Madness In The Middle Kingdom

As Mr. Kevin C so eloquently pointed out .. I am laid up with the broken leg and so it has given me a chance to do a bit of reading. Those with young ‘uns know that a bit of reading is all you get to accomplish (if you don’t count the nightly reading of the timeless classic “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish”).

The first book I tackled this summer was the following

It chronicles the protaganist’s (Timothy Treadwell) fascination with the grizzly bears of Alaska.

In a nutshell Timothy Treadwell was a surfer dude hanging out in California who travelled to the Katmai National Park in Alaska every summer to live … yes live … among the grizzly bears. In the end his obsession was his undoing as he was eaten by a grizzly in his 13th summer of travel to Alaska. This alone would make it a worthwhile read but what I particularly enjoyed about the book was how it left it up to the reader to decide if the protagonist was either a) a man who really was in touch with the grizzly and died doing what he loved or b) a nutcase with no sense of the grizzly and who merely ran out of dumb luck. I must admit that I thought he was a total whackjob before reading the book but the author Nick Jans does a fantastic job of putting forward the first argument to the point where you are left wondering. Mr. Jans in no way settles on an opinion but instead advocates both positions admirably through his own analysis woven in with interviews and opinions of other “experts”.

I enjoyed this book much better than the second one I read … but you will have to wait until the next post to find out.