Review: Townie: A Memoir

Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I really liked this book. It is a memoir by an author whose books like [b:House of Sand and Fog|7944648|House of Sand and Fog|Andre Dubus III|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348794554s/7944648.jpg|932849] and [b:The Garden of Last Days|2079538|The Garden of Last Days|Andre Dubus III|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1409436719s/2079538.jpg|2084812] riveted me in the past. He is such a great writer, and his telling of his real-life story is no less consuming.

Andre and his three siblings live in New England and when his parents get divorced, they end up with his mom. The five of them struggle in poverty in different towns like Haverhill and Newburyport while his father becomes a professor at a nearby college, seeing the children once a week and either ignoring or not noticing the conditions under which they are growing up.

As he gets older, he turns to anger, and violence, and also forges an unusual relationship with his father. We know the ending - that ultimately he grows into a highly successful novelist - but the book ends long before that happens. How he gets there and what his formative years are like is the real story. What I liked most about this book was the writing - Dubus was able to describe both time and place as well as emotions with great skill.



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Review: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was a really interesting memoir.

Sierra Leone is bookmarked in my head as an African country with atrocities that have been going on for decades. I have to admit, I sometimes confuse it with Sudan and Rwanda - but this book was a sad education on Sierra Leone itself through the eyes of Beah.

Beah is a young boy - not even a teen - when civil war erupts in SL. He and several of his friends end up on the run, their families killed, trying to figure out how to live in a war zone. It is unclear to the reader and probably the boys who is right and who is wrong in the conflict - there are rebels and a national army and they seem to blend into one military force.

Beah ends up recruited into the army at 13, drugged and manipulated, and becomes a soldier. It is only after several years that NGOs and the UN step in to rescue him and many other boys in his situation (on both sides of the conflict). It is a testament to his core as a person as well as help he receives along the way that he emerges from this trauma as an optimistic functioning human being.



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Review: The Silver Star

The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book, by the author of [b:The Glass Castle|7445|The Glass Castle|Jeannette Walls|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400930557s/7445.jpg|2944133], was great. It follows the story of Bean and Liz, two sisters who go live with an eccentric uncle after their mother abandons them. It was hard not to draw comparisons between this novel and Walls' real childhood, where her parents were benignly neglectful, bordering on abusive with their childrearing style. In both cases, she (or in this case, the narrator, Bean) shies away from blaming her parents, rather, she is optimistic and ultimately perseveres.

This book was eminently readable. The narrator and her sister were very likable characters, strong little girls who tried their best to riddle out how to live in an adult world. The story and plot kept me interested, while the writing itself was easy to absorb and kept my interest.

I'll keep being interested in what Jeannette Walls writes.



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Review: Blowback

Blowback by Valerie Plame

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I really wanted to like this book. I had read Plame's [b:Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House|1815529|Fair Game My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House|Valerie Plame Wilson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327869499s/1815529.jpg|1815022] about her life as a CIA spy and figured this would be a really fun novel.

It barely qualifies as a good airport read crossed with a bad episode of Covert Affairs. The story followed spy Vanessa Pierson as she hunts down a known nuclear arms dealer who is otherwise impossible to find. She has assets, a secret boyfriend, and people who don't trust her in the CIA.

While I have a lot of respect for Plame in real life, her novel was not much more than pulp.



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Review: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is probably the top business book that has been recommended to me since I joined a startup. Now that I have read it, I can understand why - it ought to be required reading for anyone coming from a big company into a fast-paced startup. I had many a "a-ha" moment reading this, like "Oh, that's why we are shipping a product that seems incomplete...it's on purpose!"

The concept of Lean Manufacturing grew out of the Toyota Production Systems innovations of the mid-20th century. This comprised the idea of constantly improving systems, measuring more important things, and driving organizational learning. In grad school, I remember learning about this, and about its influence on the software industry. Agile/scrum development seems to have its roots in Lean.

So all this forms the backdrop for the ideas in this book - that companies and projects in general can use a lot of the same concepts that have fundamentally improved Manufacturing and Software Development. There's a real focus on learning and structuring the product development process to increase the speed with which everyone learns. (And it is worth pointing out that like Innovator's Dilemma, this is relevant for innovative parts of big companies, not just startups.) Two items stuck with me the most:

1. Vanity Metrics - Ries argues strongly against using vanity metrics when evaluating a change to a product. He says that too often metrics are chosen that look like improvements when really they aren't, like number of downloads (without number of repeat customers) or number of repeat customers (without number of paying customers.) He says you really need to know what you are measuring and why.

2. Experiments - Ries gives several examples of how you want to run experiments about your product in real life with real customers. If your audience is big enough, A/B test actual features. Release great products without all their features to see if you have Andreesen's elusive product/market fit. Ask focus group customers the right questions, not question your existing assumptions.

It's his examples that I liked the most - they were perfectly relevant and constructive. He's delightfully honest about how hard it is to learn this way by sharing his experiences at his company IMVU. In any case, this is a MUST-READ for people interested in the model for success in technical innovation in the next decade. It's in my mental bookshelf next to "Innovator's Dilemma" "Good to Great" and "Crossing the Chasm."



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Review: The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was a really interesting book. I saw it at Trident Cafe and bought it on a whim.

The story is about a young author (Marcus) whose author mentor Harry Quebert is accused of murdering a young woman. Marcus, who is having difficulty writing the followup to his best-selling book, puts his life on hold to help Harry clear his name in a small town in New Hampshire.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a classic mystery - with Marcus, I was figuring out what happened, among a cast of quirky, colorful, odd characters. I kept being surprised by twists in the plot, and I kept wanting to know what would happen next. I liked how some of the story was told through a book Harry wrote, and some of the story was told through a book that Marcus wrote.

While I did find a few sections in the middle a little slow, overall this book kept my attention and I enjoyed it.



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Review: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Michael Lewis never, ever (ever) disappoints. And this book was no exception.

Released with little pre-press lead-up, this book starts with a detailed description of a fiberoptic cable being laid through the Alleghany Mountains. *Through*, not *around*, being the operative word - because going through the mountains reduces the computer latency between NY and Chicago by a couple of milliseconds, and this is how people make money.

Lewis looks into this dark, weird, shady part of the financial industry, called "high frequency trading" that basically exploits unnatural benefits like millisecond differences in who has information when. His narrative follows some guys at Royal Bank of Canada who figure out what is going on and set out to find a different way to more fairly operate a stock exchange. As usual with Lewis, the characters were well-developed and appealing to follow.

Though the book was heavily criticized by insiders as being everything from entirely untrue to being a sales pitch for this new exchange, I think it's a case where criticism is indicating concern on the part of the incumbents.

As a stockholder, I was horrified by this book. As a reader, I was enthralled.



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Review: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I first heard Jillian speak on an episode of The Moth, on NPR. Her story - that of being a theater school dropout who interviews with a "casting director" for what turns out to be a gig "entertaining" the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei - caught my attention.

It was the People Magazine-reading part of me that thought this would be an appealing story, and it was satiated at that level of quality. This was a fun read, a quick read, but not a high quality Jeannette-Walls read. I liked reading about her time with the other women in Borneo, and I was fascinated by her relationship with the Sultan and his brother. And I'll admit, I was more than a little curious reading about a harem and its goings-on.

But I didn't find the book uplifting, or the author particularly likable. She comes across as victimized but really made a lot of choices at a lot of junctures to get her where she ended up. Her brief forays into her personal life growing up and as a young adult didn't change my mind about her either, and seemed kind of choppy in the narrative.



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Review: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession by Apostolos Doxiadis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



A new friend at work recommended this book to me, and it was one of those things where you appreciate new book friends who expose you to books you wouldn't otherwise know anything about.

This novel was close to my heart in that it was about a mathematician who spent his life chasing an elusive proof of a difficult problem. The story is told by his nephew, who also pursues mathematics. I really liked the storyline itself as well as the glimpses of math. There is a pivotal plot element based on Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which I spent several courses at school studying, so that was fun, too.

My only complaint was that the writing and the character development weren't great. And I think you really had to be a math person to read this That said, I'm glad I gave it a try!



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Review: Crow Lake

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Terry recommended this book to me years ago and I just go around to reading it. It was wonderfully written - very sad but great.

The story follows Kate Morrison and her two older brothers (Luke and Matt) and younger sister Bo. Growing up in Ontario, her parents are tragically killed when she is a child. Her older brothers sacrifice their own futures to keep the family together and the book follows the children into adulthood.

The writing in this book was superb. I could feel what the characters were feeling (heartbreak, yearning, hope) and see their surroundings. The characters were very likable, although imperfect, and the epiphany the protagonist goes through towards the end is one of the most striking I can remember reading recently.

Definitely recommend this book and look forward to reading another by the same author.



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Review: The Middlesteins

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was a really, really weird book. Meredith recommended it to me.

The story is about a woman who is obese. When her husband leaves her right as she's facing a medical emergency, there are ramifications for the entire family. The story jumps around in time, tracking her weight gain from when she is a child, through her career as a successful lawyer, through becoming a mother, and then as a grandmother. The story is told through many different perspectives, including her daughter-in-law, her children, her boyfriend, and even a unique chapter representing a group of couples that she and her husband knew socially for years through the synagogue. Some people try to help her lose weight, others enable her to continue gaining weight, and others just find her disgusting.

I thought the writing was really good in this book - simple and direct, but created moods and characters quickly and eloquently. All the characters were very well-developed, and the setting was too. Glad I read it.





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Review: Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I don't remember what list I originally found this on, but I thought it would be like reading the New York Times' "Well" column - clever and interesting anecdotes about a doctor at a large city hospital with quirky characters.

Not even close.

Manheimer is the Medical Director at Bellevue hospital, which is the oldest public hospital in the country, and yes, the one that has the psych ward featured on Law and Order. The stories he tells are much more complex politically and socially than I expected; they are less than about the medicine. There are illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, families with generations of obesity, convicts in Rikers Island, and even the author himself. (Manheimer suffered from throat cancer.) He and his wife have a house in Mexico and an affinity to Central America - and he uses that expertise with many of the patients who are Latino.

The book was significantly longer and more complex than I expected, but I really liked it.



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Review: Once We Were Brothers

Once We Were Brothers by Ronald H. Balson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I had very mixed feelings about this book that Jo recommended.

It was billed as a "legal thriller", and opens in the present time when a senior citizens accuses a prominent civic leader and philanthropist of being a Nazi war criminal. The story is told in the present time, but large sections of it are flashbacks to Poland in the 1940's, as the senior citizen is telling his lawyer the story. It is, like many stories about the Holocaust, both a very individual story as well as that of a whole nation. Jews in Poland begin the war optimistic, then end up in some of the worst conditions known to humankind.

This book read as if it were a YA book. If it is designed to be a pedantic piece of historical fiction, then it did a good job. But as a modern novel, or even a thriller, its characters were not well-developed and the plot was pretty transparent. Something like [b:The Book Thief|19063|The Book Thief|Markus Zusak|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1390053681s/19063.jpg|878368] was a YA book but so uniquely written that it had wide appeal. This book was not that - I was caught up in the story (at least the story of the war) but not the writing or the book itself.

As an aside, it was a good reminder of the importance of continuing to remember what happened during the Holocaust.



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Review: February

February by Lisa Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Found this book in the "Globe and Mail" list a few years ago and finally got around to requesting it from the library. It was very sad but I'm glad I read it.

The story is about a woman who loses her husband when an industrial rig sinks. She has several young children, who she raises on her own. The book toggled between current day, where one of her sons finds out he is about to become a father, and the months around when she lost her husband. The characters were very well-developed, and while the story was tragic (and the description of the drowning devastating), I enjoyed reading it. The main character was in particular was incredibly complex - she does a lot of reflection on what her life could have been or what may have happened, and accepting that she did the best she could.

I'd definitely read something else by Lisa Moore in the future.



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Review: Ordinary Grace

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Jo recommended this book to me. I am not sure - I think maybe the first chapter had been excerpted somewhere because it was eerily familiar. Either way, I liked it.

The story is about a minister's family, told from the point of view of 13-year-old Frank. He has an older sister and a younger brother, and the story unrolls over a summer. At the beginning of the summer, a young boy is killed and Frank goes with his father to learn more of the details. Throughout the summer, there are more people killed and the small community struggles with grief, racism, and accusation.

What I liked most about this book was that it was a coming-of-age story more than it was a mystery. Both Frank and his younger brother are shocked by the events of this summer and grown into young men. The story was really well-written, the characters sympathetic, and the story interesting.




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