After seeing the movie with Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, I decided that I wanted to read the book. I’m glad I did because there were a few scenes that weren’t in the movie and a whole part of the movie that was not in the book. Before I get to those comparisons, here is the basic story. John and Jenny at the beginning of the book (this is nonfiction by the way) are worried about having a baby because Jenny can’t even take care of a plant. One day while looking at the classified ads, John gets the idea of getting a dog. They go to the breeders, see the mother Labrador retriever and her little puppies and wonder where the father is. They pick up a puppy and as they are leaving the farm, this male Lab comes barreling out of the forest at top speed with tremendous energy. This foreshadows what the Grogans will have to deal with with Marley.

Marley is a handful from day one. He chews up the drywall, tears up the furniture, everything in their Florida home has to be dog proofed. There is a lot written about dog poop in this book because that is one of the big things they have to deal with, especially after Marley becomes enamored with eating mangoes. Speaking of eating, Marley eats at top speed and will eat anything that he can find whether it is edible or not. There is one point where he eats a gold necklace John was going to give Jenny for their anniversary.

John and Jenny are both journalists working for the local papers in Palm Beach, Florida. The movie dealt more with John’s working life and how he became a columnist and even introduced a close friend of John’s at the paper. These were only barely touched on in the book. We knew he was a columnist and we knew what paper he worked for and he talked about some of the stories he wrote as a columnist and how he would get those stories, but other than that, work life wasn’t discussed as much. Another aspect of this book is Jenny’s pregnancy and the complications she had with her first baby and how she was able to have two more. Marley’s reactions around Jenny when she was in distress were very interesting and it makes me think of another good Fiction book I’ve read called The Art of Racing in the Rain where the dog narrates the story, but has this sixth sense when the human the dog is close to is in real pain. It is very fascinating to me how the dog’s mind must work.

One more comparison that I wanted to make is a scene in the book that was completely left out of the movie. Marley was a movie star. . . briefly. A film crew came to Florida to make this movie called The Last Home Run that ended up being so bad it went straight to video. They wanted a dog so Marley was auditioned and got the part. This is a hilarious chapter in the book because of all the antics Marley gets into from stealing food from the buffet table to having them do take after take because Marley behaved so horribly. Here are a few scenes from that movie with the actual Marley:

Just like the movie, the book was funny and sweet and the ending was a real tearjerker. It was a very enjoyable book though and one any dog owner would probably like.

When most people plan a vacation, they think of warm weather, palm trees, and sunny beaches. Sarah Vowell thinks of graveyards, tours of old houses, and metal plaques mounted on walls of buildings. Readers get to tag along with Vowell as she vacations, visiting places of historical interest as they connect to the lives, and deaths, of assassinated former United States Presidents.

Despite what you may be thinking, about a historical book written about long dead Presidents, I assure you, the book is fascinating. Vowell has split the book into three parts, one for each President she focused on. The first section is about Lincoln, one of the most famous U.S. Presidents. The second section is about Garfield. Who is that?

“The most famous thing said about President James A. Garfield is about how nobody has any idea who the hell he was.”, explains Vowell.

The last part is not about JFK, as you might expect. Vowell does talk a little about the JFK assassination in the book, but, he doesn’t get an entire section dedicated to him. No, instead Vowell finishes off her book with a section on McKinley.

There is something about Vowell’s writing style that I found captivating. She can be sarcastic one minute, serious the next, and humorous the entire time. I am not one to wake up in the morning, while on summer vacation, and think “I just can’t wait to read that book about dead Presidents!”. However, Vowell’s snarky writing made this book something I did not want to put down. All high school history textbooks should be cast aside, and replaced by one written by Sarah Vowell. She really makes what could be dry, dull, subject matter into something so interesting I didn’t want to stop reading.

Vowell uncovers some bizarre things about the lives of the Presidents, the childhood’s of their assassins, and how they all came together. In one chapter, she describes a sex cult, that later on made pottery. She points out that Todd Lincoln might have been the “Angel of Death”, because of a series of bizarre coincidences. Vowell brings family and friends with her as she tours places people lived, died, or used as a hideout. I found myself laughing at the statements her friends made about these strange vacation destinations.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that I wish I had read it sooner. I guess that’s more about my poor timing, and not about the book at all. Vowell wrote this book while George W. Bush was still president, and she refers to him throughout the book as “the current president”, instead of by name. This can be confusing to readers who lose track of who she means, now that time has gone by, and Obama is now our current President.

I have had an extremely hard time writing this book review. I did like the book, quite a bit, actually. It’s hard to capture the essence of Vowell’s macabre, yet quirky, style in this book, without making things sound dull. Go read it. You will soon see what I mean.

This book has three distinct parts. In part one we are introduced to the boy Piscine Patel. Piscine lives with his mother, father, and brother in Pondicherry, India. His father is a zookeeper and their house leads into the zoo grounds, thus Piscine knows a lot about animals and zoo keeping. The beginning of the book contains interesting arguments about why zoos are good for animals and tries to bring the other viewpoint against those who might think it cruel to contain animals. It is also interesting when he discusses how people anthropomorphize animals or try to give them human characteristics. It is easier to do that with the apes and chimps, but humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize all of the animals.

Then there is Piscine at school. He is tired of kids taunting him about his name, mispronouncing it like “pissing” so he shortens it to Pi. Pi is deeply religious although curiously he is the only one in his family who is. Pi just loves God so much that he joins three religions–Hindu, Muslim, and Christianity–which boggles the minds of everybody including the leaders of each one those churches. They want him to choose one religion, but he says he loves God too much.

Things start to get hard for the family in India, so they decide to move to Canada. This part was interesting in learning about how hard it is to sell and transfer zoo animals to different locations. So the family boards a tanker called the SimSoon with several animals that they are relocating in the cargo holds underneath the ship. But the ship sinks in the Pacific which leads to part two of the book.

Part two of the book is Pi’s survival all alone in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But he is not all alone! In the lifeboat is a tiger from the zoo, Richard Parker, who escaped the wreck. Pi not only has to survive the elements of the ocean, but he has to do it with an added terror of a Bengal Tiger aboard. The survival strategies in this section of the book were very interesting and very clever as well. Pi is extremely intelligent for a 16 year old boy. My favorite part of this section is near the end of his journey on the sea, they stumble across this island with meerkats on it. This isn’t your typical island though because the trees grow out of algae. The algae has this horrible chemical reaction when the sun goes down so everything inhabiting the island has to live in the trees. I don’t want to give anymore away, but it was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me.

Part three is the shortest section of the book and it is his time after he has made it to the mainland of Mexico and is interrogated by Japanese officials representing the owners of the Simsoon investigating why it sank. I don’t want to reveal anything in detail, but this ending kind of made me angry at first, but kind of made up for it in the last few pages of the book.

I found the book to be fascinating from several perspectives including zoological, religious, survival, and adventure on the Pacific with a wild animal in tow. There were parts that dragged a little for me, but most of it I found very interesting and I would recommend it to anyone. Just watch out for the ending. I guess it makes for a good book discussion group though.

I’ve read several Michael Crichton books including Jurrasic Park, Lost World, Sphere, Congo and all of them have the similar element of mixing science with fiction. This isn’t the science fiction of aliens and time travel, but science that is being practiced by scientists right now or science that could conceivably be practiced in the near future. Michael Crichton books, this one included, generally start with the following disclaimer that I will paraphrase here: “This is a work of fiction except for the parts that aren’t”. This means that Crichton puts a fair amount of research into his books and there are some facts interlaced into the fiction.

Next is about genetics. The story starts with a trial in which Mr. Burnett had cancer, went to a UCLA specialist to get it treated because this specialist was tops in his field, and then UCLA sold his tissues and cell line to a private genetic company called Biogen. The court ruled that Biogen owned his cells. This book is filled with moral and ethical dilemmas like that one. The people in this book, usually the scientists, tend to edge more to the immoral and unethical in the decisions that they make which actually makes for entertaining reading or in my case listening.

Another direction the book takes is in transgenic animals. These are animals who, in the lab, were injected with human genes, and can now talk. This is where the book can get a little bit far-fetched, but it is still entertaining. A group of tourists in Southeast Asia come across an orangutan that swears in French in a raspy voice. The news media go crazy, but when they can’t find it, they give up on it. One of the fun characters in the book is actually a talking parrot named Gerard. Gerard imitates people and TV shows, but much more proficient than an actual parrot. In one scene Gerard is like a tape recorder playing back for his female owner the whole scene verbatim of her husband having an affair while she is at a conference out of town complete with the “Oh Baby’s”.

Interspersed in the action of the various story lines are news articles related to genetics. These are the kind of fluff “news” science stories that appear in newspapers. Examples included the genetics of blondes and how Neaderthals evolved blonde hair to evoke more sexuality. Those were kind of funny. Overall I found the book to be entertaining. It is not heavy literature, but light, fun reading. The science was made interesting as well. Included with audio book is a publisher’s interview with Michael Crichton in which he points out some real life issues researching the book has made clear to him. One is that it should be made illegal to patent genes. In Crichton’s opinion genes are natural and should not be patented. He says that someone owns the patent for the SARS genes which prevented treatment of the disease until courts could find a way around the patent. That was very interesting.