Tai-Pan

I have a new favorite author. After some twenty years, James Clavell has displaced Margaret Mitchell atop my personal pantheon of authors. Last fall I fell in love with Shogun; my concerns as to whether Tai-Pan could live up to such lofty expectations were unfounded.

The Tai Pan is Dirk Straun, a Scottish trader who has risen to become the most powerful trader in Hong Kong, which in the midst of the Opium Wars is on the verge of the becoming a prosperous and beloved jewel among British colonies. To reach the apex of trade society, Tai Pan has had to fight not only other European and American traders to build The Noble House - sometimes in the literal sense of the word - but he's engaged in his fair share of politicking and intrigue with both the Chinese and the British. On the eve of unparalleled success, his future plans are sullied when he learns that his wife and most of his children have succumbed to one of the many epidemics that swept England in the early nineteenth century. Now he must recalibrate and bring his young son, Culum, into the fold earlier than he anticipated while ensuring the future of all of Hong Kong.

Like Shogun, James Clavell does an absolutely remarkable job of creating authentic characters in original settings. His description of the trade routes and wars, the history of the opening of China, and the early days of the settlement of Hong Kong are lovely to read. I also loved the juxtaposition of Straun's English and Chinese families and the dialects that practically call out from the pages. Clavell's characters are complex, multifaceted beings, and the experience of reading Tai Pan is enriched by the conflicting emotions each of the characters is able to generate in the reader. If it's true that the Russian sub-plot was slightly far-fetched, it's also true that it's the only questionable or ham-handed aspect of the book.

Five stars.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is required reading for anyone who looks at Russia today and wonders how Putin has consolidated his hold on power so neatly. 

Secondhand Time is essentially the story of the mass disillusionment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, as told by the individuals who lived through it. In a word, these people miss it. They miss the strength, yes, but also the cohesion, the sense of sameness, and the predictability that ensconced their formative years. This can be hard to understand from an American perspective, because there was no end to the suffering during the Soviet years, either. Hello, Stalin and Lenin, right? It is more understandable, though, when you consider how irrevocably their entire world changed overnight, and how ill-equipped they were for a world in which the choices suddenly seemed endless. I lost count of the number of people who mentioned the variety of salami that became available, clearly a proxy measure for so much else in their lives.

That said, Alexievich's work is about 300 pages too long. I was engrossed for the first couple hundred pages, both by the stories themselves, as well as the window onto Russia that Alexievich opened for me. After the first couple hundred pages, though, I began to feel the interviews were repetitive and tedious, all the more so for being almost uniformly dark and depressing. It's hard to imagine a more complete collection of suicides, for example. 

Secondhand Time has the same potential to be a seminal work of anthropology, but could use a trim and some additional context. Full disclosure: Once the repetition became too much, I did not finish Secondhand Time, feeling I'd gotten the gist and needn't learn any more tales of suicide. The interviews are certainly the heart and soul of the book, but I think it would have benefited from Alexievich's commentary, in the same way that Barbara Myerhoff inserted herself on occasion to provide context in her formidable work Number Our Days: A Tirumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk was a recent airport bookstore find. I was sold on the idea of a little old lady, a retired ad exec from the days when women simply didn't work, reminiscing about her life as she walked through miles of New York City on New Year's Eve 1984. Ultimately, I found the premise more enticing than the execution; or, perhaps I found Lillian slightly lacking, at least in comparison to other geriatric protagonists (take a bow, Ove and Hendrik).

Kathleen Rooney is a fine writer, and she does a lovely job placing Lillian in mid-80s New York - grit, crime, AIDS, the soaring Twin Towers - it's all there for the reader's pleasure. I just found Lillian a bit too...abrasive? Sure of herself? Odd? I'll let you determine whether and how her character is deficient (also: it could just be me), but I had a hard time caring about either her past, or the events unfolding before her on NYE. Correction: I didn't care. The book was short, the writing was snappy, the flight was long, and in the end I was determined to finish. My life is no better for the decision, though.

Two stars (one each for good writing and entrancing cityscapes).

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan introduces readers to the history and biology of selected plants - the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. I liked the idea, and was hoping for something like The Beekeeper's Lament, but alas The Botany of Desire is just a tad on the boring side. More than a tad, actually, although I'm going to offer two compounding factors: 1) The tulip. More to the point, between Waves of Prosperity and Tulipomania I've more than had my fill of the flower. 2) It felt like a repeat of Bread, Wine, and Chocolate, just with different - and for me, less interesting - plants. And, yes, this may be slightly unfair since Pollan's book was written over a decade earlier, but I happened to read Bread, Wine, and Chocolate first.

This isn't a bad book. (At least not what I read of it, which was more than half; I called it quits somewhere in the middle of the marijuana chapter.) It's just a book that requires a very specific audience, preferably one that is really, really in to botany and has a serious green thumb. I found the background on Johnny Appleseed interesting, and imagine I would have had similar thoughts on the history of the tulip, if I weren't already so tulip-ed out. Ultimately, though, I'm not enough of a plant person to sustain an interest in them for a couple hundred pages.

Saving Ceecee Honeycutt

I've of two minds about Beth Hoffman's Saving Ceecee Honeycutt. On the one hand, the first part of the novel manages a deft little tap dance between the dark and heavy (I'm giving nothing away when I say that Ceecee's mother's mental illness is the cog around which the entire book turns, and her mother's suicide is the defining moment of Ceecee's short life) and the delightful (Hoffman puts a bounce in Ceecee's step even when she's confronting the horrors of her father's infidelity or her mother's madness. All of which is to say, I just knew this was a book I would love. But.

After Ceecee's mother commits suicide, her father cedes Ceecee's upbringing up an eccentric great-aunt from Savannah whose life is 180 degrees from anything Ceecee has previously known. Overnight, she's transported from small town Ohio to Savannah, plopped amongst her aunt's equally eccentric neighbors and friends. In Savannah, Ceecee quickly makes friends with her aunt's housekeeper, Oletta, and it's here that I began to have my doubts. Oletta is a fantastic character, full of her own brand of fun and joy, don't get me wrong. But.

Despite Ceecee and Oletta's friendship, despite Oletta's reverence for one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., despite a racially charged encounter between a white man and Oletta's friends, despite the fact that the entire book takes place over the course of one summer in 1960s Savannah, it felt like Hoffman glossed over what could only have been the - the - issue confronting Ceecee every day of her new life. Yes, Ceecee's mother was from Georgia - Miss Vidalia 1951, thank you very much - but she had lived her entire life in a tiny midwestern town and I had a hard time buying what Hoffman was selling in the later chapters.It's a shame, too, because I'm a little gaga for Savannah, myself, and generally have a soft spot for Southern literature. Saving Ceecee Honeycutt just missed the mark, though.

Tulipomania : The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

According to the cover, Mike Dash's Tulipomania is "A marvelous parable of greed, skullduggery, opulence, extravagance, and retribution." I'm not sure I'd go quite that far.

So why was I even reading a book about the seventeenth century Dutch tulip bubble? I read about the bubble in Waves of Prosperity and was sufficiently intrigued. Dash has certainly been thorough in his research, both of the history of the tulip as well as Netherlands history and particularly of the economic conditions in seventeenth century Europe. I actually found the most intriguing part of the book to be the discussion of the mores of the Ottoman Empire; Dash's commentary is a great complement to that of Edmond Taylor in The Fall of the Dynasties.

The deficiencies, then, aren't inherent to Dash's research or writing. The bigger challenge is that I often felt there just wasn't quite enough for this to really be an entire book. Dash himself acknowledges regularly the extent to which events are unknown - and unknowable.

Perhaps if I had a greater interest in botany, if I didn't have to mentally rack my brain for an image of the various parts of a flower, and if I didn't harbor a secret horror of trying to keep a flower alive, let alone paying years' wages for a single bulb, well I might have enjoyed Tulipomania just a tad more. As it stands, I'm inclined to feel what I read of the bubble in Waves of Prosperity was sufficient, and imagine most readers would agree with me.


Two stars.