Book Review: Isaac's Storm

"This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself."
-Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm

I have to start by saying that I absolutely adore Erik Larson. He writes non-fiction that is gripping, page-turning delight. His book The Devil in the White City is one of my all-time favorites, and it is he (along with Jon Krakauer) who taught me to love non-fiction.

Larson's books tend to follow a pattern; he chooses an interesting, but forgotten event/era and brings it to life. He does so by focusing on the intimate details of a few lives (who become the main characters) and weaving those details in and among "big picture" descriptions of the event/era.

In Isaac's Storm the event is a devastating hurricane which nearly wiped the city of Galveston, TX off the map in 1900. Even now, 117 years later, it remains the deadliest natural disaster to have occurred on American soil.

Larson's sweeping descriptions of the storm and its aftermath are haunting. But it is in the details that Isaac's Storm doesn't quite land. Larson chooses to focus on meteorologist Isaac Cline, his brother Jacob, and a few fatuous men from the fledgling U.S. National Weather Service. He makes their stories as interesting as he possibly can, constructing the drama from old letters and telegraphs, but the story just didn't catch me. 

I think part of the problem is that Isaac Cline, as a person, seems kind of cold and reserved, and so as the sympathetic center of the book, he just didn't quite work. 

Still, the magical way that Erik Larson makes history come alive is always such a treat, and I fully enjoyed looking for further information and old pictures of the Galveston Hurricane. Any book that fires up my imagination in that way deserves at least 4 stars. 

Book Review: Famous Modern Ghost Stories edited by Dorothy Scarborough

In continuing my search for readable Gothic tales for 10th graders, I came across this collection of short stories which is in the public domain.

Famous Modern Ghost Stories, is kind of a laugh as a title. Having been published in 1921, it's hardly modern, and I hadn't heard of any of the stories in the collection, though I was familiar with some of the authors, so I would hardly say they are famous.

Apparently there's a longer version of this collection with a few stories that didn't make it into the version I read; there's a Poe story called "Ligeia" that I was missing, and another called "The Beast With Five Fingers" - I don't know why the version I read didn't include these stories.

I used to love creepy collections like this when I was younger. I checked them out from our local library and read some of them over and over again. One of them in particular contained a story called "The Toy Killer", about a mother that would destroy her son's toys, which always gave me the creeps (I think this story is the genesis of my obsession with stories about Munchausen's syndrome by proxy). I can't find the name or author of that collection, but I remember how much I loved reading horror stories, and how scared I used to be to go to the bathroom at night after reading them.

This particular collection was a little thin on real chills; there was a sweet little story about dogs waiting for their owners at the gates of heaven ("At the Gate" by Myla Jo Closser), another kind of sweet one about a ghost letting go of her former husband, and giving her blessing to his marrying her sister ("The Shell of Sense" by Olivia Howard Dunbar), and a cute story where a man puts to rest the ghost of young lovers ("The Haunted Orchard" by Richard Le Gallienne).

My hopes were high when I saw that Guy de Maupassant, author of the dark, ironic story "The Necklace", had a story in the collection. However, his story, "A Ghost", is one of the dumbest ghost stories I have ever read. Basically, the main character sees a ghost (so I guess it's aptly named) and then combs her hair. I feel like I missed something; perhaps it was written in French originally and something was lost in translation, because it seemed aimless to me.

"Lazarus" by Leonid Adreyev, is a creepy, atmospheric, zombie story that kind of touches on the same theme as Stephen King's Pet Sematary, namely, that sometimes death is more merciful than life. If you're familiar with the Bible, you will recognize Lazarus as the man Jesus raised from the dead in the book of John. This story is a meditation on what might have happened afterward. I personally thought it was a bit overlong, and it wasn't my cup of tea, but it did create a tense mood and atmosphere throughout.

The best of the collection is Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows." Although it too, suffers from being overly long (I actually skimmed the first 15-20 pages and basically missed NOTHING)- I started reading in earnest when the two main characters land on an island full of creepy willow trees and weird stuff starts to happen. If you're the type of reader who wants to know "what actually happened", (i.e., if you're the type of person who hates shows like Lost or The X-Files for not tying up all loose ends and answering all questions) then this is not the story for you. The willows are merely described as a place where the fabric between dimensions is thin and something malevolent is trying to get through from the other side.

It's a great example of a bottleneck story; the main characters are stuck on an island with a rising tide and are continually plagued by problems- losing their steering paddle, finding a hole in their canoe, etc., that keep them from leaving. This story is the longest of the collection and at 139 pages (at least in the digital version) it is really more of a novelette than a short story.

Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to students who aren't experienced, high level readers. You need to be the type of reader who can expertly skim in order to get to the best parts, otherwise you will probably be bored as the pacing is certainly not ideal for modern readers.

Book Review: The Island of Dr. Moreau

"And I know that they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both." - H.G. Wells

I read H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau to see if it will work for a 10th grade unit on fear and Gothic literature.

I don't ordinarily think of a sun-drenched island as a Gothic setting, but in a sense it is exotic. And it is certainly creepy! It definitely is probably more in the genre of sci-fi or even body horror, but its emphasis on the limits of science and the responsibilities of creation has lots in common with Frankenstein.

I won't say too much more because I don't want to give spoilers, but I will say that this book was readable and fun. I finished in a few hours, and I really enjoyed it. Of course, I am an X-Files fan so I love a good mad scientist story.

Wells's theme, that the line between animal and human is thin and easily crossed, could not be more on the nose, particularly at the end of the book, but it was so well-written that I really didn't mind being beaten over the head with it.

Overall, I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

********Addendum, 8/1/17 - CONTAINS SPOILERS!**********

Even on my first reading I realized that Dr. Moreau's animal/human hybrids function as stand-ins for the human race. Wells is pretty straightforward about that, and even has his narrator observe that looking at the hybrids is like seeing "the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form." 

However, after reflecting a bit more on the book, I now have a deeper understanding of Well's ideas. I think that much like the narrator sees the hybrids, Wells sees the human race as a species constantly at war with itself.

Humanity is a mixture of the animal and the spiritual; the book of Genesis describes the creation of Adam as entirely earthly (literally, he is created from the dust) and also spiritual (he is created in the image of God). Over the years, many different terms have been coined to try to describe this internal conflict, such as "nature vs. nurture" or "duty vs. desire", but the essential idea is that man's animal self and its earthly desires (food, sex, pleasure) is constantly battling his constructed self and its spiritual desires (holiness, godliness, morality, meaning).

H.G. Wells nicely describes this never-ending battle in the scene where the hybrids recite Moreau's laws in a kind of religious fervor. Wells says that the Law "battled in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their animal natures. This Law they were perpetually repeating, I found, and- perpetually breaking." So although the hybrids desperately want to obey the law, their animal natures won't allow it.

In Paul's letter to the Romans, he describes the condition of humanity in much the same terms: 

"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am!"

- NIV Bible, Romans 7:21-24

Like Wells, Paul describes the battle between the law and sin. (In chapter 8 of Romans, Paul goes on to exclusively name the "earthly nature" and its desires as the source of sin.) 

Notice too that Paul describes the wretchedness of this condition, and so too, does Wells, saying: 

 "Before [their hybridization by Moreau], they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surrounds. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never dies, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau--and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me."

Because Moreau's hybrids can be neither fully animal, nor fully human, they are forever in limbo, unable to commit to either existence. Wells is saying that humanity is in the same sorry condition, caught in an endless tug-of-war between the earthly and the spiritual, with a desire to please God and an equally strong desire to please the animal nature. How then can the human animal ever experience peace? Wells uses words like "fret" and "agony"  and "struggle" to describe this constant state of guilt and dissonance, and even accuses a God who would create such a situation as wanton.

I see this book as a really effective critique of religion and its expectations.

Book Review: The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

I bought this book with my Christmas money and just finished it today, which should tell you how much of a page-turner it was (not much!).

This book had some beautiful writing, some phrases that I had to stop and reread, absorb and enjoy. But overall, I just didn't get invested in the story.

The book starts in 1996, with the explosion of small bomb in Delhi. Two Hindu boys are killed in the blast, which also injures their best friend Mansoor, a young Muslim. Both sets of parents are liberals who enjoy a friendship that transcends religious boundaries, and yet their attitudes shift in the aftermath of the blast. Narration jumps from character to character as people navigate their grief; we also get to hear the story from the point of view of the bomber.

Delhi is almost a character of its own in the story; in my opinion Mahajan's descriptions of the city are among the finest passages in the book.

He describes an office building with windows so old and congealed that "they were quietly weeping light...The tables piled with fresh-smelling paper. Above all this, the enormous distant ceiling fans that shivered like the antennae of insects and patrolled the sprawling empire of paperwork with their breeze..."

And outside, in the city, "a car had broken down between two flowing gutters. Beneath it, a runway of needles, discarded by the hospital, glistened in the sunshine, the garbage ponderously overflowing, everything protected by the rusty, aggressive fragrance of the air conditioner, in whose lungs the krill of pollution stuck."

But despite these and several other lovely word clusters, I can't give this book more than three stars. It just didn't capture my interest much.