Three Little Book Reviews

Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick"

Despite the impression you may have gotten from the movies, Captain Ahab spends most of his time off stage, below deck, and Moby Dick doesn't appear until the last few pages. Melville once admitted that he tacked on the Ahab story so that there would be a story, and it shows.

It's best to ignore all the academic b.s. about "Moby-Dick" being the great American novel. It was panned by critics (not without good reason) when it first came out, and was nearly forgotten until the aftermath of World War I, when a novel about hubris yielded insight into the minds of the leaders who had gotten the world into such a devastating mess.

What we actually have here is a weird, rambling natural history of whales and whaling. With a subplot about a crazed, obsessive sea captain. And another subplot about a gay romanc -- err, deep friendship between an observant Yankee sailor and a cannibal harpoonist. Often fascinating, often tedious, with poetic, but sometimes incoherent, language that must be read out loud for full effect.

Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth"

I have to apologize to my wife for marking up the margins of "A New Earth" with all my comments. I've never read a book that gave me such an overwhelming urge to talk back to the author. After reflecting on it, I realize I was reacting not to Tolle's basic message, but the tone of his writing.

Eckhart Tolle is a lot better at communicating his ideas through speaking than writing. In his series of online seminars with Oprah he comes across as a moderate thinker, humorous and likable. [Note: I don't know how to link to the archives of the online seminars, but you can find them by going to iTunes and searching for Oprah.com's Spirit Channel.]

In "A New Earth", he is often harshly judgmental, following a pattern of making a very black-and-white condemnation of some aspect of unenlightened humanity on one page, then admitting to a more moderate view a few pages later. I sometimes wondered whether the book's tone was the result of his editor over-urging him not to be wishy washy.

To give a balanced review, I have to say that Tolle's best moments in writing are the little illustrative stories he tells about zen monks or people that he has counseled. It's in these passages that the same personality he displays in the Oprah conversations shows through.

So, what is Tolle's basic message? The power of stilling one's mind of counterproductive, habitual thought patterns by learning to be in the moment. (His previous bestseller, which I haven't read, is called, "The Power of Now".) Tolle is primarily a popularizer of Buddhist thought. And I walked away from reading "A New Earth" with an intereset in reading the Buddhist source materials that influenced Tolle.

Matt Welch, "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick"

This book may seem like a hit piece on the presumptive Republican candidate, but Welch actually wrote it back when it looked like McCain's campaign was barreling towards failure.

This portrait of McCain, largely drawn from carefully reading McCain's own confessional autobiographies, shows a career politician who doesn't care about, and freely flip flops on, issues conservatives are supposed to care about: abortion, immigration, gay marriage, etc. Meanwhile, what does McCain care about? The military life, and national greatness in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt's vision of America.

I doubt this book will have much influence on the upcoming elections. Although McCain has flip flopped on all the big issues in the past, his latest positions on all the big conservative issues are "correct".

Matt Welch, the new editor of the libertarian magazine, reason, wrote "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" while he was still on the editorial staff at the Los Angeles Times. There's a lot in the book that would turn libertarians off to voting for McCain, but few libertarians are fans of McCain or Obama, anyway.

Playground Project

By keeping an eye on garage sales and mailing lists, we've accumulated a world-class collection of little tikes® play structures. We now have a table, a picnic table, a big slide and a little slide -- and the crown jewel of our collection: a blue octopus merry-go-round.



We decided that my big "stay-cation" project would be to build a playground in our backyard. The yard was thoroughly torn up when we remodeled our house, so there wasn't any good place for Nate to play outside. I spent every morning for the last two weeks working on this area just off of our living room and mommy and daddy's offices, where we will be able to keep an eye on him when he is old enough to play outside on his own.

Yesterday, Nate got his first chance to try out his playground. Although we're going to continue taking him to the playground at our local park, he enjoyed these smaller play structures. They are just the right size for him to learn how to climb all over them without getting hurt when he falls off. And he's already fallen off all of them, with daddy hovering nearby but restraining himself from coddling too much.

The hardest part of the project was prepping the 16' x 16' area. The scraggly remains of the old lawn were full of construction trash, roots and weeds, old sprinkler pipes, and that annoying green plastic netting that they use to strengthen rolls of turf. So, I decided to completely clear the topsoil. I think I found nearly a hundred old nails, many that must date back to when our house was built in 1954.

Here, Frances helps out by cutting a bunch of roots that were growing through one corner of the area:



I had originally drawn up plans to do a more elaborate frame around the area, with a bench built in along one side, but I scaled back the plans to fit the amount of time available (and then spent a week more than I thought it would take). The simplified redwood frame is lightweight, but should be stable since it is half-buried in our nearly-hard-as-brick clay soil. Getting the frame square was the hardest part, but the contractor working on our hall bath gave me some tips. (By the way, the hall bath remodel is the reason for all of the trash piled behind the playground.)

Once I had the frame built, I graded the ground, adding back about half the topsoil, carefully raking through it to get out all the crud mentioned above. If you look carefully, you can see that there's a shallow ditch running across the grade. After I had started removing the topsoil, I realized that one of our downspouts has a drain pipe that runs under the sidewalk and drains into the play area. I'm hoping that the ditch will help the water drain to the down-slope side of the frame.



The frame is filled with about four inches of "playground fiber", a mulch of soft wood that doesn't splinter. And is very good at being tracked into the house.

When we were about to try out the playground yesterday afternoon, it was getting hit with some strong sun. So, we decided to move the canopy that we bought for Nate's first birthday party over the play area. It cooled it down nicely.