (reunification) but did support it so didn't think much about it. The college that sponsored our summer abroad forbade us to go back after the Wall and I, with my friends, pooh-poohed the danger, but I didn't have the spending money to go back anyway.

This book is worth reading, though if you see Kennedy as a hero, somewhat painful, but I doubt that it's completely wrong-headed, though maybe his speculations about ending the Cold War earlier weren't entirely realistic and he acknowledged the logic of Kennedy's rationale: "A wall is better than a war." The real issue was how likely Khrushchev would be to jump to a nuclear war. Then our assumptions (at least mine and I think most of the public's) were the Russia had superior military might and possibly more nuclear weapons. They certainly had more fighting power in and near Berlin. But Khrushchev seemed a real person, not just a cardboard bad man, scruffier but just as bad as Nazis in the movies--as all the other Russian leaders seemed.

In retrospect Khrushchev was not at all anxious for war, but most of us didn't know that. Still Kennedy did pretty much know that. He had a private correspondence (through RFK and a Russian spy), but Khrushchev also seemed impulsive, the sort who might start a war because he was mad. And Kennedy was haunted by the thought that he'd be the President who unleased a nuclear war.

The introduction to the book was written by Brent Scowcroft for what that's worth.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

A good friend actually turned me on to this book, six months ago or more. I bought it but in spite of liking the intro, put it down for other things. So I nominated it for the nonfiction group I'm in and when it was chosen started reading it seriously.

I really liked this book and I think I'd like the author. He's lived in the US for a long time and understands American history, politics and public opinion. He's not religious himself and has a great command of English as well as a considerable sense of proportion--and of humor.

He divides the world into 3 parts: The West (Western Europe and the Americas), the East (Asia and the Pacific Islands) and what he calls "The Middle World", the part of the world that includes the what we'd call the middle east, north Africa, the southwestern ex-Soviet republics, to India (under the Moghuls).

The first part of the book is a history of the Muslim world (the Middle World), from Mohammed through the Khalifates and beyond. It focuses almost exclusively on that part of the world, but beginning with the Crusades, Ansary incorporates incorporates the interface between the Middle World and the West (only though when Europe becomes reasonably civilized since initially it was just a huge expanse of barbarian territories). And when West meets Middle, he reports history from the Middle (Muslim) point of view. The book culminates with the three great Muslim Empires which coexisted and lasted (at least one of them did) until WWI: the Ottoman, the Safavid (Persian) and Moghul (Indian). Increasingly as the book comes closer to our own time--he stops basically at 911--he articulates the attitudes, opinions and prejudices of the Muslims, but the fact that he understandsIran the corresponding attitudes, opinions and prejudices of the West is critical. He's particularly interested in the various secular modernist reformers, seeing in their efforts a desire to incorporate industrialiam and the industrial goods of the West without considering the role of the social structure of Western Europe in the technology they created.

The various schisms of Islam are explained. (I finally understood who the Pakistani pilgrims were with whom we shared a small hotel in the Khan al Khaili area of Cairo. They were Shi'ite pilgrims to the Hussein Mosque and Hussein was the grandson of  Ali (the 4th Khalif) who was descended from Mohammed's "favorite wife" Fatima. The difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites became clearer and it also became clear that there were many varieties of each.  There were interesting tidbits like the Sikhs whose religion was originally an attempt to amalgamate Islam and Hinduism and the various Sufi sects that were offshoots of Shi'ism. The rise of Wahibism was interesting too--the first Ibn Saud embraced Wahibism in the 18th century, long before the family became powerful and organized the Arabian peninsula as Saudi Arabia.

As the history becomes more modern Ansary focuses on 20th century history from the point of view, for example, of Iran (the US overthrow of Mosadeq and restoration of the Shah), of Egypt (Suez Canal crisis) and of Palestine (Israel emergence as a state)--to name a few instances. In the early part of the book we were learning the history of the Muslim world, isolated as it was, but as the story progresses we're beginning to understand our own history as seen in the Middle World.

This is a very readable book. I recommend it highly.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I highly recommend this book, though mine is a probably a very superficial review. I'm not highly knowledgeable about statistics or models, though I've had my experiences and have always been suspicious of predictions based on them. And of course I recognize that the "really big things" seem to come out of the blue. 

The main idea is relatively simple, that when we consider the universe of possibilities, we tend to focus on models and statistics that define the limits of the possible and to ignore the outliers. His initial example was from the point of view of the pig, which every morning for 1000 days, got a big breakfast and was left to wallow, and so defined reality in terms of its experience--until suddenly one morning it's slaughtered for bacon. He likens the pig's surprise with our surprise at the stock market crash of 1986 or 911. (The book was written before the current financial crisis and before the Japanese earthquake/tsunami.) And he talks about the danger of discounting those events that lie outside of our mathematical models and normal ways of planning for the future.

Amazon's description of the book is better than mine: "A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences."

I like it because I can't help but notice that everyone who predicts the future (including me) is wrong--maybe not completely wrong but they usually miss the really big things--and yet we don't really consider the range of what might happen, only what seems likely to happen. We tend to be like the pig who was totally blindsided by his ultimate fate. The discussion of how to build nuclear plants in the wake of Fukishima seems a case in point. In any one location, it's not all that hard to consider a range of possible events to protect against, but protecting against the really big event? In the wake of current tornadoes, I hear planning to prevent future damage as if it really were possible to contain the tornado (or other weather) danger. Clearly what we usually do, is plan for a range of possibilities and assign the others to the realm of the nearly impossible. Taleb is arguing that we do ourself a huge disservice by discounting the outlying possibilities.

Taleb himself is definitely present in the book which one doesn't expect. We learn a lot about him personally and his origins in a small village in Lebanon. His jokes are not always funny. You sometimes feel embarrassed by his combination of arrogance and transparency. But he didn't totally turn me off because I think he's made a career of not fitting in because he's attuned to truths that others don't even consider. He's particularly hard on the financial world.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

F

First of all it's old and it takes some adjustment to get back into the mindset of 1975. When Theroux traveled to Vietnam the war wasn't over (he was horrified to discover entrepreneurs setting up battlefield tours) and when he went from the Soviet Far East to Moscow, it was still the USSR. In fact, that last part of the trip, when he traveled from northern Japan to the USSR in the winter, was the worst part of the book and not only because it was an old story politically. Theroux was also tired of the trip and irritable.  I began to wonder (because I think he did) why he'd planned this trip. I'd also recently read Ian Frazier's excellent Travels in Siberia which gave me far more insights into this area than did Theroux who never even got off the train. Of course he'd not have been free to travel in Siberia in the 1970ies as Frazier was in the early 2000s. Still he came off as sick of the trip and not in the least interested in where he was. No associations at all with places and Russian history, for example, not even Yekaterinburg where the Tsar died.

The book seems to have been written as he went because he arrived in London with six notebooks full of text. It does read as if he was writing “in the moment”. The journey—and the book—begins at Waterloo Station in London and he began talking about what he was seeing and the people he was traveling with right then—to underline the fact that English travelers were as odd and noteworthy as the Malays or Burmese. He traveled to Paris and then to Istanbul on what was left of the Oriental Express (not very luxurious at that time). The idea was to travel the great trains of Asia and of those he found the Indian trains the most comfortable for travel—clean sheets and good food. Frankly, I became a little bored with the details of the accommodations. I suppose I was more interested in the destinations while Theroux’s fascination was with the journey itself.

While I share Theroux's fascination with trains which he attributes to growing up near the tracks of a major train in Massachusetts (my fascination came from the train that passed right near my grandparents in Duluth—zillions of hoppers full of red iron ore and engineers who always waved at me), I don't really like books that are primarily train journeys where the writer just passes through and notes all the exotic stuff. I didn't much like The Old Patagonian Express either--in both cases because I wanted to know more than the odd tidbits. I also read Dark Star Safari (more of less the route of the Cape to Cairo railway that was the dream of Cecil Rhodes). The through railway didn't actually exist so he spent more time in the countries and he went back to Malawi where he's been a Peace Corps volunteer years before. 

In short I don't know why I keep reading Theroux because he's not a favorite. I guess it's the places that interest me and I never get enough because when he arrives he’s soon off on the next train.