Shorter NoticesI Hope They Serve Beer in Hell In his autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean '24 speaks of the power that his borderline-alcoholic brother, Paul, and his editor wielded as the principal authors of the local newspaper in Helena, Montana. "Most of the town feared them," Maclean wrote, "especially because they wrote well." A River Runs Through It has long been a standard in the American literary canon, largely because it stands as a testament to the indisputable importance of good writing—and, more specifically, good story-telling. The rise of the non-literary in the last half century follows in this same vein. While many of these works—airport novels, beach books, whatever you care to call them—lack the subtexts, intricacies, and character development of Maclean's or, say, John Steinbeck's fiction, their authors have shown a prodigal ability to craft engaging and seductive storylines, often set in fantasy worlds inaccessible to readers. Mario Puzo's The Godfather, for example, straddles the line between literary and non-literary fiction, as it has been equally acclaimed for the humanistic, if sympathetic, portrayals of mobsters in a violent underground world as for its masterful storyline. In the last fifteen years, however, readers have been drawn to the "what you read is what you get" genre fodder of Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Dan Brown, et al.—all of whom, while entertaining, leave little room for any type of scholarly analysis. Perhaps most notably, J.K. Rowling has become the richest person in England thanks to an epic franchise of childrens' books so skillfully written that their appeal, even to adults is unrivaled. This knack for story-telling seems the only plausible explanation for the immense popularity of "The Tucker Max Stories," a collection of Mr. Max's ongoing escapades spanning roughly the last decade. For those unfamiliar with his work, Tucker Max has risen to the status of cult celebrity as an unapologetic, self-proclaimed, and self-aggrandizing asshole. He possesses an utter unconcern for the feelings of others or for the consequences of his escapades, sleeps with more partners than a Saigon prostitute, and fuels his adventures with a capacity for alcohol consumption rivaled only by a Dartmouth student on Friday night. Before writing him off as a vapid, alcoholic waste of life with no sense of direction, though, consider Mr. Max's background—he graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, then attended Duke Law School on an academic scholarship, which he managed to pass despite spending six weeks of one semester working in Cancun. A close reading of personal information on his website, to the extent that it is to be believed, shows him to be quite thoughtful and well-read in the classics. Max's celebrity appeal is an irresistible combination of intelligence, wit, and unhealthy excess. American essayist George Jean Nathan famously declared, "I only drink to make other people seem interesting." Max seems to have adopted this mantra, as all his exploits are tinged with a misanthropic, though comical, disdain for humanity, excepting only his closest friends. Here the importance of quality story-telling enters the equation. Told by most people, Max's adventures—all of which revolve primarily around some disastrous combination of sex and drinking—would come across as unpalatable, puerile, or outright stupid. However, Max possesses a gift for making them both addicting and hilarious. Not impressed yet? Consider this: how often do you hear tales from college students about drunken exploits and dalliances that simply end with, "Oh, well I guess you had to be there. It was really funny though." Alternatively, have you ever tried to write down your own adventures, only to find out they're not quite as funny to others as they are to you? Therein lies the essence of powerful story-telling: the ability to make the reader feel like a witness rather than a third party audience; the ability to make minutia and humorous asides relevant and remarkably humorous. Max understands these elements of story-telling exceedingly well, and his work stands as a testament to the power of this comprehension. It is easy enough for anyone to be rude, obnoxious, intolerable, constantly drunk, and of questionable morality. It is quite another proposition to make these qualities both interesting and entertaining in written form for a mass audience. Tucker Max seamlessly blends his personal excesses with intelligent wit and a sardonic sense of humor to produce stories which are engaging for their own merit, and not just their juvenile content. Max's new book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a compendium of about a dozen previously published stories and another dozen new ones, matches the above description to the letter. Decorum prohibits delving into the content in these pages, but rest assured that the new stories are equally as entertaining as the old. While the content of Max's website provides more than an adequate quantity of material, the new book is well-suited for those who have exhausted the website or simply need mindless bedside reading. Or, if read closely, a lesson in crafting amusing stories from one's own experiences.
Green River Running Red My memories of the fall of my final year of prep school remain a blur of college applications, Miller High Life, and Friday night football games (never at the same time, of course). Yet one of my clearest memories from this time is getting up from my chair at a mid-December poker table to watch Gary Ridgway repeat "guilty" when asked how he would plea on 48 separate counts of murder. Gary Ridgway resembled a calm but aging gas station attendant throughout the entire ordeal. Gary Ridgway is the infamous Green River Killer, and although he finished the majority of his killing before I was born, the effect he left on Seattle lingered until he was finally convicted in 2004. The thought that someone could kill so many innocent women and apparently get away with it haunted the city. It was not so much a fear of becoming a victim (as Ridgway murdered prostitutes almost exclusively), but a fear that a normal neighbor or co-worker could be the killer. If the Green River case taught us anything, it was that serial killers are not necessarily conspicuous monsters; they can appear to be normal people, and only after they are caught does society brand them as macabre pariahs. When I first opened Green River Running Red, I hoped to catch a glimpse inside the twisted brain of Ridgway. I desired answers to my questions about why he did it, how he justified it to himself, and what caused this schism between his thought process and that of a regular empathetic human being. I figured the decorated true-crime writer Ann Rule could provide me with this view into Ridgway's mind. Unfortunately, Green River Running Red left something to be desired. I started this book with the intention of finding something other than what Ms. Rule had attempted to provide, and I frequently found myself dozing off while endeavoring to make it through 652 pages of true-crime prose. The book starts off with a brief description of the "Pac HiWay," the stretch of Washington State Route 99 nearest to SeaTac airport between Seattle and Tacoma where many of the Green River victims were last seen. This begins the first of many instances wherein Rule fails to provide an adequate description of the relative positions of the locations she references. One sentence describing this area reads, "To reach this stretch of the Green River from my house, I had to cross Highway 99 and head about four miles down the long curving hill that is the Kent-Des Moines Road." Ignoring the cluttered semantics of this sentence, the fact remains that I live around Seattle and I still have no idea what she is talking about. This impression continues throughout the book. Rule could have provided readers with a simple map of South King County in the beginning of her book, highlighted the necessary locations, and greatly facilitated the reader's mental grasp of the relative locations of the aforementioned landmarks. I eventually tired of keeping track of all the places in my head, and kept my place in the book with a small map of south Seattle. Every few chapters, Rule takes a break from her tiresome narration on the Green River case to detail the life of Gary Ridgway. When describing Ridgway's troubled growth from childhood to adolescence to maturity, Rule uses the impersonal pronoun "he," as if to maintain some sense of mystery about his identity. It is not clear to me what effect she was trying to achieve by writing in this manner. Anyone reading the book would have most likely taken an interest in the case and would already know the identity of the Green River Killer. Rule begins the first of these rather peculiar chapters: He was a strange little boy who seemed half-formed, a newt in a world of strange creatures. It wasn't that he was missing any features or limbs, but his face was like a bland pale puppet's… This stylistic element was not exactly bothersome to me, but it came off as contrived and unnecessary. I certainly could have looked past the two aforesaid shortcomings had I found Rule's work mildly entertaining, but the vast majority of the book was quite tedious. She spends the first two thirds of the book giving what details she could find on the background of virtually every prostitute who disappeared from the streets of Seattle in the early 1980s. Though Rule brings dignity to their short and ill-fated lives, the reality is that this makes for bad reading. The same is true of her depiction of all the discoveries of the victims' bones, but to a lesser extent. After the first few tales, all the partial skeletons and body sites essentially run together in the mind of everyone but the detectives investigating the case. Rather than employing a comprehensive approach to the case, Rule could have focused on the most interesting and important victims and body sites that finally led to Ridgway's conviction. After struggling through the first two parts of the book, I arrived at the final and most compelling section. After finally revealing the identity of the killer to the readers, Rule begins to delve into the interrogation and trial of Gary Ridgway. In the two years between Ridgway's arrest and conviction, the detectives conducted countless interviews and recorded hundreds of hours of video. I found Rule's recap of these conversations to be the most interesting part of the book, and I easily devoured this section, never coming to close nodding off. In retrospect, Rule had a very difficult job in writing this book. The mere scale of the case presents a huge impediment to crafting gripping prose. I would not discourage interested parties from purchasing and attempting to read Green River Running Red, but I would also advise them to expect a long, arduous struggle in grinding through the first 500 pages. Rule definitely does justice to everyone involved in the Green River case: the investigators, the families, and especially the victims; she simply fails to make it engrossing.
He's Just Not That Into You Dispelling the popular Dartmouth belief that all it takes to win a guy's heart is a few intoxicated blitzes and a batch of burnt cookies, Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo's book reveals the brutal truth about interacting with the opposite sex: in most cases, as their chosen title bluntly proclaims, He's Just Not That Into You. Instead of initiating entry into the realm of awkward phone calls (and perhaps protracted cases of food poisoning), women should wait for men to make overtures, Behrendt writes. While the image of a woman waiting by her phone on Friday night, hoping for it to ring, may seem old fashioned, Behrendt's mantra makes sense: if a man wants to see a woman, he'll call her. If he doesn't, well, at least she has avoided the inevitable train wreck of a relationship between two incompatible people, as well as the time-consuming scheming required to land this mismatched mate. Benhrendt's overenthusiastic repetition of this concept, which rears its head several times in every chapter, takes its toll on the reader – couldn't he at least diversify his turn of phrase beyond that which graces the title page? A better question may be, why should women pay twenty dollars for a book that insults them and tells them that every bad relationship was essentially their fault because they did not realize their significant other was "just not into [them]"? How He's Just Not That Into You has risen on the best-seller list, and remained there for several months, is beyond my understanding. The advice it dispenses is nothing more than common sense, dressed up with "Super-Good Really Helpful Workbook" sections encouraging the reader to deface her book by drawing red flags – because, if I'm questioning a relationship, seeing a bright red flag with my boyfriend's name on it is definitely going to convince me to break it off with him. But beyond He's Just Not That Into You's marginal value as an adult coloring book, it contains nothing else worth paying for. If someone needs a book to tell her that "He's Just Not That Into You If He's Having Sex With Someone Else" (the deep truth of chapter five) or "He's Just Not That Into You If He's Breaking Up With You" (insightfully revealed in chapter eight), she is probably a lost cause in the relationship arena anyway. Despite its worthless advice and juvenile tone, punctuated by the type of language one would expect from two authors who worked for the raunchy television show "Sex and the City," He's Just Not That Into You does retain some value – as a humor piece. Containing one's laughter at the cheesy fake letters asking for relationship advice is nearly impossible, as their senders make clichéd comments like, "I like bad boys. They're exciting. If you don't, you're too uptight." Stealing this device straight from the pages of glossy teen magazines, the authors answer these pseudo-letters seriously, advising their recipients that they should only date men who shower them with presents and a fabulous sex life, and that it is better to be alone than with Mr. Imperfect. This viewpoint, if widely adopted by women, would reek of a hypocritical nature, given that women often complain that society possesses impossibly high standards for their own sex. In spite of these many flaws, one piece of Behrendt's advice may be useful for the average Dartmouth female: "He's Just Not That Into You If He Only Wants To See You When He's Drunk." Given that the typical date at Dartmouth seems to be a game of pong (or three or four), perhaps we need to be reminded not to let our "desire to be loved and feel affection cloud [our] judgment (like a big tall glass of scotch)." That is, of course, only applicable if we're not the ones drunkenly choosing a mate. Perhaps, on this campus, a round of She's Just Not That Into You is in order.
Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask Your Doctor After Your Third Martini Despite being a #1 New York Times bestseller, this book failed to give in-depth explanations for the answers to many of the questions, leaving the reader largely unsatisfied. All in all, it is much more a humor book than a health guide. For instance, between questions like, "how do people in wheelchairs have sex?," "does breast milk cure warts?,"and "can poppy seeds make you test positive for heroin?" the authors placed sections that appear to be comedic transcripts of their writing and brainstorming sessions. These sections were so painful to read I found myself skipping them over entirely. The authors also included two different recipes for artificial phlegm in their "what is snot" section, which I neglected to try. If anyone finds himself with a bizarre medical question, he would be better off saving his $12.95 and then turning to Google, rather than purchasing this poorly-written book. The Ten Books You Won't See Anywhere in These Pages We here at TDR are proud of our vast library, but it is, shall we say, uneven. Any perusal of the bookshelves yields some surprises. Here are some notable volumes from our collection that we chose not to include in putting together this issue: High and Tight: The Rise and Fall of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry The Dartmouth Literary Monthly: Volume VII (1893), Edited by Students of the Senior and Junior Classes (property of Theta Delta Chi) I, Rigobertu Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala 942 Celebrities Tell You All About Sex I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report On Recognizing, Fighting and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood How the Grinch Stole Christmas The Real Anita Hill Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns We the People Declare War! |
Article ToolsRelated Articles· Fitz and Schul Defeat Sobriety and Bad Cinema · Fitz and Schul Defeat Sobriety and Bad Cinema: The Story of F. Scott Fitzgerald at Winter Carnival · Wright to Step Down in June 2009 · Winter Carnival: The History
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