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Renato Patricio timespacev2ae4 — At first I asked myself why I was reading this book, then I couldn't put it down. It's good once you get into it. Interesting..

Jeyan Cakirlar jeyancakir7ae5 — Memoir by my favorite professor in college. I used to love hearing his stories about growing up, serving in berlin during the cold war, and getting to where he ended up. This was definitely a personal labor of love for him, and it includes all of his own photographs as well, so I'd recommend this to anyone wanting a more personal exploration of post Korea, pre Vietnam America.

林 志展 jjlin17062e082 — NO stars! I couldn't get past the language from what I remember.

Andrea Moroni moroniandrea — ''

Gabriel Mckinnon gabrielcmc5f4 — Andre Dubus III's second novel, House of Sand and Fog was adapted to film in 2003 by a Ukrainian-Americana director by the name of Vadim Perelman. Luckily, Perelman enlisted the help of Roger Deakins A.S.C., who's really just a wizard behind the camera. Also, Deakins is the man partially responsible for why most of the films by the Coen's look so inimical and striking in that trademark, neo-noir way that they do. He's also quite talented at dancing around landscapes and interiors with his camera in such a way that the characters seem almost like magical wraiths. Kingsley's tactfully understated performance helps a bit, but between an all-too liberal use of fog machines, and an oppressively swelling musical score the film is forced along as a excessive exhibition of charged melodrama, and clichés about the American Dream. Then again, Perelman's adaptation is a fairly literal reenactment of the story. Details seem fairly important to this particular tale because Dubus III is more or less prodding the reader to come to some sort of moral conclusion. Again, they seem important to the story, but they aren't always terribly consistent. To begin with, there is Kathy Nicolo. What we know about her barely takes up a page; her husband recently left her, they were recovering drug addicts. She's now living in the coastal town of Corona, in a house that was left to her by her father, and she cleans other people's houses in order to make ends-meet. That's about the bulk of the information that the reader is given at the onset. The conflict that begins the story is that the county is auctioning off her house due to delinquent business tax payments because, you know, she's a recovering addict; they never open their mail, right? She's hastily evacuated from her house one foggy morning, and begins to take last-second, desperate legal actions. Meanwhile, Colonel Mahsoud Behrani, a former SAVAK (Sāzemān-e Ettela'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar) - basically the Shah's secret police, a nasty little organization, even by secret organization standards - member who fled to the United States when the Iranian Monarchy was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution in the late 70's. Mr. Behrani has been working on a road crew in the Bay Area, as well as at a convenience store at night. He does this in order to keep up the illusion and appearance that his family is still living as luxuriously as they did in their homeland. Noticing an ad in the paper for an ocean-side bungalow that is being auctioned off at a ridiculously low price, Behrani sees his standard-American-Dream-type opportunity to quit working and manipulate the real-estate market by buying auctioned off homes and selling them at four-times what he originally paid. And really, there's nothing wrong with that ... or is there? Anyway, he buys it, and quickly begins remodeling it, with the intention of moving in autumn. It's summer, correct? So, Ms. Nicolo might be a pathetic recovering drug-addict, but it turns out that there is no reason that she should have paid a business tax in the first place, or rather, the county goofed on the exact address; the details in the book get a little hazy. There is another passage that confusingly describes it as a mere $500 property tax. Regardless, the county had no right to auction off her house, so her lawyer threatens to sue. The county tries to rescind the sale, but it's too late, and Behrani is not budging. He perceives this as a blunder on the part of foolish American bureaucracy, and feels that Ms. Nicolo must take it up with the county. Aware of the fact that he can quadruple his profit by selling it himself, he only agrees to sell it back to her for that amount. Kathy can sue the state, but that will take months, she's living out of her car, and well, she believes that it's still her house. Taking pity on this hapless female, knight-in-shining-armor Deputy Lester Burdon, the officer that came to Kathy's door on that fateful foggy day, has taken a liking to her, despite the fact that he's a father of two and still married. Apparently, he's been waiting for this opportunity for a long time, and this downtrodden, homeless, recovering drug-addict* is exactly the woman he needed to help him realize how much of a domestic zombie he had been all this time. This is where things begin to get really goofy. Kathy has already been making too many visits to the house. Behrani becomes aware of this, turns her away, and obstinately refuses to believe that he should give up the home for what he originally paid. After years of service Burdon suddenly becomes a loose cannon for Ms. Nicolo's sake; one particular visit illustrates his racism (well, you could call it racism, it's hardly that convincing in the book), and the worst possible results occur. Dubus III takes some liberties with what is an otherwise straightforward narrative; nothing too liberal really. He begins by switching back and forth between the first-person perspectives of Colonel Behrani and Kathy Nicolo. It's clearly an attempt to offer a balanced account of the moral conflict of the story. After part two, he switches to third-person narration, and intermittently returns to Burdon, Behrani, and Nicolo as the tension builds. The prose style is mostly straightforward American realism, nothing too minimal, but nothing terribly nuanced either. Voicing for Behrani, he's probably most at his most compelling as a stylist, but he has a terrible habit of running headlong into mundane details, mostly irrelevant to the story. Many of the log cabin scenes read like lackadaisical journal entries. As he must have felt somewhat awkward, telling part of the story from an Iranian-American point-of-view, he plays it safe, tossing in the occasional stylistic riff, seemingly a result of a sufficient amount of research. The important thing here is that Dubus III does manage to avoid a bias of any specific character's perspective, thus strengthening the conversational aspect of his moral storytelling capabilities. So then, in the end, is Dubus III suggesting that this is a small story of the complications inherent in pursuing the American Dream? He seems to suggest that it can be profitable for some, and not so much for others; the one's that don't profit. There is also a familiar thematic quality found in the characters of Nicolo and Burdon (who are more or less suggested to be the "bad" guys here) that was noticeable in his first book The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, people who could only be described as the relatively well-intentioned in society who sometimes end up falling through the cracks. Usually these people are ex-cons or addicts who realize what they've done wrong, yet who are also seemingly predisposed toward screwing up their lives, no matter how much they enact change, even for brief periods of time. Actually, Dubus III's humanitarian preoccupations seem reminiscent of Hubert Selby Jr. and Flannery O'Connor, in that he shares a similar preoccupation with the obstinacy of human depravity. In the case of certain characters of his, they can't help but continuously fail, and he wants to see them do so; it doesn't seem to hurt that they also manage to bring level-headed or impressionable people down with them. Culturally speaking, this is a dodgy book. Dubus III had very specific reasons for choosing an ex-SAVAK member as one of his main characters. To add a weak-willed white female character such as Kathy to the story seems to indicate that he is beckoning the reader to make a seriously difficult judgment call concerning who the villain really is here; whether Ms. Nicolo is simply a weak woman, prone to blaming other people for her own irresponsibility, or whether it's that Behrani is a greedy misogynist; a human relic of an inhumane empire that was trumped by the Iranian peoples' refusal to live in constant fear. It could be that while Kathy doesn't do anything wrong or immoral at the beginning of the story, her proclivity for irresponsible life choices, eventually turns a small mess, into an enormous one. Either that, or substance abuse is to blame, but Dubus III doesn't seem to dwell on that specific issue intensely enough. And there is also the issue of Bahrani’s values, which could hardly be described as sympathetic to women; this is apparent in his various descriptions of Kathy throughout the book; the epithet "mother whore" is used quite a bit. He's also been know to physically assault his own wife. Actually, Lester Burdon's character doesn't display much more sympathy for women or human life at all really. But it would hardly be accurate to say that misogyny is the true villain here. And in a very Selbyesque fashion, these three characters become so obsessed with their respective pursuits of happiness, that their purported selflessness is really something of a lie in the end. It's just difficult to tell who Dubus III is siding with, or who's in the right. Not that all novels should have such a morally tight conclusion, but toward the end, the reader can't help but wonder if he is even aware of ever having a specific moral point to begin with. *Although, a nymphlike Jennifer Connely plays Kathy in the Perelman film, which makes it a little more convincing.