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I had hoped to find a copy of this book or Book Lovers’ London before leaving for my trip to the capital city back in March. I wasn’t lucky enough to find a copy then, but I did find one for $1 last week at one of the indepdent bookstores downtown during my town’s Crazy Days sale. The novel discusses “Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West” as well as what the authors’ call “Journey Between the Pages” which examine particular cities through the eyes of the authors to live and wrote about them — Charles Dickens’ London, Victor Hugo’s Paris, James Joyce’s Dublin, and Franz Kafka’s Prague to name a few. It also talks about book fairs, which I know some book bloggers frequent, in the states and abroad.
I’ve really enjoyed spending the afternoon reading about some of my favorite authors’ haunts and homes. I only wish I had the book for my trip to London so I could have explored some of the lesser-known aspects of London, but I was glad to see that I had visited most of the major highlights (libraries and homes) listed in book. And I’m excited to use it while I back in New England for school this summer. A day in both Nathaneil Hawthorne’s Salem, Massachusetts and Louisa May Alcott’s Concord sounds like the perfect way to spend an afternoon.
Book Mentioned:
- Schmidt, Shannon McKenna and Joni Redon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington D.C.: National Georgraphic Society, 2008. Print. 358 pgs. ISBN: 9781426204548. Source: Purchased.
Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen is still surrounded by the literature she loves — but now it’s because she’s the owner of Flyleaf Books in a small town in Upstate New York. Every day she watches her novels fly off the shelves along with dozens of unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations that twist her novels’ meanings and provide her with no royalties. One such novel implores young girls to remain chaste and pure, like Jane, as they wait for their own Mr. Darcy, but the author is crass, rude to Jane, and only wrote the novel to make money. Her frustration grows, though, when the manuscript she started two hundred years ago is rejected for the 116th time.
I picked this novel up despite my reservations about paranormal Austen novels because the premise actually sounded quite funny; how would Austen react to the rewrites, sequels, and butchering of her six completed novels? I personally think it would be really interesting to hear what Jane herself thought of her books becoming their own genre within the literary world; would she not allow sequels to be written without permission like Margaret Mitchell’s family has done?
However, it eventually comes to light that the person who turned Jane into a vampire is Lord Byron, who is desperate to have a sexual relationship with her. Known for being quite the ladies’ man, Byron also turned several other British authoress, including Jane’s nemesis Charlotte Brontë. As Jane struggles to get her novel published, Byron and Charlotte rear their heads.
I started out enjoying this one as it was much of what I expected the novel to be about, but as soon as Bryon and Charlotte entered the scene it just became too much for me. Jane comes across as a frumpy, middle-aged woman who remain unaltered by the two centuries of change around her. She’s kind of boring. And I didn’t like how Charlotte is portrayed; she harbors a lot of ill will towards Jane for being such a famous author and comes across as caddy and mean. The premise originally written by Ford that sounded so interesting — how would Jane react to how exploit her name is to sell books — turns on its head as the author then proceeds to exploit her.
Others’ Thoughts:
Book Mentioned:
- Ford, Michael Thomas. Jane Bites Back. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Print. 300 pgs. ISBN: 9780345513656. Source: Library.
Although the book is subtitled “How One Dog Escaped the Shadowy World of American Puppy Mills”, this book deals with more than just Gracie’s rescue and rehabilitation from the Mike-Mar Kennel. It’s actually a pretty damning nonfiction book on the growth and conditions of puppy mills throughout the United States, particularly those in Pennsylvania and those run by Amish and Mennonites, centered around a shockingly large case of abuse and neglect in a single puppy mill where 300 plus bods were crammed into stack, metal cages.
The way the book is written — focusing on a larger issue in the frame of a single case — makes grappling with such a stomach-wrenching problem easier to understand. Switching from the case to an examination of federal and state (Pennsylvania) law flows easily and was particularly interesting to me and more intriguing than the chapters documenting the dogs’ struggles with house training, walks, and other mainstays of normal canine life. I finished this book with a sobering understanding of the hurdles facing those who wish to make real changes in the lives of breeding dogs.
Puppy mill operators have orchestrated an astonishing number of ways to weasel out of constraints and oversight and continue to make money from the suffering and mistreatment of bods. Sadly, powerful elements of the breeding world have rushed time and time again to puppy millers’ defense, particularly supports of the Amish and corporate pet store such as Petland, which was investigated by the Humane Society of the United States for supporting and selling puppy mill puppies. This book reaffirmed my decision to only rescue dogs from shelters rather than purchase them as puppies, and I can only hope people considering buying a puppy will read this book before they decide.
Book Mentioned:
- Bradley, Carol. Saving Gracie: How One Dog Escaped the Shadowy World of American Puppy Mills. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Print. 242 pgs. ISBN: 9780470447581. Source: Library.
This book came to my attention after seeing Nasr interviewed on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”; his perceptions of the necessity of a middle class in the Muslim world intrigued me and I wanted to read more about his ideas. Subtitled “The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World”, the book actually deals with much more than that as it traces the economic development of Dubai, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey as well as the rest of the Middle East within the context of colonialism, secularism (which Nasr calls Kemalism), and fundamentalism and American/British/European interference as well as the influence of Islam on the economic and political climate of the Middle East. His basic premise is fundamentalism, jihad, and terrorism will only end and democracy will only win after the West opens up trade and encourages the formation of a middle class in Islamic states.
“The prevailing narrative in the West tends to emphasize that the rights that we hold so fear — the right to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of association, and the rule of law — were established by the institution of democracy. Less attention is paid to the prerequisites of democracy, and the West has become too enamored of the notion that democracy will flower spontaneously once there are free and fair elections. This discounts the vital importance of fundamental changes in society, law, and the relations between states and their citizens that are necessary for democracy to succeed. Western history clearly shows that those fundamental changes follow on the evolution of commerce” (pg. 254).
Although the book begins with a discussion of Dubai, Nasr real focus is on Iran and the predicament he sees the country as in with it’s current form of government — clerical rule. According to Nasr, Iran wants to spread it’s influence across the region and realizes that the only way to do that is through commerce and free trade within the region. As long as Middle Eastern countries are dependent upon the country for goods, services, and the highly necessary electricity, Iran will be able to flex its political and religious muscle within those particular countries. The most concerning part, though, is not that Iran wants to spread its own form of Islam and government structure, but rather that the countries secular middle class is not interested in forcing the governments hand into democracy as they are worried about a repeat of the Islamic Revolution and would much rather live under an authoritarian government than an (even more) uber religious one.
“The plight of the Iranian middle-class intellectuals and artists, writers and academics, businessmen and civil servants after the Islamic Revolution made an enormous impression on their counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world. From Morocco to Malaysia, whatever the sins and failings of the state and its elite, the middle class perceived that it would be subjected to the same face without the state’s protection. The middle class would not be fooled again. All around the Middle East ever since, thought the secular middle class has engaged in plenty of criticism of government, and when the opportunity has presented itself, has often expressed support for democracy — even spearheading massive protests in Iran and Pakistan recently — they have generally shunned alliances with Islamic forces. When push comes to shove, the middle class has lined up behind authoritarian, secular leaders as against fundamentalists. This dependence has been expedient, but it has also meant that that the secular middle class has not, by and large, acted as a force for cultural, economic, and political liberalization. In the many battles between governments and fundamentalists that have raged in the region, the middle class has played a secondary role at best” (pg. 141).
Nasr makes the case that fundamentalism is a reaction to the secular autocrats of the early 20th century. Ataturk, Pahlavi, and the other rulers of Middle East accomplished a great deal by importing Western technology and political structures, but they believed progress came from the state, not the people. Their rigidity led to a backlash that we have been grappling with for thirty years. But Nasr doesn’t see Iran’s fear having much of a bases in the rest of the Islamic world because, according to him, fundamentalism is on its way out. Thanks in part to the rise in Islamic banking, which allows the most fervent of Muslims to participate in the global economy, the radical Islam practiced by Islamic terrorist organizations is no longer maintaining sway over the middle class.
“Khomeini’s radical breed of fundamentalism is by no means ascendant in the region today. The great promise of the new pious middle class that is rising to prominence in so many pockets of the region is that it has rejected such extremism and is practicing a new blending os Islam and capitalist believe in entrepreneurship and self-reliance, which can pave the way for liberalization, and for accommodation with the West. Those championing this blending for the most part seek ever more integration for the region’s national economies into the global capitalist system” (pg. 144).
His claims are interesting as well as the wealth of background information provided, although I did begin to lose focus during the second to last chapter which talked about Turkey. For the most part, the book is so well-written that I quickly forgot Nasr’s premise and just tried to absorb all the facts, but when all is said and done I do believe his premise does have some wait the United States and the rest of the world should take note of. It’s certainly much easier to make friends with trade than bombs.
Book Mentioned:
- Nasr, Vali. Forces of the Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. New York, NY: Free Press, 2009. Print. 308 pgs. ISBN: 9781416589686. Source: Library.
For the past sixty plus years, the Arab-Israeli conflict been one of the world’s longest and most deadliest conflicts that divides the world into the (seemingly easy to define) categories of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. Since reading Palestine by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, I’ve been on the lookout for a book on the conflict that is not decidedly pro-Israel or pro-Palestine and offers more information about the conflict than I can find in the newspaper. I believe I’ve finally found it.
Framed in the context of world history rather than Israeli history post-1948, this book offers a fair and balanced view of all countries involved and affected by this conflict — Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, the United States, Britain, etc. — that places appropriate blame on everyone. One of the most interesting aspects of the book for me was Bickerton’s use of “facts on the ground”, meaning the rush to find and develop tangible items that prove the rightful existence of one group over another. (I previously read about this phenomenon in Nina Burleigh’s Unholy Business.) Facts become twisted to serve the viewpoint of those involved in order to justify preemptive strikes, declarations of war, settlement building, and suicide bombings.
“Participants in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and partisan observers, believe that the more facts you know the greater your understanding of the conflict. This is a mistaken notion. Many participants in any conflict seek always to justify their position. One of the ways they do this by accumulating so-called facts, the more the better, they think. There is not nd to the number of facts that can be educed in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict — or any other conflict for that matter. It is ridiculous to think you can add up all the facts. Facts are no more than carefully selected events that are woven together to form a narrative that supports a particular viewpoint. Participants all too frequently find facts to confirm their predisposition. They seek to find who fires the first short –if you like, the shot heard around the world. They point is not who fired the first shot, the point is that a shot was fired at all. And that a second shot was fired in return. Once the parties take up a gun, this is, once they resort to military force, there is no moral high ground, it is just a question of who wins, if in fact there is such a thing as winning a war. After seven wars and sixty years of intermittent warfare, no one has won the Arab-Israeli conflict. It continues unresolved, and there are no winners. That is because shooting does not solve problems, it just creates new ones” (pg. 21).
Almost important to me as finding a book that’s fair with both sides of the conflict was finding one that is easy to read and follow along because this is such a difficult, touchy subject for everyone involved. This book is exactly that, and I think it has lain a great framework for conversations with friends active in Hillel at my university and those active in the Palestinian rights group as well as for my class on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East because the book provides a great wealth of information on all involved (especially the expanding role of the United States) without picking sides.
Book Mentioned:
- Bickerton, Ian J. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History. London: Reaktion, 2009. Print. 244 pgs. ISBN: 9781861895271. Source: Library.
