THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE: A SINNER'S SEMESTER AT AMERICA'S HOLIEST UNIVERSITY by Kevin Roose ✰✰✰✰ 1/2

Generally, I do not read books that revolve around religious issues unless they are written by a member of that faith.  I have zero tolerance for faith bashing, no matter who the target may be.  As a member of a faith frequently under fire (I am a Mormon), my thought is that people develop many misunderstandings about my faith from reading writings of those outside it, and while some of them are amusing, the majority of the time they are very derogatory.  I hope people choose not to read those types of books on my faith, and in exchange I refuse to read books that injure the reputation of other churches.

After reading two excellent reviews of Kevin Roose’s book, which chronicles his experience as he becomes a sort of “foreign” exchange student on what he terms his “semester abroad”, I decided to add this book to my TBR, given that both reviewers mentioned how nonjudgemental and evenhanded his writing is.  Kevin was three semesters into his English degree at Brown University, a bastion of liberal thinking, when he decided that he wanted to embark on a bit of an ethnographic experiment and spend a semester at Liberty University, the school affiliated with Christian evangelical Jerry Falwell, a school at the polar opposite of his liberal upbringing and education.  He went into the experience knowing that he wanted to write a book about his semester.

Right from the beginning it is very apparent that Kevin is very willing to be open-minded, wholeheartedly engaging personally in all aspects of Liberty students’ religious and campus culture.  The book is very funny, without ever being derogatory; it easily passes my litmus test for that criteria.  It is readily apparent when the author disagrees with his classmates and professors on issues, but his handling is such that as a reader I never felt that he disparages people, just respectfully questions their beliefs as being different from his own.  A very tough road which time and again he handles with aplomb.

All aspects of life at an evangelical Christian university are covered.  The reader follows Kevin in all of his coursework; Liberty is a full curriculum liberal arts university, but Kevin chose to take all religious themed courses while he was there.  In addition, life in the dorm and the friendships he built there (some very close ones), extra-curricular activities, dating and sex, spring break in Daytona Beach (not the usual variety), church attendance, and other related topics are discussed.

Several factors make this book well worth a read, chief among them being how honest Kevin is about his own thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors and how he is affected by being immersed in a culture so foreign to his own.  In the end, because he is so open-minded, he produces a thought-provoking look at life on the other side of the liberal/conservative and faith divide.

My one warning about the book would be that it is not really appropriate for an audience younger than college age, as there are discussions about specific sex acts to which some parents might hesitate to expose younger children.

Overall, this is a very well-written, tightly edited look at a sensitive topic handled with candor, wit, and grace.  I definitely recommend this one for all adult readers.

ROOFTOPS OF TEHRAN by Mahbod Seraji ✰✰✰✰

As a westerner, when you think about the word “romantic”, the image of red roses might come into your mind, and you might smile and think of candlelight and proposals and happily ever after.  To a Persian, the word has a vastly different connotation.  Romance to Persian sensibilities is something which is worth giving your life for, something bigger than yourself.  That is what the rose stands for to the Persian.  And that is the premise around which Mahbod Seraji built his lovely debut Persian “romance” novel, Rooftops of Tehran.

Told in the first person, through the eyes of Pasha, a seventeen year old Iranian, the novel takes the reader into the heart of Tehran on the brink of revolution, as discontent against the Shah is roiling. The reader will meet the inhabitants of one neighborhood and feel how their simple lives are impacted when one of their own becomes a target of the feared and hated SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police.

A love story, the book explores the Persian cultural practices regarding courtship and marriage through several families interactions, but primarily in a love triangle involving Pasha and the girl he loves, Zari, and the man she has been engaged to since childhood, as well as in the relationship of another couple, Pasha’s best friend Ahmed and his girlfriend.

The greatest aspect of this novel, I think, is how much it has to teach about the beautiful Persian culture.  Whether the discussion is marriage, dealing with death, extended families living under the same roof (Including those just graduated teens that Persians think it so odd that we cast out when they need our guidance the most.), education, or medical practices, the reader will find ethnic lore woven seamlessly throughout the tale.  This book made me pull out my copy of Hafiz poetry and take a fahll, a delightful indulgence I haven’t done in a very long time.  Hafiz is a very famous Persian poet, and a fahll is a tradition in Iran and practiced by Persians everywhere, where you make a wish or ask a question and then open your copy of his poems, and whichever verse your eye lands on, that is the answer to your problem.

There are times when the writing in the novel, given that it is a debut novel, is a little rough (that is what cost it a fifth star from me), but the plotting is excellent, the characters are fairly sound, and the cultural aspects outstanding.  Overall, I definitely recommend this one, and would like to thank my reading friend Regina for her strong recommendation of this one for me.  You were right, Regina, this was a great book for me!  I am happy to report that although the author is currently working on something else, he does plan to write a sequel at some point in the future.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE by Dodie Smith ✰✰✰✰

Mr. Mortmain had it all.  He was the celebrated novelist who had written the thinking man’s novel, the innovative “it” novel that everyone wanted him to come and lecture about, even in America.  The problem is, that was more than a decade ago.  And he hasn’t written anything since.  And the writers block has driven him into hiding in a castle in the English countryside with his artist’s model wife, young son, an adopted young man, and two teenage daughters.  

Royalties have dried up and genteel poverty really isn’t so very genteel when you are a teenage girl.  Narrated through the eyes of Cassandra, the middle child and youngest daughter of the family, who aspires to be an author and keeps the book we are reading as a journal (although it doesn’t read as dated journal entries), we follow the sorry plight of the Mortmains as they struggle to put food on the table and inspire Dad to write again through whatever means, fair or foul, they can devise.

To further complicate their lives, their landlord dies; so enter their young (of course) and handsome (what else?) new property owner on the scene to inspect the premises and meet the tenants.  Cassandra’s sister, Rose, and step-mother, Topaz, are quickly hatching a plot to marry Rose off to the new landlord (Did anybody think to ask his opinion?) and solve all their financial woes in one fell swoop.  Romance (?) and hilarity ensue.  Never fear, there is romance for our own dear Cassandra as well.

This book has a plethora of plot twists and turns to keep the reader engaged and delighted, but the one element that I like the best is that the ending is not all tied up in a bow.  There are enough hints given that if a reader wants to make assumptions you can, but if you choose not to go that way, you do not have to.  I enjoy that aspect of the novel, that after crafting so many machinations in the plot Ms. Smith isn’t afraid to leave the ending just a tad bit nebulous.

After reading the book, I decided to watch the movie as I had heard that it was quite well done.  My feelings are mixed.  Much of the nudity and innuendo in the movie seem to me to be purely gratuitous and avoidable-unfortunately they took a humorous 1950s family read and twisted it into an R-rated 21st century movie.  That said, it is quite a decent rendering of the novel into film for an adult audience, albeit with a bit too much emphasis on the hormones for my taste, and for what I believe the novel really implied.  The acting, characterizations, costuming, etc., are all very fine, as one would expect from a BBC production.

This is a fleet, poignant, romp of a read that is appropriate for all ages middle school and up.  A wonderful modern classic that I definitely recommend.  As for the film, you might want to save that for the grown-ups in the household.

NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell ✰✰✰✰

With her novel North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell, a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens, attempted to take on many of the same themes that he addressed in his own novels.  However, if you have tried and found Dickens to be daunting, don’t let that put you off Gaskell.  I would class her work as something of a cross between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, although I found her prose somewhat easier to read than Austen’s, and I would call her social philosophizing “Dickens lite”.

The novel is set in 1850s England, originally in the south, both in London, where Margaret Hale was raised with her cousin Edith, and in the quiet country parsonage home of Margaret and her parents, where she returns to live after Edith’s marriage.  However, Margaret’s father comes to the decision that he can no longer in good conscience continue as a minister, and so he gives up his living and moves their family to the manufacturing town of Milton, in the north of England.  Here the reader is introduced to many new characters on both sides of a clearly written social divide, laborers and masters, as Margaret and her family struggle to adapt to the drastic changes in the viewpoints between the northerners and their own southern way of seeing things, and as the Hale family wrestles with trying to find their own social standing in this new society.  As the novel progresses bridges are built, between people of different classes, between men and women, and between a grieving man and his enemy’s children.

Character development was the absolute high point of this novel for me.  Characters who began proud and inflexible slowly evolved into something utterly changed, but in such a way that it was completely believable.  Other characters remained true to form, and yet that seemed right for them.  I felt that Gaskell picked her evolving characters well.  I also loved the plot: there was romance, a social message, a couple of legal entanglements, and a great deal of suffering (which was realistic for the era and place).  At the end of viewing the mini-series my kids were ticking off on their fingers all the characters who died, and ultimately they decided that given how many of them there were they could put up with the main characters at least getting to kiss in the end!  Kids not being into the “kissing parts” you know! :-)  Very generous of them.

What cost the book its fifth star was a very slow beginning-it took me almost a hundred pages to get into the story.  However, in the book’s defense, it might have been the mood I was in when I read the print version, because when I listened to the audio it did not strike me as being quite as tedious as my initial impression. 

In addition to reading this novel in print, I also purchased a copy of the audio book.  The Clare Wille narration had come recommended to me, but when I listened to a sample on Audible I found the sound quality to be very poor-rather tinny sounding.  Since there was another version available from one of my very favorite narrators, Juliet Stevenson, I unhesitatingly went with that one and can recommend it without reserve to all listeners.  Each voice was differentiated; Mrs. Thornton was given a wonderfully in character, lower tone; and the northern accents were spot on and distinctive among the classes.

I also highly recommend the BBC mini-series to all who have read Gaskell’s work.  Fine performances are turned in by Daniela Denby-Ashe (Margaret Hale), Sinead Cusack (Mrs. Thornton), and Brendan Coyle (Nicholas Higgins), but Richard Armitage does no less than breathe John Thornton to life out of the pages of the novel-an absolutely masterful performance.  

Whether you choose the print or audio, follow this one up with the mini-series; it does take some liberties, but the characters are very true to the novel, and it is just a wonderful way to round out your Gaskell experience.  Invite your family to join you-all of my kiddos watched the movie and enjoyed it.

HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson ✰✰✰✰

Ruth and Lucille experience a rather severe lack of parenting, losing first their father, who abandons them, then their mother, who after leaving them on their grandmother’s porch proceeds to drive off a cliff (no spoiler-this is on the back of the book).  Unfortunately for them, their situation doesn’t greatly improve.  Despite her love of them, the grandmother’s advanced age shortens her time in their lives and soon leaves them in the care of two aged great-aunts, who, feeling out of their league, and not the least interested in raising two young girls, track down, post-haste, the girls’ transient-living (for that read a nice way to say “hobo”) aunt and prevail upon her to return to her hometown and do her duty by her sister’s daughters.  Within a day of the aunt, Sylvie’s, return, the elderly aunts decamp, leaving the young girls abandoned to her less than exemplary, if willing, care.

Through beautiful prose Marilynne Robinson paints a picture of two sisters who come to see in their aunt a picture of who their mother might have been, and some of the demons that might have haunted her.  It is clear that Sylvie is mentally unstable, and the narrator of the tale, Ruthie, seems to feel and show some leanings in that direction as well.  As the story progresses, Lucille craves normalcy and strikes out on her own to find it, but Ruth loyally cleaves to family and the memories that surface for her of her own mother when she is with Sylvie.

There are so many gorgeous quotes in this book, but here are a couple examples:

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.  For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?”

“There is so little to remember of anyone-an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

This is a lovely work, laden with pathos; you watch these two young lives slowly spiral downward, and you ache for them.  I highly recommend reading it in one undisturbed sitting (it is a fairly short novel-a little over 200 pages), allowing the complete flow of the narrative to spin.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee ✰✰✰✰✰

This is my third time reading this outstanding modern classic. My first trip through was in my teens, and I was most taken with young narrator Scout’s first person account of her small town depression era life as a lawyer’s child in Alabama, as she weathers not only the spite of the members of the white community, but also the outright dangers, as her father takes on the defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman.  I enjoyed seeing how Scout and her brother were raised by an entire community of people, both black and white.

Later, I read the book as a young adult, and I saw more clearly the social issues which the book highlighted.  There was the obvious racial issue, of what would happen when a black man in the 1930’s found himself in a compromising situation with a white woman, and it was his word against hers, but many other issues struck me as well.  I noticed issues such as feminism beginning to take hold in characters such as Miss. Maudie in her independence and in Scout herself.

This read, being much older and a parent myself, the overriding theme for me was that of parenthood, and so I enjoyed following Atticus, who is the lawyer featured in the story and the father of the story’s narrator, and Calpurnia, who is the family’s black housekeeper and nanny to the children.  These two, through some truly harrowing experiences, show great wisdom.  Atticus often expresses doubt in his own decisions as a parent, but I for one think that he is spot on.

When I read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, I said that I felt that Jean Valjean was one of the most honorable men in all of literature.  I think that Atticus Finch is another.  In a time in America’s history when a white man could scarcely be found to speak behind a closed door in a black man’s defense, Atticus Finch dared to stand in a court of law and speak for a black man against a white man, revealing that man to be a liar and a fool.  When his community spit on him and his children and came at them with clenched fists, he and his children kept their heads up and their hands loose, and in so doing took the higher ground and set an example that startled and shamed and got the message across.

I won’t tell you, of course, the outcome of the court case.  For that you must read the book. You will most likely pick up this book for the social issues, but it is the characters that you will never forget.  This is not the book to reach for if you are wanting stunning prose or an original plot.  It is about character’s that you will dwell on and issues that will swill in your brain long after the book’s cover is closed.  

EXIT THE COLONEL by Ethan Chorin ✰✰✰✰

After my review of Tamim Ansary’s Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan (If you haven’t read it yet, you really, really must-it was my number two nonfiction book for 2012.), the publisher gave me the opportunity to review this work on Libya.  One would think that given the amount of media attention that Libya gets there would be a plethora of books on the subject, but as I began this book I realized that despite having read well in excess of a hundred books over the years on the Middle East and political Islam, a good history of Libya had slipped through the cracks of my reading list.

Ethan Chorin explained why.  Western journalists had always been rather thin on the ground in Libya during the Gaddafi regime, and therefore, modern histories of Libya are a very new literary phenomenon-literally since the fall of Gaddafi.  Chorin’s book, which came out in late October of 2012, and covers material he gathered as late as that summer, gives some of the most up-to-date information that readers can find in book form.

There are other books out there that will give you a more comprehensive history of Libya-that is not his intent.  Chorin does give some history-essentially what you need to know to understand how Gaddafi was able to maneuver himself into power from a cultural standpoint.  He does an excellent job explaining the duality of Libya as a country, the divisiveness that those of the eastern half and those of the western half have always felt towards one another, and the powerful effect that this has in her politics (not to mention her soccer matches-we are not talking friendly rivalries here!)

Obviously, politics plays a huge part in this book, and there is a massive cast of players; I would dearly love a roster at the front of the book listing them all.  That said, mine is a pre-publication manuscript, so it is possible that one was added at publication time.  A good deal of ink is spread detailing the role not only of Gaddafi, but also of his second eldest son, Saif al-Islam, who was believed by many to be the son whom Gaddafi most wanted to succeed him in power.  In addition, many power brokers on the Libyan, U.S., and European fronts are discussed.  If you don’t know about Gaddafi’s dealings with Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, this book will be rather enlightening for you.  Mr. Chorin briefly explains the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which inspired the Libyan rebellion that finally brought down Gaddafi after forty-two years in power.  He then goes on to cover about seven months after the fall of Gaddafi in October of 2011, and so the book includes the first faltering steps of the Transitional National Council. 

One area in which this book really shines is tracing Libya’s economic journey, both before Gaddafi, through his regime, and after.  Ethan Chorin has excellent sources, both inside Libya and outside, and he shows how Libya affects and is affected by global trade.  It is interesting to note that in Libya, unlike in Afghanistan and many other countries where the United States and her allies are involved in trying to assist in establishing democratic governments and stabilizing economies in the wake of civil unrest, we are dealing with a country that is well able to pay her own way, as Libya is very rich in natural resources and has the know-how and infrastructure in place to exploit them.

My one major quibble with this book, and the factor which kept it from earning a fifth star has to do with a writing and not a research element, which bothers me to no end, because I feel like it could have been solved so simply.  This book makes the most ridiculous overuse of acronyms I have ever encountered.  To the point that it renders the book almost unreadable.  I quite literally had to begin a crib sheet that I kept in the cover of my e-reader, because I could not remember them all.  These are not the acronyms that we all know, such as WMD for weapons of mass destruction-some of these were obscure acronyms for organizations that the average reader of this book is not going to have in their working vocabulary.  And the acronym was not just used several times within close proximity of each other; several chapters later an acronym might pop up again-one time out of the blue.  Without my crib sheet I would have been lost.  Seriously?  Would it really have been that difficult to type out the words?  It drove me crazy, and it was so unnecessary because simply typing out the unfamiliar names would not have been overly repetitive, as the list of acronyms was MASSIVE.  It almost felt like the author put in all the acronyms during his research process, as a form of short-hand, and then in the editing process everyone neglected to go in and write them out for the reader.  Or failing that, at least give the reader a list at the beginning of the book with all the acronyms and their interpretations.  So, reader, just be aware from the beginning, unless you have a prodigious memory for acronyms, I highly recommend making a list as you go along.  I must say, this is the oddest reason I have ever withheld a star from such an excellently researched and written book!  

On a more positive note-you needn’t take my word on the merits of this work-Professor Dirk Vandewalle, unarguably the most highly respected scholar regarding Libya, and a professor of government at Dartmouth, says of Chorin’s work, “Chorin's book will undoubtedly remain the best analytical work on Libya and its revolution for a very long time.”  Coincidentally, there is a first rate article written by Professor Vandewalle and published in the November/December 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, entitled “After Qaddafi: The Surprising Success of the New Libya”; it makes the perfect epilog to Ethan Chorin’s book.  On the advice of both Professor Vandewalle (you cannot get better than his, really!), and my own feelings from my reading, I recommend this one to serious readers of nonfiction political history.