Atlantic Monthly Books

"Zoo Station" is important as a document of the young Left in the West in the 1980s, during a time when the United States was funding vicious wars in Central America and the Soviet Union was preparing to collapse. Since the Berlin Wall has fallen , few people have had much good to say about the governments of the former Eastern Bloc countries, and the media treats the continued existance of a strong communist movement in Eastern Germany as an anachronism. Having read "Zoo Station", I was able to understand why some people regarded East Germany as a pinnacle of socialist achievement, much more preferable to its capitalist twin in the West. It is good travel writing, and is both politically and culturally astute.

Walker's life among the Turkish residents of Kreuzberg in Berlin also has helped me understand the predicament of guestworkers in Germany, the country with the highest percentage of resident "foreigners" in Europe.

More than anything, "Zoo Station" highlights Walker's skill as a journalist, and it's a shame he never did publish that book on Nicaragua like he said he would.

I first visited Berlin over a quarter of a century ago when, like the author, I was a young man in my 20s. I have lived and studied there. I have crashed out in the tower blocks of the satellite suburbs and walked the sleazy inner-city streets at night. I think I know the place pretty well; Berliner friends tell me I probably know it better than some of the locals! The buzz about the place is alluring and irresistible. Berlin is a city I love dearly. I also think I've read most of whatever is worth reading about the place, in both English and German.

Why do I mention all of this? Simply to underline the sheer awfulness of this execrable piece of work.

Heavily influenced by 'On the Road', Walker Dean Moriarties his way through a Berlin populated by spongers, drop-outs and weirdos whose lives revolve around dope, booze and 70s soul. Trouble is, he ain't no Kerouac. Of course, part of the city's attraction - as it has been down through the ages - lies in its vibrant social mix. In many ways, the people ARE the city. But really, to read Walker, you'd think they spent half their lives lying in the gutter, stoned and wondering where the next handout was coming from.

Walker's book does a disservice to a great and wonderful city. There is no sense of balance or perspective about his work, the 'adventures' of the title become predictable and repetitive and the style suffers from a painful desire to show us all how ultra-hip he is.

This is one of those books that you keep reading simply because it's so bad. Like a rabbit transfixed by oncoming headlights, you can't tear yourself away. I wish I could have given it no stars.

Just read while visitng Berlin in 1997. Good historical background of divided city. I enjoyed his perspective of questioning both societies' institutions (he was in his 20's & lived with many other young people who partied & lived a hedonistic poor life in West Berlin.) Excellent background for a 1st time visitor to Berlin. I'd like to find more of author's writing but unable to.

Correcting a minor error in the previous review, there are only 5 of these delightful little books that belong back in print, possibly as a single volume (in order):
Nana, Luna, Diva, Lola(initially released as Rock) and Vida, the last and weakest, coming in the wake of the movie version of Diva which kept the basic plot but absolutely none of the spirit of the books.

I love the books and the movie, *but* they are two completely different animals. The books are, as described by Delacorta 'fairytales for adults' while the movie is an incredible journey in which Gorodish becomes the omnicient if not omnipotent mystical guardian of Alba (transformed into a Vietnamese orphan of all things) Jules and recording-shy opera star Cynthia.

Out of the 6 books Delacorta has written starring Serge Gorodish and Alba, this is one of the best. The first few chapters dont make a lot of sense if you havent read Vida, but at about chapter 4 you have trouble putting it down. The reason for Gorodish being sent to prison was hilarious, I thought. Its worth reading the book just for its ending, which Im not going to tell >=D You have to read it yourself.

I read this novel back in highschool. It was a delightful find amongst the various Dungeons and Dragons books and encyclopedias. The story telling style is unique. Burke's wordplay continues to amuse me, lyrical and somewhat similar to that of a beatnik poet. The characters are lively, and the plot so familiar and touching but at the same time saddening and eerily disconcerting. In the beginning it seems to be a story about a girl struggling to find herself in an era of pop star deaths, feminist movements, and political scandels. Burke weaves the herion into each of the time period's monstrous events, as she marches in protests, watches Marilyn Monroe sing to President JFK and has her little talk with Nixon. But as the story unfolds it reveals itself to be about more than the herion, but about a family altogether, each cultural event a metaphor about her life and really life in general. It's about her parents relationship, her relationship with her parents, and the death of the american dream.

When I finished this book, I was gripped with a stirring of passionate emotions and to this day am still spinning from the impression it made upon me. I will praise this book until the day I die, and gladly proclaim it one of my favorites. If you have a love of a good story that is out of the ordinary, I highly urge you to pick up this book and indulge.

Atomic Candy does a great job of placing the reader in the middle of many important cultural events in the post-WWII era but does nothing beyond that. The book disintegrates into a ho-hum story of a woman trying to find some purpose in life and concludes with a puzzling encounter with Richard Nixon. I finished reading this book on a trip and spent the entire ride back trying to figure out what exactly the point of the story was. I'm still scratching my head.

The reviewer below missed a lot-- the Fang Mulheisen books are one long story about a detective and the colorful people he works with and chases down. Don't read this one first: read and savor the first 8 books in the series. They are: The Die Hard, The Blind Pig, Grootka, Hit on the House, Dead Man, Dead Folks, Man With an Axe, and La Donna Detroit. (And his new Fang novel, No Man's Dog, is #10.) These are GREAT novels, full of perceptive writing and compelling characters. Get to know them and this book will enchant you. Don't, and you'll be like the reviewer below, clueless.

This is the first book I've read by Jon Jackson. I think there are other books with the same protagonists, and maybe if I'd read those first I would have liked this book better. I did not find the protagonists interesting at all. In fact, I found the villain--even though I think the author tried very hard to make him unlikeable--to be a more interesting and even occasionally compelling character. The plot had some trouble too...either I wasn't reading carefully enough, or there were some major unanswered questions about the motives of several characters. Last of all the author tended to use various names to refer to the same character (e.g. sometimes calling a person by his last name, sometimes his first, sometimes a title) and I thought this was a bit confusing since there are a lot of characters involved in the story.

To summarize...this book was entertaining enough to finish, but mostly I was glad when it ended so I could start another book.

Dunn studies the history of the word and the idea of democracy from its inception in Athens, suggests why it went dormant for 2000 years, then picks up the study again with the American revolution and the French Revolution.

But this isn't primarily a linguistic or historical exercise, but rather a study of democracy as a process ("democratization") and as a form of government ("capitalist republic"), and a study of how the word "democracy" has been co-opted and changed and why it still has power today.

Dunn seems democracy as a split (framed in philosophy by Sieyes and in practice by Robespierre during the French Revolution) between equality and "egoism" - Ayn-Randian capitalism, basically, is how I'd describe Dunn's use of the word. The American experiment resolved the dialectic (Marxism is dead as a form of government but not forgotten as a way of thought) in favor of egoism by accepting limits on equality, with controls on egoism as envisioned by Madison in Federalist No. 10. This framed the success (i.e. avoidance of Terror) of the American revolution, while taking the practice of democracy as a form of government another step removed from the original Athenian definition and practice.

This salvation and distress is the form in which democracy has conquered the world. Dunn restates and sometimes overstates the uniqueness of his question, but the study is a worthy one.

Sentence structure of this book is not so reader-friendly and plainly written for a reader like me. I picked up this book to work on my World History paper, and honestly benefited from what the author has to say in this book. I was able to grasp general idea and the author's passion for true "democracy" and quest for drawing its relevant definition. Yet, so many times I was not able to digest the contents well, not that I necessarily disagree with his ideas, but because of his "high brow" vocabs, and long-long sentences.

One error I caught : His interpretation of acronym "DPRK" (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) is misinterpretted as Democratic and Popular Republic of Korea.(p.143) This was somewhat disappoionting.

However overall, he tackled some deep and big questions that the term "democracy" has left us, and his effort is visible throughout the book.

Schweizer has certainly done extensive and compelling research into the murky world of economic espionage. He raises some red flags that should not be ignored. However this book stops near its publication date of the mid-1990s, and that makes its content "dated". Are we doing better today? If I have to read about it from another book by Schweizer, I will probably pass on it. I found the presentation more like a textbook than a "page-turner" -- instead of saying "I could hardly put it down, I find myself recalling that I could hardly pick it up -- sometimes reading only a single page in a day.

Still, if you are interested in the clinical history of our "friends" stealing us blind for technolgical information, and bid-jumping -- hey give it a shot!

One hundred billion dollars annually is one White House estimate of the cost to U.S. businesses imposed by economic espionage carried out predominantly by our allies-France, Israel, Germany, South Korea, and Japan being among the top culprits. Peter Schweizer was the first to really put this issue on the table, and he deserves a lot of credit. Neither Congress nor the Administration are yet prepared to take this issue seriously, and this is a grave mistake, for in the 21st Century information is the seed corn of prosperity, and our allies are eating our seed corn.

I knew Mr. Berkey many years ago. He did too many drugs. I have been waiting for his next book, but it hasn't come. I very much regret not buying as many copies as possible of the English edition for $2.99 when I had the chance. There is abundant hidden meaning in this tome. Don't be fooled by the book's apparent deficiencies.

I think this book was comprimised by it's lackluster, irrelevant ending. The first 386 pages were wonderfully rich. The main character, Richter Boudreau, was brilliantly inept. Following him around the underside of Tulsa was a great blend slapstick and mystery. The cast of characters were also very colorful, most notably Ronnie, with his commando-like persona. However, there are too many details and ideas that go undeveloped. Some are just unnecessary. Why does Boudreau have two jobs? Why mention his ambition to write a sceenplay? The latter I suspect was meant to pesent a commentary on racial prejudice in the south, but it's sadly never developed. After all this effort is spent developing the characters, the last 9 pages of the book bring the story to an unsatisfying, abrubt halt. I read the last chapter at least 5 times trying to figure out how it fit with what came before. I thought it was a very unbalanced ending (The movie version has a more satisfying, albeit trite, rewritten ending). This book should have been better.

This is a silly book, about a silly story, about what may even be, quite a silly country. Perhaps you should read it to find out why. Well done, Farley. Obviously not one of your best, yet it had to be written anyway, I suppose...

I am a long time fan of Farley Mowat's work and by chance managed to get my hands on this, one of his more obscure books, and one that I had been wanting to read for a long time.

It was a fairly quick read, I plopped myself down on the couch this evening and now only a few hours later, I've finished reading the book and done a few quick web searches to access curent imigration law.

The book itself was a fun read, threaded with the humor and wry comments that I've come to love about many of Mowat's books. More than that though it was an eye-opener and I found myself becoming increasingly angry (and concerned) about imigration law. Put simply Mowat was refused entry to the country in the mid 80's under the McCarran-Walter Act a fun little law (repealed in the 90's) that allows the INS to refuse entry to anyone on fairly shallow grounds. In this case Mowat seems to have been denied entry because of his conservation (tree-hugging) beliefs. So although the book was delightful, it gave me a definite chill as it produced definite worries about governmental regulations of freesom of speech. Especially when just a little research seemed to indicate that although this particular act was scrapped in the early 90's, there have been many attempts to bring back pieces of it, and my grasp of government as a foreign language is not good enough for me to fully comprehend current law as laid out the INS information websites.

Altogether worth both a read and some further inquiry. I'm now curious as to whether Mowat has since been granted leave to enter the usa.

Neversink is a beautiful book that borders on poetry. It is about a man who loves a river and fishing and finally buys a small piece of land with Neversink river frontage. It is about his many efforts to improve his fishing and river habitat on his property. And it is about Nature and man's relationship to it. I own fishing water and value the wisdom of this wonderful book and I have given it to many of my friends who, like Wright, try to improve their fishing waters. The basic lessons of this book apply to much more than rivers and fish. This book is a pleasure to read and think about, reread and think about some more. It is more in the genre of Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold than how to fish. I love the book and highly recommend it.

Leonard Wright's book is as boring as watching a tree grow. It was a suffering bore to get through this book. There are a few interesting tidbits about trout in general, but for the most part we are bored to death with the day to day details of Wright trying to manage a section of the Neversink. Never mind, that his wit is dry, pretentious, humorless, and just plain not good. You need life points for making it through this book. I have read about 30 books about fly fishing and fishing in general this year and I can say that this one was the hardest to finish.

The Truth: I'm a Girl, I'm Smart and I Know EverythingAs a positive psychologist and the author of four books for women and girls, the latest is a quick fiction read,designed to build self-esteem, The Truth (I'm a girl, I'm smart and I know everything), I am always eager to see how women are portrayed and what lessons we can learn from a story in terms of female development. Yes, I am addicted to the series, Sex and the City. I never saw it when it ran, but now can hardly fall asleep without a rerun. Give me any of the girls and I'm happy. Give me all four together, chatting over lunch or breakfast, and I'm even happier. As a psychologist I see the brillance of the series tied into the intimacy that the women achieve with each other. It is this intimacy that helps them through love disappointments, career mistakes, loss of family, etc. However, although I enjoyed the book very much, I missed this level of female closeness in the book. I was surprised and fascinated at the same time. The characters I could see being birthed in the book, but the community they created with each other I guess had to wait until the book was rewritten into a screen play. I wonder if Candane Bushnell was pleased with the next step into the closeness that women can achieve with each other that the series and the movies has taken on.

In terms of my work with girls and women, it is this closeness that is so important developmentally. We need the time of endless dialogue and anaylsis that Carrie, Charlotte, and all had day after day. Men don't need it, but we do.

Still, Sex and the City is a great read. I recommend it and you will, like myself, be intrigued to see how the four women came into being. You will laugh and be dismayed and it won't change one way or another your eagerness for the next re-run of Sex and the City. At least it didn't change my late night run to the television!

Okay, so I bought the book because I'm a fan of the show, and the movie was fun, if not as sexy and smart as the series. I just found this book really boring - it seemed as though Bushnell couldn't really be bothered writing it... maybe that was to convey the superficiality and heartlessness of the people, but how can you care about people like that?
Give me the show over this any day - in the end it was the friendships between Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha that gave it its zsa zsa zsou - and the superb acting.
Some chapters are insightful but overall, it's bland. I'm just glad that it spawned the series though!

I have to admit when I first got the book I expected something similar to the series. Even though this was not the case, I was not dissapointed. A lot of the stories made me laugh out loud to myself. I saw truths in the stories. This book and the series makes one enjoy being a girl!

I'm an absolute Sex and the City nut. Been addicted to the show for years. Happy to finaly have the book it all come from.

Beware!! This is not a novel!! If you want an engrossing read and you want the girls from sex and the city, do not let this fool you. This book is more of an essay. Paragraph after paragraph of what appears to be the newspaper column maybe. Not novel format at all. I was real disapointed because I enjoyed Lipstick Jungle and Trading Up and Four Blondes. This book is nothing like them.