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."

No Country for Moby Dick

No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy










Moby Dick, Or the Whale
Herman Melville






I didn’t know much about Moby Dick before I read it, but my friend Matt barbacked at a gay bar in SF called the Moby Dick and the women’s bathroom was spotless. So I decided, based on that positive association and the fact that my reading tends to lean heavily towards the modern, to give Moby Dick a shot.

For a long time I thought that Moby Dick might be the last book that I chose based on a bodily function. But that was when I was trying to read the (free) e-book version. It took an incredibly long time to plow through a third of the book. I read many other books during the same time. I nearly gave up hope of ever finishing it, imagining my tombstone to read “Beloved Wife and Mother, Nearly Finished Moby Dick .”

But. Then I broke down and bought the paper book. And I found myself…enjoying the book. I don’t think that I’m the only one who had difficulty finishing e-Moby Dick. The e-book version shows 352 highlighters for a particular section of page three. The highlighting quickly dwindles down to close to nothing and you can almost hear the e-sighs as Captain Ahab remains off the page until a third of the way into the book.

Which is in direct contrast to No Country For Old Men, a book that I read (actually re-read) while trying to force myself through e-Moby. In No Country, the action starts right from the beginning. And while the pacing and use of marine mammals are vastly different between the two books, they share the common theme that the past has a claim on us that we cannot escape. And that is a hard, hard thing to live with.

Unless you happen to be Anton Chigurh, who just might be the prophet of destruction, or at least one bad-ass accountant who has a rather funky idea of right and wrong. Or rather right and fair. The two are different according to Chigurh. And he’s probably not someone you’d want to dither over the difference with. Unfortunately, Llewelyn Moss wasn’t aware of this when he made off with a bag filled with millions from a drug deal gone bad that he found while out hunting.

Like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick, Chigurh will not rest until he has finished his accounting with Moss. Money, drugs, even Woody Harrelson cannot deter him. Judgment, it turns out is not a one-time check-out affair where if your credits exceed your debits you’re free to go. It is an ongoing process and you may be called to pay at any time. As the narrator in Moby Dick says, “Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

Can one repent? Is it possible to save oneself? Can you run off that delicious cupcake you just ate?

Everyone facing death at Chirgurh’s hand tells him that “you don’t have to do this.” But it is not Chigurh’s choice. Maybe it is not possible to trace the exact path that led to the moment or reckoning. But it is there. And repentance is not possible without knowing what you are repenting for. Without that knowledge repentance becomes mere words. To have that knowledge would be to be grateful for the punishment. As the narrator in Moby Dick says when describing Jonah's (of Jonah and the whale fame) repentance, “And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”

Captain Ahab though feels no need for repentance. Rather, his need seems to be to complete the accounting that the whale began when he “de-masted” him by taking his leg but leaving him behind. Captain Ahab though, manages to convince an entire crew to help him pursue his revenge. Maybe within a ship’s confined quarters your needs and desires and fate begin to become the same by necessity – there is simply not room for more than one.

And maybe it is also too close of quarters with one’s thoughts that turns you and the object of your desire into the same, so in the end it is yourself that you are chasing. You cannot separate the act from the thing. The act is the thing. You think you are pursuing the thing but the pursuit is the thing and you become the pursuit.

We like to think that we can continually reinvent ourselves. That what’s past is past. But it’s not. The past is us.

Incendiary

Incendiary
Chris Cleave

I didn’t take any notes while I was reading Incendiary as I was on an airplane, certain that death was only a few moments away. I am always amazed when I walk down the aisle for my 1,000th bathroom trip, at the people calmly working their crossword puzzles, putting together a presentation for work, or just in general holding it together.

The subject matter of Incendiary, also didn’t help my barely repressed urge to yell WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE and 16 ACROSS IS MISSOULA . The unnamed protagonist is writing a (really, really long) letter to Osama bin Laden after her husband and “four year and three months” son are burned/blown to bits by a terrorist bomb while attending a soccer game. Not exactly cheery stuff. But a good book nonetheless.

It’s written (mostly) sans commas, which gives an urgent, yet peculiarly flat feel to the voice. It’s either done very well, or I’m not a very observant person, as I didn’t notice this until I was about three-fourths of the way done.

The author was also adept at creating characters that swung from likeable to dislikeable to plain ambiguous. For example, the main character primarily deals with stress in one of three ways, tidying up, sleeping with other men, or tidying up for the other men she’s slept with. Not exactly your flawless heroine. But she goes on to exhibit compassion for those that wrong her, in ways that would be impossible for most. And it is her compassion that one of the men she is involved with after her husband’s death is counting on when he reveals a horrendous secret that upends the tentative rebuilding of her life. In this new world, nothing can be counted on. And that is what the characters try to do, to find that one thing that can sustain them as the ground rocks beneath them.

The only flaw with the book was that at moments it had that “this was written to be made into a movie” feel to it. And sure enough, it turns out that the book was made into a movie. I was curious about the movie. Unfortunately, as they say, curiosity killed the pretty enjoyable book. Or at least the interesting and funny main characters.

A World of Little Boxes

Little Boxes
Rob Keil

Worlds Away
Edited by Andrew Blauvelt

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,

And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

If you’ve watched the Showtime series Weeds, you're familiar with Melvina Reynolds’ song “Little Boxes” that accompanies the opening view of Agrestic, the fictional California suburb where the show takes place. Reynolds’ song plays while an overhead shot of the land shows it being populated with look-alike houses that resemble a rapidly replicating virus.

What you might not know though is that the actual inspiration for the song is located roughly 300 miles north of Los Angeles in Westlake, a neighborhood located in Daly City that was built in the 1950s. Rob Keil’s book, Little Boxes is a love letter to these homes that were built by Henry Doelger. He originally started building them in San Francisco in the 1920's eventually extended down the coast to Pacifica by the mid 1960’s where we purchased our own little box in 2010.

When I first saw these homes, they seemed a bit strange and evil -- especially the houses that featured one giant window on the front side that made them look like a Cyclops amid the fog. And then, an odd thing happened. I started to like them.

Running through the cool mornings with no other person in sight, the uncharacteristically large homes felt like large gargoyles watching out for me. One of the homes I ran past seemed to have a perpetual “open house” sign up. Whenever I ran over to check it out though(because I’m such a hardcore runner that I will pause for an open house) it wasn’t open. But I could see the backyard and the flat decent-sized (for our budget and area) backyard and it seemed a possibility. Eventually, that possibility became our house.

And with the house came the fog. Pacifica is known for its fog – its annual civic celebration is called Fog Fest (which somewhat ironically usually turns out to be one of the less foggy days of the year). Living in Pacifica almost caused me to fail my drivers test. When asked what you should do when you encounter significant fog while driving, I didn’t pick the correct answer “pull over”, because well, doing that would have meant that I would have sat at home for the last year and surely that couldn't be the right answer. Turns out it was. I imagine it must have taken Keil a decade to produce all the beautiful, sunny photographs that are in the book.

The weather though, seemed to take a backseat to criticism of the actual homes, that according to Keil’s book, were considered by many architects to be the devil incarnate. World’s Away is an interesting collection of essays about suburban landscapes and ideas of aesthetics. John Archer, In one of the book's essays, presents the argument that standardized themes and clichéd expressions actually allowed the epic works of Homer to survive, because it allowed the work to survive due to the (relative) ease of memorization. And that suburbia has always been the fulcrum of the conflict between public and private interests.

Private interests wanted affordable housing that wasn’t stylistically bankrupt. Public interest wanted homes that were aesthetically pleasing and contributed to a sense of place. Doelger did his best to walk that fine line.

Although our house is older (1964) it is solidly built, with the home built almost entirely out of redwood. Doelger was able to use the more expensive wood by cutting costs in other areas. He acquired surplus vehicles at auction, including troop transport, ambulances and trucks and set up his own fueling station and maintenance yard as he didn’t want to risk reliance on outside vendors that could cause expensive delays. He made his subontractors compete against one another by employing them both at the same time. When one fell behind, the other one got his work. His policy of quickly paying the subcontractors allowed him to obtain lower labor rates.
l
He paired his cost cutting measures with design aesthetics that were intended to create both consistency and deliberate architectural variations for each house. For example, Doelger's use of varied rooflines helped keep his developments from falling into the visual monotony that plagues some suburbs. Ultimatley, Keil’s book is a fun and visually beautiful, if somewhat light look (no deep delving into Doelger's life) into Doelger's creations.

Moonwalking with the Tiger Mom

When I ran across a mention of Moonwalking with Einstein in an issue of the Atlantic I almost immediately forgot tthe name of the book. Fortunately I also forgot I read the article and reread it several days later and so I was able to write down the name of the book.

Moonwalking with Einstein is part mnemonic history and tips and partly an account of the author’s attempt to improve his memory with those same techniques in an attempt to make a respectable showing at the US Memory Championship.

Those who are experts in a subject are more likely to remember details as they are more readily able to quickly ascertain what is important and what is irrelevant. Having a vast bank of information that you can sort through allows you to more readily capture the pertinent information. Or as the author puts it, having a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

One of the techniques practiced by mnemonists is the "memory palace". The memory palace technique combines spatial memory which is very good in humans – it’s what keeps you from pitching into the walls and falling off curbs. The memory palace uses a combination of images and spaces to secure memories. You place an image that you associate with the word (the bawdier the better) in a place that you are familiar with, such as your house. Then when you need to recall the information you simply “walk” yourself through the house.

A different sort of memory palace is found in David Foster Wallace’s short story, Backbone, where a young boy becomes determined to press his lips to “every last micrometer of his own individual body.” The boy is successful at first. His body becomes both more real and less real at the same time. Once he has reached a spot, he documents it on a four-faced chart. He is moving his knowledge, his memory of self to an external source – he now only exists as locations on a chart. He is searching for a way to access all of himself.

And maybe this is also what Moonwalking is talking about – that these days with all of our options for externalizing our memories – flash drives, cameras, blogs, etc., that we are forgetting a fundamental part of what it means to be human – and that we are in essence like the little boy in David Foster Wallace’s story – able to recall any moment at the press of a button, but unable to say what it means, furiously darkening in our outlines but forgetting what it is we are to do with the interiors.

Foer reminds readers that memory once served not merely as a parlor trick, but also as a means for shaping one’s character as well as being the essence of expertise. The place of academic memorization in a way sums up the firestorm over Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, Amy Chua’s memoir about trying to (and at least partially succeeding) in imposing her strict Chinese ideals on her daughters, requiring them to forgo sleepovers and television in favor of the rote memorization that she says is undervalued in America. The roughly nine thousand comments that the article generated indicate that perhaps the rest of the US in not all in agreement with her.

Caitlin Flanagan’s article in the Atlantic, The Ivy Delusion, identifies the root cause of the division that Amy Chua’s book is about recognizing that “life is a series of choices, each with its own rewards and consequences. …[i]t’s an unwelcome reminder…that the world really doesn’t like before us like a land of dreams. At best---the very best—it can only offer us choices between two good things, and as we grasp at one, we lose the other forever.”

The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin

I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I developed somewhat of a crush on James Triptree Jr./Alice Sheldon after reading her biography and the story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. And it is through Triptree/Sheldon that I came to read Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven.

I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, so maybe it’s just that I don’t have enough experience in the genre to appreciate it, but it seemed, well, even for 1971, a bit stale. George Orr (even I have read enough science fiction to get this connection) is a man whose dreams have the ability to change reality. Not just the present reality, but everyone’s memory of the past as well. The tricky things about dreams though, is that they are not controlled by your conscious mind, but rather it’s drunken, unpredictable, oh-no-he-didn’t, close cousin, the subconscious. George becomes troubled by the effects of his dreams and after overdosing on a combination of uppers and downers, finds himself in the office of Dr. Haber, under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment.

Dr. Haber is able to witness the changing of reality as he hooks George up to his “baby”-- a dream augmentor that gives Dr. Haber the ability to induce dream sleep, or d-state, as it is called,. During subsequent sessions Dr. Haber attempts to “better” the world by suggesting ideas to George while he is under hypnosis and hooked up to the augmentor. George tends to dream big. He isn’t dreaming that he forgot his pants and is waiting for the bus, or registered for a class that he never knew about until finals. Instead, it is large scale changes – aliens, volcanoes and environmental catastrophes. As George explains to Dr. Haber:

“I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. …You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a toll that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”

Realizing what the good bad doctor is up to, George seeks the counsel of a lawyer, Heather LaLeche, a female character that never seems to come to life. The most relevant trait she seems to have, is that she has a purse with a large brass snap that she snaps loudly. And if you think dating is difficult in the ordinary world, just try it when you have multiple versions of your past.

I found George himself not to be very likeable. I think he is supposed to be the embodiment of zen-ness , an example of embracing what is. He lectures Haber on how he shouldn’t try and change things, that to do so is wrong. But, of course, he himself is actually trying to change how things are, i.e. the “effective” dreaming.

“I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine , where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

“This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.”


In Lathe, the world seems to be divided not into black licorice lovers and black licorice haters, as I would divide up the world, but into dreamers and changers. It’s clear what happens when a dreamer and a changer meet up, the changer becomes frustrated because you can only change something that has a solid definition of what it is. A dreamer never “is” something. And in a way, this book is like that, content to drift, to be, without fulling pulling in the reader.

Operation Every Mincemeat Dies Alone

Operation Mincemeat is a story about how the British used a dead body to fool the Germans into believing they wouldn’t be invading Sicily. Ha – stupid Germans! Okay, it was a little more complicated than that.

Operation Mincemeat, an elaborate Trojan horse-like plan (that is if the horse were a dead, three-months on ice corpse) to use a dead body carrying fake military information to fool the Germans into believing the Allied forces wouldn’t be invading Sicily, helped make the invasion of Italy a success and made a mysterious Welsh man, along with the creators of his made up life, famous.

The plan was simple enough on paper – a downed Naval officer carrying a briefcase of sensitive military information washes ashore in neutral-in-theory Spain. Spanish officials allow the Germans access to the body and papers and the Germans believe the information and alter their plans to protect the fake invasion location thereby leaving Sicily, the real invasion location, with scant protection.

It turned out though, to be a little more complicated than that. For one thing, getting a dead body was apparently not as easy as one would think it would be in war time Europe. The question of the body and its genesis was also the reason given for the continued secrecy of the operation, even after the war. The official story is that a Glyndwr Michael, a destitute Welshman who had been found after apparently ingesting rat poison in an attempt to end his life.

It’s hard to believe that such a ruse could be successful these days with that many people involved. It seems like it would only be a matter of time before the “Tricked Nazis today with dead body – can’t wait to find out if invasion will be a success!” post appeared on Facebook.

More difficult to digest than the questionable acquisition of the body though, is the writing. The books seems filled with extraneous material that never seems to lead anywhere and never seems to delve beneath the surface of the characters. The writing comes off as sort of an overstuffed, though capably written, official report.

Since the book got a very favorable review in the New York Times, I went and read through some of the reviews on Amazon just to see if there were others that thought that the book didn’t live up to its NY Times hype. And among the reviews, there was the suggestion, that if one wanted to read a good WW II book, to get Every Man Dies Alone. Which leads us to the second book of our double feature.

Even though Every Man Dies Alone (*I guess women get to cuddle together or something), is fiction it somehow rings truer than Operation Mincemeat. Technically, I guess it’s fiction-ish, as it is based on the true story of a couple who distributed anti-Nazi postcards after the wife’s brother died. In EMDA, it is the couple’s son who has been lost in the war. The resulting postcards that are painstakingly made every Sunday by the couple, are of questionable efficacy. Most of the those who come across the postcards are too terrified to take them and pass them on as the Quangels hope, and instead almost immediately turn them in. In Nazi Germany, it seems that one of the most powerful weapons the Nazi’s have is the myriad ways in which one can be found to have violated the law. Nearly everyone is guilty of something and therefore is afraid to take any action, as their own law-breaking may come to notice and endanger their lives and the lives of their family. A good tyrant knows that to control a population, you must first make everyone guilty.

The title of the book of course, begs the question– did the Quangels die alone?

But before that can be answered, the question of what is “alone” needs to be answered. And here, the alone is literal – we each must endure the view at the end alone, no one else can share it, even if we are surrounded by loved ones. But we are more than flesh and bones, we are acts, we are hand-drawn postcards dropped in a stairwell, we are impossible hope that does not die with us and gets carried with those who knew us, occasionally coming to life again in a book that can still move people and cause them to question whether their own acts are worthy of enduring.

Two For One Special!

Born to Run
Christopher McDougall


                         Run Like a Mother
                   Dimity McDowell Davis
                      Sarah Bowen Shea



Run like a mother. Or a Tarahamura. Or run like anything, just run. These two books share that basic idea - that running is about more than mere exercise and that without it we are prone to more disease and depression. I have to agree with at that. My form is atrocious and I’m slow. But I love, love, love running. Why? Because there is simply few things better than coming back from an early morning run, the sun just shrugging her shoulders over the hills, listening to some Simon and Garfunkel and feeling your feet beneath you.

Run Like a Mother, co-written by Sarah and Dimity, could also be titled Run Like a Female, as a good portion of the book is less centered on motherhood and more on running in genera. And the parts that did touch on motherhood as it pertains to running fell into one of areas (1) the physical effects of pregnancy and running (2) balancing family life with running.

The book did a decent job with the first area. I ran through my own pregnancy and my plan was to have the baby, take 3, maybe 4 days off from running and get back into it. Hahahaha. Let me say that again. Hahahaha. It was several weeks until I managed to get to the gym and walk on a treadmill, hunched over grasping the sides. Afterwards I had to lie down on the gym’s couch. And it was a year before every run did not involve me thinking about having given birth to a 10 pound baby (all right, he was more like 7, but considering the region, it’s like the difference between getting hit by a train and getting hit with a train with a dining car – sucks both ways) that is, it was easily a year until I felt good during a run. Which probably would not have seemed like such an abnormal time if I’d read Run Like a Mother. Of course, if I’d read that before I got pregnant, there might have been a getting pregnant. So, it’s a good thing the book wasn’t Run Like a Trying to Conceive Woman.

They did have some handy tips, some of which I was already aware (the peeing in public benefits of running skirts) and some I wasn’t – effervescent tablets to replace the minerals lost while running without having to suck down three tablespoons of sugar at the same time (sugary drinks make me want to instantly brush my teeth and I already look odd enough running without having to carry a toothbrush with me.)

What I wish they had been more specific about was the whole balancing family life with running. They provide anecdotes, but not enough background information to really be able to use any ideas from them. For example, we don’t know if the authors work outside the home, how long they work, or (and this is a pet peeve of mine) what is meant by “early morning”. There’s a world of difference between out the door at 5 a.m. and out the door at 7 a.m. Mr. Inktini has generally been very generous and understanding about my morning runs, which may or may not be helped by my non-too subtle glances at my watch after he gets up (I get up with the Offspring).

McDougall’s book on the other hand, is all about the Woman Who Finished in the top 10of a 100 miler, while stopping to breast feed her child at every stop (Emily Baer), which while certainly impressive, could be a little discouraging to those who fall a little to the left of that endurance spectrum (quick note: for all of McDougall’s interesting facts and stories, there is no footnotes). He does however, provide some interesting research on why we run and how humans are particularly adapted to running long distances. It turns out that the average marathon time, about 4 -5 hours, is just about the same amount of time it takes hunters to run down game.

McDougall’s real story though, is about the Tarahamura; an ancient civilization for whom running ultra-distances is second nature. First nature seems to be a gentle and honest character that is apparently not harmed by the occasional corn-alcohol fueled parties.

McDougall helps put together a race that pits the Tarahumara against a ragtag bunch of American long distance runners that include Scott Jurek and a pair of young runners that seem to share the Tarahamura's ability to pound down drinks and rise the next morning to run insanely long runs. McDougall himself runs the race, uncertain whether he will be able to finish the 50 mile course, having been told by doctor’s that if he wanted his pain to go away that he would need to stop running.

It’s a fun read and inspiring. I even ran a few times without my iPod, which was good in that it allowed me to concentrate more on my form, which is usually centered around the best way to hold my iPod so that I can compulsively switch songs or listen to the same one for an hour. But, then ultimately, I went back to my weak, iPod listening, peeing in the street ways. Which is not such a bad thing. As both books show, running, any way that you can manage it, is always a good thing in the end.

Room

Room
Emma Donoghue

I am so, so, so very behind on writing up my thoughts on what I’ve been reading. Granted, since I’ve been sick I’ve been reading some lighter material and going through it without taking notes, but still…someone should just lock me in a room…and wait—was that just an only slight segue way into my next review? Why, yes it was, my dear non-existent reader.

In Room, Emma Donoghue’s seventh novel, five-year old Jack and his Ma are being kept captive in a converted garage but not to write book reviews. Instead Old Nick as Jack calls him because he comes in the middle of the night, visits Ma in the middle of the night for distinctly non-literary activities. Jack, born into captivity, knows only “Room” and as a consequence all the little items one would take for granted come to take on greater significance – a spoon becomes Meltedy Spoon, a bed becomes Bed, and everything outside their 11 x 11 room is Outer Space.

That is until Jack’s mother, in a momentary fit of frustration, tells Jack that what he sees on T.V. is real and is outside their door. Not long after this little revelation, in a scene that would serve well as a blueprint for creating tension and suspense in a novel, Jack and Ma, make their escape, perhaps spurred by the vision of cable television.

Once on the outside though, Jack and Ma, predictably, have some difficulties. And so does the book. Inside Room, the book slowly reveals through the contents and Jack and Ma’s games, their lives. It is both sad and comforting. Part of you wants them to stay there, cocooned in their Jack and Ma-ness.

Outside Room though, the story becomes a bit flat and not quite as believable, as if the author spent all of her energy creating the world in Room. In particular there is a scene towards the end where Ma takes a bunch of pills and is in danger of becoming permanently Gone, that didn’t ring true for a woman that spent five years fiercely protecting her son.

Still, there are some poignant observations though from Jack as he learns to live Outside, such as:

“Driving home I see the playground, but it’s all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side. “Oh Jack, that’s a different one, “says Grandma. There’s playgrounds in every town.” Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.”

The second half of the book isn’t bad by any means, it’s just, well, a little disappointing. Kind of like escaping from captivity into the “real” world would be I suppose. Except for the better television.