Jesse's Reading List

Stylistically sub-par (for Twain), this brief "pamphlet" reads like it was rushed off by a hurried pen. Which it may well have been, given the urgency of the subject matter. Twain here is lending his name, if not his brilliance, to the cause of reforming Leopold II's butchery in the Congo Free State. The soliloquy reads more like a naked indictment than like the probable thoughts of the king himself, and thus lacks the aroma of actuality requisite to effective humor or satire. Moments of sheer, factual horror deliver knockout punches despite the stale prose. One such moment is a description of the magnitude of the butchery, in which Twain reflects that the skeletons of Congolese killed under Leopold II's rule could stretch single file from New York City to San Francisco. This sounds unbelievable. But do the math--you will realize that Twain was actually understating the case. Ten million skeletons, standing hand in hand in a line, would stretch not just from NYC to S...

I could go on for more words than the book contains about this one. Instead, I'll note that I like both the book and the movie. Set the two side-by-side, and you have a clear illustration of how Hollywood perverts the world.

A slap-in-the-face account of one of the largest mass killings in history. As many as thirteen million dead. Jaw-droppingly shocking. If we could replace every "rah-rah America" history book in school with something along these lines, I dare say it would solve half of the world's problems. Kudos to Hochschild for going where few had gone for almost a century, and for having the persistence to get the result published. It's a tragic commentary on developed-world society that Jersey Shore attracts millions, while the death of millions goes largely unnoticed. Of course the book is not without its flaws. Hochschild's journalism has its own yellow bent, and this leaves us with a picture that is less telling and true than it could be. In Hochschild's world, it seems, characters are either very good or very evil. The exclusion of nuance from this book is a nearly-damning weakness--How are we to understand the genesis of great evil if we assume that the characters wh...

Never judge a book by its cover. Nor by its author, apparently. I admit to being pleasantly surprised. Well-written, funny, full of pathos, a quick but deep read. There's lots to this book. I found myself relating so much to the main character--a quirky, super-intelligent, 30-something male with socially-crippling OCD--that I lost any hope of objectivity about a third of the way through. I spent about thirty minutes mentally adding up the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal sums of the eight-by-eight magic square, noting that it is constructed in the Franklin-fashion, so that the diagonals don't add to the right number. Is this a sign that I was in-to the character? Or that I am the character? Thank God I don't have a fear of curbs. The closest Rite-Aid would be a marathon away.