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Richard's Reviews > God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
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by
Nancy Perl, Seattle's celebrity librarian, has a method for deciding when to abandon a book, and for someone like me that's a serious act, akin to betrayal, but here it is - up until the age of 50 you give the author 50 pages, and if (s)he hasn't gotten to you by then you can let the book go. For every year past 50, you give the author one less page, so by the time you reach 99, if the author hasn't grabbed you on page one, you can feel free to drop it, (it will probably slip out of your hand as your fifteenth nap of the day sets in anyway.) Today's my 62nd birthday, but even so, I gave Richard Grant 124 pages to grab me, and he didn't.
God's Middle Finger is predictable adventure journalism wherein the author, the "hero," for whatever reason - thrills, understanding, curiosity, man-hood - travels into one of the world's less pleasant places, survives, and comes out to tell us all about it. In the best of the genre we really do get to go on the hero's journey, and as the author learns something about his/her self we learn something about ourselves, and our world. Not so much with God's Middle Finger. The locale is interesting, but only nominally, the characters suffer a fatal sameness, and the situations (at least until page 124, and I suspect throughout) aren't all that enlightening. Mr. Grant goes into the Sierra Madre, meets some dicey characters, and then moves on - over and over again. I don't see how it was worth his time, it's not worth mine.
God's Middle Finger is predictable adventure journalism wherein the author, the "hero," for whatever reason - thrills, understanding, curiosity, man-hood - travels into one of the world's less pleasant places, survives, and comes out to tell us all about it. In the best of the genre we really do get to go on the hero's journey, and as the author learns something about his/her self we learn something about ourselves, and our world. Not so much with God's Middle Finger. The locale is interesting, but only nominally, the characters suffer a fatal sameness, and the situations (at least until page 124, and I suspect throughout) aren't all that enlightening. Mr. Grant goes into the Sierra Madre, meets some dicey characters, and then moves on - over and over again. I don't see how it was worth his time, it's not worth mine.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
October 2, 2008
– Shelved
October 2, 2008
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Finished Reading
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My thoughts exactly. I got further - about 70% then skimmed through the rest.
I don't know if I'll read this book, but I will always remember the "selection criteria" for book abandonment. I love it! I'm only forty, so I guess I have a decade of reading the full fifty pages. But, now I have a solid point at which I can "give up." I always feel like I am the failure when I just can't finish a novel. Thanks for passing along this gem of a "permission slip."
Dena wrote: "I don't know if I'll read this book, but I will always remember the "selection criteria" for book abandonment. I love it! I'm only forty, so I guess I have a decade of reading the full fifty pages...."haha, i turn 70 in two weeks, whittling down the years and pages...
Thanks for your note.
God's Middle Finger
What also was distressing was that Grant went looking for danger, went to the most dangerous place in Mexico, found it and then proceeded to generalize about all of Mexico including having the chutzpah to say that because of what he saw in La Sierra Madre he thought the destiny of all of Mexico was destructive chaos. He really knows little about Mexico.