Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen was originally published in 2006. My paperback edition is 350 pages, including an author interview and reader's guide. The synopsis of the story follows:

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.

The story progresses smoothly and it is truly an enjoyable book to read. I very highly recommend Water for Elephants and am asking myself why on earth did I wait so long to read it? rating 5

Publishers Weekly review at Barnes and Noble:

"...The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures, including an elephant who only responds to Polish commands. He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers-a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clich d prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book. (May 26) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information."

Quotes:

" 'The disaster March...means something's gone bad - real bad... Could be anything - fire in the big top, stampede, whatever...The poor rubes probably don't even know it yet.' "

"I knew how important it was to keep her secret, and keep it I did - for the rest of her life and beyond. In seventy years, I've never told a blessed soul."

"Either there's been an accident of there's roadwork, because a gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They're spidery and frail, their hair as fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me."

" 'You didn't just jump a train, boy. You done jumped the Flying Squadron of the Benzini Brother's Most Spectacular Show on Earth.' "

"And to this day I have no idea who they were. I know my children, don't get me wrong - but these are not my children. These are the children of my children, and their children, too, and maybe even theirs... You multiply five by four and then by five again, and it's no wonder I forget how some of them fit in."

"My brain is like a universe whose gases get thinner and thinner at the edges. But it doesn't dissolve into nothingness. I can sense something out there, just beyond my grasp, hovering, waiting..."

Into the Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is a nonfiction account of the wandering pilgrimage of Chris McCandless that eventually lead him to his tragic death in the Alaska wilderness in 1992. Originally published in 1996, my paperback copy is 207 pages. This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. After I finished it I wondered why I put off reading it for so long, especially since I also really enjoyed Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven.

The story of McCandless is introduced right on the cover of my edition with the following words: "In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to a charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and invented a life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter...." Rating: 4.5

From Amazon:

"After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods. - Publishers Weekly; Reed Business Information"

Quotes:

"Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 as anonymously as he walked into them in April."

"Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however; that cares nothing for hope or longing."

"I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world..."

"He just didn't make the connection. It was like he was off in his own universe."

"Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense. Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to have great difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest."

McCandless was a seeker and he had an impractical fascination with the harsh side of nature."

"He wasn't antisocial - he always had friends, and everybody liked him - but he could go off and entertain himself for hours...He could be alone without being lonely."

Martin Dressler

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser won the 1997 Pulitzer for Fiction. It was originally published in 1996. My paperback edition has 293 pages. This appears to be one of those books people either enjoy or dislike. Personally, much of your reaction to this book will depend upon how you view it. Martin Dressler is subtitled The Tale of an American Dreamer for a reason. It is a multi-tiered work that encompasses an American myth. In Dressler, Millhauser has created a character that rises from humble beginnings, working in his father's cigar store, and reaches his goal, a hotel magnate. As Dressler moves more and more into his dream world and is successful with his ventures, his personal life disintegrates. When he takes his vision to the ultimate expression, the other-worldly Grand Cosmo, the question arises, "Did he dream the wrong dream?" I highly recommend. rating: 4

Amazon.com

Martin Dressler is a turn-of-the-century New York City entrepreneur who begins in his father's cigar store but dreams of a bigger empire. That dream shapes into a series of large hotels. At first, Dressler's seems the archetypal American success story, but he does not quite grasp the future. The Manhattan of fabled skyline is about to take shape just over the horizon, but Dressler cannot see it. So the story becomes another kind of fable, as Dressler contemplates having "dreamed the wrong dream."

Quotes:

first sentence:

"There once was a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeeper's son, who rose from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune"

"And he had a gift that surprised people: he could swiftly sense the temperament of a customer and make sensible, precise suggestions."

"But if people liked him... it wasn't at all, he decided, because he was striking to look at...it was because of something else, some quality of sympathy or curiosity that made him concentrate his deepest attention on them, made him sense their secret moods."

"As he walked, looking about, taking it all in, feeling a pleasant tension in his calves and thighs, he felt a surge of energy, a kind of restlessness, a desire to do something to test himself, to become, in some way, larger than he was."

"In Mr. Westerhoven's arguments there was always a ground of the solid and practical, but Martin knew that they were arguing... about the manager's secret desire to stop the city from it's rush into the new century, his desire to return to his childhood parlor..."

Lost 3

This is what I've been doing in the evenings.

The Giver

The Giver by Lois Lowry was originally published in 1993. My paperback copy has 180 pages. The Giver was the well earned recipient of the 1994 Newberry Medal. This is a young adult book, recommended for ages 12-14; based on that fact I am going to highly recommend it. If The Giver were written for an older audience I would have wanted to see more details and more character development, however, I do highly recommend The Giver as a worthwhile dystopian novel.

Rating: 4

From Amazon.com

In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world and struggles against the weight of its hypocrisy. With echoes of Brave New World, in this 1994 Newbery Medal winner, Lowry examines the idea that people might freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable society. Gradually Jonas learns just how costly this ordered and pain-free society can be, and boldly decides he cannot pay the price.

Quotes:

"For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure."

"It was one of the rituals, the evening telling of feelings."

"You're ready for the pills, that's all. That's the treatment for Stirrings"

"How could someone not fit in? The community was so meticulously ordered, the choices so carefully made."

"It's the memories of the whole world... Before you, before me, before the previous Receiver, and generations before him."

"It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete when we went to Sameness."

"We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences... We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others."

Chunkster Challenge

I'll be participating in the Chunkster Challenge this year since I have books on my TBR list that qualify:

Echo Maker - Powers, TBR, chunkster
The Lost - Mendelsohn, TBR, chunkster
Oppenheimer - Bird & Sherwin, TBR, chunkster
The Terror - Simmons, TBR, chunkster
Alternates:
The Way the Crow Flies - MacDonald, chunkster
Gold Bug Variations - Powers, chunkster
Einstein: His Life and Universe - Isaacson

The Orchid Thief

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean was originally published in1998. My Ballentine paperback edition of this nonfiction book was published in 2000 and is 284 pages long (plus a reader's guide in the back). I really enjoyed this book. If you read it with the preconceived idea that it is going to be an exciting true crime story, then you will likely be very disappointed. What The Orchid Thief is is an interesting look at obsession and collecting, along with some Florida history, Seminole Tribe background, court cases, and several other topics. I found The Orchid Thief extremely entertaining and I highly recommend it.

Rating: 4

From Amazon:

Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors.

The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:

I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.

Even Orlean--so leery of orchid fever that she immediately gives away any plant that's pressed upon her by the growers in Laroche's circle--develops a desire to see a ghost orchid blooming and makes several ultimately unsuccessful treks into the Fakahatchee. Filled with Palm Beach socialites, Native Americans, English peers, smugglers, and naturalists as improbably colorful as the tropical blossoms that inspire them, this is a lyrical, funny, addictively entertaining read. --Barrie Trinkle

Quotes:

"Laroche's passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs."

"Schemes like these, folding virtue and criminality around profit, are Laroche's specialty. Just when you have finally concluded that he is a run-of-the-mill crook, he unveils an ulterior and somewhat principled but always lucrative reason for his crookedness."

"He is also the most moral amoral person I've ever known."

"... Florida is also the last of the American frontier. The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both, though are always in flux..."

"[F]or years there has been an apparition wandering the swamp, the Swamp Ape, which is said to be seven feet tall and weigh seven hundred pounds and have the physique of a human, the posture of an ape, the body odor of a skunk, and an appetite for lima beans."

"Hunting clubs used to raise and fatten ordinary pigs on local farms and then let them loose in the swamp so club members could then have fun tracking them down and shooting them. Some of the pigs didn't get shot, and some of those adapted to swamp living. Their offspring are now thriving in the Fakahatchee and have been transformed into gigantic, nasty swamp pigs who are totally mad and totally wild."

"Scams and real estate schemes flourish because land in Florida is not like land anywhere else in the country. For one thing, Florida land is elastic. You can make more of it."