Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

 #89
Title: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: Norton
Year: 2003
Genre: Medicine, natural history
304 pages

Roach's enjoyable inquiry into the history and uses (and misuses) of human cadavers, while not exhaustive, explores emblematic activities (cremation, research, etc.). Roach is a genial guide, willing to endure a great variety of smells, body parts, and activities most of us prefer not to watch in order to pursue her narrative. She tells the tales entertainingly yet respectfully, and with obvious affection for both the living and the dead.

Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

#88
Title: Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't AvoidAuthor: Lemony Snicket
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2007
Genre: Humourous, Young Adult
168 pages
A little book of aphorisms, which I presume is intended either to be sincere but wry, or a parody of the little-book-of-pensees genre. Since the volume is attributed to Snicket, whose ouvre is extensive and whose voice is distinctive, it is regretable that the majority of these large-type entries are neither funny nor apt. Some simply read like bland, generic self-help aphorisms. I expect more from the man who introduced the word "cakesniffer" to my vocabulary.

Powers (Annals of the Western Shore)

#87
Title: Powers (Annals of the Western Shore)Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 2007
Genre: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Young Adult
502 pages
The third in the Annals of the Western Shore series following Gifts and Voices. These are ostensibly young adult novels, though Le Guin's work seems to get this label whenever the protagonist is a child or adolescent, regardless of the themes or sophistication of the narrative.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Le Guin read from Powers at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing. Before reading the first seven pages, she compared the book to "a jointless chicken" or "baby back ribs" because it lacks structural points that make it easy to start and stop an excerpt. This jointlessness is characteristic of Le Guin's more recent work, which has a deceptive simplicity and clarity of language and story. (She also remarked that she has stories but is not sure that she has plots.) Le Guin's writing often embodies or evokes the Tao (the link is to her translation and commentary). It is subtly complex yet straightforward.

Like the protagonists of the previous books in the series, Gavir has a secret gift--in his case, he remembers events that have not yet happened. The action is somewhat picaresque, through also psychologically developmental. I was reminded through most of it of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, which it reflects/distorts/revises nicely. I strongly suggest that you read the Heinlein, then the Le Guin, in the same way that you'd pair Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the book, please, not the film) with Haldeman's The Forever War.

Beyond Birdwatching: More Than There is to Know about Birding

#86
Title: Beyond Birdwatching: More Than There is to Know about BirdingAuthor: Ben, Cathryn, & John C. Sill
Publisher: Peachtree
Year: 1993
Genre: Birding, humorous
80 pages
The third parody of birding and birders from these authors, the current volume is in the form of a birding magazine. It includes not only notes on seldom-seen birds, but also articles, ads, and editorials. Not a sleek as the previous two, but it's still pretty funny.

A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North America

#85
Title: A Field Guide to Little-Known and Seldom-Seen Birds of North AmericaAuthor: Ben, Cathryn, & John C. Sill
Publisher: Peachtree
Year: 1988
Genre: Birding, humorous
92 pages
The precursor to this book. Their styles are similar, with similarly beautiful and funny illustrations and the same affectionate fun poked at birding manuals.

The Lost Executioner

 #84
Title: The Lost ExecutionerAuthor: Nic Dunlop
Publisher: Walker & Co.
Year: 2005
Genre: Asia, Cambodia
343 pages

Dunlop's biography humanizes Comrade Duch without diminishing the horrifying impact of his actions. He illuminates some of the internal politics that make the Khmer Rouge's contradictory policies so confusing.

Though the account is engrossing, some of the writing is uneven and awkward. Some sentences don't seem to relate to their contexts. He repeats himself. He assumes that the reader knows the basic history of Cambodia, so there are gaps that detract from the reader's ability to follow the narrative easily.

Dunlap is ambivalent about photography, finding it distancing and aesthiticizing of suffering, yet it was a photograph that moved and motivated him to conduct this investigation. Similarly, he wants people to visit the Toul Sleng prison museum, but also denounces it as a "commercial enterprise" (p. 226). His ambivalence doesn't trouble me, but he frequently gives strong, contradictory opinions without developing the relationship between these points of view.

Dunlap's resources are good, but he does not seem to be aware of Vann Nath's A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 Prison.

Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters

#83
Title: Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family DisastersAuthor: Annie Choi
Publisher: Harper
Year: 2007
Genre: Autobiography, humor
242 pages

There's nothing wrong with this book, which is a collection of aurobiographical stories about growing up as a first-generation Korean in the U.S. There also isn't much to make the book exceptional. With the emphasis on the family's purportedly hilarious yet incessant sniping and bickering, it is somewhat monotonous. Where Choi manages to bring some emotional complexity to the work, in recounting some of the events related to her mother's health, she is a pale imitation of Amy Tan, who told very much the same story but in a much more compelling manner in 1989's The Joy Luck Club. Choi is not a bad writer, but despite a certain gloss, she comes off as a young writer. Since she is young, perhaps her style will mature. She has the misfortune to have come of age in an era in which prematurely world-weary authors posture about what their 26 years on the planet have taught them. It is ultimately tiresome.