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MINI-REVIEWS: The 14th Dalai Lama and Gandhi manga biographies

Posted by Anastasia on October 5, 2011 4 Responses »

Oct 052011

Click on the book cover to go to its Amazon page.

116. The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography by Tetsu Saiwai
Publication: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (September 28, 2010), Paperback, 208pp / ISBN 0143118153
Genre: Children’s/MG Graphic Novel, Biography

Read: September 29, 2011
Source: Publisher (thank you!)

Review

It’s always difficult to compress a person’s life story into a book that’s less than 200 pages, but The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography made a decent effort. It highlights the important parts of the Dalai Lama’s life, from childhood to adulthood, and it gives a good overview of the situation with Tibet and China. The art was nice, if not overly detailed, and the writing was pretty compelling. Maybe some scenes were a little melodramatic, but they kept the story from getting boring.

I do have some issues with other aspects of the book, though. There’s no info on who translated the book, there are no page numbers, and the pages have been flipped. I’m guessing the flipping happened because it’s easier for people who aren’t familiar with manga to read, but why the exclusion of the page numbers? Why no translator info? It’s just weird.

Rating

Not the best manga ever, but it’s pretty good.

117. Gandhi: A Manga Biography by Kazuki Ebine
Publication: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 27, 2011), Paperback, 192pp / ISBN 0143120247
Genre: Children’s/MG Graphic Novel, Biography

Read: September 29, 2011
Source: Publisher (thank you!)

Review

Since I enjoyed The 14th Dalai Lama I was hoping for something similar with this one, but unfortunately it’s not that good. There’s still the same issue with compressing 70 or so years into less than 200 pages, but I think The 14th Dalai Lama‘s author did a better job at doing it. Gandhi‘s author put emphasis on the world-changing parts of Gandhi’s life, sure, but he skipped over a lot of the personally important parts. The 14th Dalai Lama has bits with the Dalai Lama’s family, and his friends, etc., and it makes for a more compelling story. With Gandhi, almost all that personal stuff is either skipped over or visualized with maybe one page, and it made his story feel very cold. I don’t think the stilted dialogue helped, either.

Like The 14th Dalai Lama, there are no page numbers or info about the translator, and the pages are flipped. Even worse, however, are the multiple errors in the text, including a misspelling of “perhaps.” There also isn’t any punctuation except for exclamation and question marks, which makes reading it pretty terrible. The art is also less interesting than in The 14th Dalai Lama, which, considering how light on the details that one was, is saying something.

Rating

Good for the very basics of Gandhi’s life, but it’s got mediocre art and questionable copy-editing.

REVIEW: Ringlingville USA by Jerry Apps

Posted by Anastasia on August 8, 2011 8 Responses »

Aug 082011

78. Ringlingville USA: The Stupendous Story of Seven Siblings and Their Stunning Circus Success by Jerry Apps
Publication: Wisconsin Historical Society Press (October 6, 2004), Paperback, 280pp / ISBN 087020355X
Genre: Non-fiction, History

Read: July 22, 2011
Source: Bought

Summary from Amazon:

The Ringling Brothers began their business under the most modest of circumstances and through hard work, business savvy, and some luck created the largest, most famous circus in the world. They became wealthy men, one 50 cent admission ticket at a time.

Ringlingville USA chronicles the brothers’ journey from immigrant poverty to enduring glory as the kings of the circus world. The Ringlings and their circus were last studied in depth over four decades ago. Now, for the first time, the brothers’ detailed financial records and personal correspondence are available to researchers. Jerry Apps weaves together that information with newspaper accounts, oral histories, colorful anecdotes, and stunning circus ephemera and photos, many never before been published, to illuminate the importance of the Ringlings’ accomplishments. He describes how the Ringling Brothers confronted the challenges of taxation, war, economic pressure, changing technology, and personal sorrows to find their place in history. The brothers emerge as complex characters whose ambition, imagination, and pure hucksterism fueled the phenomenon that was the Ringling Brothers’ Circus.

Review

Look, clowns are scary, right? But clowns aren’t the only part of a circus and I LOVE the circus, even if I haven’t been to one since I was 10 or 12 or something. That last circus? That last circus was the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, and it was AWESOME. I love books about circuses, real or imagined, and so by all rights this book, which is about the history of the Ringling Bros. circus, should have been at least as awesome as the circus itself was.

Well, it wasn’t. Continue reading »

REVIEW: Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden

Posted by Anastasia on April 5, 2011 3 Responses »

Apr 052011

27. Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden
Publication: Gotham; Reprint edition (March 1, 2011), Paperback, 288pp / ISBN 9781592406067
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography/Memoir

Rating: Buy it
Read: March 21-23, 2011

Source: Publisher

Summary from Amazon:

For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy’s birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink. In Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy invites readers to meet her tragically flawed family, including an uncle with a fondness for Hitler, a grandfather who believes you can never have enough household staff, and a remarkably flatulent grandmother.

Review

You know those family history-slash-memoir books that came out in the 1920s and ’30s? The ones with wit and style and humor, so much so that it all just screamed “flapper”? Well, that’s what Dead End Gene Pool reminds me of. It’s not a true flapper memoir, of course, not least because it’s not set in the 1920s. But the style reminds me of those flapper memoirs, and despite the edge of darkness it’s actually a really fun book to read.

Wendy Burden’s family has a long and somewhat sordid past. They did great things and spent a lot of money, and somewhere along the way they became infected with “bad genes” (hence the title). Nearly every member of Ms Burden’s family has got some sort of trouble, be it drugs, alchoholism, mental problems or a proclivity towards suicide, and yet Ms Burden manages to write of their lives in such a way that you feel sympathetic and a bit disappointed with the way things turned out, like watching a butterfly become stuck in a spider’s web. Everyone had so much potential– the Vanderbilt family was/is brilliant as well as rich– but the sticky strings of money, boredom, and an overinflated sense of self damned the Vanderbilt family just as the trapped butterfly is damned to being eaten.

Of course, not all of the Vanderbilt family is trapped. Wendy seems to have gotten away after a bit of fiddling with the sticky strings, so perhaps her genes have reverted back into the “good” ones and the family’s future isn’t entirely doomed to hungry spiders after all. Somehow I always think that if at least one member of a family can pull off writing a great book, that must mean that the rest of the family will be okay later, too. Like it’s by proxy, almost– although I don’t think it ever actually happens, sadly enough.

If you like family memoirs that showcase quirky, lovable, and slightly manical people but doesn’t ever get overly saccharine or cute, you should definitely check out Dead End Gene Pool. The combination of darkness and humor was just perfect.

And

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Other reviews: Book, Line and Sinker | Sophisticated Dorkiness | Book Journey

MINI-REVIEWS: Walt Disney’s Way, The Boxcar Children’s Mysteries #1, Scrapped Princess: A Tale of Destiny

Posted by Anastasia on January 31, 2011 4 Responses »

Jan 312011

04. Walt Disney’s Way by New Word City
Publication: FT Press (February 1, 2010), ebook, 139kb / ISBN
Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography

Rating: Bin it
Read: January 14, 2011

Source: Downloaded (when it was free)

Review

So, yeah: this isn’t really a “book,” it’s more like a short pamphlet or something. Also, it’s boring as hell. Good primer for Walt Disney’s life, and if you’re a business person you might be interested by the end where it details how to emulate the good bits of Disney’s business sense, but if you’re looking for an actual biography or, like, anything more detailed than a Wikipedia page, look elsewhere.

05. The Boxcar Children’s Mysteries #1 by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Publication: Albert Whitman & Company (December 14, 2010), ebook, 1552kb / ISBN
Genre: Children’s Fiction

Rating: Borrow it
Read: January 14-15, 2011

Source: Bought

Review

Hey, it’s a reread! Yay! On the other hand, I probably could have picked a better book to reread. My favorite thing about the Boxcar books when I was younger– the last time I read this– was that it’s about kids who live on their own in a boxcar, and they’re all self-sufficient and stuff. That’s good stuff! It’s exciting, and when you’re a kid you might not notice the…er…other stuff. The stuff where all the girls are super happy to do household stuff, know how to make fabulous dinners, and can sew whatever the hell they get their hands on. And the boys (well, the oldest boy, at least), are the providers who get jobs and bring home the bacon and stuff.

WOW. I mean, yes– it’s an old book. It was written originally in 1924, before women’s lib and before people generally started wanting their kids to be kids instead of little versions of adults. But still. How could I not have noticed that when I was younger? I guess I was too busy thinking about how much I wanted to live in a boxcar to worry about the job I’d be stuck with if I actually did live in one with my stupid brother.

Ms Chandler Warner did seem like a sweet lady, though, just one that was stuck in the so-called standard roles for women and men. This bit from the Boxcar Children Wikipedia page is so sweet and cute, I can’t feel overly angry towards her:

As she wrote the story, Warner read it to her classes and rewrote it many times so the words were easy to understand. Some of her pupils spoke other languages at home and were just learning English, so The Boxcar Children gave them a fun story that was easy to read. Warner once wrote that the original book “raised a storm of protest from librarians who thought the children were having too good a time without any parental control! That is exactly why children like it!”

10. Scrapped Princess: A Tale of Destiny by Ichiro Sakaki (translated by Paul Kotta)
Publication: TokyoPop (October 3, 2006), Paperback, 200pp / ISBN 1595329846
Genre: Light Novel, Fantasy/Sci-fi

Rating: Borrow it
Read: January 23, 2011

Source: Bought

Review

This book has a PRINCESS in it, and it’s so awesome. Don’t take too much heart into the fact that I rated it “borrow,” because I’m pretty much going to rate all light novels “borrow.” They’re fun to read and very enjoyable (for the most part) but they aren’t the best written things out there.

Anyway, what I really liked about Scrapped Princess is that though it’s got the “hidden princess who is secretly the thing upon which the future of the world resides” trope in it, it does some unusual things in the actual story. For instance, Pacifica (that’s the princess) was adopted by some ex-soldiers and raised as there own. When she finds out she’s a princess? She does not immediately abandon her adopted family, nor do they abandon her! In fact, one of the main themes is how even if you’re adopted your adopted family is still your FAMILY, your family who loves you and wants to protect you from insane assassins and the king who wants you dead! I thought that was really wonderful, and pretty unusual in a story where the more standard thing would have been for Pacifica to wander off alone somewhere.

I also liked the blending of fake historical past with almost steampunkish technology– a thing that’s not overly unusual in anime– and I liked the characters, and the action was great! It was a lot of fun, for real.

Unfortunately, there’s 13 volumes in the series (plus some short stories), and TokyoPop only licensed the first three. I’m going to Google around and see if anybody else has licensed (or translated) the rest– but I’m very annoyed by this! Just FYI.

Review: Inventing George Washington by Edward G. Lengel

Posted by Anastasia on January 11, 2011 4 Responses »

Jan 112011

01. Inventing George Washington by Edward G. Lengel
Publication: Harper (January 18, 2011), ARC, 214pp / ISBN 0061662585
Genre: Non-fiction, (Social) History
Rating: Buy it
Read: January 1-3, 2011
Source: Publisher
Summary from Amazon:

In Inventing George Washington, historian Edward G. Lengel shows how the late president and war hero continued to serve his nation on two distinct levels. The public Washington evolved into an eternal symbol as Father of His Country, while the private man remained at the periphery of the national vision—always just out of reach—for successive generations yearning to know him as never before.

Both images, public and private, were vital to perceptions Americans had of their nation and themselves. Yet over time, as Lengel shows, the contrasting and simultaneous urges to deify Washington and to understand him as a man have produced tensions that have played out in every generation. As some exalted him, others sought to bring him down to earth, creating a series of competing mythologies that depicted Washington as every sort of human being imaginable. Inventing George Washington explores these representations, shedding new light on this national emblem, our nation itself, and who we are.

Review

I had a lot of fun reading Inventing George Washington! I hadn’t realized that some of the things I thought I knew about George Washington were actually false– I suppose I had more faith in my history teachers, that they wouldn’t propagate false stories or lies (although, really, ALL history books have issues with telling the truth). I do remember talking about the cherry tree myth and how it was false, but I don’t remember doing anything else. And poor Martha Washington was completely thrown under the bus in my history classes! (I really need to read a M. Washington biography now, for real.) Anyway, it was a real eye-opener.

My favorite thing about Mr Lengel’s book is how he traces political and ideological changes throughout society, and how those changes affected how people viewed Washington. I found it especially interesting how various politicians and the like twist Washington’s character to push their own agenda. For instance: people that want to legalize pot say that Washington grew and smoked marijuana himself (he did not), people that want to push religion even more into government say that Washington was a Christian (no evidence for that), etc.

It actually makes me feel kinda bad for Washington, especially since he tends to be viewed as a block of stone instead of as a person. It’s very difficult to sympathise with a block of stone, which is probably why people have such an easy time shoving him into their pigeon-holes. Are any of the other “founding fathers” in the same predicament? I don’t think they are– but then, that’s because most of them left a large paper trail that’s still relatively intact. Washington (and Martha) got rid of a lot of his papers, and his stupid relatives got rid of a lot more, so we have less to go on regarding his character, personality, etc. Hence: block of stone.

I went off on a tangent there, I think! But, yes: I enjoyed this book a lot! It covered the Washington myth succinctly and, I assume, accurately. My only complaint is that it didn’t have much in the way of what Washington actually thought or did, it’s just what he didn’t think or didn’t do. Jenny said something about how that might be because Mr Lengel wrote a biography on Washington already, which makes me wonder if this book is sort of like a supplement to that one. Either way, this book has firmly cemented my interest in American Revolution history, which means I’ll probably be tracking down more books on the subject soon!

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Other reviews: Jenny’s Books

Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Posted by Anastasia on November 15, 2010 3 Responses »

Nov 152010

217. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Publication: Bantam (199) originally published 1968, Hardcover, 412pp / ISBN 0553380648
Genre: Non-Fiction
Rating: Borrow it
Read: October 31-November 12, 2010
Source: Library
Summary from Amazon:

Tom Wolfe’s much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced “acid tests” all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe’s ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter-culture canon of American literature.

Review

I had to read this for one of my classes, and unfortunately I don’t remember what my prof said about it even though we only talked about it like two weeks ago. This isn’t my favorite book in the world, and in fact I had such a difficult time finishing it that I’m feeling a bit hostile. I said on Twitter that after finishing it I was going to give myself a few days to get over my antagonism towards it so I could write a decent review– so that’s what this is. My attempt at writing something more than “those damn acid heads.”

As a novel, I find The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test boring as hell. There’s only so many times I can read about what acid makes you feel like when you’re on it, and the entire book is about acid and what it makes you feel like. It’s interesting for the first few pages, but by the end I was just hoping for someone to start doing some cocaine or something, just for a change. 400 pages of acid-induced hallucinations and acid head babbling is about 300 pages too many, and not even the compelling characters could drag me out of my apathetic towards their acid-filled lives.

Add onto all that the fact that I’m not overly interested in 1960′s drug culture or the plight of middle-class white Americans who think living in a slum is high adventure, and it made for some dull times. I had to force myself through the last 100 pages, and even then I skimmed most of it. Continue reading »

Review: Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures by Menno Metselaar and Ruud van der Rol

Posted by Anastasia on January 8, 2010 2 Responses »

Jan 082010

3. Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures by Menno Metselaar and Ruud van der Rol
Publication: Flash Point (September 1, 2009), Hardcover, 216pp / ISBN 1596435461
Genre: Biography
Rating:
Read: January 4, 2010
Source: Library
Summary from Amazon:

On a summer day in 1942, Anne Frank and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. Until the day they arrested her, more than two years later, she kept a diary. ANNE FRANK is the indispensible visual guide to her tragic, but inspiring story. Produced in association with The Anne Frank House and filled with never-before-published snapshots, school pictures, and photos of the diary and the Secret Annex, this elegantly designed album is both a stand-alone introduction to Anne’s life and a photographic companion to a classic of Holocaust literature.

Review

I didn’t sleep well Sunday night, and my eyes weren’t wanting to focus on the book I had brought with me to work (the type! so tiny!). So I grabbed this off the shelf and hoped for the best– and it was the best.

I first read Anne Frank’s diary in elementary school, I think, and while I haven’t read it in a while I do remember the basics. I also remember really enjoying it (I tend to like diaries-as-books, anyway, but Anne Frank’s is particularly well-written). This book, Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures, is sort of like a supplement to her diary. It has lots of pictures of Anne Frank, her family, her friends, the annex where they hid for nearly two years, plus photos of her actual diary. I had never seen these photos before, so I really appreciated being able to look through them and into Anne Frank’s life.

As well as the photos, there’s a sort of biography of Anne Frank and her family’s life from the time she was born to the time she died. It doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail, but it’s a good outline and one that’s sensitively written. I appreciated that it didn’t go into sensationalism or frivolity; it kept itself to the known facts, with few speculations and no hyperbole from what I could see.

I’m actually feeling really emotional after finishing this book. I was reading it on the bus ride home and I definitely teared up so much I nearly missed my stop. I think being able to see Anne as well as reading her words and the words about her life is so touching, and poignant, and wonderful, that can’t recommend this book enough. I think it works for everyone, both young and old, for anyone who is interested in history and human life.