The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson (re-read)

This is my first time reading The Body since its initial release. Like all Bryson books, it’s an entertaining, funny read. Bryson’s books generally fall into two categories: travelogues, in which Bryson chronicles his journey through a particular part of the world, and researched books, in which he chooses a subject and explains it in layman’s terms. The Body, as the name suggests, is among the latter.

Bryson’s output has skewed towards research books in his later years, quite possibly because he’s less inclined to take long journeys. He is very good at both, and while the travelogues tend to be funnier (I would count his funniest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, among this group, even though the “travel” is through his own childhood), The Body still includes humour through bizarre anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. The overall content, however, is educational, as Bryson works his way through the human body section by section, branching off near the end into disease and medicine. The final chapter, fittingly enough, deals with death, and the process of dying. It ends a bit abruptly, but then again so does life in a lot of cases, so perhaps that’s fitting in its way.

Bryson peppers his chapters with anecdotes about figures in medicine and biology both famous and obscure, charting medical breakthroughs and quack remedy fads with equal relish. He has always had an ear for bizarre stories and seems to delight in bringing forgotten heroes a bit of posthumous fame.

There isn’t a Bill Bryson book I haven’t read at least once, and nearly all of them I’ve gone through multiple times. It saddens me to hear that he intends for The Body to be his last book, but he’s certainly earned his retirement. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not hoping that boredom gets the better of him and he finds his way into a new one at some point.

Note: in preparing the tags for this entry, I discovered I’ve already written about this book once before! Oh well, interesting to capture my views on it a second time.

A Woman First: First Woman - Selina Meyer (Billy Kimball and David Mandel)

Veep is a great show. It’s so good that I couldn’t resist buying A Woman First: First Woman, even though I’m not often one for TV show or movie tie-ins (though I have made exceptions: see The Real Festivus). The book is proported to be an autobiography by former president Selina Meyer, and is presumably distinct from the fictitous Some New Beginnings: Our Next American Journey (though I would happily read that as well). Humour books are tricky, but this one plays very well, with a solid collection of jokes that vary enough in structure to avoid getting formulaic or predictable. It also fleshes out some of the events in the show, which always took the admirable path of hinting at actions rather than dumping exposition in your lap. (I confess that I didn’t fully understand the Uzbek hostage scandal until I read about it here.)

There are some jokes hinting that the entire book was lazily ghostwritten, presumably by Mike McLintock, and the early chapters parsody the optimistic vacuity of most politicians’ books. However, the bulk of the book is presented as an honest recounting of Selina’s life, told from her perspective but without the outright lies that would doubtless obscure any actual publication the character put out. It reads most like a long-winded grievance told to a trusted confident. Selina is arrogant, insulting, and blind to her many defects, but she still tells the story more or less as it probably happened, rather than causing you to glimpse the truth behind veils of falsehood, which is more what I expected.

The voice feels very much like Selina’s, particularly in the final seasons, where her original flaws have metastatized and consumed whatever bit of actual humanity she’d possessed in season 1. Veep and I’m Alan Partridge, two of my favourite shows, were both written by Armando Iannucci, and while there are certainly similarities betwee nthe tow characters—outwardly successful bigheads who are nevertheless deeply unhappy and busting their skulls bloody on the ceilings of their own limitations—I noted in watching Veep that Selina’s flaws deepen, while Alan’s remain more or less flat. Selina in season 1 is a better person than Alan Partridge, but Selina in season 6 is far worse, plummeting past pigheadedness into the depths of clinical sociopathy. I would mark season 4 as the point in which their lines cross on the old Douchometer, though I’d need to rewatch the show carefully to be sure.

Definitely something for fans of the series to pick up,

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 - Garrett Graff

I came across mention of Garrett Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky in a Guardian article discussing books that explored different stages of 9/11 and its aftermath. The list also included the Looming Tower, which I’d read a bit befor,e so it caught my interest, and as I’m a fan of oral histories, I thought I’d give this one a try as well.

Graff builds his narrative using a chorus-like approach, providing snippets of conversations about a similar topic that build on each other, rather than the extended transcripts of discrete conversations favored by Studs Terkel. Context is provided in italics at times, but by far the majority of the text allows participants to speak for themselves, offering a range of viewpoints that includes office workers in the Twin Towers ,the loved ones of the deceased, government officials on the ground scrambling to understand the situation, first responders, and the cadre surrounding the president in the critical hours of the mornign and early afternoon, as he sought to find a safe place to reassure the nation.

There’s not much to say about the writing, considering it is all transcripts, but the book is well-constructed and remains coheren in its narratives, though the individual stories can get a bit murky as we jump back and forth between participants. The overall picture was quite clear, however. This book is an important piece of history and a chronicle of events that feels very immediate. It can be harrowing at times, but is worth a read for those of us who remember the day as distant observers.

Nuking the Moon - Vince Houghton

Nuking the Moon was another book I stumbled across thanks to my wife, who checked it out from the library and foolishly left it where I could see it. The title, naturally, grabbed my attention, and I welcomed a more lighthearted distraction from the heavier fare I'm currently working my way through, of which more later.

Written by an intelligence e pert and curator of the International Spy Museum, Nuking the Moon takes the interesting approach of documenting the most ambitious and unbelievable exploits that didn't actually happen. That's not to say their fictional, but merely plans that never made it past the drawing board stage, or at least never saw fruition.

Houghton knows his stuff, and the stories are told with rich detail and obvious enthusiasm. His humor can feel a little forced at times, but the “dad joke" aesthetic seems deliberate, and was ultimately a better choice, given the material, than trying to document such exploits as warming a nuclear mine with live chickens using dry academic prose.