5 posts tagged “nonfiction”

Harrison's analysis of a boy's murder of his abusive parents and innocent younger sister got a huge write-up in the

Sunday NYT Book Review, and all I can say is Harrison must have a hell of a publicist.  The book held my attention, and I read it quickly thanks to being temporarily couch-bound with a physical ailment, but it felt about a quarter-inch deep to me.  Maybe I expected something different, because I do enjoy the occasional true-crime book with an emphasis on forensics and law.  This one is much more psychological in its focus, but it's pop psychology at best - speculative and not very interesting, in my estimation. Harrison was herself a victim of abuse, which was the subject of The Kiss.  That work got stellar reviews from trustworthy sources, but judging from this work, Harrison is in a mode of shaping her pain into some kind of psychoanalytical narrative, and I am just not interested in that.

Time magazine journalist Azadeh Moaveni was born in America, a child of Iranian exiles. Twenty years after the Islamic revolution, she moved to Iran to report on Iran in general and the burgeoning reform movement in particular. She confronted her ambivalence about her heritage and her sense of alienation from both American and Iranian culture. This should make for a riveting book, and I did learn a lot that I did not know about Iran, but the author's voice was so irritating that the reading experience was absolutely painful.  It may be an affectation, but the author presented herself as so self-involved, shallow and yuppified that I was almost rooting for the mullahs against her. Ms. Moaveni, the story of modern Iran is really, really, really not all about you, okay?

I haven't been doing as much reading as I should in the past couple of weeks, having been experiencing an unusual amount of drama for my sensibly-shod life.  Finally, I finished The End of Faith, Sam Harris's provocative argument

against religion.  Faithful readers (Jenny? Daphne?) will recall that I didn't care for Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, finding it simplistic and needlessly pugnacious.  Well, this full-length work is considerably more sophisticated, of course. The primary argument is that religious faith -- and that includes religious moderates -- is a force for evil in the world.  His most frightening scenarios involve Islam, but he certainly slams the predominantly Christian culture of the west, as well.   I won't rehash the arguments here; I'm convinced, and the faithful will probably not be.  Most interesting to me were the later chapters outlining the case for ethics without faith and even spirituality without faith.  He presents the atheistic spirituality of Buddhism as something that is not predicated on faith and could be a valuable way for human beings to connect with something larger than themselves.

The 2/25/07 New York Times has an interesting article about the place on the tv dial you can find serious authors being interviewed about their books.  Surprise - it's Comedy Central, specifically The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  A publisher is quoted thusly: “It’s the television equivalent of NPR...You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books.”  Who knew?  I thought I was a stoned slacker. Oh wait, I am interested in books.

So I'm finally reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.  The chapters alternate between the story of a charming serial killer and the story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  As morbid as I am, I assumed I would be skimming the fair stuff to get to the murders, but not a bit of it.  Who knew that architects could be so interesting?