Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh - a guest review by Lea Ann

***Periodically I will feature guest reviewers on this site - this is Lea Ann's second review.  You can read her first here.

Book:  Baker Towers

Author:  Jennifer Haigh

Grade:  C

Recommended To:  Blue Collar Fiction Fans


Baker Towers begins with the death of Stanley Novak and then follows the five Novak Children, George, Dorothy, Joyce, Sandy, and Lucy through almost three decades of events. The story takes place in Bakerton, a town built on the coal mining industry and founded by the Baker brothers - owners of twelve separate mines that employ almost the entire town.

I enjoyed reading about a small town and the unique life led by those who live in company houses, shop at the company store, and basically live and die by the company.

The main problem with Baker Towers is that Haigh seems to take on more than can be handled in a 330 page novel. She jumps through time and narrative point of view without grounding the reader. Within the first 50 pages the reader discovers that Lucy was born in 1942, but when George comes back into town driving his 1948 Cadillac, she is only four years old - this was an oversight that bothered me through the rest of the book. Although I never bothered to check on the math again, I was increasingly frustrated by the large chunks of time that were simply skipped over.

Haigh didn't spend enough time with a single character to make the reader engaged in their story. Just as I was interested in what was happening to the character of focus, the chapter abruptly ended, the time jumped anywhere from two to ten years, and I was seeing through the eyes of an entirely different Novak sibling. The jumps left some narrative themes or facts completely uncovered and baffling.

In the end I wasn't invested enough in any of the characters to really know what sort of development the characters made or to understand why they would have changed. The book either should have been much longer or simply tried to tell a smaller story.

Happy Reading!

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer - Guest Review by Jon

*** Periodically, I will feature guest reviewers on this blog.  This is a review of Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory” by Jon. The views expressed in this review are his own. ***

Book:   Where Men Win Glory

Author:  Jon Krakauer

Grade:  A

Recommended To:   Everyone 

I must admit at the beginning that I am not an avid reader. My ideal day does not include peace, quiet and a good book. However, “Where Men Win Glory,” impacted me in a way that I have not felt since reading books about the holocaust. 


Jon Krakauer’s portrayal of Pat Tillman evokes a series of emotions both good and bad. After reading the book, there is a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I cannot acknowledge the source of. 

All I knew of Tillman before the book was that he passed up a lucrative career to serve his country. In this book, Krakauer provides a fair portrayal of an American idol. I say idol because after reading the book Tillman is more than a hero, he is a man I wish I could emulate. Krakauer does not shy away from anything in his portrayal of Tillman and covers both his faults and his ideals. The book does not come off as a highly edited fluff piece about a war hero. Instead, it is a story about a man and the set of ideals that caused him to turn down millions of dollars and leave his wife to serve his country. 

As far as my criticism of the book, Krakauer spends a considerable portion of the book discussing the pitfalls of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the beginning of the book this helps to provide the landscape for the events that led to Tillman’s death.  But Krakauer does little to mask his distaste for how the war was conducted by the Bush Administration. By the end of the book this begins to distract the reader from the true hero, Pat Tillman.  

As a fair warning, there are large segments of the book that will make you mad. It would be impossible to make a movie about Tillman’s time at war because so many of the events that led to and resulted from Tillman’s death are beyond comprehension. But the one thing that is easily understandable is that Pat Tillman was a great man who deserved more than what he got. 

I hope that you will enjoy reading this book. I realize that an A is the highest honor possible on this blog and I believe that this book deserves it. If nothing else, I highly recommend that you check out the Wikipedia page on this American idol.  

Happy Reading, 

Jon

 

Guest Review by Lea Ann - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

*** Periodically, I will feature guest reviewers on this blog. This is the first and is a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road by a dear friend and fellow book club member Lea Ann. The views expressed in this review are her own and as I have not read The Road, I accept them as true. ***

Book: The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Grade: B +

Recommended To: Readers looking for a book that asks hard questions and gives no answers.

The Road is a critically acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. The story follows a father and son in a post-apocalyptic journey from the north to the south of what is presumably the United States, but it shouldn't be considered in the genres of science fiction or fantasy that tackle the same subject matter. There is no explanation as to how this world exactly came about, and the events in the novel do not take place directly after the apocalyptic event, but anywhere from 6-10 years later. The man and his son inhabit a world that is in the burning, burnt, or covered with ash. There are no plants, no animals and no sun.

It's haunting. But what beauty the scenery lacks is made up in McCarthy's mastery of language. "Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." McCarthy's ability to conjure emotion from language is startling and it was easy to feel what the characters were feeling, even though the world we inhabit is so different from theirs.

What I liked about the book were the questions that were posed by the man, through whose eyes we see the world. One question asked was: "Query: how does the never to be differ from what never was?" The book continues to ask that of the reader while McCarthy gives pieces of information with which the reader can build an answer. Where does hope come from - if it comes at all? Yes the book is depressing, but I think it's important to ask these questions and to have novels that challenge our understanding of the human condition. It's a deep book of dark times - and sometimes I just had to put it down, take a deep breath, and be thankful for all the wonderful things I have in my own life.

What I thought McCarthy may have done better was made the novel a little more accessible in places. The style it is written in works for the story, but it's not always consistent. It's hard to figure out who is speaking, the man or the boy, as neither are named in the novel and their dialogue is often short and rapid. Other times McCarthy got a little carried away with his language that made whole paragraphs sound nice but the meaning of the words were somewhat lost.

I gave the book a B+ only because I know the bleakness of the story will make the material unapproachable for some. The horrible things people do to each other in this world, and in the world the man and the boy inhabit are sometimes too much to accept.