Lost City of the Monkey God

I really wanted to like this book. Actually, I did like it, but thought it fell somewhat short of the book cover blurb promises of “stunning” and “battling torrential rains” and a “stunning medical mystery.”

The books starts out fairly well (but what book doesn’t? I suppose there are books that start out crappy and then pick up at the end but who would make it to the end?), with Preston explaining the history of the area they will be exploring. This section though, makes up about a third of the book. The actual initial exploration part of Mosquitia that the author is present for, takes place in roughly under 100 pages, but is a quick-paced read and there was some interesting stuff about the use of lidar (which works like radar but with lasers) to map areas under dense vegetation.

The remainder of the book covered some of the controversy that surrounded the exploration and the illness that the team members suffered upon their return. The book’s back cover calls what they faced a “stunning medical mystery” that was the result of a “mysterious-and-incurable-disease.”

Medical spoilers ahead!

That disease turns out to me leishmaniasis (leish for those unfortunate enough to be personally familiar with it), a disease transmitted by the sand fly. While I certainly wouldn’t want it, I was a bit put off about the author’s writing about the disease and the treatment. To begin with, to say that it is incurable implies that it’s something that you actively have for the rest of your life. Instead, what happens is that after successful treatment, the parasite hides in your body, but is at such levels that the immune system can generally manage it. This is similar to chicken pox which many people have had, but that don’t go around saying they have an incurable disease. The description of the treatment and the side effects also seems to be outsized, based on a super-quick google of the disease.

I should also say that at one point I had (have?) a perhaps unhealthy interest in reading breast cancer blogs. And in these blogs (see But Doctor, I Hate Pink for one of the best examples), there are descriptions of treatment that are much worse than Preston’s leish treatment, but that are written about with such clear-eyed accuracy that is tinged with gallows humor that you both get a sense of the seriousness of the disease and of the humanness of the writer.

I mean, I get it, you need to sell books and adventure and mystery and hardship do a good job of that and I have no doubt the author is a very capable writer. I just thought that this book would have been better suited as a long form article or series of articles than trying to puff it out to a full size book.

So there. I promised myself I would write a quick review of each book I read before moving onto the next one, because I read a fair amount but sometimes come back to a book I know I’ve read before and the only thought is “huh, I know I read that and liked/disliked it, but can’t recall any of the details.” So here’s to 2018 and more books!

Detroit City - Is the Place to Be

Detroit City - Is the Place to Be Mark Binellie I wanted to like this book, I really did. I mean, I kept starting it, getting distracted and putting it down, only to have to restart it again later. I think I did this for at least a year, if not longer. Finally, I committed to finishing it, just because I was tired of seeing it on my night stand, or bookshelf, or wherever I had left it, mocking me with its promise of “The Afterlife of an American Metropolis.”

The problem I had with the book, was that I think the author was trying to hard not to be that voyeuristic outsider journalist that he comes down hard on. And while he is not an outsider (he grew up in Detroit and returned there not long before starting to write this book) his attempts to tie things together to a greater theme than “look at how awful Detroit is!” And while that attempt to dig beneath is admirable, it ultimately didn’t work for me because I don’t think he ever really solidly landed on an overlying theme, and perhaps that is as much the fault of the city, as it is Binelli’s. For example, towards the end he starts out about the history of meditation and Renaissance Italy and ties that to his family roots, and then ties one of Detroit’s ruins (Michigan Central) to Italian art.

Added to that, the people that Binelli interviews and speaks with never really came to life for me – I think that might be due to the fact that he mostly tells us what they said to us (we don’t hear their own voices) as opposed to occasionally getting a direct quote. Also, there are a lot of people that make appearances in the book without being connected to something else, or being followed up on. This too, made the other people more one-dimensional than I think Binelli intended. I think Binelli was trying to distinguish himself from those other writers that he viewed as rubber-necker journalists, but in the end, I think his attempts to completely avoid any appearance of such, hurt the book. It’s not a bad book by any means and I feel like I learned a bit more about the politics of the city, but ultimately, it’s not a book I’m likely to read again.

Damascus

Damascus
Joshua Mohr

They say that fiction should make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. I think there might be a third branch to that saying and that would be to make both the familiar and unfamiliar feel like a shared secret. I think it’s one of the reasons that I like picking up books set in locals where I’ve been – it’s always fun to see if our experiences or observations match up. That if we weren’t exactly like ships passing in the night, we were at least Muni buses barreling by in broad daylight.

The danger to this though, at least when it comes to San Francisco set writing, is that we all secretly want to be a Bukowski. And one of my problems with Damascus was that it can’t seem to make up its mind whether to be an SF Bukowski or to skewer the wanna-be Bukowski-ites that inhabit SF.

For example:

“And, of course, the next generation of alcoholics, the reinforcements, twenty-two, twenty-six, thirty-four years old, who came of age admiring Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs, and early Tom Waits. Turned on by their seductive tales of debauchery. They didn’t fathom that the movie Barfly wasn’t real, didn’t understand that they’d never meet Faye Dunaway while drinking bourbon in the afternoon. They didn’t know about years of diarrhea, of ulcers, anal fissures and hemorrhoids and shaking hands and dementia and memory uncoiling and nightmares and nigh-sweats and hangovers so brutally majestic you kneeled before them and wept.”

On the other hand, we have, among others, a prostitute (hand jobs only though) named Shambles and Owen, an alcoholic bar owner with a birthmark in the shape of Hitler’s mustache. These characters seem like they could have just as easily resided in a Bukowski book. However, Shambles and Owen lack the humor and the unexpected that coexist with Bukowski’s drunks and makes them more than a collection of sad stories.

The story itself centers around an artist whose performance art piece involves nailing live catfish to portraits of dead soldiers in a bar (Damascus). Which I wasn’t clear whether Mohr intended this to be a genuinely shocking piece of performance art, or was meant to skewer the performance art world, because…really? A catfish? I dunno. Maybe it’s because it’s precisely because I lived in the same area and time period as the story is set in (SF Mission during the Iraq War) that this seems so unlikely. Irony was, and is, the lingua franca and Damascus seemed to sorely miss that mark.

The Impossible Life of My Traitor's Heart

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer Tim Jeal

My Traitor’s Heart
Rian Malan

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time in the school library. All the cool kids were doing it. And by “it” I mean whatever was the opposite of what I happened to be doing. Which happened to be reading books about Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey. And I didn’t even have to Google that just now. I did though have to Google “depressed about time spent in libraries as a youth.”

For some reason that is unclear to me know, and was likely also unclear to me at the time, I decided that I would read all the books about each country that the school library had. While I did eventually manage to make it “through” Turkey -- largely due to the underwhelming number of books about Turkey that our school library had -- I didn’t make it out the Middle East section before graduation.

Since every bookstore near us has closed down I was recently forced to get (and promptly lost) a Pacifica library card, allowing me to revisit my geographic quest. The first books I checked out-- and then got fined a gazillion dollars for because I cannot return a library book on time to save my life -- were Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, and My Traitor’s Heart -- two books about two men that lived and worked in Africa a century apart, but who shared some remarkably similar experiences.

Both Henry Stanley and Rian Malan sought to find their place in Africa. Stanley was abandoned by his mother and by his entire family and forced to live in a Welsh workhouse at the age of six. He spent a good portion of his subsequent life trying to recreate an identity without that hid that difficult beginning from public. In doing so, he inadvertently helped to create an image that would stand him in the public eye as a man of cruelty, the bad cop to the more famous Livingstone’s good cop. Tim Jeal does an impressive job of documenting why Stanley doesn’t deserve the reputation he has and that he was, in fact, one the greatest explorers of Africa. I’m usually a footnote reader, but my knowledge of all things Africa are such that Jeal’s footnotes would have needed footnotes. And I think this was my only truck with Jeal’s book, that it seems to depend a little too heavily on the expectation that the reader has a certain amount of familiarity with the continent and that they hadn’t say, gotten bogged down in the Middle East section of the library during high school.

Stanley’s reputation for cruelty came in large part through his own reports about shooting Africans. Although the shootings were in self-defense they raised objections from those who had never had the occasion to experience the place where “once Africans had made overt threats of violence, they would treat as weakness any subsequent attempts to placate them.” Even though separated by a century, Rian Malan’s Africa turns out to be not that much different.

I first read an excerpt from Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart in an old Granta (Winter 1989) that I picked up for a couple of bucks at a thrift store that shall remain nameless because I am greedy selfish bastard and someday I plan to go back and buy up every available issue. Malan’s essay is a heartbreaking and inspiring story about Creina and Neil Alcock, a white South African couple that moves to Msinga, a district in the self-governing homeland of kwaZulu, that Malan describes as an “ecological Hiroshima.” The Alcocks don’t just live among the Africans though; they live like them as well, enduring rats, cold, heat, and tadpoles in their coffee (even amphibians need a little caffeine apparently). Their story isn’t movie neat – there is no clear resolution, no easy answers. But there is a love and a stubborn hope that has had me re-reading the story at least once a year, just to remember that people such as the Alcocks can exist.

Rian’s book does an excellent job of illustrating the soul crushing stone of apartheid and why it could not be easily be moved those, including Malan, who were against the system. But the same belief system of respect through violence that existed in Stanley’s era continued to apply. And because violence ruled, taking a stance against the system becomes dangerous. Simply taking a black African home was enough to cost some whites their lives.

The question then comes down to this: do you believe in equality to such an extent that you are willing to possibly risk your life and your loved ones by following that belief? I’d like to say yes. I’d like to think that I could be as brave as Creina and Neil Alcock, but I know what the answer is. Separated by thousands of miles and experience, and years, in the case of Stanley, it’s easy to say “not me,” but in truth, it is me. Which may explain why I reread Malan’s Msinga essay every so often, to remind myself that there are people whose answer to inequality is a resounding no, even at enormous personal cost to themselves. And that they were able to do so because they possessed something that could not be had from an entire arsenal of books.

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion

"The Autumn of Joan Didion", Atlantic Monthly
Caitlin Flanagan Jan. /Feb. 2012

In “The Autumn of Joan Didion” in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan writes that she believes that Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, e. Maybe my problem with The Year of Magical Thinking, is that when I first read her I am firmly entrenched, um, on the other side of that cusp.

Those who presumably came across Didion during their womanhood-cuspdom and are admirers of her work, often seem to relish the small details that are threaded throughout the book. The details act as weights do to curtains, holding down something that might otherwise be carried away by a light wind. Details though, can turn on you during grief, as when Didion, after her husband's unexpected death, tries avoiding the photographs on her walls as she walks to her room and finds it useless: she has them memorized,

“I remember that we all made soufflés. Conrad’s sister Nancy in Papeete had shown Katharine how to make them work without effort and Katharine showed me and Jean. The trick was a less strict approach than generally advised.”

The cataloguing of details was a bit too much for me and my post-womanhood-cuspdom, especially when the brand of water purchased gets space.

When Didion is approached by the doctor to tell her that her husband in dead, the social worker assigned to her assures the doctor that he needn’t worry about her reaction, that she is “a pretty cool customer.” Didion (rightfully) is bothered by this reference but says nothing and accepts the news with dignity and wonders what an uncool customer might have done. “Break down? Require sedation? Scream?” She doesn’t, but she never forgets that comment.

When my grandfather was in a coma in the hospital, shortly before he died, I remember that the doctors thought that maybe my grandmother did not understand what was going to happen, that she did not understand that once medical intervention was withheld that he would die. And from outward appearances maybe she too, appeared as a “cool customer.” She made jokes; she helped me jokingly hold the bathroom door shut on what we thought was my mom (don't ask). She didn’t, that I saw, scream, faint or make a scene in anyway. Perhaps, she too, like Didion was busy collecting the small details that would have to sustain her afterwards, that would act as beacons back to the living when their pleas to the departed to come back were denied.

My grandmother and Didion didn’t conform to what society has come to expect of grief, especially of older women. They didn’t lay bare the nature and depth of their grief for all to see. If they were men, once upon a time it might have admirably have been called, keeping a stiff upper lip. We don’t do that though these days. We connect. We socialize. We have a status that need to be updated. We are a global community. We forget that there are other ways to be, other ways to love. That the surface can be just that, the surface. Didion’s book if it does nothing else, illustrates this.

Auschwitz x 4

Auschwitz, a Doctor’s Eyewitness Account
Miklos Nyiszli
Richard Seaver
Tibere Kremer





Behind Enemy Lines
The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany
Marthe Cohn with Wendy Holden












Rena’s Promise – Two Sisters in Auschwitz
Rena Corneich Gelissen with Heather Dune Macadam













The Dentist of Auschwitz
Benjamin Jacobs

During the week I spent laid up with a bad sinus infection/migraines/in the hospital, I managed to read four Nazi survivor memoirs. I say managed like there was some effort required – it was pretty much the only thing I was capable of doing. I will say one nice thing about e-books – they do come in handy when you’re barely capable of making it to the bathroom, let alone the bookstore.

I’m not going to go into much detail for these because I’m catching up on all my work. I chose these books to read while I was sick because I've always been interested in the subject and I was pretty sure that they would be interesting reads – I really didn’t have the mental capacity to search out unknown books/authors. Also, if there’s anything sure to squash a self-pity party, it’s reading accounts of those who had to endure the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Without a doubt, all of the stories are just heart-breaking. One the things that stood out to me, was that those who managed to survive seemed to have first of all, good health to begin with, a lot of luck – but also the ability to identify an opportunity and seize upon it. For example, in The Dentist of Auschwitz, upon arrival at Auschwitz the dentist/author is selected by Mengele for survival and sent to the line that meant life and not instant death in the crematoriums. His father who was there with him was sent to the other line. While they were still standing there, there was a commotion and the dentist took advantage of it to pull his father over to his own line, risking his own life, but also somehow sensing this would be the last chance to save him. Which is why I think I would not have survived – I probably would have dithered weighing the pros and cons of each situation until it was too late. That and I crumple under a cold.

What also touched me was the way that love for others, often sustained them and helped them. In Rena’s promise two young sisters who voluntarily showed up for deportation because they did not want to risk harming the families that were hiding them, depend on each other and on their memories of their mama and papa who are not there and that they imagine are alive waiting for them. When Rena describes how her mother used to take a warm brick at night and run it over her covers at night to warm them and lay it at the foot of her bed, it made me think about what the Offspring might have to hold him over in a difficult time.

And I realized that we are a more selfish generation. I think about how Mr. Inktini and I divvy up his pick up and drop off since we both work and wonder if the Offspring feels like we are divying up a chore. I think about how we want time for ourselves for our own projects. And I think about how we’ve lost a certain amount of the ability to just enjoy what we have. Which is not to say that I pine for the good old days, because they certainly weren’t good in a lot of ways. But I do long for an existence where a warm brick can carry such meaning and love and ultimately life.

Pigeon English

Pigeon English
Stephen Kelman

I should start this out by saying previously I've fallen firmly in the "pigeons are rats with wings camp." When I travelled to Morocco I purposely ordered Pastilla, a sort of pigeon pie, as a sort of revenge for all the pigeons I'd had to wade through and then dodge their poops when I used to roller-blade to work way back when. Don't ask me why the various assortment of characters of San Francisco's 6th Street didn't bother me while the pigeons did. Perhaps because they had knives.

So when Harri initially makes friends with a pigeon I admit I identified more with his mom who told him it was dirty and don't be feeding that thing. Actually identify might be too strong a word, as the characters in this book are kept a bit at arm's length. So while the book was definitely competently written and engaging, I didn't feel completely drawn into their world. That is, until the last two pages.

What happens manages to stun, sadden and makes you question whether there wasn't a certain amount of comfort in the distance from the characters, i.e. we're used to being uninvolved voyeurs in other's lives, more so for those life circumstances are drastically different from our own.

Oh and by the way -- Pastilla? Let's just say, the Pigeons won that round too. Which is ok with me now. As Harri's pigeon points out - "We ask only for the same rights as you: we just want to live our lives, make a place for ourselves, room to shit and room to sleep, room to raise our children. Don't poison us just because we make a mess. You make a mess, too. There's enough of everything to go round if we all stick to our fair share."