persepolis

I haven't read a ton of graphic novels, but some.* This book was a loan from my oldest; not too long ago I commented that I had read a bunch of books written by authors sympathetic to the Israeli point of view in its continuing quarrels with its Middle Eastern neighbors, and I was hoping to read something that took a different view. Marjane Satrapi was born in Iran, was raised there as a child, and moved to Austria for her education--what ended up as essentially a boarding school, with her parents stuck in Iran--not long after the fundamentalist revolution or uprising in Iran.  

Persepolis ** is her telling, in two parts, of her life as a child in Iran,  her teens in Austria as a student and newly birthed innocent into the ways of the West, and her eventual return (at least for a while) to her home and family. One assumes this is strictly autobiographical, but I don't know that I actually read that anywhere... let's check. Random House lists it as Biography/Memoir, so I guess so.

The illustrations/cartooning in the graphic novel are bold, black and white. When I did an image search for Marjane Satrapi a lot of her photos are also black and white, which made me wonder if that is so because that is what she wanted, or if the photographer or publisher of the photo used black and white because of the novel's imagery. hmmm

The story of Satrapi is one of conflict; between her and her family and the oppression the are forced to live under, as well as the conflict of her innocent early years in contrast to the modernism of Vienna where she attended school. She rebelled against the regime as a child, and rebelled against xenophobia and elitism in Vienna, and after her return to Tehran, she rebels again as an adult, and eventually leaves again to live in France and find the freedom she tasted as a teen.

As you would expect there are scenes of sweetness, and sickening oppression, stress, anger, prejudice, love, and healing, but none of these ideas and feelings overwhelms the story. In the end I felt for the author, and had the feeling that she did the best she could with what she had. Maybe not as good as some in similar circumstances, but better than most. 

While confirming for this blog entry, I discovered that there is another book, Persepolis 2, that presumably continues the story, so I'll need to look for that. There was also an animated movie of the same name, with a limited US release, in 2007.

* Watchmen, and one or two others.

** The title Persepolis, I presume, comes from the capital City of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, of the same name, founded by Darius I, about 2500 years ago, which sits in current south-west Iran. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

river of doubt

At some point in February or March, I read River of Doubt, by Candice Millard, but I didn't get a chance to write about it. It was probably after Wool, but before Shift. I probably spent my time working on my post about why March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb instead of writing about this.

I heard from someone that I should read this, and its been a while since I put it on my list. It even made it to this blog; you can find it in the "notes and scribbles" applet at the bottom right of the page. The link takes you to the hardcover version of the book, so its probably been there a while.

In any case, I can see why, this was a good one. I'm not a big nonfiction fan, but I did like this one. I had no idea about this trip that Roosevelt took into the interior of the Amazon, which he decided to take just after his losing bid for the presidency in 1912. Millard lays out the trip from the early conception and planning stages through to its completion, along with some anecdotal information about the later lives of some of the expedition's members in an epilogue.

Most of the story is based on notes, letters, news stories and reports, and other documents. It seemed to me that very little needed to be glossed over by the author; she was able to find documentation for nearly every event and every day of the expedition. 

I was surprised and how difficult and trying this trip was without my never hearing about it. By the end, I was amazed that the party even made out alive.

word freak

I picked up Word Freak at a library book sale, thinking my wife would want to read it.

Nope.

Word Freak, with its ridiculously long sub-title; "Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players" is by Stefan Fatsis, the writer and author who you sometimes hear on NPR, talking about sports. It looks like Fatsis went looking into the world of competitive Scrabble, to get a better idea of the strange world he only saw glimpses of in pick-up games in the park, played by sketchy-looking folks with time clocks--a la chess.

After digging into this weird, obsessive, sub-culture, Fatsis found himself losing his objectivity. Yeah, he went down the rabbit hole.

Now I guess Fatsis would say that he never lost his objectivity, and I guess that's probably sort of true, but if he was there originally to simply report on competitive Scrabble as an interesting sub-culture, somewhat related to sports do sports writers report on chess and crap like that? then I think changing that intent, or allowing it to evolve, into more of a spectator/autobiographical story, has a little taint of rationalizing after your project has gone off the rails. Fatsis makes no bones about the fact that he pretty quickly became obsessed with the game, and is now, incidentally, one of the higher ranked competitive Scabble players in America.

Word Freak* traces Fatsis's trip down the rabbit hole, his struggles with the game, the obsessive studying of words and anagramming, and perhaps most interesting, is the history of Scrabble, and the personalities of the people who play competitively. It was an interesting romp.



* Hasbro, the new-ish Owner of Scrabble in the U.S. wouldn't allow the use of their trademarked board game in the title of Fatsis's book.

leonardo, yeah, that one

Leonardo and the Last Supper is my third or fourth Ross King book, I'm not really sure. One of them: Brunelleschi's Dome, you'll see down along the right hand column under 'great.' Leonardo won't be on the 'great' list. was that too abrupt?

Its been a while since I've read one of Ross King's books, pretty much everything I read now ends up on this blog and there aren't any of his books listed on 'the books' tab, so its a few years anyway. I also read one about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which was also very good. This latest installment wasn't up to those standards however, and I'm not sure why, but I have some guesses. In order for my guesses to be proven out, I'd have to go back and do a little comparative analysis, but that's not going to happen; this isn't science I'm doing over here.

Here's my guesses for what I think is missing from this book, when compared to the other two I mentioned. First, historical data. King seemed to be short on it, as is everyone else, and he did an admirable job in putting together this story from what seems like not very much. He had to rely quite a bit on other biographers, and then suggested that maybe those other biographers were wrong, or at least weren't above conjecture. Second, there isn't much to the story; da Vinci took a number of years to paint the Last Supper, but that seems to be because he was always busy doing something else. There isn't a whole lot of information about how the panting/mural was done, who worked on it, or what happened day-to-day. For that matter, there isn't much information available about what da Vinci was doing during this time either. So that brings me to my third point, the book is more filler than substance. Because so little is know about what the master was actually doing and how he did it, this book is more about what was going on in Italy at the time, centering mainly on his sponsor in Milano, Ludovico Maria Sforza, or as he was known, Ludovico il Moro (Ludwig the Moor.)

The Sforza story is a very interesting story, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Leonardo's name in the title was more about selling books than a true reflection of what this story is about. "Il Moro and Leonardo's Last Supper" might have been a better title given what I read. I'm not saying you shouldn't read this book, especially if you are a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, just don't expect that King uncovered some amazing treasure trove of lost information about him.

Last complaint: there are a handful of color plates in the center of the book, but no image of da Vinci's Last Supper. No where in the book, in fact, is there an image of the entire work.

da vinci's ghost

Toby Lester, you crazy mixed-up history geek, what were you thinking, taking on Leonardo in a 200 page* book?

Interesting, yes. Did I learn new things? Yes. Has my image of da Vinci changed a little after reading? Yes, yes, yes. But come on; 200 pages? I felt like the story was just getting started.

The story arc, too, was a little herky-jerky. The big idea is that Leonardo was not the first, but the last (and greatest) in a long line of folks, who put Vitruvius's concept of a perfectly proportioned man fitted into both a circle and a square, in picture form. This is a big deal because Vitruvius's work was essentially forgotten for something like 1500 years, and it was only when men started to think about proportion, in art and architecture, in a serious way again during the Renaissance, did men rediscover Vitrivius again.

Only, there weren't that many people--well, maybe that's unfair--there weren't a ton of people that preceded da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and really only a couple cited in the book that were actually trying to create an illustration of what Vitruvius said in his Roman Era book on architecture. The others were expressing ideas of perfect proportion as a representation of God's design of both man and the universe in his own image. Basically, the two ideas have very similar results, approached from slightly different directions.

Lester's thesis is sound, no complaints there. I may have just been caught up in some hype after hearing him discuss his book on the radio. I was expecting more and I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get it.

Da Vinci's Ghost is carefully researched and amply illustrated but may have been improved with a more linear timeline. Lester's writing is easy, and his enthusiasm is palpable throughout. He also showed me da Vinci as a man who (at least in his early career) was so distracted, that he almost seems to suffer from a kind of ADHD.** It's not an image I enjoyed, and I couldn't help wondering, if Lester had given himself another hundred pages or so, if this might have resolved itself more.


* This book is more like 275 pages, but there is, like, 70 pages of backmatter. Oh, and 15 pages of preface, and a dozen pages of prologue. Aaand, like 40 pages of epilogue. Okay, I'm done.

** After writing this, I did a search for ADHD for a link, and thought: what the heck, maybe he did have it and put that in the search. Sure enough, a variety of internetty sources (albeit, wishy-washy sources) also ask this same question.

john adams - ii

I finished John Adams last night after work. I thought it was great. This book isn't a page turner; I didn't find this book taking over my life and squeezing out all my spare time, as some books do, but the story was very gratifying in any case.

Abigail Adams, by Benjamin Blythe, 1766

I wrote about this book about a week ago, and talked about how the story was fleshed out using all the different source materials the author could find. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, McCullough states that the Adamses left behind more personal, written material than any of their contemporaries. Adams loved books, and he also marked in them in the margins. Treating the written word more like a conversation with the author, he would respond to the authors statements with his pen in the margins. McCullough says one book has over 12,000 words in the margins!

The other thing I felt strongly, was how the personal correspondence and diary entries, grounded Adams for me. I was delighted to read, near the end of the book, that others felt this way. After witnessing the re-acquaintance of his grand aunt, late in life, with her old friend, Adams, Josiah Quincy wrote, "It is a surprise to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human."

I've included the pastel of Abigail Adams done just after they were married, by a Salem artist, because she figures so greatly in the story and in Adams' life. She's his anchor, and his greatest friend. She was smart, well read, opinionated, funny, strong willed, and helped to guide Adams when he got caught up emotionally in an issue.

If you have any interest in the way the United States struggled for independence, and then struggled to stay that way, or about the men and women who worked so hard for it, I can't recommend this book enough. I learned more than all of my American History classes together, and had fun doing it. Read this book.

john adams - i

So I'm reading John Adams, and I've been pounding through it for weeks. That's not to say I'm not enjoying it, because I am, but the book is dense. I haven't read a lot of biography, so I'm out of my element, but McCullough has shown me a founding father in a way that's accessible, real and human.

This story of Adams' live is amazing as a history lesson, but his personal thoughts, interests and feelings layer the story and give it depth. McCullough uses personal correspondence and journal entries from not only Adams, but his wife Abigail, his friends, neighbors, and contemporaries, which help us see the mind of the man. But it doesn't stop there, the history is there, not only in the emerging America, but in Europe. Details from local politics, competing and sometimes warring foreign governments, news outlets of the day, and even the private thoughts of his adversaries, help fill in the history to create an amazingly rich description of Adams, the world he lived in, and what he did to make America what it is today.

I'm about three-quarters through, but I wanted to get my thoughts down. More later.