Tagged: book

March 15, 2012

Audiobook Review: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook
by Bruce D. Perry (Author), Maia Szalavitz (Author), Danny Campbell (Narrator)

This book was so fascinating that I dropped all my other podcasts and shows in order to listen to nothing but it from start to finish. I consistently found myself rewinding to catch things I’d missed. Everyone that’s seen me in the last 3 days has heard about this book. It is because of my own personal experience with childhood trauma that “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog” caught my eye, but you don’t have to have a history of abuse in order to find Dr. Perry and his work as compelling as I did.

This book is relevant to anyone who was ever a child and anyone who plans to raise children. Perry’s simple explanations, and memorable associations really helped me grasp the subject matter. For example, your developing brain is built like a thumbs-down fist, each finger matures at a different rate and requires different stimuli. After making this association, Perry would refer to the “fingers” of the brain throughout the book, helping me to visualize his subject.

The stories of these amazing children are riveting, and touching, and illuminating. From what I had previously thought I’d known about the brain, I was worried that the book would be little more than a freak show of irreparably damaged children and eventually adults, touched by the bony finger of neglect; disfigured mentally and physically by their relatively brief early trauma for the remaining years of their difficult and joyless lives. Fortunately, I was wrong about the brain. It seems that, while there are some things a person can’t retrieve from the jaws of serious damage, the brain will work to repair its self, and with proper stimulation, recover almost miraculously.

Perry talks about coming into the field of child psychology at a time when the official psychiatric belief was that children don’t suffer from trauma. If a child was molested, abused, or experienced the death of a parent, any significant change in behavior after that was considered to be purely coincidental.

As a child of the eighties, I came of age with the backlash from that incorrect assumption. The message I got growing up was that people who suffered abuse as children have been irreparably damaged. Forever broken on a foundational level, childhood trauma sufferers were doomed to a life of degradation.

A lot of people who find themselves in abusive relationships, or who have a history of abuse rewrite their stories rather than admit that they’re “that kind of person.” Violence, neglect and molestation don’t have a “type.” Childhood trauma has happened to every different kind of kid, with every different type of personality and in every different sort of home in the world. If you are currently living in fear for your safety, or if you ever have, you’re that “type.” I’m that type.

What I like about “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog” is that it highlights just how much recovery the brain can make. It sends a clear message to and for those of us who felt that we would always be broken: the brain is amazing, your brain is amazing. Extreme childhood abuse and neglect has clearly left it’s mark on these children, and yet many of them make wonderful recoveries and are able to have and create the kind of social network that sustains mental health over time.

Dr. Perry confirmed something that I have long suspected on my own. Being in a 12 step program has shown me that massive recovery is possible with the right input and a strong social network. Human beings are amazing, and nothing can keep you down if you don’t want to be down. Damage takes time to repair, but nobody can break you if you get the help you need, and make the choice to not be broken.

March 5, 2012

Audiobook Review: Monster Hunter International

Monster Hunter International [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
by Larry Correia (Author), Oliver Wyman (Narrator)

Imagine every one of your favorite action movies ever combined into the best bedtime story ever, told to you as an excited child by the best storyteller dad ever and you’ll get a fairly good idea of what it’s like to listen to Oliver Wyman narrate Larry Correia’s “Monster Hunter International.”

Gorilla sized prize fighter, sharp shooter, and genius Owen Pit has a destiny, a destiny he is failing to fulfill by working late hours in an accounting department with a shit for brains middle-management slug of a boss who treats everyone poorly and acts like a tool. Thankfully destiny is the kind of thing that will come to you, especially if you’re the protagonist in a fantasy book; and brutally killing your werewolf boss in hand to hand combat opens a lot of doors for a young accountant when Monster Hunter International is on the scene.

Me listening to this book is the result of yet another one of Audible’s seemingly unending (thankfully unending) special sales. This one was for series starting books. If it wasn’t for this sale, I probably would have gone my whole life without this book, and that would have been a God damned shame. Because this book is two things I have grown to greatly appreciate in audiobooks. First, it is extremely well narrated. Second, it is 23 hours long and only costs 1 credit. Because of the audible sale, I paid real money for it (about $5), but I intend to buy books 2 and 3 with my audible credits. That gets me 20 and 18 respective hours of entertainment for the same price I pay for other books that are only 9 or 10 hours long.

I’m not saying that the hours to credits ratio is the main selling point, just that it’s a pretty bow on an already well wrapped package, if you know what I mean. Let’s put it this way: I don’t know if Larry Correia writes “BOOM!” when the hero Owen Pit shoots his gun, or if Oliver Wyman just gets excited and yells “BOOM!” but I don’t give a shit, because I love to hear a grown man say “Boom!” Especially Oliver Wyman.

The voice on this guy is amazing! There’s a reason Wyman has won fourteen Earphone Awards, five Audie Awards, two Listen Up Awards and narrated over 150 audiobooks. Other narrators I’ve listened to have about 3 unique character voices for the main character, their BFF and their love interest, and they tend to make every foreigner a Russian. Wyman had a unique character voice and tone for every one of the extensive cast that populate the Monster Hunter world. I was enrapt from first word to last. I’ve even created a new list of books I want based solely on the fact that Oliver Wyman has narrated them.

This book is packed with fun, and specially made for people who love guns. I’m not really interested in firearms, so some of the dick-hard descriptions of different guns and custom mods went completely over my head. Thankfully, the descriptions of guns was well and properly balanced with the shooting of guns, which I rather do enjoy.

If you have trouble with willful suspension of disbelief, this book is not for you. Not only does it have every single 80′s action movie cliche I ever heard of, but there are some I never even imagined before. I ate it up, and because there’s 23 awesome hours of it, I could listen and listen and there was still more to listen to! If you are the kind of person who clapped their hands and smiled like a hungry baby at feeding time whenever Mel Gibson took off running after a car traveling full speed down the freeway in a Lethal Weapon movie, this is your book and it’s calling your name. Don’t deny it. Embrace it. Be who you are, this is your destiny.

January 2, 2011

Book Review: Drowning Ruth

Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz

I received this book at a white-elephantesque book exchange Ben’s family has started doing for the holidays. As a new tradition, it’s suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. It may be about getting rid of books you’d rather not have company see in your house, but it also might be about sharing books that you think people might like. Currently, it’s kind of both.

First of all, I’ve always associated the “Oprah’s Book Club” seal with anti-feminist, melodramatic housewife schlock that a reader of my social and intellectual standing couldn’t possibly enjoy, or at least couldn’t possibly enjoy in public. Unlike my secret, shameful love for murder mysteries, I have no affection whatsoever for womanly family dramas. So I was interested to see if I would even finish the book.

Maybe it’s because I had such low expectations when I started reading “Drowning Ruth,” or maybe it’s because I was on a family vacation with a family whose main pastime is reading, but I cut though this book in a matter of days. Every time I would start to get bored with the characters, or the scene, someone would appear or something would change that would pull me back in. This book is a page-turner without question.

Even before I learned that this was a first novel, I could tell from the almost mechanical way in which Schwarz works her transitions. In my experience, first novels universally carry this trait, and it’s almost a requirement for a freshman novelist to have difficulty constructing transitions. Though this book carries a lot of them, I felt that rather than clunking, the multiple transitions in the novel took on a pleasant clicking quality, like a familiar kitchen clock. Schwarz moves back and forth in time, as well as back and forth between characters–mostly Ruth and her aunt Amanda. Sometimes the narrative is first-person and sometimes it is third. I know some people take issue with this sort of voice-changing, but I never have. I felt that it was helpful in showing detail and in setting the scene.

One thing that the first person sections could have done, but didn’t, was bring the reader to a greater knowledge of Ruth and Amanda as people. Instead they remain poorly developed cut-outs on and around which the complicated plot hangs and gathers. The characters in “Drowning Ruth” do and say things so that the story can move forward, but I had a hard time figuring out what, if any, consequences they suffered for their actions. Both Amanda and Ruth experience some fairly damaging psychological trauma, but they both seem fine when the crisis is over, even if it lasted a year or more. When Schwarz needs them back in good form they pop up like daisys, right as rain and ready to behave normally–or at least not insanely–once again.

The real gem in “Drowning Ruth” is the plot, and the circuitous process by which it is revealed. We know from the first chapter that Ruth’s mother has drowned and that the only other people there were Amanda and Ruth as a toddler. What you spend the rest of the book figuring out are the exact circumstances of that death, and why Amanda has kept so many secrets for so many years.

Towards the end I started to get frustrated with the multiple twists and turns in the story line, but by that time I was in too deep and I wasn’t putting that book down, no matter how obnoxious it got. People who were invested in the picture of dysfunction and middle-class suffering that Schwarz was painting for most of the novel might be annoyed at the way she chose to end it, but I found the ending to be redemptive and life-affirming. It felt tacked on and falsely upbeat, but to be honest, after so many pages of downtrodden, unloved children being subjected to tragedy after tragedy, the tacky happy ending was a boon.

If you like kitchen table melodramas, then this is the book for you. It will keep you interested page after page from first to last. If you feel the need for literature, if you consider yourself high-brow or intellectual, this is not the book for you. But what it lacks in finesse, it makes up for in movement. If you want an easy read that you can blow through in a couple of winter days, this is certainly a book to add to your cold weather stack.