Review: Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What makes “Daisy Jones and the Six” stand out is the way it is written. The author uses the gimmick of presenting this story as if it were a non-fiction book about a band, written entirely using strung together quotes from a variety of characters, from the band members to people the band interacted with. If you have ever watched VH1’s “Behind the Music”, this will seem very familiar. If you read “Live from New York”, it was written in much the same way. This book feels like those documentary takes on bands and a show. But the author has extended this made-up documentary into an interesting story, dropping some surprises into the story near the end, making you really want to finish the book to find out what happens to the band members. I found the story fun to listen to, and I could picture the band being part of the 70s band scene. The author even duplicated the typical discussion of song lyrics you hear and see in documentary sources on rock bands. This felt very realistic.

I listened to this on audio, and I believe that greatly increased my enjoyment of this book. Those snippets of quotes were often very short, a few words or a sentence by one character. The audiobook used different voice actors for each character, and it made them very distinctive. I can imagine if I were to have read the book, I would have had to work harder to recall each character by name, and I suspect that extra effort would have lessened my enjoyment. In addition, many of the narrators’ lines were very well acted, more emphatic and emotional than most audiobooks. The audiobook was very well done.


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Review: Ain't No Place for a Hero: Borderlands

Ain't No Place for a Hero: Borderlands by Kaitlin Tremblay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second Pop Classics book I’ve read, and I enjoy the topics chosen and the writing. Here, you get some edge to that writing, as author Tremblay provides a very personal and impassioned take on a video game that I knew nothing about. The author provides some deep analyses of the game Borderlands, focusing on the inclusivity designed into the game. This is apparently quite novel in gaming. I enjoy this kind of deep analysis of media properties, with the understanding that people often find patterns when there aren’t intentional patterns existing. She made it interesting, though, by finding plenty and corroborating intentions in some cases with the game developers. Probably the best audience is those that know the game and that are interested in broader societal impacts of game design, but many will find interest.

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Review: Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship

Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship by John Baldwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You get a good idea of the story here by reading the blurb on the cover – Confederate ship harassing Federal maritime industry doesn’t know the war has ended. That is a good, short description. The book adds a lot to this story, but also misses some opportunities. The main source for the book is the diary/ship logs of Executive Officer Conway Whittle, who comes across as a true Southerner in manner and temperament, charming the occasional woman while pining for his true love, and planning a duel for honor near the end of the book. After learning of Whittle’s work with the Confederacy, we learn about the ship procured for the Confederacy and of the efforts to sneak away from Britain. We then follow Whittle and his ship the Shenandoah on a year long voyage with stops in Australia and Pacific islands, and capturing US whaling ships in the Arctic Ocean. And then, we follow them back to Britain, their choice of venue to lower the odds of being hung as pirates. Their tour was a mix of terror from weather issues, visits to ports where the crew is treated quite well, capturing and firing whaling and other merchant vessels, and typical boredom from many long and continuous days at sea. You learn a lot about sailing and cruising during the war years, and you understand how difficult the work could be. Missing from the story was additional context that would have analyzed the place of the Shenandoah in the strategy of the Confederacy, summarized the impact of the ship on the war, and positioned the story of the warriors fighting beyond the end of their war with other examples from history.

One story, from near the end of the book, was an example of how the author approached this material. Sailors on the boat were held captive by the British government after they surrendered their ship at the completion of their voyage. The British decided to free the sailors, unless they were British citizens who had, in effect, joined a foreign Navy. Those sailors would be put to death. The crew, many of whom were British, according to the author had no time to collaborate, yet all answered under interrogation that they were Southerners. The author expresses surprise that this has happened, and stretches this section out to draw out some drama. Yet it seems to me that the best explanation is that all these British sailors knew this was the case, and had talked about this during the long trip back to Britain. No surprise. But it was a kind of obvious attempt at drama by the author that wasn’t necessary.

Overall, I enjoyed learning about the voyage of the Shenandoah, and getting to know and to understand some of the sailors and officers. It is quite a story, and the Executive Officer’s diary was a great source to mine.


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Review: Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend

Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend by Leroy Satchel Paige
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

What a great story, by a larger-than-life storyteller. You never know if what you read is 100% true, or exaggerated, but what Paige describes is a hard scrabble life of a guy who knows how to make money by capitalizing on his freakish abilities to play baseball, and who knows how to spend said money. Time and again, Paige tells of needing money, often after realizing a big payday or signing a playing contract. You learn a lot about his life, the ups and downs, family life, his difficulty in driving a car below the speed limit, and you learn about baseball at the time. You learn a lot about baseball, from the Negro League to pro ball, international play, and barnstorming for entertainment over the decades that Paige played. Paige has wonderful things to say about Bill Veeck. Paige also drops a couple of ethnic slurs along the way. But what I’ll remember about this book is how much of a character Paige was, and how funny he could be. This was one of those audiobooks I found myself guffawing at while driving. Quite a hoot.

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Review: Known and Unknown: A Memoir

Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s not easy to determine whether Rumsfeld is a good guy or a bad guy based on his memoir. I tend to believe the best in people, but Rumsfeld offers plenty of proof why he wasn’t always the best guy to have in the room. I’ve never read an autobiography where the author says that he meant to say A, but instead people heard him say B, but that’s not what he meant, and people don’t believe he meant A. Strangely, this happens to Rumsfeld with regularity, and given that he’s covering the high and low points in his career, this was a big problem for him. He mentions more than a dozen of these anecdotes here. I’m left with the feeling that Rumsfeld operated at too high a speed to always get things right, or to think things through, or to always pay attention. This aspect of his personality is kind of scary given his jobs. Rumsfeld shares his thoughts on many of the people he worked with in government, and it ends up he didn’t like quite a few. He was equal opportunity here, sharing negative stories about folks from both parties. Here, he trashes Jimmy Carter, General Powell, and Condoleezza Rice, generally for poor decision-making or people management skills. Rumsfeld also shared anecdotes about his decision making, and this seemed quite strong, and a reason he was able to hold high responsibility jobs in government and private industry for decades. Overall, Rumsfeld comes across as a decent manager, but with flaws. His anecdotes from his work in private industry, his early elections and time in Congress, and his work with the Ford and Bush administrations (heaviest on the Bush war years) are quite interesting and telling about the times he impacted.

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Review: Rent Collector

Rent Collector by Camron Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose to read “The Rent Collector” because from the description it reminded me of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” which I enjoyed quite a lot. Both books follow people living in and working in garbage in Asian countries. Both books illustrate the kindness and industry of the poor, and both show that people can behave meanly as well. Boo’s book is considered non-fiction, though it read like a fiction book. “The Rent Collector” is fiction, but based on a documentary. So the books seem very related on the surface. In terms of writing style and intent, “The Rent Collector” felt a more saccharine story, along the lines of a Mitch Albom or Nicholas Sparks book. It felt more popular and American, for example the characters repeatedly say that they live in a “dump”. That seems too judgmental and American a word for these people to describe their homes. There were also observations, such as a passage about wearing Western t-shirts, that seemed like something an American writer would notice, but the characters wouldn’t have noticed. You could see “The Rent Collector” becoming a Hallmark movie. Bad things happen, but there is a little growth in the characters. It felt like a story, whereas BtBF felt like a lesson wrapped in a story, a good kind of sermon. This sounds over the top, but in perspective, reading BtBF changed me, while reading “The Rent Collector” provided me some entertainment.

Another aspect of this book that was interesting is the author’s back story. The author describes in an afterward how he came to write the book. His son created a documentary on people who lived in a dump in Cambodia. The author took stills from the documentary, which followed specific people around in the dump, and built his fictional story on these photos. He included a selection of the photos in the back of the book, with the character names and descriptions that he came up with. Talk about art imitating life. Given the real-world basis for the story, I feel I learned a little while reading a story of another culture.


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Review: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story of Dylan’s folk concert surprise. Wald opens with a tease of the event to be fully described later – Dylan rocking. The author then dives into the history behind the event, with extensive bios of Dylan and Pete Seeger, name dropping dozens of others in the folk firmament in the late 50s and early 60s. Wald covers the business aspects, including concert promoting, as well as the music aspects. I found the variety of perspectives really helped set the stage for what was to follow – the night at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Dylan broke the code and played rock and roll, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. In the frantic description of the concert, perhaps it was Dylan backing Butterfield. Nevertheless, things changed for Dylan and for folk music, as the prince moved on to conquer larger fields. I most enjoyed the stories of concert promoting, especially from the folk music collective, which isn’t a subject I’ve read a lot about. I also enjoyed a story I have read before, Dylan becoming Dylan. Here, there seems to be more direct quotes from sources including film. This has more of a feeling of immediacy than other Dylan-focused books I’ve read. I also enjoyed the descriptions of the focus of the book, the concert. There is a lot of back-stage intrigue, yet what exactly happened is not recorded. Wald weaves a narrative, explaining where he’s making conjectures and what he’s basing them on. This was nice work making a readable story of a confusing event where new paths in popular music were set.

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