My wife has assured me that this is not just a chick book, and I’m glad I trusted her. This is a great story, warmly told, for anyone.

Time to take a break from current affairs reading and be reminded of what some other civilizations learned (or didn’t).

Scathing, funny, maddening, frightening. The liars in the book continue to lie, and continue to hold enormous sway. Then again, we can’t let them get away with it. As Al says, “Truth to power, baby!”

I should have brought this with me on our Florida trip. It would have been interesting to take notice of the area of “The Ridge” that we drove right through on our day going to WDW. Other than that, it’s just great McPhee storytelling.

Her non-fiction is outstanding, so I thought I’d try some of her fiction. While the voice is the same, the story was somehow less compelling than her non-fiction.

This is a beautifully told story, but I really did not like the way it played out in the end. I don’t believe that the course the characters took was “inevitable”, simply disturbing, selfish and without much compassion or sympathy for other human beings – cultural differences be what they may.

I had a similar reaction to the ending of “Bel Canto”, that the tragedy wasn’t needed to provide closure to the story, that there were many other story lines that could have resolved it without the violence that was called in. In both books, I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, but it was unnecessary.