Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos always wanted to be a writer, and these days, he is the well-known author of numerous children’s books, including the Rotten Ralph series and Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key. But his path from aspiring writer to writer was a circuitous one. Hole in My Life is one Gantos’ books for teens, a memoir covering a few years of his life, his late teens through early twenties, when he often got drunk and did drugs, agreed to help two drug smugglers move a couple of tons of hashish, got caught, and ended up in jail.

In a word, Hole in My Life is riveting. Gantos writes matter-of-factly about the mistakes he made, not afraid to show himself in a poor light. During his junior year of high school, his father moved the family to Puerto Rico, where Jack ended up working as an electrician because he couldn't attend the Spanish-speaking public schools and his family couldn't afford to send him to an English-speaking private school. But he was a poor electrician. Deciding he wanted to get his diploma, Jack returned to Florida, without his parents, to finish high school.

At first he stayed with a family who needed the boarding money Jack's father paid, but after missing the toilet one too many times in his alcohol-induced puke-athons, Jack takes a room at an old motel. While his living situation did not, unfortunately, increase his appeal with girls ("maybe it was my whiny Holden Caulfield imitation of a boy in need of carnal therapy that got me nowhere. Or perhaps my sitting in the library with an intensely cheerless, poetic look on my face only scared girls away"), it was while he was living at King's Court that he is invited to the apartment of a friend of a friend, where there would be a weed party.

I had read lots of books where people smoked weed. Some seemed to really enjoy it and got happy and hungry and silly and had deep insights into themselves and the world. I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to be the other kind of smoker—the kind I had also read about who go off the deep end and let life drift way out of control, and become dependent on dope and other users to help them out, and are abused and broken down and the only deep insight they gain from the experience is that they have totally ruined their lives—and I'd end up like that girl from Go Ask Alice who went nuts on LSD and was locked in a closet after she imagined a million bugs were on her skin and to kill them she clawed off all her flesh and nearly bled to death.

By the time I finished restocking the entire canned vegetable section at work, I was convinced I would be a vegetable if I smoked. Yet I went to the apartment.

As weed parties go, it was a disappointment, even to his hosts. But it didn't dissuade him from trying marijuana again. A year later Jack, having decided college, or at least the University of Florida, wasn't for him, reunited with his family in St. Croix, where drug use was rampant. It is in St. Croix that Jack will meet the smugglers who ask if he wants to join them and the lure of $10,000 proves too much to resist. And it is a testament to to Gantos' skill as a writer that even though you know he'll take part in the smuggling before ultimately finding his focus as a writer in federal prison, you're still turning the pages rapidly, holding your breath and unable to put Hole in My Life down until you finish the very last page.

[cross-posted at The YA YA YAs]

Guardian

Julius Lester's Guardian is a slim novel with tremendous impact. At under 120 pages, Lester's book is a powerful story set in one of the darkest periods in America's history, told with economy and an honesty as unflinching and intense as the cover's image.

In Guardian we meet 14 year old Ansel Anderson, whose father owns and manages the General Store in Davis, a small town in the Deep South of the United States. It is 1946, and prejudice runs deep in the community, lurking beneath the surface of day-to-day interactions between black and white neighbors. Ansel feels stuck in Davis, and he wonders how he will ever take up the family business from his father when the time comes. In spite of his father's misgivings, Ansel is friendly with a young black kid, Willie, who works for his family. The two boys like to sneak off to go fishing on the hottest summer afternoons. The story unfolds over 6 days, and proves how lives can be changed forever in the shortest time, especially when people live in a climate of hatred, fear and gross imbalance of power.

Lester establishes an immediate sense of tension and foreboding in his narrative. Part of this comes from the choice for point-of-view. The third-person present tense makes you feel like you are watching things unfold as the characters experience them, like a play. The weather is part of the drama here too. It's hot, really hot and close and "heavy as a broken heart." This gives you the feeling that something nasty and violent is coming, right from the start. And it is coming. Characters are developed in this short novel with as much realism and complexity, if not more, than you often find in much longer works. Once you start reading, it's hard to put this story down, in part because you can sense what is coming.

Guardian is a novel about human ugliness and the power of each person to make choices, even in desperate times. It's about how people come to terms with their actions and their inaction. This is not an uplifting book, but it is not without hope. It should inspire readers to learn more about this historical period, and Lester offers a starting place for further investigations in his author's note at the end of his novel. This is a book that should be passed on after it's read.

If you’re a fan of this site, you know we’re fans of Alan Gratz—but did you know he’s a big fan of baseball?

You might recognize Alan Gratz’s name from a review I did of an earlier book of his; but I’m not the only one who’s reviewed Alan Gratz here. The books in his Horatio Wilkes mystery series crackle with great language; a smart, world-weary, engaging main character; and ripped-from-Shakespeare’s-headlines plots. But before he wrote YA hardboiled detective mysteries based on Hamlet and Macbeth, he wrote a really interesting baseball book called Samurai Shortstop.

Shortstop concerns Toyo, a young man growing up in Japan in 1890, who discovers in baseball a way to link his family’s tradition of bushido to the new industrialization transforming Japanese society. Did you know Japan had baseball before World War II? Before Babe Ruth? Before automobiles? Well Alan Gratz knew, because he knows his baseball history. And it’s that history, that ability to illuminate the oddball corners of America’s most storied sport, that he brings to bear full bore on his new novel, The Brooklyn Nine.


The Brooklyn Nine follows nine generations of the Schneider family, from Felix Schneider, German immigrant and fan of the New York Knickerbockers in 1845, to Snider Flint in 2002, who hunts down the provenance of a mysterious old baseball bat while recovering from a broken leg. Each generation faces problems—some small, some historic—grounded in their specific moment in history. Oh, and each generation has a powerful love of baseball.

I’ve often heard it said that baseball is a writer’s sport, that baseball makes for the best kind of story. Intrinsic to the sport are notions of character, place, conflict that take place at a story’s pace. Games can be diagrammed like sentences and one inning’s close strikeout can foreshadow a late homerun like a gun on the first page of a book signals somebody’s death in chapter seven.

However, Gratz has made the most baseball of baseball books here: nine characters for nine innings, and each character gets three chapters, like the minimum at bats for a team each inning, or three strikes a batter gets before he’s out. And the characters’ situations revolve around baseball—like how Louis Schneider discovers in the middle of the Civil War that he has more in common with the Confederates than he realized. Or how Jimmy Flint’s agony over losing the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles reflects the nation’s agonizing struggle with the changes of civil rights and the cold war.

Readers familiar with his earlier books may initially be struck by the age of Gratz’s main characters—where Samurai Shortstop and the Horatio Wilkes novels follow high schoolers, the Brooklyn nine range from ten to maybe sixteen. But that’s not the whole story. In fact, this is probably Gratz’s most complex novel to date. As I’ve already noted, the structure of the novel is fairly complex. But it’s not just that—each character is given their proper due, whether they triumph in their struggles or not, whether their individual story is one of hope or one of disappointment. I’m convinced that The Brooklyn Nine is an epic, a book of the long now, one that is more interested in looking at stories that only find resolution over generations—the goal of a young man in 1845 may not find completion for a century or more, and no one character, while the hero of their own individual story, can claim to see the big picture.

A couple of notes before I wrap this up and hopefully send you on your way to find this great book. First, Alan’s website has some really interesting bits, including some great background info on the research he did for each section of the book. Second, I think Alan’s a fascinating writer and I’m interviewing him for guyslitwire and hope to have that on the website soon.

Books mentioned in this post:
The novels of Alan Gratz:
The Brooklyn Nine
Samurai Shortstop
The Horatio Wilkes mysteries: Something Rotten and Something Wicked

Guys Lit Wire & Teen Book Drop 2009

Some of you might have noticed the link on our left sidebar for the Teen Book Drop. This event, which involves gathering publisher donated books for pediatric hospitals while also encouraging folks to distribute a YA title of their choice "into the wild" on April 16th for a teen to find, is the brainchild of the ladies at readergirlz who are all fabulous and doing very good things to bring great books to the attention of teen girls. (The Ying to our Yang.) On behalf of GLW I helped to connect some publishers with the readergirlz and YALSA who put the whole thing together for the hospitals. We would also like to encourage folks to leave a book for teen readers in a public place where it can be discovered and enjoyed.

Behind the cut, enjoy the TBD trailer from the very talented Holly Cupala with a killer song and links to more info.

Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first human-made object to orbit Earth. The 183 pound satellite, just a winking dot in the sky, terrified Americans, who realized they were behind the Russians scientifically.

As the space race heated up, down on Earth boys were falling for girls and trying to learn who they wanted to be. Homer Hickam, 14 when Sputnik passed overhead, weaves together the atomic age and coming of age in his memoir, Rocket Boys.

Hickam grew up in Coalwood, West Virginia, a town built around a coal mine, where the identical white houses and even the church were owned by the mining company.

In the late 1950's, [the church] came to be presided over by a company employee, Reverend Josiah Lanier, who also happened to be a Methodist. The denomination of the preacher the company hired automatically became ours too. Before we became Methodists, I remember being a Baptist and, once for a year, some kind of Pentecostal. The Pentecostal preacher scared the women, hurling fire and brimstone and warnings of death from the pulpit. When his contract expired, we got Reverend Lanier.

Hickam's father was the mining superintendent, a dedicated, hard-working man, but one who couldn't see very far past their small town and the mine at its heart. He thought his bookish son might make a good clerk for the company, but waved off any talk of sending him to college. Then came Sputnik and American attempts to launch a satellite led by scientist Warner Von Braun. Hickam saw an opportunity. If he could build and launch a rocket on his own, maybe his dad would see he had the potential to follow his dreams.

His first attempt blew up, taking his mother's garden fence with it. But working with a little more than a chemistry textbook and a rocket diagram from Life Magazine--and a lot of trial and error--Hickam and his friends refined their rocket designs and fuel mixtures.

Rocket Boys is, as much as anything, a love note to science, to the joy of learning stuff. Hickam reports on each successive launch attempt, from the materials tried to the equations needed to calculate their altitude. Through the books, he shows his rockets' evolution from crude pipe-bombs to truly amazing things soaring thousands of feet into the air.

And while they figure out the mysteries of jet propulsion, the rocket boys also have to figure out other, more common, mysteries teenage boys face. Rocket building meetings include occasional lessons on how to unhook a bra. When Hickam is partnered with the gorgeous Dorothy Plunk in biology class a couple days after the Sputnik, his yearning for her is tangled with his love of science.

"Are you scared?" she asked me.

"Of the Russians?" I gulped, trying to breathe. The truth was, at that moment Dorothy scared me a lot more than a billion Russians, and I didn't know why.

She gave me a soft little smile, and my heart wobbled off its axis. I could smell her perfume even over the formaldehyde. "No, silly. Cutting open our worm."

Our worm? If it was our worm, couldn't it also be our hearts, our hands, our lips? "Not me!" I assured her, and raised my scalpel, waiting for Mr, Mams to give us the go-ahead. When he did, I made a long cut down the length of the specimen. Dorothy took one look, grabbed her mouth, and lurched for the door, her ponytail flying.

Every teenager is a scientist, dazzled by the world around him, desperate for knowledge. A lot of growing up is trial and error. Occasionally, you blow up the garden fence. But through all their missteps with rockets, with parents, and with girls, the rocket boys stick to their motto, cribbed from Dr. Von Braun, that we learn more from out failures than our successes.

Cairo by G. Willow Wilson

This graphic novel begins in The City of Victory from the perspective of several characters. Ashraf is attempting to transport drugs hidden in a truckload of beets. A wounded Israeli soldier finds herself in Cairo a after a firefight near the border. Shaheed, an American teenager, is stranded in the city when his flight to Beirut is cancelled. An Egyptian journalist and a young American journalist are kidnapped by thugs looking for Ashraf. Believe it or not all of these characters along with a Jinn (genie), a magician and a slew of bad guys are seamlessly intertwined in Wilson's story.

The adventure begins when a piece of drug paraphernalia that actually houses Shams the Jinn goes missing. Ashraf has to find the teen he sold it to in an attempt to placate some mystical thugs and save his kidnapped friends. The story seems almost straight-forward for a while but then takes too many twists and turns to note.

Wilson has injected a lot of things to think about in her debut graphic novel including some really enjoyable humor. Fear is one of the main themes, both as its use as a political tool and as a weapon evil uses to combat the heroes of the story. The characters also frequently move from our world to places like the Undernile, forcing them to overcome barriers through thought and reason not just brute force, though that is also used.

Wilson deftly makes her characters seem real despite surreal circumstances. The crux of the story is how complicated it can be in the modern world to do the right thing and make it a better place. While trapped in the Undernile, Kate says, "Everything is a mess and I don't know how to fix it, not a single thing..." Ali replies, "No one does, but brave people are trying." Along with Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, Cairo is one of my favorite graphic novels of '08.

What to Watch After the Watchmen

As I have no doubt that you've already hurried out to see the Watchmen, I respectfully submit some reading suggestions to follow up the experience.

First, cleanse your palate with Superman: Brainiac (by Johns and Frank). This is a straight up, mainstream, super-hero adventure. But . . . Johns captures a sense of grandeur and a depth of emotion that will catch you by surprise. He manages to capture the best of Superman, making the book feel both classic (recalling the feeling of Superman: the Movie, in particular) and completely fresh at the same time. This has got Superman and his cousin Supergirl facing a terrifying threat from long-dead Krypton in a battle which has unexpected, and tragic, repercussions. It doesn't hurt that Frank's figural work and action are about the best in modern mainstream comics. I swear, you will be able to hear Christopher Reeve speaking when you see his Superman.


Then, dip into something decidedly darker and stranger with Omega the Unknown (by Lethem and Dalrymple). Novelist Lethem updates the obscures 1970's hero with the story of an alienated teen who starts off by learning that his recently deceased parents were actually robots and ends up with a connection to one very, very unusual super-hero. Intelligent, disturbing and filled with characters that are complex in both motive and morality, Omega is one of Watchmen's worthy successors.

Finally, if the movie has prompted you to take a look back at your much-thumbed or brand new copy of Watchmen, here's something you might not have noticed. Chapter 5 ("Fearful Symmetry") is perfectly visually symmetrical. The first page composition and color scheme matches that of the last page exactly. The second page matches the second to last, and so on, right to a dramatic meeting right in the middle. Just one more way that Watchmen used the sequential art form like nothing before it ever had.

Hopefully, this will keep you until you head back to the theater for a second viewing.

Thought You Should Know

Did you know that malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases produce false positive results on HIV tests? Christine Maggiore reports in her book, What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong, that "Many antibodies found in normal, healthy, HIV-free people can cause a positive reading on HIV antibody tests." She also notes that "Canada's Laboratory Centre for Disease Control does not recognize the American T cell count criteria for AIDS. This means that 182,200 American AIDS patients - more than 25% of all people in the US ever diagnosed with AIDS - would not have AIDS if they were in Canada."


This book is an eye opener: "Can you imagine receiving a fatal diagnosis without being told the diagnosis is based on an unproved idea and an uncertain test? Being instructed to take powerful, experimental drugs without being told these drugs compromise health, destroy functions necessary to sustain life, and were approved for use without adequate testing? Being informed that you have, or should expect, deadly illnesses without being told that these same illnesses are not considered fatal when they occur in "normal" people?"

The HIV/AIDS hypothesis was introduced at a press conference, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I knew that. So not everything I thought I knew about AIDS was wrong.

This surprised me, though: HIV tests are not required for an AIDS diagnosis in Africa.

The author is not making this up. She provides 10 pages of references, from the World Health Organization, and from publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Lancet (one of the top British medical journals).

"AIDS is not a new disease or illness; it is a new name or designation for 29 previously known diseases and conditions. As the NIH (National Institutes of Health) states in its comprehensive report on AIDS, 'the designation AIDS is a surveillance tool.' Since 1982, the surveillance tool AIDS has been used to track and record familiar diseases when they appear in people who have tested positive for antibodies associated with HIV."

On page 11 of her book, Maggiore lists 65 other "Factors Known to Cause Positive Results on HIV Antibody Tests". I think people need to know this.

1993 Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis said of this book, "Christine Maggiore writes clearly for any reader the simple truth about AIDS."

Grift, Where is Thy Sting?

Listening to news reports of the recent Wall Street scandal involving Bernard Madoff, I kept hearing the same descriptions about the man who scammed and scammed big. He was charming, likable, distinguished. He treated his employees like family. He also happened to manage a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme that has wreaked havoc with investors, many of whom were non-profits that are suffering from investments made on their behalf. Over and over people wondered how this well-respected Wall Street investor could have charmed and snowed so many people.

The simple answer is he was a con man trying to pass in the real world.

Con is short for confidence, and the con man runs games that snare unsuspecting marks in a web of trust that eventually ends with the individual being separated from their money. In most cases, though there is a great deal of deception involved, the con man is not considered a thief because the victim hands their money to the con and his outfit. Where Madoff differs from traditional cons is that usually the con involves a greedy victim who knowingly involves themselves in shady activities, so that when the deal goes south they are too embarrassed to report it to the police. Madoff was simply using his existing experience and connections to manipulate people for no known reason and broke many finance laws doing so. He may simply have been playing a high stakes game for the fun of it.

To understand how elaborate these confidence games can be, and how seemingly innocent people can get snared into these webs of deception, I found myself returning to David W. Maurer's classic The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. Originally published in 1940, Maurer's examination of the inside world of classic confidence games is a fascinating look at the real world machinations that inspired movies like The Sting and The Lady Eve, and fiction like Jim Thompson's The Grifters. For a book that is 60 years old, with con games that stretch back even further, it's surprising how relevant this book still is today.

Maurer's look at this non-violent criminal underworld is built from a collection of oral histories by those who knew the creators of the original con games, or participated in them. Tracing the history of "big store" games - con games that originated in fake storefronts at the end of the 19th century - we get the full run-down of the three big cons: the rag, the wire, and the payoff. These games - and they really play out like games when you read them - took places in fake betting rooms and fake stock brokerages, with a full accompaniment of fake banks and fake telegraph offices to match. There could be dozens of players involved, organizations pulled together to create a very convincing world of high stakes gambling and finance, that would lure in marks to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars (in 1930's dollars, mind you) in one lump-sum payout. And once that payout was made those storefronts were gutted and shuttered within the hour, the players scattered to different cities where they would pick up parts in new games.

Toward the end Maurer also drops the dime on some short-con games, games where a few con men can make a quick buck on whatever a mark has on him. Things like three card monte, crooked card and dice games, and the occasional hot-seat - a con that involves the mark putting up money as a bond against splitting the profits toward a larger amount like a found suitcase full of cash. The modern version of this is the advance-fee scam, often called the Nigerian Bank letter scam that takes place in people's email boxes all over the world. Big and small, cons fleece them all.

As Maurer was professor of linguistics it shouldn't be surprising that the book is packed with the lingo of the con's world, with full explanations provided when known. Familiar terms like mark (victim) and roper (a scout) and the fix (paying off police) bump alongside colorful terms like cackle-bladder (a fake a murder used to scare off marks), plinger (a street beggar), and a fitted mitt (a bribed official). The joy in reading Maurer's book is that he lets the cons play out on the pages, allows the players to tell the composite stories he's constructed, butting-in to explain details only as necessary. The chapters read like classic short crime fiction full of characters who, with a change of venue and only slightly different methods, are still among us and plying their trade on Wall Street and through our junk email.

Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.



The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man
by David W. Maurer
with and introduction by Luc Sante
Anchor Books edition 1999

Brains Brains Brains - ZOMBIE HAIKU

Anyone can write haiku, right? It's so simple that schoolchildren learn it. In fact, it's so simple that even zombies can write it.

ZOMBIE HAIKU by Ryan Mecum tells the story of a zombie plague. It is presented as a journal full of poetry by some guy. At first, he's just a guy writing haiku (a lot of which are parodies of other people's poems, including those of Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats), but he continues to write haiku as he becomes a zombie and starts hunting for brains. However, right at the start, in the margins around the poems, there's some blue handwriting by a human guy who has been bitten by a zombie, but has grabbed the journal. So he sets up the scene (zombie plague, some people hiding out at the airport, all of them dying one way or another), and then he gets out of the way so you can read the story of the zombie plague straight through. The note-making guy comes back in at the end, with rather tragi-comic consequences.

Here, some samples of what you can expect from ZOMBIE HAIKU:

Little old ladies
speed away in their wheelchairs,
frightened meals on wheels.

Wheelchair pile-up!
Five old women on the ground,
helpless as babies.

That's from an episode where our zombie poet is in nursing home. From a bit later, here's this tidbit:

Blood is really warm.
It's like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

Here's another general observation:

Brains are less squishy
and a tad bit more squeaky
that someone might guess.

And another, which appears inside the book with a "his skull", but is on the cover as follows:

Biting into heads
is much harder than it looks.
The skull is feisty.

A general warning: This book is full of zombie murders and mayhem, including descriptions of zombies decomposing, maggot infestations, and gruesome injuries. Interestingly enough, Ryan Mecum, zombie haiku-writer extraordinaire, worked as a youth pastor at a Presbyterian church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Gotta love a youth pastor who writes about zombies. Coming this summer, Ryan's next opus: VAMPIRE HAIKU.