Published :: Rick Bass for Smithsonian Magazine ::

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of shooting author Rick Bass for Smithsonian Magazine. It was late spring in Montana which means it's still a hell of a lot colder here than most other places in the country. Mr. Bass had written a piece on why he loves living in Missoula, Montana for the Smithsonian. I spent a couple of days in Missoula shooting places he particularly liked before our time together for portraits.

Bass is known for being an author particularly enamored with place. Originally from the South he has been out West for the majority of his career. His most recent book focuses on the controversial movement of oil from Canada into the U.S. on highways running through rural Idaho and Montana. He was a pleasure to talk to and we discovered he takes yoga classes at the same spot as my assistant. Always a good way to start off a session. Despite the freezing temps and gusty wind Mr. Bass was more than happy to spend some time with us on the banks of the Clark Fork River. The fish were just starting to rise as we left.

You can see more of the images from this shoot and read the accompanying story on the Smithsonian website here.

Lipstick Jihad

I recently finished this memoir by Azadeh Moaveni. Lipstick Jihad follows an American born woman as she decides to move back to Iran and reconnect with her past. In the process she becomes a correspondent for TIME magazine. While she's there she comes to terms with what life in Iran is really like for women and whether or not that will jive with her thoughts on how she wants her life to be. It's a great, quick read and gives an interesting inside view of a country that is in the headlines so much lately. I really enjoyed it and thought it gave an thoughtful perspective on living in a country that uses terror to control its people.

Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers

I must admit I first heard of this book while watching Six Feet Under. It was given to David on the show. Well, it is a very interesting book. It goes into all types of uses of human cadaver from medical research to canibalism. It has all kinds of interesting hisorical info. I was especially intrigued by the part about the Guillotined head that appeared to hear his name!!!! (how is that for a teaser?) It is very engaging and humorous while still being respectful to the subjects.

I must warn you...this book is not for the squemish...there are detailed descriptions of decaying human flesh and so on. But, I would highly reccomend this book if you are curious about what happens to the body after death. Check it out!

If Nobody Speaks of Incredible Things

Just call me the guy who buys books based solely on the length and cleverness of their titles. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor lays out the story of a single event on a street in England. This is the basic premise at least, and the impression that I got from the back of the book.

What you really get, however, is the story of one main character, supplemented with vignettes of her neighbors' lives. I was a bit confused for about the first 70 pages of this book. The author is a male, so I wrongly assumed that the main character was a male. Nothing really dissuaded me of this assumption for the first part of the book, so I was surprised when I finally realized that the main character was a girl. It is possible that i simply missed some important clue that the main character was a girl (i say girl as opposed to woman because she is at most a college student, and more of a girl than a woman), as i read this book mostly at airports and in-flight.

I was further confused because i had assumed from the back cover of the book that the events chronicled all took place over the course of one day. While this is true for the most part, the main character's story is not limited to a single day. Her story takes place over some period of time. The main character has her own chapters interspersed with chapters detailing the lives of the other residents of her street.

So it is fair to say that i was confused both by the sex of the main character, and the time frame within which events were occurring for the first quarter of the book. Because of this i had my doubts about whether i was going to enjoy the book. That said, the secondary characters (the people who live on the same street as the main character) all have interesting stories. The events of the day within which their stories are told ties them together with the story of the main character in one culminating final event with at least one unexpected twist.

There is a sort of macrocosm/microcosm style in sharing the story between the main character and the subcharacters that plays out in an interesting way. Once i figured out what was going on, i found If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things to be a really enjoyable read.

Shopgirl

For those of you who weren't aware, the movie Shopgirl is based upon the novella by the same name, written by Steve Martin. For such a short book I was surprised that it took me a while to get into the story, even though i already knew the basics of the plot.

The main character, Mirabelle, is a young, slightly damaged, sales girl working at the glove counter. She is a wallflower and an artist. From the instant she is introduced she is an underdog whom you want to root for. It is clear from the start that Mirabelle will be mistreated, and that things will probably end badly for her. Mirabelle hangs in there though, and in the end her story is one of personal growth.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the way it is written. The style is halfway between a normal narrative and a screenplay. It reads like a movie. If you have seen the film, you can easily imagine Steve Martin narrating the entire story. The language is pleasant and clever. Each scene is artfully laid out.

The book and the movie are very similar, but there are some differences and surprises that make it worth reading.

The Glass Castle

I literally stumbled across this book on someone else's night table. The back cover was enough to make me go buy it and read it all in the same day.

Written by Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle is the story of growing up with parents unlike any other. Her father and mother refused to live a normal life, always moving from one town to the next, always one step ahead of bill collectors, and never allowing their children to become truly settled or accepted.

The book is filled with stories and anecdotes that I'm sure most of us have never experienced, and especially not at the hands of our own parents - and yet Walls conveys nothing but love and possibly admiration for her parents throughout the book. After finishing the book - half of me was appalled at the parents' behavior, and the other half wanted to experience a childhood that was as exciting and filled with adventures as hers.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

For starters, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWSG for short) is a fantastic title which immediately caught my attention. It also made me suspicious that the book would fail to live up to my expectations. Fortunately, in addition to a clever title, the book has intriguing cover art so I went ahead and bought it anyway.
Dave Eggars is a clever author who is well aware that he is not actually as clever as he presumes to be, but presumes it anyway. His story begins painfully as the author and his siblings suffer the death of both parents to different cancers in less than a year. What follows is a memoir documenting how the author moved on with his life while learning to be responsible for not just his own life, but his younger brother Toph's as well. I found the relationship between the author and Toph to be the most interesting part of the book. Toph is the source of all Eggars' greatest joys and deepest fears.
Eggars' writing is self absorbed in a playful way. He dares to write down the things that we all think to ourselves about ourselves, but would never dare to say out loud; most of the time it works for him.
The result is a memoir that not only chronicles what happened in the author's life but reveals just how cool the author thought he was when the events were happening.
I have seen a lot written about the "clever" introduction to the book, but I am not commenting on it because I did not particularly enjoy it. What works stylistically in the book crosses the line into "cutesy" in the intro in my opinion. If you pick up this book and don't like the intro, don't give up on it. Skip it and move into the memoir.
Overall a very enjoyable read with interesting characters. It is a memoir, but reads like fiction.

Welcome

The idea here is to work together so that none of us ever ends up leaving the bookstore with a book that will disappoint. We are all too busy to waste our valuable leisure time reading books we don't really enjoy.
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Write a brief summary and give a link like so ... I just finished reading The Iliad and I thought it was swell...... Down at the bottom of the "posting" box there is place to add a label. Label your post as fiction, non-fiction, mystery, sci-fi, or whatever, and the site will automatically create categories so that you can find all posts with the same label.

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