Chickadee by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Small things have great power” The first three books in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series take Omakayas from seven years old in 1847 to twelve in 1852 and her family from the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker in Wisconsin to the magical forested islands and lakes of Minnesota. The fourth book, Chickadee (2012), jumps forward fourteen years to 1866, when Omakayas is married to Animikiins (first known as Angry Boy) and the mother of eight-year-old twin boys, Chickadee and Makoons (Little Bear), and the foster mother of Zozie, the daughter of her cousin and childhood rival Two Strike. The story depicts what happens to the loving, closely-knit family and the inseparable twins when Chickadee is kidnapped by a buffoonish and muscular pair of mail-delivery brothers Babiche and Batiste and taken far away. The novel proceeds in multiple point of view strands, one depicting Chickadee on his own, the others the different family members searching for him or waiting for him to return. There is much humor in the novel. Chickadee’s misperception of Catholic Sisters, Mother, and Father as a strange family is cute, as is his observation of the two brothers Babiche and Batiste who love each other as much as Chickadee and Makoons love each other and are comical rather than hateful: “Your fist is hard,” said Batiste. “And as large as your own head.” “Har, har, har,” laughed Babiche. “You are very funny, my brother.” Chickadee is an authentic boy, as when he regrets his name: “Why couldn’t he have a protector like the bear or the lynx or the caribou or the eagle? Why was he singled out by such an insignificant little bird? He had a sudden thought that appalled him--he would be a grown man and still be called Chickadee! What kind of name was that for a grown warrior? He groaned.” Luckily, he has a wise great-grandmother, Nokomis, who tells him about his namesake: “He is a teacher. The chickadee shows the Anishinabeg how to live. For instance, he never stores his food all in one place. . . . The chickadee takes good care of his family. The mother and the father stay with their babies as they fly out into the world. They stick together, like the Anishnabeg. . . . The Chickadee is always cheerful even in adversity. He is brave and has great purpose, great meaning. You are lucky to have your name.” The moments of Chickadee’s culture shock, whether seeing for the first time the prairie (“Where were the trees? Where were the hills? And again, where were the trees?”) and a city (“This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. It would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone”), or hearing for the first time violins (“the crying music that sometimes skipped and sometimes wailed”) are fine. And the twins’ love for each other is poignant: “Chickadee and Makoons curled together under one fluffy rabbit-skin blanket. Warm and full, lulled by the grown-ups’ voices, they fell into a charmed sleep and dreamed, as they always did, together.” So it is all the more painful when they’re separated, and when one brother is eating he tries to imagine what the other is eating, and when one brother is falling asleep with a painful chest he says the name of the other. There are moments of vivid life in the novel, as when “Animikiins drew his knife and sliced out the moose’s tongue and liver. He brought both into the shelter, heaped snow against the opening, and ate a bloody, raw, satisfying meal before he dozed off to sleep.” However, apart from some vivid details about the Metis community (mixed race Indian-whites who enjoy fiddle music, singing, and dancing and colorful clothes and go on long buffalo hunting trips in ear piercingly noisy wagons made completely out of wood), and a neat explanation of why the Ojibwe don’t point at people or things, the level of absorbing and authentic detail illustrating how Ojibwa lived in the mid-19th century, developing the characters, and making the previous three novels in the series so outstanding, is lower here. Another noticeable lack is Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother who plays a neat role in the second and third books. In The Porcupine Year (2008) Omakayas thinks, “He was the best thing that had ever happened to her, ever . . . this little brother who adored her no matter what she did.” So where is he now? Her other family members from the previous books are present: grandmother Nokomis, mother Yellow Kettle, father Deydey, big sister Angeline and her husband Fishtail, younger brother Pinch/Quill, and cousin Two-Strike. So what happened to Bizheens, who should be about sixteen by now? Did Erdrich want to focus on the twins and so removed Bizheens from the family and the series without bothering to write an explanation? How dissatisfying! The novel is the shortest in the series so far, and is a less is more work, so much so that there isn’t enough of it, too few characters making their presence felt, so that, for example, I forget about Yellow Kettle till she says something suddenly out of the blue, so that I want more of the ever fierce loner Two Strike (I love the scene where she lets Omakayas hug her after promising to retrieve Chickadee), and more of Nokomis, Deydey, and Angeline. And I wished for more Omakayas! After developing her so much as the appealing protagonist in the first three books, with her hearing voices of spirits telling her what to use for medicine, being in tune with bears, having a crow pet, being a natural healer, and having dreams that help save Deydey’s life as well as a vision of her future life, in this fourth book she’s just a loving and worried mother with too few compelling traits and point of view passages. But much of my disappointment in the fourth book is due to the excellence of the first three in the series, and readers who liked them should like this one (though readers new to the series should begin with the wonderful first book, The Birchbark House). View all my reviews
2 Comments
The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors by Dan Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Readable and Absorbing Templar/Crusader History In the introduction to The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors (2017), Dan Jones says that his book will tell an entertaining narrative history of the modest beginning of the Templars after the first Crusade, of their rapid rise to wealth, power, and influence in the medieval world (east and west), and of their “spectacular fall” and dissolution. The last sentences of his book describe what he achieves as well: “The legend of the Templars will live on, inspiring, entertaining, and intriguing generations to come. That perhaps is their real legacy.” Through the course of his history, Jones illuminates much about the Templars in the Holy Land, where their order started in the early 12th century, dedicated to protecting the Christian presence, which I expected, but he also explains plenty about them in European countries like England and France, where they were major land-holders, bankers, political influencers, and crusaders (helping the Reconquista in Spain and Portugal), which surprised me. “Those hundred years had seen the Templars transformed from indigent shepherds of the pilgrim roads [in the Holy Land] dependent on the charity of fellow pilgrims for their food and clothes, into a borderless, self-sustaining paramilitary group funded by large scale estate management [from Scotland to Sicily],” with their “martial prowess with spiritual prestige and global connections” enabling them to act as diplomats, bankers, and advisors to kings and popes and other powers. Jones also vividly and suspensefully depicts battles and sieges and wars and negotiations, as well as the political and religious motivations behind them. Although Jones writes most of his history from the European point of view (using words like “unfortunately” or “fortunately” when describing things that hindered or helped the Templars and their crusading Christian allies and rivals achieve their goals), he also does present the Muslim point of view and quotes a fair number of Muslim chroniclers. And he depicts famous Muslim leaders like Saladin and Baybars as complex, charismatic, and capable men. He is a clear writer capable of finely dry lines, as when he says, “The Templars were not a missionary organization,” because they were not dedicated to converting enemies but to killing them. (One of the many interesting things to glean from his book is the distinction apologists for the church militant made between homicide (the sinful killing of men) and malicide (the graceful killing of evil). Another savory line comes when Jones covers a low point in the Templars’ history, when losses to Muslim armies left them “a ragtag leaderless rump.” He excels when critically summing up some of the less savory figures in his history, probably chief among them King Philip IV of France, the man most responsible for wiping out the Templars: “Philip was a man of little warmth and no great intellectual curiosity, but he was a calculating zealot, committed to his own self-serving form of piety, able to convince himself of the worst intentions in others and quite unafraid of destroying anyone who stood in his way.” I found many interesting things in Jones’ account, like the rationalization of some Christian thinkers and leaders to condone violence in the service of a religion whose major figure, Jesus, preached non-violence, the Templar rules forbidding members from doing things like wearing pointy shoes, hunting every animal except lions, and wearing clothes with decorative accessories, the rivalry between the Templars and the Hospittalers, and the way Philip IV and Pope Clement freely used torture and intimidation and even the University of Paris to destroy the Templars, not only in France but everywhere. He does hurry through the fourth Crusade and its sack of Constantinople, leaving me to wonder what if any role the Temple played in it. On the other hand, I sometimes felt I was reading a history of the Crusades in addition to that of the Templars. That’s inevitable, given how inextricably they were involved in the Crusades almost from the start, but still… The result is that, although I enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it, I sometimes wondered if he was stretching things to make the Templars relevant to the history of the Crusades, and I don’t now feel the need to read his book on the Crusades. The book closes with an interesting epilogue covering the history of idealizing or demonizing fictional representations of Templars, from the beginning of their order up to the present, from the early 13th century poem Parzifal up to the recent Assassin’s Creed games and including their co-option by the Freemasons in the 18th century and by Mexican drug cartels in the 21st. Jones summarily debunks the fanciful legends of their supposed continued secret existence and secreting away of great treasures and holy relics like the grail, explaining that the “evidence” from all such fancies derive from earlier fictions about the order. Although Jones reads his own book just fine, with clarity and enthusiasm without overdoing anything, for obvious reasons the Audiobook lacks his notes and maps, as well as his four appendices (Cast of Major Characters, Popes, Kings and Queens of Jerusalem, and Masters of the Order of the Templars). For readers interested in the Templars and Crusades, this book should be an enriching experience. View all my reviews
The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Omakayas Growing Up Louise Erdrich’s third Birchbark House series novel, The Porcupine Year (2008) takes place in 1852 two years after The Game of Silence left off, with now 12-year-old Omakayas and her family still in exile, still traveling the forested Minnesota lakes by canoe looking for a new home while trying to avoid the hostile Bwanaag (Dakota/Lakota), having given in to US governmental pressure to leave their ancestral Wisconsin home at the end of the previous book. As this one opens, Omakayas and her irritating younger brother Pinch are doing a little nighttime river deer hunting in their canoe with torch (Omakayas) and bow and arrow (Pinch) when the powerful current of a surging river joining their mild one carries them off downstream, clinging to each other, through such formidable rapids that when the siblings later see them in daylight, they are struck dumb by the realization that “Whatever had saved them was beyond and greater than any human strength or skill.” How the kids get by insultingly supporting each other until they may reunite with their family is neat. During that process Pinch gains a new medicine animal, a porcupine, and a new name, Quill, in a humorous and nice way: “You look like you were in a battle with a thousand miniature warriors. And they hit you with their arrows. Tiny ones.” Omakayas twisted her face to stop her laughter, but a snort escaped. She pretended to control herself. “My brother, I am in awe of the great deed you did today.” “Then I’m making a fire,” said Pinch. “Give me your striker. If our enemies discover us, I’ll quill them to death. I am not Quillboy, but Quill. Just Quill. The great Quill! We’re going to feast on my courage now.” The book goes on to depict for Omakayas and her family a “year of danger and love, sacrifice and surprise—that porcupine year.” By the end of the Porcupine Year Omakayas, who is transitioning between girlhood and womanhood, will suffer hunger and cold and separation, gain a new appreciation of her goofy but maturing younger brother Quill, love her baby brother Bizheens more and more, develop her relationship with Animikiins (aka the Angry Boy), feel an “ancient” hatred and then a sudden sympathy for her fierce cousin Two Strike, learn why her father doesn’t trust white people and how Old Tallow stopped being Light Moving in the Leaves and became Old Tallow, and enter the woman lodge. By the way, despite Deydey’s painful story about when as a boy he met his white father for the first and last time, Erdrich does not exclusively depict white people as villains. Auntie Muskrat’s husband Albert LaPautre is a pathetic alcoholic who does Omakayas’ family an almost fatal bad turn. As with the other Birchbark House books, this one is full of fine writing and appealing, interesting, and complex characters. It is also full of vivid details of daily Ojibwe life in the mid 19th century, including cutting and drying venison, making pemmican, getting a new name, making a sweat lodge, becoming a woman, dating while chaperoned, etc. It is also full of storytelling, as grandmother Nokomis, family friend Old Tallow, and father Deydey tell various stories, from realistic biographical vignettes featuring abandonment, abuse, compromise, and canine justice to fantastic moral legends featuring bears becoming humans and left and right arms fighting. It is also full of humor and pathos. And what happens when the family finally encounters some of their fearsome, if handsome, enemies the Bwanaag is scary, funny, and somehow magnificent. Erdrich again displays her awareness of the psychology of kids, as when Omakayas and Quill are both jealous when Two Strike starts taking Animikiins out hunting with her every day, or as when, in a wonderfully suspenseful and funny scene, Bizheens (the family’s beloved toddler) goes out on some dangerously thin ice, far too thin to take the weight of anyone older than him, and takes such pleasure in the terrified and appalled reactions of the family stuck on shore that he goes out on the ice further still. As in her other Birchbark House books, Erdrich incorporates Ojibwa words, providing a glossary at the end of the novel but also usually defining the words in her text, as when Omakayas’ baby brother Bizheens says to her, “Giizhawenimin. Giizhawenimin. . . I really love you.” Readers who like young adult historical fiction, especially well-written work centering on Native American girls with charming illustrations by the author, should find much to like here. I am looking forward to future books about Omakayas and her family. View all my reviews
The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “All things change, even us, even you.” In the beginning of The Game of Silence (2005), Louise Erdrich’s sequel to The Birchbark House (1999), the now nine-year-old Ojibwa girl Omakayas is counting the things she loves, like her crow Andeg and her family (even her pesky younger brother Pinch), when a group of starving, raggedy refugees show up on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker where she lives with family and friends and relatives (in today’s Wisconsin). After having been made to move by the US government into the lands of the Bwanaag (Dakota/Lakota) people, the refugees were attacked by the Bwanaag and were only able to barely escape in their canoes with the clothes on their backs. One of the refugees is a baby boy whose parents have been killed or lost, so Omakayas is happy when her mother adopts him (calling him Bizheens, or Lynx), as the girl has been missing her baby brother who died in a smallpox epidemic two years ago. Also among the refugees is a proud boy who, having lost his mother, always frowns and bristles when he catches Omakayas looking at him, so she takes to calling him Angry Boy. He will stay with the family Auntie Muskrat. The Game of Silence is a fine sequel to The Birchbark House! The book features convincing depictions of kids and their thoughts and actions in the context of mid-19th-century Ojibwa daily life through four seasons (cleaning and drying fish, making canoes, beading clothes, setting snares, gathering medicinal mushrooms, weaving mats, playing in the forest or snow, telling stories in winter, preparing a sweat lodge, learning to read the white man’s writing, and more), strong female characters (family friend Old Tallow, cousin Two Strike, grandmother Nokomis, big sister Angeline, mother Yellow Kettle, and Omakayas herself), interesting supporting characters (comedy relief bad boy Pinch, distant but loving father Deydey, and a white girl nicknamed the Break-Apart Girl because her corset pinches her waist almost in two). There’s lots of “simple” pleasure (food, warmth, storytelling), as well as things related to growing up, like observing the adult love between Angeline and Fishtail and feeling an inchoate love between herself and the Angry Boy, going on a dream fast, and having to deal with envy and resentment towards her cousin Two Strike (“When she overheard Nokomis say something admiring about Two Strike, a hollow place formed in Omakayas’s heart”). There is much neat stuff on respecting nature and using everything and thanking the spirits. There is more in this book than the first concerning white people’s appalling treatment of Native Americans. In the first book, Omakayas’ family and friends are devastated by white people’s smallpox, while in this one they’re devastated by white people’s perfidy in breaking treaties (and then cheating them out of payments and supplies promised in return for moving). The Ojibwa call white people chimookomanag (big knife), because they are always cutting things up and taking them. There are many moving moments here, including ones between Omakayas and Angeline, Nokomis, and Pinch. The relationship between Omakayas and the Break-Apart Girl is sweet: they cannot understand each other’s language but enjoy sharing food treats and playing on the beach of the lake. Omakayas feels sorry for the white girl because her tight boots pinch her feet so much, while the white girl probably worries about Omakayas not being Christian. And the culture shock experienced by Omakayas when visiting the Break-Apart Girl is neat, as when she observes the white people’s “slave [domesticated] animals,” is disgusted by the idea of drinking animal milk, and is thankful that her friend can’t understand Nokomis say that her “head bucket” (bonnet) would be useful if a bottom were sewn onto it for carrying things. Kids must love the novel’s affirmation of apparently small, weak beings: the Little Person (memegwisi) who saved Nokomis, the Angry Boy’s real name, Animikiins (Little Thunder), Two Strike’s killing of a bull moose with a single arrow shot, Nokomis’ story about the Little Girl and the Windigoo, and Omakayas, so young and little but so formidable in will and personality and dream/vision/healing ability. When you think that she’s only nine, a moment like the following becomes quite impressive: “Omakayas slit open a fish as long as her arm and plunged her hands into the slippery fish guts.” Erdrich is an excellent writer, writing vivid details that depict daily Ojibwa activities and develop her characters, as in the following passage: “Mama and Nokomis were weaving reed pukwe mats outside in the shade of a maple tree. They used long flat matting needles that Deydey fashioned of bone. As he did with everything that he made for his beloved wife and her mother, the needles were extra special, decorated with circles and crosses. The matting needles and the reeds ticked and rustled together, and the sitting mats grew bigger and bigger. While the two women worked, the new little baby, Bizheens, watched each mat develop under their hands. The women laughed, for his baby gaze was as critical and solemn as an old man’s. Just as Mama predicted, he was growing plumper so quickly that he seemed rounder every morning, as though he was adding baby fat in his sleep. They touched his nose, jiggled the tiny dream catcher that dangled just over his forehead. His cradle board hung off a low branch and from time to time Nokomis swung him lightly. When she did, his eyes sparked with alarm first, then pleasure, and he made a sharp little cooing sound of happy surprise. Still, he never laughed.” Erdrich textures her story with Ojibwa words, for which she provides a Glossary after the story (though it isn’t necessary because her characters usually say the English meanings). Readers who like authentic, beautiful, humorous, and moving young adult historical fiction (especially about Native American families and girls) should like this book (but should start with the first one, The Birchbark House). Anna Fields capably reads the audiobook, but Erdrich’s charming illustrations make the book special. View all my reviews
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Too Much Treacle and Too Many Exclamation Marks! In the beginning of Catherynne M. Valente’s third Fairyland novel, The Girl Who Soared over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (2013), September’s mother teaches the girl how to drive on her 14th birthday, and soon she’s running errands around her Nebraska home in her neighbor’s old Model A Ford to earn money to bring with her to Fairyland on her next adventure there. But the usual season to visit Fairyland comes and goes, and she’s starting to fear that she’s become too practical and adult to go again, when one day while out in the car to repair a fence, she meets a Lineman tasked with maintaining the line separating Fairyland from our world (September’s adventures in the first two novels in the series have created trouble spots along the line). Suddenly the Blue Wind, accompanied by flying puffins clad in Spanish armor, floats by, scorns September, and vanishes with the Model A through a hole in the Lineman’s net, so the girl jumps after her. September lands in the hinterlands of Westerly, the city of the Six Winds. There she becomes a “Royal scofflaw, professional revolutionary, and criminal of the realm,” dons a black silk outfit, retrieves her car, and buys a “Way,” which has her setting off to deliver a mysterious box to Almanack (a giant whelk) on the moon of Fairyland. After about seven long chapters, September reaches Fairyland’s moon, where she spends the rest of the picaresque novel visiting a series of mostly forgettable outre characters with mostly difficult to remember names, including the Calcatrix, a crocodile exchequer; Ballast Downbound, a Klabautermann; Nefarious Freedom Coppermolt III, a lobster; Spoke, a taxicrab; Pentameter and Valentine, a pair of a Stationary Circus acrobats; Marigold and Tamarind, a pair of Lamia Lunaticks; and Turing, a tiger Tyguerrotype. The otherwise varied supporting characters do a lot of equally hyper sounding talking, their utterances punctuated with exclamation marks, like this: “‘Where I come from, being a Princess is a job, young primate!’ huffed Marigold. ‘A position in the civil service! We are Executive Branch, child! Why, I never wore a dress except on a dare! I wore a suit, like any government employee. And a fine suit, too, with a hat to match! I had more ties than a railroad!’” (She goes on for a few pages like that.) Sometimes the talking furthers the plot, which comes to concern September’s quest to stop the giant Yeti Ciderskin from carrying out his revenge on the moon and Fairyland below it. (Long ago the Yeti lost his paw to a fairy trap, because, as Yetis move so fast you can’t see them--except in blurry photos--the fairies wanted his paw to manipulate time, so Ciderskin is apparently causing moonquakes to shake everyone off the moon and perhaps to make the moon fragment and rain down rocks onto Fairyland below.) But often the talking does not seem vital to the story, as when Candlestick the Buraq (mule) in charge of fates goes off on a page-long rant on the relative religious merits and demerits of Teatimers vs. Midnight Snackers. Partly as a result of all the talking (often more disquisition than conversation), this third book is less enjoyable and more labor-intensive than the wonderful first two novels in the series, the first fantastically introducing September to Fairyland, the second interestingly exploring the concept of shadows. The third one’s title has September soaring over the moon of Fairyland, but reading it felt more like struggling through treacle. There are plenty of neat concepts in the novel, like money and magic being the same because people give them value by believing in them, the members of the Stationary Circus feasting on paper, ink, and printing type, three-dimensional flesh and blood people meeting two-dimensional versions of themselves in the Country of Photograph, and of course “Tools have rights.” Yet there is also at times too much of a muchness with Valente’s fertile imagination, as if it, like many of her characters, is hyper. For example, time is spent now and then on September’s criminal title and outfit, only for her to end up never doing anything criminal in the story, her Model A car gains a name (Aroostook) and steadily changes into something organic and alive as the adventure continues, but never becomes an appealing character, and Abecedaria the Librarian of the Lopsided Library is not only a Catalogue Imp, which sounds just right for her job and name, but also a Periwig from the Foxtail Haberdashery, which sounds excrescent. Luckily, September is accompanied on her quest by her charming best friends Ell the Wyverary (a wyvern who is sure his father was a library) and Saturday (a Marid, a sea genii), and it is great to spend time with them again. Ell is working in the lunar library, troubled by a curse that makes him shrink each time he breathes fire. Saturday has found his niche as a trapeze artist in the Stationary Circus but suffers from September’s inability to appreciate the effects of Marids like him living backwards and forwards in time. Moreover, he and she are both older now, so there’s the awkward teenage love thing. September’s prolonged identity crisis, not knowing what she wants to be or what to call herself, is fine (this is a YA fantasy novel after all), and the climax and the resolution are splendid, providing a perfect surprise that is strangely moving and perfectly fitting, casting in a new light the monstrous Yeti, a special Stethoscope, and the usual end for a mortal child visiting Fairyland. But finally this book was more labor and less pleasure than the first two, and if my graduate student were not writing her thesis about the series, I might not muster the gumption to read its fourth and fifth books. View all my reviews
A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Clear and Absorbing Historical Overview I got a lot of nourishment from Niall Kishtainy’s A Little History of Economics (2017). His history begins with the first philosopher-economists like Plato, moves through economist giants like Adam Smith, and finishes with contemporary figures like Thomas Piketty. Along the way it concisely references historical events like revolutions, wars, famines, bubbles, depressions, recessions, and so on. I like Kishtainy’s accounts of things like normative economics, Marxism, exploitation, free trade vs. protected trade, conspicuous consumption, game theory, creative destruction, speculators, “pegged” currencies, externalities, feminist economics, behavioral economics, rational expectations, auction theory, and so on. He explains difficult concepts clearly and uses helpful analogies (some from the economic theorists he’s referring to), like the bathtub, the parade, the football (soccer) team, the pineapple island, and the noisy trumpeter. He uses simple language to explain complex concepts. As an economics tyro, I learned a lot from his book (although I also feel that, because it’s a short book and I’m not good at retaining complex information, I will probably forget much of what I learned). Kishtainy is rather balanced and unbiased in his history, presenting the ideas of key figures like Keynes and Friedman while showing opposing points of view or theories to demonstrate how complex the field is and how many different ways there are of understanding economics. Some figures he covers are really neat, like the Indian economist-philosopher Amartya Sen, who started looking at different ways to be poor or wealthy than traditional money/food ones, focused on “capabilities” rather than on mere freedoms, and also cast a light on gender inequality. Kishtainy’s overall point is that economics is an important and interesting field, exploring in the context of scarcity “what do people need to be happy and fulfilled” and “what makes them truly thrive.” He succeeds in making us see that “Economics is a matter of life and death.” He also argues that we should use economics to solve specific problems, because it’s not so effective at solving big complex problems. And that economists should have cool heads and warm hearts. The audiobook reader Stephen Crossley is fine: clear, personable, committed, without drawing attention to himself. Sometimes while listening to the audiobook, I wished I were reading the physical book so I could dip in and out of earlier or later chapters to firm up an understanding of points where Kishtainy says something like, “As we saw in chapter 29,” or “As we’ll see in chapter 36,” so I several times listened to chapters over again after finishing them once. The book is well-written and well-read enough that re-listening to chapters was interesting rather than a chore. Readers new to economics—especially young readers—should find much of interest here, though older readers well-versed in them may not. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
March 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University