5 comments about Lake Effect.

1. Very interesting, perceptive, and often funny writing style. Cohen can write "thumbnail sketches" of people and sitations as well as anyone I've read lately. (His short riff on a summer of bad jobs is a good example, wherein he sums up his bad bosses in a sentence or two, and you still "get" what kind of people they are.) In short, highly recommended.



2. As a graduate of New Trier High School, I feel that this book did a wonderful job illustrating some of the feelings I had during High School. I thought Cohen's writing was captivating and entertaining, and I am very interested to read his other books. "Lake Effect" is a must read!



3. The book recounts the author's years growing up in the 1980s in Glencoe, a Chicago suburb, and subsequently his student years in New Orleans, but really centres on his best friend Jamie. It is evocative of the period and full of memorable imagery. Jamie is an extraordinary and delightful character, and the remarkable platonic friendship he and the author Rich enjoy is beautifully recounted. This is a book which repays careful reading, not one to be hurried. It reveals much insight, and while the end is far from negative, I experienced a feeling of great sadness and yet tremendous warmth as the book drew towards its conclusion. A thoroughly rewarding book, highly recommended.



4. Rich Cohen is a very-very good writer. This book is a bitter-sweet memoir of him growing up. I was surpized to find out what kind of kid he was. As usual, Rich is superb at making his characters so alive that they seem a part of your past also. Here is proof that one doesn't have to be from the Midwest or from the 70s to enjoy the book! It reminded me of Catcher in the Rye, except it's good to know that the kid turned out all-right in real life. Reading this book was a pure delight, although it is sad at times.



5. Rich Cohen's 'Lake Effect' is great literature for me for a number of reasons:
   
   . It unassumingly transported me to Glencoe Illinois, the town in which i grew up and the town in which I came of age - at the same ages Cohen covers in the story.
   
   . The story focuses on Cohen's friends, and yet conveys the author's deepest feelings and concerns without his wearing them on his sleeve.
   
   . I couldn't put the book down! It was a great read! And at the end of the book I came away with a feeling that I'd been carried on a ride through Cohen's most intimate teen-aged years, years that, for me, had been critical towards forming my own self-definition.
   
   . He conveyed a clear picture of the folks on whom he focused in the book's text.
   
   
   I highly recommend this beautiful book to all, and envy them the journey on which they'll be setting out. It won't be a lengthy one - I finished the book within three days, partially because, as noted above, I just couldn't put it down. But I assure potential readers that the trip along the author's route will be a memorable and pleasant one.

1 comments about Wages.

1. Armstrong is a terrific writer and he has seen the whole capitalist system from the wrong end of the rabbit cages. His story of having worked for a living since he was a young teen in provincial Farmtown, BC is truly apocalyptic; it's an epic, almost Homeric catalogue of slights, injuries, mishaps, horrid bosses, substandard working conditions, insulting and inhuman treatment, virtual slavery, and he argues skillfully that this is what all of us have to eat every day of our lives.
   
   Armstrong's mom used to sigh about how there's always too much month left over at the end of a cheque. Ain't that the truth! Her boy John wasn't raised to suffer fools gladly, but a man's got to have some sort of job, and John tried them all, cleaning up in a giant rabbit hutch (a job truly worthy of Dante's 9th circle of hell), sorting out "adult movies" to make sure they violated only US standards, not the rather different Canadian ones, working in a body shop with morons who were sure they could score with some high class women if only they installed a top of the line muffler in their car--but they're totally delusional losers. Armstrong points out that the system turns all of us into losers, yet if it's a call to action, it's one delivered with a knowing wit and a sympathetic, understanding lack of pretension.
   
   Even despite his minor fame as a rocker in the bustling Western Canada scene of the late 1970s and early 80s, Armstrong (author of an earlier book on his misadventures on the music scene) soon found himself a prisoner of bank loans and extended credit, the sort that turn you either to bankruptcy or "going postal." "Now that we had a basement," he writes, "we got another loan and bought a used washer and dryer. I felt like Pinocchio--I was a real human boy and like the rest of them I was to up to my assin debt." Armstrong's strongest vitriol he reserves for the editors and readers of the alternative weeklies that employed him when, not having any other training or experience, he turned to journalism to make his payments. There's a New Grub Street going on and, to hear him tell it, John Armstrong was Sergeant Grub. It's a funny, coruscating book, and if the bosses knew what was between these two covers, they would go to unheard of lengths to shut down feisty, independent New Star Books, even if it meant dipping every extant copy of WAGES, and every inch of John Armstrong's tattered flesh, into industrial strength battery acid, turn them all into a few burps and bubbles of quick dissolve. If you value freedom and social justice and self determination, gang, then get it while you can.

2 comments about Do You Remember?: The Whimsical Letters of H. L. Mencken and Philip Goodman.

1. The discovery of a "new" book of H. L. Mencken's writing is always a special pleasure for those of us who love the old grouch and his work. This particular book, however, is something of an oddity. Anyone who has read much Mencken will be familliar with the style; from the scurrilous asides he liked to sprinkle into his narratives. In his published writing they served as a condiment, adding a scandalous spice to accounts of Political Conventions and the like. Here they are the whole meal, and it can become something of a muchness.

   The subtitle "The Whimsical Letters..." is somewhat misleading. Whimsy has overtones of gentility, like two little old ladies exchanging stories about the faries that live in their gardens. Here we have two old so and so's raking up scandal in the "Old Neighborhood"; indulging in vulgarity, innuendo, and (had the subjects of their discourse been real) slander.

   Fans of Mencken (and, presumably, of Goodman) will probably enjoy the book, although it is not a new Newspaper Days or Prejudices. Non fans should probably avoid it until they are familliar with Mencken and his world. This is not a good introduction.




2. A beautiful book, nicely edited with notes so that you can get the obscure references, and funny--nay, uproarious--impromtu tall tales. Mencken and Goodman knowingly comment on the goings-on of all-too-human folk, with Olympian and sunlit wit and detachment. If you like to read Mencken, don't miss this one.

1 comments about Chaos Clear As Glass: A Memoir.

1. Ann Hyman is a regular columnist for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, FL, and Chaos Clear as Glass is a slim collection of her memories growing up in the area, as well as stories of a trip to the Soviet Union. If you are familiar with Ann's column and can get a copy of this rare book, you will enjoy her relaxed, anecdotal style. The influences of Eugenia Price and other regional writers are recognizable in Ann's writing.

No comments about Through Life's Lens: A Memoir.

2 comments about Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily.

1. Scoop-Wallah

   Reading Justine Hardy's Scoop-wallah, an alternatively hilarious and pensive account of her hacking days as a features writer for the New Delhi daily the Indian Express for about a year, is to realize that good writing about India keeps coming out regardless of, or perhaps because of, the country's status as "a functioning anarchy," to borrow a famous phrase from Daniel Moynihan, a former U. S. Ambassador to India. Justine Hardy is a clever writer. She does not claim to be writing about all of India. She is writing just about New Delhi. Her portrait of New Delhi has all the anomalies that one expects in such a book. There is a raja's son who has no kingdom to rule and his satrapy in the flophouse where the writer resides. There is a newspaper editor, her boss, who is unable to understand references to April Fool's jokes in spite of his Anglicization. His name, as transliterated in the book is "Sourish," perhaps a version of "Suresh," meaning the god of gods in Sanskrit. Sourish Bhattacharya will consider for publication only such of Hardy's writing as can be considered fictionalized features, not hard news. When Hardy rants about her missing slides, telling him in London a lost or stolen slide fetches up two hundred pounds, he feigns indifference. Then there are the usual gang of culprits: charlatan gurus, rickshaw drivers salivating over the experience of driving a white woman to her destination trying hard to catch a glimpse of her white skin in one of their many mirrors, fops who decry colonialism and hold her responsible for all Britain's crimes without taking into account she hadn't even been born when Nehru's somnolent words announced the birth of India on the midnight of August 15, 1947, dreaming social workers who want to show off their good works. Our writer does not fall in love with New Delhi, but she likes it very much, notwithstanding its unsettling attachment to dust and defeat. She tries to fit in. She wears Indian clothes; she tries to learn to speak Hindi. Of course, her attempt to speak the language always identifies her as a foreigner, a fate she tries hard to avoid. Of course, she speaks Hindi only to those who drive her around or make tea for her. Good intentions don't matter. British administrators also learned regional languages just so that they could tell their servants what to do. Not much goes right for her. Indians are notorious for trying to sharpen their English skills on visiting foreigners. They don't want the visitors to speak the local language, partly because they think it is not polished enough. Thus, it is not surprising that Hardy runs into scores of Indians who want to show her that there remains a British presence in India in the form of English remade in the nuances of native languages. English is the language of power. "English is still the currency of the social establishment. The socialites of Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi may swirl their saris and stand proud in their national dress . . ., careful copies of the sartorially patriotic Nehru, but still they speak English. Their feet are silent speakers too, shod in English shoes, black Oxfords to match the aspirations of language."

   Much as I enjoyed the book, I am not able to formulate its readableness in anything other than its fictionality. I believe that the book reads like fiction because everything novel that the writer experiences turns into interesting. In her moments when she stops pretending to be amused by New Delhi's transmogrification by globalization Hardy writes passages which indicate that she can indeed free herself from her self-imposed obligation to remain unsettled by her Indian experiences. Hardy turns from being an entertainer into a Blakean observer when she lets her pen rip the calm surface of her humorous meditation and speak of the mimic men and women, living an opulent life style which is more a parody of life in New York or London than one truly free of sexism as exemplified in arranged marriages and dowry extortions. Her Kiplingesque analysis of the horror of AIDS in India, often brought home to well provided-for wives by ambitious, much-traveled entrepreneurial husbands, the government's denial that the disease is widespread, the government doctor's refusal to treat AIDS patients are perhaps the best part of the book.




2. Justine Hardy is a British journalist who decided to take the plunge and work on a Delhi newspaper. Her book covers diverse topics such as a visit to the Dalai Lama, toilets (or the lack-thereof), Slum education, organic farming and polo.

   The prose is easy to read, and both funny and sad. This is essentialy a travel book. It won't change your life, but if you have any misconceptions about the Raj still being alive in India, this might cure you. A great book to take on holidays, about ordinary people and how they live int in India today - a world away from western Europe and America.

1 comments about The Undefeated.

1. This is a deeply-felt, deeply-thought and deeply-moving book. It tells of the author's movement towards communism in the context of a pre-war continental Europe which had to choose between fascism and communism; and how his experiences in Hungary after the war led to his slow but systematic disillusionment. The result is one of the most convincing intellectual testimonies against communism as it was practised, portrayed in a context of a very personal agony. As part of the history of Hungary, or any part of central Europe, this would be compelling reading. As testimony to the human spirit in adversity it is both humbling and inspiring.

No comments about Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F.Buckley Jr. 1954-1961.

5 comments about My Life in the Klan.

1. I have to agree with the previous reviewer. I picked this one up in my local library expecting to learn something new, but instead found that this so-called "writer" didn't have anything to say. There is no real hint of danger, especially from an organization which, from the description given by the author, was frequently unable to muster enough members to conduct an initiation ceremony or hold regular meetings. Given the non-existent threat from a skeleton organization made up of a handful of nuts and rejects, Thompson's story amounts to nothing. It is incredible that his newspaper was willing to back such a fruitless project (or that they were willing to hire him as a reporter in the first place), and even more incredible that any publisher would bother putting this pile of crap into print. The only thing Thompson exposed was his utter lack of talent. I regret having wasted my time reading this lousy book.



2. The idea of an undercover investigation of the KKK is a sound one, and I opened this book with the expectation that some new and startling facts would be uncovered. Unfortunately, however, I discovered the same fact as the previous reviewers, which is that there is no story here at all. A would-be journalist sets out to infiltrate the modern-day Klan, but apparently fails to find a story worthy of being published. This book merely confirms what the majority of Americans already know, which is that the KKK is a group of misfits and losers. It is also painfully evident that Jerry Thompson is just as big a loser as those he attempted to investigate; however, the biggest losers of all are the unfortunate readers who wasted the time and effort to read this boring pile of trash. Mr. Thompson should have stayed awake during journalism classes, if he even bothered to attend them in the first place. This book is pure crap.



3. After reading this book, I can understand the negative reviews. There is nothing particularly interesting about either the author or his alleged story. While Mr. Thompson may have had a great time playing "undercover reporter", the reader will find this book to be far less than enjoyable. This bland little tale merely proves than almost anyone can be published, and is useful only as a cure for insomnia.



4. The critique of this book that it has no real story, is solid. Thompson merely flirted with the Klan, found nothing new out, and talks mostly about finding apartments and building cabinets. HOWEVER, the most interesting thing is the fact that the Klan he found in the "hotbed" of Klan activity in Alabama (the US even) was disorganized and almost nonexistent. This is what he should have been talking about. He should have written about how the Klan in popular consciousness is a large, ever-present organization. I get this opinion from classmates who are afraid to move to rural areas, for fear of "the Klan." When in fact the Klan is a much smaller organization with little power anymore, save the power to draw media attention. The name still has power, but that is all that has power anymore. I wish Thompson would have taken this fact and turned it back on the media to show their baseless sensationalism and irrational fears for what they are.



5. Add me to the list of readers who couldn't find any redeeming value in this sorry excuse for a book. Mr. Thompson had nothing of value to say, but somehow managed to have this slice of tripe published. Thompson should have admitted that there was no story, returned to his newspaper, and found a more worthwhile project; instead, he wasted his time, his employer's time and money, and the time of the reader. Mr. Thompson should be profoundly ashamed of this steaming heap of trash.

5 comments about Without Keys: My 15 Weeks With the Street People.

1. A middle-class professional woman suddenly finds herself without money and homeless in the middle of a Minneapolis winter. Without Keys is the story of the author's experiences, and the stories of the people she knew on the street.

   People become homeless for many reasons. Alcohol, drug abuse, and mental illness are the stereotypes, but there were also battered women, high-school dropouts and ex-cons that no one would hire, kids who had been thrown out by their parents, the priest who was ready to retire and was told that the order was bankrupt and there were no retirement funds, people who'd been living from paycheck to paycheck and been laid off, and people who'd been bankrupted by medical expenses. A very few were on the street by choice.

   This wide-ranging book contains vignettes of dozens of street people. The interviews are reminiscent of those in Studs Terkel's books.

   It tells of the struggles to live when you have to carry all your possessions with you, when you can't call for an appointment because you don't have a quarter, when there's no place to receive mail or phone calls, when there's no way to clean up and dress for a job interview. It tells of how others relate to the homeless, and the dichotomy of being an office worker with a temp job from 8-5, and a street person the rest of the day.

   Without Keys contains numerous extracts from a journal kept by McDonough during her experience, and delves into not only the day-to-day details but also the psychological and spiritual struggle, the sociology, and the politics of homelessness.

   Recommended for those who enjoy "real-life" vignettes, those interested in the public policy and sociological aspects of homelessness, and students of peace and justice studies.




2. I teach a class on Homelessness and have used this book for the past three years. Not only do I enjoy re-reading this book each year, but every class has found this book to be the best book of the class.

   Pat McDonough has an insight into homelessness through her own experience that no one since George Orwell has been able to capture. This book is a must read.




3. This book is a fifteen-week diary of the author's life experiences while she was homeless and living in shelters. It is easy reading and it grabs your attention so that you do not want to put the book down. It is a must read.



4. This book is about a well educated and capable adult woman and her children, who was literally forced to be homeless by the court system. Given a similar set of circumstances, we could all be in her shoes! This book tells a straight forward story of how the author became homeless, what she did to cope, and how she dragged her family out of this overwhelming situation.

   This book should be read by anyone, adult or teen, who has become too familier with the good things that many Americans feel entitled to.




5. When McDonough was still writing her book, she came to speak to my businesswomen's group about it--and gradually dressed, as she spoke, in the clothes she wore when she was homeless. There was a powerful impact in noting differences in how we "heard" her then, from how we'd "heard" her when she was seen to be "like us," minutes before. We averted our eyes. One member said it was one of the most memorable talks we'd heard in 15 years of monthly programs.

   The book does that too; it makes it uncomfortable to see street people as "them" rather than "us." "There, but for a good break, go I"--not to mention the realigning of one's perception of "there but for the grace of God," for there are many excerpts in the book (from her journal at the time) that address the painful spiritual growth that results from such a wrenching experience. I no longer think that I could survive even a few days, if I suddenly found myself to be a baglady, yet I'd always thought of myself as resourceful, resilient, frugal, educated, middle class. Think again. I'd need a lot of help.

   This country cannot afford to pretend that Americans who are (usually temporarily) indisposed far enough to have lost their living quarters for the moment are somehow different or "un-American." They are us. What we do about those of us with these problems--including the elderly and the ill--may someday become very personally relevant and (if we don't do better, faster) could become a big national problem. The housing situation in Minneapolis at the moment is veering sharply away from keeping some of us in affordable housing who used to be "the working poor" rather than "the homeless." The situation needs to be addressed by those in legislatures, healthcare, social services, volunteer groups. This book can help them to understand better. Very often the real view from the street is not understood by those who "help" them, as when the physician who treats the understandably ulcerated feet of those who have no place to sit down, let alone a sink with warm water, tells the patient to "soak her feet." Right. How?