Title: People Who Eat Darkness
Author: Richard Lloyd Parry
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Nonfiction; True Crime
Nutshell: The mystery of an English woman who suddenly went missing in Japan
The story of Lucie Blackman, who disappeared in Tokyo while working as a club hostess in 2000, is a sad an incomplete one. Her disappearance ripped her family apart, and became a minor cause celebre for a time within Britain and other countries. The European stereotype of Japanese "strangeness" increased because of it.
Richard Lloyd Parry tells a riveting story with access to all sides--Lucie's father and mother, who split in an acrimonious divorce years before her disappearance and whose mutual hatred of each other caused a great deal of pain and complication for their children; Lucie's siblings, a brother and sister who loved but at times barely knew their older sister; Lucie's friends, some of whom knew her better than others and watched her become someone difference the closer she got to leaving for a foreign country and the deeper she fell into debt; and the man accused of causing her disappearance in Tokyo. Stories sometimes mesh and sometimes are hopelessly far apart, and Lloyd Parry does a good job of keeping all the balls in the air and keeping the reader interested.
This is essentially a true crime story with a lot of history and sociology thrown in as necessary, due to most Western readers' general unfamiliarity with Japanese life and customs. Many Americans and Europeans may not have any idea about the sort of hostess bar where Lucie Blackman worked, or the feelings the Japanese have about Westerners in general and Western women in particular. The section about Lucie's accused kidnapper also deals with the plight of the ethnic Koreans of Japan and the racism they still face even in the modern era. It is much to take in, but Lloyd Parry weaves everything in without making anything boring or too much like a lecture. Lucie is at the center of everything and we are never too far away from her and the search for where she has gone.
I'd recommend this book for any fans of true crime or Japanese culture. The Japanese police don't get a shining grade in this story, but one could easily argue they probably shouldn't. Lloyd Parry is English and may not have all the cultural facts or understanding as an outsider, but I think he did a pretty good job reporting overall and I don't believe he set out to insult anyone.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Methland
Title: Methland
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.
This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.
Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.
Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.
Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.
This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.
Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.
Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.
Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
The Astronaut Wives Club
Title: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.
So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.
This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.
Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help.
I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.
So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.
This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.
Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help.
I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.
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