a tragedy that dribbled away to inconsequence
353750
Dubus came up with an unusual and intriguing premise for his novel: A bureaucratic error over the ownership of a house in down-market (!) San Francisco that leads to its being contested by two protagonists. The house's newest "owner" is a dignity-hewing, appearance-maintaining former colonel in the  Shah of Iran's (since deposed) air force groping for the first rung on the ladder of the American dream. His place in the narrative is enriched by his Persian family relationships: his wife Nadi and 14 year-old Americanized son Ismail.

The colonel is pitted against the real owner of the house, Kathy Nicolo, mistakenly evicted by the county from the home she inherited from her father. She has addiction issues, lacks moorings, and is the sort of unrealistic blue-collar girl that unerringly picks sexy but unintelligent and irresponsible guys who leave.

Well and good - a conflict set up between a disciplined patriarchal ex-military man with a bruised sense of honor in his Persian-American community, and an undisciplined, depressed "heroine" floundering in isolation and inaction.

In a real literary tragedy, the house in dispute would become the third character, serving as a metaphor that balances and defines the relationship between the colonel and Kathy. In other words, the house would hold the protagonists in artistic tension, like the great white whale in Moby Dick, or the boat in John Casey's award-winning Spartina of 1989.

But Dubus never goes there and the house becomes just a place where the conflict deteriorates, devolving into a distracting, manipulative melodrama. Instead of a house potent with symbolic meaning, the reader instead gets, er ......... officer Lester Burden, he of the crooked mustache and sudden penchant for rescuing lost loser ladies.  Literary troikas, where three characters are harnessed together by adroit plot making, can have narrative complexity and drive as its characters interweave in the story --  but first, the author needs to know something about his horses and harnesses, and second, should never saddle a protagonist with a moniker like Lester.

And it's not just the unfortunate name. This character -- a trainer of new police recruits who  look up to him, makes some unbelievably bad judgement calls, causing the irreversible loss of his career and family. When Lester numbly concludes in his jail cell that his police career is over, this reader laughed out loud:  no s__t, sherlock!  After an exasperating, melodramatic showdown at the courthouse between Lester, the colonel and Ismail, and which goes terribly wrong, the rest of the book sputters along in a protracted anti-climax for several more pages. All of the tragic elements have drained away and Dubus's tale ends pointlessly.

I listened to the audio version. Dubus provides the male voices and does a decent job. His wife assumes the character of Kathy Nicolo but struggles to realize the hapless character created by her husband. I suspect the film was much better.
819856
On March 25, 2011, the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire will be observed. It was the 9/11 of its time and ignited reforms in working conditions and union representation. While this book is lyrically written, it has a number of discordant notes. At times it reads almost like two small books pasted together: one dealing with fire survivor Esther Gottesfeld's experiences and the other of her granddaughter Rebecca and her future husband composer George Botkin. What left me cold was the portrayal of a researcher, Ruth Zion, as a repelling, cartoonish, self-absorbed woman. As she attempts to find out whether there were children in the building on the day of the fire, Rebecca and George fight her at every step. The story creates tension between an individual's right to privacy and the value of full revelation of the facts about a major tragedy. Weber's plot suggests she believes that some facts are better hidden than revealed.
2309422
It's a shame that A Noble Radiance is cast as a mystery.  Take the need to solve the mystery out, and this would be an above-average novel about contemporary families in Venice.

Ms. Leon takes a long time to set up the mystery.  Then, she has the investigation proceed very slowly as well.  That would be fine if the resolution was interesting, unexpected, and credible.  But to me, the resolution was nonsense:  It just didn't ring true.

With much of the story taking place outside of Venice, there's not as much of the local color as usual. The best parts of the story relate to Guido Brunetti's father-in-law warning him about Guido's marriage to Paola, eating Chira's first dinner she's cooked for the family, and exploring Signorina Elletra's seemingly contradictory morals about getting secret information and making public investments.

Here's the set-up:  A house and garden have fallen into ruin because the heirs are squabbling until a German buys the place for a huge sum and starts fixing it up.  While the garden is being tilled, a bone sticks up that turns out to be human.  As the police dig around, they also find a ring with the crest of a noble Venetian family, the Lorenzoni family, best known in recent times for having sold out the location of Venice's Jews to the SS during World War II.  The family's son had been kidnapped two years earlier, and he was never found.  When the autopsy shows a bullet hole in the skull of a young man, Commissario Guido Brunetti looks for a dental match.  Finding one, he now has reason to dig into the kidnapping, looking for murderers.

The Lorenzonis have taken on their lost son's cousin as their heir.  Was he involved?  Why else had a motive?

As you finish this book, think about what the purpose of a family should be.
220527
It's not done with alot of enthusiasm.  The actors are not believable. I only watched 15 mins and was done. I have read a couple books on this  tragedy and it just not what I expected.
3106825
Kristina Ohlsson's "The Chosen," translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy, focuses on a series of murders in Stockholm.  The victims are members of the Solomon Community, a close-knit group of Jews who settled in Sweden hoping to live peaceful lives.  The detectives assigned to the investigation, DCI Alex Recht and Frericka Bergman, are stymied by the stubborn silence of witnesses who know more than they are willing to reveal.

Some of the action takes place in Israel, since events on a kibbutz and in the West Bank will come back to haunt some of the central characters.  The author engages in a game of hide-and-seek, providing quick glimpses into a dark past and foreshadowing even more horrors to come. The complicated plot, although suspenseful and puzzling, has too many sensational and implausible elements.  The motive for the murders makes little sense; the relationships resemble those in a daytime soap opera and require a scorecard to follow; and the police are so clueless that they are little more than bewildered bystanders.

The wintry landscape of Stockholm is an evocative setting for a story with many distressing elements, including sadistic predators, merciless vendettas, secrets, lies, and cover-ups orchestrated by cold-hearted government officials. All of this culminates in an over-the-top conclusion.  Although the narrative moves along briskly enough and we are eager to discover who did what to whom and why, the books is repetitious, dour, and disheartening.  The central theme is that there can be no tranquility in a world where enraged individuals engage in a vicious cycle of violence and retaliation.
1827973
I found the premise of this movie compelling but its execution was largely unsatisfying.  My biggest criticism was not the family dysfunction or petty squabbling, the shaky-cam (distracting and annoying), or even Anne Hathaway's behaving as a whiny, self-involved child demanding that the world revolve around her. It was the fact that the *real* story--of blame and the refusal to forgive, either oneself or another--was barely touched upon.  The bulk of the movie was spent on non-dramatic wedding festivities that did nothing to move the plot forward and was an unfortunate waste of screen time. (A wedding--like the birth of a child--is only thrilling to those directly involved.)

The film's finest moments occur during the scene directly after the rehearsal dinner--at which Kym makes an unconvincing and insipid public amends to her sister--when the real drama begins: the heated discussion exposing the worm at the rotten core that no one has been able to face.  The incendiary confrontation between Kym and her mom says it all, and the fact that it takes place this far into the movie points up to what this story could have been: a melancholy disquisition on the catastrophic chain of events set into motion by a family's tragic flaw: in this case, a mother's inability to love unconditionally, and more perhaps more disheartening, her refusal to forgive.  For those who might accuse me of reading something into this that wasn't meant, I found it interesting and highly significant that the wedding takes place at the father's house where the entire party is housed.  The mother comes late and leaves early to the arguably most important occasion of her daughter's life.  In every scene she appears like a cold, distant cousin rather than the mother of the bride.  And her treatment of Kym at the end of the wedding--as if she couldn't wait to get away from an offensive acquaintance who strained the limits of her civility--was the most devastating scene in the entire film.  It left me wondering who the real malevolent force was in this whole tragedy.

If Kym's initial behavior is childishly insufferable, her redemption comes when she implores her mother to tell her why, when she knew her daughter was a seriously disturbed drug addict, she would leave her 6-year-old son in her care.  Her mother's shocking and incriminating reply, and the terrify event that follows is the first sign that Kym is closer to understanding the bitter but liberating truth about life which is where the true heart of this movie beats: that we cannot make someone else forgive or love us, but we can forgive and love ourselves.
2308121
I have always been interested in the subway in Boston, the first in the nation, and so this book was something I actually snapped up eagerly. And the book didn't disappoint at first. It was filled with the history, the people, the technology, the scientists. But it fails on many, many levels. There is no sense of perspective presented. The period in question was one of the greatest upheavals in US history yet no sense of the subway's place in history is provided. In Boston, the biggest engineering project in America is underway - the filling of the Back Bay, yet it is never mentioned once. Medical history is being made with the discovery of germ theory and antisepsis: no mention. In New York the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge are given passing notice. The assassination of a US President and the shooting of another is a footnote. The economic collapse of America and the personalities involved is mentioned over and over with no details as if it were some kind of secret. In addition, much of the book reads like a bunch of newspaper articles strung together as opposed to actual narrative. Where was the editor? On vacation? This is a book that is in dire need of continuity editing. For various reasons, the book jumps back and forth, sometimes decades at a time. If you miss the passing reference to the dates, you lose alot of context and it becomes confusing. Also, although the author takes great pains to separate the characters, many of whom have the same name, he does not succeed as well as he might have simply by repeating "In Boston..." or "In New York...". It makes following the story sometimes confusing. When he does get to the climax of the stories, the running of the trains, the writing is good, sharp and interesting, but the passages where this happens are rare. The book is generally good, but it can be tedious. It starts out sharp and fast, declines in the middle and picks up in the end, and while the author makes a weak attempt to provide some info about what happens to the major players after the subways are complete, he botches that job miserably. Also, the author misses no opportunity to plug the "Boston Globe" because he worked there, but he never mentions that the "Globe" was the advertising arm of Jordan Marsh department store and that it was considered the worst rag in the city for a long, long time. He gives it a credibility it does not deserve for the period. The book is pretty good all things considered, but for people who know a little about the period and the players, it's seriously flawed.
2282211
I ordered The Big Crowd as someone from Ireland living in New York. I figured it would be a surefire hit with me. The character of Charlie O'Kane, based loosely on the real-life of New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer, and his brother here in New York seemed that they would be nuanced and intriguing.  Unfortunately, the 411 page book proved too jumbled and full of truly, too many characters and too much time-shifting. Tom O'Kane, Charlie's younger brother (young enough to be his son) is the better read of the two and keeps your interest as he investigates the death of a police informant and finds out things about his brother we see coming early on. He also is part of a romantic entanglements with Slim and his brother and with himself and Slim and Ellie.  However, since the Charlie O'Kane character is clearly a weak man with power early on in the reading, you feel you know where the whole thing is headed and then when it finally gets there, the ending is disappointing and anti-climatic.  I wish I had read a historical non-fiction piece about that time period instead.
842214
I was disappointed in this book, especially after having enjoyed Isaac's Storm.  I can not help but think it could have been and should have been better.
The book follows two and a half themes - the building of the Chicago's great fair, the Columbus Exposition, a serial murderer named (alias) Holmes and the half theme, another murderer named Pendergrast.
Although the Pendergrast theme is the least of the three (only about 25 pages devoted to it) it was the most gripping.
Larsen's account of the fair itself is, as one might expect, extremely well-researched.  However, the telling is filled with redundancies.  There were probably as many pages devoted to the landscape artist Olmstead's physical maladies as there were to Pendergrast's madness.  By the end of this book, you will surely know he suffered from insomnia, toothache, etc.  Mr. Larsen must tell it six or eight times.  More space was devoted to building delays and weather induced problems than in descriptions of what actually was built.  Since there are a dirth of photos of the architectural wonders Larsen wants the reader to appreciate, this was a short-coming.  The book devotes more to the problems of building than the end result.
The story of Holmes' murders never grips the reader as it should.  Possibly because there are few firm facts.  Mr. Larsen acknowledges this in his Notes and Sources at the end of the book.  Holmes is an interesting story unto himself and Larsen does well to try and weave him into the fair story.  Unfortunately, due to the lack of hard facts, the story of the killer never raises the tension as one might think.
Mr. Larsen's emphases just seemed to be misplaced making what could have been a riveting read a somewhat tediously plodding one.
1728016
This book could have been shortened some, and I wouldn't have had to scan past so many paragraghs.

Overall it's a pretty depressing read, and many of the twists leave the reader baffled.  There were things that never seemed to come to a resolution too, or maybe I missed something in all my skimming.

The change in story teller took some getting used to, but it added an intersting element, albeit sometimes confusing.

This had a bit of a historical element, which I always appreciate.  I felt like the story left a lot to be desired.
3337915
I have a bit of a soft spot for mysteries and thrillers set in the years before, during, and after World War II, and this 1949 London-set book ticked all the boxes. The problem is that tries to tick far too many other boxes too, resulting in a herky-jerky, overstuffed and overpopulated story. The author clearly read and absorbed a lot about the cultural history of austerity-era Britain, but struggled with finding the right balance between injecting period detail and getting lost in a sea of possibilities.

Regine "Reggie" Milner is a 34-year-old red-haired beauty, who left her wild young years and first husband behind in wartime Shanghai, and is now married to a respectable art historian at the British Museum. The highlight of her life seems to be the Sunday afternoon salons she hosts in her Hampstead house. One frequent guest is her old friend Freddie, a gossipy homosexual photographer connected to the London ballet scene. When he turns up murdered on Hampstead Heath the night after one of her gatherings, the police are soon along to start poking into the secrets of both Reggie and her guests.

All of which sounds fine, except that there are far too many guests, with far too many secrets, and everyone is either trying to seduce one another, or hates one another. One major subplot involves Reggie's secret past, another involves the remnants of Oswald Mosley's fascist movement, then there's a missing necklace, all kinds of blackmail, compromising photos, an Irish nationalist, a cabinet minister, a missing will, a detective with a crush on Reggie, and even a lame Venetian epilogue set some 20 years later. It's just too many people and too much crammed into too small a space.

The book would have been vastly improved by stripping away a lot of more lurid aspects and potboiler background, so that the mood and tone of a slowly recovering London could have come through.
2227574
Lovely Bones is a long convoluted story of "I was murdered".  The movie deals with the atrocity and aftermath of it all.  It shows the family slowly crumble and wither.

Clocking in over two hours, Lovely Bones could have dropped 30 minutes more to the editors and cutting room floor in order to keep the viewer from losing both patience and interest.

Stanley Tucci's make up looks like one of Bruce Willis' characters in&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Jackal/dp/B001VM0LAK/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Jackal</a>, or, as I also saw Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Pink-Panther/dp/B001H1UQDW/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Pink Panther</a>. Tucci does an awesome job conveying the calm and portraying George Harvey, the murderer of at least 10 girls and young women in the Northeast during a 10 year period.

Only his need to have to keep a souvenir of his victims does Harvey leave a trail in which victim Susie Salmon, "Like the fish," younger sister Lindsey expose the truth.
1252070
What She Left Behind is a story that centers round two young woman who face enormous difficulties, one is 17-year-old Izzy and the other is 17-year-old Clara who lived in the same community back in 1929.  Izzy discovers Clara's diary while helping her foster mother go through some patient personal belongings from an old closed down mental asylum.  Izzy is fascinated by Clara's story, and feels somehow connected to the tragic young woman.

While I found the story interesting to read, there were so many tragedies and horrible people through out the story that as a reader it became overwhelming.  As Izzy faces the school bully, a vicious girl named Shannon, Clara argues with her father and is sent to a mental hospital.  The cruelty that they both face is overwhelming, and things continue to go from bad to worse for the two.  There were some good moments, but many of the characters felt one-dimensional.  We learn very little about Claras father and why he wanted his daughter locked away.  The author uses incest in a trite and stereotypical way, making the whole story less believable.  I was frustrated with the ending.  While the author tried to offer a somewhat happy resolution, it fell flat and the reader can't help but feel disappointed at the tragic waste of lives that occurred.

Despite its many flaws, I did like the premise of this book and enjoyed reading it.  While it was not one of the best Ive read, I would recommend this book.
1253262
Rick Rescorla's heroism in Vietnam and on 9/11 were remarkable and those sections of the book are memorable and moving.

Sadly, perhaps in exchange for Mrs. Rescorla's cooperation, a very large portion of the book is about her--I am sure she is a wonderful woman, but jumping from her husband in Vietnam to her having a romance as a college girl on vacation was jarring.

In addition, Stewart--oddly for a Pulitzer Prize winner--accepts the wild stories from Rescorla's friend as fact, when many sound like barroom BS.

The key incidents in Vietnam are also rushed through.  Skim through the dreck and you will find some compelling reading--this was originally a very moving New Yorker article--what a shame this normally fine author added so much mediocre padding.
3605147
Really?  The story is about a school reunion years after a mass shooting.  The storyline works, but I felt like so much of the story was missing.  This is not how a reunion is put together as it takes a lot more effort.  These people come together as a reunion committee and immediately have the reunion?  No one else shows up except the whole town?  And no one else in the town is a victim, except . . . .

The book would have been a better read had the story been assembled more realistically.  The book, like most movies, skips over inconsistencies in order to get to the desired conclusion.  The author is a good writer, but needs to develop the story-lines better.
269331
Feeling that I was in far a gripping read, given the book's plot-plan, settings and character dynamics, I'm sad to report that a failure, in my view, for the opening two pages to convey the fear, drama and tension of the slaying of a family was a serious handicap to further enjoyment. Whenever I read passages of such horrific or extraordinary happenings, I want to feel that I'm there - like the parrot on Long John Silver's shoulder - seeing and feeling the emotion of both assailant and victim. And I was as puzzled as the killer by the happily-families sticker on the minivan; even after a re-read I'm not quite sure of the intended message and its impact on the wicked man. Agreeable prose will not be enough to sustain my reading after this disappointing start, I regret to conclude.
1566787
The trouble with Someone to Watch Over Me is predictability. The event which is the starting point for the story is profound and tragic, but the story pretty much shys away from this thereafter - we are transported in time to a point where the aftermath is history and everyone has moved on with their lives. The concept were the victim of the previous tragedy is seemingly intervening to save another young victim from different circumstances just didn't grip me, it was told in a pedestrian way and the mix of improbable ghost story with a group of characters who had little to recommend them had very little going for it - afraid to say I was counting the Kindle percentage bar to get to the end.