Thoughts

How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb?

 

Answer A: This should be determined using a nonparametric procedure, since statisticians are not normal.

Answer B: One -- plus or minus three (small sample size).

 

delightful, clear production of a witty, fun play

 

This fully dramatized production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is delightful. Shakespeare's wit comes through in full force (especially in the Beatrice-Benedick storyline): I love that the words from hundreds of years ago can evoke my laughter today. This play is immensely fun and the performance is excellent.

The enunciation of the lines is clear and the voices of the different characters are distinct, but - not being a Shakespeare expert - I found it invaluable to read over the synopsis included in the liner notes, since the audio performance does not include any stage directions or character identification (as in "Beatrice:" and "Claudio:").* With that small help, however, my enjoyment was unhampered.

I highly recommend this dramatization!

* Indulgent tangent: The occasional confusion resulting from a lack of character identification reminded me of a wonderfully clever passage in Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book (the sequel to The Eyre Affair) in which a fictional character hiding out in the real world is revealed due to his inability to follow "undedicated" dialogue (i.e., dialogue without explicit attribution as to who is speaking). Fforde's books are wonderful, silly fun for the Shakespeare and other literature lover; the passage I refer to is on page 360-361 of the paperback edition.

1. A histogram of how many reviews have 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star.
2. An excerpt from the most helpful favorable review (4 or 5 stars)
3. An excerpt from the most helpful critical review (1, 2, oe 3 stars)

I just read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, author of the wildly popular The Kite Runner from a few years back. I wrote the 802nd Amazon review of the book, so I'm clearly the pivotal opinion. Still, I keep telling myself that I write these reviews mostly to help me process them (and for you, if you read this blog). This book wasn't always easy to read, but Hosseini is all about redemption, so you can count on him for a feel-good ending (unlike Kiran Desai and her Inheritance of Loss or Rohinton Mistry and his Fine Balance: I guess people in Afghanistan have happy endings but people in India don't: if that were true, I'd expect more India-Afghanistan migration than we currently observe...).

intensely engaging story of women’s struggles in Afghanistan

 

This is the story of two women in Afghanistan and their intersecting lives. It seeks to capture a glimpse of what life for women was like there from the 1960s to the present. The glimpse isn’t pretty. One reviewer expressed it this way: “Hosseini's depiction of Mariam and Laila's plight would seem cartoonishly crude if it were not, by all accounts, a sadly accurate version of what many Afghan women have experienced” [1].

 

As in The Kite Runner, Hosseini knows how to tell a compelling story. I couldn’t put the book down and read it in about two days. I missed my subway stop on the way to work as I read, I read it while I walked down the street, it’s a true page-turner. Also like The Kite Runner (but even more obviously so here), Hosseini brings the story full circle and ties up every loose end, leaving something of a contrived feeling.

 

That said, as the New York Times review put it, “Mr. Hosseini’s instinctive storytelling skills…[mow] down the reader’s objections through sheer momentum and will. He succeeds in making the emotional reality of Mariam and Laila’s lives tangible to us, and by conjuring their day-to-day routines, he is able to give us a sense of what daily life was like in Kabul — both before and during the harsh reign of the Taliban…. In the end it is these glimpses of daily life in Afghanistan — a country known to most Americans only through news accounts of war and terrorism — that make this novel, like ‘The Kite Runner,’ so stirring, and that distract attention from its myriad flaws” [2].

 

I found the story to be just as compelling as The Kite Runner but the subject matter here was of even greater interest. Hosseini successfully gives a window on a place few Americans know much about and does so in the context of a compulsively engaging tale.

 

(For an interesting but in no way as engaging non-fiction account of family life in Afghanistan, read The Bookseller of Kabul.)

 

[1] Jennifer Reese, “Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns,” Entertainment Weekly, 15 May 2007.

 

[2] Michiko Kakutani, “A Woman’s Lot in Kabul, Lower Than a House Cat’s,” New York Times, 29 May 2007.

 

Note on content: the book has some war and domestic violence and a couple of sexual scenes. None of these are fun, but each plays an important role in demonstrating relationships in this society. I did not find them excessive (just real).