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Date Posted: 15:27:19 09/23/07 Sun
Author: Lynx
Subject: Time for another book thread. (One I liked, one I didn't.)

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan (a National Book Award winner)
Walter Cronkite called this one "can't-put-it-down history," and Uncle Walter does not lie. While previous Dust Bowl tomes have concentrated on those who left, this one focuses on those who stayed, and is an unparalleled chronicle of the worst manmade ecological disaster in human history. In short, it beautifully validates two things Mr. Lynx and I have long held to be true; that the Great Plains simply were never suitable to have been cultivated, and were never meant to have been inhabited by large numbers of human beings.
If you love a good history, you can't go wrong with this book. I grew up in OK, and therefore heard about the Dust Bowl all my life, but there were countless things in this book that I never knew. Absolutely fascinating.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
This is the huge bestseller that received outstanding reviews in everything from the NYT Book Review to lowly People Magazine. I thought it was complete dreck, and I'll tell you why.
All of the reviewers heaped praise on Sara Gruen for her "meticulous research." However, all the way through the book, I couldn't escape the feeling that it had been written by someone who had never even been to a circus, a feeling that was validated when I read the interview at the end of the book and learned that, prior to deciding to write a book about the circus, author Gruen had never been to one. One of my college roommates was a real circus girl, born and raised in one, so I spent a couple of semesters hearing about all things circus, and, trust me, Sara Gruen does not even scratch the surface.
Another complaint about this book and a piece of advice to all writers of fiction: Unless you can do it convincingly, never write in the voice of the gender that you are not. Gruen attempts to voice a male protagonist in this novel, and does it very, very badly. (Some writers do it well. Not Gruen.) If I had not known for sure that it was written by a woman, it wouldn't have been a tough guess.
Aside from those two complaints, I found the book to be over-sentimental, totally predictable, and not the least bit interesting. I couldn't wait for it to be over.
One last gripe. All good novels build our expectations, and then present us with a surprise. Gruen does this, too, but doesn't seem to realize that the surprise has to sound true. Her surprise was utterly ridiculous.
In short, thumbs down.

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