Saturday, September 26, 2009

Finding Moon, by Tony Hillerman

Finding Moon, by Tony Hillerman

I’ve enjoyed Hillerman’s tales of Leaphorn and friends, but Finding Moon isn’t in that series. Moon Mathias is the main character here, and I found him to be a whiny, selfish, and unappealing lead. The story is somewhat interesting and the setting vividly described, but the characters are one-dimensional and dry. Not Hillerman’s best work.

First Sentence:
Shirley was giving Moon the caller-on-hold signal when he came through the newsroom door.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers, by Robert M. Sapolsky

Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, by Robert M. Sapolsky

Preventative medicine can counteract many adverse health situations, especially stress-related ones. The nervous system has two halves, one that is activated by stress and one that is suppressed by it. The sympathetic nervous system is turned on when life gets exciting or alarming, governed by “the four F’s of behavior—flight, fight, fright, and sex.” The parasympathetic nervous system is the other half, controlling calm activities such as sleep, growth, digestion, etc. Together, they control how our body works and this book shows exactly how; if we don’t manage our stress the book also describes how our health can suffer.

While containing a lot of medical and anatomical terms, the text is quite readable and in fact quite humorous in places. (“Are you overwhelmed and intimidated by these terms, wondering if you should have bought some Deepak Chopra self-help book instead?”) The light tone and amusing anecdotes made a complicated subject reasonably straight-forward and accessible. I learned a lot here and found myself enjoying a book that I initially wasn’t excited about reading.

First Sentence:
It’s two o’clock in the morning and you’re lying in bed.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Last Car to Elysian Fields, by James Lee Burke

Last Car to Elysian Fields, by James Lee Burke

Dave Robicheaux is an alcoholic detective working in southern Louisiana; this is the third book in which he stars I’ve read. The plot is a bit crazy, including a decades old murder of a blues guitarist, a tragic car crash that kills three teenagers, and a hired killer that masquerades as a priest. You don’t read Burke for the stories, though; you read Burke for the rich and evocative descriptions. “New Orleans wasn’t a city. It was an outdoor mental asylum located on top of a giant sponge.” Or, “Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the thunderheads in the south, and the sugarcane in the fields along the road to St. Martinville thrashed and flickered in the wind and rain, the oak canopy blowing leaves that stuck like leeches on my windshield.” I love imagery like this; it makes the literary experience so much richer.

First Sentence:
The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot wind and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once more danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned the hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl.

Persuader, by Lee Child

...

Another Jack Reacher novel, another winner. The first chapter is a roller-coaster ride with Reacher accidentally shooting a cop while foiling a kidnapping, and it doesn’t slow down after that. Child weaves two gripping stories together, one in the present and flashbacks of the past. The two come together with the revelation that the villain in both is the same supposedly already dead man. There were many clues along the way that didn’t appear to make sense, but a twist towards the end neatly explained them all in a way that was truly surprising and not at all contrived. Entertaining and well-written, this is a perfect novel for an afternoon escape.

First Sentence:
The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot.

Friday, September 04, 2009

100 Things Longhorn Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Jenna McEachern

100 Things Longhorn Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Jenna McEachern

As most folks that know me can attest, I do love my Longhorns! I finished this the day before the first game of the season and it certainly helped to put me in the right frame of mind. It should really have been called 100 Things Longhorn Football Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die because virtually every item is either about football or strongly related, but then football is the lifeblood of the University so I suppose that should be expected!

The book is a series of vignettes covering the history and traditions of Longhorn football. Sections on places (Memorial Stadium, the Drag, the Cotton Bowl), people (Vince Young, Clyde Littlefield, Rooster Andrews), and important years and decades make up the bulk of it, and McEachern admirably captures the essence of them all. For instance, when discussing the Texas-OU game she mentions Robert Heard’s quote, “There is no rivalry to rival this one.” She follows it with, “Just reading those quotes [sic] makes you want to drive to Dallas tomorrow. It makes your mouth water, makes your heart pump faster, and makes your breathing shallow.” Well said! Another fun story: Yards After Contact is a common football statistic; it turns out that UT was reportedly the first school to track it, although at the time it was called “Yards Made by [Earl] Campbell After First Hit by a Tackler.”

In places this book was entirely too repetitive and could have used some judicious editing. At one point we learn “the day Texas football was truly born was November 30, 1893, when The University of Texas Foot Ball Club accepted a challenge from the Dallas Foot Ball Club, the self-proclaimed champions of Texas.” On the very next page we are told “no game was more crucial than the very first one, when the Texas Varsity stormed into hostile territory to challenge the Dallas Foot Ball Club, self-proclaimed "champions of Texas."” This particular tidbit gets mentioned elsewhere too, but to be found on facing pages is a bit too redundant for me. Another oddity was the seeming lack of logic behind what items had dedicated sections and what ones were combined into overviews. For instance, the World’s Largest Texas Flag didn’t get it’s own section—it had to share with the Hex Rally and Pig Bellmont in the More Traditions category. However, both the color PMS 159 (burnt orange, naturally) and the tunnel at the Cotton Bowl got their own entries—with the actual Cotton Bowl getting yet another! Seems like odd logic to me, but the stories were all still entertaining.

First Sentence:
The University of Texas was legislated to be great.

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