“Heart Berries: A Memoir”, by Terese Marie Mailhot

 

160 pages, Counterpoint, ISBN-13: 978-1619023345

Heart Berries: A Memoir is the debut book from the Canadian First Nation writer Terese Marie Mailhot and describes her troubled childhood, tumultuous motherhood and adult struggles with mental health and personal identity. Critics and readers have, as far as I can see, fallen all over themselves to praise this book to the stars as a raw, honest work of a Woman With Issues. And it’s true that Mailhot’s memoires give insight as to her innermost thoughts and struggles, things that are not to be belittled or taken lightly. This explains the book’s structure for, while officially divided into 11 chapters, the whole thing is really a kind of stream-of-consciousness strand in which the writer’s voice mimics the reality of her world of an indigenous woman as she struggles with mental issues and poor taste in men.

I’m not the only one to notice this, either, for Minnesota’s Star Tribune described Mailhot’s writing as “spooky and powerful…although many critics have described this book with stuttering superlatives, readers will differ on whether it’s poetic or incoherent, brilliant self-examination or wordy narcissism”. I think I fall into the later category, mostly due to her style, which are lots of short, jabbing sentences, like I was being poked by a beefy wrestler in the temple with an iron thimble on his finger (this is the same reason I don’t like Hemingway, either). Her habit of starting each essay as if it were part of a conversation that I just stumbled into was jarring, as well, and I felt like I had to spend several pages catching up before I could join in. And she keeps talking to “You”, but I quickly lost track over which inadequate man “You” is supposed to be at any given time. There are so many.

Sooooo…I dunno; after completing this book in a single sitting – I mean, its only 160 pages – I still don’t know what makes this woman tick, except, perhaps for sheer stubbornness and to avenge herself in print on all those men who Done Her Wrong.

“The Problem with Me – And Other Essays About Making Trouble in China Today”, by Han Han, translated by Alice Xin Liu and Joel Martinsen

 

240 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1451660036

According to all I have read, Han Han, the author of The Problem with Me – And Other Essays About Making Trouble in China Today (translated by Alice Xin Liu and Joel Martinsen) is China’s most popular blogger, creator of the literary magazine Party, a singer, professional rally car driver and best-selling author, having published five novels to date. In May 2010 he was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine, while in September of the same year he was listed 48^th in “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010” by The New Statesman; in June 2010 he was interviewed by CNN as China’s rebel writer who has become the unofficial voice for his generation. And I had never heard of him. So…..

The Problem with Me are a series of essays about any number of topics that spark Han Han’s interest, which turns out to be rather broad, even in totalitarian China. And through it all he seems to be rather honest: about his shortcomings as a husband, as an activist, writer and speaker. He recognizes that, for all his verbal boldness, he really isn’t that radical and is more on the political Right (relatively speaking; it’s China, after all) than his friends would like, and he is, like most people, selfish. And I’m sure the translators struggled with his writings because he isn’t really all that nuanced with Kanye West level arrogance. I guess that’s to be expected, seeing as how successful he’s been at such a young age, but it can grate after a while.

Han Han earned a reputation as a dissident in China because he criticized various institutions – educational and political, but others besides – but only when he was affected by the same, not because of any concrete aims for reform. Most of his writing is simply what passes through his mind, the stuff of diaries and memoirs (school days and rally races and reunions and interviews). Nevertheless, he’s evidently popular, with the entries where he argues with his comment section or debunks conspiracy theories (that he’s merely been installed as an arm of the state, that there is no actual Han Han) bear this out. So: a portrait of a place from a popular critic-incrementalistic, not exactly someone who’s really concerned with “making trouble” or inspiring revolutions.

“Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”, by Allan Gurganus

 

718 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0394545370

My mother bought Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus way back in the early 90s but never got ‘round to reading it, which is about when I came along and “borrowed” it. So, what to make of it? The premise is that it is the oral reminisces of one 99-year-old Lucy Marsden (that’s the Widow) as she speaks to an unnamed visitor to her nursing home, circa 1980 or so, about her life and times, most of which were spent with her husband, “Colonel” William Marsden, who was 50-years-old when she married him in 1900 at the ripe of age of…15. And there is the first issue I had with this book: while she explains that, after having made a fool of herself at her first cotillion which led her to become Persona non grata in proper society – and, evidently, the perfect match for a 50-year-old bachelor – I had a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of parents allowing their child to be wed to a man old enough to be her grandfather. Different culture, different rules, I know, but…lordamighty.

This “Oral History” structure of the book allows for certain privileges on the author’s part, like letting Lucy ramble on and on about one topic or another in little self-contained vignettes, which more often than not are out of chronological order; in this way it sounds very much like an old person rummaging through their memories and picking up whatever thought they find before moving onto the next (anyone who has ever spoken to an elderly person for an extended period knows what I’m talking about). This literary devise often works well…until it doesn’t, for all too often one feels that the book is too well-structured to be a true oral history, as Gurganus has a handle on balancing the descriptiveness of the story while moving the plot along, something I suspect a woman closing in on a century of life wouldn’t be able to accomplish in her fly-by-wire ruminations on her long life. But Gurganus the author must keep the story turning, so this supposed memoir has a proper, professional structure to it after all.

But, for all that, this is an uneven book. The first 200-pages, give or take, are good, cleverly written and formally structured; again, beyond what would be believable as an old woman’s spoken recollection. So much so that it is painfully obvious that these words, supposedly spoken ex tempore by an almost-100-year-old woman, were in fact carefully crafted over long hours by a professional writer (so much for suspension of disbelief). But after that the tale quickly goes south (heh), and Widow dissolves into a series of brief vignettes in which Lucy – and thus, the reader – find themselves lost in a string of disconnected tales, some of which were quite engaging while others were tedious as hell, if not pointless. Perhaps this was Gurganus’ way of correcting his overly-written book and making it seem more like the memories of an old woman pouring forth? I doubt it; any editor worth their salt would have detected this and made him correct this obvious change in tone and focus.

So while I really, really wanted to like Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, there were just too many literary inconsistencies for my liking for me to really enjoy it. All well and good for a book club, maybe, where discussions can be started and controversies sparked (hmmmmm…), but for a one-on-one read I would find better things to do.

“Sailing to Utopia” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

534 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041837

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Sailing to Utopia was the eighth in this series featuring the characters Konrad Arflane, “Ryan”, Colonel Jerry Cornelius (who seems to be a different character from Jerry Cornelius) and Max von Bek, and includes the tales The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Distant Suns and Flux. I think that the editors over at White Wolf were in a quandary over these stories, as bundling them all together is rather a stretch, seeing as they basically have nothing to do with one another – except for ships, and traveling hither and yon. So…there’s that. Anyway…

 

The first book is The Ice Schooner, a stand-alone work published in 1969 that really has nothing to do with Moorcock’s Multiverse…but oh well, here it is. It takes place on Earth sometime in the far future after a nuclear war has caused temperatures around the globe to plummet and coating the planet in a never-ending sheet of ice. Creatures have adapted to the new climate, especially the whales who now prowl the surface and have become the principle source of food and raw material for the sparse and dwindling human population. Indeed, the existence of the eight cities of the chasms where the story takes place depends on the hearty crews of these ice schooners to do their job and hunt the terrible and elusive whales. The ice schooners themselves are rather cool, too: sailing ships with fiberglass hulls that glide about on massive metal skies, they were crafted long ago and the method of their construction has been lost. I found The Ice Schooner to be rather cool (heh), with an interesting (though underdeveloped) world filled with intriguing creatures and a different-though-familiar society. The protagonist, Konrad Arflane, still has all the trappings of an Eternal Champion, what with his being strong and clever and wise and willing to Fight the Good Fight, but in a rather different twist, he is not a future-sighted revolutionary but rather a traditionalist determined to preserve his world and its way of life; indeed, the novel’s central theme is the friction caused by Arflane’s stubborn traditionalism butting against other characters who are slowly departing from the time honored ways and the physical evidence of the evolving world is. This is at heart a Sci-Fi action yarn and is unapologetic about it, despite flashes of trying to be something more or say something profound.

 

Next we have The Black Corridor, and a book more different from the previous entry would be hard to find. Likewise written in 1969 – this time coauthored with Moorcock’s wife at the time, Hilary Bailey – this tale explores the effects of physical isolation – in the first instance, a spaceship with a lone awake crewman hurtling across space (written by Moorcock) and societal isolation – and in the second instance, a near-future world plunging into fascism (written by Bailey). The two tales are parallel narratives in which an astronaut, piloting a spaceship with a group of family and friends towards their new home of Barnard’s Star, while Mr. Ryan, a successful toy businessman, is compelled by the authorities to fire his Welsh staff and begin manufacturing weapons; both stories converge at a distant point in space. I promise, while both stories appear to have nothing in common, it all becomes clear in the end. There is a deep political message running through the stories, as well, one that states that warns against mankind’s tendency to search for messiahs to solve their every problem rather than a pragmatic politicians to fix everyday problems (a hopeless desire, if you ask me).

 

The Distant Suns is the third book in this volume and takes place on a 21^st Century Earth (uh-oh) that is overcrowded, underfed and teetering on the brink of worldwide chaos (I repeat, uh-oh). But fear not, for Colonel Jerry Cornelius, hero and adventurer extraordinaire, arrives as humanity’s last best hope to Save Us All and, accompanied his wife Cathy and good friend Professor Frank Marek, undertakes to brave the madness of space in order to find another world able to sustain human life. But all is not what it seems on this New Earth, and Colonel Cornelius finds himself in a race against time to uncover the hidden mysteries of the planet in time for the rest of humanity to relocate and save itself. As well being a straight-up Sci-Fi novel, The Distant Suns is a Jerry Cornelius book, which may or may not mean anything, seeing as there is precious little to connect his books with one another. What it does have in common with other Jerry Cornelius tales is its pretentiousness, which wears thin in this book even faster than usual. The characterizations in The Distant Suns, along with the pace and overall style, are sadly typical of any work starring Jerry Cornelius – well, maybe not, seeing as in this one, at least, Cornelius has been extricated from his native Carnaby Street, London.

 

Lastly we come to Flux which, along with being the shortest tale in this volume (and written in conjunction with Barrington Bayley), is also the oldest, having been published in New Worlds #132 way the hell back in deepest, darkest 1963; is has also been retconned, with the original character, Max File, being replaced by Max von Bek, thus retrospectively making it a part of the Eternal Champion mythos. So here we go: on a future Earth, the European Economic Community (EEC) is nearing a critical mass of combined overpopulation and overdevelopment and a point of catastrophic entropy (you don’t say). To avert crisis, it quietly developed a means of time travel and selects Max File…er, Max von Bek, a government functionary who was socially engineered to possess a high degree of skill in the art of organizational management, to travel ten years into the future to find out what will happen and what will come about and then return to report his findings so that laws governing the sequence of time may be analyzed and a formula for human government may be developed that removes “the random element from human affairs”. Got it? Flux is nothing if not ambitious, and it’s a shame that Moorcock did not develop it into a full-scale novel, or more, and is more frustrating than intriguing because of it. While many Deep Thoughts emerge and the Multiverse makes a cameo, the tale is far too short to be really fulfilling. As for the Shyamalanesque twist at the end…

“Choose Your Own Adventure” by Multiple Authors

 

Bantam Books

Along with Endless Quest series of books (reviewed on November 11^th, 2021) and The Three Investigators (reviewed on March 13^th, 2024), Choose Your Own Adventure books made up much of my adolescent reading schedule. As with Endless Quest (which it predates by three years), the Choose Your Own Adventure series are books aimed at adolescents in which each story is written from a second-person point of view with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome. The subject matter covered by these works was much broader than Endless Quest, which limited itself to All Things TSR, especially Dungeons & Dragons; thus, time travel, ocean voyages, desert adventures, outer space quests, mysteries, spy thrillers, westerns, medieval tales, road races…innumerable subjects could and were subjected to the CYOA treatment.

 

“The Cave of Time”, by Edward Packard
115 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232288
“Journey Under the Sea”, by R. A. Montgomery
117 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232295
“By Balloon to the Sahara”, by Douglas Terman
117 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553140057
“Space and Beyond”, by R. A. Montgomery
116 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553208917
“The Mystery of Chimney Rock”, by Edward Packard
122 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553209617
“Your Code Name Is Jonah”, by Edward Packard
114 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553209136
“The Third Planet from Altair”, by Edward Packard
117 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553139785
“Deadwood City”, by Edward Packard
113 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553139945
“Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?”, by Edward Packard
122 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553231816
“The Lost Jewels of Nabooti”, by R. A. Montgomery
121 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232318
“Mystery of the Maya”, by R. A. Montgomery
134 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553231861
“Inside UFO 54-40”, by Edward Packard
118 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553201970
“The Abominable Snowman”, by R. A. Montgomery
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553233322
“The Forbidden Castle”, by Edward Packard
118 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232363
“House of Danger”, by R. A. Montgomery
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553225419
“Survival at Sea”, by Edward Packard
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553227680
“The Race Forever”, by R. A. Montgomery
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553259889
“Underground Kingdom”, by Edward Packard
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232929
“Secret of the Pyramids”, by Richard Brightfield
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232950
“Escape”, by R. A. Montgomery
128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553232943

And, for the most part, they were all cool, too. I mean, everything from my youth is seen through a diaphanous haze of nostalgia in which all that was good is crystal clear while all that was bad is blissfully hidden. But I recall not being able to wait for bedtime when I could crack one of these bad boys open and read by the light of an old office lamp my Dad had attached to my headboard. In the years before I discovered History and the Great Men of the World, these books were what thrilled and, to a certain extent, educated me. And they all ignited that love of reading that I have still to this day (as well as my love of collecting books, a blessing and a curse, if I’m to be honest). Choose Your Own Adventure – AND Endless Quest AND The Three Investigators – are just a few of the treasured jewels from my childhood that I will cherish always and that will remain even after these books have crumbled to dust.

“Apollo: The Mission to Land a Man on the Moon” by Al Cimino

 

192 pages, Chartwell Books, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0785837039

Chartwell Books is one of these publishers that produces big, splashy, colorful and informative books for the general reader that I get for cheap from the Barnes & Noble overstock shelves or from Ollie’s book section or even from 2^nd & Charles when I’m in the mood. Apollo: The Mission to Land a Man on the Moon by Al Cimino came from the Barnes & Noble overstock shelf and is everything you’d expect from a Chartwell production: while less than 200 pages it’s a big book, and each and every one of those pages is packed with pictures, text, graphs, informational boxes and so on. Again, just what you’d expect from Chartwell.

While there are a wide range of subjects and events covered in this book – all of the Apollo missions are discussed, as are the Astronauts, engineers, technical aspects of the missions and so forth – this is not what I would call an in-depth study of Apollo. It is, rather, a splashy overview of the American achievement of putting men on the moon and bringing them back again, if only for a few years. Not uninformative in the least, just more of an introduction to the Apollo program. There are, however, several problems with this book, for I think the editors were asleep at the wheel when it was produced. These include, but are not limited to (*ahem*):

• pg. 6 – Werner Von Braun was not captured by the US Army; he surrendered
• pg. 16 – 8000 meters isn’t 2500 feet and 2500 feet isn’t 1.5 miles
• pg. 21 – the Thor rockets were IRBMs (Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles) not ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles)
• pg. 21 – the Jupiter rockets were single stage rockets, not two; the September 20^th flight referred to as a “Jupiter” was a Jupiter-C which was based on the Redstone rockets
• pg. 21 – the Vanguard rockets were not developed as military rockets, as implied
• pg. 26 – the Vanguard was described by Khrushchev as a “grapefruit”, not Explorer 1
• pg. 45 – while Deke Slayton was one of the original Mercury 7 Astronauts he in fact was medically disqualified to fly, as stated
• pg. 48 – the Mercury-Redstone rockets had solid retro rocket motors not retro-rocket thrusters
• pg. 48 – the Atlas rockets did not use liquid oxygen as a fuel but as an oxidizer
• pg. 57 – Huntsville, Alabama, was home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, not the Manned Space Flight Center
• pg. 60 – the Apollo 1 cabin pressure was only slightly higher than atmospheric pressure, not 1.5 times higher, so that the engineers could check for leaks
• pg. 68 – he Saturn V rocket was assembled next to the launch umbilical tower, not atop it
• pg. 73 – the on the Couch-Restraint System were on the side panels, not on the couch itself
• pg. 78 – Conrad’s full name was in fact Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr.
• pg. 88 – Cimino states that “Two of the 2nd stage engines gave out during liftoff” on Apollo 4, which is incorrect: the 2^nd stage engines were not burning at liftoff and when they did fire, they worked properly (he is perhaps confusing Apollo 4 with Apollo 6)
• pg. 88 – Apollo 4 did not “keel over”
• pg. 92 – there was no Lunar Module on Apollo 7 as stated
• pg. 92 – Apollo 7 did not fly over terrain that “had never been seen before”
• pg. 108 – the astronauts did not wear “metallic suits” as stated
• pg. 110 – the text has the Rocketdyne J-2 engines firing before the ullage rockets
• pg. 111 – the Lunar orbit insertion burn occurred behind the moon, not on approach
• pg. 111 – no explosives were involved in LM/CSM separation
• pg. 140 – the flotation collar was applied by the recovery team swimmers, not by Collins
• pg. 169 – text states Scott cut the descent “engines” when there was only one

I stopped counting after that. So, what to do? If you get it cheap – like I did – then this is a good buy, but under no circumstances pay full price for this thing. Maybe check it out if your local library has it, and then just look at all of the pictures.

“Tutankhamun: The Untold Story” by Thomas Hoving

 

384 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671243050

Say, do you miss Borders as much as I do? I’ll bet you do. Between them and Barnes & Noble (2^nd & Charles had yet to make an appearance) I acquired hundreds of books, new and used, for my library – for cheap, too. Like this one, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story by Thomas Hoving, which tells the tale of how the tomb of King Tut was discovered, cataloged, restored and brought to light in 1922. Written in 1978, I got it for a mere $4.55, which all good-hearted people can agree is a bargain, make no mistake. Even though this book is 30+ years old it is still (as far as I know) the definitive account of the events surrounding the rediscovery of this most-famous of Pharaohs.

I found myself exceeding my typical chapter-a-day reading schedule with this one, as the title of the book is true: there are many tales surrounding the discovery and opening of this tomb that were unknown, at least by me (and others, I imagine; everything I have read or watched about King Tut’s tomb failed to mention much of the information I gleamed from this book). For instance, the fact that both Howard Carter and his benefactor Lord Carnarvon illegally entered the tomb before announcing its discovery, or that, contrary to popular belief, while the tomb was mostly intact, it had been broken into and robbed on previous occasions in the past.

But wait! There’s more…Carter and Lord Carnarvon not only practiced “art dealing of a rather cutthroat and questionable variety” – that is, they up and sold ancient artifacts for the cash they needed to support their digs – but also spirited numerous items out of Egypt against Egyptian law (some of which can still be found in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; indeed, Carter’s biggest attempted theft was discovered and then covered up, with help from the Met). Meanwhile, Carter’s unbalanced, combative behavior in dealing with Egyptian/French authorities was largely responsible for the end of friendly conditions for archaeologists in Egypt.

But all this came after such dedication and persistence on the part of the difficult Carter and the patient Carnarvon, for after five years of fruitlessly searching the “played out” Valley of the Kings, just when they were about to give up, their efforts were at last crowned by success; the fact that the tomb was actually the long-lost Tutankhamun’s was just gravy. Add to that the description of the first tour of the interior (whether Carter was cheating by undertaking it) and the account of the gradual peeling away of the layers of the magnificent tomb at the center of which lay the remains of the King…considering all that it is quite possible to forgive most trespasses.

Be warned, however: while the mechanics of discovering, accessing, cataloging, preserving and removing the many treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb are presented, the main thrust of the story involves the politics behind all of that; Carter fighting with the press, with the antiquities department, with other archeologists, with the governments not only of Egypt and Britain but of America and others, and so on (rather too much, if I’m to be honest). All of which distracts from what should be the main thrust of the story: the treasures and their meanings to the Ancient Egyptians. Not that it was without interest…just not THAT much interest.

While many of these stories may be familiar to many of us today, they were not when first collected together into one source by Hoving in this book from 40+ years ago, and for that there is no reason to despise Tutankhamun: The Untold Story.