On Bogus Book Reviews, Facebook Hoopla, & Why Book Reviews Even Matter

Posted on September 1, 2012 by williamjcobb

So I read with some amusement and (tempered, jaded) dismay a good piece in the NY Times about bogus, “bought” online book reviews, here. I didn’t know about any of this, exactly, but I’m not too surprised. The ‘net is a hive of hoax, that’s for sure. Facebook, for instance, into which I’ve been dragged, kicking and screaming, and now find (somewhat) interesting and (somewhat) annoying, seems like joining the Pep Squad. (I’m also well aware that what seems weird to me on FB is old hat to others, who are used to it.) Everyone is so upbeat! Everything is great! You’re fabulous! I’ve never seen so many exclamation points!! I use them just to say Hi How ya doin’!!!! You changed your profile picture!!!!! Isn’t that fabulous!!!!!!
Nevertheless (and when can you say “nevertheless” with a straight face? that funky run-on compound that looks like it’s itching for hyphens?), I do try to preserve some kind of FB integrity, and only mean what I say/say what I mean. More or less. I mean, a little upbeat feelgoodism doesn’t hurt, in this dark world, does it? You do look great. Really!
But my real subject here is book reviews, both the bogus and the “real.” By real I mean the traditional idea of book reviews, the kind I’ve been doing for almost twenty years now: You (the critic, writer) are assigned a book to review by an editor (someone knowledgable about language/literature, we assume), written by someone you don’t know; the editor is essentially asking for your public opinion, not biased or slanted, or not unreasonably so (aren’t we all biased in our own particular ways?). But there’s a crucial difference between the real and the fake book reviews: I’ve reviewed for the New York Times, Houston Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News. Never has an editor suggested what I should (or shouldn’t) think or say about a book. They edit for accuracy and style, but not content. As it should be. And I should note this: I consider my high point of reviewing when I was assigned and reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), and my quote made it to the book jacket back page of the paperback edition, and appears in the Wikipedia page, here.  (Scroll down to the Literary Significance and Criticism heading.) I think book reviews are important, they matter. So many books are published in the world, we need some legitimate voices to offer preliminary opinions. I don’t believe everything that’s said, of course. But the best book reviews make you want to read, and that’s what matters most.

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Review of David McGlynn's "A Door in the Ocean"

Posted on August 27, 2012 by williamjcobb

So my review of David McGlynn’s just-published memoir, A Door in the Ocean, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here. It’s a good book, and gives an interesting insider’s viewpoint of competitive swimming, how grueling and isolating it can be, a view that you usually don’t get in all the Olympics hoopla. Plus I’ve never read a book that talked about being a virgin at a late age (well, late in these times: in his 20s).
I just returned from a backpacking trip in my beloved Sangre de Cristo mountains. On the first day we saw a young Golden Eagle, huge and impressive. We also saw many other birds, including Audubon’s Warblers, and some Western Tanagers, as captured below in a recent pic.

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Teenage Mutant Cannibal ATV Riders & The Coming Megadrought in the West

Posted on August 15, 2012 by williamjcobb

So last weekend I was camping in the Medicine Bow Wilderness Area of southern Wyoming, loving it, my family all alone in a beautiful campground, when the sound of loud motors, screams, dogs barking, and shouting wafted through the forest of spruce and lodgepole pine. Then came the thunderous roar of engines and rising dust behind them. It was like something out of Mad Max or The Road Warrior, only it was teenage girls on ATVs, racing around in circles. We joked that they were teenage mutant cannibals coming to have us for dinner. But mainly they just made a lot of noise, reinforcing my belief that ATVs are The Scourge of the West. After they left we watched the Perseid Meteor Shower from about 10,000 feet elevation, saw sixteen shooting stars in a short time. On our way home, we passed the Mangy Moose Saloon, with its sign below.
And in this morning’s New York Times, some frank warnings about climate change and drought in the West, here.

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On Frozen Penises and Rivers Coated With Pelican Feathers: Reading Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage," About the Lewis & Clark trip of 1804-6

Posted on August 9, 2012 by williamjcobb


So I’m heading up to Montana/Wyoming in a month, to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, and to get warmed up for it, I’m reading Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (1996), which is in some ways a retelling of the Lewis & Clark voyage of North West Discovery in 1804-6. Now I have to admit I have a weakness for Lewis & Clark, that dynamic duo of intrepid explorers, and have read (and taught) their journals from this trip, and find it fascinating stuff. Ambrose is much more “romantic” and hyperbolic than I would be about this material. He tends to make them sound like Superheros, or Super Explorers—brave, valiant, wise, and trustworthy. And although I’m sure they had their flaws, it’s hard not to be in awe of their accomplishments. Plus it’s full of great visions of the American West before it was settled (and during the Little Ice Age, when it was colder): At one point they round a bend in the Missouri River and find a remarkable sight:
“On August 8, one of the bowmen called back to Lewis, who was working in the cabin. The captain looked up to see a blanket of white coming down the river. He went to the bow to stare down into the water. The keelboat and the white whatever-it-was came together. One close examination it turned out to be a sea of white feathers, over three miles long and seventy yards wide” (152).
(It turned out to be feathers from an enormous flock of White Pelicans. We still have them in the West, thankfully, and below is a picture from a lake in my area, where I went kayaking, and came upon some of them.) At times Lewis looks out on herds of buffalo as far as the eye can see, estimating them to be in the tens of thousands. (Until they cross the Rockies, that is, and then the buffalo are mostly gone.) Undaunted Courage (as opposed to, say, Cold, Clueless, and Lost, which could be the title for the Journals of Zebulon Pike, circa 1806) also contains sentences like this: “It was always cold, often brutally cold, sometimes so cold a man’s penis would freeze if he wasn’t quick about it” (191). Quick about it? What if you got stage fright, standing in a frozen field surrounded by a zillion buffalo? I’m just saying . . . .

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Good Review of "The Bird Saviors" in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Cormac McCarthy News

Posted on August 8, 2012 by williamjcobb

So there’s a good review of The Bird Saviors in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or “SeattlePI”), here. I’m not thrilled with the word “meandering,” but then again, the reviewer gives much praise, so I’ll set aside my quibble. Here’s a pic from my neck of the woods, in honor of Cormac McCarthy’s recent 79th birthday. And from CormacMcCarthy.com comes news of two films of his work in production, Child of God (now that will be a wicked-good one) and The Counselor (with Penelope Cruz, no less).

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The Smell of Drought and Feckless Politicians

Posted on August 6, 2012 by williamjcobb

So in this hot-as-hell summer it’s hard to keep up with all the bad news on the Climate Change front, and I can barely bring myself to read ThinkProgress.org lately, good as it is, because the news is just a drumbeat of despicable politicians in the pocket of Big Oil or their own greed and myopia. It seems the whole country is frying. In my little neck of the woods, at 8,823 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, our summer “monsoons” have been fitful, hit-and-miss—mainly miss. A normal year our yard is lush and green with typical (and reliable) afternoon rains. All the locals up here note how the summer rains have been less reliable in the last few years, which I’ve noticed, too (we’ve owned the house a decade now, enough to see good years and bad). While the whole country seems to be acknowledging the danger of this heat and drought, our politicians are doing anything they can to deny it, or simply not do a thing about it. The Republican smear campaign about Solyndra is a smokescreen: Sure, there will be alternative energy successes and failures, the same as any other industry, but if we don’t go out of our way to promote it, we’re doomed to the Business As Usual, which is what is leading us to Doom. I hope the next week finds something for me to feel optimistic about. Perhaps the answer lies on the moon.

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Richard Muller's "Conversion of a Climate Change Skeptic" in the NY Times, Simon Winchester's "Atlantic," Plus One Glorious Bird

Posted on July 30, 2012 by williamjcobb

So it’s heartening to see that a climate change skeptic has changed his tune, and makes his case for human-induced climate change in today’s NY Times, here. I was hanging out with my two teenage nieces this week, and made the point with them that climate change will be one of the biggest issues in their lifetimes. Muller’s editorial does seem to encourage cross-party (and ideology) discussion about the problem, which at least is some kind of positive movement. ThinkProgress.org has reported that the Koch Brothers, that dastardly duo, has actually funded part of the study Muller is describing (here), which is an interesting twist to the data.
And I have to say I’m greatly enjoying Simon Winchester’s Atlantic, full of oddball facts and keen insight. Here’s a quote, describing the oceanographic studies of the HMS Challenger, circa 1872: “All told there were to be eighty volumes. It was a formidable intellectual achievement, arguably the most comprehensive study of the ocean ever undertaken, and it remains a landmark to this day. The information assembled and disseminated  represented what was at the time the sum total of humankind’s knowledge of the sea, and especially the Atlantic Ocean” (139).
Plus here’s one of my favorite birds of the West, the Lewis’s Woodpecker, named after/by Meriwether Lewis, on the Lewis & Clark Expedition of 1804-6. It has a beautiful glossy dark wings full of greens and purples, and a pink blush on its breast:

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The Raptors of Custer County

Posted on July 24, 2012 by williamjcobb

So living in a high-desert mountain valley, I see a ton of raptors on the telephone poles and fence posts as I drive to and from town. Most of the time they’re easily identified (or guessed) as Red-Tailed Hawks, since Red-Tails are essentially the most common. Such as this one:

But many, many other species liven up the skies: Golden Eagles, Bald Eagles, Northern Goshawks (my favorite: one flew through my yard the other day), American Kestrels, Rough-Legged Hawks, Cooper’s Hawks, Prairie Falcons, and many more. Yesterday I snapped the photo below, and it’s either a Peregrine Falcon or a Swainson’s Hawk. The breast bib looks like a Swainson’s, but its size was more like a Peregrine Falcon, and the face looked close to a Peregrine.

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"Dust-Bowlification" and Climate Change in the NY Times

Posted on July 23, 2012 by williamjcobb

So Paul Krugman has a good piece in today’s NY Times, here. ThinkProgress.org has blasted the Times for its recent blather about climate change, so it’s nice to see at least Krugman seems to get it. I like his ending quote: “For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now.”

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On Simon Winchester's "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories," Plus That Crazy "Mermaid" Show Last Night

Posted on July 17, 2012 by williamjcobb

So today is a High Brow/Low Brow blue plate special: Right now I’m reading Simon Winchester’s Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (2010), part of my summer reading slate of big nonfiction tomes (such as Alex d’Prudhomme’s The Ripple Effect) sandwiched between good (shorter) fiction, such as Stephen Graham Jones’s Growing Up Dead in Texas. Winchester is one of our best nonfiction writers, I think, a Brit, known for Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003) but also The Professor and the Madman (1998), and many others. It’s old-fashioned, eloquent nonfiction, almost in the vein of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951). It’s elegant, which is a rarity.
On the total opposite end of the spectrum, comes last night’s (lowbrow) TV weirdness, Mermaids: A Body Found. I watched most of it and couldn’t quite tell if it was a joke or not. (Or perhaps if the producers meant it to be a joke, like those great Monster Quest programs, the ones where they never really find the monster.) I don’t want to give anything away, for those who are interested, because I’m sure it will be rebroadcast multiple times. I mean, I like a mermaid as much as the next person—the pretty ones, you know, with seashell bikini tops and long red hair (that never needs shampooing!). But the idea of real mermaids is a trifle, how should we say, kooky? Nutcase? And the show does its best to be legit, complete with two (suspiciously camera-friendly) “experts” on the story, who formerly (really?) worked for NOAA. I think it fits on a DVD shelf next to those alien autopsy videos. It was definitely amusing, I’ll say that. But part of the show is about the (evil) Navy program of sonar sounds that kill or force to beach thousands of whales, and there’s an article in today’s NY Times that contradicts some of what the show claims—or at least it suggests that whales are adapting to the sonar blasts and are figuring out how to block the noise; see the article here.
Lastly, I’ve been trying to get a photo of a Western Tanager, one of the prettiest birds in the West, all summer. Triumph below!

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