Book Report: Zeitoun

38. Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (2009) (7/12/21)

I picked up this book because I own it, and because it's by Dave Eggers, who happens to be the husband of Vendela Vida, author of my last-reviewed book. I'm not sure I even realized it was about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, never mind the story of a Syrian immigrant and successful businessman—a building contractor—in New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Or simply Zeitoun, as he is known all over town. 

The book itself is gripping, proceeding from just a couple of days before Katrina, as that storm was spinning toward NO and people were being warned to evacuate—which the main character Zeitoun's wife, Kathy, did with their four children, but he elected to stay behind, because he "always did" whenever a hurricane blew through, and the better to watch over their many properties. Once the storm hits, in a relatively brief description—it lasted a matter of hours, from the night of August 28, 2005, into the next day—we watch as Zeitoun hunkers down, and then he gets in his aluminum canoe and starts paddling through the flooded streets, helping stranded neighbors to safety, feeding left-behind dogs: doing what he can. In this, he feels "called upon" by God. 

But the city is growing increasingly toxic, and it is ridden by looters and filling with military personnel. On Tuesday, September 6, he and three companions are roughly arrested and conveyed to a makeshift high-security prison at the downtown Greyhound station, with no recourse to a phone call or any sort of justice. Zeitoun and another Syrian are suspected of being terrorists. From there, three days later, they are removed to an established prison near Baton Rouge. 

No one knows where Zeitoun is. The story is now told from Kathy's point of view, now from Zeitoun's, as she desperately tries to track him down after receiving a hurried phone call from a missionary on September 18, almost two weeks after his arrest. Slowly, the wheels of justice begin to grind. Zeitoun is finally released on the 29th. His companions end up remaining in the prison for five, six, and eight months longer. 

The descriptions at the start, when Zeitoun is paddling about doing what he can, are almost serene:

There was the canoe. It called to him, floating and ready. It was a rare opportunity, he thought, to be able to glide over the roads. He had only this day. He bailed the water resting in the hull, and in his T-shirt and shorts and sneakers, he stepped in.
     Leaving the yard was difficult. A tree across the street had been ripped from its roots and lay across the road, branches spread over his driveway. He paddled around them and looked back to the house. No great damage to the exterior. Some shingles missing from the roof. The windows broken. A gutter that would need remounting. Nothing too bad, three days' work.
     In the neighborhood, other homes had been hit by all manner of debris. Windows had been blown out. Wet, black branches covered cars, the street. Everywhere trees had been pulled out of the earth and lay flat.
     The quiet was profound. The wind rippled the water but otherwise all was silent. No cars moved, no planes flew. A few neighbors stood on their porches or waded through their yards, assessing damage. No one knew where to start or when. He knew he would be giving many estimates in the coming weeks.

At first, the water is clean, he's still got plenty of food. He sets up a tent on a flat roof of his house and sleeps outdoors. We are told in various flashbacks about his and Kathy's pasts—his relationship to the sea back in Syria, her conversion to Islam, how they met. But then with the arrest, we learn how criminally inhumane the incarceration of so many people was in the aftermath of Katrina. All law and order seemed to have vanished..

It is what we outside the vicinity of New Orleans heard about afterward, but seeing it up close in a first-person view is that much worse. Eggers does a good job of slowing down into the horror. He finishes up several years later, describing how Zeitoun and Kathy are still rebuilding their lives, but in a way, both of them have been broken.

But here I lose my way a bit with what to say about the book—for it seems that at least some of the story that was relayed to Eggers may not have been entirely honest. A half dozen years after these events, Kathy sued Zeitoun for divorce, alleging physical violence during the whole of their marriage (there is not even a hint of that in the book) and, ultimately, attempted murder. I've seen accounts by New Orleans residents alleging that Zeitoun and his cousins were con men, that they weren't the universally beloved businessmen that Eggers suggests. These accounts, of course, are just gossip and rumors, not necessarily any more accurate than Eggers's account. Perhaps, in the end, the book is merely an elaborate fiction, spun to tell a particular story. Eggers, apparently, does not talk about these troublesome developments. Here, rather, is what he says about how he learned the story and came to "trust it to the bones."

The charges of ongoing violence from early on in the marriage aside, I am fully convinced of the details of what Zeitoun experienced with Katrina. And I would not be surprised if he was, in fact, "broken" as a result. Both he and his wife were no doubt damaged (she, for one, suffered from memory lapses and an inability to understand speech) and seriously changed by those events. And life has gone on for them nevertheless. Learning about the ugly follow-up makes me feel sad. The book itself ends on a note of hopefulness and strength. But Zeitoun is not a superhero; he's just a human. I hope both he and Kathy can find peace.

Book Report: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

37. Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007) (7/9/21)

Twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa lost her father two weeks ago, fourteen years after her mother simply vanished one day. Now she learns that the man she called her father was, in fact, not—and she heads to Lapland, the homeland of the reindeer-herding Sami people (akin to Native Americans), in the middle of winter, to find out the truth. And indeed, she learns more than she bargained for, ultimately emerging from her quest with new resolve about how she wants to spend her life. 

I found this book distancing, difficult to penetrate emotionally. Sometimes supercool, sometimes overwrought. Clarissa herself isn't an especially pleasant young woman: she seems remarkably immature for someone her age. I was surprised by the glowing blurbs by the likes of Michael Cunningham ("a taut, intricately layered page-turner that looks deeply and fearlessly into matters of profound human concern") and George Saunders ("What a brilliantly constructed lightning-flash of a novel: compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written"). It is well written, yes, and there are some lovely descriptions, for example of an ice hotel far above the Arctic Circle. The landscape reflects Clarissa's own sense of isolation and loss. I enjoyed the spare language.

Perhaps what I didn't like was the secrets and lies that undergird the overarching theme of abandonment. There was too little reaching out and communicating. (Much of the conversation is done in sign language.) That said, the feeling I'm left with upon completion is a haunting one. Clarissa learns enough about her mother's past to be able to put it behind her and invent a new identity in the world. A simpler one. In the whirlwind last few pages, she does figure out how to move on.

Here is a short section (most of the sections are quite short) from midway through the book, when she is in the town she believes her biological father lives in. Pankaj is her fiancé back in New York, who doesn't know where she is; Henrik is the nephew of the woman who has taken Clarissa in. This might be considered one of the overwrought passages.

Henrik had said I could use the phone to call my family. I considered calling Pankaj. There must be someone else. I should want to call Pankaj, I told myself, but I couldn't make myself dial his number. Our number. There must be someone I'm closer to.
     A telephone book for Finnmark, its cover ripped off, sat by the phone. I began flipping through it, at first, absentmindedly; then I looked for names. I searched for any Blixes that might live in Finnmark, and found none.
     I skimmed through the listings in Masi and the nearby town of Kautokeino, where my mother had stayed. Any of the names could be my father's. I imagined my body might spasm in recognition and revolt when I saw his name. It was in my blood, I would know. But as I searched blindly, I grew more frantic. I had nothing to go on. He could be anyone. Everyone.

The reason I picked this book up is that I noticed that it had a bookmark—or not a bookmark, but a postcard was tucked in its pages. It shows a rough wooden cabin with hand-hewn wood furniture and red-checkered curtains: "The interior of the dwelling-chamber of North-Estonian fisherman's dwelling from the end of the 19th century." On the back my friend Rasa wrote, "Maybe your cabin is like this? Or the cabin in Lapland, or Norway or Finland?" I don't know to what cabin she refers—possibly the one in Minnesota I stayed in for a couple of weeks during an artist residency, perhaps my sister-in-law's cabin in central Norway. But I imagine the one in the postcard looks very much like the cabin that Clarissa eventually makes her way to near the end of the book. And although I don't remember Rasa giving me this book, she must have. So she must have liked it. And so I read it too.

The book's title, by the way, is the title of a poem by Sami poet Marry A. Somby.

Book Report: Wake

36. Rebecca Hall, with illustrations by Hugo Martínez, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021) (7/5/21)

Rebecca Hall, from New York City, educated at UC Berkeley, was a tenant's rights attorney for eight years before she decided to go back to school and get a PhD in history, specializing in race and gender. As she put it, "I could 'win' . . . cases for my clients. But I felt the need to see underneath the 'justice system'—to get at the root of what was warping the world." To do this, she "felt compelled to uncover the stories of other Black women who fought for justice. Those women warriors who fought their enslavement."

Hall did receive that PhD, and in an effort to bring her research—and the stories she uncovered, fragmentary though they might be—alive for others, she co-created this graphic (as in illustrated) history/memoir: history of a handful of slave revolts that she found records of, and memoir of her own background and her travails as a historian. It is quite the achievement.

Her research took her to New York City, London, and Liverpool. She dug through sheaves and sheaves of unindexed eighteenth-century British documents, trying to put together what pieces she could find. In the end, she uncovered a very few slave revolts that seemed to feature women—a paucity that she attributes in part to the patriarchal society, the fact that women, never mind slave women, would never have been considered (by British officials) as agents of their own fate, and so were not recorded as actors in slave revolts. Yet there clearly was female agency. Was it coincidence that more slave revolts occurred on ships that had a higher number of woman passagers? For women, as it turns out, were left unshackled on upper decks (the better to rape them)—with ready access to weapons . . .

In the account of one land-based slave revolt, four women are mentioned by name: Sarah and Abigail are found guilty and sentenced to death; Lily and Amba are found not guilty. A pregnant woman given a reprieve on hanging is mentioned—was it Sarah or Abigail? With such scanty evidence, Hall is compelled to imagine the particulars, the whys and hows, and the aftermath. These, and other, imaginings are presented in the black-and-white illustrations by Martínez.

Hall also looks back to the experience of her grandmother Harriet, born a slave in 1860 and subsequently the victim of Jim Crow.

And she outlines her own experience as a researcher, a historian seeking the truth. She is very much a player in this history. And the slave women who came before her are players in her own life, her own making-sense-of-it-all.

Here are some of the graphics from this book. I learned a lot from the words, but also from the drawings.

Book Report: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

35. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001) (7/3/21)

This is a short book, 70 pages, but it is uber-rich with thought and feeling. Doty is a wonderful poet and a meticulous observer of life, perhaps one of the most honest writers I have read. The main theme of the book is arcane: seventeenth-century Dutch still life. But Doty weaves in memories of his East Tennessee Mamaw and her purse full of bright red peppermints, or living in a ramshackle old house with his lover Wally, stuffing it full of precious objects, or visiting Amsterdam with another lover (after Wally's death) on his forty-fifth birthday and being surrounded by still lifes in the Rijksmuseum. In these and other experiences, the careful noticing that he describes in the work of the Dutch artists is reflected in his own attempts to understand how he feels, what he thinks, what is important to him, and why. This book is philosophical, but also very much grounded in lived life.

The best way for me to convey his achievement is simply to quote a few passages.

The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets. The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted, the bread broken; the oysters have been shucked, part of this great wheel of cheese cut away. . . . Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of the plate, its handle jutting toward us; someone plans, in a moment, to pick it up again. These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated. They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time. 

*

[That house] is long since sold, perhaps demolished, and nothing that was in it remains now, save perhaps some things gone to my wife's brother or his children, who knows. Our marriage ended twenty years ago. And yet how strangely vivid a few things remain: the chipped white French coffeepot on Bertha's table, her beautiful mottled hand holding mine while she lay back on her single iron bed that afternoon [we met], the little pile of twigs and leaves smoldering in the yard. An elaborate spoon embossed with an antlered stag, and a quiver of arrows, emblems of the huntress Diana. The heart is a repository of vanished things: the rock of Gethsemane, jars of plum brandy, whole fruit turning in their sleep like infants in the womb, a heavenly blue morning glory [all these being details he has mentioned in the book]. When I was a kid I had a toy, a "Magic 8 Ball." It was a hard plastic sphere bigger than a baseball, with a little window at the bottom. The idea was to ask a question, then turn the ball upside down; a message would float into view, suspended in the black liquid which a little jar inside the ball contained (it was difficult to figure this out). "Yes" the ball would answer, or "Perhaps" or "Ask again later." Now I think there is a space in me that is like the dark inside that hollow sphere, and things float up into view, images that are vessels of meaning, the flotsam and detail of any particular moment. Vanished things.
     Or vanished from my life, at least. Who knows where they might be now, to what use they may have been put, what other meanings have been assigned to them.

*

It's a simple painting, really, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, by one Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp some three hundred and fifty years ago. . . . [Here I omit his description of the painting.]
     Simple, and yet so firm in its assertions.
     I'll try to name them.
     That this is the matrix in which we are held, the generous light binding together the fragrant and flavorful productions of vineyard, marsh, and orchard—where has that lemon come from, the Levant?
     That the pleasures of what can be tasted and smelled are to be represented, framed, set apart; that pleasure is to be honored.
     That the world is a dialogue between degrees of transparency—globes of the grapes, the wine in the glass equally penetrated by light but ever so slightly less clear than the vessel itself, degrees of reflectivity.
     That the world of reflection implicates us, as well—there, isn't that the faintest image of the painter in the base of the glass, tilted, distorted, lost in the contemplation of his little realm? Looking through things, as well, through what he's made of them, toward us?
     That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.
     That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.

But of course, like the still lifes themselves, these extracts lack the meaning of context, the flow of Doty's own remembering and relating.

I will certainly revisit this book. I have also pulled out Doty's book in Graywolf Press's "Art of" series, on—fittingly enough—description. I've read it before, but I know I will learn so much reading it again.

The more I read of Doty, whether it's a philosophical gem like this, one of his memoirs, or his poetry, the more I want to read of him. 

(See my previous blog post for a few images of still lifes he considers in this book.)

Seventeenth-century Dutch still life

I am reading a short but exquisite book by Mark Doty called Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. In it he describes and discusses (in part) various 17th-century Dutch still lifes. Words do only so much, so I decided to seek out some of the works he focuses on. 

I'll start with the one that spurred me into this brief project, because although Doty himself disparages this particular painting—or that's not the right word; he admires the skill, but he prefers more homely subject matter—I was curious as to just what a "nautilus cup" might be. So here, by Willem Kalf, Still Life with Chinese Bowl, Nautilus Cup, and Other Objects of 1662. (It is quite dark, the better to invite the eye in to settle on the items the artist wished one to contemplate most deeply.)

Jan Davidsz de Heem also painted nautilus cups—the brighter style here, I gather,  a reflection of its earlier date, dark backgrounds being a stylistic evolution:

Nautilus Cup with Silver Vessels, 1632

This imagery in turn led me to a brief disquisition on nautilus cups, which were quite the thing just then. Like this one, of South German or Flemish provenance, from 1575/1625.

Though notice the other trope in these two paintings: lemons, always with a strip of delicate peel, symbolizing wealth, power, and dominance in trade.

But back to Doty: here is the piece, also by de Heem, that he fell so in love with that he was moved to explore it and associated images, which led then to memories, feelings, and yearnings. Followed by a few other of the paintings that he mentions. (As always, click on the image to see large.)

Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with a
Glass and Oysters, c. 1640

Martimus Nellius, Still Life with Quinces,
Medlars, and a Glass, 1669/1719

Ossias Beert the Elder, Dishes with Oysters, Fruit,
and Wine, c. 1620–25

Pieter Claesz, Herring with Bread and Beer, 1636

Adriaen Coorte, Still Life with
Asparagus, 1703

Here, I will pause to quote Doty himself, on this painting by Coorte, which he spends several pages describing and wondering about. He has just outlined the colors that observers, and painters, of asparagus mention when it comes to appreciating, and depicting, lifelike spears.

Purple, black, indigo, ultramarine—not the colors convention would associate with this vegetable, and yet in Coorte's astonishing painting one sees the fierce veracity of the results: here, in all its pronged, nuanced glory, a bundle of stalks resides in the full, fleshy resonance of its three-hundred-year-old presence. They look edible, earth-scented, alive; no matter that the lead white had reacted over time with something in the oil medium in which it is suspended, lending the stalks such a pronounced transparency that you can see, right through the stalks, the edge of the stone surface which supports them. That ghostliness only adds to their charm.
     All of which simply begs the question . . . why.

Perhaps you see now why I felt compelled to seek out some of the paintings in question. Doty's description, though provocative and resonant, goes only so far. Which is not to fault his treatment, not at all. His was a bigger project than simply describing paintings. But seeing the works in question helped add further dimension to his words. Simply that.

Doty mentions many other still lifes in passing, but I will end with this, a joke from 1670, Trompe l'oeil: The Reverse of a Framed Painting, by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts. Now, I'd call that darn modern.

Book Report: What You Have Heard Is True

34. Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (2019) (6/30/21)

In May 1978, Carolyn Forché wrote a prose poem titled "The Colonel":

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

This book is the story behind, not that poem itself exactly (it is never mentioned, except in the titular reference), but her writing of it—or rather, her coming to learn enough about the atrocities being committed in El Salvador, in the run-up to and during the civil war of 1979–1992, to be able to write it.

She was twenty-seven when, in 1977, a knock came on her door in southern California: a brilliant, energetic, enigmatic man, Leonel Gómez Vides, the cousin of a poet whom Forché had spent the summer with, translating her work; he wished her to come to El Salvador to bear witness to the lives lived there, and to the great unease and the mounting violence—the coming war. 

In the book, on what would become seven extended stays between January 1978 and March 1980, the two of them spend a lot of time driving around the country, where he takes her to visit campesinos or military officers or gatherings of poets and intellectuals or Catholic workers for peace (including Monseñor, now Saint, Óscar Romero)—all people who, he hoped, would give her insight into the situation there, and a story to tell back home. Finally, by March 1980, the situation had become far too dangerous, and she left/was sent away for good. 

There is much detail of situations she was in, friendships made, brushes with death squads, conversations with guerrillas, mutilated bodies witnessed—and always, her education by Leonel. I was throughout a bit frustrated by a lack of temporal grounding. The only two time anchors—and these I had to use google to really nail down—were the year of her first visit (she was born in 1950, and she was 27 when Leonel first met her, so I figured 1977, though it was actually January 1978) and the year she left (anchored by Romero's assassination, a week after her departure). Until she states those facts and the fact of seven visits in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, there is little real sense of time. Which, I imagine, was deliberate: the people in that country were living in constant terror, where time dissolves and life becomes a day-to-day battle of survival. But I, as a reader, still wanted better time markers. 

There is also little mention of the poet-activist and humanitarian she went on actively to become. Yes, the focus is on those two years, but those two years seemed to be seminal in Forché becoming who and what she did become. I was curious to know more. (Okay okay, I can always google to find out more.) 

The final hundred pages or so of the book were in a way the most satisfying: the rhythm picks up, with short chapters and insertions of journal entries ("written in pencil"); the danger is growing. She returns to the U.S. and meets a man whom she met briefly in a tense scene earlier, he a photographer she posing as a journalist to prevent an atrocity from occurring—and they marry. There are Senate hearings, where the U.S. is implicated in the government-mounted violence. A former death squad member presents his testimony. Leonel arrives in Washington, D.C., safe despite eight assassination attempts, and granted political asylum. Then goes on to broker the peace deal that ultimately follows. 

The epilogue sees Forché back in El Salvador in 2009 with family and friends of Leonel as they scatter his ashes.

The book is really about Leonel.

I flagged so much, but I'll just quote this paragraph from near the end:

Early in his exile in the United States, when asked about himself, Leonel answered that he was a coffee farmer, and later, when they took his coffee farm away, he would describe himself as a social critic and political exile and, finally, an investigator of crimes against humanity. He would not say that he had also been a champion marksman and motorcycle racer, a painter, an expert on Formula One cars, a historian of military strategy, a part-time inventor, a collector of miniature ship models, and an adviser to politicians, Catholic priests, Carmelite nuns, diplomats, labor leaders, and at least one guerrilla commander. He would never tell anyone that the handmade AK-47 awarded to him in competition, which he kept in a glass display case, was fully loaded and always had been. We were mistaken to think that the sign affixed to the case that read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS was a little joke.

I was very moved by this book. Less by Forché's own experience, perhaps, than by all that she describes. The humanity of the people she comes to know and bears witness of. 

Hope also nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope, when everything is clear. Awareness.
                                                                      —Manlio Arguetta

No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto.
Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you.
                                                                     —Federico García Lorca

Here are a couple of articles, one about this memoir and the other about atrocity as the subject matter of poetry.

Book Report: What Do You Do with an Idea?

33. Kobi Yamada, with illustrations by Mae Besom, What Do You Do with an Idea? (2013) (6/29/21)

I don't recall where I ran across this picture book, but the title was intriguing, so I bit. It's a simple story: a child, one day, "had an idea." He's not quite sure what to do with the idea, and acts like it it doesn't belong to him. "But it followed me." He worries what people will say about his idea. But he also likes having it around. It wants attention, which the child gives it, and it grows bigger. Eventually the child embraces the idea, and feeds it and loves it. The idea encourages the child to think big, to see things differently. And then one day, the idea "spread its wings, took flight, and burst into the sky. . . . It went from being here to being everywhere. . . . And then, I realized what you do with an idea... You change the world."

That's the story. The idea itself is an odd little egg-like creature on chicken legs, topped with a crown. Which reminds me of Maurice Sendak's Max. 

I enjoyed the illustration style, which evolves from monochrome brown into full color as the idea grows to maturity. But the story itself? Sure, it's a picture book, intended for kids, but so many of the picture books I've read have also been for adults, somehow. This one felt perfunctory, uninspired. Even a little creepy. The author, Kobi Yamada, is described on the jacket as "the creator of many inspiring gift books and ideas as well as the president of Compendium, a company of amazing people doing amazing things." That right there makes me think, capitalist hack. (Seriously: "inspiring gift books"?)

I look at reviews on Goodreads, and some people—mostly mothers of small children—love the book (the overall rating is 4.49 out of 5). I, however, resonated with the two-star reviews. Like this one, by Andy:

In this weird book, an idea is a sort of a tumor that shows up and keeps growing until you can't hide it anymore and then it bursts and gets all over everything.

This is inspiring how exactly? Why is the kid so passive? Why does he/she have no role in generating or evaluating the idea? What if the idea is something terrible like...?

By all means, fight for a good idea, whether it's yours or not, but don't fight for your idea whether it's bad or good. That's madness. Not every idea is brilliant just because it's yours. Sorry.

What we desperately need to be teaching people now is discernment: between truth/lies, good/evil, honest/corrupt, competent/incompetent, useful/worthless, etc. Narcissistic overconfidence doesn't seem to be the thing in short supply.

I'll just let Andy present my basic feeling about this book. I won't be seeking out Kobi Yamada again, but I might look for more Mae Besom illustrations. She's got a lovely style.