Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk

9780385526357  

Doubleday

May 4, 2010


My thanks to the Amazon Vine Program for sending this book.  I am a huge and long-term fan of Palahniuk's books so I was eager to get into this one.  Although a bit slow at the beginning, it turned out to be an awesome satire well worth sticking around for.  One of the biggest criticisms I've read about this book is that this is not the same Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club (which is one of the best books I've ever read, quite frankly), but I tend to get a bit tired of hearing this sort of thing. People blasted Ian McEwan's Solar because it wasn't the same McEwan that wrote Atonement or Saturday -- but come on. Why aren't our favorite authors allowed to do something different once in a while?  Is that such a bad thing? If I were an author I'd be bored staying within the confines of the same mold of every book I'd previously written and I would want to be different once in a while.

(note: page numbers are from the galley copy, not the finished work)

 Without going too much into plot details, Tell-All is a sendup of  that genre of book which according to Palahniuk, Walter Winchell called the "bile-ography," and especially of those who write them -- the "literary equivalent of a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity..." (33).   I give you the Kitty Kellys of the world who latch on to the seedy details of a person's life hoping to sell millions of copies based on reader titillation, or  the Christina Crawfords who publish their hard-life stories that deface the public image of their celebrity parents, showcasing "flaws and faults" to hopefully launch their own careers (83), which Hedda Hopper (the famous gossip columnist), according to the author, would call a "lie-ography." (96) But it's not just biographies in the spotlight here. The book is also a satire on those who get caught up in celebrity worship and gratuitous name-dropping, and on the celebrities themselves for whom life imitates art.  The famous people whose names are highlighted in bold print in Tell-All may be unfamiliar to modern readers, because the book is set in Hollywood's heyday, but substitute any modern celeb name and it's all the same. Nothing much has changed, down to celebrity adoption of less fortunate babies. 

--intermission and illustration--
Personal anecdotes:

a)a few years back, my husband was flying from FL to CA and heard a conversation between two men sitting in the two seats ahead of him. One man was going on about how he was an exec at a record company in Los Angeles, and asked the other what he did. The second guy said "I work for Will." He went on to tell him that he'd just talked to Will that morning, and yada yada yada Will this, Will that. As the conversation progressed, "Will" turned out to be Will Smith, and it turns out that the guy was the principal of Will's kids' school.

b) there was a secretary at a school where I once taught in Los Angeles whose claim to fame was that she used to be  in "the business" (like big deal, everyone in LA is either in the business or wants to be).  Every day she'd tell whoever would listen about how she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Beyonce, and other popular singers.  On and on and on, each day someone else's name would drop from her lips, holding her co-workers enthralled with her stories. Turns out she was a receptionist for Warner Brothers music.

--back to the review--

But this is Chuck Palahniuk, a master of the postmodern, and the best part of his book is his treatment of that other form of -ography, the autobiography.  To say more would be to wreck it for others, but consider that one of the central characters in this novel is Lillian Hellman, author and playwright, who was notorious for penning a series of memoirs in which the facts weren't always the facts. I'll leave it to others to figure out...I ended this book with a huge chuckle. And I liked it.

Read slowly, don't focus on the names too much ...there's an awesome and very ironic story here that will make you either laugh at the end or smack yourself in the head when you figure it all out. To all the naysayers of this book -- go read it again -- it's near genius. This is a book that demands active reader participation...you have to think about this one.

happy mother's day to all of my reader friends

My hat's especially off to those of you with small children who still manage to find time in the day to read. I've totally forgotten what a tremendous feat this is! I'm in Seattle with my son & his family and reading time doesn't manage to catch up to me until about 8 pm.

I hope everyone has a great mother's day ...and now I'm going to go get dim sum.

Columbine, by Dave Cullen

ISBN: 9780446548928

Twelve (Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group) 2009

First Trade Edition, 2010



Back in 1999 my daughter was 10, still in elementary school and I never worried about sending her there each day. I mean, why would I? We lived in Santa Barbara, CA, a beautiful city on the coast where life was good and the worst thing we had to worry about at her school was the occasional episode of kids picking on other kids (not on my kid, but the parents were all aware of the major troublemakers). Then things sort of changed for a while on April 20th, when in Littleton, Colorado, high-school seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went to school like they did every other day, bringing an arsenal of guns and bombs and going on a killing spree that left 13 dead and several others wounded.  I couldn't get past the fact that the parents of the children who'd been killed had said good-bye to their kids that morning, never to see them again.  So for some time, I just sat and let CNN take me through the day's events, waiting for any new information they would broadcast about Columbine.  And from that day until this past week, I totally believed that the Columbine shooting was all about a couple of misfit kids who went into the school to take their revenge on all of those who had made fun of them or who had scorned them. I believed that Harris and Klebold were members of some creepy group known as the Trenchcoat Mafia who got some of their ideas from Marilyn Manson and waited precisely until April 20th because it was Hitler's birthday. And you know what? I wasn't alone.

Columbine is Dave Cullen's attempt to set the record straight.  It is the culmination of ten years of the author's research and hard work, based on witness testimony, police reports, survivor accounts, FBI files and psychological investigations, and last but not least, Harris and Klebold's own writing and video. As part of his work, Cullen  examines and attempts to debunk the "truths" put forth by  the media at the time, which we probably accepted because we were so eager to understand how this could happen and why. For example, rather than being outcasts at their school, both Klebold and Harris had friends, did quite well academically and participated in school events and were considering the senior prom.  However, Cullen argues for the fact that Eric Harris was a psychopath who could play the game and play it well, knowing precisely how to act for authority figures, while Dylan Klebold, who was more of just a follower, was suffering from severe bipolar depression and ultimately suicidal. Not that he's trying to excuse their behavior, but his research gives readers more of an insight into the why. Furthermore, the diaries and videos left behind indicated that Harris' plan was to take out the entire school (not just selected targets) with bombs and napalm placed in strategic locations, even as far as having bombs explode from the car to reach people who escaped the building and the police and medical personnel who would come once word got out.

Cullen offers a chilling recreation of what probably happened that day, which is extremely disturbing. Nearly as frightening were the actions taken (or not taken in some cases) by the Sheriff's department, whose officials realized they had made some really bad mistakes prior to Columbine as far as Harris and tried to cover their own butts. He also examines the aftermath of the shooting on the survivors and their families as well as the families left behind, does so very professionally -- no tabloidish reporting here. The book is obviously well researched, leaning on facts and eyewitness accounts, and never comes across as contrived.

If you're interested, after reading Cullen's account, you just might want to go back and revisit what you think you know about that day in April 1999.  I wasn't there, so I can't possibly swear to the veracity of everything that Cullen says, but his account is highly credible and makes for an intense read. If you are at all curious about the events of that day and want a fuller picture than the one offered by the media at the time, I most highly recommend you read this book.

trouble with comments!!!!!

I was just told via an email that I'm evidently having trouble with comments. So if you've posted one somewhere and it's not published or answered, I apologize...I didn't do it on purpose!

(continuing from April) The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin

ISBN: 0061655937

Harper One

The real title of this book is a long one: The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. It's a good book if you're into this sort of thing, easily readable and it raises a lot of questions for further exploration.

Lattin's central thesis is that these four men, "three brilliant scholars and one ambitious freshman," who were all together at Harvard University in the early 1960s, were able to transform not only their own lives but much of American culture as well, stemming from their involvement (or in one case, non-involvement) in a psychedelic drug research project started by Timothy Leary.  He notes that these people, collectively the Harvard Psychedelic club, "each in his own way" led Americans to think about themselves from an inner point of view regarding mind, body and spirit. And it all started in 1960, when Leary, on a summer vacation in Mexico with his son Jack, tried some psilocybin mushrooms known as "flesh of the gods" along with a bottle of beer.
 
The book goes on to sketch out the lives of these four men and their involvement with Leary and his mind-expanding research. Timothy Leary, whose slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out" would become a catchphrase for the counterculture movement of the 1960s, was a Harvard professor of psychology in 1960. Along with Richard Alpert, who had a PhD in psychology and did research into human consciousness (and who later went to India and was reborn as Ram Dass), he started the Harvard Psilocybin Project (which ultimately became the "Harvard Psychedelic Project as mescaline & LSD were introduced) at the university's Center for Personality Research, where participants would take controlled doses and report their experiences. Huston Smith (author of The World's Religions) was a friend and admirer of Aldous Huxley, whose mystical experiences with mescaline became the basis of his famous work The Doors of Perception. Smith met Leary through Huxley, and was talked into taking part in the psilocybin project because Leary wanted someone who knew "something about mysticism" and religion to experience the drug and then analyze the reports in terms of the mystical. The fourth member of the group, Andrew Weil, a student (now a well-known advocate of alternative medicine & wellness), tried to get involved in the Psychedelic Project by the time LSD was drug of choice in mind-expansion research, but was turned down due to his undergraduate status. Weil's roommate was befriended by Alpert and let into the program, and in revenge, Weil became a whistle blower and basically shut down the project and got Leary and Alpert ousted from Harvard. That's when everything really started, and when LSD and Leary started making their way out into the public, away from the confines of the ivied halls.

Lattin quickly traces these four people from their beginnings through the whole hippie and counterculture movement on into the present, and his book makes for really interesting reading for many reasons, not just because of the whole drug thing. Now here come the buts:
1)I'm still not sure why Huston Smith is included as a major player as a member of the Harvard Psychedelic Club.  He did have some early involvement in the psilocybin project, but wasn't so much known for his advocacy of mind-altering drugs but for interfaith understanding as a step toward peace in the world. Huston had actually begun to slowly disassociate himself from Leary some time later.
2) There were already movements afoot for changes away from the status quo going on already in the 1950s leading into the 1960s: poets and writers were already taking steps in moving toward nonconformity, the civil rights movement was already drawing young college students into action, and Jack Kerouac and other members of the  beat movement were looking for something new within themselves, urging others to follow. It doesn't seem just that Lattin would place Leary's ideas of consciousness expansion through the use of mind-altering drugs as the cornerstone of change from the 1950s to the 1960s.
3) While I understand that the author would have to interject some of Leary's autobiographical material into his work, my guess is that some of the  information gleaned from it was probably fabricated or at the very least, ramblings from a disturbed mind. Leary was probably so far gone in 1983 by the time the autobiography came out that it would be difficult to trust a lot of what he said. Let's just say he may be an unreliable narrator at some times.

Lattin's book on the whole is interesting, and it's a good read if you're interested in the psychedelic revolution and its proponents in the 1960s and the whole counterculture that existed and grew at the time. A lot of space is also given over to what happened as these people moved on in life as attitudes changed.  It is an extremely readable book and made me want to explore this time period a bit further, and any author that can pique my curiosity like that is okay by me.

April Reading Roundup

 There's no denying that April was a good reading month. Not buying any books for two months forced me to focus on what I had at hand, and it was good to get through so many of them.  Here's the list of what I finished in April:

Australian Crime Fiction:
Crime of Silence, by Patricia Carlon (review to come)

Books Which Became Movies: 

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote*
The Ghost, by Robert Harris*
The African Queen, by C.S. Forester*
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene*
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett*
Shattered, by Richard Neely* (Originally published as The Plastic Nightmare)
The Stoning of Soraya M., by Freidoune Sahebjam*
The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham*
Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, by Daniel Wallace*

Crime Fiction

Asia Hand, by Christopher G. Moore

Fiction in Translation
The Thursday Night Widows,by Claudia Pineiro (review to come) 
 
New Fiction
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell



Nonfiction
Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy, by William Irwin [ed.] (review to come)
The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin


Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Arctic Chill, by Arnaldur Indridason
Hypothermia, by Arnaldur Indridason


I count 17 for total number of books read for the month. Not as good as last month, but that's okay.

In other book stuff for the month:

1) my book group read and discussed Colm Toibin's Brooklyn with mixed feelings about the book all around

2) Added to the Amazon wishlist:

• The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of An Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny, by Wendell Steavenson
• Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts
• Shadow and Light, by Jonathan Rabb
• Darkness Falls From the Air, by Nigel Balchin
• Castle, by J. Robert Lennon
• Anonymous Celebrity, by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao
• The Summer of the Ibume, by Natsuhiko Kyogoku
• The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• The Sleeping Dragon by Miyuki Miyabe
• The Eye that Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, by Frank Morn

3) several books left for new homes via Swaptree, Paperback Swap and Librarything's Member Giveway program, and for the local Goodwill as I continue to sift through books in order to gain some control over my library

4) Maintained the book-buying moratorium with one exception.

That's it (and that was a lot!).

home. tired. leaving again shortly.

home again after a mini-vacation and ready for sleep. How come whenever I go on vacation I come home exhausted? And it's off to Seattle the day after tomorrow for two weeks.

I got a lot of reading done but that's all going to have to wait for tomorrow, along with the roundup for April. I can't even think right now.