"Strange and Dangerous Dreams" by Geoff Powter

This was the book that taught me the importance of reading the inside flap of the dust jacket.

I mean, just take a look at the cover. That’s Aleister Crowley, famous occultist and mystic, striking a dramatic pose while some sort of eldritch spiral … well… spirals out from his face. Add in the title (Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness), and one could be forgiven for thinking this book is about Crowley or the occult. It turns out, however, that the most important visual element on the cover is actually the mountain behind Crowley (who was not only a sex-magick practitioner, cult leader, and enthusiast of recreational chemistry, but also an accomplished mountain climber); Strange and Dangerous Dreams is a collection of stories about the dark side of wilderness adventuring.

Why Climb Mount Everest? Because It’s There. Also, I’m Nuts

Author Geoff Powter — both an adventurer himself and a practicing clinical psychologist — has gathered a collection of eleven tales about people whose personal demons both drove and overshadowed their desire to conquer the wilderness (a desire that ultimately destroyed them). He divides them into three categories according to the driving issues and forces behind their characters:

• The Burdened were tormented by horrendous pressure to succeed in their attempts to conquer the wild — either pressure put on them by others or by themselves.
• The Bent appear to have been drawn to adventure and to have behaved as they did because of some fundamental flaw in their own psychological makeup.
• The Lost seem to have drifted into adventuring with the same lack of purpose that characterized other aspects of their lives.

Some of the adventurers Powter includes in Strange and Dangerous Dreams are famous, or notorious, figures whose exploits remain well-known to this day. Others are obscure footnotes in the history of wilderness adventure, now largely forgotten. All, however, are fascinating case studies in what can go wrong when an adventurer’s drive comes from a place of obsession, naiveté, arrogance or despair.

Strange and Dangerous Dreams: A Rogues’ Gallery

Some of the luckless adventurers Powter includes in this book include the following:

Meriwether Lewis

Lewis is well-known as one half of the exploring team of Lewis & Clark, whose expedition explored the territory of the Louisiana Purchase and also the Pacific Northwest. Readers whose knowledge of Lewis begins and ends with the expedition will be surprised to read that his life ended in suicide following what he saw as his failure to meet the expectations of his mentor and father figure, Thomas Jefferson.

Maurice Wilson

Powter calls Wilson’s attempt to scale Mount Everest “an elaborate suicide.” With an almost complete lack of preparation — he acquired no climbing equipment and his training consisted of little more than reading, along with walking several hundred miles from London to his family’s home town of Bradford. There’s no question, however, that he was an innovative thinker; his plan for conquering the mountain included intentionally  crashing his plane as high as possible on Everest’s slopes to save time in the ascent.

Robert Falcon Scott

Scott’s name will be familiar to readers as the leader of two ill-fated expeditions to Antarctica, the first of which accomplished much of scientific interest but failed to reach the South Pole. Scott’s expeditionary force did succeed in reaching the South Pole on his final voyage — only to discover that another team, led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, had been there first. Moreover, he and his team all died on the return journey. Scott’s journals reflect a quintessentially British mixture of fatalism and heroic adherence to an ideal of manly adventuring. As Powter notes:

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“If there was madness in the man, wasn’t there also a touch of madness in his nation’s deification of self-destruction? Amundsen certainly understood the pattern when he wrote this blunt assessment of Scott’s decision to walk to the Pole: ‘Never underestimate the British habit of dying, the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure.’ ”

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What is Wrong With These People?

Powter acknowledges that many members of the wilderness exploration community have little but contempt for the kind of ill-prepared, possibly crazy, gravely naïve people discussed in Strange and Dangerous Dreams, and in fact feel such people aren’t worthy of being included in the annals of heroic adventure. Powter clearly disagrees, finding that the impulses that drove these admittedly extreme examples of the adventuring mindset cast light on the motivations of their more common brethren. After all, Powter points out, many of these colossal failures would be considered in a very different light if their mad attempts had succeeded; as he puts it:

“Lit by the favorable spotlight of conquest, ragefully obsessed sailors become ‘driven,’ suicidal climbers are reinvented as ‘committed,’ and the arguable immorality of extreme risk gets re-spun as heroic dedication. But when the climber falls, the sailor disappears, or the desert explorer perishes of dehydration, then the verdict is obvious: The person was mad for having the dream in the first place, or was foolish for having pursued it.”

Whatever one might think on the subject, it’s well worth an expedition through the pages of Strange and Dangerous Dreams, if only to marvel at just how nuts people can be (and to feel better about our own safe but boring lives).

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Worth a buck?

Yes, for the chance to look through a peephole at a mindset that’s completely alien to most.

Worth full price?

Probably not, but it’s worth at least half price.

Who would like this book:

Fans of aberrant psychology, fans of wilderness adventure, fans of schadenfreude

How to get it:

It’s available through Mountaineers Books; you might also look around the base of a mountain, although a copy you find there will probably have “This is NOT me!” scribbled on it.

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"Auto da Fay," by Fay Weldon

With any work of nonfiction, the question arises: “How factual is this?” In the case of biography, the question becomes important, because what is the value of a biography that doesn’t jibe with the facts?

With autobiography, however, the question more properly becomes “How true is this?” Most autobiographies are by nature selective with the facts, because people, and especially writers, have an irresistible compulsion to edit their own histories to make them more entertaining, or cast themselves in a better light, or protect themselves and those they love. Despite this compulsion, however, the truth of an author shines through in a good autobiography, even if some of the facts are missing or altered.

In the case of this week’s book — Auto da Fay, by English author Fay Weldon — the truth of the narrative is so much in evidence that the factuality is almost beside the point. Besides, Auto da Fay is a memoir, a subset of autobiography that’s even more selective than usual, promising only to cover the specific things the author wants to reminisce about.

A Bit O’ Bio

For those of you who are now saying “Fay Weldon? Wasn’t she that actress King Kong took up the Empire State building with him?” I’ll trot out a bit of biographical data myself. The first bit I’m quoting comes from the dust jacket of Auto da Fay: “Born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, Fay spent most of her life in New Zealand.”

“Wow,” I said to myself. “Fay Weldon was born a man? This book is going to be GREAT!” (Of course, as it turns out, I was mistaken; despite being an authentic girl, Weldon was named Franklin for numerological reasons. The book is great anyway.)

Weldon’s writing career spans some five decades; her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. In addition to about 30 novels, she has also published several collections of short stories and written for television, magazines, and newspapers.

Where to Begin? At — No, Before the Beginning

And how much of this illustrious career is covered in Auto da Fay? Well, none of it — and yet all of it. Instead of beginning at the customary point (birth), Weldon takes us back a few months before that, to an earthquake she experienced in utero. The last pages of the memoir show us Weldon as she first embarks on her writing career.

In between, we learn about Weldon’s early days in New Zealand, torn between a charming but philandering father and a mother determined to raise Fay and her sister Jane alone, in a time when single motherhood was a far more difficult prospect than it is today; her school years, feeling out of step, sharing little in common with her classmates; the wrenching dislocation of a move from New Zealand to England in her teens; her own period of single motherhood, followed by a disastrous first marriage of convenience and then a second one to the man who gave her the last name by which we all know her.

Woven all through these memories are themes that would later surface again and again in Weldon’s work: the mutual support of a strong network of women like the ones who raised her; men as occasionally useful but ultimately unreliable and rarely faithful creatures; the casting off of the shackles of traditional gender roles, first by necessity and then by preference — in short, the foundations of feminism (a movement with which Weldon and her work are intimately identified).

The Power of the Word: Weldon and the Writing Life

Weldon’s love of the written word also surfaces throughout Auto da Fay, going back to her youth, as this quote about her school days demonstrates:

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“Write and then rewrite: it was like bringing a piece of sculpture out of dead stone: you could make things more real than real, make something where there was nothing before; you could have new people come to you out of the steam, make them do what you wanted, send them off again into the mists and they’d go on walking for ever.”

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For Weldon, of course, writing became more than just a source of private pleasure — it was the key to survival as a single woman supporting not only a child but also a parent. Weldon reminisces about her days in the advertising industry with wry fondness while remaining quite clear-eyed about the pedestrian utility of it. We’re talking about a woman who, as a copywriter, tried to convince a vodka company to advertise its wares by pointing out that “vodka gets you drunker faster.” (I think that ad would have sold vodka by the tanker-truckful.)

The Memoir as Confessional: Auto da Fay as An Auto da Fé

The title of the book is a reference to the “auto da fé” of the Spanish Inquisition. The term is generally associated with the burning at the stake of an accused heretic. Its original form, however, is that of a ritual of public penance for sinners accused by the Inquisition. In Weldon’s hands, the idea becomes a confession of the “transgressions” she committed against the mores of society during her younger days — but not a confession with any particular penitence attached to it. Rather, it’s a celebration of the steps, and missteps, that led her to where she is.

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Auto da Fay
by Fay Weldon
© 2002

Worth a buck?

Absolutely. Weldon has a born raconteur’s willingness to edit her own life for entertainment purposes.

Worth full price?

It’s certainly worth the paperback price.

Who would like this book:

Fay Weldon fans (and if you aren’t one, you need to get cracking on her bibliography); students of feminism; fans of irreverent smartassery

How to get it:

This one was still at the dollar store the last time I was there.

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"50 Books for 50 Bucks" is now on Twitter!

Just wanted to let everyone know that having this blog has finally given me a reason to join Twitter. I'll be tweeting when I post here, as well as the odd random tweet -- and by "odd," I think you know what I mean.

Find me at http://twitter.com/#!/50books50bucks and follow me like you're from Hamelin and I'm the Pied Piper!

Okay, that was probably too nerdy. Follow me anyway. :^)

What do you think?

By the way, folks, I'm interested in your opinion of the sidebar I added this week at the end of my review of Turning Tables. Feel free to comment here and tell me if you thought it improved the review, if there's something you'd add to the list or take off, etc. Lay it on me!

"Turning Tables" By Heather & Rose MacDowell

We live in a society that worships the new. From design to entertainment to — yes — restaurant food, “innovative” and “unexpected” are high praise, while “predictable” and “formulaic” are most often delivered with a sneer. And yet there is comfort in the familiar; formula can have its good points. Consider baby formula, for example.

So when I say that Turning Tables, by Heather and Rose MacDowell, is formulaic, don’t be too quick to write it off. If it weren’t for formula, there would be no genres, and how would we know what we like? The genre in question here is chick-lit, and Turning Tables is a shining example. I’d say it’s about the restaurant industry, but that’s not quite correct; it’s set in the restaurant industry, but like all chick-lit, it’s about romance, empowerment, and self-actualization. The MacDowell twins (yes, they’re identical — and judging from their author photo, they look like the kind of girls Fonzie might have asked out on a date) have leveraged their experiences waiting tables at some of the best (and worst) restaurants in Manhattan, Nantucket, and San Francisco into a bitingly funny tale of the delicately braised underbelly of fine dining.

The Waitress as Actress: Fake It ‘til You Make It

Erin Edwards has a problem. In a town where you can survive without brains but not without money, she’s been laid off from her job in the marketing industry. Four months later, she’s desperate enough to work family connections to get a job waiting tables at Roulette, a top-tier Madison Avenue restaurant that’s the sort of place she once might have wined and dined a client. Before she knows what hit her, Erin is thrust into a life where comfortable shoes trump Jimmy Choos, where a customer’s every preposterous whim is law, and where she’s disastrously, hilariously in over her head.

Erin’s tendency to screw up puts her at odds with the restaurant’s egomaniacal chef, who makes no attempt to hide what an imbecile he thinks Erin is; the outrageous Italian wife of the owner, who treats the restaurant’s staff as serfs put there to do her bidding; and the owner himself, who may be reluctant to fire her, but has no problem trying to make her miserable enough to quit. Fortunately for Erin, she charms Cato, an experienced waiter who immediately sees through her fabricated claims of experience but can’t resist the urge to play Pygmalion and rebuild her as the perfect waitress — pulling a fast one on the management in the process. Under Cato’s tutelage, Erin begins to evolve into a consummate service professional — part psychologist, part babysitter, and part mind-reader, all the while helping fools and their money to be soon parted.

  

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“For the rest of the shift, I try to think of myself as the benevolent ruler of a five-table kingdom. I move from guest to guest, not as an impostor with a stalled marketing career, but as a born server determined to entice, coax, and sweet-talk every guest into dessert and after-dinner drinks.”

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Give Me a Man… Make It a Double

Of course, Turning Tables wouldn’t be chick lit if there wasn’t romance — preferably two romances, one with the wrong guy and one with the right guy. Turning Tables doesn’t disappoint, first sending Erin into the arms of a member of the kitchen staff (a fling that, true to formula, goes spectacularly awry), and then a suave, rich, handsome television producer who’s one of the restaurant’s regulars. Also true to formula, Erin’s relationship crumbles over misunderstandings and a man who Just Doesn’t Get It, Does He; moreover, her continuing series of disastrous missteps at the restaurant send her life spiraling ever closer to the drain. Will the chef and the owner get her to crack and quit, or give up and fire her? Will she let her pride strip away her job, her home, and her chance at love? And when a sudden lifeline appears, will she grab at it, or will she discover that after all she’s learned, her heart’s desire has changed along the way?

You Girls Want a Tip? Write Some More Books

In the end, Turning Tables is better than it has to be. From its title, with its sly double meaning, to its entertainingly flawed heroine (who unquestioningly brings much of her misery on herself), the book is a tasty soufflé of a read that whisks the reader along from page to page. (Yay, culinary metaphor!) Even if chick lit isn’t to your usual taste, you might want to give Turning Tables a nibble.

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Worth a buck?

Sure. It’s sudsy chick-lit fun.

Worth full price?

Maybe, maybe not – fans of the genre won’t have buyer’s remorse, though.

Who would like this book:

Fans of chick-lit, fans of the first two or three years of Waiter Rant, readers looking for a restaurant-themed riff on The Nanny Diaries

How to get it:

(coming soon — check back)

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"The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!" by Joe Eszterhas

Oh, you know the best advice I ever got? ... If someone gets in your way, step on 'em. If you're the only one left standing there, they hire you.

The above is not a quote from Joe Eszterhas’s The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! Rather, it’s a quote from what is perhaps Eszterhas’s most infamous movie: Showgirls. Eszterhas — whose screenwriting credits also include Basic Instinct, Flashdance, and Jagged Edge — acquired a reputation as “the rogue elephant of screenwriting.” Certainly he’s one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood history; hits and flops have flowed from his manual typewriter in equal measure, and both have caused a lot of controversy. His personal image in his heyday as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, obnoxious bad boy only added to his allure. On the heels of his 2004 memoir Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas published The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood in 2006.

Written McNuggets

Humorist “Kin” Hubbard once said, “Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.” This quote came to mind when I started reading The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. The book, after an acerbic foreword that skewers self-proclaimed screenwriting guru Robert McKee (a subject that Eszterhas returns to throughout The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood), begins with a section called “Pursuing Your Dream” that consists of a string of quotes by other Hollywood personages interspersed with pithy observations from Eszterhas himself. I finished these literary hors d’oeuvres and, ready to get into the meat of Eszterhas’s work, turned to the next section (“Learning the Business”).

At that point, however, I discovered that the whole thing is written this way. I kept thinking this collection of brassy, bite-sized chunks of gossip, bragging, mudslinging, and tawdry tales of sordid sex was going to turn into a book, but it never quite does.

The resulting text is pretty disjointed. This isn’t necessarily bad; sure, The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood doesn’t reward sustained reading, but it’s a great book to leave on the back of the toilet and dip into for a few minutes’ entertainment while your pants are around your ankles. Somehow, I don’t think Eszterhas would be offended by that.

Step 1: Read The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

There are two reasons to read a book like this: to be entertained by war stories told by a colorful curmudgeon, or to get actual advice about screenwriting. Readers looking for the first subject will find plenty to satisfy them in The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood. The book is jammed with Ambrose Bierce-like definitions of “reelspeak” (“‘Parallel Creativity’ — the phrase that will be used by someone who has plagiarized you.”), admiring accounts of screenwriters who have prevailed over Hollywood venality (or embraced it in entertaining ways), quotable quotes from Eszterhas’s fellow Hungarian, Zsa Zsa Gabor; and plenty of skewering of Hollywood types.

Readers looking for practical advice from Eszterhas will have a harder time finding what they’re looking for — and may not find it all that useful when they encounter it. Sure, it’s there, but it’s sprinkled among reams of fart jokes and stories about jerk producers and their jerky ways. When you do manage to pan a nugget of wisdom out of the dross, it’s likely to be either really obvious (“All it takes to become a successful screenwriter is to sell one script”) or else the sort of advice that mainly works if you start by being Joe Eszterhas (leading off a negotiation by sticking a hunting knife into a conference table, for example). The most useful tips are either negative in format — things not to fall for, things you shouldn’t do, people not to trust — or things to remember in order to stay sane (e.g., “YOU are the storyteller, not the director… in musical terms, you’re the composer — the director conducts the orchestra.”).

Don’t Let Anyone Walk Over You

In the end, though, The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood is an entertaining read that does have a genuine point about the undeserved contempt the film industry has for writers and the likely cause of that contempt (i.e., fear). Eszterhas rages against Hollywood’s marginalization of his fellow writers; moreover, he seems to truly want us to stand up for ourselves and succeed instead of being ground up by the Hollywood machine.  After all, as one of Eszterhas’s characters says in Flashdance:

When you give up your dream, you die.

Well said, you magnificent Hungarian bastard.

Discount Dreams (or "Why This Blog Exists")

One of my favorite places to shop is the dollar store. If your mental image of dollar stores is one of narrow, dingy aisles blocked by ample posteriors in double-knit slacks, buzzy fluorescent lights, and despair, you need to come check out the one by my house – it’s really nice, and the assortment of merchandise is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of off-brand foods, cheap toys, tacky kitsch decorations, and cleaning products (often with labels in French or Spanish).  My favorite area of the store, however, is down the third aisle from the right, across from the mailing supplies and next to the stickers.

That’s where you’ll find the books.

And I’m not talking about schlocky romance paperbacks or things like Chicken Soup for the Soul, either, although both of those things can be found at the dollar store. I’m talking about hardcover books of every genre imaginable. Self-help books. Political screeds. Science-fiction novels. Memoirs. Thrillers. Chick-lit. Even genuine literature.

For a buck apiece.

The first time I happened upon the books at my local dollar store, I didn’t give it much thought. I grabbed a couple of books that looked interesting and moved on to the kitchen utensils (by the way, my dollar store also has an amazing assortment of kitchen utensils. Check ’em out – they’re on the left wall). I figured, “Hey, even if these books are awful, so what? I’m only out a dollar on each one. A newspaper would cost that much.” And they weren’t awful, and I started buying more. It got to the point that whenever I went to the dollar store, I went to the books first, and there were usually several that hadn’t been there the last time. I often just bought an armload of whatever new ones they had, except the ones that I knew immediately I wouldn’t be interested in (sports memoirs, for example). They started to pile up.

A normal person would probably look at the pile of 10-plus books and think, “Gee, I should hold off on buying more until I’ve read these.” I am, as my wife would tell you, not a normal person. The stack continued to grow. Before long, I had to split it into two stacks, then three, to avoid a book-a-lanche. Part of it was, I’m sure, nothing more than avaricious book-lust – They’re books! CHEAP books! However, there was something else in play as well, something that perhaps only a writer would think of.

See, it’s monumentally hard to write a book, and even harder to get one published. To make the attempt requires a willingness to dream big and ignore the odds. Each of these books represented someone’s dream – and, moreover, a dream come true, because some publisher picked it out of the slush pile and gave it form. I imagined how excited the author must have felt holding a copy of his or her book, the same book I was now holding in the dollar store, across from the mailing supplies and next to the stickers.

I was buying dreams at a deep discount.

It felt like I was doing more than just scoring some extraordinarily cheap reading material. I was giving these poor remaindered dreams a second chance to live – and how could I leave any of them behind? Finally the day came when I counted my book stash out of idle curiosity and discovered that I had more than fifty of them in the queue. Jeez, I thought, I could read one of these every week for a year and not get through all of them. And then I raised my eyebrows and thought, Why not actually do that?

And that thought led directly to this blog. For an annual budget of fifty dollars, plus tax, I intend to read and review a book a week, not counting Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks. I plan to post the weekly reviews every Saturday; I may also post other entries on other days as well. I hope it’ll be fun for the readers (if I get any) as well as for me!