BOOKS - Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

Score: 7.6

First, a bit of a prelude (because those are always fun, right?). I generally prefer to provide feedback on novelists who, you know, are still alive, directly. With the exceptions of bazillion-selling Oprah's book-club authors like Franzen or Morrison, it's surprisingly easy to get direct access to even fairly successful authors and academics. I've dropped lines to Luis Rodriguez for his excellent zeitgeist of latino LA short story collection The Republic of East LA, and more recently Charles Bock, for his even more excellent zeitgeist of modern Las Vegas, Beautiful Children, among a few others over the years (these two stand out for their quality). The market for literary fiction books is generally small enough that fan-author connections are still possible, unlike most other medias. Yet some authors, including Ms. Galchen here, for whatever reason (I imagine in her case, a few too many email addresses to keep track of) don't have a big flaming "Contact Me!" button on their websites.

The point of this maligned prologue? Simply that this review might be a little harsh. When I tend to contact these still-living authors, I essentially write to them an abbreviated version of the review that would otherwise appear here. Except it's nicer. Because, I mean, you're saying it right to their faces. The tone definitely moves from criticism of skill to criticism of work, which is probably fairer (at least less Ad Hominem) and in many cases more indicative of where fault actually lies (lays? Yes, I'm a critic who never took the time to learn that freaking rule. I'm going with lies). So if you bump into Ms. Galchen on the street somewhere and she complains to you about this one jackass of an internet critic who put down her book that's won numerous awards, let her know it's nothing personal. Just put a "Contact Me!" button on your site.

Now onto the book. Ms. Galchen has crafted quite an interesting collection of words. I purposely don't say "story", because, like many pieces of literary fiction, plot is not the primary concern in this novel. It's quite simplistic, and relatively little actually happens within the course of the book. Don't let that put you off however, the book is a fantastic read. While it may be read as part mystery or thriller (and it does contain elements of those genres), it's not a dedicated page turner a la Dan Brown. Twists and turns come suddenly and sparingly, and just often enough to keep you going. The short chapters (none longer than about seven pages or so, many coming in at just two pages) also aid in making the story manageable as well as an excellent bus-ride-home read.

The true strength of Atmospheric Disturbances though, is the unparalleled access the reader is given to the narrator and protagonist, Leo Liebenstein. Specifically to the world he gradually drapes over the reader, pulling them into his highly personalized, highly developed, and highly addictive psychosis. If you've ever wondered just how insanely logical and well reasoned a worldview separated from the consensus worldview (ie. a crazy person's take on the world) can be, read this book. It is a masterful dive into mental illness and serves as the source for those same mystery/thriller aspects of the novel, as the "mystery" is concocted entirely in Leo's mind. The strength of this immersion is also furthered by the nature of Leo's work. As a psychiatrist well-versed in the vocabulary of the mental health community, the narrator's imaginary search for truth is littered with transference, Oedipus complexes, psychiatrist vs. analyst bickering, and numerous other psycho-babble I probably didn't even pick up on. It's a ridiculously immersive ride from New York to Argentina, and most of that immersion stems from the strong writing that Galchen exhibits via her main character.


But it's not just the prose itself that showcase Galchen's obvious talents. Essentially a story of two characters, narrator Leo and his wife Rema, the dedication shown to Rema's character is almost as evident as with Leo. As an American immigrant, Rema's English is prone to certain playful rearrangements of idioms and common phrases, and Leo finds himself falling prey to the use of them the more time he spends with her. As a reader, too, you are gradually exposed, unannounced, to these slightly off phrases as they work their way into Leo's own writing. It's a beautiful and very delicate touch that's applied liberally and accurately throughout the book, as you slowly realize just how much Rema has infused herself into Leo's person - the strongest mark of a real relationship I can think of. All the other small details of her character, like the way she drinks her tea and her indifference towards canines, are dutifully brought out as appropriate, making her in every way except direct voice an equal in Leo's frantic journey. 


The crux of that journey lies in Galchen's combination of her own father's science, meteorology, with the telling of Leo and Rema's relationship. The relationship = weather metaphor infests every corner of the novel, as Leo continually seeks to understand the present and future states of his love life by relating them to the unpredictable nature of weather. If Leo's voice is the centre of the story and Rema the planet that orbits tightly, that central metaphor is the gravity pulling them together then swinging them apart. Mixed in liberally with a dose of Pynchon-esque postmodernity, weather constitutes both the driving force behind many of the plot twists, and the fixation of Leo's increasingly fractured mind.


Perhaps the most daring technique Ms. Galchen used in the course of the novel though, was the weaving of autobiography into the text. The meteorologist who provides Leo with his background information is none other than Tzvi Gal-Chen, the author's own father, who died in the mid 1990's. Tzvi becomes one of the many characters drawn into Leo's disturbed web of meaning, and his research into doppler effects and current state measurement drives Leo towards his many otherwise incoherent actions. While the purpose of including Tzvi as a central character is not immediately clear, there is a sense of autobiography in this. Ms. Galchen, on top of being one of the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40, is also a Mount Sinai medical school graduate who, like her protagonist Leo, specialized in psychiatry (don't you just love over-achievers?). Though I couldn't determine an exact purpose for all these autobiographical clues being brought together, I did extract a sense that Leo, by diving into Tzvi's research, was in some respect standing in for Ms. Galchen, trying to grow closer to her father, gradually moving away from an ability to diagnose the mentally ill, and submersing into meteorology, which, in this novel, is really a stand-in for matters of the heart.


It is a ballsy maneuver, and one which, short of a complete re-read of the novel, would require much more analysis than I can provide here. Some, including the original New Yorker review, were especially taken with this aspect of the novel. I found it neither wasteful nor inspired. For me, it was simply there. Perhaps I read too little into it, or missed some of the clues that were out there, waiting to be read, but ultimately I didn't feel strongly about it.

Now usually, as I get near the end of a book and begin to think of what would go into a review of it, the one question I always pose is, "Who did the author write this book for?" In my opinion, knowing whether you are the designed reader can influence your understanding of any work. Usually the answer is fairly clear, but this time I had a difficult time. It is a little too small in scale and character to appeal to fans of pulp, too smart and apolitical to appeal to most modern literary fiction sensibilities, and not really autobiographical enough to appeal to fans of that genre. I was truly stumped. Eventually I found an answer on the back of the hardcover copy I'd taken out from my local library. All three sets of praise plastered on the back were from other writers. And truly as an aspiring (read: unpublished) writer myself, this book most appealed to that aspect of myself. The skill, techniques, and dedication to truly immerse oneself into a head that fucked up, to describe with such dedication and detail the intricacies of a relationship as fleshed out as Leo and Rema's, well, that's the kind of writing that other writers salivate over. But as a reader, it still left me unfulfilled.

As a reader I wanted the physical journey to matter a bit more. As interesting as the descent into a worldview disparate from that of the majority consensus was, a recovery from that view and back into the real would have been truly spellbinding. I wanted sanity to be laced somewhere in Leo's journey, because otherwise all it was was essentially one giant talk therapy session. Again, the intended ambiguity of Leo's insane voice means that maybe that was the whole point, that maybe, like the weather, setting an "end point" at which resolution is achieved, is an unrealistic expectation. If the central metaphor of relationships = meteorology is the whole point, then how is weather supposed to heal? When does weather ever really make sense? At what point does trying to extract meaning out of chaos become useless?

Even as I write it, I can't help but think that a journey out of psychosis sounds horribly Hollywood, horribly blase and predictable. But I still want it. I want Rema to pull Leo out of his mindset in a passionate display of the power of love. That would be the epitome of Hollywood, the epitome of Hemingway and his love for an affirmation of the positive spirit of man. I don't want to get into a whole discussion of the artistic merit of pulling a Hollywood and displaying the world (and in this case, one aspect - mental illness) as we want it to be, versus displaying it as it really is (I doubt a mental disorder as powerful as what affects Leo is likely something someone recovers from easily, if ever fully). This is not the place for such a discussion. All I know is that the minute after putting this book down, all I could think of was the potential it had for illuminating not just the depths of self-imposed mental loss, but the joys associated with overcoming that same loss. Even just pulling a quick Catcher in the Rye and having the novel itself be Leo's writing therapy for his psychoanalyst would have been a nice touch. And really, given the excess of mental health practitioners in this novel, the most unrealistic thing I can imagine is that Leo would fail to undergo treatment of some sort. 

And really, that was what upset me the most about this novel. The first twenty or so pages had me so deeply enthralled with the possibilities that Galchen's eventual path of postmodern lack of meaning out of the whole thing was more than a little disappointing. All the pieces were in place, the entire autobiographical aspect prepared for insertion into the midst of an emotional climax. Instead, it merely fizzles. Still, the writing is so strong, and Galchen's talent so obvious, I couldn't help but enjoy the book. Loving it, as the book makes clear, would have required just the right atmospheric confluences, and the weather just wasn't right.

GEAR - Kobo WiFi E-Reader

Score: 6.1 (UPDATED July 20, 2011 - See Below)

First, I have to say to the person who bought me this: it is still the single greatest gift I have ever received. No low score can take away from the heartfelt nature of this gift, or the countless hours I have already spent using its delightfully delightful services.

Yes, it was my wife who bought me this.

In all fairness, I did ask for it for basically six months before this most recent Christmas, when I, like a child, savagely ripping off layers of wrapping paper, feasted my eyes upon the one gift I'd wanted above everything else, and was at one with the world, the universe, and the little poverty stricken orphan Timothy Cratchit. It was the tickle-me-elmo beanie baby wrapped in some other slightly more obscure holiday madness gift with a quaint electric sheen. And it was mine. My heart did flips. I took all my Chapters gift cards I received that same day, and splurged on beginning my electronic book collection. Now, I kind of wish I'd waited.

Which is not to say that the Kobo e-reader is in any way bad. It's not, really. I mean, a little bit. Ok, it's kind of bad. When asked to do nothing but let you read and slowly turn from one page to the next, it performs fine. That was the original reason I asked for it: to read. I didn't want an iPad or any other tablet, I wanted an e-reader, with e-ink. This is because my eyes, which are already seared consistently enough by working at a desk all day, simply could not handle arriving home and having to deal with another glaring LCD screen when all they wanted was some simple, passive, black on white text. Is that too much to ask?

Prior to this Christmas season, the answer had always been "yes". Amazon's Kindle, which has revolutionized ebooks, was still at a price point that was simply too high to justify. Sure, ebooks are a bit cheaper, but I'd have to amass an entire library to make up the price difference (actually it was only about 50-75 books, but still), and the technology still had to prove itself. But along came Kobo, and just in time for Christmas, along came it's $139 price point. Just dear enough to justify a great Christmas present, or so I told my wife. Truth be told, Amazon had come very near to matching that price with their cheaper WiFi only Kindle, but two things directed me to direct my wife to getting the Kobo over the Kindle. #1: Amazon's proprietary DRM ebook format annoyed the hell out of both the library user and open-source geek in me (user only, don't worry), and #2: As weird as it sounds, I wanted to support Kobo, a Canadian company, because I just couldn't bear the sight of my big box book retailer getting shut down by, you know, that other big box American retailer. A flurry of ill-dispensed patriotism sold me on the Kobo.

Selling my wife was a bit harder. Let's just say she's a book purist. It's paper or nothing for her. She rejects ebooks with the veracity of a dog lover thrust into a nest of adorable, cheezeburger has'ing kittens. It's for this reason that I never expected she would actually get it for me, and the same reason I was so child-like upon opening said gift.

My first week of ownership was (to begin a metaphor whose final path I'm not sure I want to know) the honeymoon period. I downloaded and started reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and was loving every bit of it. The readability is excellent, the weight and ergonomics of the device itself are great, the buttons respond well and are laid out nicely, the page-turning speed (the one spec I'd actually cared about deeply) was more than adequate, and not having to earmark my current page (the e-reader does bookmark whatever page you're currently on when you switch it off) was the best thing since sliced bread toasted with sliced cheese. I read that first novel in about a week and a half, and it was then that I noticed my e-readers fatal flaw.

That flaw is battery life. Now, my understanding of e-ink, and one of the great advantages it possesses over LCD screened devices, is that the display itself only uses power when the page is being turned, ie. when the pixels are actually doing some changing around. E-readers, then, are supposedly amazingly power efficient. So efficient, in fact, that they never have to turn off. One of the weirdest things I experienced when I first opened it was that it simply doesn't turn off. You hit the power button and the only change noticeable is that the cover of whatever book you're currently reading replaces whatever else was on the screen. And it stays there. Forever. Or, and this is much more likely, until the battery runs out.

UPDATE (July 20, 2011): I am stupid. This section is not entirely accurate. There are two modes for turning off the Kobo. The first is what I've described above, and is referred to as Sleep mode. The "Powered Off" mode is achieved by holding down the power button longer, and actually stops all power drain. The only difference in view is the wording itself at the top though. It is likely I was sometimes setting it to sleep mode, and sometimes powering it off, and was just too dumb to notice the difference. Because of this inconsistency, I am scoring the Kobo a full point higher. Not so much because I'm sure it will perform better, but because when you're this dumb, you've got to give out freebies as recompense.

See, the device evidently does continue to use power at all times. The engineers who designed the thing obviously figured that the extra power required to boot the OS up and down would be far more damaging to battery life than the steady draw it currently employees. That may be true in situations when people are turning it on and off every hour. But for anyone like me who reads in long intervals and then takes a week off, it's incredibly annoying, because every time I went to go read, the battery was dead.

When the honeymoon started to wrap up, I plugged it in for my first charge, figuring the battery would get better. It only got worse. A full charge lasts about four days of non-reading time. Not fourteen. Not even close. Mix in some reading, say an hour a day, and suddenly it's three days. My previous LG cell phone that I used and left on all day and night, lasted two weeks on a charge, and had an LCD screen. It probably even had the same wattage battery (this was a very slim LG phone). There is a possibility that the one I received was a lemon, and that most other Kobo owners don't have to deal with this problem. The simple reality is it doesn't matter - I'm not a professional reviewer who gets to run through samples until I find one that the company thinks is representative of its standard quality - I get what I get. And what I got is poor design at some stage, whether it's the actual electrical, the other hardware, the firmware, software, something, somewhere, is crap. There was no nice, slow descent into happy married life, it was instant fights about kids, money, and sex (the unholy triumvirate/trinity/triad of unhappy marriage) all at once.

Still, like a man desperate for kids, money, and sex, I stuck through it. I figured we could work it out. I reasoned with myself that yes, it wasn't perfect, but damnit, I was in this for the long haul. I bought more books. I dove into Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which is not a short book, and told myself that I would have had to charge the hard cover version just as frequently as I did the ebook. In short, I began to lie to myself.

After the death knell that was the faked battery life, all the other issues, all the little blemishes and behavioural quirks that, in a normal marriage, you can deal with, started to come out of the wood-work; in this one they were just extra nails in the coffin that our relationship was born into. The menus are overly simplistic and don't allow for ease of picking through pages or hunting for a specific quote. The absence of a keyboard makes even basic activities involving, you know, words, hard. The lack of real page numbers means I can never retain an exact spot. Even the fake page numbers that are provided for each chapter (see my review of Steinbeck for examples) change as soon as you shift the size of the font. On top of everything, my e-reader was inconstant. The Kobo application that's required to buy books and sync them with the reader crashes and hangs occasionally, even mid-purchase. The application's bookstore, while pretty, isn't easy to navigate. The bookstore on the e-reader itself? Fuggadowbdit. Until the most recent firmware update, it was impossible to read while the reader was plugged in to charge, which, as I've mentioned, was every time I was in the mood to read. The USB cord that came with it is too damn short. The list goes on. Again, these are small travesties that get in the way of truly enjoying the device. Under normal circumstances, I could look the other way, but by this time, I'm pissed. I don't want to look the other way. I want to revel in my righteous indignation, and let loose a torrent of hellfire upon the object of my affection/affectation.

These issues I've pointed out thus far are all the reader's problems. They're things that Kobo could control. I have other issues, but these are really just mine.

The biggest is the lack of ebook support from libraries. This, I have to admit, should have been expected. Ebooks just achieved popularity. There's almost no way an industry as big as the publishing one would have a good idea of how to lease out ebooks to libraries, and still make money. The technology is still too young, and the economics of it are still being sorted out. I don't know why, but I expected to be able to log in to my local library and take out a dozen new releases all at once, keep them on my ereader until I'm done, and then return them somehow. It's not there. The groundwork is being laid, but at least where I live, the selection of ebooks are so limited as to be a joke.

My second self-inflicted problem is that Kobo is, I've heard, rather poor for supporting independent publishers and self-publishers. Amazon, meanwhile, has opened up the Kindle, and now anyone can write a book, publish it on Amazon for 99 cents (or more likely 9.99, for reasons of incentivization), and get it out to millions who have bought a Kindle, without ever killing a tree. No such luck with Kobo. I'm not sure if this will change in the future, but right now, it's not the greatest for the small voices who are struggling to be heard. You know, like this guy.

So how does this rather technocentric love story end? Not sure yet. I still have my Kobo, and I still use it for what I wanted it for: reading. But that's it. I find it hard to use as a replacement for a book - the tactile sensation, the ease of use, all the small things that go to make a reading experience pleasant. My Kobo has put everything back in perspective. Whereas before I was so happy to save two dollars when buying an ebook version over a paperback, or ten to fifteen for a hardcover like Freedom, I've since begun moving back to buying physical copies if the price is within a decent range of the ebook (usually about five dollars more). Sure, I've lost the portability, convenience, and good green feelings of owning my entire collection in one little device. But I don't have to charge my paperbacks, and I don't mind bending over the top corners so much anymore. In the long run though, I'm sold. The technology works, it just needs a bit of kneading to make it work well. Whether that's a Kobo in the future, or a Kindle, I'm not sure. But it will be something. I'm in it for the long haul.

NON-REVIEW - Blog Update

Just a quick note that I've made some small updates to the blog in terms of style and focus. More on books and other storytelling media, less on other mediums including music and automotive. They may pop up still from time to time, but yeah, just wanted to narrow the focus a bit. So... book background it is!

Also, I hope to keep the posts streaming a bit more regularly than they've been trickling in for say... the past three years. We'll see how that works though. In the meantime... books! Oh, and Louis CK. Cuz the guy is a genius.

BOOKS - John Steinbeck - Travels With Charley: In Search of America

Score: 6.9
Version: Kobo Provided Penguin E-Book Edition

This review will be relatively short, in large part because I honestly can't remember enough of the book to feel I can really dive into it.

I read Travels with Charley over about three months, during which I took numerous breaks, got fed up with it, and generally didn't pay it the kind of attention a really good review deserves. Still, after reaching the end of it, I couldn't help but think "This would make a great book to review!" The reason for that? Well, it's an interesting book, if nothing else.

Pegged as non-fiction, but probably fitting a bit more into one of the creative non-fiction veins of memoir or personal essay, it is the account of John Steinbeck (you know, of Grapes of Wrath fame) and his drive around the United States of America in the year of 1960, with a poodle named Charley in the passenger seat. Beginning in the northeast, where he lived, Steinbeck drove through the midwest, across the northern plains to Seattle, and then down the coast of California, and finally, across Texas and into the South. Along his way he met some interesting characters, had a few run-ins with law enforcement and racists, and generally connected with a large swath of America of that time period.

But ultimately it's not the people of America that he best documented in this book. While there are a few memorable characters (and I do mean characters - according to Wikipedia large portions of the book are not consistent with Steinbeck's actual movements that year), his true successes in building this book are two fold: weaving his own personal history with that of the people and landscapes he comes across, and providing a very accurate portrait of the nation of America in the time period in which he travelled.

Having never read any Steinbeck before (no, not even The Grapes of Wrath), I had no pre-existing knowledge of the author. No sense of what style to expect, or any knowledge of his personal life beforehand. With this book, I feel I knew the man better than authors who I've read six or seven times. He deftly mixes his previous experiences with a given locale with analyses of their (then) current situation. In bringing out previous stories and experiences about a place like Chicago, he makes the place come alive while simultaneously breathing a history into it as well. The best examples of this are his stories about Seattle, the Bay area of California, where he grew up, and Texas, where he has a number of in-laws and friends. He reviles, revisits, and reabsorbs each respectively, and by the end you get a sense of a writer and observer who very keenly understood the temporal nature of what he was describing. Steinbeck, by this time an older man with some health problems, gives the reader a glimpse (albeit a contrived, and if critics cited on Wikipedia are to be believed, a bit of a false one) into the life and times of a revered American writer.

The true strength of the book, however, is in building the rough outlines of the nation that was America in 1960. I use the term "nation" very specifically, because as Steinbeck admits, there is no way to try and grasp a representative of every walk of life in one book. Instead, what he leaves you with is an imagined sense of the lives the vast majority of people in America were living at that time. It's impossible to forget, for example, his description of trailer parks and mobile homes, before the powerful stigmas of trailer trash and extreme poverty were attached to those homes. To Steinbeck, in 1960, they're a fabulous new invention that's sprouting up all over the country and populated by hard working, resourceful people who don't want to live in crowded cities or the new stretches of suburbs. It's a jarring understanding of mobile homes given the way they are constantly portrayed in media in the here and now, and his interpretation of these new living devices sticks with you. Similarly his mentions of polluted air, growing suburbs, wide open but soulless interstates, and probably most thoroughly his description of Texas, gives the reader an overview of America. Nothing more, nothing less, just a solid, complete overview of the imagined community that he builds in his mind and expresses on the page.

To sum up this point, near the end of the book, Steinbeck himself says, "When I laid the ground plan of my journey, there were definite questions to which I wanted matching answers. It didn't seem to me that they were impossible questions. I suppose they could all be lumped into the single question: 'What are Americans like today?'" (34 of 107 of Part 4 - Ebook, no page numbers for me!) At first he considers his quest to discover a suitable answer a failure, until he reflects and says, "Americans as I saw them and talked to them were indeed individuals, each one different from the others, but gradually I began to feel that the Americans exist, that they really do have generalized characteristics regardless of their states, their social and financial status, their education, their religious and their political convictions." (36 of 107 of Part 4, emphasis mine) This sense of the American people though, was "increasingly paradoxical" (36 of 107), and really, the sentence I have just quoted is as close as he ever gets to describing what he finds. Yet that's not really a failing, because what he is counting on the reader to do is wretch their own sense of these things out of the previous pages, and come up with their own sense of Americans as a people, and hence, of the place as a modern nation. It's a neat little trick, and it works well enough - you feel that he's provided you with the information, all that's left is for you to pull out the meaning behind it.

Sadly though, the book has many failings as well. For all Steinbeck's accessible style and everyman wit, some large portions of the book read very dryly. The descriptions of landscapes are likely the worst, as are some of the earlier sections about his time in New York. Even the dialogue, which I understand was once one of his strengths, doesn't read all that great. Perhaps his greatest issue though, is that he doesn't devote time to the one part of his travels (the South) that would actually warrant a full, thorough investigation of the issues. What could have been a scathing indictment against racial segregation (a la his indictment against the rich in the Grapes of Wrath) falls flat and impotent, much like Steinbeck's own, lone confrontation with a racist southerner at the end of the book. Essentially he took what could have been the most interesting quarter of the book (roughly equal with its geographic weight in the nation), and turned it into a fifty page (e-pages, that is) footnote. Maybe he was trying to say that racial conflict isn't a problem that defines America, but considering that's really the only thing he talks about at all concerning the South, it's a shame he didn't go further. In fact, he seems to purposely ignore the chance to go into further detail. He claims at the end that he remembers with perfect clarity everything on his trip up to Virginia, but his only anecdotes set in the South stop somewhere in Louisiana. It's a shame too, because the conversations he does have (with a racist and an equalist white, and with a thoroughly race-shamed black person and a young, hopeful black), are easily the best in the book. They get to the core of the whole, "What are Americans today?" question better than any other portion of the book. Yet, tellingly, they are expressed after he's posed that same question to his readers. It's almost as if the South isn't what he would consider part of America. It's historically apropos then that the South he envisioned did largely disappear in the fifty years since he wrote this book. It turned out not to be a huge part of America after all.

Another huge problems facing Steinbeck in this book, and one all travel writers essentially deal with, is that it's near impossible to get a real good sense of characters aside from the narrator. There can be no deep interplay between multiple characters leading towards a climax, as in a novel or even short story. By its very nature, everything is eternally in passing, in for a few moments and then gone again. It's simply not conducive to building a character. Without characters, there is no real action. Without action there is no conflict. And without conflict there is little to pull a reader in.

In lieu of a pantheon of fleshed out, detailed characters, the reader really has to rely on the narrator's voice to walk them through everything that is going on, to pull meaning and emotion out of the transitory events and make something for the reader to hold on to. The points where Steinbeck does this well are those outlined above, and they do a great job of engrossing the reader. Everything else though, from the descriptions of the landscapes to the issues with Charley, don't hold up nearly as well. In the end you get a good sense of what this book could have been - an amazing memoir about a man who had his finger on the pulse of a nation for most of his life. But when the best thing a book gives you is the possibility for another book entirely, it's simply not that good.