Wednesday, June 22, 2011

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

This novel traces the roots of a remarkable book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, through several hundred years of history.  More importantly, it brings the creators of the book to novelistic life through the imagination of the author.  It also tells a taut, dramatic story about the restoration of the book in the modern era, centering around a young fictional Australian expert named Hanna Heath.  Hanna's story could stand alone as a novel all its own, and it provides quite a bit of drama in the end parts of the novel.  It also allows us to see the survival of the book through to contemporary times, and that it is always more complicated than we would expect for something like the Haggadah to survive.  The "people of the book" are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah tells of the complex interplay between these faiths.  First of all, the book is Jewish, but it is illustrated in a style influenced by Christian prayer books, or books of hours.  It ended up in the hands of Muslim caretakers, and the novel ultimately traces the art back to a Muslim source, although that supposition is not proven as it would be in a non-fiction work. The creators and preservers of the book come into the book through artifacts that are found in the binding or on the pages when Hanna restores the book -- she finds a butterfly wing, for example, that leads into a story of survival during the Nazi era. 

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Decision Points by George W. Bush

The 43rd US President's memoir conveys quite dramatically some key decisions of his time in office.  The transformation of the Presidency from peacetime to what the former President calls a "war footing" is striking.  The first few chapters focus on Pres. George W. Bush's family life, the decision to run for President, and stem cell research.  Then, he describes learning of the attacks on September 11 while attempting to promote testing in public schools, and the book shifts into a different gear. The former President attempts to describe the way September 11 forced him to confront some stark realities, in a chapter entitled, "A Day of Fire," but it skirts some other important issues.  The use of what Pres. Bush terms "enhanced interrogation techniques" and others have called torture gets some explanation, but Abu Ghraib and the abuses there get about one sentence -- an off-hand reference when someone says Guantanamo is "no Abu Ghraib."