The Yiddish Policemen's Union

#100
Title: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2007
Genre: fiction, alternate history
414 pages  

This seemed like a good book for #100. Chabon gives us an alternate history in which the Jewish nation, more or less, has wound up in Sitka, Alaska rather than the Middle East. It starts slow, which I apparently enjoyed more than some reviewers. I found the opening psychological and developmental sections more compelling than the later, faster-paced action. Chabon manages an enjoyable and never-normalizing blend of Yiddishkeit and the noir detective novel. The end seemed deflated, with a confused climax and a concerning loss of momentum. I did not find it to be an adequate payoff for the buildup. For this reason, I'd recommend The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay instead.

The Leap

#99
Title: The Leap
Author: Jonathan Stroud
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2001
Genre: children's/young adult, fantasy & science fiction
233 pages
Not nearly as complex as Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, this is essentially a modernized folk tale, with a fantasy base and a certain amount of young adult-level horror to spice it up. I found it effective, though the plot was predictable. However, this is an understandable aspect of folk tales (and I'm not a young adult reader). Stroud gives us a nicely obvious but unremarked-upon contrast between the protagonist's cheerless industrial town and the alluring natural (and supernatural) world to which her quest takes her.

Invite young adults to read this now, then move on to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Stolen Child when they are ready for more sophisticated versions.

Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School

#98
Title: Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School
Author: Stephen Eliot
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Year: 2002
Genre: memoir, psychology, education
309 pages A memoir by a very long-term resident and student of Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School at University of Chicago. Eliot reports that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia; it's always hard to form an impression from edited discourse, but my understanding of his description of himself is more in accord with a classic Kernbergian borderline diagnosis (for Kernberg, this meant "borderline psychotic," not today's "borderline personality disorder"), moving, as Kohlberg suggested, into a better-compensated narcissism.

Eliot does not tell his story coherently, and the jumps in time frame do not appear to be intentional or to contribute to the narrative as a deliberate structural feature. One can understand this storytelling failure as indicative of the author's ongoing difficulties with empathy and preoccupation with his internal state, but that is supposition on my part. Eliot's tale reflects, and states, his profoundly ambivalent relationship with and evaluation of Bettleheim, but, like much of the book, the reader is left with an experience of having been told something rather than having been shown it. It's hard to enter Eliot's world. That may be a lot of the problem.

For a more accessible story about schools that are also treatment settings for kids with profound needs, read Nazeer's Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism. Pair Eliot with One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (the book with the Chief as narrator, not the film) and the excellent documentary on Bettelheim and the practice of blaming mothers for their children's autism, Refrigerator Mothers.

Survivor

#97
Title: Survivor
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Anchor
Year: 1999
Genre: fiction
289 pages

I've now read everything of Palahniuk's other than Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. I read Survivor out of sequence because I never saw a copy for sale until recently. I was pleased to read it, because it was significantly better than Haunted, but also saddened because it seemed to confirm my suspicion that Palahniuk's earlier work much fresher and better written.

Told more-or-less forward but counting back down to the opening moment (including reverse page numbering), Survivor is relatively complex and very engaging. Palahniuk engages in some low-key yet profound worldbuilding that is more characteristic of Jonathan Lethem than of Palahniuk's usual style. Palahniuk sometimes has trouble with the balance between depicting his protagonist's brutal (and brutalizing) inner narration and evoking empathy for the protagonist and his or her plight. Not so here--the protagonist is both troubling and attractive. Palahniuk might do well to aim for this blend and not, as his more recent books would lead one to believe, for the most outrageous and disgusting extremes of human behavior and experience.

Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Diseas

#96
Title: Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease
Authors: Sharon Moalem and Jonathan Prince
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Year: 2007
Genre: Science, Medicine
288 pages

Ignore the title and the hype about "a medical maverick." In fact, just take the dust jacket off. It was clearly constructed to be provocative, but it's not accurate.

Moalem marshals evidence for the positive or effective aspects of diseases that we might other characterize as harmful. He is able to do so (and stick to this theme) fairly consistently throughout the book. Afficionados of popular medical non-fiction will recognize some of the diseases and their associated anecdotes (there's some overlap with Meyers's Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, for example). In some cases this association may not be evident until later in the chapter--"Of Microbes and Men," for example, treats evolutionary considerations for microbes and parasites that parallel those for humans.

I did find myself frustrated at times by what seemed like unreasonable dumbing down, leading to misinformation. On page 199, for example, Moalem discusses "the cold virus." The point would be stronger if he described the cold viruses, since there are a multitude of causal agents for "the cold." Some of his arguments are reductive and eliminate important considerations that are not well-expressed in an either/or paradigm (essence vs. environment makes multiple appearances inn this way, when the explanation is probably much more complex than the binary choice suuggests).

Still and all, this book was enjoyable and does a good job of eleborating on what is, for many people, a paradigm shift in thinking about the role of disease.

The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

#95
Title: The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology
Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 2001
Genre: History, Science, Biography
329 pages

While I liked The Map that Changed the World well enough, it was a slow read (about 25 pages a night). I preferred Winchester's OED-related books, perhaps because I'm actually interested in the picky details of dictionary development, and because with a focus on words his Byzantine sentences don't seem out of line. Winchester is somewhat repetitive, which helped to relate events to each other but also diminished any dramatic tension to be found in the story.

I didn't mind the intrusion of the author's story at mid-book; I understood it as an outcropping from a different era than the surrounding narrative, if I may use a geological metaphor. Perhaps the problem was that I gained little sense of William Smith's psychology, which made this more a book about the history of an idea and less about the progenitor of the idea. That's fine, but a less-rich narrative.

Winchester's richness seems typically to reside in his descriptions of the historical context in which the events of his books occurred. At this he is quite masterful. I enjoy Winchester's compulsive need to share amusing tangential or coincidental information in footnotes. He also turns one particularly fine phrase , which may help explain why there is so little of Smith's emotional stratum in this book. Regarding Smith: "He was no great diarist; but once in a while his entries make one wish he had been a better one" (p. 56).

One may read excerpts here.