The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie

In Alexie’s highest-acclaimed novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Arnold Spirit is a teenager living on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, where everyone calls him Junior. As a baby, he was hydro-cephalic, which caused seizures, poor vision, and a perception from his peers that he was different. Most of the others on the rez picked on him, except his family and his closest friend, Rowdy. Rowdy was a tough guy and would fight anybody over anything, especially anyone who got too rough with Junior.

Beginning high school at the rez became a turning point for Junior. He got upset that the textbooks were so old his mom’s name was in them. He was suspended for throwing the book, which hit the teacher, Mr. P. During his suspension, Mr. P visited Junior and convinced him to get his education off the reservation.

Most of the Indians picked on Junior because he was different, and now they picked on him because he was a traitor for leaving the rez.

Reardon was Junior’s new school, it was twenty miles from the rez. Sometimes his dad was sober enough to drop him off and pick him up, but every once in a while Junior had to walk. He was the only Indian at the white school, and it was a rough start for him. He was half white at the rez and half Indian at the school. It took some time but Junior found his place after he realized he was as smart and athletic as anybody at Reardon. While finding himself there, he also lost some close friends and family back home. Rowdy believed he was a traitor and went for blood during the high school basketball game.

Reading this book, I was reminded of the character’s in NS Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which focused on an American Indian’s struggle with modernization- living in the white world. It is a struggle between centuries of knowledge their family had taught them about their culture, or going outside on their own to try find a better life. A struggle of honoring ancestors to keep the culture alive or turning their back on them to leave the rez. It is a tough battle, and many on the rez didn’t fight it. They stayed and accepted life as they lived it.

The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury

The early culture of space sci-fi was built on a foundation which portrayed Martians as beastly killers attacking Earthlings with no remorse. However, in Bradbury’s 1950 novel, Martian Chronicles, we have a chance to think about what really might happen. How would humans feel if Martians came to colonize Earth? Would we defend ourselves? Would we welcome the aliens with open arms and help them make a home here? Another viewpoint Bradbury explores is the human pioneering spirit. He writes about humans exploring and settling on Mars much like the US Western Expansion through the 19th century. He reveals that humans are determined to take what they want and to make the land and culture adjust to themselves, rather than adapt to the new settings.

The first few chapters had a humorous tone. The humans sent the explorers to Mars, but the first three crews were killed in defense. In a dream, a woman saw the first rocket coming, and she talked to the captain of the rocket in her sleep. Her jealous husband overheard the conversation and resolved to keep his wife away from the mysterious visitors. He made sure she stayed at home while he went for a casual walk with his hunting gun (which shot shells full of bees!). The chapter ends with two shots in the distance and the wife solemnly welcoming her husband back home.

The second crew found themselves in a frenzy of Martian paranoia. Martians had used telepathy to brainwash each other. Many didn’t care that the humans arrived and found it more of an annoyance. They sent the captain and his crew here and there until finally a smart Martian welcomes them and sends them into a room to wait for him to return. The crew was dumbfounded, how could the the aliens not acknowledge that they have actually traveled through space? This was a major accomplishment! The crew met many Martians in the room they entered and soon realized that each of the Martians was delusional. The smart Martian was a psychologist, he returned and conducted interviews with the humans and determined that only the Captain was real and the other crew members were holograms to trick those who met him. The psychologist then asked the Captain to take him to the rocket as he suspected this was also a hologram, and then he could prove that the space travel was fake. After exploring the rocket, the psychologist knew it was the best mental projection he had ever seen. The Captain’s brainwashing telepathy was unlike he had ever seen before. He knew if the simply shot the Captain the rocket and crew would disappear- but it didn’t. It was the best projection he had ever seen. Even when dead, the Captain’s brain power still made him see the rocket and crew! So he shot each crew member, and he still saw it all in front of him. The only other explanation he could think of was he, himself, was projecting the imagery, so he took his own life in an attempt to stop the delusion.

The third rocket’s crew landed in a small town on Mars. Each crew member strangely recognized the village as their own hometown. Each also happened to see a deceased loved one they recognized in their fake hometown. The friends and family they met explained that they didn’t know how they got there, but they had died on Earth and showed up there. They tried their best to make it more like home with the houses and shops familiar to them from their past life. This Captain was very leery of it all, but dropped his guard when his brother showed up and took him to visit their parents. They had a wonderful meal and the captain held his mother close and danced in the living room with her for hours. At bedtime, the two brothers lay in the same room, when the Captain had a quick thought that it might be a trick… He decided to sneak back to the ship to wait for the others. The Captain crept across the floor toward the door when the brother suddenly killed him. The following morning, the entire town of Martians held a service to bury all the dead human explorers.

Further into the book, similarities between the real pioneers and the characters in MC are more apparent. A character resembling Johnny Appleseed saw a need for oxygen production in the early days of humanity on the red planet, so he devotes himself to the task. A husband and wife build a business selling hotdogs at an intersection of two major roads. Priests believe the Martians need saved so they join the adventure and send missionaries to the planet. Bradbury said Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was a major influence on the Chronicles and with the mass migration the states saw in the 1930s, one can find many parallels between the two works. The Martian Chronicles was a very imaginative work 70 years ago, and can still captivate audience today, making for a very enjoyable book.

The venture, Mars One, plans to turn The Martian Chronicles into reality with a mission to create the first permanent human settlement on Mars.  You can find out more here.

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

William Golding’s 1954 Nobel Prize-winning novel, Lord of the Flies, resonates as a cornerstone of required reading in schools over the last fifty years. While it plays out well as a captivating story, it also serves to teach young students about using symbolism in writing.

In the midst of a war, a group of young boys are marooned on a desert island after the air transport taking them from the war zone makes a crash landing. Ralph and Piggy find each other trying to be brave, but don’t see any of the other passengers. Piggy annoys Ralph but he decides he might be helpful, in some ways, on an island with no adults. They find a large conch shell and Ralph blows it because Piggy has asthma and shallow breaths won’t make the shell bellow. Soon, a large group of children gather around the boy with the conch and they begin a meeting in which Ralph is elected leader over another confident boy named Jack, who develops a strong jealousy toward the chosen leader. Ralph assigns Jack and his choir boys as hunters to try to capture meat and food. Others are assigned to build a fire for a rescue signal, and others are to build shelters.

Nothing seems to go right. While Ralph and Piggy have the right ideas, most of the young boys are looking for adventure and fun, and half of them are ‘littl’uns,’ too small to be much help in any way. The boys used Piggy’s glasses to light the first fire, which burned a large section of the forest, and seemed to have also killed one of the young boys. The first shelter the group built was pretty good, but the second had fewer helpers, and only a couple of the boys helped put up the third, so each one was progressively worse. Jack’s jealousy kept building and when Ralph was angry about all of the boys hunting instead of minding the fire, Jack started trying to talk the boys into choosing himself for leader, which was unsuccessful. A few days later, Jack saw his chance when most of the boys were expressing their fears- ghosts, monsters and beasts. Jack offered to keep them safe, besides, weren’t the boys all tired of all the rules Ralph was trying to push on them?

Two tribes formed and by luring with roasted pig along with the fear of violence to keep them, Jack pulled most of the boys to his side of the island. In their first hunt as a new tribe, they killed a big female pig with small piglets suckling. They put her head on a stake as an offering to the much feared beast nobody had actually seen. Simon, one of the boys sleeping near the pig’s head became entranced in his thoughts, projecting his own voice into the fly-covered head. The Lord of the Flies told him that the fear they felt was close, in fact, it was inside each of them. Simon ran away to escape the head, finding another secret the boys needed to know about. He ran back to Jack’s tribe and they saw him in the darkness as a beast. Their fears came alive and they beat the boy to death before realizing he was just a boy from their camp.

In a couple of night raids, Jack’s tribe had first stolen fire and then they stole Piggy’s glasses taking all of the power through the ability to make fire. The four remaining boys of the original group, Sam, Eric, Ralph and Piggy walked together to the boys fort to ask for the glasses back because Piggy was practically blind without them. A fight escalated, and an accident happened. Not really an accident, the wild tribe hoped to cause damage, but it seemed they really didn’t understand the falling rock would kill Piggy. Sam and Eric were captured and forced into the new tribe, and Ralph became a hunted boy. Throughout the next day, Jack’s tribe systematically hunted Ralph, spreading through the island and walking it together, being sure not to miss the hiding boy. They also started a fire to flush Ralph out. At the last moment, Ralph ran and darted out of the forest toward the beach, where he found a sailor who had come ashore to check on the fire. He took the boys onto their warship, the boys were rescued.

Symbolism as explained by Golding:  Ralph projected the ideal society with rules and order. Piggy served as his brain trust, no power, but good ideas if they were heeded. Jack represented the opposite end of society- evils, lack of morals, acting on emotions. The large female pig symbolized sex and desire. The head on the stick, or the Lord of the Flies, represented subconscious thought, or what some psychologists term the Id. At the end of the story, the sailor stumbled upon the boys fighting a battle to the death. While they were then safe from themselves, the sailor would be taking them on a ship in war time, to essentially fight an adult battle to the death, a sort of transfer of boys to men fighting.

The Quick and the Dead – Louis L’Amour

The day finally came when the McKaskel family set out upon the Santa Fe Trail. Duncan, his wife, Sarah, and their son, Tom, had only known the city life back East. Both parents were educated and Tom was eager for adventure just like any teenage boy would be. Little did they know how much adventure they would find.

All of the education they gained in life would not be enough to secure their survival on the dire trail. Within the first week, the horses were stolen. Surely they would have had to turn back if the hero, Con Villain, hadn’t shown up. He was only passing through, but that pretty woman, Sarah, sure made a great cup of coffee.

The McKaskels weren’t sure what to make of Con. Was he just waiting for the right moment to rob the family himself? Little by little, Con earned their trust. First of all, he never had to follow Duncan to the outlaw’s town to retrieve the horses. He especially didn’t have to shoot the man in the barn aiming to shoot Duncan in the back. Con didn’t even have to stay with the McKaskels when the Indians came to visit. But he did all of those things, and the McKaskels slowly began believing he was on their side.

With his help, the family gained a different knowledge. They learned things that had not been written in the books they read. The horse thieves followed them on the trail and Con always helped the McKaskels stay a step ahead. One night, they were split up by the outlaws and Sarah figured they might not ever see Con again. If it were true, would the family make it on their own? Would they overcome the struggles of the trail or would they become like the thousands of unmarked graves on the dangerous route?

A classic Western, The Quick and the Dead has been made into movies and is one of Louis L’Amour’s most popular works. The suspense keeps the pages turning to find out if the family survives, if Indians attack, if outlaws return, and if Con Villain would be their savior, or a wolf in a sheep’s skin, which provided a great read.

Hollywood – Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s book, Hollywood, gives the reader a backstage pass to see how the gears move behind a Hollywood film. Many pieces fit together to line up the financial backers, the writer, the director, all the way down to the movie premiere. From the late nights drinks to make a deal, to the ghetto BBQs, this one digs deep for the unedited glimpse behind the scenes and characters that go into creating a movie.

Henry ‘Hank’ Chinaski is an alcoholic writer in his twilight. Most of his old friends have died from their similar bad habits, but his most recent wife, Sarah, has been pushing the health foods and Hank thinks this is the reason he’s outlasting all of the other alcoholic writers from his generation. He’s written several novels and poetry, but his friend, Jon Pinchot, a director, is urging him to write a screenplay. Pinchot has some connections and money which will help it along. What would an alcoholic novelist write a movie about?… His glory days, of course- the dirty bars, the seedy motels and apartments, the women, the fist fights. Hank barely believes his movie will amount to much of anything, but the eager support of Pinchot has him playing along. Throughout the process financial backing appears and disappears, actors want their own directors and production companies withhold payments, threatening to shut down the movie. Pinchot takes matters into his own hands when Firepower Productions tries to back them into a corner by refusing to release the movie deal while they also refuse to make the movie. Finally on the day of the big premiere, Hank gets to relive the good old days, arriving in a limousine to the red carpet.

What does a writer do when his first screenplay is developed into a mildly successful movie? Write a novel about writing the screenplay, of course!

The book was an interesting read and went deep into the process of creating a movie from start to finish. I liked how it put the reader behind the scenes and Bukowski’s details and stories provide a good read.

Exile and the Kingdom – Albert Camus

Albert Camus, the Nobel Award-winning author from Algeria, explores isolation and intense revelations with a series of six short stories in Exile and the Kingdom. Each of the stories has a character who seems to be lost or isolated from their society and each of them finds a way to connect with themselves or those around them in the muck of what is playing out around them.

The first story is ‘The Adulterous Woman,’ in which a wife accompanies her long-time husband to rebuild his dry-goods business after a war. She contemplated why they were still together after so many years- was it because he loved her or because she needed to feel loved? A stop in a foreign desert town helps the woman finally finds an answer, but perhaps not the one she had been looking for.

‘The Renegade’ is the second story. A young man from the outskirts of the Catholic Kingdom joins the church to become the greatest missionary. His hubris broke himself from order of the church to go to a an area forbidden to Christians, a desert land of other gods and deities. He believed his strength would hold out, but after torturous days and nights, he falls to the dark side and must make a decision to defend his God.

The next story, called ‘The Silent Men,’ is about a shop of coopers who return to barrel-making after several weeks of striking for higher wages. Mixed feelings spread throughout the shop: the boss was sour that his workers walked out on him, and the workers were upset that the boss was not so understanding of their situation. Ugly words from the boss did not help the resolution. The main character, Yvars, lived each day to come home to his wife and a glass of anisette enjoying the sunset over the sea. That was his kingdom. While at work, he felt undervalued, but could understand the boss’s view. A tragedy occurs to the boss’s family on the first day back to work, but it still could not overpower the silence in the shop, and Yvars ends up watching the sunset in reflection that night.

The fourth story, ‘The Guest,’ is a tale about a school teacher living alone on the top of a mesa. As the first big snow fell over the plateau that winter, he knew the small group of students would have struggles surviving the winter. That afternoon, he watched two men ride horses up the mesa and welcomed an old acquaintance, a lawman, transporting a prisoner. The lawman quickly delivered the prisoner to the objecting teacher and left to continue preparing for his duties back in the city. The teacher was to continue the transport to a city a small distance away. The prisoner had killed his cousin to help feed his family. The family had hidden the man and it took a while for the law to catch up. A war was forming at their home and the lawmen could not take care of all of their duties themselves. The teacher disagreed with the transport and hurt the lawman’s feelings when he said he would take the prisoner but had no intentions of delivering him to the prison in the other city. The lawman left and the teacher and prisoner spent a night together in the schoolhouse. Several thoughts went through the teacher’s mind throughout the night: Did he need his gun? Did he lock it up? Would he continue the transport? What will happen if he released the prisoner? The next day he contemplated whether his decisions were the best he could have made.

The fifth story was called ‘The Artist At Work.’ A man with special artistic ability was grateful for his abilities and had never asked for more. Early in his career, he knew he had talent and graciously accepted the first contract given to him. There were no major complaints and he soon found love. The years passed, the family grew, and the artist’s work also grew, but he remained humble. Many friends and followers visited the house daily  and at all hours, and the artist was grateful for these friends and critics. An architect he was friends with from childhood came often and gave him honest opinions of art and life. As the years went by, the artist’s fame waned and he realized he needed to rekindle the creativity. Weeks went by and he turned to alcohol, then women, and his work continued to fall behind. Finally, he builds himself a loft to paint in and he believes this will bring everything back, but a change this simple may not be enough to bring an artist back to relevance.

The final story, ‘The Growing Stone,’ is about an engineer who is hired to construct a jetty to protect a small village on a large river delta in South America. The man is touted as a hero before he even proposes a plan. The man meets many of the locals and joins in a Christian festival that follows many of the local customs and seems to be a mix of the new and old religions. The following day, he joins the judge and chief of police to watch a parade, in which his new friend, a chef, has volunteered to carry a large stone on his head to show his gratitude to Jesus for saving him from a sinking ship. After the parade has finished, the engineer has not seen the chef, so he runs to the street and finds him struggling to carry the stone. The engineer takes the stone and quickly walks it to the church himself, but he does not stop there. He continues on to the chef’s hut and drops the stone onto the floor inside. The struggles between new and old were all around in this story, and as the engineer drops the stone, he shows his respect for the people and their ways instead of taking the stone to the church where it was intended to be taken.

Each of the stories were entertaining alone, but altogether they form a great theme of realization and reverence. Characters come to respect their own callings and others around them. Much like his more popular work, The Stranger, the internal struggles of the characters are apparent and central. This is nice read for thinking and personal self-reflection.

Once There Was a War – John Steinbeck

The Nobel Award-winning author, John Steinbeck, often created themes of domestic economic struggle with such titles as East of Eden, Cannery Row, and Grapes of Wrath, but at the very center of his career, he took his pen to the European Theater of World War II as a war correspondent. Later in life, Steinbeck looked back at his time during the war and compiled several of the newspaper pieces he wrote into a book called Once There Was a War.

Steinbeck’s introduction started by saying the most famous war was mostly forgotten by the men who fought it. He explains that the trauma, the urgency, the peril was experienced and acted on with instincts of war, and a fighter might not remember exactly how many barrels of the enemy guns were trained at them as they ran across fields. But, perhaps, they also might forget at times due to the fear that gripped them as each step the soldier took was escaping death, while many of their comrades were not so lucky.

Steinbeck also adds that during times of war, much of the media is censored. Partly because the soldier’s missions are treated as top-secret: any news the enemy might receive of an upcoming attack or position of the allies could put many men in danger. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Steinbeck adds that any news of less successful missions might reflect on commanding officers, so to protect their egos (and the correspondents), the failures and the officers names were often struck from the record by censorship. With America’s values of freedom of speech, someone today might think that the censorship then was unfair, but the correspondents did their best to follow the rules. Nobody wanted to lose a chance of a nice job in journalism after the war, and more importantly, none of them wanted to be blamed for losing the war.

Steinbeck joined the war in 1943 and spent about a year in the action. Through the book, the reader gets a first-hand account of sailing from the US to England on a troopship, life at a bomber squadron in England, life in Tunisia and missions to Italy. The correspondent’s accounts give the reader the ups and downs, the little-known pieces of war life, that is likely unknown to someone living 75 years after the event.

My favorite pieces in the book were about a private named Big Train Mulligan. Big Train was a driver in the army. He was a smart man and the soldier life suited him. He would do anything that was asked of him, but he also decided he loved his position as a driver in England better than any other option. He loved it enough that he seemed to always mess up details when he was in line for a promotion, but not quite enough to lose the job. That was the kind of guy he was. He could have gone far in the army; he could have been an officer and led many men. But Big Train wasn’t interested in being responsible for other men, he just wanted to do his job. He drove officers to and from appointments and waited for them in the car until they required a ride to the next place. Big Train somehow always attracted women as he waited at the cars and he kept a big address book where he wrote each woman’s information into. When he drove the officers to stay overnight in a cramped house with tattered sheets and stiff beds, Big Train always had a woman from his book nearby where he would stay in a soft and comfortable bed and have a home-cooked meal. The women would stop at the car and talk to Big Train and he would reach into the officer’s belongings and pull out a pack of cigarettes, or occasionally chocolate for them. The ladies loved the guy for this. When the officers returned from meetings to find their personal cigarettes or chocolates missing, Big Train would just explain that the woman was there and it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do to offer her whatever he could find, and the officer agreed so no feelings were hurt.

Whether you’re a fan of WWII, Steinbeck, or just want a good book to read, this one fits the bill. There was a nice range of emotion- fear, disgust, sadness, joy- this has it all. As we lose many WWII veterans to time, it is nice that we have these accounts Steinbeck has left us. Stories like these and from the veterans I’ve spoken to always send a chill down my spine and remind me of the enormous amount of respect these men and women have earned.
Twitter- @blookworm

Born on a Blue Day – Daniel Tammet

Years ago, I watched a BBC documentary on autistic savants in the world. Kim Peek, the inspiration for the movie Rainman, was a contribution to the program, but another major focus was on a twenty-something Daniel Tammet. He was filmed setting the European record for reciting over 22,000 digits of pi, the irrational number which has an infinite amount of decimal digits. When I picked up Born on a Blue Day, I didn’t have this person in mind, but it was a nice surprise to find his autobiography in the pages.

Tammet was the first-born in a large family with many siblings, but the new parents could tell from an early age he was unlike most children. He cried constantly and found it difficult to make friends in school. His interests were fascinating but bordered on obsessions. He collected hundreds of ladybirds over a period of weeks (lady bugs to the US readers) and proudly brought them to school one day. He had thoroughly read about the insects and was excited to share his knowledge of the small pets to classmates and his teacher. The teacher realized the bugs may live a better life in the wild, so he created a note to send Tammet out of the classroom while a classmate freed the insects outside. Tammet was crushed and didn’t speak to the teacher for weeks.

Tammet also had a fascination with numbers from an early age. A rare case of synesthesia helps him develop unique visual images of numbers. The number nine, for example, resembles tall figures, and the number six is represented by a dark hole. Putting these figures together, he can quickly find arithmetic answers to complex problems. He can even identify large prime numbers (his favorite) with this ability. When he set the record for reciting the digits of pi, he created a landscape of the digits which helped him memorize the thousands of numbers in the correct order.

Tammet’s synesthesia not only gives him numerical gifts, it also allows him to learn foreign languages more easily than most. One challenge the TV producers presented to him was to learn a language in less than a week, and speak fluently enough in it to be interviewed on a local news program in the native language. The language chosen was Icelandic. It is a difficult language spoken by only around 300,000 people. It was a great challenge, but Tammet was successful and gave a fluent interview on the local news program in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Though his gifts are now apparent, it wasn’t always that way. As a child, Daniel had few friends. As is common with children with autism, he lacked emotional connections to peers and found it difficult to maintain conversations. Daniel Tammet said of his experiences:

“The very same abilities that had set me apart from my peers as a child and adolescent, and isolated me from them, had actually helped me to connect with other people in adulthood, and to make new friends.”

Currently, Daniel Tammet runs a successful website in the UK that provides language tutorials to consumers. From a teacher’s prospective, Tammet is an ideal model for many students with autism. He has focused on his abilities to create a successful living and has overcome some challenges to become successful in the world. I enjoyed learning so much about him in this book.

Veronica Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho

As morbid and depressing as the title seems, this Paulo Coelho book takes the usual turn in his books: looking for understanding of the universe and an inspiration for readers to strive not to settle into the kind of routine they don’t wish to be in. Coelho’s books have been NY Times Best Sellers and translated into dozens of languages, he’s one of the top-selling modern authors. It just takes one book to understand why, and this book certainly fits into that category.

Veronica is a young woman with a happy life. She has loving parents and a nice job. She lives in Ljubljana, the capital city of the newly formed country of Slovenia (after the Yugoslavian Civil War). With as many positives points in her life, Veronica found nearly as much sadness. She believed the routine of her life was inconsequential and secretly vowed to kill herself to leave the world behind. After feigning sleeplessness, she collected strong sleeping pills and went about the deed. She slowly fell into a drowsy state, but the peaceful death was not coming. A burning throughout her body led her into a coma and she woke in the infamous Villette Hospital, an institution for the mentally insane. Upon waking, the doctor told the girl she would survive, but her heart had taken a toll from the suicide attempt. The state her heart was in would only leave a week of life before she succumbed to the death she had wished for.

Not to give too much away, Veronica reluctantly made friends and rediscovered her passion for the piano. In fact, her piano playing was said to lift many spirits in the gloomy hospital. With a week left to live, what would you do? Veronica searched for her soul and others joined. Her weak heart pushed the limits and she found herself having heart-attacks through the week.

In a previous interview, Coelho explained his need to write this book. He had been put into a mental asylum himself as a young man. Coelho even modeled a character in the book after himself. His parents expected him to become an engineer, but his thirst for writing could not allow him to complete the studies the family expected of him. He broke out of the institution and the rest is history.

Whether you’re feeling ‘in a rut’ or just enjoy Coelho’s books, this is a good read. Coelho never lets you down, enjoy!

The Adventures of Huckleberry Hashimoto – Jack Douglas

A couple of years ago, I saw a simple paperback book listed on eBay that was selling for over $200. I was intrigued as I had got into a little buying and selling, so I’ve always kept my eyes out for the book, The Japanese-Jewish Sex and Cookbook and How to Raise Wolves by Jack Douglas. I’ve never seen the book, but I have found a few other books by the author and I have finally got around to reading one, The Adventures of Huckleberry Hashimoto.

The name of the book was based on a nickname a family friend gave the Douglas’ son, Bobby. Jack and his Japanese wife, Reiko, (20 years his junior) take their infant son on a summer tour of the Orient in the early 1960s. The family takes the train from NYC to LA, then a ship from the California coast to Tahiti, then flew to Honolulu, and another flight to Japan to meet Reiko’s family. If you can imagine what a comedy writer would write in the 1960s, that just about covers the bases. He [lovingly] complains about his wife, kid, locals, etc. At one point he even calls a friend’s 16-year-old daughter ‘sexy’. I hadn’t heard of Douglas before these books, but apparently he was a popular comedy writer in those days. He mentions a lot of ‘famous’ people he knew, but I don’t think I had heard of any of them. Jack Paar sounds familiar, but I can’t be 100% sure on that.

Apart from the apparent change in taboo topics from that era, there were many funny parts of the book. He tells of the way strangers address each other when approaching on a cruise ship: “Well- We meet again,” (followed by a small chuckle), “You’re not walking a straight line,” and “Well- drunk again!” Douglas also tells of a short anecdote of cold coffee in Tahiti. None of the coffee pots have lids, so it cools faster. The shipment of coffee pots was separate from the lids, and unfortunately, the lids ended up in Samoa where they were sold, then sold again to tourists as the top of Robert Louis Stevenson’s last coffee pot.

In Japan, Douglas told of how he learned to gain patience as the Japanese side of the family had many customs to adhere to. One involved the changing of shoes. Shoes worn outside are not allowed to be worn indoors. So, slippers are worn when walking through hallways (bare or stocking feet only in bedrooms), the bathrooms have separate bathroom slippers, and the commode has built in ceramic slippers one has to stand in to do their duty. Another story involved Reiko buying a hair barrette. They announced her intentions to her parents, who discussed it with her for 15 minutes. It was decided. They would buy the hair barrette (four cents). Then another 15-minute discussion was presented to find where they would go to buy the barrette, and another 15 minutes to decide which store to buy it from. At the street outside, they had another 15-minute discussion to decide if they would walk the two blocks or take a taxi; they chose to walk because it didn’t make much sense to spend more on a taxi than a barrette. When they reached the market, another 15-minute discussion took place to decide to go a few more blocks to the cheaper market. Upon arriving at the next market, they found that a four-cent hair barrette was no cheaper, and they did not have the gold-colored one Reiko wanted. The shop owner provided drinks and they had another lengthy discussion. It was decided Reiko would get the silver barrette and if she was not happy in a couple of weeks she could return it with a full refund. They took the taxi home.

This was a book I had looked forward to, and though there were some funny parts, I can’t say it was my favorite. I have another book by him, ready to read, but not necessarily at the top of my list at this time. It was a short book, a quick read, and I think I will read more of his work one day, but it might be a while before I ‘find the time’ for it.