Recommend a Book

by Black Man 78 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Valis

  Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

  From Booklist.com
  A past winner of the World Fantasy Award, Morrow could easily claim another prize, for the year's most outlandish fictional premise, if there were prizes for such things. When God Himself drops dead, leaving His two-mile-long corpse floating face up in the Atlantic, former sea captain Anthony Van Horne is recruited by a grieving archangel to haul the Corpus Dei to an icy tomb at the North Pole. Eager to redeem himself for indirectly causing the century's worst oil spill, Van Horne resumes command of his newly repaired supertanker, the Carpco Valparaiso, and speeds north with God in tow. Already faced with protecting the corpse against marauding predators from the air and the sea, Van Horne confronts a series of setbacks as absurd as the notion of his divine cargo--setbacks such as a plot by a rescued feminist castaway to bomb and sink the patriarchal corpse for the good of womankind. Writing a brand of masterfully understated comic prose all his own, Morrow is a genius, and this book is one of the most deliciously irreverent satirical sprees in years. Carl Hays --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

  Sincerely,

  District Overbeer
• 

  funkyderek

  I'm not going to mention the classics that everybody knows, but here are a few books definitely worth reading, and their reviews from Amazon.com
  In no particular order:

  A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

  Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

  The Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha

  The story of bad behavior--fanaticism about small debates, gender-disguised "Netsex," the spending of other people's money on vast phone bills--has been told by others. In The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier, Indra Sinha tells the same story in a British context where the poverty and uncertainty of the Thatcher era made everything that much more intense and obsessive. This is also the story of the near collapse of the author's marriage: he withdrew from his wife or dragged her off to meet Net chums who never showed up--or showed up and never introduced themselves.
  These were also the years of his growing political commitment--a highly paid copywriter, Sinha started using his skills for good causes like exposing the use of chemical weapons by Saddam against the Kurds. He writes well about his discomfort with his Net friends' games of expensive verbal sadomasochism in the face of real evil. This is a moving and wise book about a man who loved games and came to feel that he could no longer, in good conscience, play them; there is real pain here, in his rejection of a sort of beauty.

  The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

  In The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks presents a distant future that could almost be called the end of history. Humanity has filled the galaxy, and thanks to ultra-high technology everyone has everything they want, no one gets sick, and no one dies. It's a playground society of sports, stellar cruises, parties, and festivals. Jernau Gurgeh, a famed master game player, is looking for something more and finds it when he's invited to a game tournament at a small alien empire. Abruptly Banks veers into different territory. The Empire of Azad is exotic, sensual, and vibrant. It has space battle cruisers, a glowing court--all the stuff of good old science fiction--which appears old-fashioned in contrast to Gurgeh's home. At first it's a relief, but further exploration reveals the empire to be depraved and terrifically unjust. Its defects are gross exaggerations of our own, yet they indict us all the same. Clearly Banks is interested in the idea of a future where everyone can be mature and happy. Yet it's interesting to note that in order to give us this compelling adventure story, he has to return to a more traditional setting. Thoughtful science fiction readers will appreciate the cultural comparisons, and fans of big ideas and action will also be rewarded.

  Longitude by Dava Sobel

  The thorniest scientific problem of the eighteenth century was how to determine longitude. Many thousands of lives had been lost at sea over the centuries due to the inability to determine an east-west position. This is the engrossing story of the clockmaker, John "Longitude" Harrison, who solved the problem that Newton and Galileo had failed to conquer, yet claimed only half the promised rich reward.

  The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

  Carl Sagan muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience. Along the way he debunks alien abduction, faith-healing, and channeling; refutes the arguments that science destroys spirituality, and provides a "baloney detection kit" for thinking through political, social, religious, and other issues.

  River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

  Nearly a century and a half after Charles Darwin formulated it, the theory of evolution is still the subject of considerable debate. Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins is among Darwin's chief defenders, and an able one indeed-- witty, literate, capable of turning a beautiful phrase. In River Out of Eden he introduces general readers to some fairly abstract problems in evolutionary biology, gently guiding us through the tangles of mitochondrial DNA and the survival-of-the- fittest ethos. (Superheroes need not apply: Dawkins writes, "The genes that survive . . . will be the ones that are good at surviving in the average environment of the species.") Dawkins argues for the essential unity of humanity, noting that "we are much closer cousins of one another than we normally realize, and we have many fewer ancestors than simple calculations suggest."

  The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

  You loved the comic strip; now read the business advice.
  Or should that be anti-business advice? Scott Adams provides the hapless victim of re-engineering, rightsizing and Total Quality Management some strategies for fighting back, er, coping. Forced to work long hours, with no hope of a raise? Adams offers tips on maintaining parity in compensation. Along the way, Adams explains what ISO 9000 really is and assesses the irresistibility of female engineers.

  The breath-taking cynicism of the strip should prepare readers for the author's no-holds-barred attack on management fads, large organizations, pointless bureaucracy and sadistic rule-makers who glory in control of office supplies. Readers of the on-line Dilbert Newsletter are familiar with the kind of e-mail Adams receives from his readers -- and may even have sent a few of those missives themselves. Along with illustrative strips, e-mail messages provide excruciating examples of corporate behavior which compel the reader to agree with Adams when he insists that "People are idiots".

  The final chapter offers a model for would-be successful businesses to follow: the OA5 model. It's introduced with little fanfare, no outrageous promises and just the right amount of self-deprecation

  --
  Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts[/i]
• 

  RunningMan

  Thanks for the suggestions, Funky. I am a big fan of John Irving. I don't know how I missed Owen Meaney. And "The Demon Haunted World" is fantastic. It should be mandatory reading for everyone.

  Valis: I loved Towing Jehovah. The sequels, Blameless in Abadon and The Eternal Footman were also great.
• 

  sableindian

  Well, Blackman,

  I would like to recommend Invisible Woman about a young girl growing up Black in Germany. Also Clifford's Blues. A Black in the concentration camps. He ends up meeting a Jehovah's Witness and....

  good books, both of them
• 

  GentlyFeral

• The Hero with an African Face, Clyde W. Ford. The author is trained as both a chiropractor and psychiatrist, and wrote this book to remedy Joseph Campbell's inexplicable neglect of African mythology. There are some wonderful expressions of universal themes here.
• The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. Now available in paperback again for the first time in about thirty years, ever since the gorgeous BBC miniseries last year. Which is now available on DVD and worth watching.

  Gently Feral

Edited by - GentlyFeral on 25 September 2002 3:34:18