Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family, by Glenn Plaskin--A Review

Hachette Book Group/Center Street, ISBN 9781599953854, September 2010

In 1988, Glenn Plaskin bought a twelve-week-old cocker spaniel puppy, and named her Katie. As a first-time dog owner, he hardly knew where to begin, but a mutual friend introduced him to his neighbors down the hall in his Battery Park City apartment building, Pearl and Arthur. This older couple were life-long dog owners, and their last dog, a cocker spaniel named Brandy, had died two years earlier. Unprepared to get a new dog at this late stage of their lives, Pearl in particular is more than willing to help Glenn learn how to be a dog owner, and provide dog-sitting services.

It's not long before Glenn, Pearl, Arthur, and Katie start to build a bond a good deal closer than friendly neighbors. Arthur and Pearl were never able to have children, and Glenn's family, while close emotionally, is not close geographically. Pearl becomes another grandmother for Glenn, and a vital part of Katie's life, since she can't (usually!) accompany him to the office. Katie is a pampered darling, but a sweet, cooperative dog as well, and the fun grows when, as an indirect result of Glenn's work as a newspaper columnist, Katie starts to get modeling jobs.

And then Glenn's life runs full speed into a brick wall. The paper he works for is sold, and he's among the many let go. With all the other newspaper people on the job market at the same time, he's not having any success finding a new job. While he's still looking, his long-standing back trouble worsens dramatically, leaving him too disabled to work. He's getting physical therapy and attending a support group at a local community center--and Katie, accompanying him to the center, expands his family once again. She starts playing with six-year-old Ryan, and Glenn forms a friendship with Ryan's single dad, John. Coincidentally, John wants to move to someplace that will give him a less stressful and demanding commute, and an apartment becomes available in Glenn's building, on the same hall. Pearl becomes a friend and confidant to John and a grandmother to Ryan, and the three households bind together. They're in and out of each other's apartments, having "family" dinners together on a regular basis, and celebrating birthdays together. When Glenn is recovered enough to work again, he gets a job with Family Circle, and one of his feature articles is "Grandma Down the Hall," about the family they've created together.

It isn't all high spirits and fun. They're in the residential building closest to the Twin Towers. They live through the terror of realizing what's happened, fleeing the expanding debris cloud, and slowly rebuilding their lives and waiting out the time until they can return to their apartments. Also, Pearl and Arthur are in their late seventies when we meet them, and Katie is a dog, so in one sense the ending is no surprise. Glenn Plaskin makes Katie and his human neighbors come alive on the page, though, and while the ending is natural and inevitable, it's also deeply moving. Honestly, I cried through most of the last two chapters.

This is not a depressing book, though. It's warm and engaging and hopeful, and a must-read whether or not you're a "dog person."

Highly recommended.

I bought this book in ebook format.

From Fearful to Confident--A Little Dog's Progress

A little over four years ago, I adopted a powderpuff Chinese Crested named Addy, who came from a great breeder, but then spent nine months in a home that, for her, wasn't ideal. It didn't give her the continuing socialization and training she needed; at less than fifteen pounds and with a sweet personality, within her own home it wasn't clear that training was needed. Then her owner's circumstances and needs changed, and she was returned to her breeder. It quickly became apparent that she was terrified of any dog that wasn't a Chinese Crested, and of most things that she'd encounter outside of the house or a fenced suburban back yard.

Two Moon Princess, by Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban--A Review

Tanglewood, ISBN 9781933718279, April 2010

I'm sorry to say that I was very disappointed in this book. The biggest problem is Princess Andrea herself. She's immature, self-absorbed, impulsive, and generally out of control. Initially this seems plausible for her age, since we're told that she's fourteen. However, it turns out that the year in her world is longer than ours, and in our years, she's seventeen. This does make the discussion of her admirers or lack thereof considerably less creepy, but even though seventeen-year-olds still have a fair bit of maturing to do, most of them are a great deal more mature than Andrea.

Andrea is the youngest of the four daughters of a king, Don Andres, and his queen Jimena. She's also the misfit, the tomboy, who wants to be a knight instead of a court lady. She's been indulged so far, training with the pages hoping to become squires to her father's knights, but with her fourteenth birthday, she is required to put away childish things and learn to be a lady. Unfortunately, she has so far failed to learn even some of the basics of court protocol, and already without any friends amongst the court ladies except the next-youngest princess, Margarida, she manages to actively offend people without intending to. She hopes for some support from her uncle, Tio Ramiro, her mother's brother, but even he thinks it's time for her to grow up. We do learn the interesting detail that no one really knows where Ramiro's castle is--and this of course is the key to much of the story.

The Atomic Weight of Secrets, or, The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black: The Young Inventors' Guild, Book One, by Eden Unger Bowditch--Review

Bancroft Press, ISBN 97816160880022, March 2011

It's 1903, and five children suddenly find themselves and their parents whisked away from their homes all over the world, to Dayton, Ohio, by mysterious men dressed entirely in black. The children are then separated from their parents, and brought together as the only students of Miss Brett, at Sole Manner Farm.

The children's parents are brilliant scientists, and the children themselves--Faye, Jasper, Lucy, Noah, and Wallace--are also budding young brilliant scientists. Miss Brett is startled to discover that she has nothing to teach them in the realm of science and mathematics, and equally startled to discover that they have never encountered stories, rhymes, songs, any form of literature. (Or cooking, either; Faye, for instance, has never seen eggs in their uncooked form.) They abandon the intended lesson plan, and the children expand Miss Brett's knowledge of science, while she introduces them to literature and cooking.

Meanwhile, the children worry about the absence of their parents and the lack of any word from them, and about the fact that the Men in Black are patrolling around the farm, ensuring that they cannot escape. But these are not your ordinary scared children. They act out their fear by trying to investigate the Men in Black, and invent the means to escape from the farm, and find and rescue their parents. In the process, these children who have never had good school experiences because they knew even more than their teachers, who have never had encounters that didn't end badly because they are accustomed to always being the smartest, have to learn how to work together as a team. The mechanical genius, the chemistry genius, the photographic memory, the budding young draftsman who can make "sketches" that are good working blueprints, all need to learn mutual respect and trust, and pool those talents.

They also need to take in a good deal of conflicting and confusing evidence, and figure out who in the adult world are their friends, and who are their enemies.

In addition to some definite science-fictional elements, there's also a strong element of secret history here, and saying more than that would reveal some critical plot elements far too soon.

This is a good, solid, young adult science fiction novel, probably accessible to readers somewhat below the intended age range. It is the first of a series, but does come to a reasonably satisfying interim conclusion.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Doc: A Novel, by Mary Doria Russell--Review

Random House, ISBN 9781400068043, May 2011

This novel is a rather different look at the life of John Henry "Doc" Holliday, famous (or infamous) friend and ally of the famous (or infamous) Earp brothers. The shootout at the OK Corral is epilogue, not centerpiece. After telling the tale of Holliday's upbringing in Georgia and his education as a dentist on the recommendation of his doctor uncle, who felt that medicine was becoming the realm of quackery while dentistry was becoming ever more scientific, the book focuses on what is presented as his one happy summer as an adult: the summer he met the Earp brothers in Dodge City, Kansas.

The new-minted dentist John Henry Holliday begins a promising young practice in Atlanta, but before too long comes to the painful realization that he's suffering from the same consumption (tuberculosis) that killed his mother. His uncle, Doctor Holliday, recommends that he move to the hot, dry southwest, and helps him locate a practice to join in Texas. All is well for a few, brief months--and then the Panic of 1873 happens. The dental practice can barely support its owner, and Holliday is out of a job. He gradually starts to support himself by gambling, and after a few years of sinking deeper and deeper into this life, he meets Kate Haroney, a smart, educated, former minor aristocrat who lost her entire family and position and is now supporting herself as a whore.

This is a partnership that will last, off and on, for the next decade, and it's also what brings Doc Holliday to Dodge City, where he meets the Earp brothers. And this is the meat of the story that Russell is telling, the story of the summer when Doc thought consumption might be loosening its grip on him, starts up a dental practice again, and forges a friendship with the Earp brothers, especially Morgan and Wyatt. It's the summer when Morgan and Wyatt get a painful education in politics, and the summer that another figure who will someday be famous, Bat Masterson, is also in Dodge and starting to fabricate the stories that will be the cornerstone of his fame. Russell gets us convincingly inside these heads, especially Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and builds a compelling account of how and why they made the choices that led them to that fateful thirty seconds in the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. We also see the beginning of Bat Masterson's myth-making about them, especially Doc Holliday, and the great distance between reality and myth in the story of Holliday's career as gambler and gunslinger.

One of the most touching strands in this story is Holliday's commitment to the positive good that professional dentistry can make in people's lives, freeing them from pain, even while it's clear to him that he'll never support himself with dentistry. In fact, it's his gambling that enables him to support his dentistry. Another, almost equally touching thread is Wyatt's rehabilitation of the horse Dick Naylor.

While there are gunfights and brawls in Doc, this is not a story of western gunslinging derring-do. This is a thoughtful and compelling look at some major icons of the American west, before they were famous and when they never expected that a gunfight would become the central event of their lives.

Highly recommended.

I received a free galley of this book for review from the publisher.

Ashfall, by Mike Mullin--A Review

Tanglewood, ISBN 9781933718552, October 2011

Alex Halprin is a few weeks away from his sixteenth birthday when, somewhat to his surprise, his mother agrees to let him stay home alone in Cedar Falls, Iowa, while his parents and his sister Rebecca head off for the annual summer visit to his uncle's farm in Warren, Illinois. The delightful sense of freedom only lasts a few hours, though, before an impossibly loud noise starts up, and something crashes into his house, and he's trapped under his desk while fire creeps closer and closer. He manages to dig his way out, and then is taken in by Darren and Joe, a neighboring couple whose home is, so far, undamaged.

The sky is dark. The deafeningly loud noise does not stop. Ash is falling from the sky. And the power, phones, and water are out. On a battery-powered radio, they mostly get static, but pick up bits and pieces of emergency broadcasts.

The Yellowstone supervolcano has erupted.

They huddle inside for several days, eating salad for every meal to use up the perishables first, and stuffing their ears with tissue and wearing headphones to shut out the noise and protect their hearing. Then looters break into the house, and during the fight Darren pulls out a gun and shoots all three of the intruders. Alex is shocked and horrified, and flees back to his own uninhabitable house. He decides he has to head for his uncle's farm in Illinois, and find his parents and sister. He salvages what equipment and supplies he can from the unburned portions of the house, and sets out on foot.

For the remainder of the book, we follow Alex's adventures and struggle to survive in a world turned suddenly stark and lifeless. He meets some people willing to give him a night's shelter and a meal once they know he's not a looter, and other people only too willing to kill him and take what little he has. And when he's out of water and hasn't had food in two days, he collapses in the barn of the Edmund farm. It's an interlude of peace, safety, and recovery--and then disaster strikes again, and Alex and Darla Edmund set out on a new round of travel, struggle, and survival in a wrecked landscape with almost nothing in the way of functioning society and government, with conditions improving only very slowly as they move eastward--and the remnant of the national government they find is one of the challenges they have to survive. They both have to learn new skills, learn to trust and rely on each other, and figure out how to remain civilized human beings in the face of the catastrophe and collapse all around them.

In some ways, Ashfall is reminiscent of the post-Apocalypse survival novels that were popular twenty years ago. It feels more grounded in reality, though, in part because Mike Mullin has worked hard at grounding the depiction of the effects of a supervolcano eruption in what scientists know and theorize about them, while also remaining grounded in a realistic but not unduly negative view of human nature. There's no magic, unexpected technology, and Darla is scary-smart but not more so than some people I've really known--and she's not without her own weaknesses and insecurities. Alex finds a toughness in himself that he hadn't expected, but which, again, isn't superhuman. These are real teenagers, dealing with horrific challenges. They're not saving the world; they're just making their little piece of it a little bit more habitable.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected when I started reading.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea With Ocean Experts, by Ellen Prager--A Review

University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226678719, May 2009

Prager has a noble purpose in this book: to convey the excitement and adventure of doing science, and specifically of doing ocean science fieldwork, through telling the stories of the experiences of ocean-going scientists. To a fair degree she succeeds, but not entirely. This feels more like a collection of anecdotes than a collection of stories--but some of them are, no question, great anecdotes! I'm reminded of Randy Olson's Don't Be Such a Scientist, in the sense that I would wonder if she had read it, and were working at applying his advice, except that her book was published first.

The book is arranged in thematic chapters, highlighting the challenges of ocean-going shipboard research, diving in coastal waters, the effects of weather in making hay of the best-laid plans, the benefits of serendipity and of direct observation in making critical discoveries that would elude remote observation using  ROVs and AUVs (remotely-operated vessels and autonomous underwater vessels)  to do deep ocean exploration and research, the joys and challenges of life in underwater habitats, and the sheer delight and wonder of seeing the undersea world first-hand.

Prager was previously the chief scientist for the Aquarius Reef Base program in Key Largo, Florida, which includes what is currently the world's only undersea research station. Some of her best tales include the challenges, dangers, and rewards of living in an undersea research station, able to dive and do active research for eight or nine hours a day. She also shares her own and other scientists' stories of surviving dangerous weather at sea on the ocean-going research ships of the Sea Education Association--hurricanes, waterspouts, sudden squalls, and even an encounter with pirates. There's a disarming honesty about the role played by simply human mistakes and errors in judgment in contributing to dangerous situations, as well as human ingenuity in surviving the dangers and recovering and doing useful research anyway. She seems to take a special glee in describing her own early experiences, including her own mistakes that sometimes placed herself and others in danger. Prager learned the hard way to check everything twice, including whether or not colleagues had actually done their part in the preparations.

On the other hand, she also learned the joy of making unexpected discoveries for herself, whether or not those discoveries proved to be ones that would move the science forward in a big way, and she talks about her passion for sharing that joy with students who may yet become scientists themselves. This is one of the two major things Prager is seeking to convey in this book: the joy, delight, and pure satisfaction of doing real fieldwork at sea.

The other major point she wants to convey is the importance of real fieldwork, the vital necessity of doing direct fieldwork to build a real understanding of the ocean that is three-quarters of the surface of our planet, a major source of both food and weather affecting us all. She and her colleagues are deeply worried about what essential knowledge we might miss, if the difficulties, expense, and dangers of underwater fieldwork cause us to cease doing it, and she returns again and again to this issue.

Recommended despite my reservations.

I received this ebook as a free download from the University of Chicago Press.

Escape Artist: An Edna Ferber Mystery, by Ed Ifkovic--A Review

Poisoned Pen Press, ISBN 9781590588475, June 2011

It's 1904, and nineteen-year-old Edna Ferber is working as a "girl reporter" for the Appleton Daily Crescent, in the small Wisconsin town of Appleton. She's frustrated by the trivial nature of the stories she gets to report, and indulges her imagination and creativity in making the stories she can report as vivid as possible. While the publisher, aging Civil War veteran Sam Ryan, likes Edna, the new City Room editor, Matthias Boon, does not, and believes that females have no place in the newsroom.

Then Appleton's homegrown international celebrity, Ehrich Weiss, better known as Harry Houdini, comes home for a visit. Through a combination of luck and initiative, Edna scores the interview that Houdini originally didn't intend to give to either local paper. Boon's hostility is ratcheted up even further. Meanwhile, Edna can't escape from the stresses at work by going home, because she's in near-constant constant conflict with her sister Fannie, and her mother Julia is resentful and angry over husband and father Jacob's blindness which has forced Julia to take over running the family store, My Store.

When a beautiful young German-American girl, Frana Lempke, disappears from the high school and is found dead two days later, Edna finds herself drawn into the investigation. She knows the school, she knows Frana and her friends, she knows everyone involved. And of course, she is filled with imagination and curiosity that won't let her let go of it. And the deeper she goes in her investigating, the more the tensions at home and at work increase and threaten to come to a crisis that will force her to make major life decisions--if she doesn't become the next victim.

The characters are all compellingly drawn, not least Edna Ferber herself. Ifkovic set himself a risky task, making his viewpoint character and protagonist a young woman who will herself be the most famous and successful woman novelist of the first half of the 20th century, and he's pulled it off. I believe in Edna, her family, co-workers, and friends, and the little midwestern town they live in. Escape Artist works both as mystery and as historical novel, and is a delight to read.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

The Goddess Test, by Aimee Carter--Review

HarlequinTEEN, ISBN 9780373210268, April 2011

Kate Winters' mother is dying, and wants to return from New York City, where Kate has lived her whole life, to her tiny home town of Eden. Kate, completely dedicated to her mother's welfare and having as much time with her as possible, takes her back.

Immediately, odd things start to happen. Some of them are "normal odd"; it's a small town, Kate's Mom is remembered, and surrounded by strangers, she finds everyone asking about her mother. She enrolls in the local high school for her senior year, and is quickly befriended by James, the local nerd, and earns the enmity of one of the very popular girls, Ava, by attracting the interest of her boyfriend Dylan, the school's football star.

Other oddities aren't quite so normal. On the way into town, Kate nearly hits a cow who simply appears in the road, and then has to swerve again to avoid a young man standing in the road--and then they are both gone. And then Ava tricks Kate into coming with her to an isolated estate, Eden Manor, and tries to abandon her there. When Ava jumps into the stream to swim out through a small gap in the hedge. she hits her head on a rock, and Kate, who is terrified of the water, nevertheless goes in and thankfully finds the stream shallow enough that she can reach her and pull her out. Unfortunately, Ava's skull has been crushed, and she's dead.

The young man that Kate thought she saw on road coming to Eden turns up while she's still dealing with the shock. His name is Henry, he owns Eden Manor, and he offers to save Ava's life, if Kate will give him what he wants. She hastily agrees to do whatever he wants, if Ava lives--and suddenly Ava is reviving. astonished and grateful that despite her nasty trick, Kate braved the water to save her.

What does Henry want? He tells Kate to read the story of Demeter, and she'll understand. She has until the fall equinox to decide.

Henry is Hades, God of the Dead, and his Queen, Persephone, chose to give up her immortality for a mortal lover, and has died. He can't rule alone, and needs a new Queen, or his fellow Olympians will replace him and he will fade.

But it's not as simple as Kate merely saying yes. There are seven tests, and she has to pass all of them. Henry has been looking for a new queen for a century, and every girl chosen has either failed one of the seven tests very quickly, or has been dead by Christmas. When Kate agrees, she's taking her life in her hands. Henry promises her more time with her dying mother, though, and she decides it's worth it.

And so Kate embarks on a very challenging and confusing experience, living in a not-this-world version of Eden Manor, surrounded by the Dead who are Hades' staff and servants, studying, not knowing when tests are coming or what they'll be like, and not knowing who is friend or foe. She enjoys dream-time with her mother in Central Park, and struggles in her waking hours with inexplicable hostility and suspect friendship, as well as mastering all the knowledge she'll need and the uncomfortable idea of, at the age of eighteen, becoming the wife of Hades for eternity. There are layers of deception she hasn't guessed at, and she has to peel them all back to pass the tests, survive attempts on her life, and have a chance of building a future.

This is a good, solid story, with interesting characters who are more complex than they appear at first, and all in all this book should please not only its intended young adult audience, but adults who don't require "adult" content in a story. Fair warning, though, it's the first of at least a trilogy, and while there's a complete story here, there's also a larger story arc to be continued in later books.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen--Review

Penguin Group/Dutton, ISBN 9781101502242, February 2011

This is a long essay about what Tyler Cowen considers to be the real roots of our current economic and political frustrations: a stagnation in technological advances that started around 1970. This sounds counter-intuitive, but Cowen makes a good case for his approach.

Up until that point, America always had a great deal of what Cowen refers to as "low-hanging fruit": first, and for a very long time, land so abundant it was practically free. Europeans could come to America, stake their claim, work hard, and be substantially better off than they'd been in Europe. Next, the enormous technological advances of the 19th and first half of the 20th century--steam engines, trains, the telegraph, electricity, the telephone, the car, the airplane. Thirdly, large numbers of smart, uneducated people who could be educated and add tremendously to productivity. Technological advances and the expansion of education continued to make huge differences in the lives of nearly everyone, raising the standard of living and the available wealth dramatically in each generation.

But by the late sixties, there were fewer opportunities to continue making those dramatic advances. Most Americans are now being educated, and the gains to be made are incremental gains amongst the most challenged learners--students with language barriers, or learning disabilities, or who are from families that are economically disadvantaged, or broken or disrupted in ways that make the parents less available or less able to give the students a stable basis. Overcoming those obstacles and educating these students is important  and will benefit the economy as a whole as well as the individuals affected--but not nearly as dramatically as previous, more general advances in education. Technology also has had mostly incremental gains--better cars or better planes, medical gains now concentrated in care for the elderly and other marginal-gain areas. We'll all be glad for those advances when we are old, and they're important, but, again, not making dramatic changes in most people's everyday lives. There's no room for the dramatic advances in medicine and hygiene that took place through the first half of the 20th century.

Moreover, the largest parts of our economy now are government expenditures, medicine, and education, and two of the three should be very dynamic parts of our modern economy. They are, unfortunately, areas where real value, quality, and productivity are hard to measure effectively, and the market forces that control food prices or electronics prices simply aren't effective because of this.

As a result of all these trends, we have slow or stagnant growth, and a political system hampered by the frustrations of a population that is barely keeping even rather than experiencing the steadily rising standard of living of their parents and grandparents.

The one exception to this general picture of technological stagnation is the internet. Cowen discusses with great enthusiasm the advances connected to the internet, the ways in which they have dramatically changed and enhanced the lives of much of the population. By way of the internet, for the cost of a connection and the minor cost of electricity, we have access to information, education, entertainment, and contacts and friendships all over the world. It gives us access to opportunities to be happier, smarter, more fulfilled, without expenses we can't afford in the midst of our Great Stagnation.

And that in turn means that, while easing the pain of the economic slowdown, the internet also paradoxically makes it worse, because we're not spending the money to generate the more externally productive economic activity that's a vital part of reviving the economy.

All this sounds pretty grim, but in fact Cowen sees real prospects for a path out of our stagnation, for the creation of new "low-hanging fruit" that will make possible a return to dynamic growth, development, and human progress. If you have political opinions at all, whatever they are, you will disagree with some of what he says, but this is an essay grounded in fact and reality. Even if you don't in the end agree with Cowen's approach to a solution, you'll find yourself challenged to think by his discussion and analysis.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.