The Book Shopper

Down & Outbound at Book Festival

In  a rare public appearance, discounted copies of my book Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire will be available for perusing and sale at the Root City booth #528 at the Decatur Book Festival being held September 2nd and 3rd.  This is your opportunity to experience  a book about the absurdities of public transportation, which has been specifically designed for those who ride buses and subway trains. (You can read it with one hand. See video below.)  At the booth, which will also have cards, notebooks and other writerly accessories, you can experience how Down & Outbound's soft plastic comb massages the tender spot between your thumb and index finger while you read. This book tickles.

"Will the reclusive D & O author be available?" you ask.

Only late Sunday afternoon at the Baptist Church venue, but not as an author but as a Festival volunteer during the Ernie Johnson appearance. Maybe I can get the famed sportscaster to hold my book. Hmmm. Good idea.

 

 

Vietnam Summer Vacation Posting

I spent most of my summer reading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), and  it deserved more rumination than normal and a few more potential readers so I shared it with another blog that I like: Tropics of Meta.  Check out the blog and my essay "Dog Day Classics: My Vietnam Vacation With John Paul Vann," which can be found here.

John Hersey Days

I first read John Hersey last year when a book friend gave me a remaindered copy of Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (2011).  In this book, the critic and scholar John Sutherland chronicles English language fiction dating back to the 17th century. Sutherland’s theme is to list the authors who will still be read 100 years from now and why. He includes some stalwarts, some surprises, but mostly authors I had not read.

Hersey (1914-1993) was a combination of all three for me. I knew about his most famous book, Hiroshima from high school, but as a youth I was reluctant to read such sobering material.  However, while planning my books for a vacation to Florida and browsing the Sutherland book, I noticed that I had a copy of Hersey’s Key West Tales (1993) on my shelves.  I brought this short collection of Hersey stories to the beach and thoroughly enjoyed them as several of the offerings were light and almost whimsical. (See this posting from last year, which includes a brief comparison of Hersey to Ernest Hemingway.)

More recently, I stumbled across a yellowed, crumbling copy of Hiroshima in one of those neighborhood library kiosks. Its condition didn’t deter me from bringing it home, because feathery-light and portable paperbacks are ideal for my MARTA subway commute. I read the short book in a few days.

The book has renewed relevance, especially now as North Korea and the United States goad each other with threats of destruction as cavalierly as soccer hooligans trade barbs and fists, Hersey’s Hiroshima is a reminder of why the horrors of nuclear attack should be avoided at all costs. As Sutherland summarizes:

Hiroshima follows the experiences of six survivors – all intensively interviewed by the author: a clerk, a doctor, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, a surgeon, and a Japanese minister. The interviewees were chosen to overturn the monolithic image of the subhuman ‘Jap’ promulgated during hostilities. The description of physical effects of the ‘Bomb’ were horrific: melted eyeballs, bone-rotting radiation sickness, and the image that went around the world – a victim whose only relic was a shadowy profile on a wall; the rest of him vaporized.

Published in 1946 as a special piece in The New Yorker, Hersey used narrative fiction techniques to tell these stories. Moreover, he seems to capture the rhythms of his subject’s Japanese speech patterns as well.  It reminded me of a Haruki Murakami novel.

The Algiers Motel Incident

If this were not enough, Hersey is in the news because of a connection to the recent Kathryn Bigelow film, Detroit. Screenwriter Mark Boal mentions Hersey’s book The Algiers Motel Incident (1968) as one of the sources for his screenplay about the 1967 race riots that engulfed the city. In Algiers Motel, Hershey uses some of the same techniques as he did in Hiroshima extensively interviewing eyewitnesses and participants of the event that ignited the riots. Hersey donated the royalties for the book, which sold a half a million copies, to a scholarship fund for African-American students.

Today’s headlines include racial violence in Charlottesville and the threat of thermonuclear war. It seems like we are all living in John Hersey Days.

Meditative Reading

Sometimes the key of fully appreciating a book is choosing the right place and right time to read it. Such is the case with Eva Brann’s book Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech (2016). Brann, a classics professor at St. John’s College, normally writes the kind of challenging book that I would be hesitant to buy, but I swapped publisher Paul Dry at Paul Dry Books my own  Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit  for a copy of the Brann book. Bartering can be as good as cash for writers except the appliance repairman wouldn’t except a boxful of D & Os for fixing my washer last week.

I’ve always had a fondness for quotes and aphorisms, but Brann’s brief notes on such widespread topics  as Death, Home, Kookiness and Morals demands more meditative reading. This is the kind of book where you read a passage, you think, you read again, and tell yourself either, “Oh, I get it!” or “I am not deep enough to understand this. Sigh.” and move on.  You cannot do that kind of reading on the train (Sorry MARTA Book Club) or after a day at work, which fills your mind up with all kinds of rubbish. This book must be read before everyone else in the house gets up and you are at your favorite spot with your morning coffee. (Mine is shown here.) It becomes a predawn mediation --  sans breathing, stretching or praying. This book deserves that you put yourself in a position to concentrate.

Brann’s book is a series of aphorisms, which comes from the Greek for de-limitation and is defined as, “a brief expression of a much-pondered opinion, succinctly and suggestively phrased.”  I could have yellow-highlighted the whole book, but are just a few samples of personal favorites:

On Intellectuals

‘Thinking outside the box’, the mantra of the creativity folks, doesn’t work. As soon as thought leaps out, the box expands and they’re as inside as ever.

On Memoirs

How much sweeter to be serenely sure of having been underestimated than to have to sink through the floor shamed by clueless overpraise.

Respect we deserve to get; adulation we deserve not to forget.

On Home

Two Human Types: It’s better to come home to anybody than nobody/ It’s better to come home to no one than the wrong one.

 

Other Paul Dry Books (which are on sale)

 

Note:  Until August 8^th, you can get $10 discount at Paul Dry Books for orders over $30. (Use code SUMMER2017).  I’ve read quite a few of this publisher’s offerings: two books of essays by Gabriel Zaid, Ill Met By Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, a thriller about the Crete resistance against Nazis in World War II, and humorous fiction by Irish writer  Lord Dunsany and a fine book by Margaret Kaufman, the latter which is reviewed in the blog here.

Blog News

You don't have to tell me it's been a month since I posted something, Facebook reminds me on a weekly basis that I have been a writing slacker. Of course, I just received my first Believer Magazine in two years, so there is slacking and there is major league goofing off.

Ironically,  blog statistics remain robust by my modest (very modest) standards. This can be attributed to the Discovery Channel's mini series Manhunt: Unabomber since The Book Shopper Blog is the virtual home to the Unabomber's Library. Every time the Unabomber makes the news, I experience an uptick in interest. If you don't believe me, believe Google:

However there are other reasons for my hiatus.  The main excuse is that I have been devoting my writing time to a longer essay on Neil Sheehan's voluminous book on Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988). But there are small ideas that are swimming around as well, so expect some catch up in the next few weeks.