[meteorite-list] "The Fallen Sky" Redux

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:32:45 -0500
Message-ID: <l9qk65p283adqdl7s38s8u0vjdmt9mn4kg_at_4ax.com>

Well, I"m around 80 pages in now, having finished the chapters on the (human)
history of Willamette and Brenham. The author can write concise, reasonable
prose when he isn't injecting irrelevant autobiographical material or attempting
to sound profound and philosophical. The histories themselves are mostly old
material of course to long-time meteorite enthusiasts, but would be interesting
to an "outsider"-- and there were some interesting details about just how
muddled the mythology around the Brenham discovery actually is. In these
chapters he didn't mention his love life as much-you could go several pages at a
time without a mention of it. Though there were not one but two different
sections where he mentions no longer wearing his wedding ring, and near the end
of the Brenham chapter we get information about his new woman, who he is with
while both he and the new woman are still married but have decided that they
"belong together." We learn that, when he visits Kiowa County "about a year has
passed since I left my wife and house. I did so with neither grace nor
honesty." More skimming (though I am reading it through) shows it to continue
to be a mix of reasonable writing about meteoritics and history of important
figures, interjections about his personal relationships (I fell on a passage of
him "making love" to someone-didn't note if it was ex-wife or new girl) and
strained philosophy.

So, in light of the new chapters, I'll change my general preliminary
recommendation from "pass on it" to "give it a try if you can find it cheap
enough and are willing skim over all of the squishy details of his personal life
that he doesn't have the good sense to keep to himself."

BTW, one point on which I'll have to defend the author-- in Geoff Notkin's
excerpt, there is two pages of text between those ellipses, not a mere few words
or lines. That dilution makes the actual reading of the material seem less
florid than it is made to look squished together.
Received on Fri 24 Jul 2009 10:32:45 PM PDT