Unbroken: A World War Two Story of Survival, Resiliance, and Redemption

Title: Unbroken
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Rating: Two Stars OR 5 Starts


I just finished this book today, and I am not sure whether to rate it as a 2 or a 5.

This book recites the harrowing details of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner turned POW survivor. It depicts his life from birth until his now 90's- including shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 games in Berlin, his divine survival from 47 days of drifting in the Pacific Ocean on a raft, and turning to Christ to learn how to forgive his tormentors after surviving a Japanese POW camp.

Laura Hillenbrand is brilliant in her story-telling. I felt like I grew up with Zamperini as a close friend, and later that I was in Japan experiencing the torture that befell the POW's. That was the greatness and the difficulty of this novel.

Louis' story must be read. His story must live on forever- for us to remember not only all that we owe to so many men and women who lost their lives not only in WWII but in all other wars that have been fought, but also to remember the horrendous viciousness that occurs during war so that we can avoid it in the future. That is why it deserves a 5-star rating: a brilliantly told true story of a great war hero that should never be forgotten.

However, this is an incredibly difficult read. It embodies everything I dislike about WWII literature: I hate reading that there are people on this earth who are so cruel as to enjoy the severe suffering of others. In WWII, the Japanese were satanic in their punishments to their captives, and this book does not hold back in the retelling of the torture. The images of what they inflicted on other human beings makes me literally ill- and it was hard to read. Based on the subject matter and the perfect imagery that Hillenbrand created of this most despicable behavior, I want to rate it a 2- meaning, this is an incredibly hard read.

I really do believe every American should read this novel- it should be required reading in High School. But, I will never read it again. And if a movie comes out, I will skip that as well.

Has this review confused you enough?

Super Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

I should've known I wouldn't really like this book after I read the first line on the cover written all in caps:

THE EXPLOSIVE FOLLOW-UP TO FREAKONOMICS.

Whoopity-freakin-do.

Blah, blahblahblah, b-blah.

At least in this one I wasn't forced to read as a header to every chapter how ridiculously full of himself and his multiple accomplishments Steven Levitt is, Mr. "I was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most influential economist in the history of the universe under the ripe old age of forty". And I'm personally over forty by the way, and that-is-not-young-by-any-standard. Hell, if you're a man you're already past middle age by that time. Practically on death's door for crying out loud. Get over yourself already man.

Their desire for the almighty dollar and their own ideas on politics came shining through throughout most of the book. I thought I'd be reading an unbiased account of the "facts". Apparently they didn't even check those. Isn't that what economists are supposed to do? Get to the very bottom of an issue. To the truth? After all, do numbers and statistics lie? I guess I was expecting more than bathroom reading material from this one.

Double ew-ew!

I did learn something though, economists are like emergency room doctors - they think they know everything about everything. I bet people are just lining up to talk to them at parties.

Or running in the other direction.

After reading this, it's not hard for me to guess which I'd do. But you decide for yourself. I'm just a regular old American who will continue to recycle and use her carseats regardless of what their "facts" say.

But then again, I haven't won any awards other than The Most Mischievous at girls camp.
2 stars

Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich

Lula (my favoritely named person) is having a bad day. She witnesses the murder of a barbecue king by some decapitating-happy psychopaths and wants deep-fried chicken with a side of doughnuts but can't find any. Now the killers are looking to put her in a similar headless position.

So what's a girl to do? Recruit her good friend Stephanie Plum of course, and with the super-duper help of Grandma Mazur, enter a national barbecue sauce contest to track down her would be axe murderers. But Stephanie has her own set of problems at the moment. Ranger's got a mole in his security operation and is need of her, ah...expertise. And even worse, no proud Jersey girl looks good in black.

Anyone who has ever read a Stephanie Plum novel knows "Death in the Burg was like pot roast at six o'clock. An unavoidable and perfectly normal part of the fabric of life. You got born, you ate pot roast, and you died."

This one is no different in that regard. Let's check the rest of my list of Stephanie Plum requirements to see if Finger Lickin' Fifteen passed the acid test of sexy absurdity:

-Car explodes or burns up, or get squished by a dump truck. Check
-Ranger calls Stephanie "Babe". Check ++
-Rex changes his address. Again. Check
-Morelli has the best buns in all of Jersey. Check super ++
-Lula and Grandma Mazur reek havoc at a funeral. Lid lifted? Check
-Morelli and Stephanie are fighting. Again, and again. Sheesh. Check
-The Buick makes an appearance. Check
-Joyce Barnhardt wants to do Morelli. Check
-Stephanie moves into Ranger's apartment, but nothing actually comes of it. You know what I mean ladies...Check
-Lula's hungry. I'm talking super hungry!!Check +++
-Ranger wears black shirts, black pants, black hats, black socks, pink underwear. No, wait, that's not right...Check

And then there were some new (spoiler) developments that I found not the least bit Plumish. There's a lot of farting and other forms of bowel discontentment. Good grief! Is this what one of my favorite series has evolved into?? Farts for laughs? And another thing, the flirting is sub-par, I would even say non-existent between Ranger, Morelli, and Stephanie. N-O-T-H-I-N-G happens. If Evanovich thinks I'm reading these for only the fart jokes then she's got another thing comin' Burg girl!

So, overall then, I was disappointed with this one, and probably with where the series is headed in general. Time for Stephanie to move on with her life. Introduce a new love interest, get her married, something. Anything, but this. Until then, I'll stick with books 1-10, by far the best in this tried and true tale of a curly-haired, blue-eyed babe from the Burg.

And since the barbecue sauce was a main character of sorts, I was hoping she'd include a recipe at the end (but then I remembered the super rich Janet doesn't cook), so I decided to add my own version here. Feel free to - like in the book: explode it, smash it, crash it, and cover the ceiling with it. It'd probably taste better that way.

Barbecue Beans -

6 strips of bacon, cooked

2-3 cans Pork n' Beans

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp garlic salt

1 tablespoon dried onion

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

salt and pepper to taste

Heat in oven until bubbling.

Eat on toast, with a hot dog, in a bread bowl or all by its little self.

2 stars

The Stephanie Plum Reading Challenge

Marked

By P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

So I had a few problems with the book Marked.

The premise: In Marked, our hero heroine Zoey is a seemingly normal teenager in a dysfunctional family. She is surprised to find that she is not only a wizard vampyre, but also has an important destiny as indicated by an unusual scar tattoo on her forehead. As a result, she is whisked away to a boarding school called Hogwart’s The House of Night, where she trains to become a wizard vampyre.

I’m a little uncomfortable with its “young adult” rating: This book is full of cussing. It is also obsessed with sex. Yeah, I know that’s what’s on teens’ minds, but do you really want your kids reading so much about it? (And how weird is it that a mother-daughter team wrote this book? I have a close relationship with my mom, but we can barely even say the word “sex” around each other, let alone write a sex scene.)

The preachiness: Good girls don’t swear, sleep around or lust after hot boys. They are never ever prejudiced, they are not shallow and they always get good grades. And just in case you didn’t know all that, this book will repeat those messages over and over again until they are driven into your brain with all the subtlety of an ice pick.

Too much wish fulfillment: Zoey is super hot, all the hot boys are in love with her, she has super-duper vampire –- oops, sorry…vampyre –- powers, and she can drink all the non-diet brown pop she wants without getting fat. And yes, vampyres can get fat. All the perfection started to get on my nerves.

The writing: The teen talk and cultural references get old pretty quickly, but worse than that, our heroine and narrator Zoey is so repetitive. Can we use the word “hot” more often? Yes, I get that (fill in the name of any male character here, because they’re pretty much all hot) is hot. You don’t need to say it every stinking time he makes an appearance. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

All of this kept me so busy rolling my eyes that I could never really get into the book. I am forced to confess that it actually has a fairly interesting story, interesting enough that I skimmed the other four books in the series that have come out so far. It’s probably even safe to say that I would have loved this book when I was fourteen. Of course, my mom would have forbidden me to read it then, so I guess Marked and I were doomed from the start. 2 stars.

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

Clary Fray is no ordinary teenage girl. After she witnesses a murder in a New York City nightclub, everything goes awry in her life: her mother disappears after leaving her a cryptic message, she can suddenly see dead people – oh, no wait, they might be alive, but with weird markings on their arms, oh yeah, and one of them is really hot – and demons want to suck out her brains, vampires want to drink her blood, and werewolves want to just end her life. Clary’s had a bad week.

If you want to read some really good reviews of this book, check it out on goodreads. The first few on the list mirror my thoughts so exactly, that I don’t want to just repeat what they said here. Instead I’ve made a little overview list of my own, and if I ever decide to write a book, I’ll have something to refer to as a quick guide to unbridled success in the current teenage fiction market.

- Name the main character after yourself. --Check

- Use italics for emphasis on almost every page. --Check Check

- Compare everything from the taste in your mouth, to the smell in the room to old paper. (I’m not exactly sure how old paper tastes. Is anybody sure? Is there a Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean with that flavor? If anybody would know it’d be this author, because she obviously likes Harry Potter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Star Wars.. a lot) --Check

- Be sure to have one extremely long 'how I became a werewolf and why' scene description similar to another book that I too found way too long.. --Check

- Make everybody smell like blood and sweat at some point in the story, and yes they are a stinky lot because of it. --Check

- Make the bad guy (or at least I assumed he was bad, because by the end I wasn’t so sure) Voldermort, Darth Vader, and your dad on any given bad day rolled into one and you’ve got your villain! --Check

- Reveal a plotline in the end that made me say aloud, “Eeeww!” --Check

- Have everything have a convenient fix, whether it’s a quick, as yet unknown magical fix or good-guy-gone-bad fix, for no reason whatsoever other that to drive the plot to some end. --Check

- Make the anti-hero/love interest so much like Spike in Buffy that I wanted to watch him in his original form again. Sigh…. (Did you catch that word, original? It’s a new concept here.) --Check

- Am I being a little harsh? --Check, Check, Check. Oh well, you don’t have to read this ramble if it was your favorite book. Oh, but wait, it's too late! You've already read it if you've gotten this far! Hee-hee (insert maniacal sounding Dr. Evil laugh here). 2 stars

~~As a side note, I hear the author improves a little, and that the other two in the series are better. So, if I have nothing better to do, like say cleaning my house, I’ll probably give the series at least one more try just to give her the benefit of the doubt. Because in a battle between cleaning my house and reading, which do you think wins? Hmm...

Same Kind of Different As Me

By Ron Hall & Denver Moore (with Lynn Vincent)

**Major spoiler alert if you're reading this for book club.

I don’t know what it is about my book club picks this year. They seem to be taking a religious, emotional turn at full speed around a curve with no side rail. Perhaps it’s because of the difficult times we are facing. Perhaps people are drawn to inspirational tales of overcoming obstacles and wanting to discuss them in an open forum. So far, 3 of the last 5 books we’ve read have dealt with death on some level and it’s not even Halloween yet. Not Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery type of death, but long drawn out, miserable suffering sort of death. Do I want to read about this stuff in a time of crisis? In the words of Charlie Brown, good grief, no, no, no. Not one right after the other. I’m starting to have nightmares. Seriously.

With that said, if you’re still even reading this depressing ink (if I were you I’d have stopped long ago) my third tale of woe in this series of “inspirational” reading, is one of Denver Moore, a man born and raised in Louisiana in the 40’s and 50’s, and until the late 60’s worked for “the man” on a share-cropping farm. He’s never been to school a day in his life. Never gotten a birthday present. Never owned a home or a car. He’s a man who’s skimmed along the surface of life without anyone noticing. Until he meets Ron Hall and his wife Debra at a homeless shelter, two rich people trying to make a difference. They notice him, and everything changes, for all three of them.

If this book had only been about Denver, I probably would give it 4 stars. His story was very interesting and almost unbelievable. A modern day slave on a cotton farm, he worked for nothing but food and a roof over his head until he literally jumped on a train to Texas, and while there remained homeless for almost thirty years. Somehow what he said rang true.

However, Ron Hall’s part of the story (as it is told from both their perspectives) I found to be self-indulgent and (here’s that dreaded word again) preachy. He talks of his “poor” beginnings in a white middle class family. How he smoked pot with “fat chicks” in college and how later he rose from Campbell Soup salesman to a fantastic and super rich art dealer of the famous. Somewhere along the way with the help of his saintly wife, and after he’s caught having an affair, he finds God and a purpose in life. His wife drags him to a homeless shelter where the two of them come across Denver, who is of course all too happy to be hounded by two rich people with a cause. It’s not hard to guess what happens next.

So, I’ll say no more of this get happy tale but this: ugh. 2 stars

The Lovely Bones

By Alice Sebold

Susie Salmon is murdered when she is fourteen years old. In The Lovely Bones, Susie tells us her story and the stories of her friends, family and even her murderer as she looks down on them all from Heaven. The end result is a devastating depiction of pain and suffering. Consequently, this is not an easy book to read. The murder itself is appalling, and the aftermaths are painful to witness.

Wimp.

Excuse me?

Remember that article in the April 20, 2009 issue of Newsweek? It was called,” Why Is It a Sin to Read for Fun?” It put forward the idea that reading for fun is fine, as long as it leads a reader to more edifying texts: “…at some point reading should stop being a pleasurable diversion, and start being work.” How else are you going to grow?

I sort of agree with that (although nothing is going to stop me from reading for fun). I did force myself to finish the book after all, even though I wasn’t enjoying it. But I’m still trying to decide if this book was edifying. Regardless, I don’t think the writing was particularly great.

Examples, please.

“Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced,” or “She asked for coffee and toast in a restaurant and buttered it with her tears,” or “Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.”

The narrator was a fourteen-year old. How great a writer were you at that age?

Um…let’s move on, shall we? I have some problems with Susie’s Heaven. I won’t spoil the book for anyone by divulging details, but Susie’s Heaven and Susie’s attitudes toward it seemed contrived and often artificial (like a poorly conceived gimmick designed to draw in readers).

For one thing, Susie was bored in Heaven. What kind of Heaven is that? Also, Susie seemed to have very little interest in her afterlife. For example, God or a higher being is never in evidence, but not once does Susie (or anyone else) ask about His/Her/Its existence. I’m not saying the book had to dwell on the big philosophical questions. A few brief sentences (“You’ll find out when you’re ready,” or “We don’t know!”) would have sufficed. Ignoring The Big Questions made Heaven feel unauthentic.

First, everyone has a different idea of Heaven. Second, not everyone is as full of (annoying) questions as you are. Third, again, Susie is only fourteen.

Fair enough, although personally, I think most people are going to be asking about God when they die, even if they are young. Look, I realize that a lot of people love this book. I don’t have any good reasons for disliking it; it’s just not my cup of cocoa. And there you have it. 2/5 stars

Silenced

by Betsy Brannon Green

This is one of many in a series called the Haggerty mysteries. It is about a young cop named Mila Edwards who moves to Georgia for a new job and ends up on a case where two young children are abandoned by their mother. The police think the mother ran off with the father who was on the run from the police, but Mila thinks something more sinister happened.

We own three of this series and not in any particular order. We don't even own the first one but my husband likes the series so I thought I would give it a try. This is the earliest book in the series that we own so he said to begin with this one but he did warn me it was his least favorite. Well, I see why. I had to force myself to finish it and I started skimming at the end. I found it predictable and pretty slow. It just dragged on and took forever for anything exciting to happen. A few bright spots: I did enjoy the romance in it and it is by an LDS author so no language.

I will try the other two we have since he says they are much better but we will see. Apparently the others involve Eugenia Atkins, an elderly lady from Haggerty, Georgia, solving mysteries but she was only a minor character in this one. I think that was part of the lack of appeal for me. I was expecting more Murder She Wrote (which I LOVE!!!).

2 stars

The Shack

By William P. Young

Mackenzie Phillips is a man lost in "The Great Sadness". Lost from God, from his family, and from any sort of real happiness. His youngest daughter, Missy, was brutally murdered in an abandoned shack in the mountains while on a family camping trip four years earlier, and Mackenzie is having a hard time moving on with his life. He receives a suspicious letter from "Papa", inviting him to go back to the shack to find some answers, and incredulously, he does return to the focal point of his sadness. What he finds there, is supposed redemption.

I don't know what to say about this book. I didn't really like it, but I'm not a big fan of religious fiction or even self help books for that matter because of too much information in too small of a space. I would rather read these types of books in stages when the need arises, rather than in one big gulping swallow.

The writing was sub par and the dialog choppy and unrealistic in the beginning but improved as the book moved along, until really there are only pages upon pages of dialog. I could barely draw breath. Young not only likes to say his point over and over, he means to stomp it into your brain until you know nothing else.

At the same time, I can see why so many people like this book. Young manages to make God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost more relatable and human in a scary world where religion has become out of reach for some. The Shack is Young's personal guide to finding your own way through the murkiness and sludge that make up the problems in our world today. His opinions are rarely theologically or scripturally based, but rather, perhaps, a way he's learned to handle the grief in his life. If that helps other people, fine by me.

But, for me personally, it was just too much. 2 Stars.