David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas ****

In anticipation of our upcoming cruise through the Panama Canal, I read this award-winning popular history of its construction. 

The book is exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting), covering the initial French attempt, the geopolitical intrigue, and the sociology in addition to the engineering. Construction doesn't start in earnest until page 500 of the 617-page book, and technical details occupy only the final chapter. In other words, McCullough focuses on the human side of the story.

Despite its comprehensiveness, there were still subjects I wish I'd learned more about.

• The first third of the book details the French attempt to build a canal across Panama and the resulting human and financial disasters. During the same time period (roughly 1870 - 1890), the Americans set out to build a canal across Nicaragua, but all we learn is that "it had been an underfinanced affair that collapsed with the Wall Street Panic of 1893."
  
  
• Ferdinand de Lesseps, the mastermind of the French canal, had to convince the Americans that his canal did not violate the Monroe Doctrine. What were his arguments? How skeptical was the America government?
  
  
• McCullough emphasizes the monumental scale of the problems the canal builders needed to solve, both technically and logistically. He also notes that many key decisions were still in debate as last as 1910 (including the fundamental one: sea-level canal or locks?) He then describes the impressive, unprecedented results. How did they manage it? Most of the planning and problem-solving takes place offstage.

Undoubtedly having read this book will enhance my experience when we travel through the canal. I will know what to look for and marvel at.

The Path Between the Seas is the first book I've read by David McCullough. I found his writing style to be a tad more academic than I expected from a popular historian. The story he has to tell is inherently dramatic and he organizes it well, but the prose often lacks the immediacy that would make the scenes come to life. McCullough's sentences tend to be too long and to eschew the simple past tense; in other words, he needs to follow my writing guidelines for accentuating the transitive (email me for details!). A brief example, chosen at random:

Phillippe Bunau-Varilla had gone directly from Hay's house to the station, had taken the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore had sent a telegram...

This sentence would be so much more dynamic in the simple past tense: "Phillippe Bunau-Varilla went directly from Hay's house to the station, took the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore sent a telegram..."

Lisa Scottoline, The Truth About the Devlins ***

The Truth About the Devlins is a solid example of what I call a "supermarket thriller." It is the literary genre that most resembles the crime procedurals that you find all over network TV. A whodunit murder mystery, characters sketched quickly through personal quirks, a resolution that ties together the various subplots. The Devlin clan are lawyers, so add in white collar crime and familial dynamics.

The book is well plotted, although I did guess the basics of the solution early on. I'm not sure I believe that the bad guys would resort to this level of violence, but hey, the story has to have stakes and clock-beating action. 

Scottoline avoids the most annoying tics that often mar the genre, like twists that depend on non-communication between characters. However, the dialogue does tend toward blocks of exposition rather than natural speech, and characters do form lifelong bonds of friendship or enmity based on a single encounter.

Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place For Us ****

When I learned to sail, the heart of the certification test was the person-overboard drill. Successfully retrieving a person who falls overboard requires coordinating all of the skills learned throughout the course. I happen to believe that the crisis of homelessness holds a similar position with respect to contemporary societal issues: successfully addressing it requires coordinating our responses to wealth inequality, racism, class prejudice, dwindling public services, gentrification, and so on. That's why I read so many books on the subject (see here, here, and here).

There Is No Place For Us has the subtitle "Working and Homeless in America," but it doesn't really focus on the fact that working people can't afford housing. Its larger purpose is to draw attention to people who are not literally homeless: families residing in relatives' living rooms and extended-stay hotels and unlivable buildings. This group far outnumbers the more visible folks living in tents and on the streets, and they often don't have access to the same support services.

The book follows several families in Atlanta as they struggle to find and retain housing. Their challenges are relatable and infuriating, and they paint a clear picture of the business and social service ecosystems. I will admit, however, that I had a hard time remembering which families endured which trials and who was living where at any given time.

I appreciate that Goldstone stays locked into the families' perspective, but I do wish he had found a way to acknowledge the perspective of the landlords and/or government officials. The bureaucracy seems clearly intended to frustrate and humiliate the homeless; I would like to have someone attempt to explain why the system is set up the way it is. I am inclined to believe that homelessness is a systemic problem but many readers will believe that it's a function of the individual's poor choices; Goldstone doesn't attempt to address those readers.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan *****

My favorite Vonnegut novel. The Sirens of Titan deals with issues of fate, free will, personal responsibility, and the meaning(lessness) of life in the inimitable Vonnegut style. The science-fiction plot is silly but its questions are profound.

I can't provide anything close to an objective opinion about the book because it was so formative when I  read it in high school. My journals from the time are littered with quotes from Salo and Winston Rumfoord. Vonnegut's outlook is rather dark despite the surface humor. It would be a fantastic book club book because it's short, easy to read, and philosophical.

As they say in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent:

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Dream Count **

The first 11 pages of Dream Count are an excellent evocation of the social dynamics of Zoom calls during the COVID shutdown. The narrator Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in Maryland, and this introductory section introduces her international network of friends and family.

On page 12, Chiamaka turns her attention to previous boyfriends, making a "dream count" of other possible lives. She sketches the male characters well, but I quickly lost interest. I learned very little about her.

The book has sections devoted to three other women in Chiamaka's orbit: Zikora, a Washington D.C. lawyer; Omelogor, a successful financier in Nigeria, and Kadiatou, a Guinean maid who works for Chiamaka. These descriptions make them sound like interesting people, but they never become full-bodied characters. In fact, their characters feel inconsistent.

There is a horrific incident at the center of the story, one that Adiche confirms is the "seed around which I would weave my imagination," but like so much of the intriguing background it gets buried under clichéd chatter about dating. I'm not sure what Adiche wants to say.

David Bather Woods, Arthur Schopenhauer ***

The subtitle of this book is "The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist," but it's not a biography to read to learn about Schopenhauer. Woods assumes the reader is largely familiar with Schopenhauer's core ideas—by which I mean he doesn't explain them—and acknowledges up front that Schopenhauer could be an unpleasant character. The book will mostly interest people who are already Schopenhauer fans. It emphasizes how Schopenhauer's pessimistic worldview led him to have a great deal of compassion for his fellow sufferers.

In the first chapter, Woods notes that Schopenhauer had a bigger influence on creative writers than on philosophical protégés. The reason for the lack of followers, I would say, is that he never held a powerful academic position and instead alienated other philosophers. (He particularly hated Hegel.) The reason for his literary admirers is his clear and entertaining writing style, unusual among German philosophers of the period.

My favorite story comes near the end, when Schopenhauer rents rooms from a family with small children. He appears so grumpy and intimidating that the parents discipline their kids by threatening to report their misbehavior to Herr Schopenhauer. Pretty quickly, though, little Lucia fell in love with Schopenhauer's poodle and ended up spending long hours in his rooms cuddling with the dog.

Daniel Kraus, Angel Down ***

Angel Down has a fantastic premise (in both senses of the word): Soldiers fighting in France during World War I save a fallen angel from the battlefield. It tackles the story with an audacious stylistic gambit: the book starts with the word "and" and consists of a single sentence.

I applaud the author's ambitions but his execution was merely serviceable. The various characters' reactions to the angel were predictable and shopworn. The single sentence was just a lot of normal sentences connected with "and." The prose is laid out in paragraphs that imply a poetic intention, like a modern Illiad, but the vivid brutal violence lacks a spiritual or metaphorical dimension, save for a visit to hell in the late going.