Zeitoun and The Lacuna

If Dave Eggers wrote the original Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he's followed it up as an adult with even more heartbreaking works: What is the What a few years ago and Zeitoun in the past year or so.  It might be too soon for some to read a non-fiction account of a family's post-Katrina life in New Orleans.  If that family is Muslim, it might put anyone over the edge.  After sitting on my shelf for a year, I picked it up only because it's the current book club pick. I didn't know if I was ready to cry through the entire story.
The cover is an illustration, but could be any number of photographs that came out the days following the hurricane and levee breaks...a man in a canoe, gliding through the streets.  The man is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who owns a contracting business along with his wife, Kathy.  Eggers writes about their lives in a journalistic fashion.  He fills in the day-to-day life of a hard working father of five with brief backgrounds of Zeitoun's life in Syria and Kathy's life as a younger woman in New Orleans (including her decision to convert to Islam).  Kathy and Zeitoun watched the weather reports leading up to Katrina's attack on the gulf coast much as we all did, but most of us didn't have to decide weather or not to evacuate and most of us didn't have to come home to houses completely inundated.  Even fewer of us chose to stay in New Orleans, as Zeitoun did, witnessing trapped neighbors, looting, interrogations by the law and the lawless.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is a different account of so called law in the guise of public safety but 50 years earlier.  It's a fictional account of William Harrison, an American who grew up in Mexico and ended up working for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as a kind of jack of all trades-- sometimes plaster mixer, sometimes cook, sometimes confidante to Mrs. Kahlo.  Frida has become such an iconoclast that it was hard to believe her conversations with Harrison.  I had trouble seeing where Kingsolver was going at times-- why so much background on Harrison's mother? It was a 600+ page book and at times I felt like I wouldn't make it through.  But then there was a turning point.  When Kingsolver devoted the second half of the book to Harrison as popular author and quiet bachelor in a small Southern town, the story became compelling.  Kahlo and and Rivera are too big to compete with and Harrison deserves to stand on his own, and he does.  In a short time we learn that he is targeted as a Communist, quotes from his fiction are attributed to him, out of context, and no matter what, the US government will bring him down.  Kingsolver is a bit heavy handed in her allusions to current government control and persecution (read Zeitoun) but Harrison is a complete and sympathetic character. I felt the same helplessness with Harrison as I did with Zeitoun.
These may not be the best reads for conspiracy theorists...or maybe they're the best reads for all of us. 5 and 4 stars respectively.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

A certain Evil Twin is contributing this post on The Know-it-All by AJ Jacobs. I'm thankful for this because a) I have been too busy to read, b) too busy to post anything I have read and c) I like Evil Twin #1 (and #2).  To bring home the point that we do not share the same taste in books, I have subsituted the normal cover shot of a book with a pie chart.  --And

 

For the most part, my taste in books is the exact opposite from Steph's and Andrea's. So it should have been no surprise, when I wrote to Andrea about enjoying the Know-it-All, that her reaction was less than favorable. Normally, biographies are my favorite. Seldom do I get to laugh out loud on a plane packed with people, while reading one of my non fiction dry biographies. But then again this book is not meant to be a serious read.
AJ Jacobs starts a quest to finish the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica from cover to cover. Maybe that is where he won me over, as I spent many an hour with our Encyclopaedia Brittanicas as a young child. In this absurd endeavor, we see the root of his insecurities, a brilliant father, who is quirky and fun, his nemesis/brother-in-law, who is more successful than him, and the number one failure, his inability to sire a child with his ever patient wife. Most of the encyclopaedia facts that pepper the pages are simply a device to illustrate all these insecurities in detail.
The Know-it-All won't change your life, it won't make you cry, and it may fill your head with random factoids. It is fun read meant for the beach or a plane, a place where you can giggle without making a huge ass of yourself.