The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum

From The Week of October 24, 2011

In many respects, the history of exploration is also a history of the pursuit of wealth. For while adventurers are invigorated by the desire to see and to make known the unknown, they are also galvanized, to press on through the darkness, the doubt and the loneliness, by their hopes for fame and fortune. Will their daring dreams be realized by overcoming the next hill, by panning the next river, by searching the next league of ocean? Or must they return, crushed, to lives they have, in every respect, rejected? While this history from Mr. Blum concerns the hunt for riches of gold, it is this human story, of triumph and failure, of motivation and determination, that animates his compelling tale.

The Floor of Heaven is a human's eye view of the last, great, North American gold rush which played out in alaska and the Yukon during the closing decade of the 19th century. Though it would endure for only a few years, the attack upon the Klondike was fierce, enticing men from all walks of life, and across the whole of the continent, to quit their lives and venture to the remote and inclement northwest in hopes of scoring for themselves riches that would elevate them out of the monotony of their dreary and difficult lives. This mad rush not only hastened the playing out of the goldstrike, it ensured that characters far more dastardly than goldminers found their way to this final, continental frontier. Mr. Blum, a prolific author of popular histories, reconstructs this frantic time through the eyes of three of its most fascinating and controversial characters.

Orphaned early in his adolescence, George Carmack was raised in northern California by his faithful sister and her difficult and much-older husband. Disinclined to devote the remainder of his life to farmwork, Carmack fled into the arms of the US Navy before deserting when the opportunity rose to prospect for gold in the Yukon. Though his would not be the greatest fortune pulled from those frozen hills and icy streams, Lying George, then known for his failures and his love of Native Indians, would be remembered as the first man to strike it big in the Klondike.

Though they would eventually come to trust one another with their lives, Charles Siringo was nothing like solitary Carmack. A strapping cowboy from Texas, Siringo was a restless soul who, prior to earning fame for his detective work with the infamous Pinkerton Agency, stole cattle and sold cigars in the heart of the lawless west. An honest cop with a quick and inventive mind, Siringo found himself in the distant Yukon, chasing down the robbers of a gold mine while trying to outrun his broken heart. However, it was the latter, and not the former, that motivated Siringo to the Klondike. For it was the death of his beloved wife that drove him to seek oblivion in a dangerous and difficult assignment, far from the comforts of home. Without her passing, siringo would have never been in a position to save George Carmack from the schemes of dark-hearted men.

A career gambler, shyster and thief, Jeff 'Soapy' Smith was one of the Wild West's most colorful characters. Known for a clever scheme in which he would grift money from unsuspecting marks by pretending to hide bills in select bars of soap which he'd then sell to his many dupes, Smith would find a lawless town in which his name was not already known and quickly set up shop, running booze, girls, and games of cards and dice, all pursuits designed to deprive his customers of their well-earned money. Though Smith was, at the height of his power, a gangleader of national disrepute who was best known for virtually running Denver in the 1880s, he was forced, with the coming of the law to the West, ever-more to the fringes of the United States, losing fortunes almost as quickly as he made them. Finding himself marooned in the Klondike, Smith would roll the dice one final time, enacting a plan to deprive George Carmack of his golden fortune. Should he succeed, Smith could retire from his gangster ways and return to his wife in St. Louis, but should he fail... Well, that might just be the last toss of the dice for Soapy Smith.

The Floor of Heaven amalgamates Carmack's determination, Siringo's cleverness and Smith's gangsterism into a riveting narrative of the Yukon Gold Rush. Mr. Blum draws upon the personal histories and boastful writings of all three flamboyant men to not only paint a picture of a goldstrike, but to demonstrate how the opportunity to acquire great wealth has the power to attract every kind of character, from the noble to the devilish, from the highest businessman to the lowest laborer. The author then ties these narrative threads into a single, dramatic knot when Carmack, Siringo and Smith all converge upon Carmack's unimaginable fortune. But as much as this tale succeeds narratively, the reader is left to wonder how much of it is true. Mr. Blum has gone to great lengths to verify the accounts of all three men, but many of the twists and turns here feel like they were re-imagined and embellished later on, told to a captive audience in a comfortable tavern long after the deeds were done. In this, one must take some of the more outlandish segments here with a substantial portion of salt.

However, while we can be skeptical of certain of the work's claims, this is not its point. The Floor of Heaven is designed to introduce its readers to the minds and the mentalities of the men who gambled on the Klondike. The extent to which it reveals how success and failure changed them is both revelatory and disheartening. For while it demonstrates how hard work and persistence can earn one great fortune, it also carefully notes how wealth invariably claims the morality of its owner, a truth we'd all be wise to remember. A gripping tale, if not one of academic rigor. (4/5 Stars)

Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we discuss the Good Life and all the elements that constitute it, a loving partner, an engaging job and healthy children are often cited as its most vital components. But while these are undoubtedly stabilizing influences which sustain the Good Life, the bulk of the credit for maintaining true north on our moral compasses should go to the roots that we put down in our chosen communities. After all, these attachments to family, to friends, and to country and its laws, are what shackle our worst excesses, keeping our temptations from transitioning from fantasy to reality. Uproot a man from these normalizing influences and he is morally adrift, willing, with time, to sample any desire. And as Snowdrops so vividly demonstrates, there are parts of the world brimming with destructive delicacies.

Upon the occasion of his engagement to his future wife, Nicholas Platt, a British lawyer, pens a long letter to his fiance, full of confessions and revelations, concerning his years spent in hedonistic, tempestuous Moscow during the first decade of the 21st century. A contracts man for a European bank doing business in the new Russia, Platt recounts how, over a calendar year, his relationship with a young, seductive Russian woman drew him down into the amoral embrace of a country which, since its birth from the ashes of the Soviet Union, has been shaped and run by a cabal of oligarchs and autocrats intent upon turning Russia into a Mafia state. I'll equipped to handle these neon-soaked, vodka-laden, gangster-infused streets with which his British upbringing has not familiarized him, Platt describes how, with the passing of only seasons, he lost focus on his work, his future, and his scruples, forsaking all for sweat-soaked nights with Masha and a world she knows intimately well.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Snowdrops is a gripping work of philosophical fiction which was unlucky to have not taken out the award. Mr. Miller, an author and a Moscow-based correspondent for the Economist, skillfully portrays one man's quiet descent into the temptations of life in powerful, corrupted states. Russia, which thanks to its history has never had a strong, pervasive respect for the rule of law, has discarded even the veneer of communist equality to welcome in the unrestrained, unregulated vices of extraordinary wealth. In this, it has created the perfect playground for entitled oligarchs and opportunistic peasants to succeed in a world which has enthusiastically embraced the fast-paced lawlessness that characterized the Wild West. All of this is too much for Nicholas Platt, a decent, British bloke who, here, feels hopelessly overmatched by the hard-bitten reality of the rapidly developing, non-western world.

Though Snowdrops succeeds in depicting the menace of new Russia and the hedonism it espouses, the novel's greatest virtue is the extent to which it portrays this world without resorting to a single gunshot, fist-fight, or act of brutality. Platt's descent is neither characterized by Hollywood violence nor soviet-era blackmail. Instead, Platt's morality is killed by that human desire which is unleashed any time opportunity intersects with a man unconstrained by the obligations of family life. In this, the author has published a work which feels as authentic in spirit as it is in detail.

However, Snowdrops is not without flaws, foremost of these being that the author fails to convince us of Platt's original innocence. Snowdrops rests on the notion that the new Russia is a seductive place that tempts ex-pats to sample its many vices. But if Platt is an ass to begin with, then it becomes difficult to make the novel's central argument, that his descent is caused by Russia and not by his own flimsy character. That the author failed to sell us on Platt's prima facie goodness robs the novel's conclusion of some of its formidable power.

Nonetheless, this is wonderful and thoughtful work which is no less potent for its gradual development and its quiet but pervasive melancholy. (4/5 Stars)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

From The Week of October 17, 2011

Though it is frequently marred by both bias and error, memory is the primary tool by which we navigate our lives. After all, without it, we would not know ourselves, what we've endured in the past, what we stand for in the present, and what we wish to accomplish in the future. Life's narrative does not exist without it. And so its deep and systemic flaws can and do profoundly impact and reshape our lives. Though The Sense of an Ending harbors mystery and philosophy, expresses revenge and regret, it is, at root, a rumination and an expose of memory and the ways in which it is a malleable record of what we consider a concrete past.

Tony Webster is an aging Englishman largely content with his life. Though he's been divorced now for nearly 20 years, he is on amicable terms with both his ex-wife and his grown-up daughter who now has children of her own. He has long since put to rest any hopes or aspirations of being extraordinary. And so, when a letter arrives from the mother (Sarah) of his adolescent girlfriend (Veronica), bequeathing him $500 and the diary of a high school friend who committed suicide some 30 years earlier, Tony is stirred from his settled life to both make sense of this puzzling development and to delve into his past to revisit the events which lead to it.

While Tony reaches out to the difficult and uncooperative Veronica to ask that she hand over the diary, he recounts the story of his life, ruminating on the desires and the vicissitudes of his ordinary adolescence. He details how, in his schoolboy years, he and his friends added Adrian, an intelligent boy and the author of the diary, to their clique. Though Adrian dates Veronica just after she and tony break up, and though he commits suicide a short time later, Tony sustains his appreciation for Adrian, envying both his clarity of his thought and the force of his moral vision. Now, decades have come and gone, careers forged and retired from, families raised and released into the world. And Veronica has returned to both bemuse and trouble him. For she refuses to cooperate with her mother's request and Tony must find out why if he is to understand what happened, to himself, to Adrian and to Veronica, all those years ago.

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this slim novel from Mr. Barnes, a British author of more than a dozen works of fiction, is, in the main, a reflection upon the fallibility of memory. Though Tony's geniality entices us to like him, to feel sympathy for him, and to believe his account of events which depict him as having been a gentleman to Veronica, we swiftly learn that Tony's version of events cannot be trusted. As the novel unfolds, the reader and Tony together are presented with proof that Tony was far from accepting of Adrian and Veronica's relationship, that, in fact, he did his best to poison it by revealing to Adrian his suspicions about Veronica and her odd family, and that his harshness may well have contributed to the challenges both friends later on. This revelation forces Tony to re-evaluate his life and causes the reader to re-evaluate Tony, feeding every new fact he tells us through the lens of suspicion and doubt.

Though I can understand why The Sense of an Ending has earned its acclaim -- rarely has the Unreliable Narrator been used more skillfully and to profounder effect than it has been here --, the work is less than satisfying. Despite many hints, from the author and from Tony, we learn next to nothing about the lives of Veronica and Adrian, characters vital to the story's plot. What's more, the author is elss than convincing with the novel's central conceit, that a settled Tony would lift himself out of his comfortable retirement to pursue a 0-year-old mystery. Yes, most novels rely upon conceits to drive the core drama, but this one is surprisingly clumsy for a novel of such repute. When stacked up against prior winners of the prize, The Sense of an Ending does not measure up to works like Wolf Hall or The God of Small Things, pieces which both moved and educated. For all its supreme cleverness, this is, in the end, a story about a bored Englishman,his unspectacular life and his glitchy memory. Well-done, yes, but revelatory or provocative? Sadly, no. (3/5 Stars)

The Crisis Caravan by Linda Polman

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we look into the world's most troubled corners, only the most callous of us cannot but feel empathy for our fellow humans who must live, every day, with chaos and despair. Families forced from their homes, famines ravaging communities, genocides playing out over regions... These ought to be crimes with penalties so severe that no savage dare indulge in them. And yet they unfold, seemingly on a yearly basis, devouring the lives of those who deserve so much more.

Should not those of us with the power to mitigate such atrocities do so, if only to spare the innocents from fates they did not invite? The answer must be a resounding yes. Not so fast, argues Ms. Polman, who points out, here, that humanitarian aid is so fraught with squandered funds and unfocused efforts that it can barely be called aid at all. In this, there could not be a larger gap between the goodness that imbues the desire to help and the dismaying corruption that results from its pure intention.

The Crisis Caravan devotes its 200-some pages to a scathing expose of the corrupted culture of humanitarian aid. Ms. Polman, a freelance journalist, reconstructs her experiences covering African conflicts, from the Rwandan Genocide to the conflict in Sierra Leone, to demonstrate that, though aid organizations (NGOs) are launched with the best of intentions, they swiftly devolve into professional fundraisers. Because NGOs do not generate their own products, because they have no internal economies to sustain them, they live and die on external funding that flows from the United Nations, the aid budgets of wealthy nations, and the pockets of generous individuals. With their very survival riding on the acquisition of contracts to lend aid to the war-torn, the NGOs quickly succumb to what the author calls Contract Fever, a particularly repugnant form of exploitation in which NGOs learn of a crisis somewhere in the world, race there to claim it as their cause, and then send up flares to the developed world for funding to give aid to the troubled. Ms. Polman argues that this aid, when it comes, is almost never vetted. Only a handful of crusading journalists ever investigate to find out if roads are paved, bridges built, water distributed, food programs established. Even scarcer are those individuals tasked with measuring the effectiveness of the aid which may well go to services considered essential by the NGOs but secondary to the people they are trying to help.

Around her own experiences watching NGOs in action and investigating their programs, Ms. Polman lays down the 150-year history of humanitarian aid, how it was spawned by the abominable conditions of the Crimean War and then rapidly expanded during the two world wars of the 20th century which devoured so many civilian lives. In this, the author not only takes the reader into war-ravaged Africa, but she beckons him into a philosophy class in which she poses the questions all-too-rarely asked of humanitarian aid. Does it prolong conflicts? The evidence suggests it might. Is it moral to give succor to the perpetrator as well as to the victim in an effort to treat all the afflicted equally as human beings? Though the ICRC may wish it otherwise, perhaps not.

The Crisis Caravan is a well-argued, utterly gripping examination of the folly that surrounds humanitarian aid. From the accounting tricks that allow wealthy western nations like the United States and Canada to claim that they give far more humanitarian aid than they actually do, to the sickeningly corporate and self-serving cultures that have overtaken NGOs around the world, the author spares only the victims of the aid in what is an all-encompassing and ruthless excoriation of aid culture. This is no polemic against generosity. The author never advocates that aid should be withheld from peoples in desperate need. On the contrary, the author claims that Western aid comes at such a cost to the people to whom it is given that it often loses its effectiveness. If the aid was injected directly into the economies of troubled nations, and not into the budgets of NGOs and the pockets of Western businesses promising to do good works in crisis zones, aid would not only help those directly in need, it would come at far more reasonable a pricetag to the nations trying to do good works.

Rarely has more been packed into so few pages. Completely compelling. Ms. Polman may well have a chip on her shoulder when it comes to NGOs, favoring their flaws while downplaying their virtues, but when their flaws are this apparent, this systemic, they deserve to be exposed to the light of truth. This rotten culture is a betrayal of the vbest of human ideals. Not good enough... (5/5 Stars)

Mohamed's Ghosts by Stephan Salisbury

From The Week of October 17, 2011

We have known for some time now that liberty and security live in opposition to one another. Liberty requires that individuals be allowed to act and choose as they desire, unfettered by the restrictions of government. Security, meanwhile, requires that personal freedom be restricted so that deviant behavior can be seen and snuffed out. Giants of history like Benjamin Franklin, men who have created nations, have convinced us of this much. And so, when terrorism does hit home and governments respond by strengthening security to protect against future attacks, they must know that every choice they make in the pursuit of security weakens the very liberties they claim to cherish.

No matter how obvious a truth this is, governments will never admit it; to do so would be to invite unwelcome scrutiny into the ways in which governments have weakened the freedoms of the people they purport to serve. And so it falls to journalists and libertarians, advocates and whistleblowers, to alert us to the ways in which our governments have robbed us of our freedom for the sake of our security. In this, Mohamed's Ghosts is a revelatory and frightening tale.

Mr. Salisbury, a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes here the manner in which the US government, in response to the September 11th Attacks, have used the insinuation of possible links between American imams and foreign terrorists to jeopardize and then shut down mosques across the United States. The author's case centers on a particularly egregious incident in which the mosque of Mohamed Ghorab, an Egyptian living in Philadelphia, was left to decay after immigration officials discovered that Ghorab was in the United States on an expired student visa. Launching an investigation, the authorities used rumor and innuendo, along with an old airplane seat in the basement of ghorab's mosque -- a one-time garage in one of Philadelphia's worst neighborhoods --, to justify his deportation back to Egypt, severing him from his American family and leaving his community work on Philadelphia's troubled streets to wither on the vine.

From this, Mr. Salisbury expands the scope of his investigation to document other cases in which the US government, paranoid of further attacks, overreacted to a swath of expired student visas by heartlessly uprooting the offenders from their lives and expelling them from the United States. The author concludes that this overzealousness may have lead to the expulsion of up to a thousand Islamic leaders from the country, mistreatment which would surely not have befallen Christians had Christians been responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Mohamed's Ghosts is a challenging read. Though Mr. Salisbury undoubtedly infers too much from a handful of gross injustices, the picture of a nation struggling to cope with the psychic wound of 9/11 is both vivid and convincing. While then president Bush was on television, asking Americans to be tolerant of Muslims, arguing that Islam was a peaceful faith, his government was scraping together rumor and shards of half-truths in order to banish innocent Muslim from its shores. It eagerly seized upon the expired visas as proof of ill intent while failing to acknowledge the widespread incompetence of the immigration service which allowed those visas to lapse and stay lapsed without sanction or comment. More over, the author documents the unwillingness of the US government to acknowledge, or vigorously prosecute, the numerous cases of anti-Arab crime which played out across the country in the days and weeks following the attacks. The case for the Bush administration's extraordinary duplicity is well-made.

But while Mr. Salisbury succeeds in demonstrating how the overreactions of governments ensnare and criminalize innocents, his longwinded digressions into his own past as an activist in the 1960s are unnecessary distractions from the work's primary thrust. In fact, given that the author fails to provide much in the way of proof that Mohamed Ghorab's treatment has been duplicated with a thousand other imams in the United States, his reflections on the 1960s, which are meant to exemplify the flaws of the security state, read like filler.

This is chilling work. Mr. Salisbury nails the duplicity, he nails Ghorab, he nails the culture that gives rise to the foolishness of the post 9/11 security state, but the weakness of the case for the broader picture is troubling. Nonetheless, a worthwhile read. (3/5 Stars)

Destiny of The Republic by Candice Millard

From The Week of October 17, 2011

From the printing press to the personal computer, numerous inventions have transformed our world. However, considering the degree to which it has altered the playing field between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, the big and the small, none can claim a greater impact on human civilization than the gun. Prior to its introduction, strength and skill were required to kill. After all, the deed had to be accomplished with blade or projectile, both of which demanded extensive training to be used properly. But the gun makes no such claims on its user. It needs only to be aimed and fired to make it as lethal a weapon for the fool as for the genius. Rarely has this truth been better demonstrated than in the arena of political assassination where the deranged can now, with a single shot, bring low the great. And of the histories documenting such incidents, few are the equal of this latest effort from Ms. Millard.

Though he would live on for two more months, the life of James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was effectively ended on July 2, 1881 when Charles Guiteau, a mentally disturbed American, approached him in a Washington D.C. train station and shot him in the back. Garfield, Ohio's version of Abraham Lincoln, was a self-made man who, having pulled himself up from impoverished beginnings, went on to serve with distinction in the American civil War before ascending to a seat in the House of Representatives. His career reached its zenith in 1880 when, despite not seeking out the office, the honor of the Republican nomination for president was bestowed upon him in spite of both his stiff resistance and a crowded field of other, overeager claimants. He was, in every respect, a man in whom his country and his state could be proud. Guiteau, meanwhile, was a lifelong shyster. Having been rejected by the University of Michigan, he turned, as a young man, to a utopian cult in New York for solace. But when even they tired of him, he fell back on the steadfast charity of his sister to keep a roof over his head. A man who bounced from scheme to scheme, Guiteau represented himself as a respectable lawyer in order to grift money from generous dupes until the electoral season of 1880 when he fixed upon the notion of aiding the Republican nominee to victory. When Garfield and his advisors failed to recognize or reward him for his dubious efforts, Guiteau took his revenge and, in doing so, consigned James Garfield to 80 days of feverish torment until, on September 9, 1881, he died in Ohio, having been president for a mere 200 days.

Destiny of The Republic recounts the lives of these two, disparate men, couching them in the America of the 1880s. Only 15 years after the civil War, Ms. Millard describes the deep wounds which yet divided the nation even after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. But as much as that conflict still weighed on the national psyche, America was, in 1881, a country of burgeoning technology. Advancements both in communications and the practice of medicine would go on to catalyze and shape the 20th century. And yet these innovations would come too late for James Garfield who, in spite of the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, and because of the ignorance of backward-thinking doctors, died at the dawn of a transformation in medical thought which may well have saved his life if Guiteau's bullets had come even a year later.

Ms. Millard is a first-rate historiographer who never fails to inform or entertain. Her biography of Theodore Roosevelt's journey along the River of Doubt was gripping, but she has outdone that effort with this compelling history of two very different men who, in one fateful moment, came together and changed a country's future. Though she is perhaps a bit too eager to paint Garfield as the noble hero and Guiteau the disreputable villain, the manner in which she imbeds these men and their moment in the accelerating, technological change of the 1880s leaves even the skeptical reader defenseless against a fascinating narrative which flows with the smoothness of liquid gold. Her descriptions of the medical torments to which Garfield was senselessly put are as riveting as Bell's efforts to save him were novel. The reader is left with little doubt that he has not only witnessed the cost of ignorance, but the beginning of a new era of innovation that would quickly consign the 19th century to the dusty annals of history.. (4/5 Stars)

Links by Nuruddin Farah

From The Week of October 10, 2011

Though Africa has been beset by conflict since the end of European colonialism, surely few of its nations have experienced as much mindless chaos, such nihilistic bloodshed, as Somalia. For decades now, this coastal nation has been plagued by conflict and torn apart by rapacious warlords grasping for power. Such is their grip that not even the earnest efforts of the UN appear to have soothed its national nightmare. In fact, with the rise to power of its sea-born pirates, it appears to have only emboldened its destructive forces. Few of Somalia's native sons are better able to authentically articulate this atavistic anarchy than Mr. Farah who, since taking up exile from his country in 1976, has written vividly, and at length, about his troubled homeland. And here, in Links he succeeds in giving his readers a glimpse into its burdens.

Jeebleh is a Somalian exile living in New York when he hears of his mother's death from old age in the country of his birth. Though he is an educated and successful man with a wife and two daughters, he nonetheless feels a powerful pull to return home to settle accounts with his mother's spirit. So, abandoning the stability and lawfulness of Western life, Jeebleh journeys back to war-torn Africa where he intends to contact his mother's housekeeper as a means of locating the dead woman's grave.

No sooner has he landed, then Jeebleh receives a crash course in Somalian nihilism. He witnesses a game played by teenaged punks wherein they target one of the many passengers disembarking a plane and shoot their victim in cold blood. In this, they are motivated by nothing more than sport, a momentary distraction from boredom. The incident profoundly affects Jeebleh who resolves to complete his business as swiftly as possible. But when he realizes that the brilliant niece of one of his oldest friends has been mysteriously kidnapped, events quickly spiral out of Jeebleh's control, sending the ill-prepared westerner barreling headlong towards a confrontation with one of the country's many, ruthless warlords.

Though Links is a moving expose of the existential challenges of Somalian life, of the disrepair of the Somalian state, and of the clan loyalties that complicate the former and exasperate the latter, Mr. Farah's two-dimensional characters fail to engage the reader's emotions. Part of this is clearly a deliberate choice on the part of Mr. Farah to convey the sense of numbness Somalians must cultivate as a self-defense mechanism against the horrors they are forced to witness on a daily basis. But the author fails to distinguish this numbness from the general flatness of his characters which leaves the reader feeling anesthetized to the drama taking place here. Make no mistake, Mr. Farah has penned a shocking and compelling portrait of Somalian life, capturing all of the damage that eventuates from a country devastated by warlords. However, if the reader cannot connect with any of the story's characters, then this chaos, no matter how superbly it is depicted, is all-but reduced to an academic exercise.

Linksis a deeply disturbing glimpse of the price of war and the extent to which exposure to it can dehumanize even the most civilized souls. It is also a compelling demonstration of the challenges faced by well-intentioned, foreign powers trying to affect positive change in a country whose customs they cannot understand. But while these are points well-made, Mr. Farah's inability to weld this onto anything like a gripping narrative prevents Links from becoming memorable fiction. I feel far more educated about Somalian life than I do entertained by an actual story. (2/5 Stars)