A book came out, and last month it hit No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, edging out Laura Bush's memoir. When Halpern told his father this, the reaction was phlegmatic. 'Trust me,' Halpern Snr said of Bush. 'She doesn't give a fuck. She could have you killed."
I like to think that I have a pretty good sense of humour. I enjoy quick wit and sarcasm, and appreciate when people say it how it is and get to the point. After last weeks book, Beyond Belfast, I was on a bit of a humour kick. This weeks book, Sh*t My Dad Says, written by Justin Halpern, had been catching my eye for the last couple of weeks, and I figured now was as good a time as any other to sit back and enjoy a few laughs. Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.
'At 28 years old, I found myself living at home, with my 73-year-old father. As a child, my father never minced words, and when I screwed up, he had a way of cutting right through the bullshit and pointing out exactly why I was being an idiot. When I moved back in I was still, for the most part, an idiot. But this time, I was smart enough to write down all the things he said to me…'
After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his seventy-three-year-old dad. As Justin says at one point, his dad is ‘like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair’; and has never minced words. Sh*t My Dad Says is an all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts. When Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him. Now, almost one million people follow Mr Halpern’s philosophical musings every day on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his sayings. What emerges is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father and son relationship from a major new comic voice.
"Happy Birthday, I didn’t get you a present… Oh, mom got you one? Well, that’s from me then, too – unless it’s shitty."
"Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it."
"Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn’t stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down."
As Justin grows up the book captures the awkward formative moments between father and son, the hangovers, the first break-up and the "sex education" that consisted of Halpern Snr presenting his son with a pile of condoms. Despite this tough love, a sense of deep fondness runs all the way through and ultimately it's the story of a father trying to teach his son right from wrong and bring him up the best way he can. In many ways Halpern Snr is the voice of reason in a world where we spend too long pussy-footing around, fearful of creating offence.
"Why the f*ck would I want to live to 100? I’m 73 and shit’s starting to get boring. By the way, there’s no money left when I go, just fyi."
"All I ask is that you pick up your shit so you don't leave your bedroom looking like it was used for a gang bang."
"You seen my cell phone? What's it look like? Like two horses f*ucking. It's a phone, son. It looks like a phone."
Bigoted, rude, filthy - and currently conquering America... Shit My Dad Says encompasses far more, however, than the 118 tweets Halpern has so far put up on his site. A mix of personal reminiscence and self-deprecating humour, the book takes in his childhood, 1980s America, his relationships with his brothers, his failings in Hollywood, giant steaks, drunk college blondes, and, of course, countless scatological jokes: a funny, silly, well-observed tribute to American male-hood. The book is straight up hilarious, dry and wry and full of vim, thanks, mostly, to the brilliant character of Halpern Snr.'
"That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them."
"Do people your age know how to comb their hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started f*cking."
"The worst thing you can be is a liar. . . . Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar. Nazi one, liar two."
I picked up Sh*t My Dad Says from the store, and went immediately to a very crowed cafe, where I ordered my drink and sat back in the big velvety armchairs to devour this book. A public place is probably not the best setting to read this book, especially if you are alone. I found myself on the other end of many uncomfortable looks, as I tried and failed to stifle my hysterical laughter. This is a book that you can open to any page and discover yourself in a fit of laughter before you have read more than three lines. It's perfect to read in an afternoon, or keep by your bed to read a few lines to start and finish off your days. Anyone that appreciates blunt wit and sarcasm, as well as a few profanities, needs to have this book in their possession.
"Put the rake down. I don't wanna sit around watching you 'give it your best.' Either stop sucking or get the fuck out of the way."
"You came out of your mom looking like shit. She thought you were beautiful. Don't know what scared me most, your looks or her judgment."
"Nervous? In 5 billion years the sun will burn out and nothing you did will matter. Feel better?"
Here are a couple links to follow Justin and Harper Sr, as they continue to share their stories and wisdom.
http://shitmydadsays.com/favorited/default
http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
For some reason, quite unknown to me, I have always been attracted to Ireland. It started with the celtic music when I began Irish dancing, and I soon fell in love with the country. Everything from the culture to the language, the pubs to the rolling green hills, there was just something about it that drew me in. I had been looking for a book that was set in Ireland, and had been having trouble finding one until this week. I walked into my favourite Chapters store and started browsing the tables that were so optimistically labeled; new and hot fiction, read it before you wrap it, stores twenty bestsellers, when I noticed a bright yellow book with an oversized green shamrock on the cover. Unable to ignore it, I walked over to see that it was titled Beyond Belfast. After reading the short summary I realized that I had finally found the perfect book to fill my Irish craving. This book was lively, knowledgeable, opinionated, disrespectful, debatable and immensely readable.
Beyond Belfast, written by the savagely hilarious Canadian author, Will Ferguson, is offbeat and charming, and filled with humour, insight, and a wide array of eccentric characters. It tells the story of one man's misguided attempt at walking the entire Ulster Way: a 560-mile path that circles Northern Ireland, from the city walls of Derry to the moorland heights of the Sperrins, from the green glens of Antrim to the Mountains of Mourne. Along the way, Ferguson, grandson of a Belfast orphan, uncovers his own hidden family history. There are clues about a lost inheritance, a mysterious photograph, rumours of a vast estate: the truth when it comes is both surprising and funny
Taking place the year after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, his journey captures something of the atmosphere of Northern Ireland at the beginning of a precarious and uncertain peace, or, as Ferguson remarks, "the absence of war, which is not quite the same thing". The narrative is punctuated with historical and political musings, triggered by the places he visits and by his encounters on the route. His thoughts are informed by a fair amount of reading, a keen sense of observation and a humane disposition.
Ferguson writes with a fine sense of historical irony and a deep revulsion for the ways in which loyalist and republican paramilitaries have treated people as expendable pawns, destroying lives for their respective causes. He is also unsettled by the “the tacit approval given to terrorists and bigots,” and exasperated by the self-censorship that is often necessary for survival. “I was tired of being neutral,” he says at one point, “of having silence forced upon me by unstated threats.”
Sometimes, when he decides to speak his mind, he runs greater risks than he realizes. You do not tell loyalists in the most Orange part of Belfast, on the most Orange day of the year, that in burning the Irish tricolour they are “almost burning their own flag” because one of the colours is orange. Not if you want to live a long and happy life, anyway. Still, he got away with it, possibly because of his Canadian accent, and lived to tell the tale. There's a tale within the tale as well: the heart-rending story of Ferguson's orphaned Ulster grandfather, who came to Canada, and the quest to uncover the hidden family history. Both tales, of routes and roots, are born of desire to reconnect with the past, and speak in their related ways to the perduring power of Ulster Protestant ethnicity in Canada. They are funny, intelligent and well worth hearing.
Ferguson narrowly survives death by lorry, drowning, mugging, wayward bulls, frenzied dogs and electrified fences. He is up to his ankles in cow shite, he is chilled to the bone, he hikes in waterlogged boots, he is often lost, and for long stretches of time he is lonely, with only his own footprints for company. All this would knock the romantic stuffing out of anyone. And yet, he also come across majestic scenery, magnificent views and breathtaking landscapes. If heaven is a replay of the “softest and finest moments of our lives,” he writes, “I'll see more than a few fleeting images of Northern Ireland move past.” It is, as he says, "a land of contrasts"; during his travels, he meets with occasional meanness, but much generosity of spirit and many small acts of kindness.
Will Ferguson's talent as a satirist is to be treasured. He writes refreshingly, provocatively and at times eloquently. He takes on issues from a contrarian's perspective, but never exceeds the bounds of reason. He looks for the essence and his search sometimes brings out some smashingly insightful stuff. Ferguson possesses a crafty eye for detail, not to mention a highly developed understanding of the essential folly in what passes for everyday life.
When I started this Journey Through Literature, I began marking pages in the books that I was reading that I wanted to come back to. They usually had some kind of quote I like, or a word, event, or person that I wanted to know more about. While reading Beyond Belfast, most of the pages I marked contained phrases and conversations laced with Irish wit and humour, such as "The titanic was built in the shipyards of belfast.... still a sensitive topic, that, and even when asked about the titanic, people in belfast will tell you "it was fine when it left."" In order to share all the things I marked down, I would be relaying near full chapters of this book, so instead I will just insist that If you enjoy travel, humour, and authenticity, you should without a doubt read this book.
Some weeks I have an idea of a book I want to read, perhaps one that I have been noticing or a recommendation from someone, and sometimes, as is the case with this week, I have no idea what I am going to leave the bookstore with. I'm not sure what drew me to pick up Tinkers, written by Paul Harding, but after reading the summary, I realized that the content of the novel was like nothing that I had read about before, and felt compelled to leave the store, book in tow. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. It is spellbinding, written with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense.
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.
As time collapses into memory, George Washington Crosby travels deep into his past where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. George repairs clocks for a living, and as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, "right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners" he revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father's epilepsy and the cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure are stunning, and the household's sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, ‘showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.’
A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web.
Harding’s interest is in the universalities: nature and time and the murky character of memory. The small, important recollections are rendered with an exactitude that is poetic. This is a book so meticulously assembled that vocabulary choices like “craquelure” and “scrieved” – far from seeming pretentious – serve as reminders of how precise and powerful a tool good English can be. The prose are lyrical and specific, making this novel a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can’t go anywhere at all. It is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship.
"Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby's ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy."
Harding's language dazzles whether he's describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. The most memorable parts of this novel may be the depiction of a nineteenth-century landscape complete with mule-drawn carts and “frozen wood so brittle that it rang when you split it.” Tinkers is a finely crafted piece of work by a writer who clearly respects his own trade.
"Now the horologist looks upon an open-faced, fairy-book contraption; gears lean to and fro like a lazy machine in a dream. The universe's time cannot be marked thusly. Such a crooked and flimsy device could only keep the fantastic hours of unruly ghosts."
At only a very brief 192 pages, it still packs an emotional punch that books of three times its length often lack. It's a novel that you'll want to savor for its stunning yet economical use of language, for its descriptions of nature, of illness and health, and for its profound understanding of humanity's deepest needs and desires for family and home. I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience, yet Harding is in such control of his material that it never devolves into mushiness or becomes maudlin.
Tinkers is a novel rich in close observation, short in dialogue and event. While normally this would be a cloying combination, the sharp richness of Harding’s language and the precision of his descriptions makes the novel both transfixing and compelling. Harding brings a clarity to the work which sets it clearly apart. This is underscored, resoundingly, by the deep emotional effect of the novel’s closing pages, a moment of grace, of synchronicity, of father and son, which will break your heart. Tinkers confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls, and is cumulatively moving because it is woven together into the single quilt of our humanity.
"Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely..."
"The Internet is to news, what car horns are to music."
This weeks book is one that I have had in the back of my mind for a little while. The first thing that caught my attention was the title, The Imperfectionists. I am someone that always strived for perfection, whether it was school projects, or cooking, I wanted them to fulfill my idea of perfection. But I have come to learn that sometimes it's when we let loose and are completely spontaneous that we have the most memorable experiences. When I saw the title I was curious to read deft stories about delectable, difficult characters, who were living messy, impulsive lives, and witness as they worked through trails and triumphs. This was a rich, thrilling book that is both a love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world. Rachman’s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.
Printing presses whirr, ashtrays smolder, and the endearing complexity of humanity plays out in Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Set against the backdrop of a fictional English-language newspaper based in Rome, it begins as a celebration of the beloved and endangered role of newspapers and the original 24/7 news cycle. Yet Rachman pushes beyond nostalgia by crafting an apologue that better resembles a modern-day Dubliners than a Mad Men exploration of the halcyon past. The chaos of the newsroom becomes a stage for characters unified by a common thread of circumstance, with each chapter presenting an affecting look into the life of a different player. From the comically overmatched greenhorn to the forsaken foreign correspondent, we suffer through the painful heartbreaks of unexpected tragedy and struggle to stifle our laughter in the face of well-intentioned blunders. This cacophony of emotion blends into a single voice, as the depiction of a paper deemed a "daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species" becomes more about the disillusion in everyday life than the dissolution of an industry.
Among the cast is Lloyd Burko, a past-his-prime reporter, married four times, alienated from all his children except one, whom he’s about to betray as a source, only to find. . . . Well, I won’t give that away, but it’s quite something. Then there’s Arthur Gopal, a sad-sack obituary writer devoted to his young daughter, Pickle. He’s sent off to Switzerland to interview a dying feminist intellectual. During a break, he switches on his cellphone to find 26 missed calls. His life is about to change.
Herman Cohen is the paper’s corrections editor, the grammarian and style cop indispensable to any newspaper. He writes thunderous, generally ignored memos about impermissible acronyms, solecisms and misspellings like “Sadism Hussein.” You feel his pain when Tony Blair is included on the newspaper’s list of “recently deceased Japanese dignitaries.” “He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail — what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?”
Kathleen Solson, the editor in chief, has just discovered that her ne’er-do-well husband is cheating on her. (There are lots of ne’er-do-wells in Rachman’s novel, making one wonder: Is this so very common among newspaper folk?) Kathleen is looking to rekindle an old romance with an Italian, now married and a government press flack: “Here he is, temples graying, eyes bagged, slightly handsome but slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.”
The funniest section, which comes off as a cross between Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” adventure, concerns the paper’s helpless young Cairo stringer, Winston Cheung, whose life is hilariously usurped by a fast-talking, on-the-make war correspondent.
Ruby Zaga, the copy editor, is a paranoid Miss Lonely hearts who always checks into a hotel on New Year’s Eve so she can pretend to be a stranded American business traveler rather than a dateless 40-something with no prospects. She hates her job and is terrified she’s about to be fired. She drunk-dials the Italian flack with whom her boss is trying to reconnect. Bad move, Ruby! But Rachman has a way of getting the reader to root for his losers.
Craig Menzies, the news editor, is informed one day that an e-mail photo of his much younger girlfriend, Annika, naked with another man, has been sent to everyone on the staff. He confronts Annika, who says she feels terrible about it all, but now she (and thus he) faces the prospect of being sued by the man in the picture — for breach of contract because she had promised to buy an apartment with him. Does Italian law actually permit spurned lovers to sue? How do you say in Italian, “Is this a great country, or what?”
One of the strangest but most arresting characters, Ornella de Monterecchi, is the Italian press officer’s mother. A kind of Miss Havisham with obsessive- compulsive disorder, she lives alone amid a mountain of clutter consisting of every issue of the paper from the late 1970s to the present day. These she insists on reading in sequence. The current date might be Feb. 18, 2007, but in her world, it’s April 23, 1994. When she runs into one of the staffers, she complains about his obituary of Richard Nixon, leaving him to scratch his head. Ornella, however, is no mere caricature. There is, as with Miss Havisham, a terrible personal tragedy to explain her bizarre existence.
The most Roald Dahl-esque episode is granted to Abbey Pinnola, the paper’s chief financial officer. Abbey, whose job includes sacking the paper’s employees, finds herself on a plane en route to Atlanta, headquarters of the now troubled Ott Group, seated next to a man she’s just canned. I won’t say more, other than that the end of her story provides that sudden intake of breath reminiscent of Dahl at his sang-froid-est.
"What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. wWe enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories."
After reading this paragraph something went off in my head like a light bulb. It was probably something that was already there on a subconscious level, or something so obvious that I never really paid it much attention. Great authors need to have such a deep understanding on a wide variety of topics in order to create such diverse characters, plots, and ideas. Not only that, but they need to breathe so much life into them that they seem to be real, and the fact the Rachman can do this with so many characters in one work of literature is truly remarkable.
This book is filled with gorgeous writing, jolts of insight and narrative surprises that feel both unexpected and inevitable. Rachman leaves little doubt that he's writing what he knows well. His novel is sprinkled with hard-won observations such as that “news' is often a polite way of saying 'editor's whim' ” and “journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males.” And yet even someone whose familiarity with newsrooms doesn't extend beyond the work of Clark Kent and Peter Parker will recognize these characters.
My Dad is an avid reader, and over the years I have become more and more interested in the books that he recommends. While I was in my teens, I tried to appreciate the books that he had convinced me to read, but it has just been in the last couple of years, as I have made my way into adulthood, that I have sought recommendations from him, and not only enjoyed the read, but also the long conversations that we share after the final page.
This week while looking for a book, I once again found myself asking my Dad for suggestions. He had mentioned the title 1984 several times, so I decided it was time to find out why he kept coming back to this book. 1984 is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life, the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language, and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell.
This is the story of the down trodden and destinctly average Winston Smith who lives in post war London. Set in an imaginary future world that is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states, we accompany Winston in his attempt at subversion, and are unwilling witnesses of what that attempt brings about. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth altering documents that contradict current government statements and opinions, but when Winston begins to remember the past that he has worked so hard to destroy, he begins to turn against The Party. He begins a relationship with a woman who works for the Government, and though boyish and brash, she is still an attractive and likable character who compliments Smiths innocence beautifully. Even his quiet, practically undetectable form of anarchism is dangerous in a world filled with thought police and the omnipresent two-way telescreen, the ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity.
1984, George Orwell's final novel, was written amidst the anti-communist hysteria of the cold war. But unlike Orwell's other famous political satire, Animal Farm, this novel is filled with bleak cynicism and grim pessimism about the human race. Orwell made in this book many observations that are no more merely fiction, but already things that manage to reduce our freedom. This is a book that only gets better with the passing of time, as you can read in it more and more implications. One of Orwell's main reasons for writting this "negative utopia" might have been to warn his readers against communism, but many years after his death and the fall of communism with the Berlin Wall, we can also interpret it as a caution against the excessive power of mass media, data mining, and their harrowing consequence, as well as the immoderate power of any government, even those who don't defend communism.
Technological innovation should be at the service of men, and allow them to live better lives, but it can be used against them.
The people of Oceania are in the process of stripping down the English language to its bones, creating Newspeak. One of the new words created is doublethink, the act of believing that two conflicting realities exist. Such as when Winston sees a photograph of a non-person, but must reason that that person does not, nor ever has, existed. Some inspiration for Winston's work may have come from Russia. Where Stalin's right-hand man, Trotzky was erased from all tangible records after his dissention from the party. And the fear of telescreens harks back to the days when Stasi bugs were hooked to every bedpost, phone line and light bulb in Eastern Europe.
Orwell has created characters and events that are scarily realistic. Winston's narration brings the reader inside his head, and sympathetic with the cause of the would-be-rebels. There are no clear answers in the book, and it's often the reader who has to decide what to believe. But despite a slightly unresolved plot, the book serves its purpose. Orwell wrote this book to raise questions; and the sort of questions he raised have no easy answer.
1984, is not a novel for the faint of heart. It is a gruesome, saddening portrait of humanity, with it's pitfalls garishly highlighted. Its historic importance has never been underestimated; and it's reemergence as a political warning for the 21st century makes it deserving of a second look. Winston's world of paranoia and inconsistent realities is an eloquently worded account of a future we thought we buried in our past; but in truth may be waiting just around the corner.
It has been a few months since I read Malcolm Gladwell's, Blink, and I decide it was time for his next book. In Outliers, Gladwell poses a provocative question: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."
Outlier is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book the focus is on people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.
Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendants of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential.
Gladwell’s writing is clear and colloquial throughout, and his chapters are deftly structured, each one introducing new material while simultaneously reiterating and amplifying what came before. He broke down trends like no one else in The Tipping Point, and was single-handedly the most convincing voice for trusting your gut reactions (in an age of numbers, facts, and analysis no less) in Blink; this guy knows how to research, and better yet, put the nuggets of wisdom he's found in psychology and science into terrifically engaging and palatable text. In short, Mr. Gladwell's writing--his earnestness, optimism, and persuasiveness--never ceases to impress me.
As it was with the Tipping Point and Blink, Outliers is another attempt to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, it was to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. Outliers is meant to make us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers, it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances, and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds, and how many of us succeed, than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea
"... a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must all see scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived."
I think that I am generally a curious person. I like to know what's going on and why, and I dig for answers when I have questions. While browsing in the bookstore this week, I picked up the book Little Bee, written by Chris Cleave. The summary wasn't so much of a summary, as an enticing invitation to curious people like me. It stated "We don' want to tell you what happens in this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it." How could I not read it? Little Bee is a very special book indeed. With one of the most vividly memorable and provocative character, this novel is profound, deeply moving and yet light in touch, it explores the nature of loss, hope, love and identity with atrocity its backdrop. Cleave unfurls a haunting work of human triumph and the perils of globalization where girls like Little Bee are just silhouettes, expendable products in a world that is shifting and changing.
Some 50 years ago, the region near Nigeria’s Atlantic coast provided the setting for Chinua Achebe’s haunting novel of a world torn asunder by the vicissitudes of Anglo-imperial expansion. To capture the tragedy of colonialism in that account, “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe looked to Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” for inspiration: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The drowning of innocence and the anarchic consequences of the global reach are hardly confined to Achebe’s Nigeria of yesteryear or to the colonial underbelly of Britain’s “civilizing” mission. The story of globalization is a centuries-old account of historical interconnections shaped by exploitation, despair and, at times, moral conscience and optimism. Chris Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian, puts a modern-day spin on Achebe’s concerns with his immensely readable and moving second novel.
While the pretext of Little Bee initially seems contrived — two strangers, a British woman and a Nigerian girl, meet on a lonely African beach and become inextricably bound through the horror imprinted on their encounter — its impact is hardly shallow. Rather than focusing on post-colonial guilt or African angst, Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers’ conceptions of civility, of ethical choice.
Sarah O’Rourke might appear to be an insipid character, with her career at a British magazine, her Batman-costumed young son, her uninspiring lover and her gentrified Surrey lifestyle. When juxtaposed with the Nigerian refugee called Little Bee — whom we first meet behind the razor wire of a British immigration center — Sarah is unsympathetic, even tiresome. But that impression changes partway through the novel when a flashback to Africa reveals her fortitude. There, it is Sarah, rather than her husband, Andrew, who gallantly comes to Little Bee’s rescue. Sarah must also pick up the pieces after Andrew’s descent from third-world cowardice into first-world madness.
Yet the character and voice of Little Bee reveal Cleave at his finest. As she navigates the dehumanizing indifference of immigration detention with her self-taught Queen’s English, this young refugee tugs at the reader’s conscience. For two years, she has avoided the “ravenous eyes” of the camp’s men with her purposefully mismatched charity-box clothes, unwashed skin and bound breasts. Eventually, she turns up, illegally, at the O’Rourkes’ home in Kingston-upon-Thames. In the weeks that follow, the lives of Little Bee and Sarah will be woven into a web in which disparate worlds can be connected in the unlikeliest fashion.
The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.
London, with its dizzying abundance and multiculturalism, looks like a parallel universe when compared with the impoverished Nigerian village where Little Bee grew up. Surely the locals would chide, “Little miss been-to is making up her tales again,” were she ever to return to what remains of her birthplace. Yet it’s this same village that instilled in her the skills and values needed to help her navigate toward her own scarred survival.
Like Little Bee, Sarah is a survivor. But the lessons of the past are not enough to steer either woman to safety. Instead, in a world full of turpitude and injustice, it is their bold, impulsive choices that challenge the inevitability of despair, transforming a political novel into an affecting story of human triumph.
In the first few pages I fell in love with Cleaves vast narrative and storytelling abilities. The images that he created for me were so detailed and complete. "So, I am a refugee, and I get lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that flout across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?"
This novels greatest strength is the squeamishly raw candor of its protagonist, Little Bee. Every now and then, you come across a character in a book whose personality is so salient, and whose story carries such devastating emotional force, it’s as if she becomes a fixed part of your consciousness. Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters’ ethical struggles, Little Bee delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.
Cleave masterfully veers quickly between humor and horror, a very dark, biting humor to be sure, but usually skating along a thin blade of irony, the kind to make you laugh with a little grimace. "I think my ideal man would speak many languages... He could speak with any person, even the soldiers, and if there was violence in their heart he could change it. He would not have to fight, do you see? Maybe he would not be handsome, but would be beautiful when he spoke. He would be very kind, even if you burned his food because you were laughing and talking with your girlfriends instead of watching the cooking. He would just say, Ah, never mind... Forgive me, but your ideal man, he don't sound very rill-istic." "It was a song called We Are The Champions by a British music band called Queen... One time he showed me a picture of the band... One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understands fashion in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion... It looked like a punishment."
Again, I am amazed at the connections between books. "He'd been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the middle east, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my Husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off." Having read Three Cups of Tea, and Infidel, it's so interesting to see the different views on the same subject, in this case, the war with the Middle East.
Sequined with lustrous turns of phrase, spanning two continents and driven by real-life global concerns, what elevates this novel even further is Cleave’s forceful call for all of us, the floating masses of a globalized, socially isolating modern world, to look after one other.
