Entries Tagged 'reviews' ↓

We’re on vacation this week up in Massachusetts.  Salem, on the north shore, is my mother’s home town, though she hasn’t lived there in years.  I lived there myself for three years back in middle school.  So between family visits and memories of those days (ah, middle school - such a font of fond remembrances), I’ve got a lot of memories of Salem.

We’re not staying in Salem, but rather in nearby Gloucester.  In a beautiful and large house overlooking the water, we’re up here with all of my kids, my mother, and my sister and her family.  Gloucester is about half an hour’s drive north of Salem, fairly close to the northern edge of Massachusetts.  See your favorite mapping program if you really want more details.

Today, our first full day up here, Julie and I went with the kids to Salem.

Back in the day, Salem was a typical small city.  Lots of houses of various sorts with a suburban feel to them, an active downtown, and a few tourist attractions, which in Salem’s case included a mix of sites celebrating Salem’s history as a center of the China trade, the fact that Salem was the hometown of author Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables, one of his novels, is set in colonial Salem, and in fact you can still visit the house in question), and, of course, the witch trials.

Salem has always made a big deal of the witch trials.  The Witch City, they call it, and a witch on a broomstick is the symbol of the city.  Somewhat in poor taste, I’ve always thought: given what happened to those accused in that horrible summer of 1692 (and none of the twenty who were executed were in any way, shape, or form witches, though one of the women jailed for witchcraft and later released did try to cast a few charms (unsuccessfully, of course)), having Salem call itself the Witch City feels to me rather as if Auschwitz, Poland, called itself the Jew City.

When I lived here, there were a few tourist attractions related to the witch trials.  There was the Witch House, which was the house in which some of the judges lived during the trials - a real historical site with real historical artifacts.  There was the Witch Museum, a wax museum with several tableaux that accurately told the story of the witch trials (my favorite scene as a child was always the large wax Satan).  But that, really, was about it.  Oh, some of the history lived on in some of the names of parts of town.  Gallows Hill, for instance: the prominent hill where the executions took place was now the town’s high rent district.  But Salem, except for the witches painted on the side of every police car, was fairly decorous about its use of its past.

But then came the shopping malls and Walmarts.  They did to Salem’s downtown what they did to pretty much every small city’s downtown: they killed it dead.  None of the stores that I remember from my childhood - not Almy’s, not Daniel Lowes, none of the others - still exist in downtown Salem.  In modern America, you just don’t go to a small downtown to do your shopping.  Oh, the big cities still have thriving retail centers.  But outside of the big cities, you go to the malls or the giant discount stores that live in the edge cities, and the idea of a small town commercial center is a quaint little bit of American history.

So what is a town like Salem going to do?  What’s going to fill those retail establishments?  What kind of stores will thrive in that nicely bricked-over five blocks of downtown, a true town-center, not just a shopping mall by other name?

In Salem’s case, the downtown that died has risen from the grave and become a center of cheesy tourist traps.  Perhaps appropriately, the dead now walk the earth where Salem’s commercial heart used to beat.  Salem, from the costume shops to the month-long Halloween celebration every fall, is capitalizing on the darkest moments of its history.

Today we were in search of cheesy entertainment.  So it was off to downtown Salem.  We visited a couple of witchcraft stores (no eye of newt on sale, but plenty of witchy-costume pieces and a number of small bags of aromatic herbs sitting between a shelf of tarot decks and crystal balls and a rack of t-shirts).  Amusing, but we were out for more dramatic entertainments.  And so in a two hour period, and all within a short walk of the center of Salem, we visited:

* The Nightmare Factory, a haunted house complete with 3D glasses and special effects;
* Dracula’s Castle, a haunted house hosted by a guy wearing a black cape and oozing fake blood;
* The Witch Village, a wax museum focusing on the history of witches;
* Frankenstein’s Laboratory, yet another haunted house, can you guess the theme?
* The Witch Trials Memorial, a wax museum about the Salem witch trials;
* Count Orlok’s Nightmare Gallery, a wax museum of movie monsters (Julie, who grew up on the classic horror movies, really liked this one).

That’s got to be more cheesy tourist attractions than you can find in any other half-dozen small-towns in America.  And that’s not including the ones we skipped, such as the 40 Whacks Museum (a museum of Lizzie Borden, the OJ of her day, a 19th century Massachusetts woman who probably did kill her parents with that ax, though she was acquitted), the Witch History Museum (not to be confused with the Witch Museum that we also skipped), the Pirate Museum, and probably a bunch of others that I’m forgetting.

Oh, there’s many legitimate tourist attractions in Salem.  There’s Derby Wharf, where much of the trading was done.  There’s the House of the Seven Gables that I mentioned earlier.  There’s the Peabody Museum, a remarkable collection of things brought back by the China traders, there’s Pioneer Village, which shows how the original settlers lived (and Salem was settled just six years after Plymouth, so we’re talking early days for this country).  And there’s others.

But honestly, we had a grand time visiting all of the cheesy attractions.  If you enjoy cheesy wax museums, if you like wandering through a darkened labyrinth while guys in costume jump out and go Boo, then you probably can’t beat Salem.

But it is sad to see what has happened to the small American city.

A postscript: we finished our day in Salem at the Salem Willows.  The Willows has a small boardwalk and an even smaller beach, a couple of rides, three arcades, some pleasant paths over grassy hills, and rather excellent flavored popcorn bars and salt water taffy.  There’s also a bandstand where they hold the occasional summer concert.  If you want to go somewhere that feels a lot like small-town scenes from movies of the twenties and thirties, the Willows will suit you well.

So perhaps not everything about small town America is dead after all.

Post-postscript: I vaguely recall giving my Salem rant before, and even have diffuse memories of writing it down.  I may have blogged about it five years ago when we last visited here.  If so, it’s not surprising: I’ve had these thoughts for years.  But apologies for repeating myself.

And Salem has gotten cheesier in those five years.  While even then there were more wax museums per capita than anywhere else I’ve visited, the numbers have grown in the intervening years.

- Hens’ Teeth and Horses’ Toes by Stephen Jay Gould. A collection of essays about various aspects of biology and the history of biology. Gould was an expert as essay writing, mastering the technique of starting with some small but interesting fact and deriving from it a more general and important principle. In this, he champions certain historical scientists, reveals some wild facts about animals (did you know that male angler fish are a fraction of the size of females, and in fact merge with the female, becoming little more than an embedded sperm donor for her), and pays homage to his great hero, Darwin. I haven’t finished all the essays yet - the joy of a collection of essays is that you don’t have to read them all at once. But it’s good stuff - I heartily recommend any of Gould’s works. (I’m a particular fan of his Wonderful Life, which is about how contingency has led to the modern world.)

- Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile. I recently saw and loved the movie, the story of how roguish and scandal-mongering congressman Charlie Wilson got congress to fund the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion back in the 80’s. I came away from that wanting to know more. And boy, does the book deliver. It covers in greater detail Wilson’s various scandals (the night before one of his major trips to Pakistan, he fled the scene of a collision that he caused out of a well-founded fear that he would be arrested for drunk driving if found by the police) and the way he played the Washington political game to keep the war funded. It also tells the CIA side of the story in great detail - Gust Avrakotos, who was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the movie, comes across as even more of a loose cannon. Very entertaining, especially if you want a view into how political power really works when the cameras aren’t rolling.

- The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber. A nice light beach read, a thriller all about art, madness, and international crime, with an engaging prose style and lots of oddness. A nice book to bring on a beach vacation.

The latest few books that I’ve read:

- The Odyssey by Homer, in the Robert Fagles translation.  Somehow, I managed to get this far in life without ever reading the Odyssey, other than a kid’s version many moons ago.  The biggest surprise to me was how minor the most famous scenes are in the story.  Rather then primarily being a story about Odysseus’s voyage, most of the action surrounds the loutish suitors who are courting his wife in his absence.  They are eating her out of house and home and generally being a big nuisance.  But Odysseus comes home and, with the help of his son and a pair of loyal servants, brutally kills them all.

And all the famous stuff?  The Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, and so on?  Well, they’re all there.  But they’re covered briefly, taking up a chapter or two in total in a book that goes over 20 chapters.  And even then, they appear only in flashbacks, as Odysseus is telling the story of his wanderings at a place where he stops.  Which is too bad, because I found those parts more entertaining than all the descriptions of loutish suitors.

But the action scenes are pretty spectacular.  That Homer had a way with a good combat sequence.  The scenes were Odysseus kills the suitors are great stuff - they are in keeping with the Illiad (which I first read last year), with some of the best fight scenes that I’ve ever read.  Fairly gory - spears get thrown through skulls, teeth and blood go flying, livers are pierced and mighty men do mighty things.  Really a revelation to me, just how thrilling they could be.

- Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach.  An entertaining romp through the story of scientific investigation into sex, including both the history of the research and coverage of what is going on today.  Roach has an amusing and breezy style, though sometimes she gets a little too irreverent for my tastes.  But the information is endlessly fascinating, and she certainly goes all out to get her story.  (She recounts two cases in which she volunteers as a subject for studies.  Not surprisingly, sex studies don’t allow outside observers, so volunteering is the only way that she can get first-hand knowledge with what goes on.  And so one fine day in London finds Roach and her husband having sex while a doctor monitors what’s happening inside using a sonagram.)  What did I get out of it?  Sex researchers face special hurdles in getting funding, and women are awfully complicated sexually.  Neither of which, come to think of it, comes as a big surprise.

- The Sharing Knife, vol 3: The Passage, by Lois McMaster Bujold.  I’m a big fan of Bujold’s work - she’s one of the few authors whose every new book I buy without second thought.  Such authors, for me, usually fall under the category of guilty pleasure - a nice quick read for when I’m in the mood for something fun.  Her Vorkosigan Books are high quality character-centric space opera - fine science fiction built around strong, quirky characters.

That said, I’m not quite so fond of her current series.  It’s a fantasy world in which a set of tribes known as Lakewalkers fight an ongoing war against a supernatural foe called Malices that occasionally pop up and cause trouble (think evil demon, or liche to you D&D’ers out there).  Meanwhile, an agricultural society at roughly late medieval tech level is growing, largely ignorant of the battle and hostile to the Lakewalkers (who have their own hostilities to the farmers).  The central characters are a Lakewalker and the farmer girl that he married in the first book.

Some interesting stuff, but not Bujold’s best.  And there’s an awful lot of romance-novel tropes in here - take one look at the covers and you can see it.  But still, overall a quick, fun read.

I finished off the Sharpe’s Rifles series.  Nothing much to add to the previous notes on them - all good, quick reads without a whole lot of depth.

I’ve moved on to read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.  This is a biography of Genghis Khan, that continue past Genghis’s death to cover the subsequent history of the Mongol empire.  A fascinating read, but it does stray a bit into hagiography.  It makes a big deal about the more enlightened aspects of Genghis Khan’s rule (forbidding torture, allowing religious freedom to his subjects) while glossing over some of his harsher policies (mostly, the tendency towards widespread slaughter of the ruling elite of any nation that he conquered, and the enslavement of the common people in such nations).  It mentions those things, but tends to excuse them by comparing them favorably with the practices of the Europeans at the time.

Still, it’s a fascinating portrait of a fascinating person.  And one whose rise to power is stunning.

I always find it interesting to consider the difference between someone’s life from the low point to the high.  Up until this time, the broadest range of low-to-high in my knowledge was Adolph Hitler, who went from being homeless in Austria to ruling all of Europe.  (And this should not in any way be considered praise of Hitler, who was, of course, astonishingly evil in his methods and policies and not at all worthy of admiration.)

But Genghis Khan’s range was even greater.  In his youth, after his father was killed by enemies, the young Temujin (Genghis’s name before he became ruler of the Mongolians) and his family scrambled to achieve a bare subsistence.  At one point Temujin was captured by enemies and enslaved for a period.  From that low, he grew to conquer and rule one of the largest empires that the world has known, an empire that eventually stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.

I’m not quite finished with the book yet - while Genghis is long dead, the Mongol empire has yet to collapse.  But the book is an excellent read about a period of history that I little knew.

My reading list so far for this year:

- Several books from the Sharpe’s Rifles series by Bernard Cornwell.  These are historical adventure novels featuring Richard Sharpe, a soldier in the British army during the Napoleonic wars.  I’m enjoying the books, but they are really just pleasant fluff.  Sharpe is a straight-up hero-type, largely lacking in any character depth, and the books do get a bit repetitious after a while.  (The books are often compared to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, a series of historical novels set on shipboard during the Napoleonic era.  In my mind, the O’Brian books are much better, primarily because Aubrey and Maturin, the central characters, are far richer and more complex than Sharpe.)

The first of these books, Sharpe’s Tiger, was a particular treat.  In it, Sharpe finds himself in India at the battle of Serringapatam fighting with the British army against the forces of Tippu Sultan.  I’ve twice visited Serringapatam, which is near Mysore.  I’ve seen many of the sites mentioned in the novel, including the fortress itself, the mosque and Hindu temple within the fortress, and Tippu’s nearby Summer Palace and tomb.  So when the book described Sharpe visiting these places, I could easily imagine it.

So far this year, I’ve read the first four of these novels, which takes Sharpe from India to the battle of Trafalgar.  (Yes, I know.  A soldier is out of place at a naval battle.  But his presence is not too far-fetched as arranged by the author.)  I’d recommend these if you’re in the mood for a quick, fun read.  But don’t look here for any depth.

- Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik.  This is the fourth of a series of books set during the Napoleonic Wars including dragons.  (I seem to reading a lot of Napoleonic fiction lately - I’ve got two others sitting on my to-read pile, including Dumas and Tolstoy.)  The dragons are teamed with men and serve as an important arm of the various militaries.  I quite enjoyed the first book of the series - His Majesty’s Dragon - but have found the novels to decline in quality over time.  This one is the worst, with a confused plot that seems a contrived excuse to show us what dragons do in Africa and France.  I can’t recommend it, I’m afraid.

- The Man who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt.  A biography of Alan Turing, a fascinating figure who is one of the half-dozen or so people who could lay claim to being the inventor of the computer.  Turing was instrumental in Britain’s efforts to break the Nazi codes during WWII, and was probably personally responsible for shortening the war.  But that was not enough to spare him from post-war persecution and prosecution for homosexuality, when he was hounded into suicide.  (A fan of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Turing killed himself by eating an apple dipped in cyanide.)

I enjoyed the book, which spends as much time explaining Turing’s ideas as it does his life.  But I found some of the psychoanalytic approach of the book to be a bit heavy-handed.  I’m afraid it lost me when it started trying to find psychological reasons for some of the things that Turing put in his technical papers.  Still, I was curious to learn more about Turing, and the book satisfied much of that curiosity.

That’s what I’ve read so far this year.  I’ll update here as I read more.