Terry's Picks for October

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, Jon Krakauer

From Amazon: The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey. Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.

Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.

In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.

Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.

War, Sebastian Junger

From Publishers Weekly: War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation, warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm). The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.

In the Graveyard of Empires: Americas War in Afghanistan, Seth Jones

Various reviews:

No one understands the successes and failures of American policy in Afghanistan better than Seth Jones....If you read just one book about the Taliban, terrorism, and the United States, this is the place to start. (Jeremi Suri, Professor of history, University of Wisconsin )

[D]estined to become the standard text on America's involvement in Afghanistan. It is a timely and important work, without peer in terms of both its scholarship and the author's intimate knowledge of the country, the insurgency threatening it, and the challenges in defeating it. (Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism )

A deeply researched, clearly written, and well-analyzed account of the failures of American policies in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires lays out a plan to avoid a potential quagmire. This timely book will be mandatory reading for policymakers from Washington to Kabul but it will also help to inform Americans who want to understand what is likely to be the greatest foreign policy challenge of the Obama administration. (Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know )

Seth Jones has the answer to the million-dollar question….until Seth Jones, nobody actually sought an empirical answer. Nobody crunched the numbers. (John H. Richardson - Esquire )

I've just started reading Seth Jones's book on the war in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires, which someone told me is going to be the Fiasco of that war. (Thomas E. Ricks, bestselling author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Foreign Policy )

[Jones] zero[es] in on what went awry after America’s successful routing of the Taliban in late 2001. His narrative is fleshed out with information from declassified government documents and interviews with military officers, diplomats and national security experts familiar with events on the ground in Afghanistan. (Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times )

--Terry

Glenn's Picks for September

The three choices are...

Dark Star Safari, Theroux
From Publishers Weekly: "You'll have a terrible time," one diplomat tells Theroux upon discovering the prolific writer's plans to hitch a ride hundreds of miles along a desolate road to Nairobi instead of taking a plane. "You'll have some great stuff for your book." That seems to be the strategy for Theroux's extended "experience of vanishing" into the African continent, where disparate incidents reveal Theroux as well as the people he meets. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. But his encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself. Theroux occasionally strays into theorizing about the underlying causes for the conditions he finds, but his cogent insights are well integrated. He doesn't shy away from the literary aspects of his tale, either, frequently invoking Conrad and Rimbaud, and dropping in at the homes of Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer at the beginning and end of his trip. His trip fuels the book's ongoing obsession with his approaching 60th birthday and his insistence that he isn't old yet. As a travel guide, Theroux can both rankle and beguile, but after reading this marvelous report, readers will probably agree with the priest who observes, "Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story."

Devil in the White City, Larson
From Publishers Weekly: Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together on an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed.

When Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris
Summary from Booklist: Sometimes the originators of a certain trend in literature are surpassed by their own disciples—but, this is Sedaris we’re talking about. When it comes to fashioning the sardonic wisecrack, the humiliating circumstance, and the absurdist fantasy, there’s nobody better. Unfortunately, being in a league of your own often means competing with yourself. This latest collection of 22 essays proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he’s also getting better. True, the terrain is familiar. The essays “Old Faithful” and “That’s Amore” again feature Sedaris’ overly competent boyfriend, Hugh. And nutty sister Amy can be found leafing through bestial pornography in “Town and Country.” Present also are Sedaris’ favored topics: death, compulsion, unwanted sexual advances, corporal decay, and more death. Nevertheless, Sedaris’ best stuff will still move, surprise, and entertain.

Glenn

Tinkering at Armando's

Acknowledgments

Armando raced back from Merced and, with a little help from Garth, put together a fine meal of good old fashioned meatloaf.  Just the right menu for a cool fall night spent contemplating a novel whose most vivid settings were in the cold outdoors.  As comfort food, it was the perfect accompaniment for the conversation that followed, with its emphasis on death and dying.  We were especially touched by  Armando's account of the joy and pathos surrounding his mother's recent funeral.

The Book

Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, had the virtue of brevity, which compensated for the disjointed narrative style.  According to Doug, after Harding had drafted this story of a dying father's reminiscences about his own father (and son), he shuffled its chapters in order to collapse the generations (and, according to some of us, confuse the reader).  

Our comments were all across the board.  But many reflected an appreciation for Harding's elegance with language, the visceral impact of his story, and the various metaphors (especially that clock!) for our mortality.  Nevertheless, Peter griped about the deathbed obsession with mortality, Garth saw a plot suffused with mental illness, Dan found the story haphazard even though he insisted he read it while sober, and Paul and Tom A were both underwhelmed by the spareness of the story.  

Our voting produced a miserly 4.8--faint praise for such an acclaimed title but certainly in keeping with our mixed feelings about this elegiacal father-son novella.  

Next Up

Glenn gave us several fine choices for September, but the vote came down to a nailbiter between serial murder and magnificent architecture in turn-of-the-century Chicago and the musings of Paul Theroux as he revisits eastern Africa.  With a little prompting from Garth, who clearly felt our political sensibilities have been dulled by too much award-winning fiction, we went with Dark Star Safari.

Rest in Peace Katie Quintero

We learned that Armando's mother passed away on Sunday.  With sadness and sympathy, we extend our condolences to Armando and his family.  Below is Katie's obituary. 

Catherine Rangel Quintero, loving matriarch of a long-time Martinez family, passed away peacefully with her family by her side on June 27th, 2010. Born February 23, 1931 in Ontario, California, she moved to Martinez in the 1940‘s. She met and married her brothers best friend, the late Frank Quintero, in 1955, and raised eight children.


She loved to sing, and was a member of the St. Catherine’s of Siena choir throughout her 55 years as a dedicated parishioner. She was a “Singing Messenger”, entertaining the elderly community with song, dance and humor. She danced her way through life, both literally and figuratively, gracefully embracing life challenges, as well as taking to the floor with her husband and her closest companion, Gloria Quintero, nearly every weekend. As a member of the Guadalupana Society, she volunteered her time and services by creating a local Ballet Folklorico dance troupe when her children were young, teaching dancing and organizing performances for local events. When she and her husband Frank bought a Union 76 gas station in downtown Martinez, she became the iconic “service with a smile” for all local residents. She was a member of Chi Lambda, Young Ladies Institute, Maria Auxiliadora and in her final years, kept active in the Forget-Me-Nots program at the Martinez Senior Center.


Known as “Katie” to most, as “Cat” to long-time friends and family, and as “Uela” or “Ueli” to her grandchildren, she will always be remembered for her unconditional love and acceptance of everyone whose path she crossed, providing gentle reminders to live each moment with the grace of God, and to live by the golden rule-- to treat others exactly the way you wish to be treated. She leaves her legacy as inspired joy within each person who knew her well, and will continue to live on as a constant presence, angel and spiritual guide.


Catherine was the youngest of eleven children. She was predeceased by her husband Frank Quintero, her brothers Catalino Mora, Lupe Rangel, Benjamin Rangel, Salvador Rangel and Alfonso Rangel, and her sisters Dolores Mora Perez, and Sister Maria Teresa, O.S.F. She is survived by her sisters Ester Perez of Concord, CA. and Grace Arellano of Ontario, CA., and her brother Louis Rangel of Martinez. She leaves eight children and their families, Armando Quintero and Brigid Breen and their daughters Lily and Isabella; Eduardo and Phyllis Quintero, their children Joshua and Maria, and their daughter-in-law Heather; Patricia and Dave Brouillette and their sons Wiley and Jesse; Juanita Lynn Quintero and her children Mickey, Mikaela, Frank, Karleena and Corigan; Marialicia and George Pangilla and their children Preston and Sadie; Leticia and Bill Ralls and their children Katie and Jack; Raquel and Jim Lakeman and their sons Frank and Louie, and Shanti Kim Quintero and Brian Johnson and their daughters Sidy and Miya. The family extends their love and deep appreciation to her longtime friend and caregiver, Maria Luisa.


Visitation will be on Wednesday, June 30th, beginning at 5:00 p.m. to be immediately followed with the Rosary at 7:00 p.m. The funeral mass will be held at 10:00 a.m. on July 1st. All services will take place at Saint Catherine of Siena Church.


In lieu of flowers or other contributions, donations may be made to Hospice of the East Bay, 3470 Buskirk Avenue, Pleasant Hill 94523 and Alzheimer’s Association at Northern California and Northern Nevada, 1060 La Avenida Street, Mountain View, CA 94043.

Paul's Perfect Paella

Acknowledgments
On Monday evening, we were invited to dine in the hills of Larkspur—or, as one of our more parochial members put it, the rump of Marin. The address was not 32 Avenida del Tibidabo, the venue was not the Aldaya Mansion, and none of Fermin Romero de Torres’ signature sandwiches was on our menu. Instead, Paul’s home and his hospitality met and raised Zafon on every count. His beautifully rebuilt house, nestled atop a ridge with views of both Mt. Tamalpais and San Francisco Bay, exceeded anything described in Daniel Sempere’s post-war Barcelona.

Once inside, the literary atmospherics escalated. Paul printed out menu cards, featuring selected quotes from The Shadow of the Wind, for each place setting.  Other excerpts from the book were typed up and strewn around the kitchen.  Nice touches, yes. But while his prominently displayed Library of Forgotten Books may have struck some as a clever riff on Zafon’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books, others were not amused by this cruel jab at the collected works of the Man Book Club.

As always, though, our evening was sustained by food. In this case, excellent food. From the Spanish cava to the Catalonian bruschetta, our appetites were duly prepared for a well-rehearsed and perfectly executed paella, preceded by gazpacho and followed by a Catalonian custard. Buen provecho, Paul!

The Book
The Shadow of the Wind traces the parallel lives (and forbidden loves) of Daniel Sempere, the young narrator, and Julian Carax, a local author whose disappearance becomes Daniel’s obsession and very nearly his undoing.  Despite the sound and the fury that followed our selection of The Shadow of the Wind, the surprise was that most of us actually enjoyed reading Zafon’s international bestseller. (And that includes Doug, even if he did liken the book to Harry Potter.)

We argued whether it was high lit, low lit, or even good lit (with takers for all three), whether the characters measured up to the florid prose (yes for me and Tom J.), whether the book was memorable (Paul) or forgettable (Glenn), and—most polarizing of all—whether this novel was written for a young adult audience (Tom A. argued the contrary, while conceding that teen fiction is where Zafon made his name).

Apart from all this disputation, the consensus was that Zafon had created an enjoyable narrative with an evocative and authentic style. This consensus, and our herd instinct (or pussy voting, according to the namecallers), produced a narrow voting range, with a middle-of-the-road result of 6.9. Interestingly, our rating would have been in the 7’s were it not for Stan (6) and Garth (5), the only men who didn’t finish the book.

Next Up
Armando proposed an eclectic set of titles for our consideration for next month's meeting. His absence, however, resulted in an extended debate over our selection process. Without the slightest irony, one of us (who notoriously relies on his father for book ideas) insisted that the upcoming host should first read the titles he puts forward.  In the end, we reverted to tradition and overwhelmingly opted for Tinkers, Paul Harding’s winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Next month we’ll see if this neatly mannered family history meets our exacting summer reading standards.