Friday, April 29, 2016

Bond Girl

Alex Garrett is fresh out of UVA when she takes a job on Wall Street and realizes it's not quite what she'd grown up idolizing. Part bond-market-primer, part Devil Wears Prada, Erin Duffy has drawn extensively from her own decade working in fixed-income sales on Wall Street.

The good: Bond Girl is a quick and entertaining read. It's light - both the fact that it's a slim little novel, not quite reaching 300 pages, and that this is not a book where the reader dwells on, say, how to achieve world peace or the wastefulness of war. The tone (and therefore the narrator, Alex) is witty and, even if Duffy doesn't achieve the hilarity of Twenties Girl, it's quirky-funny.

The bad: Alex manages her personal life so badly that I had a hard time really caring what happened to her to how it all turned out for her. (She was on Wall Street, circa 2008, so I already had some clue what the broad strokes would be, at least.) She's not quite Last Night at Chateau Marmont unlrelateable; I did finish the book and sorta like it.

The thing that really nagged me though were the occasional lapses in Duffy's writing. Alex has dreamed of working on the The Street since she was eight. She dedicated the next 12 years to getting a job on the street. This is in the first chapter. That would make Alex 20, but elsewhere it's written that she's 22 when she begins her job. I've complained about this sort of sloppy work before (see my Last Original Wife rant), but it's the kind of mistake that really shouldn't happen and is incredibly distracting. Similarly, Alex tells us again and again how her desire to work on Wall Street comes from her i-banker dad. Yet, when she visits her boss's home in Connecticut, she's taken aback by the homes, the women in their perfect pearls, and the over-the-top kid's birthday party. By my calculation this is the same neck of the woods where she grew up, since she, too, is from CT, so it's hard to believe any of this is truly shocking, surprising, or intimidating.

Overall, I'd give Bond Girl in the neighborhood of two-and-a-half or three stars. Despite my gripes, it's a fun read, but there are too many truly great books out there to advise moving it to the top of any reading list.

Monday, April 25, 2016

This Side of Glory

This Side of Glory is the third of Gwen Bristow's Plantation trilogy. The descendants of the Upjohns, the Larnes and the Sheramys are well entrenched in South Louisiana now, having come through the travails of bush clearing, nation building, Civil War, and Reconstruction and passed gently into the twentieth century. Family history hangs as heavily as the Spanish moss, however, and so when Eleanor Upjohn and Kester Larne announce their engagement, all is not well. Together, and in the face of frequent opposition, they must find a way to navigate the changing world around them and build upon what their ancestors have begun.

There is nothing subtle about Bristow's characters in This Side of Glory. If I felt the characters in the second book, The Handsome Road, to be slightly caricaturized (I did! I did!), there's nothing slight about it now. Kester is the complete and utter personification of a debt-ridden Son of the South, languid and lazy, witty and wily. Eleanor is his opposite, a driven, dynamic woman whose mantra is progress, progress, progress, and whose life is ordered and orderly as Kester's is spontaneous. They are destined to clash, which of course they do.

The entire trilogy is well-written and I did enjoy it. Unfortunately, though, the first book (Deep Summer) was the strongest, with the others not quite able to fill the very large shoes Bristow created.

Three stars.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa

Truth is stranger than fiction. There is no other explanation for The Last Resort, Douglas Rogers's chronicle of his parents trials and tribulations in Zimbabwe during the first decade of the current century. Zimbabwe's troubles are well known, of course: the country's name nearly synonymous with hyperinflation and bad government. As Rogers describes, it is common for the price of goods to double in the time it takes to complete a transaction.

The Last Resort is far more personal than the consumer price index. Lyn and Rosalind Rogers are struggling to hold on to the farm, which is not really a farm, but a former backpackers lodge, singularly unsuited for farming. This is the sole reason that Lyn and Ros are among a handful of white Zimbabweans who are allowed to remain on their land, even if they may not, possibly, technically no longer own it. (Rogers devotes quite a bit of ink to his parents' quest to settle this question once and for all.)

The Drifters once graced the pages of Lonely Planet. Now, it is the local hotspot for pimps and prostitutes, illegal diamond dealers, and the occasional government minister. At one point, the Rogers have a rather successful side business in dagga, which is no more legal than it sounds. And then there are the power cuts, fuel and food shortages, and police roadblocks. All of this Douglas Rogers tells with humor and dogged good grace, while simultaneously infusing The Last Resort with a heavy dose of Rhodesian-Zimbabwean history and politics.

This is Dark Star Safari on steroids, only those living it are doing so out of necessity, not choice. My only complaint - and this is hardly a complaint - is that the book was published in 2010. What has happened since then? I found a short interview from 2012 that provides a bit of an update, but nothing since then. (Rogers's own website last appears to have been updated at least three years ago.) Alas. Hopefully the radio silence is the bi-product of writing another book; Rogers is highly enjoyable and I would eagerly look forward to his next work.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

The Handsome Road

The Handsome Road is the second book in Gwen Bristow's Plantation trilogy. The first book, Deep Summer, saw the arrival of the Larnes, Sheramys, St. Clairs, and countless other families to the rich and unsettled lands along the Mississippi; in The Handsome Road such families are long-since established and ensconced in fine plantation homes.

The two protagonists of this novel are Corrie May Upjohn and Ann Sheramy Larne, distantly related, but light years apart in circumstance and outlook. The Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction tries the strength of both women, who realize their lives are both more and less predictable than they could have guessed before the war.

Bristow has a classic historical fiction writing style and her books are well-written page-turners. That said, I found the characters in The Handsome Road to be slightly caricaturized: Ann Larne is a little too Scarlet O'Hara and Mr. Gilday is a political cartoonist's dream of the perfect carpetbagger. At times these characterizations detract from the overall narrative, but in the whole The Handsome Road is still a very good book. I've already begun the last of the trilogy, This Side of Glory.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Borderless Economies: Chinese Sea Turtles, Indian Fridges, and the New Fruits of Global Capitalism

In a nutshell, Borderless Economies is a 200-page argument in favor of immigration. The book's author, Robert Guest, explores how immigration leads to higher levels of innovation and economic growth, to say nothing of personal happiness. He mines the terrain from the Congo to China, Korea to Kinshasa, and perhaps not surprisingly devotes the most ink to the U.S.

Borderless Economies is written in the same snappy style as The Economist, which is not terribly surprising when one considers that Guest is the Business Editor of the periodical. I guffawed a bit too loudly, for example, when reading about the cars that suffered from, in a company spokesman's words, "thermal incidents," but which Guest noted the customers called "catching fire." This style makes for a quick read and entertaining read.

This is a book I could easily foresee assigning to a class of business undergrads, but which I can just as heartily recommend to friends whose professional and personal interests do not normally include international business.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Deep Summer

Deep Summer is the first book in Gwen Bristow's Plantation Trilogy. These are the days before the Louisiana Purchase, before the Revolutionary War, even, when Louisiana is a wild and untamed swampland filled with Creoles and most especially, critters. Into this strange place go the Sheramys, Puritans from Connecticut who have received a grant from the King of England in thanks for good and faithful service during the French and Indian War. Onto a single flatboat they have packed their New England lives and are floating down the Mississippi calling hello to passing boats, one of which is piloted by the dashing Philip Larne.

Philip is a Southerner, a younger son from South Carolina, determined to carve out the plantation denied him by the laws of primogeniture in the place of his birth. More than that, he is determined to have Judith as his bride, though their temperaments and life experiences could not be more different. Together, though, they face down everything from the American Revolution to yellow fever, slowly building a legacy and a dynasty intended to endure for generations.

Deep Summer is best compared to mind candy. Slightly sweet, a bit airy, it asks very little of reader. In that sense I am reminded of  Mary Alice Monroe's Lowcountry Summer trilogy. The characters are well developed, and generally neither lovable nor laughable nor detestable. It's a breezy read, one I think any lover of historical fiction should love. And, as a lover of historical fiction, I'll also add that it's nice to read historical, southern fiction that's not set in the time of Scarlet and Rhett. I've already begun book two, The Handsome Road.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

I must admit that, the more of Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938, that I read, the better I began to feel about the world which I inhabit presently. At a time when nary a day passes without headlines proclaiming a bombing or a blast somewhere in the world, it's easy to forget how much worse things could be - how much worse, in fact, they have been.

As Philipp Blom illustrates, for 20 years Europe (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the United States) staggered from one disaster to another. A rough list includes: revolution and civil war (Austria and Spain); Lenin and Stalin and artificial famine and unknowable millions killed in any given year (USSR and Ukraine); genocide (Armenia); the rise of fascism (Italy, most notably), communism (USSR), and Nazism (Germany). That is only Europe. The U.S. saw unprecedented race wars throughout the country; labor wars, particularly in mining; Prohibition, and with it the rise of lawlessness and the likes of Al Capone; and the environmental disaster now popularly known as the Dust Bowl. Also, there was, you know, the Great Depression. Unemployment reached 40 percent in Germany; it was lower in France only because such a large proportion of working age men had been killed in World War I.

So the world was a depressing place. Of course, there were also jazz and flappers and Bright Young Things; Dadaism, surrealism, and Bauhaus architecture; standard physics vs. quantum physics; advances in cinematography and music and women's rights.

Fracture frequently reads more like an academic text than a popular press one. Blom's writing is at its best when he is mining the social issues of the time, whether that is the Great Migration or the 1936 Olympics. I found the discourses on art styles, musical influences, and scientific arguments to drone on a bit, and must admit to skimming more than a few of the sections. Still, this book packs a serious punch, and history junkies in particular should enjoy Blom's thorough overview of the years between the world wars, but which were themselves packed full of conflicts and great and small, collectively setting the stage for not only World War II, but much of the world's strife today.