Twenty Five in Twenty Ten

The Road

Staci — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:06:37 +0000

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. 256 pages

In this dreary post-apocalyptic novel, a man and his son (they are never named) travel along a road to reach the coast–an arbitrary goal to reach for in a world without hope where bandits will go to any means necessary to ensure their survival into the next day.

The writing style of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” was the most effective device used to develop the cold, hopeless, desolate landscape of the world in which the man and his son live. It takes a skilled writer to use short, terse sentences like he does, and to sustain this style throughout the length of the novel.

While I made my way through the book very quickly, I did not find myself transfixed by it the way I have been drawn into other books I’ve encountered recently. I had been very excited to read this book, but after I began it, I think perhaps it was just TOO depressing, and became more of a goal to be conquered, to be able to say that I’d read it, rather than a book I wanted to find out the ending of.

Books read, 4 / Pages Read 1178

(I have read more books than this–I am catching up on reviews and will be tracking books as I review them)

Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization, author Deborah Barndt

Bot — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:55:32 +0000

Though it might seem obvious that globalization is indeed global, it is startling to figure out just how far the sticky fingers of world corporate ideology has reached. How far is far? Inside of our own bodies is too far.
In Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization, author Deborah Barndt focuses on the methodology and commodification of the tomato to reveal how the corporate reach reaches into our food source. The tomato is wisely chosen because it shapes us physically, emotionally and culturally in a way most non-consumable items can. By commodifying the tomato and following its path from its origin to consumers stomachs, Barndt sheds light on the depth of the effects on globalization on laborers, families, women, and the earth.
A wide spectrum of readers can be reached through this text. Tangled Routes is packed full of intelligible knowledge and important information. Yet this information is presented in a way that is both informative and manageably comprehendible. Barndt places before the reader subject matter that is both stimulating for the intellectual but traceable for the student.
For example, Bardnt juxtaposes her ideological work with Tomatl being the mascot for a more natural, down-to-earth approach of tomato production while the Corporate Tomato represents the capitalistic and mechanized approach global agribusinesses take. Prevalent through her book is the theme of these two tomatoes competing for production; Tomatl being sustainable and traded fairly while Corporate Tomato is purely profit driven, casting far-reaching, negative externalities.
The extensive production process is broken down into manageable pieces so it is easier to comprehend the interconnectedness from colonial origins of the tomato to the modern destination of consumption in Canada. Starting with history, Barndt takes the reader on a muddled, mysterious and mechanized journey to discover how the average tomato has reached our maybe-not-so lucky stomachs. The reader needs to travel through 21 steps to grasp the complexity of modern tomato production.
During our travels, Barndt does an exceptional job humanizing the individuals involved in each step. The combination of case study analysis and photo journaling helps complete the whole picture of the tomato production enterprise. Each laboring position has a face and name – whether it is the student cashier Carol or truckers Humberto and Jim. Bringing in actual people and personal circumstances helps the reader to connect to this increasingly impersonal, abstract operation. Instead of simply quantitative facts, these qualitative details expose how the Corporate Tomato affects individual laborers and their families.
The unforgiving situations these laboring individuals find themselves in have roots that reach back to the 1500s.
“While the arrival of Europeans in the Americas had the most dramatic effect on land ownership patterns and agricultural practices, current ecological crises and social inequalities have roots that are even deeper than Spanish colonization.” (207).
Even before Spanish colonizers reached Mexico, social hierarchies existed. Yet, the agricultural practices the Indigenous people used were a lot more ecologically sound and self-sustaining than Spanish techniques. After the Spanish arrived, Indigenous people started incorporating new European farming tools and techniques including new crops, which came with new pests, and new forms of cultivation. These new ideas led to loss of cultural identity and traditional agricultural practices as well as destroyed agricultural land . Deborah Barndt describes this ideological war between European and Indigenous agricultural practices clearly and in depth when she states that they are:
…two competing views of nature: one built on the domination of nature, the other on the intimate knowledge of nature; in political economic terms: the enslavement of people and their labor to extract their resources for the wealth of the colonizers; and in social terms: a racism that denied the complex knowledge system of Indigenous peoples and disdained their traditional practices(208).
Theses two ideological paradigms are seen in the modern era. Wealthy corporations migrate to Mexico’s fertile land and cheap labor while introducing systematic production techniques that create negative externalities. These negative externalities are surprisingly similar to those seen 500 years. Land degradation as a result of fertilizers and pesticides, local practices are overcome, and unfair labor policies are just a few of the similar negative facts that can be seen from the past and present.
Each modern tomato that ends up on a table in Canada or the USA travels through a complex commodity chain. Barndt exposes the scientific and mechanized commodity chain tomatoes travel through, from seedling to consumption. From the first step to the last, the driving force is profit. Starting with the seeds, multinational agribusinesses such as Monsanto have patents on the genetically modified forms of the tomato seed. With these seeds comes the “technological package” that include fertilizers and pesticides that optimize yield and product standardization. The companies providing these packages are provided by foreign companies and local funds flowing to these companies. After farmers acquire these products, they become dependent on them. Genetically modified tomatoes are engineered to not reproduce and rely on certain fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers are forced to buy these technological packages year after year. It becomes a tool to maximize profits and promote standardization.
The idea of standardization is prevalent through all aspects of the commodity chain. When planting and harvesting, tomato plants are modified to grow to a certain height and produce a certain size fruit. This is more convenient for technology to manage. Boxing and shipping techniques rely heavily on the predictable tomato for easy packaging. Even the ripening process is controlled. Certain gases are used to prevent ripening while others are used to ripen the tomato. Corporate scientists use the gas ethylene to control the time a tomato crop will ripen. Refrigerated transportation trucks are used to slow down the ripening process as well. Shelf life and manageability are the take priority over health concerns.
Unless we are searching for these processes lurking high above our society, it is easy to miss the often twisted ways corporation agribusiness operate. For more than five decades this unsustainable process has dominated poor laborers in Mexico. The lives of northern consumers and southern farmers are more intertwined than what is realized. Books like Deborah Barndt’s Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato are crucial in raising awareness and proposing practical ideas of resistance to the unsustainable and unfair practices of global companies.

Songs of the Doomed

Staci — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:48:31 +0000

Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream by Hunter S Thompson. 355 pages.

There were times while reading this collection of essays, letters, and short stories, whether HST (as he referred to himself a number of times) was actually the narrator or not. With little context, it was confusing at times, yet all the reading was delightful just the same.

My first exposure to Hunter S Thompson was Johnny Depp’s portrayal of him in the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” a number of years ago. Since then I have read on him, although not extensively, and I enjoyed the documentary of his life, “Gonzo.” This is the first of written work I actually read. It was fun and useful to access your inner “HST” voice and read the words through that filter.

This book collects essays, letters and notes from the 1950s to the 1990s, grouped by decade. Some are correspondences to others in HST’s notable circle, and some are reflections written years later referring back to a certain time in the author’s life. Also included are abandoned or early drafts of short stories. The collection offers insight on how HST’s writing style, and “Gonzo Journalism” evolved over the decades.

Books read, 3 / Pages Read 922

Question for Kaz

Bot — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:51:58 +0000

Why is it that your name is “plnudispatch”?

Are you really that in love with your job? Or you just that uncreative?

Troy’s Measly Attempt

Bot — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:12:50 +0000

1. Tangled Routes by Deborah Barndt

2. To Serve God and Wal-Mart by Bethany Moreton

3. A million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

4. Can Man Live Without God by Ravi Zacharias

5. The Autobiography of Malcom X as told to Alex Haley

6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

8. Autobiography by Ghandi

9. The Road by Jack Kerouac (need to finish)

10. Underworld by Don DeLillo (this should count as at least 2 books!)

11. This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti

12. The Cost of Discipleship by Bonhoeffer

13. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.

14. Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

Maybe more to come! I’d like to get some more classics in there, but the current books listed are the ones in my room that I want to read. So I figured I should go through those first.

I am currently reading Dark Star Safari and Tangled Routes. Dark Star Safari is fantastic so far (-p.180something) and it comes recommended. But book review will has out the details.

Laurel’s List of Lexicons

laurelhasper — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:08:09 +0000

1. The Annotated Alice (The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) by Martin Gardner (text by Lewis Carroll)

2. Dracula by Bram Stoker

3. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

4. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway

7. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarre

8. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

9. Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson

10. Beloved by Toni Morrison

11. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

12. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

13. Death Comes for the Arch Bishop by Willa Cather

14. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

15. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

16. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

18. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

19. Persuasion by Jane Austin

20. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

21. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

22. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

23. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

24. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

25. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Staci’s List

Staci — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:48:47 +0000

These were plucked from lists of “modern classics”

1. A Passage to India by EM Forster
2. Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
3. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
~~5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote~~
6. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
7. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
~~9. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf~~
10. Ulysses by James Joyce

And these aren’t on any kind of lists but I’m going to read them anyhow…

11. All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
12. Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
13. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
14. Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
15. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
16. Songs of the Doomed by Hunter S Thompson
17. The Bookseller of Kabul byAsne Seierstad
18. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
19. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson
20. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

The K-Man’s List

plnudispatch — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:16:19 +0000

Twenty-five “classics” to finally read:

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury, Richard Faulkner
A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Watership Down, Richard Adams
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

And five to re-read:

Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Animal Farm, George Orwell

Eat, Pray, Love

Staci — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:17:35 +0000

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. 352 pages

Eat, Pray, Love was not the spiritually compelling, life changing book that many have made it out to be, however it was interesting to read as a travel journal. Now, by travel journal, I don’t mean she writes about her travels in the way a traditional travel journal would be written, but a personal journal of pain and healing set amidst the journey through Italy, India, and Indonesia she planned for these very reasons.

I found a lot of her spiritual ramblings and discussion redundant, especially during the India part of the book, which was the hardest part for me to get through. I loved the Italy and Indonesia parts, though. Overall I found her writing chatty and likeable if self-indulgent.

Now I am interested in a man’s sarcastic reply to Gilbert, which (according to Amazon.com) takes her journey and “mirror[s] plot developments and platitudes line by line.” Drink, Play, F@#K seems like it could grow tiring quickly, but could also be very hilarious.

Books read, 2 / Pages read 567

Slaughterhouse Five

Staci — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:10:43 +0000

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. 215 pages.

Before picking this book up, I was unaware that it was a “war” book, and am still not convinced of that fact although it is loosely structured around the main character’s time in Germany leading up to the firebombing of Dresden (which the author himself witnessed as a soldier in World War II).

More accurately, this book uses vignettes, out of order, to tell the story of Billy Pilgrim’s life–before, during, and after World War II. Billy somehow manages to become “unstuck” in time, meaning at random moments his mind travels out of the present to catch a glimpse of either his past or his future, including after his death. Part of his post-war events includes an alien abduction by the Tralfamadorians who explain their concept of time which is all seen at once, like a painting, not in a linear sense.

It seems that modern moviemakers have borrowed and further developed the concept of non-linear storytelling to create the life and personality of a character the way that Vonnegut did in this novel.

Verdict: I liked it. I enjoyed the way the novel jumped around, even if the main character was not especially likeable. There were some interesting supporting characters as well which only shed light on Billy Pilgrim’s inadequacies and made for a good read.

Books read, 1 / Pages read 215