tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1 2013-06-20T00:19:36Z The official website for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CCLaP). Movable Type Pro 5.01 tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2845 2013-06-20T00:04:03Z 2013-06-20T00:19:36Z

Today's book review: The internationally popular psychological novel "The Dinner" by Herman Koch. Says reviewer Travis Fortney: "It's been a long time since I laughed so hard during the first hundred pages of a book, and it's been longer than I can remember that a book made me genuinely sick to my stomach by the end. Read at your own risk."

Travis Fortney click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.) The Dinner By Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett Hogarth Reviewed by Travis Fortney Paul Lohman and his wife Claire are invited, or perhaps summoned, to join Paul's brother Serge and his wife Babette for dinner at an expensive Amsterdam restaurant. Serge is a famous politician. Paul is resentful of his brother's celebrity, his fake smile, and even the way he eats. The reason they have come together is to discuss "the children." Each couple has a fifteen year old boy, and the kids have been up to no good. Exactly what trouble they've gotten themselves into is an early source of suspense in the book, and I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll focus on a brief passage in the "Appertif" (the book's section all take the name of the corresponding course of the meal), in which the couples discuss a Woody Allen film. "That Scarlett Johannsson," says Serge, "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers." Which leads to a conversation in which Paul searches for the proper cutting comment to discredit his brother's taste in movies. The passage is important, because it plants the idea of Hollywood cinema in the reader's mind. The Dinner up to that point, has a lot in common with the recent Roman Polanski film Carnage (or more properly, since The Dinner was originally published in the Netherlands in 2009, with the Yasmina Reza play The God of Carnage). The two stories share a similar conceit--two couples get together to talk about the kids and everything goes to hell--and at least up to the conversation about Scarlett Johannsson the book seems to be a fast-moving black comedy focused on Paul's funny and (for a time) agreeable observations, as well as laying waste to the pretensions of the Dutch upper class. In other words, the book seems like one that will play by the rules of Hollywood cinema (and American publishing, for that matter), which is to say that we're prepared to watch some messy emotional fireworks, but we expect the entertainment to be gratifying in a way that makes us feel better about ourselves in the end. Koch seems intent on defying these expectations. Shortly after that the Scarlett Johannsson conversation, the book gets considerably darker. In fact, the novel reads like Koch saw The God of Carnage and thought the play was timid and weak-kneed, thought that the opportunity to truly explore humanity's dark side had been missed. Still, I loved Carnage and I don't feel entirely comfortable saying I loved or even liked The Dinner. The Dinner will send you to Google, it will leave you chilled, disgusted and at least somewhat disturbed, and it will leave you with more questions than answers. When you read a phrase like "moral bankruptcy" or "unlikeable characters" in reference to a book, you might think you know what you're going to get, but here Koch manages to surprise by aligning the reader with the narrator and then slowly pulling the curtain back to reveal Paul's true nature. It's very uncomfortable, because by the time Paul becomes genuinely unredeemable in our eyes, we've already determined to like him. So Mr. Koch is toying with our instincts as readers and even our instincts as human beings--when we finally admit that we don't in fact like Paul, what we're really admitting is that we didn't judge him correctly and that our mechanisms for determining a person's character might not be so finely tuned as we had thought. It's been a long time since I laughed so hard during the first hundred pages of a book, and it's been longer than I can remember that a book made me genuinely sick to my stomach by the end. Read at your own risk. Out of 10: 9 Read even more about The Dinner: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia ]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2844 2013-06-19T14:38:26Z 2013-06-19T14:40:22Z

Today, it's one of our regular "Passing the Torch" essays, in which our most previous author shares some thoughts on what they like most about our most current author. Here, "Historia, Historia"s Eleanor Stanford analyzes Maureen Foley's "Women Float."

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Maureen Foley's Women Float is about to enter its second printing! That's come as great news around here, and I'd like to thank everyone for their unusually high interest in this title, and all the nice things you've been saying about it online over the last month. And speaking of which, regulars know that we do an ongoing essay series here called "Passing the Torch," in which I have the author of our previous newest book share some thoughts about what they like about our new newest book; so in this case, that would be Eleanor Stanford, whose Peace Corps memoir Historia, Historia a few weeks ago officially became the biggest selling book in CCLaP's history. Ellie recently had a chance to read through Women Float herself, and here below is what she had to say. Thanks for the kind words, Ellie! - x - In her recent memoir Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton writes, "Water is elemental, it's what we're made of, what we can't live within or without." Win, the heroine of Maureen Foley's new novella, Women Float, is in some ways the polar opposite of Shapton, who spent much of her childhood in a pool, competing and practicing, and eventually qualifying for the Olympic trials. Win can't swim at all, but the water is nonetheless a powerful presence in her life, both physically (she lives in Southern California) and emotionally, linking her to her absent mother, who first took her in the water, and who lives in Win's imagination as a mermaid, elusive, beautiful, living in a distant, dangerous place where Win can't follow. As she approaches her twenty-ninth birthday, twenty years after her mother left, Win begins receiving mysterious postcards from far flung locales. When a sexy Costa Rican swimming teacher serendipitously appears at the bakery where Win works, and offers to trade swimming lessons for cream puffs, Win is forced to confront fear's paralyzing paradox, and to enter that element that "we're made of, what we can't live within or without." Foley's writing is captivating and luminous. It captures perfectly a Southern California of golden light and goddess icons, but also one where drought rustles in the hills, and fire ravages the dry brush, "a rooster tail of flames jump[ing] over the top of the nearest slope." A pleasurable summer read about a young woman adrift and casting about for love and meaning, Women Float will draw you in with its powerful undertow, and its surprising depths.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2843 2013-06-19T14:35:21Z 2013-06-19T14:35:55Z

Today's photo: "Untitled," by British photographer Lisa Wormsley.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Today's photo of the day is untitled and is by Lisa Wormsley. Lisa is based out of the British city of Brighton, which I believe is where this particular shot was taken as well. She also has a nice personal website, for those who would like to see and learn more. Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2841 2013-06-18T17:30:48Z 2013-06-18T17:33:06Z

Today's book review: The engaging human-interest drama "High and Inside" by Russell Rowland, in which an alcoholic baseball player who's been drummed out of the pros impulsively moves to Montana to build a house from scratch, despite not knowing the first thing about construction.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.) High and Inside By Russell Rowland Bangtail Press Reviewed by Jason Pettus (Originally written for the Billings Gazette, and reprinted here with their kind permission.) It's become almost a cliche by now, the rich and famous who build upper-class rural estates in Montana so to "get away from it all," unfortunately instead bringing it all with them to the consternation of locals; so it would make sense that writers would find it interesting to fashion novels out of such a dramatic conceit, like Billings author Russell Rowland has done in his latest, High and Inside, his third book after multiple best-of-the -year picks In Open Spaces and The Watershed Years. And Rowland adds to the drama by making this a redemption story too, not just a famous person moving to Montana but an infamous person fleeing there -- disgraced major-league pitcher and raging alcoholic Pete Hurley, that is, whose drunken errant pitch that ended the career of a saintly Dominican up-and-comer has inspired a national movement towards more safety in baseball, and who on top of everything else also accidentally paralyzed his girlfriend after they both took an unluckily serious tumble while in a blackout fugue. Hurley has come to Bozeman not necessarily for its charms, but merely to get as far away from everyone else as he can, although he's convinced himself that he's come so to accomplish the pipe dream of building an entire house by himself; but that's what gives us one of the first clues as to how damaged he actually is, in that he has an almost comical lack of knowledge about tools or construction, just one of the many elements (including haranguing in-laws, a sexy but tough neighbor, and a three-legged dog) that keeps our anti-hero on his wobbly toes throughout the course of this tragicomedic novel. And to be sure, we're supposed to have an ambivalent attitude towards our hard-to-love protagonist; a runaway addict still in deep denial, Hurley has the habit of making things even harder on himself by picking drunken fights with the people who could've helped him the most (for example, the city employee in charge of approving and overseeing construction projects, standing in for every local who's ever gotten angry at an encroaching outsider), as well as scaring his young nephews on a regular basis and creeping out females in a whole variety of different ways. And that's of course a big part of this novel's entire point, to show our hero at his worst so that we can follow along as he gets better, a classic bottoming-out story but with a lot more than usual at stake. Rowland handles such a story with a lot of aplomb and maturity, turning in a novel by turns funny and serious that takes its time getting to its point. But unfortunately, High and Inside has its problems too, in a few cases pretty big ones that pull the book's overall enjoyment level down a couple of notches. Chief among them, for example, is Rowland's habit to trust neither himself nor his audience and turn in many moments too broadly; after all, this is a man who not only caused one of the most horrific injuries in the history of baseball because of his drinking problem (a 100-MPH pitch straight into a man's eye socket), but then just a few months later permanently paralyzed his girlfriend, a bit of an overkill when all is said and done, and there are multiple other examples here of Rowland sometimes going too big, or sometimes too sentimental, or sometimes too melodramatic. Plus, he's chosen some details for his characters and settings that can sometimes approach hackneyed from overuse; and like a lot of authors of more slowly paced stories, Rowland has a habit of sometimes including entire scenes that only exist to spell out little inconsequential niceties ("And then they had dinner, and then they engaged in small talk, and then everyone went home") that ultimately have nothing to do with either the plot or the characters' growth. All in all, though, High and Inside was an enjoyable read, as long as you keep your expectations reasonable going into it, a solid character study that shows off the Montana culture and landscape in an engaging way. It comes somewhat recommended to a general audience, and more to those who specifically enjoy good stories about addiction and recovery. Out of 10: 8.1 Read even more about High and Inside: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2840 2013-06-18T17:23:16Z 2013-06-18T17:23:55Z

Today's photo: "Untitled," by Taiwanese photographer Liting Wang.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Today's photo of the day is untitled and is by Liting Wang. Liting doesn't mention much about herself at Flickr, although does say that this particular shot was taken in Taiwan. Do make sure to stop by her main photostream for a lot more great images. Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2839 2013-06-17T23:01:16Z 2013-06-18T17:49:17Z

Today's book review: The rural New Hampshire human-interest drama "Lake People" by Abi Maxwell. Says reviewer Travis Fortney, "Worth the read [if thought of] as a short story collection, but won't be rewarding for those who try to make sense of it as a novel."

Travis Fortney click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.) Lake People By Abi Maxwell Knopf Reviewed by Travis Fortney Growing up in the Midwest (in Medina Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland), I always held an exaggerated view of life on the East Coast. Which means I considered all of New England to be a a wide-lawned suburb of New York City, full of liberal-mided folks who descended from rich landowners that came over on the Mayflower. I could go on describing this dream New England, but you probably get the picture. When I went off to college at a small liberal arts school in the Southwest, the student body was largely populated by the offspring of just this kind of East Coaster. Trustafarians, I called them. And so, my ideas about the East Coast stuck. In my imagination, New Hampshire and Connecticut are one and the same, and so are Boston, D.C., New York. But of course I know better than that now. A few years ago I rode my bicycle from Bar Harbor, Maine down part of the coast. On that trip, I spent several days biking through New Hampshire, and I can tell you its a strange kind of place. Let's put it this way: The state might be peopled by the descendants of pilgrims, but more of them are living in trailers than you might think. More sleeveless t-shirts, too. More tattered American flags and more Gadsen flags (the one featuring the coiled rattlesnake and the words "Don't Tread on Me") than you might expect to find in a state populated by "East Coast Liberal Elites." New Hampshire's motto is Live Free or Die, and a good number of the state's residents take this idea to heart. What sticks out for me after visiting the state isn't its overwhelming beauty, but rather the shocking poverty and sense of rugged independence that permeates everything there. Its spirit is a lot closer to rural Montana or Iowa than New York City. I've visited every state in America, most of them by bicycle, and nowhere else was what I found so different from what I had expected. In other words, New Hampshire must be a strange place to grow up. Abi Maxwell, a New Hampshire native, sets her debut novel Lake People in the state. It's certainly a rich enough place to locate a setting-driven novel. Lake People begins with the image of our heroine Alice Thorton as a newborn baby, floating abandoned "in an old canoe on the big lake." It's the kind of mysterious opening that might strain believability, but it also tells us what kind of story this one will be--that is, the kind where newborn babies might be placed in canoes in lakes, and one in which this is the kind of thing that people might actually do. We also understand that this novel will be concerned--at least in part--with telling us who exactly this baby is and how she got into a canoe. Alas, in the very next paragraph, Ms. Maxwell takes a step back. The canoe, she tells us, "wasn't floating freely. It was tied up in the boathouse where I would be found, just east of Kettleborough pier." The decision to dial back on the opening image is a puzzling one--sure, putting a child in peril in the opening scene is a borderline lazy way of building suspense, but reducing the child's peril by introducing new information drains all the energy out of the scene. It isn't long after that first scene that Ms. Maxwell has answered all the questions we had about baby Alice. She is the daughter of Jennifer Hill and Karl Wickholm, two Kettleborough teenagers. Just before Alice is found in the lake, Karl is found dead. Jennifer runs away from home and is never seen again. It's framed in the novel as a kind of a scandalous star-crossed love affair, because the Hills and the Wickholms come from opposite sides of the tracks in Kettleborough. Essentially, the Hills are those "Don't Tread on Me," sleeveless t-shirt wearing, beat-up-trailer living, "Live Free or Die," New Hampshire-ites that I saw so many of on my bike trip. The Wickholms are the kind of New Englanders who send their offspring to tiny liberal arts colleges in the Southwest. Certainly there is an interesting story to be told about these class divisions, but when Ms. Maxwell gets bogged down in these details the story grinds to a halt. The reason the story stalls is that it's too confusing. The proud (read: rich) Wickholms live a big house with a water view. The only thing blocking their view is a stand of pine trees owned by a woman who is a friend of the Hills, whom we are clearly meant to believe belongs to their socioeconomic class (i.e., poor). Huh? Not sure how it is in the lakes region of New Hampshire, but in every other waterfront community I have visited the people with the money live on the shore. Also, Ms. Maxwell tells us that Alice's great-great grandparents were immigrants who were so penniless that they settled on an uninhabited island and built their own cabin. Then Alice's grandmother dies, and her mother is raised by a lesbian aunt (although Ms. Maxwell somewhat uncomfortably refers to her as a gay woman--"I had failed to understand that she herself was a gay woman"). The aunt is not rich. So the method by which the Wickholms rose in one generation to such a high economic status is unclear. Alice's grandmother Sofie is married to a gentle Swede named Otto who owns a store in town, from which he makes and sells his own ice cream. So it turns out that the ivory tower the Wickholms look down at the Hills from is actually made of vanilla. Unfortunately, the confusion doesn't end there. As a novel, the driving force of Lake People is the question of Alice's origins. The problem is that those origins (that she is the product of the aforementioned star-crossed love affair) are clear to the reader very early on in the story. The rest of the novel is taken up by Alice trying to figure it out for herself. There are no surprises along the way. The problem with setting up a plot in which the reader knows everything that Alice is trying to find out is obvious: The longer it takes Alice to piece it all together, the stupider we think she is. By the time Alice moves away to the hill country (where she lives in poverty with a man who doesn't love her, then marries him in a courthouse, right after he tells her again that he doesn't love her, then is shocked and depressed that he doesn't love her), we're beginning to think she might not be the sharpest tool in the shed. In the hill country, Alice happens to meet a woman named Martha Hill, who I believe would be her second or third cousin. When Martha tells Alice that she knows a secret about her, Alice doesn't seem too interested in knowing what it is ("Alice shrugged," Ms. Maxwell writes). Instead, Alice seems more interested in conveying how poor and backward Martha is compared to her. You see, Martha belongs to a lower class than Alice, the Hills vs. the Wickholms all over again, and Ms. Maxwell won't let us forget it. Martha lives in a ramshackle house "built so sloppily it looked like a house of playing cards that would surely blow over in the wind." But again I was confused by this. For one thing, Alice at that point in the story doesn't know she is a Wickholm--in fact, she's been raised by an alcoholic single step-father--so why is she so judgmental of Martha? In the hills a hundred miles away from the lake, they still live right down the street from one another. Their husbands work at the same factory. Alice's husband beats her. Alice has a broken down car. Why does she feel her status is so much higher than Martha's? Later, Alice reads the following passage in Martha's journal: "God forgive me for writing it down. Us Hills and them Wickholms have a secret child from my dissapeared cousin Jennifer Hill and their dead son....Alice, the secret is you!" And Alice still doesn't get it. She's got to go back to Kettleborough, go to the library, spend time on the microfiche, etc. It takes her almost another hundred pages to finally connect the dots. I think Ms. Maxwell senses that her plotting isn't cutting it, and so she attempts to add gravitas to her novel in other ways. Perhaps ten or twenty people drown in the lake during the course of the book. Many of them are Alice's ancestors. Alice is raped by an older man. Alice has a random sexual encounter. Alice witnesses an accidental death that she is forced to cover up. Baby Alice is a passenger in a van that falls off a cliff. There's also the aforementioned single alcoholic father, and the husband who physically and emotionally abuses her. And that's only Alice. Countless other tragedies befall the other characters in the book. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a little blood and guts, but there are so many tragedies here, all with no plot to pull us through or a single character we really care about, that the tragedies themselves are like a drumbeat behind the story. Toward the end of the book, when Ms. Maxwell's well has apparently run dry, Alice repeatedly contemplates suicide. I just don't have the patience for that kind of thing. Ms. Maxwell also tries to compensate for her plotting with elegant sentence construction, but the tone seemed too self conscious and effortful to me. "My mother was named Ida and she followed a call that led her out upon the frozen lake and by that lake she was swallowed. Those tall rocks that stand in our lake today rose up immediately after she fell within." On its own the writing is nice, but in conjunction with all these other shortcomings it makes me suspicious. And that's the bottom line--nothing about this little book was too offensive, but the little flaws added up so relentlessly that they became overwhelming. Part of the reason for this might have been that the beginning of the book demands a close read, because each of the chapters are told from a different point of view but lack the chapter headings a book like this would commonly have (e.g. "Sophie," "Signe," "Alice"), and it's difficult to decipher who's speaking. I wouldn't have judged this book nearly so harshly had it been presented as a book of stories. To present it that way instead of as a novel would have negated the need for a plot connecting the stories, just as it would have negated the need for common themes and chapter headings. If those things hadn't tripped me up, then I might not have found the language and the catalogue of tragedies so grating. All of that being said, it's undeniable that Abi Maxwell is a talented young writer, who has found a wonderful setting for her fiction. A few chapters of this book function very well as self contained stories, particularly "Lake People" and "The Old Factory." Lake People is worth the read as a short story collection, but won't be rewarding for those who try to make sense of it as a novel. Out of 10: 7 as a novel, 8.5 as a story collection Read even more about Lake People: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing |]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2838 2013-06-17T21:40:31Z 2013-06-17T21:45:19Z

Today's book review: The overly sentimental morality tale "The Clock of Life" by Nancy Klann-Moren, a book which is obviously connecting with some readers (based on its numerous award nominations and wins) but that reviewer Jason Pettus found a preachy disappointment.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.) The Clock of Life By Nancy Klann-Moren AnthonyAnn Books Reviewed by Jason Pettus Nancy Klann-Moren's The Clock of Life is one of those frustrating books I found a chore to even read enough of to give an honest review (for what it's worth, I made it about a third of the way through), because it's a perfect storm of every little thing I dislike in contemporary literature -- a genteel coming-of-age tale about racial tolerance set in the rural South, it has the cloying sentimentality of a Reader's Digest piece, paints its heroes and villains as broadly as a cartoon might, makes its thematic points with all the subtlety of a two-by-four to the back of the head, and follows not so much a plot as an endless string of easy cliches. Plus I have to admit that I was confused even by the time period this book is supposed to take place in; for while the first few chapters explicitly state dates from the 1970s and '80s, there are all kinds of references to things that sound more like the 1930s, such as someone mentioning the Scopes "monkey" trial, children fashioning fake coins out of foil that work perfectly in vending machines, and the state government apparently having no problem with rural families pulling their kids from required public education after the start of every school year. (And indeed, just like this last reference, the entire first chapter of The Clock of Life is an almost beat-for-beat aping of the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird, inviting a comparison that unfortunately Klann-Moren badly loses.) There's an audience for this kind of work, for sure, given that this has either won or been nominated for several literary awards now; it's just that I don't think any of those audience members are regular visitors to CCLaP, meaning that most of you should stay well clear of this admirably earnest yet overly sentimental morality tale. Out of 10: 6.2 Read even more about The Clock of Life: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2837 2013-06-17T21:32:04Z 2013-06-17T21:32:47Z

Today's photo: "Empire State Building," by Californian in New York Toby Hancock.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Today's photo of the day is entitled "Empire State Building" and is by Toby Hancock. Toby is based out of Hollywood, although obviously this particular shot is of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. Do make sure to stop by his main photostream for a lot more great images. Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2836 2013-06-14T15:00:00Z 2013-06-14T14:59:23Z

This week Karl Wolff reviews "Escape From Paris," a romantic suspense novel about the early years of the Second World War and two sisters' battle to save downed British pilots from Nazi menace.

Karl Wolff http://driftlessareareview.com/   Escape From Paris By Carolyn Hart Seventh Street Books/Prometheus Reviewed by Karl Wolff   France under German occupation is the setting for Carolyn Hart's novel, Escape From Paris. Set in 1940, with England going it alone against the Nazi juggernaut, two American sisters, Linda Rossiter and Eleanor Masson, decide to resist oppression and tyranny by moving downed British fighter pilots out of France. The Nazis will have none of it, plastering notices all around Paris that those harboring British pilots have to deliver them to the Kommandantur no later than October 20 or face summary execution. The stakes are high and both sides play a game of cat and mouse. Seventh Street Books, a new imprint from Prometheus Books, focuses on mysteries and thrillers. Prometheus has traditionally published science fiction and fantasy titles. In this case, they have re-issued and expanded Carolyn Hart's 1983 story of romantic suspense. At first blush I saw the words "romantic suspense" and started to gag. Romance, as a genre, has gotten a bad rap these days and with sub-standard titles like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, I was a prejudiced reader. Luckily Hart's book delivered a tightly constructed tale of suspense and had a genuinely romantic sub-plot involving Linda and a British pilot she is harboring. Even the villain is believable and portrayed as a human being. Major Erich Krause heads the Paris section of the Gestapo and is tasked with eliminating the British pilots and their treasonous enablers. He meets his match when he deals with the two sisters, since they are American citizens and he can only do so much. (The United States and Germany still weren't officially at war, thus any harm done to the sisters would cause Major Krause a serious diplomatic headache.) The crux of the suspense focuses on the creation of a reliable resistance network and moving the pilots across the Demarkation Line, the line dividing Occupied France from Vichy France. Major Krause is a believable character, like the sisters and the pilots, in that he has lost loved ones in the War. He is also a veteran of the Great War and puts high value on military valor. It is nice to see a Nazi villain not come across as a sadistic caricature. But just because he is portrayed with human depth doesn't mean he's a nice individual. He is a racist, an anti-Semite, and not above using "enhanced interrogation" techniques to get information he requires. I enjoyed reading Escape From Paris, because it was reassuring to see a traditional suspense novel done well. This might sound like I'm damning the novel with faint praise. I'm not. I give the novel high marks because it was well written, tightly plotted, and populated with believable characters. It makes splendid summer reading. There are spectacular dog fights, a harrowing prison scene, and ferocious verbal confrontations. The only drawback relate to the confines of the genre. Hart writes "cozy mysteries" and these aren't for everyone.   Out of 10/8.5, higher for fans of suspense.   Read even more about Escape From Paris: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari | Wikipedia]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2835 2013-06-13T01:17:17Z 2013-06-13T01:17:53Z

Today's photo: "stan braves the beach," by Danny Edwards.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Today's photo of the day is entitled "stan braves the beach" and is by Danny Edwards. Danny is currently based out of the British town of Beverley, which I believe is where this particular shot was taken as well. He also has a portfolio over at Lomography.com, for those who would like to see and learn more. Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2834 2013-06-12T23:12:10Z 2013-06-13T03:20:15Z

(Once a month throughout 2013 and '14, CCLaP critic Travis Fortney is reading a series of classic and contemporary books set in Chicago, not only to understand his new adopted hometown better, but to learn more about the origins...

Travis Fortney (Once a month throughout 2013 and '14, CCLaP critic Travis Fortney is reading a series of classic and contemporary books set in Chicago, not only to understand his new adopted hometown better, but to learn more about the origins and nature of the so-called "Chicago Way." For a longer introduction to this series, please click here, or visit here for the complete list.) Memoirs of an American Citizen By Robert Herrick Macmillan, 394 pages, illustrated Memoirs of an American Citizen by Robert Herrick is story of a young man named E.V. "Van" Harrington, who arrives in Chicago in September of 1876, five years after the Great Fire of 1871. The book covers Van's rise over the next quarter century, a period of hectic growth in the city of Chicago. Today, it's much harder to imagine the son or daughter of a poor farmer from, say, rural Indiana or Iowa, arriving in the city without any money or education and rising to the pinnacle of the business community, but Memoirs is the kind of breezy late Victorian novel where fate plays a heavy role in our young narrator's life, plot twists happen every ten or twenty pages, and the characters are larger than life. Despite the book's flaws--it can't really be read seriously today because of the way women are portrayed--it makes for wonderful entertainment and can perhaps even provide some insight into the city Chicago has become more than a century later. Van Harrington's rise in the novel goes like this: He arrives in Chicago "a tramp from Indiana...with only a few cents in my pockets." On his first night as a "homeless wanderer" he is stirred up from the eaves of the wooden building where he has made his bed and meets a "tramp companion" named Ed who's looking for an aunt who runs a boarding house. Van and Ed make camp together in the rail yards by the lake and the next morning wander the city looking for work. When they haven't had any luck that afternoon, they make their way into a saloon intent on pilfering enough "crackers and saltfish" from the counter to fill their bellies. There they meet a hustler who looks them up and down, buys them two rounds of beers, and tells them he knows where to find work. The hustler leads them to a large department store, where he proceeds to steal an unsuspecting woman's purse. Van is left to take the blame. He's arrested and jailed, and the next morning at the hearing tells the judge the story of his fall from grace in Indiana. "I think you have told me an honest story," the judge says. He orders him released and tosses him a dollar from his pocket. And from there, Van's meteoric rise has begun. After his release from jail, Ed finds him. He's located his aunt "Ma" Pierson, who runs a boarding house on State Street. Now Van has a roof over his head, and Ed's cousin helps them find work at a general store called The Enterprise Market. The Enterprise, which is being run poorly, buys groceries from a supplier called Dround's. When the grocery's bankruptcy is imminent, Van jumps ship and goes to work for Dround's. Dround's is essentially meatpacking operation, and meatpacking is how Van makes his fortune, but we never see the operation from the inside. The Chicago meatpacking industry that was exposed in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 1906, only a year after this book was published, is here just another example of glorious American progress. One gets a sense that Mr. Herrick's view of the world is almost Randian. The spirit of the book is that America's best days are ahead, and a new breed of businessman is needed to push the country to greater and greater heights. Shortly after Van begins work at Dround's he has the following epiphany: "Suddenly, a meaning to it all came to me like a great light. The strong must rule: The world was for the strong. It was the act of an idiot to deny that truth. Yes, life was for the strong, all there was in it! I saw it so then, and I have lived it so all my life." As you might have guessed, in the world of the book, "the strong" play by the rules when the rules suit them. Memoirs takes its most interesting turn when Van is working his way up through the ranks at his new employer. Henry Iverson Dround, the proprietor of the meatpacking plant, is a "tall, dignified gentleman" whose employees think him "haughty", but who nonetheless posesses "a high reputation in the city at large for honorable dealing and public spirit." Dround is juxtaposed against big John Carmichael, his chief lieutenant, an Irish immigrant with a brash demeanor who isn't above cutting a few corners and twisting a few arms in order to make a profit. Mr. Herrick's treatment of the characters is clearly meant to suggest that Mr. Dround's way of doing business belongs to a bygone era, while Carmichael's tactics are the way of the future. The narrator tells us that he prefers Carmichael's way of doing things--bribes, illegal agreements with other packers, illegal rebates, kickbacks from the city, etc.-- to "Mr. Dound's college talk." Dround remains willfully ignorant of the goings on within his business, while Carmichael attends to "everything of importance"--that is, everything illegal. Things come to a head between them when Dround is interrupted during a speech he is giving at a charity luncheon and accused of entering into an illegal agreement with the city to lay a new switchtrack--Dround knows nothing about it, and he confronts Carmichael, who admits that he "paid the right people" to get the switchtrack laid and leaves in a huff, telling Dround that he won't stand by while the older man goes broke on "college talk and prin-ci-ples." Carmichael then goes to work for Dround's chief rival, Strauss. When Dround approaches Van and offers him Carmichael's old job, Van gives his boss an ultimatum. He will stay, but only if he can do business his way--that is, Carmichael's way, what we all think of now as the Chicago way. Readng Memoirs today, it seems almost quaint that this way of doing business would make anyone so uneasy. But Van must keep his dealings secret from his even wife. Mr. Dround is so bothered by the means they must use to make a profit that he goes permanently abroad, leaving Van in charge of the business. When Van's brother and his brother's wife arrive from Indiana, they are so appalled by the mere suggestion that Van might have bribed a judge that they would rather live in poverty and near starvation than take a penny of Van's charity. It's interesting that while Sinclair's The Jungle is a greater classic than Herrick's novel, it's undeniable that Herrick's vision more closely matches the truth about what Chicago actually became. We might not like it, but today we take it for granted that private business interests are represented by public officials. In Chicago especially, we assume that wheels are being greased, favors handed out, contracts traded like currency--so much so that it's hard to imagine a time when a choice as to whether to play by those rules or not could be dramatized. It's seems almost fanciful to think that the business world was once dominated by gentlemen like poor Henry Iverson Dround, who believed in the virtues of a level playing field. In Memoirs of an American Citizen Mr. Herrick seems to suggest that this new, immoral way of doing business was born in Chicago. I doubt that's true-- humans have been cheating one another ever since it became within one person's power to possess more property than the other--but I will leave the question of whether Chicago is prone to some special form of corruption open to exploration in future reviews in this series. As for our hero Van Harrington, I will leave his fate unanswered here, so that if readers want to seek out this forgotten novel and discover its many pleasures for themselves, there will be surprises to be had. I will say though that Herrick's thesis is that the strong are the ones who are to inherit the Earth, and one of the virtues of "the strong" is a deviousness that Van Harrington possesses in spades. Read even more about Memoirs of an American Citizen: Official site | GoodReads | Wikipedia]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2833 2013-06-12T18:00:00Z 2013-06-13T01:33:20Z

Karl Wolff reviews "The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone," by MP Johnson, a bizarro lit book that's like watching a Troma movie.

Karl Wolff http://driftlessareareview.com/   The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone By MP Johnson Bizarro Pulp Press Reviewed by Karl Wolff Daryl just wants his beloved pig back. That's the premise that drives the action in The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone, by MP Johnson. Bizarro Pulp Press turns the gore and ultraviolence up to eleven in this short little love letter to Green Bay, Wisconsin. After Daryl's beloved pet pig Pork Knuckles gets slaughtered by his pa, he hitch-hikes to Green Bay. After escaping the clutches of a cannibal hippie, he bunks up with his relatives, Uncle Shard and Aunt Sheila. There's also run-ins with Neo-Nazi flies, mutant drag queens, and naked Mantis cultists. The textbook definition for bizarro literature is the bookstore equivalent of the cult movie section of your local video store. (Do video stores still exist?) Anyhow, The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone is less cult movie (Ed Wood, John Waters, etc.) than the literary equivalent of a Troma movie. Like a Troma movie, MP Johnson combines bloody gooey gore, comic ultraviolence, and outre offensiveness with a bent childhood innocence. Daryl's innocent yearnings to take care of his dear Pork Knuckles, misguided as they are, gently tug the heart strings. That said, The After-Life of Pork Knuckles Malone is an, um, acquired taste.   Out of 10/8.9; not for everybody, but for fans of bizarro lit and Troma movies, Pork Knuckles Malone is some pig!   Read even more about The After-life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone: Official site | Amazon | GoodReads | LibraryThing | Shelfari]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2832 2013-06-11T18:00:50Z 2013-06-14T15:10:31Z

Excelsior! CCLaP's third original book of the year is now available! It's a collection of John-Muir-style essays about nature and science called "Mountainfit" by Meera Lee Sethi, and I'm sure you're going to love it, whether as a free ebook or a special handmade hardback. Click through for more, including links for ordering and downloading!

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Excelsior! CCLaP's third original book of the year is now out! It's another book of essays this time, entitled Mountainfit by a nature writer and field volunteer named Meera Lee Sethi, someone who travels a lot because of her work but is currently based out of Berkeley, California. The dust jacket synopsis explains the book a lot better than I can, so let me just run it here below... In 2011, a tiny bird observatory in far western Sweden found itself hosting its first American volunteer, and Meera Lee Sethi found herself exactly where she wanted to be: watching great snipe court each other under the midnight sun and disturbing lemmings on her way to find a gyrfalcon nest. Mountainfit is an ecological field notebook, a keenly observed natural history of the life that sings from the birches, wheels under the clouds, and scuttles over the peat bogs of the Swedish highlands. And it is a letter, in 21 jewel-like parts, from a well-read and funny friend. Meera's vigorous, graceful prose communicates a wry understanding of how utterly ordinary it is to long for more out of life -- and how extraordinary it can feel to trust that longing. Meera's intent was to create a book small enough to fit in your pocket and read on the train to work in the morning. It is that. But it's also large enough to contain a mountain or two. So as you can tell, this book is very much in the same vein as such Victorian proto-ecological authors as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir; and while the writing is perhaps a little too complex for children, this is absolutely a perfect gift for teens who are thinking of studying science for a career, a poetic and inspiring volume that immediately made me want to visit western Sweden when I first read it. Meera actually self-published this last year through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and had sent along a copy to CCLaP for review; but I so fell in love with it, I asked instead if we could republish it here in 2013, to which she graciously agreed. And yes, all three photos you see on the front cover are ones taken by Meera herself, during her field trip that makes up the contents of this book! As always, the electronic version of this book is completely free if you want, although we of course encourage you to make a small donation as well, in four different forms that hopefully cover just about every reading situation out there (PDFs for both American and European laserprinters; EPUB for most mobile devices, including iPhones and iPads; and MOBI specifically for Amazon Kindles). And as always, for those who want a more traditional reading experience, there is a handmade hardback paper edition as well, available with either recycled paper or cotton sheets, and available to be shipped by faster Priority Mail or cheaper First Class Mail. (And to all of you who ordered pre-release copies, please be aware that we're still waiting for Meera's signed signature sheets to arrive in the mail; we'll likely be shipping the first batch of copies early next week.) Just like our other books, there will be a plethora of supplemental material appearing here slowly over the next few weeks, including a series of critical essays and an interview with Meera; and for all my fellow Goodreads members, don't forget to add this book to your library over there, and especially to post a review once you've read it, in that this is the single best way you can help us promote our books without having to spend any money or extra time. For now, though, the electronic book is ready to download right this second, so I hope you'll have a chance to stop by the book's online headquarters right now and secure a copy for yourself. I'm very proud to have this smart, funny, charming book in our catalog, and I'm positive that you will end up loving it too.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2831 2013-06-11T17:54:58Z 2013-06-11T17:55:45Z

Today's photo: "dreamed a dream by the old canal.," by UK photographer Mark Entwisle.

Jason Pettus http://www.cclapcenter.com Today's photo of the day is entitled "dreamed a dream by the old canal." and is by Mark Entwisle. Mark is based somewhere in the UK, although he doesn't mention where this particular shot was taken. He also has a nice personal website, for those who would like to see and learn more. Don't forget that I actually maintain a whole page of favorite photographs over at Flickr, for those who would like to see more. To express an interest in having your own work featured, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com.]]> tag:www.cclapcenter.com,2013://1.2830 2013-06-11T02:05:06Z 2013-06-11T18:35:06Z

Over the next year, here at the website, I'll be posting a series of reviews entitled "My Kind of Town", which takes its title from the popular Frank Sinatra song--Chi-CA-go, Chi-CA-go, my kind of a town.... I'll be exploring...

Travis Fortney Over the next year, here at the website, I'll be posting a series of reviews entitled "My Kind of Town", which takes its title from the popular Frank Sinatra song--Chi-CA-go, Chi-CA-go, my kind of a town.... I'll be exploring novels that take place in Chicago, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. I'll be reading Frank Norris's The Pit, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, James T. Farrel's Stud's Lonigan Trilogy, Saul Bellow's Herzog, Phillip Roth's Letting Go, Alexander Hemon's The Lazaras Project and a number of others. I may revisit a few titles that I've already read, or add new books to the list as I learn of them. The first review, which I'll be posting on Wednesday, will be of Robert Herrick's Memoirs of an American Citizen, a forgotten novel whose gender politics are embarrassingly backward, but which is worthwhile reading for Chicagoans who are interested in better understanding their city, because it represents an early fictional rendering of the Chicago Way. Although I'll probably expand on my definition of what exactly the Chicago Way is in future reviews, what the phrase connotes for me today is bribery, corruption, the Mob, violence, questionable business tactics, and accepting that the world is a place where these things are going to occur with or without your own participation--if you're not cheating your way to the top and keeping everyone else down once you get there, then you're not playing the game, you're a sucker. Originally, this series was conceived as a response to this New York Times Book Review cover article. The reviewer Rachel Shteir is a New York transplant who has lived in Chicago for a decade. She pulls no punches, beginning the essay with the words, "Poor Chicago", then taking the city to task for its "many urban apocalypses", namely gun violence, the cost of parking, the foreclosure crisis and the unemployment rate. But what bothers Ms. Shteir most of all is Chicago's mythology, the story its residents and politicians tell themselves--namely, that Chicago is a great city, a world class city, with the power to face down adversity and come out on top. Ms. Schteir takes the other view--that this optimism is actually delusion. The piece caused a bit of a stir when it was first published, because readers mistook Ms. Shteir's trash-talking about Chicago for trash-talking about Chicagoans--and maybe they were right, because that "city of broad shoulders," blue-collar braggadocio, as slippery as it is to pin down, is contagious. Here in Chicago, where you live has a lot to do with who you are. Like Ms. Schteir, I'm a relatively new arrival to Chicago, having lived in the city for five years. I liked the place I moved here from--Missoula, Montana--an awful lot, so much in fact that I sometimes wish I'd never left. But I found the Rogers Park lakefront, a tree-lined street that feels like home, neighborhood bars where everyone knows my name, and I've made a few new friends along the way. Still, my relationship with the city is complicated. Chicago is the place where, only a couple months after arriving, I was out walking my dog a couple hundred feet from my apartment, heard two loud bangs over my shoulder, watched the other people on the street with me drop to the ground and cover their heads, and realized that the bangs were gunshots. Faced with a decision, I walked the short distance to my apartment--less than a block--nearly got run over by a car screeching out of the alley, then went upstairs and watched from my window as the street filled with fire trucks, police cars and ambulances, and the paramedics wheeled a body from the alleyway. I'm not sure whether the person on the stretcher was living or dead, but I am sure that the car that nearly ran me over was a green Dodge Charger. I 'm also sure that a young man was found dead in a green Dodge Charger a couple blocks away a week or so later. If that shooting was an isolated incident, it would be one thing, but it wasn't. Something we've dealt with ever since then is knowing that on an unusually hot day, there will likely to be a shooting (although, to be clear, my neighborhood recently passed a one year anniversary without a shooting death--you'll hear newspaper reports of a man being shot in the buttocks). And before you dismiss this by assuming that I live in "the hood," I don't, or at least I don't think I do. I live in the Rogers Park neighborhood, approximately one half mile away from Loyola University. My neighbors are mostly first-time homeowners, young families and college students. The fact that there are shootings is ridiculous, but it's a fact--just a couple weeks ago, a wonderful local coffee shop, The Common Cup, had a window shot out. Despite this, Chicago is also the place I got engaged, the place I adopted the best dog I've ever had, the place where my wife and I bought our first home. The streets never feel unsafe to me. It's also the place where, just a week ago, I was outside maintaining my rather elaborate patio garden and I listened to a homeless man--I know a few of the homeless people in my neighborhood by sight, as I'm sure a lot of Chicagoans do--vomit great quantities liquid into the alley not ten feet away from me. If that description sounds like I'm trying to be disgusting, I am a little. The copious pockets of vomit on the streets--which you're more likely to notice if you spend a lot of time walking a dog--are a kind of signature of my life in Chicago. But this little scene was something different. Like I said, I knew this particular person. He's kind of short and squat, red-faced, fairly young, and pushes a shopping cart full of cans through the various alleys at all hours. If the cans he picks out of a dumpster once contained some alcoholic substance, he holds it up over his mouth and shakes out what few drops he can. I've had sympathetic feelings for him, because my dog has barked at him when he didn't deserve it. My dog sometimes gets nervous when people behave erratically, and this homeless man has a severe mental disability. So here I am, in the alley, carefully cultivating my heirloom tomatoes, and this guy is vomiting in a loud, voluminous and remarkably sustained manner right next to me. Between us is a wooden slat fence, that's maybe six feet tall. And instead of unlocking the gate, making sure he's all right, going into the condo and getting him a glass of water, offering to call an ambulance, maybe making him a sandwich--instead of doing any of those things that one reasonable person might do to help another--what I do is freeze. I don't move a muscle. I duck down so that I 'm completely hidden by the fence, I listen to him vomit and hack for another minute or two, and then I listen to him wheel his shopping cart away. I've seen him a few times since, and he seems fine, but I've been questioning myself. I've always thought I was the type of person who opens the gate. But the fact is that after five years in Chicago, this is not something I would do, ever. I know that these are just stories that any Chicagoan who has lived here long enough could tell. My point though, is that Ms. Shteir was right about some things. Sure, her her piece is a shoddy takedown job that seems like it would be more at home in The Huffington Post than The New York Times, but gun violence and poverty are real problems in our city. Ms. Shteir and myself differ a bit in what we see behind the bluster of our politicians and citizenry. I agree that the Chicago Way is responsible for a lot of that bluster, but in Ms. Schteir's view, the bluster and the Chicago Way are one and the same, and in order for any positive change the city must take a humbler view of itself. Hence her desire to take Chicago down a peg or two. It's also true that it's naïve to think that political corruption has had no effect on the city's budget crisis, for example, which has an effect on the number of police, school budgets, care mental health services for the city's poor, and any number of other things. My view is that the city's bluster might indeed be an offshoot of the Chicago Way, but the bluster, the swagger, the pride Chicagoans have in their city, is also one of my favorite things about the place. After all, it's a form of optimism, and this city can use all the optimism it can get. I'm also of the view that the bluster allows Chicagoans to think that our city's problems aren't too big to overcome, and that as long as we keep on thinking this, it might be true. Obviously, my views aren't particularly well-developed or set in stone. So the purpose of this series of reviews is to explore these questions. What is the Chicago Way? What is the Chicago state of mind? What's the source of the swagger? Do I want to prove Rachel Shteir wrong? A little bit. But really, I'm setting out to right what I thought was one of the wrongs in her review. I want to give the city its due, give it a fair shake, try to learn something new. After all, for better or worse, Chicago is my home, why not try to have a more nuanced view of the place? ]]>