Where We Going, Daddy? by Jean-Louis Fournier

This is a book that deserves more attention than it’s getting. It’s a quick read, no more than an afternoon of time.

Before going any further, here’s letting you know that I’m going to refer to the children in the book as handicapped. I don’t know that this is the most sensitive term, though I am certain it’s not the most insensitive. I am a believer in the power of words, but part of that power is their ability to shift. Yesterday’s retard is today’s differently-abled person. That’s fine, except don’t forget that today’s acceptable term is tomorrow’s slur. So just understand that I am using “handicapped” today with no malice or agenda.

Jean-Louis Fouriner is a French humorist who fathered two severely handicapped sons. He doesn’t go into great detail about just what we’re talking about, but that’s what makes the book so excellent. He’s not trying to convince anyone out there to treat handicapped people one way or another. The book isn't about how hard it is to be handicapped, how the other kids make fun of his boys and that sort of thing. It's about being the father of two boys who have, as the phrase he adopted goes, "heads full of straw."

If you are looking for an uplifting tale of humanity and all its different forms, you will be disappointed by this book. He mocks them at times, almost seeming cruel when he asks idly, “How is the trigonometry coming?” Or when he tells his son, “Close your mouth. You look retarded.” He also spends a lot of time speculating what his life might have been like if his sons were different. How would they spend their days? What would they enjoy? However, it's clear that he truly cares for the boys. He has spent so much time speculating on their shuttered inner lives that it would be impossible to say otherwise.

The truth is that the humanity explored here is Fournier’s, not that of his boys. As he puts it,

Aren't you ashamed, Jean-Louis, you of all people, their own father, making fun of two little kids who can't even defend themselves?

No. It doesn't mean I don't have any feelings.

I think maybe this book is missing the broader audience for a few reasons. I think to some it seems too precious, to likely to fall into the category where all life is a miracle and handicapped children happily fingerpaint and never really grow old. I assure you this is not the case. In fact, it is far less so than most baby books and growing up memoirs.

Clearly this is not a comfortable topic for many people, which must also have something to do with it. But this is not a book written for parents of the handicapped. Fournier gives the reader a gut check every here and there, but not the kind designed to make the reader feel guilty. Not the kind that says, "You'll never understand." Like any good artist, he tries to help the reader understand something without trying to point out how little they already grasp.

If I can make a sort of analogy here, I don't read a lot of books related to the Holocaust. Sure, it was horrible and fascinating in its own way. There's a lot of material to cover there. But often you'll find that books that use the Holocaust as the center are using it to up the emotional ante. They aren't really telling me much about the topic, and they are counting on our history classes to fill in the characters. It's a way of creating a sort of artificial high, a tension and emotion that is implanted into the book by force of history. Going in, that was my fear with Fournier's book as well, that this was going to be a day-in, day-out drag of life that's a little off course, but that the tension would be raised by the very existence of handicapped children.

It's not.

Just like any good book that deals with the tragedy, you get the sense that if things had been different, this book never would have been written. And just like any good author dealing with hard times, you get the sense that the author would have preferred to forgo living the material.

Cheesemonger by Gordon Edgar

I’m not what you’d call a foodie. I do like to cook, and I’m working on getting better at it, but at the same time knowing the ins and outs of foods isn’t a passion of mine. To put it simply, I love me an Oatmeal Cream Pie that’s been sitting in the glovebox (aka Dessert Cart) for a couple days.

That said, this book is pretty entertaining for someone who isn’t already interested in cheese.

What separates this book from other food books is that Edgar, though passionate about cheese, doesn’t try to foist his passion on everyone else. Edgar’s cheese vocabulary is helpful. He doesn’t use a bunch of bullshit terms that have no meaning. Edgar’s realistic, unapologetic for growing up on cheap-ass cheese, and he must have taken half a dozen opportunities in this book to say that you shouldn’t waste your money on the best cheese if you’re putting it on a plate for a big gathering or preparing a meal for a large group. The strengths of the book are the writing and Edgar’s honesty. In other words, he is not interested in making cheese the new wine.

The book also has some pretty decent sections on running co-ops and the harsh reality of agribusiness as well. Definitely worthwhile if you’re any sort of manager, but also if you’re interested in the world of work in general. One could draw parallels to books like Waiter Rant in terms of dealing with some difficult people and the ways in which retail economics play into food.

The rougher sections, for me at least, were the larger geo-political portions. I think he may have some decent points about Reaganomics and our reasons for fearing French cuisine, but I was a lot more interested in the ins and outs of the cheese.

The biggest success of the book is in its desire to introduce noobs to the cheese world. Every chapter ends with specific cheese recommendations and the book ends with a brief guide on how to buy cheese. This isn’t a book for food snobs or people that think certain foods are only for people who know all about them already. Edgar can’t say it (though, without putting words in his mouth, he seems to dance around it) because these people are his bread and butter, or at least the spreadable cheese, but food insiders can be really goddamn annoying. They’re kind of like people who like a band only up to the moment in which they become popular in that they seem to like the actual product less than what the product says about them. To them, a food becoming popular is a bad thing. A club just isn’t a club if you can’t turn people away at the door.

After reading this book I was motivated to try a couple cheeses he recommended. I should point out that I don’t live anywhere near a cheese shop or even a Whole Foods, so these were purchased at the tiny salad-bar-cheese-counter-conversion thing at King Soopers. To recap: a know-nothing purchasing cheese from a place that probably spends more time deciding what goes in the Halloween aisle than the cheese case. So take it all with a grain of salt. The size of a meteor.

The first was Parmigiano Reggiano. This cheese comes up over and over in the book because it’s reasonably priced, hard to mess up, and because there is honestly a world of difference between the wedge of cheese I bought and the dust that comes in the green can. Don’t get me wrong, this is not me swearing off the green can. But the cheese is pretty damn good plain, and maybe it’s not the best use of good cheese, but try it as the cheese for your next Alfredo sauce. I wasn’t an Alfredo fan until I tried it with Parmigiano Reggiano. The flavor of the cheese is tempered a little by the cooking, I think, but the Alfredo has an actual taste besides salty milk, and the sauce had some stick to it instead of being so watery.

The second cheese I tried was Taleggio. The book said that it’s somewhat of a beginner in terms of stinky cheese. And stinky it was. The smell was…unpleasant. Biological. Foot-y. But I cut a piece off and ate it anyway. This is one of the few food experiences I can think of where the smell of the food was somewhat distant from the taste. It was like a horror movie where the trailer is scary as hell, but then you sit down and the overall feeling is much milder.

Taleggio, I’m afraid, won’t be finding its way into my regular rotation. The softness combined with the stink was a little, um, advanced for my liking. The texture was a little like a rubbery cream cheese. I know, really appetizing. But hey, as an adult you really never have to eat new things. When you’re a kid, you’re eating new crap all the time. You hate it half the time, maybe because it’s infused with the bitterness you feel towards your parents for making you eat it, but there’s something to be said for trying a new food variety once in a while, no?
If you are interested in food, or at least want to take a second look at that cheese case when you go to the grocery store, give Cheesemonger a shot. Hell, it’s a good read either way.

Tips on Banning Books

This gem of a human you see to my left recently tried to have manga (Japanese comics) banned from the library.

Why?

She says of the books, "My son lost his mind when he found this...Now he's in a home for extensive therapy."

I don't want to attack the victim too much here, but if a Japanese comic from the public library sent you spiraling into a loony bin, maybe you didn't have a super tight grasp on reality to begin with.

Could that dude in the middle of the picture look any more bored? He doesn't look like he gives one damn.

So why do people try to ban books? Really, what's the point, especially when most attempts to ban a book only result in a dramatic sales increase?

However, that sales increase is what I'm banking on should I ever crank out some shit book, so I would like to present a little advice on getting a book ban done right.

Tip 1: Try your best to come off as some sort of sane person. If you appear in front of some board or city council at some point, don't wear your loudest blue floral dress. I know you really want to draw attention to yourself, but you're taking it a little too far. Museum guides don't use those glowing orange popsicle things that the guys on the airport runway use, so let's calm it down a couple notches. Broadcast your sanity and people might take you a little more seriously.

Tip 2: Maybe be a little more realistic about your claim of a book's effects. For example, rather than trying to convince me that a teenager's psyche was destroyed by a scantily clad woman or someone with a sword slicing through his abdomen, you explain the realistic consequences. For example, in this case these books have the negative effect of you bothering everyone at this stupid meeting where they probably don't get anything done anyway, so they can reduce this effect by pulling the books.

Tip 3: Leave god out of it. I know you're really tempted to get god-y, but hold on a sec. What you really want to do is call someone out, not bring someone in. Tango Makes Three is challenged a lot because the penguins are gay(?), but let the others bring in the part where god's not cool with that. Call out the gays, the people who speak Spanish, or whoever, but let god be implied. Hell, he's everywhere, right? He doesn't need your help.

Tip 4: Actually read some of the material. The first questions a library or school are going to ask you will concern the specifics of what you found offensive. That means page numbers. That means passages. Luckily for you, when my shit book comes out it'll have a little card in the back that tells you where all the absolute worst shit is. That will help you speed up the process.

Tip 5: Don't hold a book burning or try to hoard all the copies or some such shit. And there's a damn good reason for this: Where are you getting the copies? Unless you're robbing an author of copies in his garage, the author is putting coin in his pocket when you bring one to toss on the fire. A book sells for the same money regardless of whether you take it home and read it a hundred times or use it to steady a wobbly table. Even if you steal it, the store absorbs that cost, not the publisher, definitely not the author. And they will order more. So again, don't waste your time trying to take away the copies from anybody else, except in the case of my book. In that case, you're lucky because I'm doing an extra print run of cheaply bound copies meant to be burned. Please buy enough to make an impressive fire and keep me in sunglasses.

In conclusion, stop wasting your time. More importantly, stop wasting everyone else's time. I'm a fan of a lost cause, but don't push it, freedom fighter.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield

Okay, before we get too far into this, everyone should know that this book doesn’t come out for a whole week.

This is very exciting for me.

Not only did I hold the book in my hands before the unwashed, unshaven, apparently wholly uneducated about hygiene masses, but the version I held was special. And not just because it was an uncorrected proof. Not just because Steve Perry was named Steve Terry at one point, something that confused the shit out of me for a second. This is all very new to me, so instead of thinking right away that there was a one-letter typo, my world started swirling with the possibilities of an entirely new band led by Steve Terry, a man who sounded by all description like Steve Perry, patron saint of sincerity in the face of ridiculousness, but was in fact an entirely different man.

Let’s leave it there because the details of how long this was in my brain and how badly I wanted it to be true are goddamn embarrassing.

No, this was not just special because of the ghost of Steve Terry. It was special because this is the official launching of my career as a book critic.

Here is my basic career outline:
1. Get books before they come out.
2. Review them. Post on helpfulsnowman.com.
3. This is wildly popular somehow.
4. Actually get paid to review books.
5. Start career as sincere, earnest critic with insightful things to say.
6. Almost immediately slide into the world of writing cover quotes that are about half a sentence. “The writer has defied science and written a book as electrifying as it is grounding.” “More mesmerizing than a swinging pocket watch right in front of my goddamn face that time I was in Vegas and somehow ended up at a magic show.” “Not since I got a lighter with a woman on it where you rub her bikini and it disappears have I been this invested in the resolution of a mystery.”
7. Get job at the New York Something.
8. Attempt to discourage young, Bambi-eyed kid reviewer from getting in over his head, actually reading all these books he reviews.
9. Bury corpse of Bambi-eyed kid reviewer somewhere near the waterfront.
So without further ado, let’s get this career a-launching!

Most of you probably know Rob Sheffield as a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. Or you might have seen him on one of those shows where people ranging from cultural critics (such as Sheffield) to Vern Troyer (alcoholic Golem on a mobility scooter) talk about things of great consequence, such as whether Michael Jackson could actually destroy a car with all his might.

Those of you who are very lucky might have read his previous book, Love is a Mix Tape. If you haven’t, get off your ass.
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The important thing to know is that the guy does an awful lot of writing, so it’s not a brand new game for him. This isn’t some silly biography that starts off with the thrilling tale of who his great-grandfather is and why we should give a good goddamn. This is a silly biography that takes us through the songs that define the 1980′s for Rob, which turns out to be a good storytelling tool. Everyone has a couple songs that don’t really mean what they’re supposed to mean. Maybe Ben Folds had a hell of a lot going through his brain, but “Rockin’ the Suburbs” might as well be called “Summer, 1999″ as far as I’m concerned.

Sheffield takes you through his songs, his times, and the music is the driving force some of the time and takes the passenger seat at others.

A great way to see if you’ll like this book is to read the section named for Prince’s “Purple Rain.” It chronicles Rob’s summer as the ice cream man, a summer filled with teenage freedom and forever solidifies the impossibility of selling Bomb Pops. This is one of the strongest sections. Good, clear writing, humor, and just enough relatibility to keep things fun.

Something that makes Sheffield’s writing about music really work is that he’s not trying to convince you to like or dislike anything. This isn’t like talking to your buddy who will spend an hour trying to convince you that Ride the Lightning is the best Metallica album when it creeps up to maybe fifth on your list. This isn’t like talking to some goofball who tries to convince you that Beyonce is important somehow. This is a guy who likes what he likes, makes no apologies for it, and tells you what he likes about it. Much like the claim he makes about Duran Duran having mostly female fans and not really giving a damn, Sheffield will have people who disagree with him, but he’ll go right along doing his thing.

The weaker points come in when reading about songs you’ve never really hear of or don’t give two shits about. As the wave of 80′s nostalgia passes over us, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to read a little something about Flock of Seagulls, David Bowie, and Hall & Oates. But Paul McCartney, L’Trimm, and the group Haysie Fantayzee (which I’m not entirely convinced wasn’t a joke because the story was so perfectly 80′s pop) round out a number of groups. It’s really a nostalgic trip through the 80′s, but moreso if you actually lived through them. Not a lot of time is spent catching you up, and folks born after 1985 will be left behind children.

To be honest, it was a little bit like a driving through a foreign country. It went fast, I enjoyed it, but at times I was so busy trying to figure out where I was that I didn’t really get to enjoy the sights. To help you out I’ve included a track list of the main songs mentioned in the book, so if you want to spend a couple bucks or know someone with a decent library of80′s music you can really get a leg up on this one.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield. Check it out July 15th. Or, you know, after that.

Songs from the Book:

The Go-Go’s, “Our Lips Are Sealed”
David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes”
Ray Parker Jr., “A Woman Needs Love”
The Rolling Stones, “She’s So Cold”
The Human League, “Love Action”
O.M.D., “Enola Gay”
Culture Club, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya”
Hall & Oates, “Maneater”
Roxy Music, “More Than This”
Bonnie Taylor, “Total Eclipse of the Heart”
Haysi Fantayzee, “Shiny Shiny”
A Flock of Seagulls, “Space Age Love Song”
Chaka Khan, “I Feel For You”
Prince, “Purple Rain”
Paul McCartney, “No More Lonely Nights”
Madonna, “Crazy For You”
The Replacements, “Left Of The Dial”
The Smiths, “Ask”
The Psychedelic Furs, “Pretty In Pink”
Lita Ford, “Kiss Me Deadly”
Tone Loc, “Funky Cold Medina”
New Kids On The Block, “Hangin’ Tough”
Big Daddy Kane, “Ain’t No Half Steppin’”
L’Trimm, “Cars With Boom”
Duran Duran, “All She Wants Is”

Fencing the Sky by James Galvin

This is one of those perfect books that makes it difficult to pick up anything else afterwards.

Though it's a novel, this is a nice companion book to James Galvin's classic, the Meadow. You could almost think of it as part II as the time is closer to the present, and the end of the Meadow, at which point open land is being parceled and essentially destroyed, is the beginning of this book.

The book has an almsot Edward Abbey feel to it in terms of the changing landscape and different groups fighting over the same area. But where Abbey's concepts and ideas rise to the top, overpowering his writing style, James Galvin treats each word with the same care and warmth that he gives to his overarching theme.

Another great writer, Tom Spanbauer, says that every writer has to do three things with readers: "Teach them something, make them laugh, and break their hearts." This book will teach you about ranching and the American West, make you laugh your ass off with character descriptions and wild tales, and if it doesn't break your heart, your blood must be pumping through something harder than the granite under Wyoming's soil.

How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley

This book of short personal essays started out about like Crosley's first, I Was Told There Would Be Cake. They weren't everything I would hope for from David Sedaris, but then what is?

The first couple essays were decent, peppered with funny moments, but they have a strong case of New-York-Itis, the disease that runs through books, the symptoms of which include referencing New York, talking about how New York is a strange and wonderful place, and attempting to describe the way in which New Yorkers are tough, savvy, or whatever (although to be fair, she does acknowledge that New Yorkers do revel in squalor at times, which was nice). I think this happens as so many publishers are in New York, and because so many writers work with publishers in some capacity before getting published, New York becomes the center of the book world. Having never been there, I hesitate to say much more about it, but I get that subways are crowded, cabs range from unpleasant to unholy, and when you concentrate a shitload of people in a tiny space you are bound to be constrained by different types of shit. However, Crosley handles most of it well, and she does some linguistic backflips that are worth a laugh on their own merit.

And the book really picks up. In "Light Pollution" Crosley describes a trip made to Alaska for a wedding, and though it's already funny, it takes a turn that brings it to a very human and very dark place. And the real gem, the final essay called "Off the Back of a Truck" is one of the better chronicles of the beginning and end of a relationship. She's smart, she makes a lot of wise statements, and people will be quoting pieces of this to crying friends over the phone for years to come. And the best part is that just when she's about to break your heart, she throws in a line that makes you laugh without destroying the tension. There's a balancing act there, and she pulls it off perfectly.

Read that last one first. I kid you not. If you like it, then read the rest.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

There are a lot of other low-star reviews for this book from people who say they aren’t into dogs, and that seems a little unfair. You shouldn’t get more than a couple pages in before you realize this is a dog-centric book and accept it. I don’t really care about dogs, to be honest. I don’t spend a lot of time in Petsmart, nor do I raise fighting dogs with names like “Sagat,” “M.Bison” and “Chun Li.” My personal affection for dogs lies somewhere in between beating them in a warehouse and commenting on how much they’re like people, I guess. I don’t wish them any harm, but on the other hand I don’t have one in my house and think it’s funny to dress them in bumblebee costumes when the opportunity arises.

This book also has low reviews based on the fact that people don’t like car racing. In fact, I read one where the person was disappointed that the book wasn’t about running, like racing 5K’s and shit. Look, if you pick up a book and it’s about driving, don’t give it a bad review because you want it to be a about a footrace. I didn’t give a crappy review to Jane Eyre because I wanted it to be about hot babes who get drunk and head out to the clubs. I gave it a crappy review because I thought it sucked, but it sucked in its own right, not because it wasn’t an entirely different book.

Also, it’s unfair because the book isn’t disguising itself as something else. Look at the cover. A picture of a dog and the word “racing” are right there! And the first paragraph mentions both the fact that the narrator is a dog and that the best thing he’s ever seen is the 1993 Grand Prix, which he also points out is an automobile race.

If you read, say, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you could be pissed off that it doesn’t contain nearly enough zombie action, or that the title is really the funniest part, or that it was way more Jane Austen than George Romero. That makes sense. You were led to believe the book was going to be one thing, but then it turned out to be another. But you wouldn’t go see Toy Story 3 and complain because you didn’t think there was enough full-frontal nudity. Nothing led you to expect it, and if you’re looking for nudity you are in the completely wrong movie, which is your own fault. The Art of Racing in the Rain is honest and upfront about what it is, so readers are not in for a surprise.

The whole point of that was to tell you this: I read the entire book mostly out of book club obligation, but I want to review it knowing that I’m not someone who should be reading it in the first place. So keeping in mind that I don’t care about race cars, dogs, dogs being run over by race cars or giant dogs eating race cars, here we go: The good thing about this book is that it clips along. The plot moves fast, and the pacing works well with the story and the doggy perspective. You can read it in a day, which I consider a plus. Screw War and Peace. Get an editor. The racing parts were interesting even as someone who didn’t go in with any knowledge or passion for racing. They aren’t overwhelming, and you learn a little something about it without getting so in-depth that it distracts from the story as a whole. Hell, I’ve never been in a fistfight, but that doesn’t disqualify me from reading Fight Club.

Okay, here’s the bad part: Way too much time convincing me that the dog really could tell this story. The dog knows things that dogs shouldn’t really know. For example, in the opening of a chapter the dog explains that Seattle had a long winter and high-pollen spring, which means that pharmaceutical companies must be doing gangbusters. Why a dog would care about that is beyond me, but I also don’t really care how he found out. In other words, if I can accept Why, I can accept How. The author goes to some stretchy lengths to make me believe that a dog can tell this story, but he should just assume that once I get past page 10 I’m on board, and at that point he should let it go. It’s a lesson that could be learned from great comic books. Take Spider-Man, for example. Spider-Man comics spend a lot of time showing him do spider stuff, but the good ones don’t waste a lot of time explaining How he does it. The movie showed a half-second clip of little spines coming out of his finger, and then we knew he could climb stuff. End of story. He didn’t have to keep reminding us or explain that they spines go through his gloves or whatever. We don’t really care about that, so let’s get on with the story. For Art of Racing in the Rain, I felt like the author didn’t believe that people would buy in to his concept, which is fair because it’s far-fetched (dog pun alert), but he should have just done a Ripley and dropped it, letting the reader decide to Believe it or Not.

Overall, as a guy who doesn’t give a damn about any of the surface contents, the book was pretty good. It moved along, kept me interested, and the ending was completely satisfying. If you’re a dog person, this is a good one to check out. Stein nails some dog behaviors, and he gives some speculative perspective on some of the stranger things dogs do, like tearing up stuffed animals or killing woodland creatures. Give it a shot, read a chapter. It’ll take 5 minutes, and then you can decide from there.