Dundas I. Flaherty

Superficial

Revisado: 03-23-19

I quit reading this book early, when the author used the word "giddy" to describe the effects of hypoxia. Long ago I flew fighters, and part of our training was to experience hypoxia in an altitude chamber, which takes less than a minute to go from altered mental state, through tunnel vision, to unconsciousness. "Giddy" misrepresents what happens. You experience altered thinking and judgment, and the point is to recognize that while you can still deal with it, same as knowing when you're too sleepy to drive safely and acting on that insight.

The author in her writing tries to sensationalize and dramatize the art+science of crash investigation, which is to get at the truth and figure out what needs to happen to prevent recurrence. It's sober stuff, intellectually challenging, witness the current investigations of the 757 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. It will take months to understand all the aspects of causation and figure out all the changes needed to prevent more crashes.

In her narration, the author tries to dramatize her own writing and doubles the ineptitude. With a skilled reader treating the trying-too-hard text more seriously, the audiobook might have been bearable.

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Disppointing

Revisado: 08-07-17

Loved Klam's earlier story collection, especially the one about the wedding toast, but couldn't finish this new novel. The protagonist is generally feckless and what he gets into seemed dull to me. Bellow wrote the book on protagonists whose life isn't working very well, especially Henderson the Rain King. That's a tough comparison, but we know from his stories that Klam can do better. Some readers add value; this one didn't for me.

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Couldn't finish

Revisado: 01-08-17

Really like Wolfe's early work, but this recent one is a big disappointment. He tries to tell Charles Darwin's story by including some convincing specifics from the period, but he smothers the facts by relying on dramatizing the story with stylized writing better suited for a TV sitcom script, using invented dialogue.

Can't really comment on the reader, who seemed OK but working on a lost cause.

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Great Material, Cleverly Done

Revisado: 12-29-16

There's a lot to like here. The ideas written about are tops. The Danny+Amos collaboration too. And the two principals, vivified for us by Lewis.

"Reality is a cloud of possibilities" was one of the ideas I wanted more of. That'd be a different book — a distillate of the best in modern psychology, behavioral economics, and decision theory. Lewis did something closer to that in "Moneyball." I really wanted to know more about the place of regret, for example, in the best current thinking on how people cope/don't.

What Lewis did write about — two luminaries melding minds, the attendant glories and difficulties — he did grippingly.

The reader was OK, not irritating, but he didn't bring life to the book as someone else might have.

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Bold, Funny, Why the Book Won the Booker

Revisado: 12-06-16

We saw author Beatty interviewed by Jeffry Brown on the PBS News Hour and thought Beatty polite, smart, restrained, but didn't get the book. Then it won the Booker (first for an American), and we decided to try it. The book is brilliantly inventive, and has black Americans dealing with racism by stealing from racist tactics and running their plays, so to speak.The language and writing are grand in their own way, and the reader/listener comes to appreciate Beatty as a poet. Turning racism inside-out and upside-down, plus splendid writing, add up to what won the book the Booker.

The reader is terrific, a do-anything guy deserving cheers.

Caveat: If you give yourself to the book, you'll find yourself thinking like the characters, your mind's voice talking like them, and you'll need to be careful not to slip and do that aloud in ordinary conversation.

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Like Breathing in Greatness

Revisado: 10-20-16

Sandburg's Lincoln is a masterwork, magnum opus, inspiration worth every hour listening. Writing with perfect scholarly integrity, Sandburg gives is the facts, drawn from the newspapers of the day, letters, transcribed speeches, telegrams, and journals. He's cautious, as with Mrs. Lincoln, on whom gossip had to abound, until he had multiple first-hand accounts on her behavior with Mrs. Grant while they attended a review of the troops shortly before Appomattox. Sandburg's writing is practically perfect — journalistic where it should be, glorious when called for, and generous in quoting endless sources verbatim. Morey is the perfect narrator for this work.

If you want to add a book's worth of greatness to the rest of your life, listen to this book.

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Love this late Bellow

Revisado: 07-30-16

This is a small thing, almost throwaway for Bellow, but it's him, brilliant and funny as always. Arch plot points, but not implausible, mention of Donald Trump, and a line you'd only get from Bellow: "Shoot me in the heart." You'll have to read the book for context that makes the line work.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 07-30-16

The work itself is extraordinarily superficial and the reader is a casting error. She'd be great reading "Curious George." USA Today's pop work digs deeper than Mary Roach did here.

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Didn't work for me.

Revisado: 05-19-14

Loved Lethem's Chronic City, but couldn't finish this. It's dystopian and wants the reader to work hard and figure out its world, but the story doesn't sufficiently reward the effort required IMO. Hard to comment on the reader because of the story.

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Spoke to me.

Revisado: 04-28-14

First, reader Bryan Cranston is a genius performer, bringing O'Brien's book to life without upstaging it.

Read O'Brien's "Cacciato" first. Found it brilliant, if flawed, overall vastly rewarding.

This one is different. Literate as before, clever in blurring the line between fiction and what actually happened as a way to explore the truth of Vietnam and war. But there's a streak of cri de coeur throughout, especially in the afterword read by O'Brien. That makes you want to help him, but it diminishes his spellbindingness as either a chronicler of what happened in Vietnam factually or a storyteller conveying the truth of the War his own way. The work winds up being a little solipsistic, a problem for me.

However, the book worked in an episodic way, where parts were knockouts, mixed in with parts that weren't. The characters worked, probably because O'Brien drew them from life, guys like Kiowa. Anyone who served (I did) will recognize the way GIs talk and behave, whether what's going on in the book actually happened that way or O'Brien's improvement on that. Either way, enough of it worked that I'm glad to have listened to the book.

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