The Rabid Reader

Reading My Father: A Memoir (Alexandra Styron, Scribner, 2011, 285 pages)

William Styron is considered one of the great American novelists.  His works are legend: Lie Down in Darkness (1951), published at age 26, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Sophie's Choice (1979), for which Styron won the Pulitzer Prize.  Styron's own memoir, Darkness Visible (1990), chronicled his own battle with major depression. 

Styron's depression suffuses Reading My Father, his own daughter's memoir of growing up in his turbulent world.  Alexandra Styron was raised under both the halo of her father's brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind.  In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, Styron and his work were the dominant force in his family's life.  Reading My Father portrays an American artist's life and his daughter's attempt to understand his life.  It is written with love, humor, compassion, and the grace of time.        

     

Lost and Found: Reflections on the Prodigal Son (Robert L. Millet, Deseret Book, 2001, 128 pages)

Wonderful treatment of one of Christ's great parables. 

Writes author Robert L. Millet, "The Savior's parable of the prodigal son is in so many ways the parable of parables.  It distills the plan of life and salvation, teaching the purpose of life, the reality of the Fall and the challenges of [this life], and the opportunity for redemption and renewal through the matchless love of God our Father and his precious Son, Jesus Christ."

Much food for thought here.

 

Marcel Proust: A Life (Edmund White, Penguin Group, 1999, 165 pages)

Uninteresting.

The Setup (Peter Crooks, Diablo: The Magazine of the East Bay, April 2011)

Diablo is an award-winning local interest magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The April 2011 edition featured a piece by Peter Crooks, senior editor and writer for the magazine.  Crooks' article--The Profile--profiled Chris Butler, a Bay Area private investigator who had gained some notoriety for employing stay-at-home moms as private investigators. 

Butler left the Antioch police force after a decade of service and cashed in his retirement fund to start his own PI firm.  His agency began employing moms as private investigators and received sufficient attention to spawn a proposed reality TV series called called "PI Moms."  Butler was, however, a fraud.  His ego and thirst for publicity proved his undoing. 

Crooks originally intended a simple profile of Butler, but after receiving a tip that Butler wasn't exactly above the board embarked on a serious piece of investigative journalism.  Makes for a fascinating read.

http://www.diablomag.com/Diablo-Magazine/April-2011/The-Setup/

 

 

  

Nuremberg : Infamy on Trial (Joseph E. Perisco, Penguin, 520 pages, 1994)

In his opening statement of the trial of the chief Nazi war criminals, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (on leave from the Court at the time) declared "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated." 

The names of the defendants are well known.  Hermann Goring, HItler's designated successor and chief of the Luftwaffe; Hans Frank, HItler's personal lawyer and the "Jew Butcher of Cracow"; Albert Speer, Hitler's cultured, aristocratic architect, who designed his rallies and worked five million slave laborers--thousands of them to death.  Julius Streicher, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Generals Jodl and Keitel, and Admirals Raeder and Donitz.  In Perisco's Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial we get a mesmerizing recreation of their trial and an intimate portrait of their motives, twisted ideals and loathsome justifications. 

Today it is easy to forget that a trial of the Nazi warlords was by no means guaranteed or even predicted.  Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at one point advocated shooting war criminals out of hand.  The concept of an international tribunal was unprecedented.  The Cold War might be said to have begun in the deteriorating relationship among the prosecuting nations--England, France, and particularly the United States and Russia.

At a time when war crimes--in Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia, Libya and other places--are being investigated, when neo-Nazi movements are surfacing in many countries, and when "revisionists" are denying the very existence of the Holocaust, the importance of documenting and understanding the Nuremberg trials cannot be underestimated.  

Terrific book.

 

Elizabeth I: A Novel (Margaret George, Viking Adult, 2011, 688 pages)

About 688 pages too long.  Tedious.

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2010, 384 pages)

[My thanks to a Rabid Reader follower for submitting this guest blog.]

The Hunger Games is a series I never really considered reading until I was on vacation with a desire to read some fiction and no wi-fi access to browse options on my Kindle. My wife started reading the series when I got my Kindle for Christmas this past year and it is the only piece of fiction in my growing Kindle library. My impression was that The Hunger Games was a series geared towards a female audience and that it wouldn't hold my attention for very long, mainly due to it's strong underlying love story. I misjudged.

The Hunger Games is written with the main character, Katniss Everdeen, narrating and takes place in a future time where the United States and other portions of the Americas are replaced by Panem. A country with a single city ruling of 12 oppressed districts, which are each required to offer up a male and female annually to literally fight for their lives. The concept of The Hunger Games is quickly addressed in the book, which is what intrigued me and kept me reading. Though there is a small level of predictability in the storyline, I feel it is filled with enough mystery and cliffhangers to keep almost anyone turning the pages. On a more critical note, I found myself not fully buying into the fact that Katniss (an oppressed teenager raised to be a coal miner) was really telling the story, because of some of the language used. Nonetheless, I was entertained and intrigued enough to continue reading the series.

When the King Saved God (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, May 2011)

Christopher Hitchens, a frequent contributor to one of my favorite magazines--Vanity Fair, extols the literary and linguistic virtues of the King James version of the Holy Bible in his latest piece available here: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105.  To be sure, Hitchens does not appear a fan of much of what the King James version preaches but he does recognize its tremendous influence on English-language cultures.  Writes he:

"Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really issomething 'timeless' in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words 'but if not … '  All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a 'burning fiery furnace.' They made him an answer: 'If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.'

"A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it 'relevant' is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. 'Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,' says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: 'Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.'

"At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: 'Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.'

"As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative 'ifs' and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s Contemporary English Version, which I picked up at an evangelical 'Promise Keepers' rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: 'Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.'

"Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of 'my friends' for 'brethren,' but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the 'New English Bible,' T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing 'in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.' (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose."

 

Mergers and Acquisitions (Stephen M. Bainbridge, Foundation Press, 2008, 300 pages)

Okay, so perhaps this isn't on your list of "must reads" right now.  It is, however, one of the best and most accessible primers on the law of mergers and acquisitions that I know of.  Bainbridge (professor at UCLA's law school) is among my favorite legal scholars.