Review: I, Lucifer

We've got a long tradition of stories involving the devil from a slightly more humanized view than what the bible gives us. Certainly, many of them still paint him to be evil, but they create a true character. Faust comes to mind, as does the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Blues musician Robert Johnson was thought to have sold his soul at the crossroads for his ability to play guitar, and who can forget Johnny betting that he can play the fiddle better than Satan? (And of course, Tenacious D met some sort of devil, but banished him with the Greatest Song in the World)

All the music references are the slow way of getting to the topic of today, Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story. The book was recommended to me by Jessica Abbazio, a fellow grad student who was working on a paper about the personification of the devil in the Stones' song. Her paper was fascinating, as was the book she sent my way.

The basic premise here: God is giving Lucifer another chance. Lucifer, who only exists in a spiritual realm (and can't even see what we see, but rather the impacts of his doings on our souls), doesn't buy it, but the setup is too good to pass on. He is to inhabit the body of a failing writer, Declan Gunn (took me half the book to figure out it was an anagram for the author), who was about to commit suicide when God snatched his soul away. The upside for Lucifer is that he gets a one-month trial run in the city of London. If he wants to give it a go, he stays in the body and tries to live a good life. If not, he can return to being Lucifer.

What follows is a month of debauchery, where the devil wrecks Gunn's body. He takes drugs, drinks, has promiscuous sex (with the ladies of the XXX-quisite escort service), cheats on Gunn's girlfriend, cheats on his mistresses. He's, pretty much, a little devil. The problem for Lucifer is that he starts to reconsider: should he stay in the body and take his one shot at eternal redemption?

The conceit behind the book is great, and Gunn (whoops, Duncan) pulls it off marvelously. I can't say too much, as the reader is left constantly wondering which way Lucifer chooses. But it's certainly worth a read, and it's definitely quick. If you hadn't had the chance, pick up a copy. I'm sure it can be had for less than a soul.

The Week Ahead

So I've got a fair amount of nearly-finished, just-finished, and soon-to-be-begun books in store for the week. The nearly finished (not page-wise, but time-wise) is Chuck Klosterman's IV. It's pretty good thus far. I might try and break my responses to it up into little mini posts in reaction to individual essays. More reason to come back!

Yesterday I finished Duncan Glen's I, Lucifer. It had me completely in its grips, and you'll read about that at some point. Finally, I pre-ordered Will Leitch's new book Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball. If you read yesterday's Sunday Book Banter, you know how I feel about the Romanticism of baseball, and a book about fathers, sons, and the baseball bond certainly qualifies. The Kindle version seems to have been taken down (that's what I ordered), but Leitch assures me that any problems there will be worked out soon. In theory, it should come tonight while I sleep!

Should be a fun week. I may put up some first impressions of the essays I've read in the new collection of Britten scholarship. In short: the ones I didn't care about turned out to be ok, and the one that I really cared about was really atrocious.

So be sure to come back this week. There's plenty in store!

Sunday Book Banter: May 2, 2010

As promised here is the return of Sunday Book Banter. I swear I'm going to be a better blogger...

In today's Washington Post, we get a review of former MLB-er Doug Glanville's new baseball memoir, The Game From Where I Stand. Glanville never really made it onto my radar of players I cared about, but the new book sounds like it could be a fun (and probably quick) read. Dave Sheinin writes:

Glanville, who contributes a column to the New York Times, is a witty, insightful writer, and his detailed descriptions of the unseen banalities and secret vanities of the baseball life -- how players pass the time during rain delays, the proper way to pack an equipment bag after you've been cut, the admission that players practice signing their autograph -- are sometimes riveting and often amusing, even for those of us already intimately familiar with that life. 

Sheinin, I should note, wrote one of the better baseball stories I've read in a while for last Sunday's Post; a great write-up on Stephen Strasburg's first weeks in professional baseball.  If you haven't had the chance to read it, do so, it's got a certain poetry to it. (I kind of love the old-school Romanticism of baseball, and Sheinin does a great job of bringing that back).

Back to the book at hand, apparently it isn't too big on naming names or avoiding clichés (player superstitions!), but Glanville does provide a nuanced approach to the steroid controversy. As a player representative to the union, one expects Glanville to want a hush-hush over steroids, but he also claims to have never used them (and with anemic power throughout his career, I think we can trust him). So he has to be conflicted between his commitment to player privacy and his anger at those who tried to get ahead of him by using drugs. I'll certainly be looking for the book. Seems like it should be a quick read, and it will probably have the little day-to-day baseball stuff that I am always eager to read about (see this review).

Review: The Guns of August

My Aunt May has been telling me to read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August for what seems to be ages. Boy was I stupid not to do so as soon as she recommended it. Tuchman's work recounts the first month of World War I: August, 1914. I have to admit to knowing very little about WWI, but this made for a great primer into the causes of the war as well as the reasons it got bogged down in the trenches.

A few things surprised me about the opening month of the war. The first was the transitional state that war was in. We tend to think of war as something that happened before mechanized weaponry or something that happened after. WWI shows that this was not the case. Weaponry used in battle of course included heavy artillery, rifles, airplanes, and machine guns. But it also included lances, bicycles, horses, and bayonets. Some of the massive casualties were undoubtedly caused by these discrepancies in firepower. I had the hardest time wrapping my mind around the idea of war that wasn't quite 19th Century but also wasn't firmly 20th Century either.

But the highlight of this book is Tuchman's writing. It took me a while to read, but a lot of that was owed to thesis writing. Tuchman's prose is absolutely gorgeous, and it draws you in. Throughout the book, I found myself angry and sympathizing with the Germans, British, French, Russians, and Belgians. She didn't allow retrospective history to get in the way of writing: the Germans aren't evil, and the British aren't demi-gods. All of the participants are instead just fallible human beings. Its devastating to realize how much human life was lost in the stupidity, and Tuchman really details the magnitude of tragedy involved, regardless of side.

While a lot of people who read the book focus on the (admittedly wonderful) first paragraph, I had a different favorite that really shows Tuchman's style. In Chapter 22, as she is setting up the Battle of the Marne that was to decide the fate of France, Tuchman writes this:

September 4 opened with a sense of climax felt in widely separated places; a kind of extra-sensory awareness that great events sometimes send ahead. In Paris, Gallieni felt this was the "decisive" day. In Berlin, Princess Blücher wrote in her diary, "Nothing is talked of but the expected entry into Paris." In Brussels the leaves had begun to fall, and a sudden wind blew them in gusts about the street. People felt the hidden chill of autumn in the air and wondered what would happen if the war were to last through the winter. At the American Legation Hugh Gibson noted a "growing nervousness" at German Headquarters where there had been no announcements of victories in four days. "I am sure there is something big in the air today."

What a beautiful way to set the stage for one of history's most important days.

If you haven't read The Guns of August and you have even a modicum of interest in history, pick up a copy. It is easily one of the best history books I've ever come across.

Like Douglas MacArthur, I Return

Hi there blog! It's good to see you again. Sorry I've been away for nearly two months, but thesis writing got in the way. After doing 80 pages of "The Manipulation of the Perception of Time in John Adams's Doctor Atomic," I didn't want to write any more. But that's all done now, so here I am again. I'll have a new review of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August up tomorrow. (Sneak peak: I loved it).

While writing, my to-read list apparently took the rabbit spirit of Easter and multiplied like crazy, so you can expect some new stuff coming relatively regularly again. I've got William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur, Chuck Klosterman's IV, Jack Lynch's The Lexicographers Dilemma (check out this review at VPO), Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm thinking of taking a trek through some Shakespeare this summer, maybe the histories. And, despite finishing the thesis, I'm already starting some reading in anticipation of the dissertation, so if I find anything interesting, I'll pass it on! I'll see if I can't restart Sunday Book Banter again too.

As for right now, I'm reading a new anthology of essays on my favorite composer (and likely dissertation subject), Benjamin Britten. Edited by Lucy Walker of the Britten-Pears Foundation, the book is a collection of essays written by mostly new scholars. I'm particularly interested in Cameron Pyke's analysis and comparison of Britten's War Requiem with Dimitri Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony.

So stay tuned! There's plenty more on the way, and this blog will be rolling regularly again!