Crazy Rich Asians: How the Other Half Lives

With a title like Crazy Rich Asians, you can't doubt that this novel by Kevin Kwan is vastly entertaining. A tale of wealth, privilege, and excess, this is one of those perfect weekend reads, when you want to learn all about people who are living a life that is more extreme than your wildest fantasies.

The novel tells the story of three interconnected wealthy Singaporean families. The members of these families are flung out across the globe but are all preparing to reconvene in Singapore for the "wedding of the century" between a wealthy heir and a supermodel. On the one hand, you have the story of Nicholas Young, a modest man who has built a life for himself in New York City as a sedate Economics professor and is living in a small loft in the Village. He is deeply in love with Rachel Chu, a fellow professor who grew up in California and has absolutely no clue that her unassuming boyfriend is a member of one of the most staggeringly wealthy families in Singapore.

On the other hand, you have Nick's cousin, Astrid, a woman who shops in Paris every season to buy millions of euros worth of haute couture, and yet has always flown in the face of family tradition. She unexpectedly married an "ordinary" man who spends all his time slaving on his startup company because he doesn't want to accept a penny of Astrid's family money and is determined to support his wife and son himself. Clearly that's a recipe for drama.

And then there are all the gossipy matriarchs who exist in the bloodthirsty arena of Singaporean society. These women are obsessed with wealth and status, forcing their children into appropriate careers and marriages so that they can carry on the stuffy family line in the manner to which it has been accustomed. This novel is a tale of the struggle between familial obligation and individual freedom, the old guard versus the new, class privilege, nationalism, and everything else in between. Putting aside those grand themes, however, this is simply a well-written, keenly observed, and blisteringly funny book. It serves as a brilliant introduction to the decadence of Singaporean high society, and while the locale might be foreign to many, the people are recognizable as the pompous upper classes that abound throughout the world.

I also dare you to read Crazy Rich Asians and not end up ordering take-out from the nearest Asian restaurant. Singaporeans are notorious foodies and the novel is crammed with discussions and descriptions of delicacies from all over the Asian diaspora. Kevin Kwan has a knack for describing things in vivid, nuanced detail that can help you understand this world and empathize with its inhabitants, no matter how different they are from you. The sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, came out this summer, so I will certainly be picking up a copy to follow the further exploits of these crazy rich people. You should do the same. 

Between You and Me: A Glorious Grammar Guide

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is a book about grammar and the vagaries of the English language, written by Mary Norris, a copy editor for the New Yorker. That description is all you need to know. There are people who care about English and people who don't. If you are one of the latter, this is not the book for you. If you are one of the former, read on.

Mary Norris is a fascinating woman. The book starts off as a personal memoir, recounting her odd jobs after college, which centered a great deal on the dairy industry for some bizarre reason. However, she eventually wound up in the offices of the New Yorker, and decades later, there she remains, a brilliant copy editor who gets to oversee some of the best literature the English language has to offer up. The book alternates between telling her personal history and serving as an intriguing English guide, dissecting the various quandaries that Norris encounters in her daily life, both in a professional and social capacity.

There is a discussion of commas, profanity, the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, deliberations on the merits of the various dictionaries used by the New Yorker and other esteemed publications. Of course, as the title suggests, she is quick to clear up when you use "I" versus "me," a conversational tic that does bother most fastidious English-language speakers. There is a chapter devoted to other forms of punctuation, including a long discourse on the em dash, which prompted me to e-mail my college thesis advisor, who was the first person to alert me to the fact that there was such a thing as an em dash. Not sure when to use "who" versus "whom"? This book's got you covered. And if it isn't hyper-specialized enough for you, the final chapter is all about pencils, a topic that I never suspected could occupy anyone for a paragraph, let alone an entire chapter.

Mary Norris is a grammar geek and proud of it. She offers an insight into the minds of people who simply love language and want to make sense of its bizarre rules. Most interestingly, she defines the role of the perfect copy editor - someone who has to clean up the prose but do so in as unobtrusive and helpful a manner as possible. Norris discusses many examples where following the rules of good grammar would destroy great literature and she therefore chose to value substance over style. Her stories about her interactions with writers are fantastic, showcasing how much these authors value the editing process and that they really do put an infinite amount of care into the placement of their commas.

Between You & Me is a quick read, a delightfully nerdy investigation into questions that puzzle the most well-read and well-educated among us. I can't promise you will read this book and instantly experience a revelation about semicolons. But between you and me, you'll certainly learn just how much you didn't know about the power of punctuation.  

Show Me a Hero: The Difficulties of Doing the Right Thing

Show Me a Hero is a six-part HBO miniseries directed by Paul Haggis and co-written by The Wire's David Simon and journalist William F. Zorzi. With that pedigree, it promised to be an interesting and challenging social commentary. Ultimately, it lived up to that promise.

Based on the book by Lisa Belkin, the series is a dramatization of real-life events from 1987 to 1994 in Yonkers, NY, when a federal judge mandated the desegregation of public housing. The idea was to build 200 units of public housing in the wealthy, mostly white, east side of Yonkers. The central character is Nick Wasicsko (portrayed by the fantastic Oscar Isaac), a young Yonkers City Council member who is running for mayor in the midst of the housing controversy. He promises to appeal the judge's decision and wins the election on the strength of that promise, becoming the youngest big-city mayor in the country. However, once he enters office, he discovers the city has already lost the appeal and he quickly becomes a proponent for the housing. This incurs the wrath of the vocal white citizens of Yonkers, who launch multiple protests, riot at council meetings, and make it very clear that Wasicsko will not be able to win his re-election bid in two years' time. 

While one part of the series follows Wasicsko's political and personal life, the other part is the story of the families who will be impacted by this desegregation order. They currently live in the projects, in graffiti-smeared buildings with broken elevators and drug dealers in the stairwells, where watching someone get arrested on the curb is a routine occurrence. There's Norma O'Neal (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), a home health aide who is losing her sight due to diabetes but is not keen to leave the projects and go over to the white side of town where she knows "those people" won't welcome her. There's Doreen Henderson (Natalie Paul), a woman who gets caught up in the drug epidemic but has a supportive family to pull her from the brink. Carmen Febles (Ilfenesh Hadera) is a young Dominican woman struggling with the decision to support her two kids in America or take them back to the DR. And Billie Rowan (Dominique Fishback) is a young black woman who gets involved with a small-time criminal who seems destined to only bring her grief. 

Show Me a Hero also portrays the broad range of personalities among the vociferous anti-housing lobby. While the majority are ugly racists, the most compelling character is Mary Dorman (played by the brilliant Catherine Keener). Mary is a Yonkers resident who is concerned about how this public housing will disrupt her carefully-ordered existence and ruin her property values. She mostly seems to view this as an economic issue, and becomes a vocal proponent of the anti-housing movement. However, as the years pass, she becomes more uncomfortable with the increasingly racist rhetoric of the people around her. Once the housing is established, she is pressed into service as one of the volunteers to help integrate the residents into their new surroundings, and she realizes that perhaps she was on the wrong side of this fight all along.

Because this is based on real life, Show Me a Hero has a messy, complicated story to tell. It cannot do justice to every single one of its characters and some seem to be sketched out in much broader strokes than others. The public housing residents sometimes feel a bit too caricaturish, but as the series progresses, you do get to delve more into their world and see that the writers and director are trying to tell as nuanced a story as possible in the six episodes they have. Every actor is doing fine work, and I was wholly invested in this story from the charged beginning to the bitter end. I had no idea what happened in real life and was frankly appalled at the finale when I discovered how things turned out. 

Show Me a Hero is difficult but necessary to watch. Desegregation of public housing is an issue that invites just as much controversy now as it did in Yonkers in the 1980s, and it is important to understand the many arguments and justifications that both sides make when they discuss it. This is also a show about politics and how the desire to do good can be trumped by personal ambition. Good people can do bad things, and vice versa, and it is often not easy to pick the right side. It is more important to know when you have lost the fight. 

The Brink: Nuclear Comedy

It's September, which means the fall TV season is almost upon us. In a few weeks my DVR will be brimming with new seasons of my old favorites. However, before that happens, I need to acknowledge some of the new summer shows that kept me entertained while everyone else was on hiatus. First up, HBO's The Brink.

The Brink follows a series of escalating events in Pakistan that could lead to all-out nuclear war. And yes, it's a comedy. Tim Robbins plays the US Secretary of State, Walter Larson, a brilliant strategist with a highly questionable personal life, who has to put up with the war-mongering buffoons that comprise the President's Cabinet. Jack Black plays Alex Talbot, a low-level diplomat at the American Embassy in Islamabad, who has high ambitions, but can't attain them as he's actually high most of the time. When Pakistan faces a military coup, Alex inadvertently gets entangled in the ensuing political maelstrom and becomes Larson's liaison, feeding him information and helping him develop a strategy to prevent World War III.

Other main characters include Alex's Pakistani driver, Rafiq Massoud (Aasif Mandvi), who is horrified that Alex is now in charge of saving Pakistan from disaster. Then there's Lieutenant Commander Zeke Tilson (Pablo Schreiber) and Lieutenant Glenn Taylor (Eric Ladin), navy pilots who are very skilled but also have an unfortunate tendency to ruin missions by getting high (yes, there's a lot of drug-fueled incompetence going on in this show - it is HBO after all). They get into a variety of scrapes that threaten to derail all attempts at peaceful negotiation and along the way meet up with some incredibly eccentric characters played by two British actors I adore. I was fairly ambivalent about The Brink, but those cameos in episode five certainly sucked me right back in.

The Brink is quite broad and lacks the nuance and biting political satire of something like Veep. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, which can be a bit of a challenge at the beginning, but it does pay off towards the end as story lines begin to intersect and complicate matters further. It does its best work in the small moments when a piece of particularly silly political maneuvering is thwarting all attempts to save humanity. My biggest problem with the show was that apart from Iqbal Theba, who plays the Pakistani General Umair Zaman who stages the coup, the other "Pakistani" characters made me cringe when they spoke Urdu. Hollywood casting directors don't seem to care when they cast brown actors, but for pity's sake, cast people who actually know how to speak the language. Or just make them speak in English.

If you're a fan of political satires that skewer the incompetence prevalent at the highest levels of government, you will probably enjoy The Brink. It isn't high comedy (well it features a lot of people getting high but...you know what I mean) but it is ten short episodes of dependable hilarity. If you're looking for a concentrated dose of comedy this long weekend, this might be the show for you.