Horizon

Well, I'm no historian, but The Making of Modern Japan by Marius Jansen, while no doubt getting its facts straight, is just so poorly written that I'd warn anyone off it whatever the dust jacket says. Its prose style is needlessly convoluted, sometimes almost humorously so. There's really no need to write straight history that way.

Even though I love Larry Brown with all my heart, I can't give "Fay" a thumbs up. If you are new to this author, start with his short story collection "Facing the Music" and weep and weep and weep over the fact that Brown died in November 2004.

I've read some books that were absolutely terrible -- Gordon Dickson's Wolf and Iron comes to mind in the post-apocalyptic genre -- but not too terribly many that caused me to lose confidence in them in the sense that Elizabeth and Callimachus did in their reviews. Probably the worst for me was a book on New France (a subject I'm wholly ignorant of) which I was fascinated by until I got to a discussion of New Orleans. The author explained that "Dixieland" derived from the French name for a ten-spot. Phut!

Fear of Falling isn't bad, but you knew I'd say that.

As I remember it, the book is very good at the particular vulnerability of the middle-class person who has begun to slip and really has no practical idea how to manage at a lower standard of living -- e.g. no idea how to behave in a welfare office.

To be frank, I feel a particular anxiety when observing acquantances whose children have "fallen". Something about a deeply bourgeois value set makes one think such folks have squandared something that was -- while not a birthright -- their parents suffered mightily to attain.