If this story is true, it’s a good example of the need for Christianity around the world. Africans in the Congo and Rwanda are fighting over control of a mineral used to make certain electric capacitors which are used in Sony Playstations. Children are reportedly being sent into the mines to collect a mineral that has increased in price 500% due in part to demand for Playstations. It is just as unacceptable for the miners to abuse themselves and their progeny for this as it is for Sony to refuse responsibility for helping to create the situation. Everyone must do what he can reasonably do to love his neighbor as he would himself. Though Sony is the big name in this story, everyone in the market handling this product is responsible to understand what’s going on to the best of his ability. But I’m not telling you anything new.
Throw Them From the Balloon
So Homer, Austen, Voltaire, and Wodehouse are in a sinking hot air balloon, arguing over who needs to be pitched in order to save the rest. What is this world coming to, I ask you? (via Books, Inq.)
Repost: The Animal Hour, by Andrew Klavan
(I’m bummed tonight. I stopped for groceries, and not only has my usual store rearranged the sections again [for the sole purpose, I’m convinced, of trying to get us to look at stuff we’ve already decided we don’t want to buy], but Banquet TV Dinners appears to have discontinued their Yankee Pot Roast meal. The things that made the Yankee Pot Roast irreplaceable were not only that it tasted surprisingly good, but it was only 210 calories. Oh yeah, and it was cheap. I’ll never stay on my diet now, and it’ll be all Banquet’s fault.
(Another Klavan review, this one from June, 2006. It has the distinction of being the only book of his that I’ve panned. It’s a stinker.)
I’ve been gushing over the books of Andrew Klavan recently (found one I hadn’t read in the store tonight—hurrah!). However, I feel obligated to warn you about one of them.
I finished The Animal Hour the other day. It’s one of Klavan’s earlier books, and I get the impression it was a kind of an experiment.
In my opinion, the experiment didn’t succeed.
It starts out with a great hook. A young woman in New York City goes in to her job and starts to settle down at her desk, when another woman comes into her office and asks her what she’s doing there. The conversation becomes a confrontation, and soon a number of employees have gathered. It quickly becomes clear that no one there has ever seen her before.
That’s a terrific start. Unfortunately, at least to my taste, the rest of the book doesn’t live up to it.
The mechanics of a great thriller are all there. Suspense mounts, and mysteries abound.
The problem is with an element that’s usually Klavan’s strong suit—the characters. There were very few characters in this book who raised my sympathy much. Most of them were creepy in one or several ways.
Also the gore level was high.
Also Christianity didn’t come off looking very good.
I’d skip this one.
Sniffing Pastry Makes You Nicer
A book claims to have researched the details into the moods we have while smelling good and bad aromas. Prep for the smell test.
Ho, Ho, That’s a Good One
Author Jim Holt talks about the subject of his book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
Discovery: Snow-like Formation Covering Cave Floor
In New Mexico’s Fort Stanton Cave, surveyors have discovered unique formations. “The few who have walked on the formation say they’ve seen nothing else like it. Early studies point to its uniqueness: Already, some three dozen species of microbes previously unknown to science have been uncovered,” reports Susan Bryan. Though it may be closed to the public, I hope they have some photographs taken.
Yes, blast it, something’s in a name
In these troubled times, I don’t often have good things to say about judges anywhere in the world.
Judge Rob Murfitt of New Zealand is an exception.
One small candle in the cultural night.
Repost: The Scarred Man, by Keith Peterson (Andrew Klavan)
(My original plan was to repost all my previous Andrew Klavan reviews before addressing Empire of Lies, but I got carried away. So I’m picking up the reposts now. This is second in the series, and like the previous repost, comes from May 2006.)
Oh, by the way, I forgot yesterday the first Andrew Klavan novel I read (actually it was written under the Keith Peterson pseudonym)–The Scarred Man. This is a psychological thriller with one of the best hooks I’ve ever read.
I love a great “book hook.” Perhaps my favorite is the beginning of The Man Who Wasn’t There by Roderick MacLeish (a much underappreciated novelist). That book (as I recall–I don’t have a copy) began with the main character, who was something of a celebrity, being recognized by a stranger sitting beside him on a plane. Instead of admitting to his identity, he played a trick he liked to play in such situations, claiming to be his own (non-existent) non-famous twin, whose story he made up on the spot.
The next morning he got up and read in the paper that this imaginary twin brother had been killed in a plane crash.
That’s a great book hook.
But the hook in The Scarred Man is almost as good.
Michael North is a young New York reporter who accepts an invitation to spend Christmas in Connecticut with his boss. There he meets the boss’s daughter, Susannah, and falls hopelessly in love in about a nanosecond.
To entertain themselves, the party members agree to tell ghost stories (I thought of you here, Phil). Michael makes up a story on the spur of the moment, telling a tale of a murderous, undead psychopath with a scar down the center of his face.
Susannah goes hysterical, shouting “Stop it! What are you trying to do to me!” She flees back to school before he can discuss it with her.
Later, when he drives up to Susannah’s college to talk to her, he pulls into the entrance and sees, in his headlights–the scarred man. When he finds Susannah, she tells him she’s been having nightmares about this man all her life.
The great thing is, this isn’t a supernatural novel.
Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan
I just finished reading Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan, and I’m still decompressing.
I have a hard time imagining how this book can ever succeed commercially. But I sure hope it does.
As the story begins, the hero/narrator, Jason Harrow, a journalist turned realtor, is sitting in the back yard of his Midwestern home, watching his children play. He’s thinking about a girl who worked at his office, who’d made a pass at him. He didn’t take her up on it, but he can’t avoid a (purely hormonal) wistful feeling. Shortly thereafter he’s joined by his wife, and it’s obvious that they have an excellent relationship. She trusts him, and he deserves her trust.
Jason is being entirely honest with the reader. And that’s sort of the point of the whole book. He’s telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even to his cost.
From the very beginning, references and turns of phrase warn us that he’s going to go through a terrible test; that he’s going to become famous, and not necessarily in a good way.
Jason goes inside the house to answer the phone, and (as so often happens in stories of this sort) the caller is a voice from his past. It’s Lauren, the woman he lived with in another life, when he resided in Manhattan, thought he was an intellectual, and was part of a very kinky sex “scene.” Jason is a Christian today. He’s turned his back on all that.
But when he agrees to go to New York to help Lauren out with a problem with her daughter, he doesn’t tell his wife about it. He has to go anyway, because his mother recently died and he needs to empty out her house. He doesn’t plan to break his marital vows. But his motives aren’t entirely pure, and he can’t bring himself to bring it into the open.
When he sees Lauren, he’s somewhat relieved to find that she’s changed. He no longer finds her attractive. But she talks him into looking for her daughter Serena, who has disappeared.
He finds the girl, sick drunk, in a night club and takes her to his mother’s house when he finds that Lauren isn’t at home. The girl is raving, and one of the things she says is, “I didn’t know they were going to kill him.” Continue reading Empire of Lies, by Andrew Klavan
“Specifically About Goodness and Evil”
The Thinklings are blogging about Batman. Jared and Philip have excellent, thoughtful reviews of what apparently is an excellent, thoughtful movie.
Jared notes: “The whole thing about nihilism or whatever just isn’t in there. It’s just not. The Dark Knight is specifically about goodness and evil, virtue and ethics, individuality and the social animal. These aren’t things one has to stretch to find in the movie to make it redemptive; they are actually in the film.”
Philip writes:
This the Batman the world has been deprived of for so long by all the other attempts. Batman is not a superhero, so much as he’s the anti-anti-hero. Batman, as we fanboys know him, is a dark, conflicted character that escorts us into a journey into human nature that is so scary that we’re glad to have him as a guide, even though we know he’d never let any of us actually be friends with him. . . . This is a movie that grapples with original sin and the nature of evil. What makes us good? What makes us bad? The Joker, like Satan in the book of Job, says that good people are only good as long as the circumstances are right. But if you change their circumstances… they’ll be evil like him. His motive for his badness (and there’s A LOT of badness) seems to be to force humanity to look at itself in the mirror only to find the Joker’s face (as a symbol of evil) staring back.