Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, by Naomi Aldort (review)

Respect, authenticity, and logic. Those are the three key ingredients to raising a healthy, happy, and productive child as I heard them in reading this book. Aldort presents a lot of good points and great suggestions here, but it wouldn't be a parenting book if it didn't come across as a little self-indulgent and didn't have some kind of agenda. For Aldort, who actually either falsified her credentials or is the biggest dope on the planet (source), the agenda begins with attachment parenting and moves smoothly into gentle parenting. That sounds good, but there's a heavy dose of parental guilt thrown in, and many of her expectations felt downright unrealistic to me. That, and the supposedly real dialogue is incredibly stilted. I did take a lot away from this book, but I was looking to it for general guidance and rough ideas, not as a parenting bible.

Night, by Elie Wiesel (review)

This book cannot truly be reviewed. I've read reviews calling it "poignant" and others calling "touching" while still others have complained either that it did not provide enough information or that it portrayed the inmates as "too much like animals", or too inhuman. Maybe these people failed to realize that this isn't a reference book on concentration camps, nor a literary work of death and survival. This is one man's memoir of a frightful history, the writing is completely human, the subjects as he saw them then. Wiesel's writing is crisp, even terse sometimes, yet the language is poetic, even when frightening. The story is told probably as it was lived—in a percussive fashion, jumping from one punctuating moment to the next, and yet it avoids becoming a collection of short anecdotes and remains a cohesive, depressing telling. Because it is a journey into a mind as much as a concentration camp the percussive style is authentic and natural. This book does not warrant a review because it is exactly what it should be, because it can only be exactly as Wiesel would write it.

Book 21 on my way to 52

In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson (review)

In the Garden of Beasts, by history writer Erik Larson, came out just a few weeks ago. It may be the most recent book I ever review. I rushed to grab it in part because of a Border's coupon, but also because I absolutely loved Larson's Devil in the White City. In Devil, Larson uses succinct but eloquent writing to tell the story of Chicago's World's Fair from the perspectives of the fair's architect, Daniel Burnham, and, conversely, the fair's serial murderer, H. H. Holmes. Devil read almost like a novel, flowing neatly even as it jumped between the two perspectives, and at the end not only had I enjoyed it, but I was newly acquainted with Chicago, the fair, and with these two men, as well as others. I highly recommend Devil to those who enjoy history and historical writing.

In the Garden was a disappointment to me. Here Larson is focusing on Berlin during the rise of Nazi power, mainly from '33-'37. As in Devil he aims to paint a picture of Berlin through the eyes and actions of two individuals, namely William Dodd, ambassador to Germany during these years, and his daughter, Martha. The story does not flow as well as in Devil but feels choppy. Much of the book is actually about Martha, perhaps because so many of her letters and diaries are available, as she flits from love affair to love affair and political ideology to political ideology. She is shown as promiscuous and silly for most of the book, so I was surprised when Larson described her as "not precisely a hero but certainly a woman of principle", in his closing pages. In that case the history told here seems to be more about women's lib and sexual freedom in the personage of Martha, although she is a weak heroine even for these causes. Other than that, the tidbits and tales about Nazi Germany are of course not new, but it was interesting to see them through the diaries and writings of people there at the time.

Book 20 on my way to 52.

The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig (review)

The best thing I can say about this book is that I found it disappointing. Though put forward as a biography, in some places, like the extensive paragraphs on Mendel's (non)relationship with Darwin, it reads more like historical fiction. Many times, after reading page upon page of anecdotes, we are told that it couldn't have happened that way after all (but imagine if it had!) and I found myself wishing for the last 10, 30, even 60 minutes of my time back. Even after finishing the book I find it difficult to decide whether Henig admires Mendel or disdains him, which isn't altogether hard to understand since some of the scientific community is divided on this as well, but I kind of wonder why she titled the book so exclusively around Mendel when she spent so much of it either referring to him in the diminutive or talking about other great names from science altogether. In fact, the parts I valued most from this book were the tales about those other scientists, many of whom I knew less about than Mendel. I read this book for my library non-fiction book club (which meets next Tuesday) and I am interested to hear what others have to say about it, so maybe I'll come back and update then.

Book 17 on my way to 52

A Man Without A Country, by Kurt Vonnegut (review)

I enjoy reading Kurt Vonnegut, and if I had it to do over I would read this, his final book, only after I had read all the rest (which I have yet to do). The man has a talent for insterting humor into the most horrific of things, a talent he accounts for early on in this memoir of sorts, but this book ultimately reads like the final disgruntled rant of a disillusioned old man. Which, incidentally, it is, and he openly acknowleges it as such. It is Kurt Vonnegut, and that was the point of most of his work, but the difference here is the saturation of bitterness because it isn't embedded in a well written story.

Reading this there were many moments when I found myself laughing outright, others when I was nodding my head vigorously in agreement, and still others when I succumbed to frustration with the constant negativity. He repeats ideas, even phrases, throughout the book and there were times when I wanted to say enough already. It comes across as just bitterness, and that's a wasted emotion in my book. But every time I was about to set the book aside intending to never pick it up again, he would renew my interest with another fabulous observation or statement that got me hooked back in.

For many, especially the true fans, the people who grew up on Vonnegut's acerbic wit, this will be an enjoyable must read. And people who are one-hundred percent in line with his political views will enjoy it even more. I fall into neither of those categories, but I would still give it a three out of five.

15 down on my way to 52.