Totally MAD : 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity

So I was perusing this slowly when Sparky arrived home from college. He spotted it...and the book disappeared for a week. I never finished it, and it's massively overdue, so I'll have to find it later to finish it. :D

The Mammoth Book of New CSI, by Nigel Cawthorne

This book reminded me so much of the sorts of books I read as a child (although more gory than those, of course) that it was a little disconcerting to have a case from one of those childhood books get mentioned in passing in the midst of discussing one of the cases in this book.

OJ is in here, as is the OK City bombing, and several other not-as-well-known cases. The discussion of the Jeffrey McDonald case was fascinating. There are several British cases I'd not heard of; not a surprise as this was published in England.

Quite enjoyable.

All Things New, by Lynn Austin

I literally read 20 pages and was so pissed off by that point that I couldn't wait to get it back to the library. Talk about crappy writing and telegraphing everything that's going to happen in the next 200 pages. Too bad, because this is a subject ripe for good storytelling. Just don't crack me over the head with the religious drama, ok?

The Fabric of America, by Andro Linklater (on CD)

I have to say that I wouldn't have read this with my eyeballs, but listening to it was remarkably interesting. Not what I expected at all, but a completely different point of view of the expansion of America.

I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had : My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High, by Tony Danza

A perfect view of what it's like to be a brand-new teacher facing a sea of teenaged faces in an inner-city school. We really have GOT to fix the educational system in this country.

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

Wow. Convoluted. Takes place over the course of 30 years, from the visit to the USSR of a black American singer in the early 50s, to New York City 15 years later, to 1980 in Afghanistan. I really wanted to like Leo, but he really annoyed the crap out of me in this book. There were a lot of rather unbelievable situations here, but the story is pretty good.

"Agent 6" shows up early in the book, but under his actual name. It's not till the last 50 or so pages that we find out who that name refers to. And the end....what the heck? I don't even know what to say about it.

A House Reunited, by Professor Jay Winik (on CD)

Interesting information here, all of the events that occurred in the month of April 1865. I learned a great deal, for instance putting together the timing of Lee's surrender and the remainder of the Confederate Army's (or rather Armies') surrenders. And Lincoln's assassination, which happened less than a week after Appomattox.

The downside of this recording is that Winik has some of Tom Brokaw's more annoying speech difficulties, and talks too fast, misspeaks regularly, and repeats himself word-for-word over and over. Ugh.

The Center of Everything, by Laura Moriarty (on CD)

Wow. There's a lot in this book to think about, which is a nice counterpoint because nothing much actually happens in the sense of plot. A 10-year-old girl grows up into an 18-year-old young adult. Think about those years in your life: full of potential, much sturm und drang, self-definition, drama, etc. For most people, most of the time, it's also a period of fallowness that is where you become You.

And so, Evelyn at age ten is relatively happy living with her young mother in a run-down apartment complex, being visited by her evangelical-Christian grandmother (but never her grandfather) regularly, and trying to make sense of the nearby and distant currents of life in Kansas in the 1980s. That year is a pivotal year: she comes to understand that family is complicated, that adults make horrifically bad judgments that turn their kids' lives upside down, that people are usually hypocritical about something in their lives, and that sometimes moms don't have all the right answers. Her mother gets pregnant, again, loses her job, becomes depressed, tries to go on welfare but her temper and pride cause problems there, and eventually gives birth to a boy with serious birth defects.

By the time Evelyn is 18, her best friends have ended up married to each other because Travis gets Deena pregnant when she is just 15. Evelyn has always assumed that she and Travis would be together, yet given the opportunity to do just that...she turns it down.

This is not a girl you always like; she does some pretty typically teenaged 'mean things' to people, but in the end she is what we all are at 18: complex and beautiful, not-yet-fully-formed, yet showing the outlines of potentiality. Gorgeous book.

Overland West (vol. 1), by Will Bagley

I started this, ambitiously, and only got about 25 pages in. I think I'll wait for volume 2 since by then he will start talking about Colorado. ;-)

OK, that's not fair, because he already was talking about Colorado. However, this may be one of those things that works better on Nook simply because I can read it for a long period of time and spend some time thinking about it and making notes to myself as I go.

The Rise and Fall of the Bible, by Timothy Beal

I liked this book. Good insight on where the book has come from, how it's been used (and misused) and why it has become something it really isn't: the book EVERYone has read. Not.

Living Oprah : My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk, by Robyn Okrant

Fun reading. The author puts some thought into this, so it's not just "Oprah is perfect!" adoration. I am virtually certain that I'd kill myself--or my family members would kill me--if I ever tried something like this.

The Great Upheaval : America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800, by Jay Winik (on CD)

Long, somewhat repetitive, but definitely thought-provoking and informative.

How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein

Remarkably interesting.

Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I'm well into the double digits on reading this book.

I love it.

Next up, the rest of the series. It's time. I read it about every 3 or 4 years.

The Lives They Left Behind : Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny

If that photo is haunting enough...

About ten years ago Willard State Hospital in New York state was officially closed after operating for over 100 years as a mental institution. This book chronicles the lives of some of the patients there, as pieced together from the suitcases they brought with them. Apparently, after their arrival the patients never had access to their belongings again; the bags were stored in an attic in one of the buildings and essentially forgotten.

What is discovered about ten of the individuals whose suitcases were found is that none of them was particularly 'crazy' in the modern sense. The amazing thing is that with few exceptions everyone who came to Willard stayed until they died decades later. So, one woman was placed in care in her 30s because her neighbors thought she was odd stayed until she died...in her 90s! For all of the problems surrounding today's mental health care, keeping someone in a sanatorium for 50 years because they were depressed after the death of a family member is not one of them.

This is a sad book, about sad people whose lives were taken away from them. It's an indictment of the medical field as a whole, and also of our culture. It was (is?) quite easy for society to believe that women and minorities who speak up about their mistreatment or who don't 'fit in' generally must be crazy (or criminal). While some great changes have come about in the past few decades, the closure of Willard State Hospital only happened in 1995. That's not that long ago, really.

This Just In : What I Couldn't Tell You on TV, by Bob Schieffer (on CD)

I've always liked Bob Schieffer; he always seemed very calm with a faint trace of humor. The book strengthens that sense. He got his start around the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, which is also where this book begins. Shieffer is justifiably proud of the history of CBS News from the 50s through the 70s, and very unhappy with the corporate changes of the 80s. However, his career survived Vietnam, Watergate, years at the Pentagon, the presidencies of Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, and ends just after September 11, 2001.

Good book.