Freddy Goes to Florida by Walter R. Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Whimsical Pre-WWII Americana with Talking Animals on a Road Trip Freddy Goes to Florida (1927/1949) by Walter R. Brooks begins like a whimsical Animal Farm. Orwell probably didn't get inspired to write his grim Stalinist parable by reading about Freddy and company, but in Brooks' book Mr. Bean's animals are sick and tired of working and living uncomfortably during winter on his farm. The rooster Charles hates having to wake up before sunrise to crow (Mr. Bean threatening to fricassee the rooster for dinner if he doesn't do his job), while the horse Hank has rheumatism. And so when a barn swallow explains migration, Charles and Hank call a meeting to discuss migrating to Florida for the winter. The animals argue about who will go and who will stay to help Mr. Bean run the farm--until the cat Jinks has everyone draw lots. Jinks also gets a robin to draw a map of the way south, and when Mr. Bean is away in town, the cat leads the migrating animals out on their journey, "with his tail held straight up in the air like a drum-major's stick." In addition to the mischievous Jinx (useful in a pinch), the traveling companions are comprised of phlegmatic Hank, the young dog Robert, the cow Mrs. Wiggins ("a character"), the pig Freddy (a songster with "an inquiring mind"), a few mice like Cousin Augustus (good at chewing through things), the white duck sisters Emma and Alice (good at teaching swimming), and the barn spider couple Mr. and Mrs. Webb (tiny-voiced and philosophical). Will Charles' wife Henrietta (who likes to henpeck him) let him go? The book depicts the adventures of the animals as they walk to, in, and from Florida, featuring roads, rivers, and towns, a treasure, a swamp, a doll baby carriage, the Grandfather of All the Alligators, some timid burglars, and a dangerous and desperate man with a black moustache and a dirty-faced son--and more. As they journey south, the animals begin to realize that maybe Mr. Bean isn't such a bad master after all, and they resolve to bring him a present when they return home. The light-hearted book has many funny moments, like Henrietta's explanation for why hens don't crow, Mr. Webb's conversations with an ant and a fly, the animals' welcome in the nation's capitol, Mrs. Wiggins' heroic defense of a bridge armed only with a few mice, the animals' enjoyment of jewelry and disguising of themselves on the way home, etc. Every animal plays a key role at least once during their adventures. There are also some bizarre touches like when we learn that Mrs. Wiggins gave Jinx and Robert some milk, without being told just how she managed this. Here are some examples of Brooks' dry humor and clear style: -"Mr. Webb, however, was firm in his decision, as spiders are apt to be." -"Mrs. Wiggins had a sense of humor. That means that she always laughed at the wrong time." -"Now, if you are a rather timid burglar, and you light a match in a dark room and see a cat that is within an inch of your nose, you'll probably do just as Ed did. He dropped his match and let out an awful yell." This is the first of 26 Freddy books, and whereas in later novels Mr. Bean's animals talk with each other AND with people, here they are limited to speaking with other animals, because although they understand human speech perfectly, people only hear them quack and squeak and bark etc. Perhaps this is because animals "hear better than people." Another difference is that here Freddy is but one supporting character among many, whereas later in the series he becomes the mover and shaker and hero of the animals' adventures (which must be why the original 1927 title of this book, To and Again, was changed in 1949 to Freddy Goes to Florida). Audiobook reader John McDonough has the perfect gravelly voice and sensitive manner for the book, taking humorous things seriously and serious things humorously. I got a kick out of his horse, mouse, and spider voices, and he sings Freddy's songs with tune and gusto. The only drawback of the audiobook is that it lacks the illustrations by Kurt Wiese, so charming, realistic, and humorous. When I binged on the Freddy the Pig books in elementary school in the 60s, I missed much of the humor and read the stories as exciting and interesting adventures, while now I feel less suspense and laugh more. Their quirky charm and affection for animals make them a pleasure to read. You should enjoy Freddy Goes to Florida if you like talking animal stories (like Charlotte's Web minus the pathos), journey and return adventure stories (like The Hobbit minus the fantasy world), idyllic rural American stories (when phaetons could be found in garbage dumps, the best way to get to Florida was by surface streets, and small farm communities spread out everywhere), and lightly satiric stories targeting foolish and or bad humans. It's the kind of book you read smilingly. View all my reviews
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Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Sad Vampire: "A Silver Clock Ticking in a Void" You might think that having immortality, a perfect complexion, and super strength, speed, healing, and senses would be a gift. But wait--imagine eternal nocturnal life: an endless series of years comprised of a never-ending series of nights (the sun and daytime are off limits to vampires). After the intoxication of heightened perceptions wore off, you might come to feel bored or out of touch with a given century. You might come to dread the prospect of never dying. And if you saw the taking of human life as a horrible crime, being a vampire might become a curse. Perhaps all that's why in the world of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), the oldest vampire is a mere 400 years old. The novel consists of Louis, a nearly 200-year-old vampire, telling his unhappy life story to a mortal "boy" interviewer who is rather clumsily recording it on cassette tapes (it is the 1970s after all). Louis begins by recounting how he became a vampire near New Orleans in 1791 and began a strange and strained relationship with the vampire who turned him, Lestat. While Louis is a reluctant predator of humans, revering life and retaining his human feeling (it takes him four years to start feeding on mortals, and he feels guilty once he starts), Lestat is a callous and wanton killer seemingly intent on revenging himself for his immortality on the mortality of humans. Lestat can't understand why Louis must always be so reluctant and remorseful in his new life: "You look the gift horse of immortality in the mouth." Louis cannot understand why Lestat refuses to explain the meaning of it all to him. Did God or the devil make vampires? And why? Although Louis finds Lestat repugnant and Lestat finds Louis exasperating, they stay together because Louis continues to hope for answers from Lestat, because Lestat needs a financial provider like Louis (who is a wealthy plantation and land owner), and because they appear to be the only vampires around. The most interesting development in the novel occurs when Louis and Lestat become fathers when Lestat turns a five-year-old girl into their vampire daughter in order to keep Louis with him: quite the modern (19th-century) family! Claudia is a fascinating character because becoming a vampire froze her physical growth as a little girl, so she must rely on her cuteness to trick human prey and comes to resent having been made a vampire before her body could mature to a size and strength that would enable her to take care of herself. But although Claudia's physical growth has been arrested, her emotional and intellectual growth (given her vampiric advantages and limitations) continues, her two fathers educating her, Louis in his appreciation of life, Lestat in his enjoyment of killing. And as her mind matures, her feelings for Louis and his for her morph into a kind of romantic love. Rice heats the discreet sensuality of the vampire genre (circa 1976) and to an sensual and psychological fever. This happens not only when Louis is drinking a mortal and feeling his heart beat synchronize with the person's--sexual intercourse is replaced for vampires by blood drinking, which is called in the novel "taking" a victim--but also when he is holding Claudia and nuzzling her hair or kissing her eyelids and inner arms and smooth palms or looking up "into my paramour's eyes." That most of the love in the novel occurs between male vampires and between an "adult" male vampire and a "child" female vampire adds to the strange nature of it all. As I read, I thought, "OK, she's an immortal vampire and vampires don't have sex," but then, "Louis sure likes touching her five-year-old body!" Love takes odd forms. Rice puts us in Louis' head so deeply that we often forget that he's rather reprehensible. Ever searching for the meaning of his existence, ever prizing life but loathing his, he feels sorry for himself in being so "alone" (an eternal exile in the world) and believes that he is more human than other vampires but doesn't shirk from killing people when he could survive on animals. Rice's novel is more provocative and moving than the movie (compelling though young Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt's vampires are), for the film downplays the sensual and romantic nature of the love between Claudia and Louis and the homosexual love between Louis and Armand and cuts out potentially upsetting moments like when Louis "takes" a priest on his altar after a botched confession. Although homosexual vampire romance must have been pretty new for 1976, Rice follows the tradition of white vampires (still maintained in Twilight et al). In her world becoming a vampire makes white people whiter, vampires of color don't appear, and she doesn't interrogate the slavery-source of Louis' wealth and power. She also gives no biological or other explanation for vampire powers, limitations, and physiology. The reader of the audiobook, Simon Vance, reads Rice's style and story with understanding and a smooth and appealing voice and manner. However, the "French" accent he assumes for Louis sounds more Cinema Transylvanian than New Orleans French, and his interviewer sounds like a Brit trying to sound like an American. Finally, although Rice's vampires are inhuman monsters, they also represent us to the extent that "the only power that exists is inside ourselves." Readers not averse to the vampire genre should give Rice's highly wrought, sensual and emotional, moving and appalling novel a try. View all my reviews A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid (2012) by John Romer5/3/2018
A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid by John Romer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Evidence-Driven, Fascinating, and Witty History of Egypt "And so the shattered relics of old Egypt become shards of the mirror in which we glimpse phantoms of ourselves playing stories from our childhoods." In A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid (2012) John Romer explains the development in Egypt of agriculture, tools, pottery, burial, sacrifice, "Egyptianness," stone work, graphic images, boats, kings, hieroglyphs, gods, ceremonies, tombs, communities, pyramids, and the "state machine." Throughout he also tells the history of Egyptology, focusing on giants of the field like Petrie and Mariette as well as engaging with recent contemporary developments and finds, repeatedly trying to train us to rely on evidence rather than subjective interpretations while reminding us that it is difficult (if not impossible) to understand what people who lived millennia in the past really thought and felt and why they did what they did without imposing our own worldviews and biases on them. Even our understanding of early hieroglyphs is limited by our understanding of later ones. The following passage is typical of his approach: "So Narmer and his successors are enlisted as archaic representatives of the European narrative of history in which nations rise and fall and everything is explained by drum-and-trumpet Darwinism. Pharaonic Egypt, however, was not just another version of those later histories, and had an entirely different tenor." You must be patient if you are eager for pyramids, because Romer does not reach them until part four of his five-part book. But so engaging is his enthusiasm and so bracing his objectivity and so interesting his information and so vivid and clear his writing that he makes his first 100 pages on Egypt from 5000 to 3000 BC (about the making of neolithic culture there and the finding, classifying, and interpreting of its remains) a fascinating read, as in this following passage about ancient knives: "… these elegantly curved broad-bladed knives, with sections as precise and slim as aerofoils, were painstakingly produced by rubbing raw flint with abrasive dust down to the form required. . . . As sharp as cut-throat razors, the fragile blades of these fine knives are best suited to tasks requiring a deal of skill and care. . . like flaying, slitting and disarticulation." And things really pick up speed and interest from Part Two: Making Pharoah, which lasts only 70 pages and from 3000 to 3200 BC, until Romer ends his book with the climax of the stunning scale and perfection of the Great Pyramid in Part Five: Building Ancient Egypt (2650-2550 BC). If I have a criticism about this book, it is that Romer uses sketches for artifacts and sites, and though they are accurate, they don't quite communicate the beauty and fascination of the original works as well as photographs would. Also, maps are rare in Romer's history, and in the Kindle version it's not so easy to go back to them to check again where we are at each given point. But I learned so much from the book and enjoyed it so much that the lack of fancy photographs does not detract much from it. I was mightily impressed by things like the demerits of adopting an agricultural way of life (perhaps "humankind's First Big Mistake"), the way the "Egyptians" from the start imbued their functional pots, knives, arrowheads, etc. with grace and beauty, the introduction into Egyptian culture of cylindrical seals and hybrid human animal figures from Uruk, the development of hieroglyphs from a set of common recurring images, the evolving nature of sacrifice and offering, Romer's analysis of Narmer's palette, the development of pyramids from mastaba tombs and the concomitant development of the organized big nation state and change of craftsmen from individualized stone-vase making to identical stone-block cutting, the competition among 19th-century archeologists for big finds (leading them to do things like purposely smash artifacts they couldn't cart away so that their rivals wouldn't benefit from them!), and so on. Here are some samples of Romer's witty, at times caustic writing: -"The notion, then, that hieroglyphs were created to record human thoughts or speech is absurd." -"No tombs, no history." -"How, then, to proceed, when the very language that we use to describe Metjen's world--words like 'king,' 'courtier', 'Egypt', 'estate' and all the rest--threatens to turn that lost society into a little England?" -"Though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all." I read this first volume of Romer's history as preparation for my first tour of Egypt and found both book and tour fascinating and enriching. I'm eager now to read the second volume in his history, which is subtitled From the Great Pyramid to the Fall of the Middle Kingdom, and to return to Egypt. I recommend Romer's work to anyone interested in Egypt or well-written history. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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