Brandon R. Schrand, The Enders Hotel ***

The Enders Hotel is a memoir about growing up in the small town of Soda Springs, Idaho. Brandon's family owned the town hotel along with its cafe and bar, so he lived in the hotel. Since Soda Springs is in the middle of boom-and-bust mining country, and since Brandon's grandfather founded the local AA chapter, the hotel was a waystation for many colorful characters.

The book provides a vivid portrait of a fairly ordinary childhood in an out of the way place. There is very little narrative drive, just a string of incidents. The cast of down-on-their-luck characters (Brandon's family included) makes the story feel like it takes place during the depression or immediately post-WWII, so it was always a bit of a shock when Brandon made contemporary references like going to see the movie Gandhi or listening to Motley Crue. In fact, Brandon was born in 1972 so the story takes place mostly in the 1980s.

Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper *** 1/2

Beat the Reaper is an entertaining comic action novel, narrated by a former hit man turned medical doctor. The quoted reviews on the cover capture the tone when they compare it to a Coen brothers movie.

The best thing about the book is the narrator's voice and his numerous interesting asides about matters both medical and criminal. For example: "'iatrogenic' (physician caused) and 'nosocomial' (hospital caused) illnesses... together are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States" and "Michael drops the gun after shooting the cop in The Godfather because the kid drops the gun after shooting the cop in Battle for Algiers." He never fails to be engaging, and the story moves along unpredictably.

On the other hand, I sometimes had a hard time suspending my disbelief. A hit man goes into Witness Protection and goes to medical school? (Was there time for that?) A protected witness against the mob moves back to New York? The chapters didn't always hang together. The hit man chapters and the hospital chapters felt like separate stories glued together roughly -- and that's not even counting the trip to Auschwitz.

So, in the end, Beat the Reaper was an enjoyable page-turner peppered with fun "facts" (which the author warns us not to trust), but you shouldn't expect too much realism.

Paul Heiney, The Last Man Across the Atlantic ***

This memoir describes the journey of an amateur sailor in his fifties who enters the OSTAR Single-handed race across the Atlantic. He is a cruising sailor, in it for the test of his seamanship and mettle not to compete in the race. The book focuses far less on the sailing technique than on the mundane aspects of the arduous passage: making lunch, going to the bathroom, tracking the (lack of) progress, staving off loneliness, and fighting the urge to return to cozy home ports rather than brave the wide Atlantic. This focus is all to the book's credit, because it makes Paul seem more accessible as an everyman and makes his achievement seem more possible for anyone who feels the need to try it.

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct ****

The first several chapters of this book provide a great introduction to the concerns and major conclusions of modern linguistics. Pinker is an excellent writer, with just the right balance between intriguing examples, clear metaphors, and technical details. I definitely recommend the book to people interested in the subject.

The only major area of linguistics that I wish Pinker had included is sociolinguistics. He is a psychologist by training and is making an argument about human nature, so the lack of sociolinguistics is not surprising. However, the chapter about "The Language Mavens" offered him a perfect opportunity to address the subject. Instead, that chapter is the weakest one. It seeks to discredit prescriptive "experts" instead of discussing how prescriptive rules and standard dialects affect our language use. I didn't care for the negative tone (not present elsewhere in the book), and I was unconvinced by his specific counterexamples.

I read The Language Instinct in a Harper Modern Classics edition. I was excited to see that the bibliography of this "modern classic" includes Jack Hawkins' Explaining Language Universals — a book that includes an article by yours truly! I was hoping for a direct citation to my article, but I guess my influence on Dr Pinker was in the background.

My rating system

I rate each book on a five star scale:

***** : One of my all-time favorites.

**** : An excellent book that exceeds expectations. I recommend it.

*** : If you like books of this genre, you'll probably like this one.

** : A bit weak.

* : Hated it.

I use half stars as well. For example, if I read a standard police procedural that has one unique and interesting twist to it, I might give it three and a half stars.

If you look through my reviews, you'll find more ratings above three stars than below three stars. This is not grade inflation but rather reflects the fact that I have ways to avoid books I'm likely to dislike. If I actually read a one-star book, it's a failure of my early warning system which should kick in at the book store before I even start.

Welcome to my blog!

Back in the days when framesets were the height of web site design (and "Web site" was capitalized), I religiously posted reviews of the books I read. I stopped a while ago, so the list of "What I Am Reading Now" at http://mike-n-evelyn.com is well out of date. I plan to start posting reviews at this blog, which is a much more suitable place for them. In the spirit of a blog, I'll also post any literary-oriented musings that occur to me.

Reading is by far my most common leisure activity. I don't go anywhere without a book. I alternate between fiction and non-fiction; in a future post, I'll try to characterize my taste so that you can more easily judge how seriously to take my recommendations.