Double Down

No, not the sandwich you DOLT. Though I did become queasy several times during the experience, which I'd imagine is a quality the book shares with the Colonel's penultimate creation. My stomach flip-flopped every time the book described:

• Joe Biden swearing (that was a happy queasy though - the quease of joy)
• Donald Trump tweeting a vague reference to Obama's African birthplace 
• Mitt Romney furrowing his brow and wondering why the American people don't like him, like a reverse Sally Field*
• Meat Loaf performing at a GOP rally wearing a "sweat-soaked black poncho"

Unfortunately, the real quease and cheese of the 2012 elections was given short shrift in this non-fiction narrative. There was no mention of the workout pics mocked round the world; an unforgivable omission that I feel I need to share here in order to make things right:

"In retrospect, the hat was a mistake"

Rick Perry's brokeback moment was also passed over, as was Herman Cain's "I Am America" ad featuring cigarette smoke blown directly into the camera. Sure, we got the behind the scenes scoop on Newt's moon base and Clint Eastwood's ramblings with an empty chair,** but I craved more. Call it the Buzzfeed effect if you will, but I wanted list after list featuring hits like "Michelle Bachmann's top stress-fueled eye twitches." And hey, I'm all about skewering both sides. I would have also accepted "5 shady political ads that straight-up accuse Mitt Romney of murdering people" or "10 times Uncle Joe put his entire foot and most of one leg in his mouth."

Maybe it's because the 2008 elections felt more like a triumph, and the 2012 elections more like a slog. For everyone - obviously my political leanings are evident, but neither side really shined in 2012. It was as mendacious and mean-spirited as an episode of House of Cards. All I wanted was more of the absurd and amusing, because the actual day-by-day was too depressing.

Halperin & Heilemann are still great writers and their insider access is unparalleled, so it's not as if the story wasn't told well. For me, it just turned out to be a story I didn't really feel like revisiting all that much.

3 regal whinnies from Rafalca out of 5.

*Reverse Sally Field may also be a figure skating move; I think the gold medalist at Sochi nailed one 
**Fun fact: he didn't prepare at all and came up with that ten minutes before going on stage, inspired by a Neil Diamond song. Level of fucks given = none.

Just Kids

If this book had a smell, it would be beer, piss, sweat, charcoal dust, and that musty thrift-store clothing odor. I’m sure certain people would also add “pretension” to that list, but I never got that vibe from Patti Smith’s memoir of her time spent in late 60s/70s NYC with Robert Mapplethorpe.  Sure, if Paris Hilton wrote “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm,” I’d be rolling my eyes with the best of them and looking forward to the inevitable reading by James Lipton on Conan. But pretension can’t exist if you have the chops to back it up, and I’d make the argument that Patti Smith, the Godmother of Punk, has got some fierce chops.

Besides, the memoir is really a love letter to Mapplethorpe and to the gritty New York City I can barely imagine. Hustling on 42^nd street, rooming with junkies at the Hotel Allerton, shoplifting raw steaks...it all has a seedy glamour* when seen through the lens of Smith & Mapplethorpe’s complicated relationship. Sometimes lovers, always friends, and often muses for each other, they navigated the city and its art scene together. The intimacy, warmth, and affection that comes through in Smith’s writing is powerful enough – take away Warhol, Hendrix, Max’s Kansas City, Joni Mitchell, CBGB’s; even the protagonists' eventual fame & fortune, and it’s still a worthwhile read. Actually, it would have been more interesting if both of them had grown up, moved to suburbia, become tax attorneys, and gotten together occasionally to reminisce about their wild youth over a glass of Pinot. Oh well - sometimes people grow up to be rock stars.

4 androgynous haircuts out of 5.

*A seedy glamour I am happy to appreciate from afar: I hate having dirty feet & I’m terrified of bedbugs, so I’m fairly content with the sanitized version of NYC that exists today.  

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

The term "armchair travel," in addition to being silly, refers to books or other proxies that give you the experience of a place/trip without ever having to get off of your fat ass and out of the house. I guess "an armchair travel book" sells it better than "you know you'll never get it together enough to spend the summer biking through Tuscany, so read about this person who did. They are also better looking than you."

Cheryl Strayed has written a book I would describe as "armchair wilderness therapy." You know, those programs that troubled kids get sent to after appearing on Maury Povich episodes about "out of control teens." Strayed's is the book you read to (via armchair) get your shit together so that you CAN (via armchair) travel to Tuscany and live your best life.

Is this a new record for the amount of words I've written in a review without actually describing anything substantial about the book in question? No? How...about....now?

Making up for lost time: Strayed's memoir, of the summer she hiked a section of the Pacific Crest Trail, is powerful and honest. It's so vividly descriptive, of both the trail & her state of mind, that it feels like she wrote it as she walked along, not years after the fact. Anyone who has ever faced a turning point in their early adulthood (so...everyone?) will find themselves nodding along, and may even start to look for their hiking boots in the closet before getting distracted by an old bag of gummy bears they find sticking out of their purse. Gummy bears never go bad - fun fact!

Read this book. You will find more than expired candy.

5 blood-filled blisters out of 5.

Brain on Fire

Susannah Cahalan woke up one day, felt a little weird. AND THEN EVERYTHING WENT TO SHIT. Seizures, aphasia, catatonia, aggression, paranoia. This book chronicles her “month of madness,” as teams of doctors tried to diagnose & treat her while her frantic family watched her become a stranger. Even knowing that she eventually recovered enough to write this book, it’s a really gripping story. It highlights the fuzzy boundaries between chronic mental illnesses and curable physical conditions, especially since most of the people with her condition do not get properly diagnosed and end up in psych wards. Or worse. It’s thought that some cases of “demon possession” are attributable to the illness, which usually affects young women. I know, strange symptoms being caused by a legitimate medical illness instead of an evil immortal ancient supernatural being (that for some reason thinks it can raise more hell in your puny human body) – it all seems so outlandish…but there it is.

And on that note, I had this Onion article sent to me while I was in the midst of this book, and it all felt a bit too close-to-home. Women + Noise Coming Out of Their Mouths = CRAZY has been a common theme throughout history I would love to see go away. Hysteria was originally defined as a condition that ONLY women suffered from: the word has its origins in the Greek word “hysterikos,” which means “of the womb, suffering in the womb.” Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus.* Yeah – my womb is suffering all right – because I can’t complain or act nutty or get angry or have an opinion without some BRO-DAWG making a “time of the month” joke.  Susannah Cahalan had something physically wrong with her, but one of the first doctors she saw said she was just drinking too much (even though she told him otherwise) and was too stressed out. Women BE moody, am I right?!

In sum: brain inflammation is something we should all be afraid of.

4 out of 5 misogynistic Ancient Greeks.

*Bright side: this led to the invention of the vibrator as a way to “de-hysterize” us lady folk. TRUE FACTS.

As I Am

I had never heard of Patricia Neal before I picked up her autobiography after reading about it on The Hairpin, but now that I've read her life story I can say that, definitively, Patricia Neal was the Jennifer Lawrence of her time.

Any by that I mean that reading this book made me want to travel back to the 1930s, invent the internet, start Buzzfeed, and churn out posts like "The 25 Best Patricia Neal quotes of 1958", "The 16 Most Epic Faces Patricia Neal made on Oscar Night", "Examples of Patricia Neal being Funny and Cute," and, most importantly "Patricia Neal tells Ryan Seacrest She's 'Starving' on the Red Carpet" (Because he is really an immortal vampire and the world needs to KNOW).

Ahem.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that after reading her life story you will imagine that you and Patricia Neal could have been BFFS. You would have laughed over dinner about the time she booked her first play and bought a new bra with cut-out nipples to celebrate (?!), and then had to promptly strip down to her underwear for a costume fitting. You would have brought over a bottle of wine to help her drink away the pain of her forbidden love affair with Gary Cooper. You would have contemplated an intervention behind her back with her other good friends when she decided to marry Roald Dahl (who was actually a *huge* asshole - this book may ruin Charlie & the Chocolate Factory/The BFG/Matilda for you...but it's worth it).

In between the Hollywood gossip and ill-fated romances there are some crazy sad personal tragedies, some moving redemptions and victories, and enough unflinching honesty to make you almost feel intrusive for eating it all up with a spoon and asking for seconds.

P.Neal, I am now your #1 fan, and I mean it: when I googled you and found out you died 3 years ago, I was bummed. RIP.

5 surprisingly saucy 1950s brassieres out of 5!

Them

Like your top five favorite movies or books, everyone has their top conspiracy theory Wikipedia entries.

Mine are:

The Vril (because don't you think it's a little bit suspicious that we NEVER hear ANYTHING about subterranean societies of matriarchal socialist utopian superior beings? I mean, what are you trying to hide mainstream media????)

and

The Philadelphia Experiment (because INVISIBLE!)

Still, they might not make it into your dinner party conversations as much as your desert island reading list because most conspiracy theories are actually pretty grim. For every wacky cloaked battleship or subterranean super being there's ten evil governments killing their own citizens to incite a world war.

Jon Ronson treads the delicate line between absurd and upsetting perfectly in this non-fiction account of "adventures with extremists," just like he did with his fantastic account of psychopaths and the people who exist around them like bugs to be squashed. He tracks down the Bilderberg Group*, hangs out with gun-happy militiamen, and pamphlets London with a rotund Islamic radical. He even experiences the "new" KKK ("now with 50% fewer calories!") and gets to try on their fancy robes, which, for a Jewish guy, was probably quite the harrowing experience.

Bottom line, I love Jon Ronson and everything he writes. Break out your tinfoil hat and start looking over your shoulder - this book is great.

5 shape-shifting, blood-drinking, half lizard Queen Mums (RIP) out of 5!

*Bilderberg Group, really? Come on - if you're ruling the world secretly can't you have a better name like, the Covert Underground Nocturnal Team of Powerful Occult Wiccan Evil Rogues? Think about it...

Columbine

This is a great book, for which I can't really write a quick & cute review. For obvious reasons, I hope. Dave Cullen is quick to say that he's never called this the "definitive" book on what's arguably the most famous school shooting in American history, but I can't imagine any one will write another one that unpacks the tragedy so eloquently and in such a deeply-felt way. I had a really weird, pained expression on my face the entire time I was reading this, and I couldn't put it down. It's also a great read for anyone interested in how the media gets it wrong sometimes; with insights into the 24 hour news cycle, eyewitness testimony, the power of a martyr, and much more.

5 stars out of 5.

The Devil in the White City

Fairs! What could be more fun?! Tilt-a-Whirls, that Viking Ship thing, and excellent representations from my favorite tiers of the food pyramid: Fried Things and Sugar Delivery Systems. I will always love getting effed up on some cotton candy and then being spun around violently by a ride that looks like a rejected transformer and is operated by a drunk teenager. That's just the kid in me, I guess! But this book taught me that fairs have a dark side, and it's America's First Serial Killer. H.H. Holmes was a scary dude with a literal house of horrors. He  would just pick off people at the fair as they exited the world's first Ferris Wheel, burning them with buckets of molten cheese. And that's why we call deep dish pizza Chicago-style! The end.

Nah, it was much less dramatic but still very gruesome and creepy. Erik Larsen doesn't talk once about pizza. Even though I really love reading about psychopaths (exhibits A, B, C...etc), my favorite part of this book was actually the Ferris Wheel stuff. There is a story about a guy who had a panic attack while it was rising into the air and basically tried to bust out one of the windows, just a little bit of history repeating.

4 mid-air freak-outs out of 5.

The Psychopath Test

This book has many rabbit holes for you to fall down. Every other page I had to stop and Wikipedia some passing mention of a horrible crime, or odd footnote in history or culture that I'd never heard about. Oh, you would never read up about an awful crime/criminal on Wikipedia because you find it distasteful and don't want to know any of the terrifying details? Well, you are better than me. Also, why are you reading this blog? You got lost here on the way to cuteoverload.com, didn't you? It's okay. Shh, shh, stop crying.

Jon Ronson gets tasked with tracking down the creator of a mysterious handcrafted book, and that case leads him into an investigation of psychopathy - what it is, what it means, who defines it, and who might have it.

I dug this book, and have already started to tell some friends which of our OTHER friends are psychopaths. Yeah, I'm onto you. So it's great if you just want a new way to talk about people behind their backs. Endless fun!

If I am murdered, the list of my friends who I suspect to be emotionless killers is hidden in the lining of my tuxedo jacket - avenge my death!

4 shallow affects out of 5.

I Don't Care About Your Band

"Girrrrrrl." - My brain, to Julie Klausner, while reading her horrifying tales of dating hipster douchebags and hateful depressives of every variety and flavor. It's like watching a slasher movie, except instead of yelling "Don't open that door!" you're yelling...okay well you're yelling "Don't open that door!" but the guy behind it just treats you like shit instead of murdering you. Which is SCARIER? You decide!

Actually my favorite part of this book is when she talks about how your twenties are the worst years of your life that at the time you think are great. God, hindsight's a bitch. I don't care about your band! Or your stupid accounting internship! That felt good, let the healing process begin.

3.5 late-night booty calls out of 5.

UFOs

Oh. My. GOD. Let me just say that I believe everything I read, and am also easily frightened, so I should have not picked up this book. But I did, because I enjoy having thoughts like "Can't let my leg fall over the side of the bed because the ALIEN WILL GRAB IT!"

This book will tell you all about the hundreds of sightings by people who know the difference between the reflection of Venus/swamp gas/weather balloons/balloon boys, and actual crazy metal cigar-shaped light-up hyperfast hovering ALIEN SPACE CRAFT. Aiiieeeee they're here and they're going to probe us.

Does Obama know? Does FLOTUS know? Flotus save us! Dazzle the aliens with your sparkle converse and sick dance moves while Barack herds us into the secret bunkers under the Rocky Mountains!

4 tinfoil hats out of 5.

Life

I love Keith Richards. The man is basically a walking pickle, at this point. But that pickle has some great stories! I skipped some of the in-depth descriptions of chord progressions and musical arrangements - get to the scandals, Keef! Even the scandals were kind of sweet sounding when described in Keith's "aw shucks, I guess there was some heroin involved but man no one got hurt and, you know, it was the 70s, man" way.

4 bottles of Jack Daniels out of 5 - chased with a line of coke.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This story needed to be told, and Rebecca Skloot was absolutely up to the task. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer decades ago, but her cells, taken without her knowledge or permission, have lived on in laboratories around the world ever since. Researchers have shot them into space and blown them up with nuclear bombs. Their production and sale has made millions of dollars, and caused billions of dollars in damage by contaminating other cell culture. Henrietta's family had no idea her cells lived on after her death - and Skloot expertly delves into the consequences of their finding out and the ethical issues that all human cell research presents.

I'm still donating my body to science, though. I'm definitely not getting into space any other way.

4 dividing cells out of 5 (so, 8 cells out of 10).

The Wave

Two giant ships are lost every week in the ocean. As Casey points out, if 747s were disappearing at that rate there would be some considerable hubbub. I know what you're thinking: That's the price we pay for trespassing in the territory of the Great Kraken. Well, get ready to have your mind blown, because it's not giant squids bringing these ships down - it's waves. Water, dawg! And no one knows exactly what causes them or where they're going to appear. Oh, and just in case I haven't melted your brain yet, there are people out there trying to surf these 100+ foot tall monsters. Laird Hamilton, you crazy son of a bitch. This book is a non-stop adrenaline fueled thrill ride.

4 broken surfboards out of 5.