Book Review: Unfamiliar Fishes

The Snooty Book Club returned to the nonfiction genre this time around with Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell's history of the annexation of Hawaii.

Before I read this book, I admittedly knew next to nothing about the history of Hawaii. My bad. It really is an interesting story that shows how people's interests and values have changed throughout history. What inadvertently kickstarts the acquisition of Hawaii by the United States is actually what unifies it in the first place - the bloody wars of Kamehameha the Great. If he didn't kill people who questioned his ways, he wouldn't have orphaned the boy who would become Henry Obookiah. If he wasn't orphaned, Obookiah, with nothing keeping him in Hawaii, wouldn't have hopped a merchant ship that eventually landed him in Connecticut. If he hadn't landed in Connecticut, he wouldn't have met the wannabe missionary seminary students. If he hadn't met them, the missionaries would never have thought to send people to Hawaii to spread the word of God.

As it was, Obookiah and his new missionary friends arrived in Hawaii in 1820, looking to tame those heathen beasts. In some ways, it's your typical story of American settlers moving west - they viewed Hawaiian customs and beliefs with condescension and tried to squelch it whenever possible. But it wasn't nearly as bad as Native Americans on the main continent. The missionaries wanted to change the natives mentally and spiritually, but never really forced them (unless you count getting close to the monarchs, who then forced them). They actually succeeded in educating the Hawaiians, teaching them and helping them develop a written version of their so-far-just-oral language so they could read the Bible.

What started as a change in customs, religion and beliefs became much more as the generations passed. Soon the settlers saw dollar signs, rather than potential crosses, in Hawaii, developing sugar plantations and even shipping in enough foreigners from other countries to make native Hawaiians the minority. When they realized the monarchs threatened their ability to own property and make money, they made steps to overthrow them and then get annexed by the United States for their valuable Naval ports.

That's the summary, but what makes Sarah Vowell books so interesting is the way she researches and writes them. Half the time, it reads like a tour book or an easy-to-understand history book; the other half of the time, it feels as though she's just another visitor in your tour group, making wisecracks about how some correspondence between Anglo-Saxon revolutionaries sounded like a Randy Newman song. She includes conversations with local experts and researchers, not using their thoughts and citing them in footnotes but actually transcribing conversations, which succeeds in tying these events from more than 100 years ago to today. Parts of it were difficult to understand - Vowell often focuses on describing an idea, rather than going chronologically, so it's hard to remember the context of some of the different events - and I would highly recommend reading the book as quickly as possible so you don't forget the names of the major players. Luckily, since the book is only about 230 pages long, that's not a difficult task.

Movie Review: Psycho

Old timey week continues with a movie that came out 25 years before I was born. But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you, right? Right.

Except I have seen it. I went through a bit of an Alfred Hitchcock phase after a childhood trip to Universal Studies in Florida resulted in watching scenes from The Birds in 3D (to this day, all 3D movie appeal is lost on me because how could you possibly top MILLIONS OF BIRDS FLYING AT YOUR FACE?!). The tour also succeeded in filling my head with random trivia about various Hitchcock movies, like how the "blood" running down the drain in the famous Psycho shower scene is actually chocolate syrup (yum!).

So, why am I watching Psycho again? A couple reasons, both orbiting around the fact that I'm positively obsessed with the show Bates Motel, a televised prequel where a teenaged Norman Bates and his recently widowed mother move to California and buy a crappy motel. If you haven't seen the first season, stop reading this right now and go do it. Seriously. I'll wait.

Now do you see what I'm talking about? And while I remembered quite a bit about the movie, it had been years and I wanted to refresh my brain. There's a scene midway through the season when Norman starts tinkering with taxidermy and I thought to myself, "Adult Norman liked taxidermy, too, didn't he?" These are things I obviously needed to know for real (it's things like this that won't allow me to understand how mortgage rates are determined or how to get a virus off my computer). But the biggest reason to watch the movie was when I discovered that my husband, who had been watching the show with me, had never seen it, and not only that, he didn't know how it ended! Oh boy. Someone was in for a treat.

For other rock-dwellers, Psycho tells the story of Marian Crane, a young woman who wants to drop everything and move to be with her long-distance boyfriend, Sam. To do this, she goes on a bit of a crime spree, stealing money from her boss, getting chased by the cops, ditching her car for a new one. Along the way, she stays at the rundown Bates Motel as the only guest. The motel operator is a friendly, if awkward, young guy named Norman Bates, who lives in a huge, spooky house out back with his overbearing mother. He and Marian bond while he serves her sandwiches and shows off his dead bird collection. You know, typical first date stuff. Then Marian goes into her room, settles in to take a hot shower, and proceeds to get stabbed to death by Norman's controlling mom.

Since Marian didn't appear from a vacuum, it's not long before people start looking for her - the private investigator hired by her boss, her concerned sister, her boyfriend. While they get closer and closer to the truth, Norman does his darnedest to protect old, unstable mom. After all, a boy's best friend is his mother.

Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed with keeping the plot of his movie a secret; when he bought the rights to the book it's based on, he then proceeded to buy as many copies of the book as possible so bookstores wouldn't have any to sell anyone. He also made movie theaters put up signs to warn late-arrivals that they should wait for a later showing so they could see the whole thing. (Of course, he also made an almost seven-minute-long trailer for it, and I'm curious what he could have included without showing any of the important stuff.) In that spirit, despite the fact that I always assumed the end of Psycho was like that of Citizen Kane or The Sixth Sense or the original Star Wars trilogy - you know the twist even if you haven't seen the movie - I'll stop the summary here.

What can I say about Psycho that hasn't already been said in the last 53 years? It's a classic in a lot of different ways and it certainly makes me appreciate Bates Motel even more. If you're a fan of the show, I highly recommend watching (or re-watching) it. If you're not a fan of the show, why on Earth are you reading this blog right now? It's like I don't even know you.

Book Review: The Stand

I would love to tell you that I have a fabulous excuse for not writing anything in a month, and in a way, I do. I mean, I have just been gestating a child for that time. Sure, that has required zero actual effort from me, save for doctor's appointments, but it does require naps. And extra eating. And by God, if it's for the good of the child, who am I to say no?

The other big excuse for not writing any book reviews in that time is because I haven't actually finished any books. Such is the fun of embarking on the journey that is The Stand, all 1,200 pages of it.

But without further ado, the great return.

The Stand

For those who somehow missed the last few decades, The Stand is Stephen King's epic tome about the fall and rise and fall and rise again of humanity. You could really break it into a few different sub-books (which is exactly what the 1994 miniseries starring Gary Sinise and Rob Lowe did over four nights), but here is as succinct a summary as I can give you: The U.S. government inadvertently releases a superflu meant for biological warfare. The flu, designed to act like the flu right up until the moment the patient dies, does its job and over the course of a few weeks one spring/early summer, kills more than 99% of the population.

What's left is a ragtag group of people who, for some reason, find themselves immune. We watch the downfall of civilization while learning their stories: there's Stu, a quiet factory worker from a small town in Texas; Frannie, a young co-ed who just discovered that she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend; Larry, a one-hit wonder rock star hiding out from drug dealers at his mom's house; Nick, a young deaf-mute drifter; Lloyd, a small-time criminal who finds himself abandoned in a maximum security prison with no one to free him; the Trashcan Man, a pyromaniac; and more. Once everyone they know and care about dies, everyone starts to realize they're having the same dreams: about a sweet elderly woman named Mother Abagail in Nebraska and about a dark, evil man named Randall Flagg in Las Vegas. The "good" people, the ones chosen by God (including Stu, Fran, Nick and Larry) go to Mother Abagail; the "bad" (Lloyd, Trash) to Flagg.

Along the way, they meet up with people good and bad. Frannie travels with a teenage loser from her neighborhood named Harold who not-so-secretly pines for her. Stu makes friends with an old sociology professor named Glen. Larry befriends Nadine, a mysterious and guarded woman, and Joe, a young boy turned savage from PTSD. Nick becomes close with Tom, a mentally disabled guy, and Ralph, a country boy.

Anyway, the various groups go to their respective destinations and start to re-create societies there. Things quickly get bureaucratic with Team Mother Abagail until an internal attack leaves a few people dead and makes everyone realize that, oh yeah, there's a war about to start. God, through Mother Abagail, picks four people to walk to Las Vegas and confront Flagg, the "stand" referred to in the title.

This book is, by far, my favorite Stephen King book. It never ceases to impress me how he's able to develop his story so gradually and yet keep it interesting (Glen's ramblings about the dangers of society notwithstanding); he's also able to create dozens of characters, each unique and with their own characteristics. In a lot of King's books, you can easily pick out who kind of represents him, good or bad: Ben in 'Salem's Lot; Jack in The Shining. You can see parts of these King archetypes in some of the characters: Stu's sense of heroism that arises when needed; Nick's quiet intelligence; Harold's identity as a writer; Larry's overcoming his own personal demons to become a better person. But they are their own characters, and the others are fully developed, as well. And each continues to develop as the story goes on, allowing the changes in temperament or character that they display is obvious. Is the Harold that finishes the story the same that started it? Not by a long shot. The same could be said for any of them.

I read this as part of my (and by "my," I mean stolen from the Guardian) Stephen King chronology project, although I must admit, I did cheat and read the uncut rerelease version that came out in the 1980s. I mean, if you're going to read something, you might as well go whole-hog. It remains my favorite and I can't imagine that will change. Now I can look forward to watching that 1994 miniseries (the first DVD I ever purchased) and even awaiting the feature version (although that project sounds like it might be kaput).

Either way, if you never read another Stephen King book, or if you're the type to say you don't read Stephen King because you don't like monsters/gore/violence/etc., this is the one to read. There is a devil, and he is a villain, but the real danger, the real "bad guy" lives within all of the human characters - good and evil. The government officials who created this terrible disease; the doctors who abused Stu when they couldn't figure out what made him immune; the good people who make bad decisions out of jealousy or misplaced loyalty or pride. There isn't a murderous clown or a rabid dog or a hotel full of ghosts to do us in; we do a fine job all by ourselves.