By the Great Horn Spoon Review

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(More customer reviews)When I was nine, I read this book. At age 40, I read the same copy to my children, ages ten and eight. As much as I enjoyed reading it the first time, reading it out loud was a much richer experience.
The writing flows naturally, and encourages a great variation in expression. The adventure truly comes out in the reader's voice. I am an actor, but I felt that this story would bring out the actor in anybody.
The story was so exciting and surprising that long reading sessions never dragged. At several points, my children threw themselves down on the floor and yelled, "Oh my gosh!"
This experience brought it all together for me, if I may speak personally: books, performing, involvement with my children, a classic story that I relished as a child myself. Those evenings added up to the happiest time of my life.
The plot concerns a boy who runs away during the California gold rush--with his butler!--to try to get his family out of debt. The adventures along the way are episodic, and each episode is an amazing and believable story in itself. Every step in the journey is given full attention: the voyage from Boston to San Francisco, the trip to the gold fields, the experiences among the miners. There are plenty of colorful characters, and plenty of opportunities for the two main characters to grow. There are also several threads that run through the whole story, maintaining suspense. Their resolution is unpredictable and satisfying.
There was very little in the book that could make a parent squirm, and very little that sounded out of date. But there were three moments that made me pause: 1) There is a fist fight, though it is handled in a light-hearted way. 2) There is a reference to corporal punishment when an adult threatens to "take a hairbrush" to a child. 3) There is an expression used once that might be innocent for all I know, but sure doesn't sound that way: "That's mighty white of you."
Minor reservations, I hope you'll agree. So plunge in and have an experience you and your listeners will never forget.

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Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, With a New Preface (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) Review

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(More customer reviews)There are books that change the way you think about things. "Imperial San Francisco" changed the way I look at the city I live in, revealing the machinations behind the development of the Bay Area and its environs.
Brechin's book is part academic treatise, part shrill denouncement, and part insightful tell-all about America's favorite sweet-hart city. Basically, according to Brechin, a moneyed oligarchy destroyed the regional environment, poisoned our streams and wetlands, steered us towards a consumerist society dependant on fossil fuels and highways, provoked war, dumped toxic waste in workers' neighborhoods, and bought and control all significant media, all in order to make a buck. All the problems plaguing our modern society-poverty, crime, pollution, materialism-stem directly from the path of our greedy, imperial, and disgusting past.
Well researched (with occasional holes better filled by other reviewers), with plenty of gruesome anecdote and illustration, the book made my skin crawl, turned my belly aflame, and made me grit my teeth each morning as I read it on the Muni. All the passing sight from the train was just evidence of Man's greed and selfishness. What's worse, it only reminded me that the pace of our development only increases here in California.
But while Brechin was quite skillful in revealing the underbelly of San Francisco's past, his tone is grating and incessant. The book is like that obnoxious friend we all have who's politically savvy and unduly righteous. Reading the book is like being backed into a corner by this friend at a party and having to listen to all the products you should be boycotting.
And what was the alternative, after all? Certainly not the agricultural-philosophical town Brechin rhapsodizes about in the introduction. Jefferson extolled the same type of society, but his model needed slavery to uphold it, as did the Greeks', who Brechin praises as the ideal. So, after putting the book down, we're left with acrid taste in our mouths, yet no refreshing alternative with which to cleanse our palate.

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