A list of books that have been on the floor next to my computer waiting to be noted. But now, I have no time left before leaving on a year-long adventure, traveling the US, concentrating on visiting the National Wildlife Refuges. So here is the list:
Elie Wiesel: Night
Justin Go: The Steady Running of the Hour
Jim Harrison: Brown Dog
Don Stap: A Parrot Without a Name
Victoria Sweet: God's Hotel
Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
Peter Mayle: Encore Provence
Andrew Schneider / DAvid McCumber: An Air That Kills (How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal).
Francine Mathews: Death in a Cold Hard Light
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night
Carl Hiaasen: Skin Tight
Erich Maria Remargue: All Quiet on the Western Front
Alison Pick: The Sweet Edge
Adam Schuitema: Freshwater Boys
Roxana Robinson: Sweetwater
Hisham Matar: In the Country of Men
Stacey O'Brien: Wesley the Owl
Joanne Harris: Five Quarters of the Orange
Molly Wizenberg: A Homemade Life
Peter Godwin: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (A Memoir of Africa)
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
J. Courtney Sullivan: Maine
Ann Leary: The Good House
Dani Shapiro: Devotion
John Hersey: Hiroshima
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Book: Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter
This was a fascinating book. Who would have known, right? that a book about what we throw away could be so interesting...
So all of us who put our little recycling bins out are really only "harvesting" Adam reminds us. What then happens to our stuff? "Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place."
The author is seldom this confrontational and admits that, he too, wants the latest iPhone.
Much of it eventually ends up in China where things like Christmas tree lights and our "e-waste" and old cars (the average life of an American car is only 10 years!) are deconstructed (often by hand) in order to separate and salvage the components for re-use. Our discards arrive via container ships. That is one part of this story. Of course, as China and India become wealthier and their standard of living rises, they also produce more and more junk.
Each chapter is packed with information as Adam travels the world, riding with Chinese scrap buyers in the US, attending scrap dealer conventions, visiting the scrap factories in China and high tech plants in our country. He concentrates on China's role in this global market since he lives in Shanghai. His family owned a junkyard, a recycling plant in Minnesota, so he has street cred and is granted access where few westerners would be allowed.
His writing is engaging, informative and not boring in the least. After all, we are ones making the junkyard planet. We should be interested. The statistics are astounding.
"We arrive late…but the upper section of the street is still dominated by a long flatbed piled ten feet high with tightly packed automobile bumpers, laundry detergent bottles, plastic washing machine gears. plumbing, defective factory parts, television cases, and heavy-duty plastic bags stuffed with plastic factory rejects from somewhere far away. Workers climb atop it and unload the pieces by hand, dropping parts and bags to the ground, where they're inspected and weighed by two portly men with notepads…We walk the length of the street…The cobblestones bake in the sun, covered in trash, melted plastics, and burn marks where unrecyclable--that is, unsalable--materials were dispatched in the night. Here and there, small-scale buyers cart around old plastic detergent containers dripping of their former contents; the pungent aroma of melting plastic wafts through an open gate. At the end of the street is a drainage ditch--perhaps once a creek--choked with garbage, a plastic mannequin head, and the remains of a green plastic bin with three circling arrows and the word RECYCLING in a English."
"Soon, maybe later today, my old phones will be downstairs in that fisherman's cage, awaiting an acid bath that'll turn them into gold and the sweet stench that chokes this dusty town. But that won't be the end. Soon after, that gold and the other raw materials will be sold to a factory that transforms them into new things--smartphones, computers, and the other accessories of daily life…Still, environmentally secure electronics recycling is far from a priority in a place that lacks access to clean air, water, and--in many rural areas--proper childhood nutrition. Right or wrong, for many Chinese--especially in Guiyu--electronics recycling is a route to prosperity that might allow them to afford those bigger problems."
We wander outside and up a narrow dirt path that winds between the abandon homes that once constituted an old village. The doors are wooden and red, the walls thick cement. Down one lane I see laundry hanging from a line between building, and near another lane I smell old urine. There's no scent of burning electronics here, no stench of wealth…."
Lots of quotes here and these were selected by randomly opening the book here and there. Such is the quality of Minter's writing that every page is compelling…..
So all of us who put our little recycling bins out are really only "harvesting" Adam reminds us. What then happens to our stuff? "Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place."
The author is seldom this confrontational and admits that, he too, wants the latest iPhone.
Much of it eventually ends up in China where things like Christmas tree lights and our "e-waste" and old cars (the average life of an American car is only 10 years!) are deconstructed (often by hand) in order to separate and salvage the components for re-use. Our discards arrive via container ships. That is one part of this story. Of course, as China and India become wealthier and their standard of living rises, they also produce more and more junk.
Each chapter is packed with information as Adam travels the world, riding with Chinese scrap buyers in the US, attending scrap dealer conventions, visiting the scrap factories in China and high tech plants in our country. He concentrates on China's role in this global market since he lives in Shanghai. His family owned a junkyard, a recycling plant in Minnesota, so he has street cred and is granted access where few westerners would be allowed.
His writing is engaging, informative and not boring in the least. After all, we are ones making the junkyard planet. We should be interested. The statistics are astounding.
"We arrive late…but the upper section of the street is still dominated by a long flatbed piled ten feet high with tightly packed automobile bumpers, laundry detergent bottles, plastic washing machine gears. plumbing, defective factory parts, television cases, and heavy-duty plastic bags stuffed with plastic factory rejects from somewhere far away. Workers climb atop it and unload the pieces by hand, dropping parts and bags to the ground, where they're inspected and weighed by two portly men with notepads…We walk the length of the street…The cobblestones bake in the sun, covered in trash, melted plastics, and burn marks where unrecyclable--that is, unsalable--materials were dispatched in the night. Here and there, small-scale buyers cart around old plastic detergent containers dripping of their former contents; the pungent aroma of melting plastic wafts through an open gate. At the end of the street is a drainage ditch--perhaps once a creek--choked with garbage, a plastic mannequin head, and the remains of a green plastic bin with three circling arrows and the word RECYCLING in a English."
"Soon, maybe later today, my old phones will be downstairs in that fisherman's cage, awaiting an acid bath that'll turn them into gold and the sweet stench that chokes this dusty town. But that won't be the end. Soon after, that gold and the other raw materials will be sold to a factory that transforms them into new things--smartphones, computers, and the other accessories of daily life…Still, environmentally secure electronics recycling is far from a priority in a place that lacks access to clean air, water, and--in many rural areas--proper childhood nutrition. Right or wrong, for many Chinese--especially in Guiyu--electronics recycling is a route to prosperity that might allow them to afford those bigger problems."
We wander outside and up a narrow dirt path that winds between the abandon homes that once constituted an old village. The doors are wooden and red, the walls thick cement. Down one lane I see laundry hanging from a line between building, and near another lane I smell old urine. There's no scent of burning electronics here, no stench of wealth…."
Lots of quotes here and these were selected by randomly opening the book here and there. Such is the quality of Minter's writing that every page is compelling…..
Book: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
A novel set in contemporary Lebanon which makes it worthwhile just for that fact; these authors writing from all over the globe are exciting. I feel immersed for the duration in their countries, most of which are in turmoil.
Aaliya Saleh is a divorced 72-year-old woman living in Beirut. The reader is in her presence while the author muses about life and literature while telling some of Aaliya's story. I did feel he was a bit show-offy and that it was important to him that we know how erudite he is…often denigrating popular culture and authors while musing (in the voice of Aaliya) about life's boundaries and pleasures and disappointments and the realities of aging, often with pertinent passages from his impressive knowledge of literature. Yes, in retrospect, my slight sniffiness is not warranted; this is non-American but universal, specifically about one older woman but generally about all of us.
While briefly glancing through this book, I realized there is beautiful writing on nearly every page: "Poetry brought me great pleasure, music immense solace, but I had to train myself to appreciate, train and train. It didn't come naturally to me. When I first heard Wagner, Messiaen or Ligeti, the noise was unbearable, but like a child with her first sip of wine, I recognized something that I could love with practice, and practice I most certainly did. It's not as if you're born with the ability to love Antonio Lobo Antunes."
Aaliya is getting old; she is not accepted by her family and has few friends. What she does is translate books, but only for herself, never offering them for publication.
"By the way, when the war was winding down in 1988, I think, a publisher called and asked if I would be wiling to 'try my hand' at translating a book. Not one of the translators he normally used was left in our violent city….For a brief moment, a frisson tickled my heart. I could be someone. I could matter. While talking on the phone, I began to rebuild this house of cards called ego. A huff and a puff…."
She dyes her hair an awful bright blue but is not too concerned; it will grow out. She reluctantly goes to see her mother by whom she was never loved enough.
A water pipe breaks and her manuscripts are damaged: "Joumana lifts the title page and sighs. Underneath, the pages are damaged. There seems to be a dry section in the middle of each, the size of a young woman's mittened hand. But the rest of the page, the rest--the smudging, the discoloring, the smell--death, as it always does, creeps toward the core. Mine certainly does."
But the disaster is liberating….as acquaintances arrive to help her…as she thinks wildly of new books to translate: "Coetzee! I would love to do Coetzee; yes, I would….No, I can translate a French book. I can spend a year with my darling Emma Bovary…..Forget Emma, I'm going to translate my Marguerite. Memories of Hadrian, my favorite novel. Marie-Therese may have wanted Vronsky for a husband but I wanted Hadrian. I wanted someone to erect monuments in my memory, build statues…Hadrian or Emma, Emma or Hadrian, a French housewife or a Roman Caesar? Choices, limitless choices--well almost limitless…"
Being the same age….I definitely considered the title.
Aaliya Saleh is a divorced 72-year-old woman living in Beirut. The reader is in her presence while the author muses about life and literature while telling some of Aaliya's story. I did feel he was a bit show-offy and that it was important to him that we know how erudite he is…often denigrating popular culture and authors while musing (in the voice of Aaliya) about life's boundaries and pleasures and disappointments and the realities of aging, often with pertinent passages from his impressive knowledge of literature. Yes, in retrospect, my slight sniffiness is not warranted; this is non-American but universal, specifically about one older woman but generally about all of us.
While briefly glancing through this book, I realized there is beautiful writing on nearly every page: "Poetry brought me great pleasure, music immense solace, but I had to train myself to appreciate, train and train. It didn't come naturally to me. When I first heard Wagner, Messiaen or Ligeti, the noise was unbearable, but like a child with her first sip of wine, I recognized something that I could love with practice, and practice I most certainly did. It's not as if you're born with the ability to love Antonio Lobo Antunes."
Aaliya is getting old; she is not accepted by her family and has few friends. What she does is translate books, but only for herself, never offering them for publication.
"By the way, when the war was winding down in 1988, I think, a publisher called and asked if I would be wiling to 'try my hand' at translating a book. Not one of the translators he normally used was left in our violent city….For a brief moment, a frisson tickled my heart. I could be someone. I could matter. While talking on the phone, I began to rebuild this house of cards called ego. A huff and a puff…."
She dyes her hair an awful bright blue but is not too concerned; it will grow out. She reluctantly goes to see her mother by whom she was never loved enough.
A water pipe breaks and her manuscripts are damaged: "Joumana lifts the title page and sighs. Underneath, the pages are damaged. There seems to be a dry section in the middle of each, the size of a young woman's mittened hand. But the rest of the page, the rest--the smudging, the discoloring, the smell--death, as it always does, creeps toward the core. Mine certainly does."
But the disaster is liberating….as acquaintances arrive to help her…as she thinks wildly of new books to translate: "Coetzee! I would love to do Coetzee; yes, I would….No, I can translate a French book. I can spend a year with my darling Emma Bovary…..Forget Emma, I'm going to translate my Marguerite. Memories of Hadrian, my favorite novel. Marie-Therese may have wanted Vronsky for a husband but I wanted Hadrian. I wanted someone to erect monuments in my memory, build statues…Hadrian or Emma, Emma or Hadrian, a French housewife or a Roman Caesar? Choices, limitless choices--well almost limitless…"
Being the same age….I definitely considered the title.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)