A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor

A Christmas Blizzard: A Novel

by Garrison Keillor

This Christmas fable is a typical Garrison Keillor story, rambling with details of the far North United States, filled with minutiae. The absurd, the ludicrous and the ironic take center stage. It's Dicken's Scrooge updated with a uniquely Keillor humor.

James Sparrow has a strange but sometimes crippling fear of sticking his tongue on a frozen pump handle. He's not exactly afraid of doing it, but rather afraid the compulsion will make him stick his tongue to freezing metal.

A rich man from sales of an energy drink he didn't even invent, he just bought and marketed it, he has bought a Hawaiin estate and prefers to spend his winters there, free from the fear of frozen metal, but his wife adores Christmas and everything it brings in Chicago. She's on the board of directors of the ballet, the symphony and the theater.

Desperate to escape Christmas in Chicago for Hawaii, instead James ends up leaving his sick wife behind as he boards his private jet to go say good-bye to an uncle in Looseleaf, North Dakota who made his childhood bearable.

Once there, a terrible blizzard descends and he finds he can't bear going to see his dying uncle. James spends the night in an ice shack on the lake and is visited by many visions

As with any short fable the characters are not drawn in depth but rather more as archetypes. He's not cast as an evil man though, just one living his life without really living, running scared of frozen metal.

In checking out the book on Amazon.com, I was horrified to read the description and a review. Did anyone actually read this short book? The description doesn't remotely capture the story, saying it's a comic novel and he's going to see an ailing aunt but the power goes out. Heh? The review says James and his wife go to North Dakota, but it's only James who actually goes. At least they mention a dying uncle instead of an ailing aunt.

Oh well, if you're looking for a Christmas story that's a little out of the ordinary or you enjoy Garrison Keillor's monologues, this short book is for you. 

The Rope by Nevada Barr

The Rope

By Nevada Barr

Nevada Barr is one of those authors that I look forward to a new book from and, when I get one, I know that I will be up late into the night until I have finished the story. 

The main character and detective in this series is Anna Pigeon, a Native American park ranger in the U.S. National Park Service.  Anna has been in some life threatening situations and has the mental scars to prove it.  She is tough and resourceful.  Each book has taken us to a new national park as Anna has moved around in her work.  Her sister, Molly, is a psychologist and has been one of the mainstays in the stories.

Of course, as with any long running series, 17 and counting, some of the books haven’t been as strong as others but one of my coworkers, another Anna Pigeon fan, agreed that this book is a return to the gritty story telling of the Anna Pigeon mysteries.

I found it an interesting and effective choice that the book does not begin from Anna’s frame of reference, but rather from the National Park Service personnel who she was working with so that our first glimpse of her is through their recollections.  When we switch to Anna’s perspective, the view darkens considerably.

In this book, we are taken back to Anna’s first foray into park service, before she was a ranger.  At this point, Anna has lost her husband, Zach, fairly recently and is looking for a change to help escape her pain.  She goes out west to be a seasonal employee in the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area.  Clearly in mourning, her fellow employees are not surprised that Anna doesn’t stick around.  Most of her personal property is gone so they assume she went back to New York City and the theater life.  No one suspects that she is still in the state, let alone still in the park. 

The character of Anna Pigeon has always been marked by her resilience in enduring pain. This is a dark tale of our heroine being tested and forged in fire.  At the end, she gives voice to her decision to go into law enforcement, saying, “Women need to come to think of themselves not as victims but as dangerous.”  

A strong female character in the making, I highly recommend this book and the others in the series.

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Odd Thomas
By Dean Koontz

Just hearing the name Dean Koontz, you might assume this is a horror book, but Odd Thomas is one of those books that rather defies classification and instead falls into the simple category of  “a really good book.”

In describing himself, Odd Thomas says, “I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.”

“Oddy” as his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn calls him, is a humble and simple man.  He works as a short order cook at the Pico Mundo Grill and if he ever left there, he thinks he might go into tires.  Perhaps it’s because of the demands of the dead that he yearns for the simple life.  You see, Odd can’t talk with the dead, because they don’t talk for some reason, but they do communicate with him and he feels the compassionate need to help them, because he can. 

“I’m not the law.  I’m not vigilante justice.  I’m not vengeance personified.  I don’t really know what I am or why.  In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action.  A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.”

Odd doesn’t take matters into his own hands, he has no intention to hurt anyone, he’s almost like some kind of avenging angel sent to bring the guilty party to justice. 

The writing style is beautifully simple but colorful, humorous and sympathetic.  For example, “Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester.  He loves that cat.  In fact, if Terrible Chester were to use up his ninth life under the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that Little Ozzie’s big heart would not survive the loss.” 

Instead of simply saying that if the cat got run over by a truck, it would kill Odd Thomas’s friend, Koontz’s choice of metaphor illustrates it and is slightly funny while also showing Odd’s concern for his friend - beautifully done.

You may wonder about the name Odd, or assume that it’s a nickname, but you would be mistaken.  “According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error.”  Sometimes she claims they meant to name him Todd or sometimes even Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle, but his father points out that he doesn’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle.

Everything Odd is welcome here.  Even the fact that the ghost of Elvis hangs around is not disconcerting because it is offered in such an understated way.  Only three people in the world know of Odd Thomas’s ability to see and interact with the dead – his author friend Little Ozzie, his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn and his friend, the chief of police Wyatt Porter.  To everyone else, Odd Thomas is just… odd.  Once you know what he’s dealing though, he doesn’t seem so odd.  In fact, he seems downright amazingly sane and even for what he’s dealing with.

This novel introduced the world to Odd Thomas and tells his adventure of thwarting “Fungus Man” from creating a day of devastation in his hometown of Pico Mundo.  Thankfully, there are several more novels featuring Odd Thomas, including Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours and Odd Apocalypse plus two more in the works.  There’s also a three part novella titled Odd Interlude and several graphic novels, not to mention an Odd Thomas movie coming out in 2013. 

Oh, and the reading of the book on audio by David Aaron Baker is brilliant in its understated portrayal of Odd Thomas.  I have read each of these books by listening to them on audio because his Odd Thomas is so perfect that it actually adds to the book, as good readers can, instead of distracting you from the story.  Enjoy!

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver by Mark Shriver

A Good Man
Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
by Mark Shriver

I’ve heard the Shriver name, of course.  Who could miss it in this day and age?  But my knowledge of that time period is relegated to memorized facts and figures as a period I did not live through.  I’d never really paid very much attention to the various people in the Shriver and Kennedy families, but this book caught my attention.  The title immediately made me think of my godfather, who I felt truly embodied the term “a good man.”  I remember at my godfather’s funeral, talking with one of his daughters-in-law about what a kind man he was.  How do you get to be that kind?  I still don’t really know.  Is it something particular people are born with?  Is it something they learn?  I hope everyone has had the opportunity to known someone like that in their lifetime. 

Though I didn’t know much about the man, I had of course heard of the Peace Corps and many other of the organizations that he put in motion.  With this book, Mark Shriver takes on the journey to understand his father Robert Sargent Shriver, known as Sarge, and “what it takes to be not a great man but a good man.” 

“Most of all, I wanted to understand the riddle of his joy.  I knew that his uncanny, boundless joy had powered him every day of his life.  Where did it come from?  How did he sustain it, gracing so many of us along the way?”

Sarge’s life was not a charmed and easy one as part of a well-known family.  A couple truly formative events in Sarge’s life were the Great Depression and his service in World War II. 

Sarge’s father “was ruined financially and emotionally during the Great Depression.  In 1923, his father had moved the family from Westminster to Baltimore, where he went into banking, and then again, in 1929, to New York City to become a founding partner of a new investment bank.  The time could not have been worse.”  They lost everything and his father fell into a depression that he never recovered from.  Sarge lost his father in 1941. 

Like most men who lived through a war, it wasn’t something Sarge talked about often but Mark remembers hearing once about a battle on the South Dakota that must have haunted his father all his life, the memory of slipping on the blood of his friends and having to clean up pieces of them on the deck of the ship afterward. 

Sarge never shrank from duty, as when he was asked to plan President Kennedy’s funeral.  Perhaps the hardest part was telling his pregnant wife, who he loved deeply, that her brother had been shot and killed.

“We are all born into a web of relationships and circumstances, tragedies and opportunities.  As I was coming into this world, my family lived through parades in Ireland one day and a funeral procession soon after.”

Through all of this, Sarge’s faith sustained him.  “I had as my father a man who not only was faith-filled and disciplined but who also insisted, in large part because of his faith, on the grace and joy in life.” 

Even if you don’t believe in God, or the Christian God, I think it’s easy to respect a man who lived by the principles that he learned from his faith to serve and help others with kindness all his life.

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Sarge worked under the Johnson administration in true bipartisan fashion to head the war on poverty.  His New York Times obituary suggests the scope of his influence by the programs that came out of that office, including “Head Start, the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, the Community Action Program and Legal Services for the Poor.”

“Yes, Dad had an ego – you have to have a strong ego to stand up and run for political office at any level in this county, let alone vice president or president… Dad really wasn’t a politician, at least not a modern-day version of an American politician, Republican or Democrat.  I don’t think he ever looked at his defeats and thought, I am not powerful anymore.  It didn’t take him thirty years or, really, any time to get over the losses, because that type of thinking never entered his mind.”

The author takes time to describe the scene and his own life, growing up part of the Kennedy clan, to put in context and show the effect his father had on his life.

“It took me until after his death to see it clearly: his faith demanded his hopefulness, and his hope underpinned his work.  He worked to give others the opportunity to hope – that was his abiding ambition.”

In the words of former President Clinton’s eulogy, “he really was as good as his family just told you, and maybe even a little better, and a whole generation of us understood what President Kennedy meant by looking at Sargent Shriver’s life.”