Sara's bookshelf: all

Sara's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:27:44 -0700 60 Sara's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)]]> 1137215
But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.]]> 416 Cherie Priest 0765318415 Sara 2
The counterfactual setting of a civil war that never ends helps to populate the plot with all kinds of compellingly textured characters -- deserters, tongueless immigrants from China, escaped slaves turned profiteers, and of course, zeppelin pilots on the lam. But beyond that, the book doesn't offer any particular reflection about the direction our shared history actually took.

Likable, but flawed. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend.]]> 3.53 2009 Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)

author: Cherie Priest
name: Sara
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/17
date added: 2021/08/04
shelves:
review:
In the first two hundred pages a really compelling portrayal of mother-son dynamics in the wake of an unbelievably messy personal history that intersected with an equally messed-up public history. So promising. But the book's real loyalties are to genre fiction. Action sequences quickly take over as the book's main focus, and the emotional resonance never really returns. The spatial layout of the book's very particular world matters a lot, but I found it difficult to track through the book's language. Were we underground, or under a dome? Why did we keep going deeper? What levels signalled that it was safe to breathe? Where were all these hallways coming from? It became a huge barrier to enjoyment for me.

The counterfactual setting of a civil war that never ends helps to populate the plot with all kinds of compellingly textured characters -- deserters, tongueless immigrants from China, escaped slaves turned profiteers, and of course, zeppelin pilots on the lam. But beyond that, the book doesn't offer any particular reflection about the direction our shared history actually took.

Likable, but flawed. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend.
]]> Days of Distraction 52973514
The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager.��And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run.

Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you?

Equal parts tender and humorous, and told in spare but powerful prose, Days of Distraction��is an offbeat coming-of-adulthood tale, a touching family story, and a razor-sharp appraisal of our times.]]> 312 Alexandra Chang 0062951807 Sara 5
Chang's book is by far the more organized and traditional of the two books, following a much more structured plot in which the narrator leaves her first full-time job in the world of tech journalism to follow her boyfriend across the country to graduate school, and then travels to Hong Kong to visit her father who now lives there. Chang's narrator starts out as ambitious at the same time that she doesn't want to give up her right to critique the idiocies of the corporate world. Traveling across the US to Ithaca, NY with her boyfriend allows her to keep her fish out of water narration, amping it up for an angry exploration of racism and what it might mean for her own mixed-race relationship. And her trip to visit her father in Hong Kong allows for yet another way she can maintain her outsider status in a book whose main interest lies not in what's going on outside, but what's going on internally. So yeah -- that might be the fantasy Chang and Offill are both offering us -- that in the age of social media, when compressed and surprising takes on one's life are practically currency, we might form beautiful thoughts on our life that will be widely appreciated without our ever having to be anything but bemused onlookers at someone else's mess. Which perhaps is a fantasy tangential to the core of the book: Chang's careful documentation of how other Americans (and then Chinese) respond to her as an Asian-American reminds us over and over that she's always being indirectly told: this isn't your mess. This doesn't belong to you.

I don't know -- this is a very half-baked thought. What if the sum of the books (together perhaps with Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This which is next on my to-read list) winds up being a fascination with the form and power of the narration? Does that undermine (for the broader consuming audience) Chang's substantial engagement with anti-Asian racism?]]> 3.56 2020 Days of Distraction

author: Alexandra Chang
name: Sara
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/01
date added: 2021/08/02
shelves:
review:
Reading this immediately after Jenny Offill's The Weather has made me question why I like these books so immensely. And because the theme of both these books is "and maybe the answer isn't that flattering," I'm willing to entertain that possibility too. I like the centering of voices of slightly scattered, deeply ruminative subjectivities whose power in the actual universe does not feel to them very great. I like to believe that simply analyzing complex problems and trying to produce a somewhat witty new view of them is valuable in itself, even when no answers are forthcoming. I like the centering female voices and the oblique venting given to anger experienced by women, always couched in plenty of humor and trenchant observation: see how attractive all our anger actually is? It's practically art.

Chang's book is by far the more organized and traditional of the two books, following a much more structured plot in which the narrator leaves her first full-time job in the world of tech journalism to follow her boyfriend across the country to graduate school, and then travels to Hong Kong to visit her father who now lives there. Chang's narrator starts out as ambitious at the same time that she doesn't want to give up her right to critique the idiocies of the corporate world. Traveling across the US to Ithaca, NY with her boyfriend allows her to keep her fish out of water narration, amping it up for an angry exploration of racism and what it might mean for her own mixed-race relationship. And her trip to visit her father in Hong Kong allows for yet another way she can maintain her outsider status in a book whose main interest lies not in what's going on outside, but what's going on internally. So yeah -- that might be the fantasy Chang and Offill are both offering us -- that in the age of social media, when compressed and surprising takes on one's life are practically currency, we might form beautiful thoughts on our life that will be widely appreciated without our ever having to be anything but bemused onlookers at someone else's mess. Which perhaps is a fantasy tangential to the core of the book: Chang's careful documentation of how other Americans (and then Chinese) respond to her as an Asian-American reminds us over and over that she's always being indirectly told: this isn't your mess. This doesn't belong to you.

I don't know -- this is a very half-baked thought. What if the sum of the books (together perhaps with Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This which is next on my to-read list) winds up being a fascination with the form and power of the narration? Does that undermine (for the broader consuming audience) Chang's substantial engagement with anti-Asian racism?
]]> <![CDATA[Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard]]> 43212849 Bringing Nature Home, sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being. In Nature's Best Hope, he takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots, home-grown approach to conservation.��

Nature's Best Hope advocates for homeowners everywhere to turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. This home-based approach doesn’t rely on the federal government and protects the environment from the whims of politics. It is also easy to do, and readers will walk away with specific suggestions they can incorporate into their own yards.

Nature's Best Hope is nature writing at its best—rooted in history, progressive in its advocacy, and above all, actionable and hopeful. By proposing practical measures that ordinary people can easily do, Tallamy gives us reason to believe that the planet can be preserved for future generations.
��ձ�> 256 Douglas W. Tallamy 1604699000 Sara 2
But if you are already converted, you don't need to buy the book. Here are the three main things he advocates: Planting plants that support a wide variety of moth and butterfly larvae, making your yard welcoming to pollinators (not just with plants, but also by leaving up dead plants through winter, so they have a place to nest), and dimming the artificial light you place outside your house so it doesn't interfere with insect and moth night life.

If you aren't sure how to do the first thing, my advice would be to visit the Wildlife Federation's Native Plant Finder here:

(Tallamy's lab was instrumental in putting this together). Enter your zip code and you'll pull up a list of plants that are native to your area, and that host the most native butterflies and moths. Then do some research on the plants that appeal to you the most (Missouri Botanical Gardens have a fabulous internet-based Plant Finder that gives the scoop on how to grow most native plants, for instance) and make some decisions about what to plant.

You can access the book's argument in any number of interviews he's done (there's a nice one on Mary Roach's A Way to Garden blog), and skip paying for the book. It's ok -- he has a day job. He's not going to starve. What you're going to miss by not buying the book is some clunky writing and also some weird tin-eared anecdotes involving his own family. He reports having an argument with his adult son about whether to allow a fox to live in the yard which makes his son look bad and gives Tallamy the last word in the argument. Halfway through the book he mentions that his wife weeds their yard, and then told a story that presented her as if she had no idea that native plants might be useful for the environment. Um, really? This is at least Tallamy's third book on the subject. There's good reason to think his wife is on to the general idea. Also, I'll confess -- my interest in reading the book waned considerably once he presented himself as an ecologist offering advice on how to landscape, who was too busy -- or sexist? -- to actually weed his own yard.

The author wants to present a positive, action-oriented argument for contributing positively to the environment, and focuses on insects, pollinators, butterflies and moths as important to supporting the bird population. All good -- I'm on board. But his elementary lessons in ecology don't entirely make sense. The book has very little vision for imagining how this ecosystem of what you plant in your yard and the winged things that live in and on them aligns with a larger eco-system of foxes, box-turtles, toads, deer, etc. who occasionally surface in his book. He mentions early in the book that he wants yards to increase their "carrying capacity," by which he means the number of species they can support, but he also mentions that there are too many deer, and deer numbers need to decrease. Ok, I can see that argument, but that also means that planting our yards with natives to support micro-fauna is not really a restoration project: we're not going back to the same level of mega-fauna that the area once supported. So what sort of ecology are we creating? Tallamy's book too often implies that as long as we use our yards to support bugs and birds and humans, everything will be just fine. Except for that one moment where he suggests that humans need to have only two children per couple, and put an end to the Ponzi scheme of social security, which requires us to have more children. That was a distraction, not an illuminating moment of ecological clarity.

Again, I get that he wants to support positive action rather than hand-wringing without any change in behavior. And I'm on board. But I would have found the book a lot more interesting if it had engaged more comprehensively with precisely what we are "conserving" and why. In the end, the book doesn't quite feel aimed at grown-ups -- it's a bit too fake-folksy condescending, with anecdotes that can often flirt with true wince-worthiness. I guess I would have preferred a book that treated me more like a grown-up and maybe presented the author himself as treating grown-ups as if they were grown-ups.]]> 4.36 2019 Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard

Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard

author: Douglas W. Tallamy
name: Sara
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2020/07/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
If you haven't given much thought to how your yard/ landscaping habits interact with the fate of the planet, this is a great informative introduction. If you HAVE thought a lot about native plants and pollinators and microfauna this book doesn't have a whole lot new to add. It's nicely argued for newbies. The notion of treating your yard as a little slice of National Park conservation is good shorthand for a lot of things he wants to communicate.

But if you are already converted, you don't need to buy the book. Here are the three main things he advocates: Planting plants that support a wide variety of moth and butterfly larvae, making your yard welcoming to pollinators (not just with plants, but also by leaving up dead plants through winter, so they have a place to nest), and dimming the artificial light you place outside your house so it doesn't interfere with insect and moth night life.

If you aren't sure how to do the first thing, my advice would be to visit the Wildlife Federation's Native Plant Finder here:

(Tallamy's lab was instrumental in putting this together). Enter your zip code and you'll pull up a list of plants that are native to your area, and that host the most native butterflies and moths. Then do some research on the plants that appeal to you the most (Missouri Botanical Gardens have a fabulous internet-based Plant Finder that gives the scoop on how to grow most native plants, for instance) and make some decisions about what to plant.

You can access the book's argument in any number of interviews he's done (there's a nice one on Mary Roach's A Way to Garden blog), and skip paying for the book. It's ok -- he has a day job. He's not going to starve. What you're going to miss by not buying the book is some clunky writing and also some weird tin-eared anecdotes involving his own family. He reports having an argument with his adult son about whether to allow a fox to live in the yard which makes his son look bad and gives Tallamy the last word in the argument. Halfway through the book he mentions that his wife weeds their yard, and then told a story that presented her as if she had no idea that native plants might be useful for the environment. Um, really? This is at least Tallamy's third book on the subject. There's good reason to think his wife is on to the general idea. Also, I'll confess -- my interest in reading the book waned considerably once he presented himself as an ecologist offering advice on how to landscape, who was too busy -- or sexist? -- to actually weed his own yard.

The author wants to present a positive, action-oriented argument for contributing positively to the environment, and focuses on insects, pollinators, butterflies and moths as important to supporting the bird population. All good -- I'm on board. But his elementary lessons in ecology don't entirely make sense. The book has very little vision for imagining how this ecosystem of what you plant in your yard and the winged things that live in and on them aligns with a larger eco-system of foxes, box-turtles, toads, deer, etc. who occasionally surface in his book. He mentions early in the book that he wants yards to increase their "carrying capacity," by which he means the number of species they can support, but he also mentions that there are too many deer, and deer numbers need to decrease. Ok, I can see that argument, but that also means that planting our yards with natives to support micro-fauna is not really a restoration project: we're not going back to the same level of mega-fauna that the area once supported. So what sort of ecology are we creating? Tallamy's book too often implies that as long as we use our yards to support bugs and birds and humans, everything will be just fine. Except for that one moment where he suggests that humans need to have only two children per couple, and put an end to the Ponzi scheme of social security, which requires us to have more children. That was a distraction, not an illuminating moment of ecological clarity.

Again, I get that he wants to support positive action rather than hand-wringing without any change in behavior. And I'm on board. But I would have found the book a lot more interesting if it had engaged more comprehensively with precisely what we are "conserving" and why. In the end, the book doesn't quite feel aimed at grown-ups -- it's a bit too fake-folksy condescending, with anecdotes that can often flirt with true wince-worthiness. I guess I would have preferred a book that treated me more like a grown-up and maybe presented the author himself as treating grown-ups as if they were grown-ups.
]]> <![CDATA[The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity]]> 44024451 In this powerful and “engrossing�� memoir, identity theft expert Axton Betz-Hamilton tells the shocking story of how her family was destroyed by the actions of an anonymous criminal (The New York Times).

When Axton Betz-Hamilton was 11 years old, her parents both had their identities stolen. This was before the age of the Internet—authorities and banks were clueless and reluctant to help Axton's parents.

Convinced that the thief had to be someone they knew, Axton and her parents completely cut off the outside world. As a result, Axton spent her formative years crippled by anxiety, quarantined behind the closed curtains in her childhood home. Years later, Axton discovered that she, too, had fallen prey to the identity thief.

The Less People Know About Us is a cautionary tale, but not one without hope as Axton looks back on the dysfunctional childhood that led to her desire to help this from happening to others.]]> 320 Axton Betz-Hamilton 1538730286 Sara 5
Also, even though the solving of the crime will leave you incredulous and a bit flattened by the evil that humans can do, Axton Betz-Hamilton's resilience, persistence, and very dry sense of humor will also make you feel pretty darn good about being a fellow member of the same human race.

NB: If you're coming to this book because you listened to the episode of Criminal with Axton Betz-Hamilton, there's still LOTS this book recounts that wasn't even gestured toward on that podcast.]]> 3.84 2019 The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity

The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity

author: Axton Betz-Hamilton
name: Sara
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
Completely 100% bonkers true crime story about a pathologically thorough identity thief who ruins a whole family's financial personhoods. And surprisingly for a story written by a professor of consumer credit, it is really strikingly good at evoking the where of the crime -- small-town Indiana, the mobile home park on the lake full of family memories, Purdue University from the point of view of a very impoverished undergraduate, a midwest criss-crossed by a stressed adult daughter trying to keep her job and look after her parents. In fact, while the 100% bonkers story (and it is bonkers. I mean, even for the best true crime, this is a whole different level) will keep you turning pages, the author's ability to summon up the places where it all occurred is probably what will keep it on your mind for a long time after you are done.

Also, even though the solving of the crime will leave you incredulous and a bit flattened by the evil that humans can do, Axton Betz-Hamilton's resilience, persistence, and very dry sense of humor will also make you feel pretty darn good about being a fellow member of the same human race.

NB: If you're coming to this book because you listened to the episode of Criminal with Axton Betz-Hamilton, there's still LOTS this book recounts that wasn't even gestured toward on that podcast.
]]> Weather 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Sara 5
Can we handle this way of thinking? Of course we can't. I can barely read the parts in this book which revisit the days after Trump's election, and it's been over four years now. The narrator's micro-paragraphs and zippy punchlines are the only thing that can even make absorbing the content of this book possible. What is the fundamental delusion? The idea that we exist as separate individual entities at all. Only fiction can make letting go of that delusion not just ok but inevitable.]]> 3.57 2020 Weather

author: Jenny Offill
name: Sara
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
With her faulty arthritic knee, her sense of doom, her meandering, and her scepticism that our concept of the pathology of "co-dependence" can even make sense in a world where everything is interdependent, I am this narator. I have no critical distance. It helps even more that this is written in a format designed to be friendly to brains deeply anxious and distracted. The truest moment in the book come when the teacher of the meditation class declines to speak in terms of victims and punishment at the moment the #metoo movement erupts. "She spoke instead of reincarnation. Everyone here has done everything to everyone else."

Can we handle this way of thinking? Of course we can't. I can barely read the parts in this book which revisit the days after Trump's election, and it's been over four years now. The narrator's micro-paragraphs and zippy punchlines are the only thing that can even make absorbing the content of this book possible. What is the fundamental delusion? The idea that we exist as separate individual entities at all. Only fiction can make letting go of that delusion not just ok but inevitable.
]]> <![CDATA[The Secret to Superhuman Strength]]> 53968436 From the author of��Fun Home, a��profound graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with��exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times

Comics and cultural��superstar��Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply��layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through��an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern��philosophers��and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.

A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.]]> 240 Alison Bechdel 0544387651 Sara 5 4.16 2021 The Secret to Superhuman Strength

author: Alison Bechdel
name: Sara
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
A book about exercise yes, but also a book about how we read literature to invent our lives, and then depend on literature to explain to ourselves the lives we have tried to invent. And also a book about how the geological layers of consumer goods that accumulate over the course of our lives become embedded texture in our biographies. And also, a pretty sturdy introduction to nineteenth-century English-language transcendentalists and their Beat inheritors. This book, like the body Alison Bechdel builds and cultivates over the course of five decades, just does a lot. And yet -- I think the introductory chapter actually makes the book more accessible than her previous Are You My Mother? even though it might be even more intellectually ambitious.
]]> <![CDATA[Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley]]> 22294061 Romantic Outlaws is the first book to tell the story of the passionate and pioneering lives of Mary Wollstonecraft �� English feminist and author of the landmark book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women �� and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Although mother and daughter, these two brilliant women never knew one another �� Wollstonecraft died of an infection in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, a week after giving birth. Nevertheless their lives were so closely intertwined, their choices, dreams and tragedies so eerily similar, it seems impossible to consider one without the other.

Both women became famous writers; fell in love with brilliant but impossible men; and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock; both lived in exile; fought for their position in society; and thought deeply about how we should live. And both women broke almost every rigid convention there was to break: Wollstonecraft chased pirates in Scandinavia. Shelley faced down bandits in Naples. Wollstonecraft sailed to Paris to witness the Revolution. Shelley eloped in a fishing boat with a married man. Wollstonecraft proclaimed that women’s liberty should matter to everyone.

Not only did Wollstonecraft declare the rights of women, her work ignited Romanticism. She inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth and a whole new generation of writers, including her own daughter, who �� with her young lover Percy Shelley �� read Wollstonecraft’s work aloud by her graveside. At just nineteen years old and a new mother herself, Mary Shelley composed Frankenstein whilst travelling around Italy with Percy and roguish Lord Byron (who promptly fathered a child by Mary’s stepsister). It is a seminal novel, exploring the limitations of human nature and the power of invention at a time of great religious and scientific upheaval. Moreover, Mary Shelley would become the editor of her husband’s poetry after his early death �� a feat of scholarship that did nothing less than establish his literary reputation.

Romantic Outlaws brings together a pair of visionary women who should have shared a life, but who instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. This is inventive, illuminating, involving biography at its best.]]> 649 Charlotte Gordon 1400068428 Sara 5
Only reason not to read is if you wanted to preserve your hero worship of William Godwin who just can not come off very well, no matter how you tell the story.]]> 4.14 2015 Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

author: Charlotte Gordon
name: Sara
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/23
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
Completely gripping double biography of two of the most sensational women of the last five hundred years. Mary Wollstonecraft is the superstar here, for being a self-made woman of staggeringly iron-clad character, but Mary Shelley shines as a daughter trying to deal with the radical heritage from a mother she never knew. Written as a novelistic page-turner, the telling satisfies entirely, even though you do have to refrain from questioning some of Gordon's rather arbitrary judgments (why WAS Godwin's second wife vilified for doing basically what what Wollstonecraft also had done?). Also, Percy Shelley was a complete lunatic. The details of his almost-entirely-white-bread-based diet were worth the price of admission all by themselves.

Only reason not to read is if you wanted to preserve your hero worship of William Godwin who just can not come off very well, no matter how you tell the story.
]]> <![CDATA[The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature]]> 42201448 A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real�� life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think. Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives.]]> 352 Sue Stuart-Smith 1476794464 Sara 3 4.13 2020 The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature

The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature

author: Sue Stuart-Smith
name: Sara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/01
date added: 2021/07/31
shelves:
review:
I consumed this as an audio-book and the author's soothing, cultured British accent purrs forth a pile of reasons why gardening is good for you, makes you feel connected to the planet, can be healing for the traumatized mind. It wasn't quite what the reviews I had read promised, which was a sense that psycho-analytic theory needs to take into account our interactions with nature. So it was more like a warm soothing infomercial for the benefits of gardening than a sudden new theory of mind that takes our interactions with nature into account. I found the chapter on gardening and anthropology the most interesting. Did you know that some Brazilian tribes accord two statuses of motherhood? One for your kids, and one for your plants.
]]> Southernmost 35489155
In the aftermath of a flood that washes away much of a small Tennessee town, evangelical preacher Asher Sharp offers shelter to two gay men. In doing so, he starts to see his life anew—and risks losing everything: his wife, locked into her religious prejudices; his congregation, which shuns Asher after he delivers a passionate sermon in defense of tolerance; and his young son, Justin, caught in the middle of what turns into a bitter custody battle.

With no way out but ahead, Asher takes Justin and flees to Key West, where he hopes to find his brother, Luke, whom he'd turned against years ago after Luke came out. And it is there, at the southernmost point of the country, that Asher and Justin discover a new way of thinking about the world, and a new way of understanding love.

Southernmost is a tender and affecting book, a meditation on love, atonement, forgiveness, and reconciliation.]]> 336 Silas House 161620625X Sara 1
I've read several reviews that say it gets better in the second half of the book, but HE KIDNAPPED HIS OWN KID. Also, gets set up as a white savior with his viral moment of pleading "let's not judge." I could not ride that train all the way through to the finish line.

The whole time I was consuming the first half of the book I was thinking Silas House was a newly minted MFA, and this was his first production and I kept thinking, eh, well, there are some nice moments, there could have been something here that worked. But the dude apparently has dozens of other books. So, nope. There are lots of newer authors out there whose work deserves attention, and they are working a lot harder on plausibility over pandering. ]]> 3.92 2018 Southernmost

author: Silas House
name: Sara
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2020/07/12
shelves:
review:
This is 100% confirmation bias porn -- imagine someone whose position you don't understand at all suddenly coming to think JUST LIKE YOU. But like all good porn, it suffers from weak characterization and ludicrous plotting. If I surveyed my most aggressively atheist NYC-born-and-bred friends about what they thought life was like for a Pentecostal preacher in small-town Tennessee, most of them would have trouble coming up with the terrible stereotypes generated in the first half of this book. Which also wind up being stereotypes that hurt marginalized people -- all preachers' wives are bitchy and just want status; when a kid goes to a therapist, it's just because his mom is bad and needs to change.

I've read several reviews that say it gets better in the second half of the book, but HE KIDNAPPED HIS OWN KID. Also, gets set up as a white savior with his viral moment of pleading "let's not judge." I could not ride that train all the way through to the finish line.

The whole time I was consuming the first half of the book I was thinking Silas House was a newly minted MFA, and this was his first production and I kept thinking, eh, well, there are some nice moments, there could have been something here that worked. But the dude apparently has dozens of other books. So, nope. There are lots of newer authors out there whose work deserves attention, and they are working a lot harder on plausibility over pandering.
]]> <![CDATA[The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma]]> 129785 There Are No Children Here was more than a bestseller; it was a national event. His beautifully narrated, heartbreaking nonfiction account of two black boys struggling to grow up in a Chicago public housing complex spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, was a made-for-television movie starring and produced by Oprah Winfrey, won many distinguished awards, and sparked a continuing national debate on the lives of inner-city children.

In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and ninety-five percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and ninety-two percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well. The investigation into the young man's death becomes, inevitably, a screen on which each town projects their resentments and fears.

The Other Side of the River sensitively portrays the lives and hopes of the towns' citizens as they wrestle with this mystery--and reveals the attitudes and misperceptions that undermine race relations throughout America. In this gripping and ultimately profound book, Alex Kotlowitz proves why he is one of this country's foremost writers on the ever explosive issue of race.

From the Hardcover edition.]]> 322 Alex Kotlowitz 038547721X Sara 3
As soon as it becomes clear that the author isn't going to solve the mystery of how Eric died, the book becomes a reflection on racial tension, and on how the experience of race shapes your sense of what is probable and likely. It is not very satisfying or deep, although maybe in 1998 it was a strikingly new contribution to the conversation on race in the US. In his book _There Are No Children Here_, Kotlowitz was exemplary at getting out of the way and letting his subjects speak in their own clear voices. Here, maybe because no one has anything very penetrating to say about racial relations, that technique just yields a lot of murk and not much that's even memorable.

The book's structure changes from being driven by the question "Was Eric's death a murder or an accident?" to "Why is it that the two towns can't share a viewpoint on this incident?" and as it does, the "answer" to the question becomes a long exposition of current racial tensions: controversies over school board leaders and prior police abuses of black citizens in the area. One of these episodes -- a 21-year-old shot to death by a cop who mistook him for someone else -- is especially unsatisfying because we get extended and somewhat sympathetic characterization of the cop who shot him, and we are never told anything about the man who actually died. The loss of middle-class jobs, the gutting of a decent police force, and the infiltration of Benton Harbor by gangs from Detroit and Chicago complete the picture.

At the end of the book, the author concludes that he's seen people from both towns work on developing relationships with one another, but 20 years later this seems laughably optimistic. The state of Michigan put the city of Benton Harbor into receivership for several years (ending, I think, in 2017), appointing a non-democratically elected city manager to make all the decisions involved in running the city. This is the same arrangement which resulted in Flint's water crisis, for those of you keeping tabs at home. Local corporation Whirlpool "invested" in helping to build a world-class golf-course in Benton Harbor -- for which the owners of the golf course will pay no property taxes -- as a move to economically develop Benton Harbor. Surprisingly, not a lot of Benton Harbor residents play golf. This summer the governor of Michigan announced plans to close Benton Harbor's high school, and farm out the students to ten surrounding rural high schools. This is a decision that's still under negotiation, but all signs point toward bridges that have NOT been built, and racism that proceeds apace on a systematic level.]]> 3.78 1998 The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma

The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma

author: Alex Kotlowitz
name: Sara
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2020/06/24
shelves:
review:
An unsatisfying book to read six years into the Black Lives Matter movement, and two years into this current American presidency. The book opens when a 17-year-old African-American from Benton Harbor is found dead in the St. Joseph River, having ostensibly fallen in the river while in the town of St. Joseph. The citizens of the predominantly black and very poor Benton Harbor, where the boy, Eric, is from, believe Eric to be the victim of a murder. They believe he was most likely killed by white people in a crime that was not properly investigated by white police. The citizens of the predominantly white and middle-class St. Joseph, right next door, see Eric's drowning as an accident that Benton Harbor residents are using as an excuse to whine about race.

As soon as it becomes clear that the author isn't going to solve the mystery of how Eric died, the book becomes a reflection on racial tension, and on how the experience of race shapes your sense of what is probable and likely. It is not very satisfying or deep, although maybe in 1998 it was a strikingly new contribution to the conversation on race in the US. In his book _There Are No Children Here_, Kotlowitz was exemplary at getting out of the way and letting his subjects speak in their own clear voices. Here, maybe because no one has anything very penetrating to say about racial relations, that technique just yields a lot of murk and not much that's even memorable.

The book's structure changes from being driven by the question "Was Eric's death a murder or an accident?" to "Why is it that the two towns can't share a viewpoint on this incident?" and as it does, the "answer" to the question becomes a long exposition of current racial tensions: controversies over school board leaders and prior police abuses of black citizens in the area. One of these episodes -- a 21-year-old shot to death by a cop who mistook him for someone else -- is especially unsatisfying because we get extended and somewhat sympathetic characterization of the cop who shot him, and we are never told anything about the man who actually died. The loss of middle-class jobs, the gutting of a decent police force, and the infiltration of Benton Harbor by gangs from Detroit and Chicago complete the picture.

At the end of the book, the author concludes that he's seen people from both towns work on developing relationships with one another, but 20 years later this seems laughably optimistic. The state of Michigan put the city of Benton Harbor into receivership for several years (ending, I think, in 2017), appointing a non-democratically elected city manager to make all the decisions involved in running the city. This is the same arrangement which resulted in Flint's water crisis, for those of you keeping tabs at home. Local corporation Whirlpool "invested" in helping to build a world-class golf-course in Benton Harbor -- for which the owners of the golf course will pay no property taxes -- as a move to economically develop Benton Harbor. Surprisingly, not a lot of Benton Harbor residents play golf. This summer the governor of Michigan announced plans to close Benton Harbor's high school, and farm out the students to ten surrounding rural high schools. This is a decision that's still under negotiation, but all signs point toward bridges that have NOT been built, and racism that proceeds apace on a systematic level.
]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 41161349
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' pain.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith...and a startling vision of human destiny.

This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale�� (John Green, New York Times)—now with a new foreword by N. K. Jemisin.]]> 329 Octavia E. Butler 1538732181 Sara 5
Indispensable pandemic reading. ]]> 4.17 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)

author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Sara
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2020/05/01
date added: 2020/06/24
shelves:
review:
Prepare for the future you see coming, not the one everyone else seems to think you should expect.

Indispensable pandemic reading.
]]> Girl, Woman, Other 44666924 Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

]]> 464 Bernardine Evaristo Sara 4 4.42 2019 Girl, Woman, Other

author: Bernardine Evaristo
name: Sara
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/01
date added: 2020/06/24
shelves:
review:
Highly readable cacophony of voices. Permanent dislodging of the notion that there might be one black British experience. Enjoyed every minute of reading it. But question of what we inherit and what we invent abides over it all, but very, very loosely.
]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Sara 4
As a book about the truth of impending eco-disaster, this would have been pretty good. But because it's also a book about the puzzle of how to tell the truth of impending eco-disaster in a way that will allow people to listen and to act, it's much much better. And I stand convicted of a desire for fiction -- the story of the trees inside this novel is good, but what hooked me was the world-record life-background character exposition which opens this book. Come for the people. Stay for the trees.]]> 4.10 2018 The Overstory

author: Richard Powers
name: Sara
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2020/01/03
shelves:
review:
"Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive -- character -- is all that matters in the end. [. . . ] To be human is to confuse the satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone."

As a book about the truth of impending eco-disaster, this would have been pretty good. But because it's also a book about the puzzle of how to tell the truth of impending eco-disaster in a way that will allow people to listen and to act, it's much much better. And I stand convicted of a desire for fiction -- the story of the trees inside this novel is good, but what hooked me was the world-record life-background character exposition which opens this book. Come for the people. Stay for the trees.
]]> Washington Black 38140077
When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist.

He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him.

What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life, one which will propel him further across the globe.

From the sultry cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, Washington Black tells a story of friendship and betrayal, love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again--and asks the question, what is true freedom?]]> 334 Esi Edugyan 0525521429 Sara 4
What most other goodreads readers say is true: the first half of this book is a quickly paced slave narrative/ bildungsroman that makes you cheer on your likeable protagonist, and the second half is a series of coincidences and improbable events that take what we thought was a simple movement from A to desired endpoint Z of freedom, and turn it into a travelogue where we aren't even sure where we are supposed to end up. But maybe that's part of the point -- it's not as if the world into which an escaped slave emerged was going to be simple, and it's not as if science has reassured us of our place in the universe. So why write a novel as if either of those things were true?]]> 3.93 2018 Washington Black

author: Esi Edugyan
name: Sara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/01
date added: 2020/01/02
shelves:
review:
Is the world a closed system, a dystopian conspiratorial landscape in which "they" control everything, or is there a possibility of soaring above it, escaping the environment, gaining a vantage from which everything can be understood, with you as the understander? And if you could gain that vantage point, would it make you a genius, a man of science? Or would it make you the master of the plantation?

What most other goodreads readers say is true: the first half of this book is a quickly paced slave narrative/ bildungsroman that makes you cheer on your likeable protagonist, and the second half is a series of coincidences and improbable events that take what we thought was a simple movement from A to desired endpoint Z of freedom, and turn it into a travelogue where we aren't even sure where we are supposed to end up. But maybe that's part of the point -- it's not as if the world into which an escaped slave emerged was going to be simple, and it's not as if science has reassured us of our place in the universe. So why write a novel as if either of those things were true?
]]> <![CDATA[The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice]]> 25489049
Pauli Murray first saw Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933, at the height of the Depression, at a government-sponsored, two-hundred-acre camp for unemployed women where Murray was living, something the first lady had pushed her husband to set up in her effort to do what she could for working women and the poor. The first lady appeared one day unannounced, behind the wheel of her car, her secretary and a Secret Service agent her passengers. To Murray, then aged twenty-three, Roosevelt’s self-assurance was a symbol of women’s independence, a symbol that endured throughout Murray’s life.

Five years later, Pauli Murray, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer, wrote a letter to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt protesting racial segregation in the South. The president’s staff forwarded Murray’s letter to the federal Office of Education. The first lady wrote back.

Murray’s letter was prompted by a speech the president had given at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, praising the school for its commitment to social progress. Pauli Murray had been denied admission to the Chapel Hill graduate school because of her race.

She wrote in her letter of 1938: Does it mean that Negro students in the South will be allowed to sit down with white students and study a problem which is fundamental and mutual to both groups? Does it mean that the University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students . . . ? Or does it mean, that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that again we are to be set aside and passed over . . . ?

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Murray: I have read the copy of the letter you sent me and I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly . . . The South is changing, but don’t push too fast. So began a friendship between Pauli Murray (poet, intellectual rebel, principal strategist in the fight to preserve Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cofounder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African American female Episcopal priest) and Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady of the United States, later first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women) that would last for a quarter of a century.

Drawing on letters, journals, diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and interviews, Patricia Bell-Scott gives us the first close-up portrait of this evolving friendship and how it was sustained over time, what each gave to the other, and how their friendship changed the cause of American social justice.]]> 480 Patricia Bell-Scott 0679446524 Sara 4
I know a lot of readers have criticized this book for making Pauli Murray play in concert with ER, when really Murray deserves her own book (she has several). I think that's a fair criticism, but I also think the whole conception of this book was a very clever way to get liberal white ladies like me to read a whole book about Pauli Murray when we'd never heard of her. So -- I salute Patricia Bell Scott. Well-played. It worked. And I DID need to hear about Pauli Murray.

What I like about Murray in this book, is you see so clearly how Murray doesn't always succeed, how her life is constantly interrupted and redirected, and how she isn't always equal to the forces arrayed against her. And yet she keeps going. For instance, when she first gets to college, she isn't a blazing star of a poster child for the oppressed. She is exhausted by how much she has to work, falls asleep in class, ultimately drops out and then GETS MARRIED TO A MAN SHE BARELY KNOWS, counter to her lifelong attraction to women. But -- she keeps going and then DOES wind up getting a degree, and DOES wind up being a sensation at Howard (where some of her student work ultimately winds up getting cited in Brown v Board of education. And of course, she doesn't get much credit). After getting her law degree from the Berkeley, she was appointed to serve as Deputy Attorney General for the state of California -- the first black attorney to ever hold such a position. And yet she had leave the job behind to return to North Carolina and take care of the ailing aunt who raised her. Did I mention that she had a terrible thyroid disorder that manifested as a mood disorder, leading to hospitalizations and breakdowns that made her think she was crazy, an idea reinforced by the era's appalling homophobia? I mean, obviously, I'm not even touching on the barriers posed by Jim Crow, bias against female lawyers, the McCarthy era (in which she was, of course, blacklisted by employers because of early activism associated with socialism). And she kept plugging along, writing the definitive legal text on race-based state laws, then a very well-respected memoir of her family from the Civil War on, then -- oh, I'm not going to spoil it all for you. Just trust me -- at the end of this book you aren't going to remember much about Eleanor Roosevelt, and that's just fine.

So, I've decided Pauli Murray is the hero I need for the next decade. I've just downloaded her memoir as an audio book. I could use a lot more Pauli Murray in my life.]]> 4.28 2016 The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

author: Patricia Bell-Scott
name: Sara
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/01
date added: 2020/01/02
shelves:
review:
When I picked up this book, I knew a decent amount about Eleanor Roosevelt, and absolutely nothing about civil rights activist/ legal theorist/ author/ priest/ transgender elder Pauli Murray. But it turns out Pauli Murray is so sensational that she really makes Eleanor Roosevelt look boring and kind of predictable. Seriously -- how did I not know who she was before now?

I know a lot of readers have criticized this book for making Pauli Murray play in concert with ER, when really Murray deserves her own book (she has several). I think that's a fair criticism, but I also think the whole conception of this book was a very clever way to get liberal white ladies like me to read a whole book about Pauli Murray when we'd never heard of her. So -- I salute Patricia Bell Scott. Well-played. It worked. And I DID need to hear about Pauli Murray.

What I like about Murray in this book, is you see so clearly how Murray doesn't always succeed, how her life is constantly interrupted and redirected, and how she isn't always equal to the forces arrayed against her. And yet she keeps going. For instance, when she first gets to college, she isn't a blazing star of a poster child for the oppressed. She is exhausted by how much she has to work, falls asleep in class, ultimately drops out and then GETS MARRIED TO A MAN SHE BARELY KNOWS, counter to her lifelong attraction to women. But -- she keeps going and then DOES wind up getting a degree, and DOES wind up being a sensation at Howard (where some of her student work ultimately winds up getting cited in Brown v Board of education. And of course, she doesn't get much credit). After getting her law degree from the Berkeley, she was appointed to serve as Deputy Attorney General for the state of California -- the first black attorney to ever hold such a position. And yet she had leave the job behind to return to North Carolina and take care of the ailing aunt who raised her. Did I mention that she had a terrible thyroid disorder that manifested as a mood disorder, leading to hospitalizations and breakdowns that made her think she was crazy, an idea reinforced by the era's appalling homophobia? I mean, obviously, I'm not even touching on the barriers posed by Jim Crow, bias against female lawyers, the McCarthy era (in which she was, of course, blacklisted by employers because of early activism associated with socialism). And she kept plugging along, writing the definitive legal text on race-based state laws, then a very well-respected memoir of her family from the Civil War on, then -- oh, I'm not going to spoil it all for you. Just trust me -- at the end of this book you aren't going to remember much about Eleanor Roosevelt, and that's just fine.

So, I've decided Pauli Murray is the hero I need for the next decade. I've just downloaded her memoir as an audio book. I could use a lot more Pauli Murray in my life.
]]> Sourdough 33916024
Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.

When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?]]> 259 Robin Sloan 0374203105 Sara 5
This conundrum preoccupies this book, a burlesque of Silicon Valley wealth and California foodie-ism that could very well have been co-written by Roald Dahl and Dr. Suess. Fantastical technology and improbable food punctuate what would otherwise be a familiar tale of a young person trying to decide what work makes sense for her life. And since both work and food are necessary for survival, this is also a tale about what sort of food makes sense for one's life. Algorhythmically optimized bagels, bread with faces, fungal party hell-scapes, urban-scale panettones and a grey nutrient called Slurry (tm) are all on the table. And like most young people, our young heroine might think she has more power of choice than she actually does.

Don't expect a profound message at the end of this book: it's a comedy, a reconciliation of opposites. The end of the book will promise you that you can have both the immovable object and the unstoppable force, as long as you listen to your inner-Lois. Or maybe just a few of the Loises in your local Lois club.]]> 3.73 2017 Sourdough

author: Robin Sloan
name: Sara
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2019/07/30
shelves:
review:
In _The Wealth of Nations_ Adam Smith creates the conditions for what will become the paradox of work for all industrialized countries: those who do work, he says, will constantly be thinking about how to do it more efficiently, so they can do less of it. That means that all good workers have to hate their jobs just a little bit, in order to be motivated to do it more efficiently. So what becomes of those who actually love their jobs? Does loving your job make you a bad capitalist? What does one do with vocational love in the context of earning a living?

This conundrum preoccupies this book, a burlesque of Silicon Valley wealth and California foodie-ism that could very well have been co-written by Roald Dahl and Dr. Suess. Fantastical technology and improbable food punctuate what would otherwise be a familiar tale of a young person trying to decide what work makes sense for her life. And since both work and food are necessary for survival, this is also a tale about what sort of food makes sense for one's life. Algorhythmically optimized bagels, bread with faces, fungal party hell-scapes, urban-scale panettones and a grey nutrient called Slurry (tm) are all on the table. And like most young people, our young heroine might think she has more power of choice than she actually does.

Don't expect a profound message at the end of this book: it's a comedy, a reconciliation of opposites. The end of the book will promise you that you can have both the immovable object and the unstoppable force, as long as you listen to your inner-Lois. Or maybe just a few of the Loises in your local Lois club.
]]> Lost City Radio 54142
For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.

But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.

Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing, Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer, and survivor carries for years after. This tender debut marks Alarc�n's emergence as a major new voice in American fiction.]]> 272 Daniel Alarcón 0060594799 Sara 4
Anyway, if you're looking to use this book to learn something about recent South American history, it's no good for that. The action actually takes place in a "nameless South American country" whose status in reality is parallel with the cities in China Mieville's The City and The City and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. The generic setting (which some reviewers on goodreads equate with sci-fi -- very provocative) allows it to focus intensively on the affects of aftermath, making it something much more original than your average airport-worthy historical novel.]]> 3.71 2007 Lost City Radio

author: Daniel Alarcón
name: Sara
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/01
date added: 2019/07/10
shelves:
review:
I had to get past my preconceptions of what this book was supposed to be in order to appreciate it for what it was. I **thought** it was going to be sort of a liberal chick-historicaromance, where I'd get to learn a few facts about Peruvian geopolitics in the 1980s and 1990s, and get swept along by tales of lost love, and maybe vicariously participate in a brave resistance movement. Instead, what I got was a much quieter tale of the aftermath of terrible upheaval, the sort of moral grey fog that settles in on people who once had much clarity about which side was right and which side was wrong, but now are just living with the terrible grief of so many lives lost. Also -- it's not really a girl book at all, despite having a woman as its nominal main character. The narrative energy always settles around the men in this book. Not a bad thing -- just a thing that's not easy to tell from the marketing material.

Anyway, if you're looking to use this book to learn something about recent South American history, it's no good for that. The action actually takes place in a "nameless South American country" whose status in reality is parallel with the cities in China Mieville's The City and The City and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. The generic setting (which some reviewers on goodreads equate with sci-fi -- very provocative) allows it to focus intensively on the affects of aftermath, making it something much more original than your average airport-worthy historical novel.
]]> Across Five Aprils 65959
In 1861, America is on the cusp of war, and young Jethro Creighton is just nine-years-old. His brother, Tom, and his cousin, Eb, are both of fighting age. As Jethro's family is pulled into the conflict between the North and the South, loyalties are divided, dreams are threatened, and their bonds are put to the test in this heart-wrenching, coming of age story.��ձ�> 224 Irene Hunt 0425182789 Sara 1
Turns out the book is unbelievably dull. I mean tepid bathwater on a Tuesday night dull. There's no character development. There isn't even a lot of dialogue, and what's there is stilted and awkward. There's no scaffolding that helps explain the issues behind the civil war. The plot follows an adolescent character who has virtually no interaction with adolescent peers, making it especially dull to the average tween reader. And by the end of the book it lapses into simply recounting the outcome of a series of Civil War battles that the main character reads about in newspapers. Which, hey, is a lot like reading about them in history books. So much for bringing history alive.

In sum, I am incredulous that this is so commonly assigned in schools. The world is teeming with engaging, well-written historical fiction for teens. This is not it.]]> 3.58 1964 Across Five Aprils

author: Irene Hunt
name: Sara
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1964
rating: 1
read at: 2016/01/01
date added: 2019/07/10
shelves:
review:
The 12yo in my house had to finish this for summer reading, and would not stop complaining about how boring it was. I'm an enormous fan of historical fiction, so I was of course incensed. How could you not love a book about growing up during the Civil War? I decreed that we'd finish it as an audio book so I could explain its many virtues and strengths.

Turns out the book is unbelievably dull. I mean tepid bathwater on a Tuesday night dull. There's no character development. There isn't even a lot of dialogue, and what's there is stilted and awkward. There's no scaffolding that helps explain the issues behind the civil war. The plot follows an adolescent character who has virtually no interaction with adolescent peers, making it especially dull to the average tween reader. And by the end of the book it lapses into simply recounting the outcome of a series of Civil War battles that the main character reads about in newspapers. Which, hey, is a lot like reading about them in history books. So much for bringing history alive.

In sum, I am incredulous that this is so commonly assigned in schools. The world is teeming with engaging, well-written historical fiction for teens. This is not it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Five: The Lives of Jack the Ripper's Women]]> 37545347 Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.
]]> 336 Hallie Rubenhold Sara 3
For that reason, the CONCEPT behind this book is brilliant: Rubenhold sifts through the historical records, finds a surprising amount of information about the women who were murdered by Ripper, and it turns out maybe two of them were prostitutes, but even then, not for most of their lives. And the fact that so-called "Ripper-ologists" hate this book suggests something quite unpleasant about those who obsess over the Victorian mass-murderer: perhaps what draws them to the story is the idea that the East End offered a mass of anonymous women whose bodies were easily available for money and whose particular identities never mattered.

Unfortunately, in execution, the book is a bit of a slog. Rubenhold's narrative energy often depends heavily on connecting slender historical records with lots of "would have"s and "as many Victorian women did"s. This might work for a vivid extended magazine article, but for a whole book it's tiring. It will take a very disciplined -- or very unimaginative -- reader to not eventually start to object "Yes, but maybe this would have happened instead." Perhaps most grating is her constant insistence that all of the women loved their husbands, loved their children, wanted to be good wives and mothers but alcohol, lack of money, and family troubles got in the way. This feels a bit too much like pushing them into a domestic box that several of them were obviously trying to climb out of. Maybe some of them were overwhelmed with marriage. Maybe some of them just couldn't adjust to constantly catering to the needs of very young children. They certainly wouldn't have been the only Victorian women who felt that way. At times Rubenhold seems a bit terrified that if she portrays them as too independent-minded or rebellious, some reader might conclude that they deserved to die anyway.

If you don't know a lot about the conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-century London, this books certainly offers a factual account that might really be compelling, but the structure of telling the story victim by victim winds up feeling quite repetitive.]]> 4.09 2019 The Five: The Lives of Jack the Ripper's Women

The Five: The Lives of Jack the Ripper's Women

author: Hallie Rubenhold
name: Sara
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/06/01
date added: 2019/07/10
shelves:
review:
Isn't it weird that everyone in the world knows who Jack the Ripper is, but no one knows who his victims were? Or rather -- everyone THINKS they know who his victims were. They were prostitutes, right?

For that reason, the CONCEPT behind this book is brilliant: Rubenhold sifts through the historical records, finds a surprising amount of information about the women who were murdered by Ripper, and it turns out maybe two of them were prostitutes, but even then, not for most of their lives. And the fact that so-called "Ripper-ologists" hate this book suggests something quite unpleasant about those who obsess over the Victorian mass-murderer: perhaps what draws them to the story is the idea that the East End offered a mass of anonymous women whose bodies were easily available for money and whose particular identities never mattered.

Unfortunately, in execution, the book is a bit of a slog. Rubenhold's narrative energy often depends heavily on connecting slender historical records with lots of "would have"s and "as many Victorian women did"s. This might work for a vivid extended magazine article, but for a whole book it's tiring. It will take a very disciplined -- or very unimaginative -- reader to not eventually start to object "Yes, but maybe this would have happened instead." Perhaps most grating is her constant insistence that all of the women loved their husbands, loved their children, wanted to be good wives and mothers but alcohol, lack of money, and family troubles got in the way. This feels a bit too much like pushing them into a domestic box that several of them were obviously trying to climb out of. Maybe some of them were overwhelmed with marriage. Maybe some of them just couldn't adjust to constantly catering to the needs of very young children. They certainly wouldn't have been the only Victorian women who felt that way. At times Rubenhold seems a bit terrified that if she portrays them as too independent-minded or rebellious, some reader might conclude that they deserved to die anyway.

If you don't know a lot about the conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-century London, this books certainly offers a factual account that might really be compelling, but the structure of telling the story victim by victim winds up feeling quite repetitive.
]]> Heavy 29430746 In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse.

Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 241 Kiese Laymon 1501125656 Sara 5
But as Laymon makes clear, this isn't a text that's written for me. He says again and again it's written to his mom, and that it's written for black people, and that frees him to say all the stuff that his mom never wanted him to say out loud because white people might overhear it, and then use it against him. Laymon's emphasis on address makes his memoir part of the tradition created by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me: books whose truths depend on the rhetoric of address, on careful attention to what can be said to whom. But where Baldwin and Coates speak to the next generation as men speaking to boys, Laymon navigates the much trickier terrain of speaking across genders and backwards to the older generation. It's a tricky public performance, because perhaps the most repeated old saw of black respectability politics is that black men need to step up and be fathers to black boys; that's the space into which Baldwin and Coates step with their essays, insisting that in order to be elders they must freely speak unpleasant truths about white America.

While Laymon certainly doesn't shy away from speaking unpleasant truths about white America, his challenge lies in telling the truth about how very many terrible things happened to him as the child of a poor black single mother, and yet not giving in to the patriarchal assumptions of respectability politics. His extraordinary ability to excavate the love present in his childhood and the love required to be an ethical teacher allows him to succeed.]]> 4.48 2018 Heavy

author: Kiese Laymon
name: Sara
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/01
date added: 2019/07/10
shelves:
review:
Don't even bother reading this review. Just read the book. Or better yet, listen to the audiobook which Laymon reads himself with all the gorgeous rhythms and intonations that he must have had in mind when he was writing every carefully crafted sentence. This is a text of extraordinary beauty about the extraordinary beauty of language -- "that black abundance" -- while it is also a text about excruciating work and suffering. There is much in this book that is very difficult to listen to: if you need to avoid representations of sexual violence, you probably need to skip the first chapter altogether. There's also a lot in this book that challenged me, as a white person. Laymon and I are almost exact contemporaries, and the tales he has to tell of the level of racism he experienced growing up are tales that the teenaged me thought were only the sort of thing that happened in the early 1960s and before. Which says a lot about my white privilege, about how I didn't have to really think about what it was like for my black peers, even when we were attending the same schools, watching the same tv programs, listening to the same music. Laymon's exceptional talent is in turning that stuff that I didn't have to think about into veritable earworms, short catchphrases and repeated sentences that are really really hard to leave behind.

But as Laymon makes clear, this isn't a text that's written for me. He says again and again it's written to his mom, and that it's written for black people, and that frees him to say all the stuff that his mom never wanted him to say out loud because white people might overhear it, and then use it against him. Laymon's emphasis on address makes his memoir part of the tradition created by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me: books whose truths depend on the rhetoric of address, on careful attention to what can be said to whom. But where Baldwin and Coates speak to the next generation as men speaking to boys, Laymon navigates the much trickier terrain of speaking across genders and backwards to the older generation. It's a tricky public performance, because perhaps the most repeated old saw of black respectability politics is that black men need to step up and be fathers to black boys; that's the space into which Baldwin and Coates step with their essays, insisting that in order to be elders they must freely speak unpleasant truths about white America.

While Laymon certainly doesn't shy away from speaking unpleasant truths about white America, his challenge lies in telling the truth about how very many terrible things happened to him as the child of a poor black single mother, and yet not giving in to the patriarchal assumptions of respectability politics. His extraordinary ability to excavate the love present in his childhood and the love required to be an ethical teacher allows him to succeed.
]]> Fruit of the Drunken Tree 36636727 In the vein of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a mesmerizing debut set against the backdrop of the devastating violence of 1990's Colombia about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both.

The Santiago family lives in a gated community in Bogotá, safe from the political upheaval terrorizing the country. Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to this protective bubble, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.

When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal.

Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.]]> 304 Ingrid Rojas Contreras Sara 3
SO -- if you are having trouble getting through this book, go online, get a few spoilers, and then return to it. I think a really good editor would have insisted on the major event being revealed at the outset of the book, since it opens as a retrospective narration anyway. It would have given the reader more of a sense of HEADING somewhere.

Overall, not a bad read, but definitely not life-changing. If you read it and you are the average US citizen, you'll be better acquainted than you were before you started with some of the main events and characters of the last 40 years of Colombian history, but you won't really have a better grasp of what set it all into motion.]]> 3.93 2018 Fruit of the Drunken Tree

author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
name: Sara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2019/07/10
shelves:
review:
So the "geopolitical events filtered through the eyes of an observant but innocent child" genre is pretty well-worn, and there's a very high bar for doing it well. In its first 120 pages, this book doesn't really clear the bar. In fact it meanders with occasional spurts of magical realism that don't add up to much and then it meanders some more. And that's where I gave up and started reading some reviews of the book -- a NY Times review, a few interviews with the author on the literary blog The Millions. AND -- that sent me back to the book, because the reviews and interviews had spoilers about the major hook of the story, which made even the choice of child-narrator make more sense. Also, around page 120, the pacing gets brisker and the details begin to accumulate into something.

SO -- if you are having trouble getting through this book, go online, get a few spoilers, and then return to it. I think a really good editor would have insisted on the major event being revealed at the outset of the book, since it opens as a retrospective narration anyway. It would have given the reader more of a sense of HEADING somewhere.

Overall, not a bad read, but definitely not life-changing. If you read it and you are the average US citizen, you'll be better acquainted than you were before you started with some of the main events and characters of the last 40 years of Colombian history, but you won't really have a better grasp of what set it all into motion.
]]> <![CDATA[Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction]]> 25663669 352 Maia Szalavitz 1250055822 Sara 3
She advocates for more room in the US mental health industry for addiction care based on harm reduction. This approach, in contrast to AA's very black and white once-an-addict-always-an-addict, encourages drug users to reflect on what motivates them to regulate and control their drug use even if they cannot stop it. Are they motivated to use clean needles to protect them from HIV, even if they are not motivated to stop using? Are they motivated to limit the hours in which they take drugs in order to hold down a job? Harm reduction starts with the motivations the user is experiencing right now, with the hope (but not the condition) that it might open up a space for them to reflect further on what they are using the drug for. Once a user sees that they can apply their motivation (rather than a rehab facility's dictates) to controlling their usage, they have a much stronger sense of their autonomy over their drug usage. She cites specific studies which document the effectiveness of this approach for some users. Perhaps her most frequent refrain is that not all addicts are alike, and that what works for one addict does not necessarily work for all addicts. And yet in the US, the main assistance offered to addicts is in the form of a 12-step program which can be very very very rigid in its rhetoric and execution.

This is a message that most Americans -- both drug users and non-drug users -- need to be exposed to. In laying out the information, Svalavitz is on the side of the angels. The message simply needs to be heard more. All the same, the book wasn't quite what I expected based on its advanced publicity, which made it seem more geared specifically toward drug users and those who care about them, offering them new approaches to dealing with addiction. This is mostly the function of the last two chapters. The bulk of the book offers a more broad policy survey of addiction treatment in America, noting its roots in racism, and the war on drugs' general lack of results. My guess is that individual buyers motivated to pick up Svalavitz's book already know a lot of this. The ideal reader of this book struck me as a student taking an addiction psychology or criminal justice course. I hope it gets picked up in the college classroom by folks who haven't thought much about addiction one way or another.

I have two gripes with the book: 1) Before she ever addresses her own largely positive experience in 12-step programs, she repeats over and over again, in almost every chapter, how horrible 12-step programs are, for the way they shame their participants. But in the end, Svalavitz's real gripe is with a particular application of the 12-step model in a particular group that owns a lot of rehab centers. She confesses that the 12-step model provided her with community and a sense of purpose when she was in recovery. The practice in AA of listing your faults and making amends can be quite shaming. Or it can be quite conciliatory -- at its best, I think it was conceived of as a way for those who had terrible shame or anxiety to speak out loud their worst fears about themselves to a group of people who experience some of the same darkness -- and to know that the whole group, instead of recoiling in horror, will simply nod and say yes, we identify and you are one of us. I don't doubt that 12-step programs are applied in all kinds of abusive ways in some rehab centers. I also think that the 12 steps provide a lot of people with a sense of autonomy and community they need to change their lives. I found the anti-12 step rhetoric to be overblown for the actual amount of concrete problems she reported in her chapter focusing on it. The refrain she repeats over and over about 12-step programs is that there's no good empirical evidence that shows that it works. That's worth discussing. It's worthwhile to organize for more funding, more research, more responsible addiction treatment. But still, IT'S ALL WE'VE GOT RIGHT NOW. Her anti-12-step rhetoric often felt like someone coming along and tearing down the tent because it was a tent, and saying "Well, we should have a sky-scraper instead." Yes, we should. But until that day, we need some kind of shelter.

2) I also think her own experience -- as a teen who abused drugs while living away from her home and before anyone was relying on her in an adult capacity -- leads her to underestimate the severe harm drug abuse does to the families of drug users. She criticizes psychological discourse that urges family members to separate themselves from drug users, and she also criticizes the way the concept of "rock bottom" (which is just a metaphor -- I've never understood it as anything but a metaphor) is used in addiction speak to discourage those closest to the addict from trying to interfere. What is missing in her book is the limitless anguish, the limitless expense, the genuine danger to children and the elderly that drug users bring to their family and loved ones. The concept of harm reduction itself emphasizes that the motivation of the drug user, not the support of the family members is the crucial factor in allowing the drug user to gain control over their situation. While I take Svalavitz's point very seriously that not all addictions are the same, for very many drug users there is almost nothing that family can do, and it does become their responsibility to try not to join the drug user on the downward spiral. This is a dynamic that the book does not have on its horizons at all.]]> 4.14 2016 Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

author: Maia Szalavitz
name: Sara
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2019/04/04
date added: 2019/05/04
shelves:
review:
The accomplishment of this book is in presenting addiction not as an on/ off switch in which one is either an addict and thus an addict forever or not an addict, with no in-between. Instead Szalavitz emphasizes over and over again that addiction is in many cases learned -- what you use the drug for, what your peer group expects from your drug usage, the setting in which you consume drugs -- all contribute to an experience of substance usage that either gradually becomes more and more compulsive, or simply fails to take complete hold. Probably her most striking observation is that almost all US anti-drug crusades entirely ignore the fact that drug users do get something positive from their drug use -- at least at first. Instead, in public service rhetoric, drugs are always a stupid choice made by losers who just haven't thought things through. Svalavitz again and again points out that for people dealing with the profound pain of traumatic memories, for people with the darting brains of ADHD, for folks with profound depression or social anxiety, drugs can offer very concrete relief from brains that make basic living very difficult. And in the US, where getting affordable access to mental health care is challenging even for the middle class, drugs might be the only relief from a brain that is torturing you. However, once you've sought relief in drugs, the unrelenting shame heaped on drug users is not much of an incentive to stop. Shame is almost never a motivator, even for the most clear-headed among us. For those whose brains make living hard, its just one more reason to tune out with more drugs.

She advocates for more room in the US mental health industry for addiction care based on harm reduction. This approach, in contrast to AA's very black and white once-an-addict-always-an-addict, encourages drug users to reflect on what motivates them to regulate and control their drug use even if they cannot stop it. Are they motivated to use clean needles to protect them from HIV, even if they are not motivated to stop using? Are they motivated to limit the hours in which they take drugs in order to hold down a job? Harm reduction starts with the motivations the user is experiencing right now, with the hope (but not the condition) that it might open up a space for them to reflect further on what they are using the drug for. Once a user sees that they can apply their motivation (rather than a rehab facility's dictates) to controlling their usage, they have a much stronger sense of their autonomy over their drug usage. She cites specific studies which document the effectiveness of this approach for some users. Perhaps her most frequent refrain is that not all addicts are alike, and that what works for one addict does not necessarily work for all addicts. And yet in the US, the main assistance offered to addicts is in the form of a 12-step program which can be very very very rigid in its rhetoric and execution.

This is a message that most Americans -- both drug users and non-drug users -- need to be exposed to. In laying out the information, Svalavitz is on the side of the angels. The message simply needs to be heard more. All the same, the book wasn't quite what I expected based on its advanced publicity, which made it seem more geared specifically toward drug users and those who care about them, offering them new approaches to dealing with addiction. This is mostly the function of the last two chapters. The bulk of the book offers a more broad policy survey of addiction treatment in America, noting its roots in racism, and the war on drugs' general lack of results. My guess is that individual buyers motivated to pick up Svalavitz's book already know a lot of this. The ideal reader of this book struck me as a student taking an addiction psychology or criminal justice course. I hope it gets picked up in the college classroom by folks who haven't thought much about addiction one way or another.

I have two gripes with the book: 1) Before she ever addresses her own largely positive experience in 12-step programs, she repeats over and over again, in almost every chapter, how horrible 12-step programs are, for the way they shame their participants. But in the end, Svalavitz's real gripe is with a particular application of the 12-step model in a particular group that owns a lot of rehab centers. She confesses that the 12-step model provided her with community and a sense of purpose when she was in recovery. The practice in AA of listing your faults and making amends can be quite shaming. Or it can be quite conciliatory -- at its best, I think it was conceived of as a way for those who had terrible shame or anxiety to speak out loud their worst fears about themselves to a group of people who experience some of the same darkness -- and to know that the whole group, instead of recoiling in horror, will simply nod and say yes, we identify and you are one of us. I don't doubt that 12-step programs are applied in all kinds of abusive ways in some rehab centers. I also think that the 12 steps provide a lot of people with a sense of autonomy and community they need to change their lives. I found the anti-12 step rhetoric to be overblown for the actual amount of concrete problems she reported in her chapter focusing on it. The refrain she repeats over and over about 12-step programs is that there's no good empirical evidence that shows that it works. That's worth discussing. It's worthwhile to organize for more funding, more research, more responsible addiction treatment. But still, IT'S ALL WE'VE GOT RIGHT NOW. Her anti-12-step rhetoric often felt like someone coming along and tearing down the tent because it was a tent, and saying "Well, we should have a sky-scraper instead." Yes, we should. But until that day, we need some kind of shelter.

2) I also think her own experience -- as a teen who abused drugs while living away from her home and before anyone was relying on her in an adult capacity -- leads her to underestimate the severe harm drug abuse does to the families of drug users. She criticizes psychological discourse that urges family members to separate themselves from drug users, and she also criticizes the way the concept of "rock bottom" (which is just a metaphor -- I've never understood it as anything but a metaphor) is used in addiction speak to discourage those closest to the addict from trying to interfere. What is missing in her book is the limitless anguish, the limitless expense, the genuine danger to children and the elderly that drug users bring to their family and loved ones. The concept of harm reduction itself emphasizes that the motivation of the drug user, not the support of the family members is the crucial factor in allowing the drug user to gain control over their situation. While I take Svalavitz's point very seriously that not all addictions are the same, for very many drug users there is almost nothing that family can do, and it does become their responsibility to try not to join the drug user on the downward spiral. This is a dynamic that the book does not have on its horizons at all.
]]> Autobiography 18625064
Achieving eleven Top 10 albums (plus nine with the Smiths), his songs have been recorded by David Bowie, Nancy Sinatra, Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Hynde, Thelma Houston, My Chemical Romance and Christy Moore, amongst others.

An animal protectionist, in 2006 Morrissey was voted the second greatest living British icon by viewers of the BBC, losing out to Sir David Attenborough. In 2007 Morrissey was voted the greatest northern male, past or present, in a nationwide newspaper poll. In 2012, Morrissey was awarded the Keys to the City of Tel-Aviv.

It has been said 'Most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status that Morrissey has reached in his lifetime.'

Autobiography covers Morrissey's life from his birth until the present day.]]> 457 Morrissey Sara 5
It all makes sense. If you were ever a Morrissey fan, it was because you desperately needed Morrissey’s complete refusal to qualify the experience of suffering, or give in to a viewpoint that would mitigate its full force by providing explanations, hesitations, apologies. Do you really want the person who lets you wail at the top of your lungs that you go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die to suddenly reveal to you that, ten years on, he feels like, well, suffering through that made him a stronger and wiser person, and really, it wasn’t nearly so bad because after all, Manchester was a really happening town? Do you want the man who let you belt out that you smoke because you’re hoping for an early death to now tell you that he’s given up nicotine, and his health is much better? Of course not. Morrissey wouldn’t do that to you, and he doesn’t in this autobiography that dishes up a 1970s working-class Irish immigrant Manchester childhood in a giant bowl of collapsing buildings, sadistic teachers, psychotic serial murderers, faithfully grim grandmothers briefly relieved by 4 minutes of a Buffy Sainte-Marie performance on Top of the Pops, a New York Dolls album cover, half an hour spent in a feminist bookshop. The story of Morrissey’s life is a story of successive sensations, not an explanation of how all those sensations came to be assembled in that particular place at that particular time. And so the first 100 pages is as well written as any Smiths song or any memoir written in English in the twentieth century. Even if you haven’t got the faintest idea who Morrissey is or what country Manchester might be in, you should probably read it.

But a long, long time ago Morrissey told us that sixteen, clumsy and shy was the story of his life, and he wasn’t lying. His getting famous, however, makes it harder to pay attention to the basic plotline. Now Morrissey’s torturous sensations and unattainable longings emerge on the chronological map we share with him of the date the first Smiths album came out, what tour they were on when they broke up, who helped him write Suedehead and every interview NME ever published. Inserted on to our own grid of music history, cause and effect, before and after, Morrissey's ironclad fixation on his own experience as the nadir of all possible suffering comes across as at best arbitrary (in a world populated with humans, why was *his* the worst of all possible suffering?) and at worst, well, stupidly self-absorbed. Managers didn’t work hard enough. Lawyers never adequately explained it to him. So many people insisted on eating meat in front of him. There was a concert and another concert and another concert in which the fans loved HIM the best, they clamored for him as if they did not, the next week, attend another concert given by another star and clamor there as well. And then there was Mike Joyce's lawsuit. High court judges collaborate in muddy black pools of legal precision insufferably overdone, forcing each peg into an unsuitable hole and making the cold-blooded destruction of one unfortunate party seem fair, placing him in unimaginable peril, as it effectively served as an invitation to others to take action against him, all culminating in a 14-page close-reading of the trial’s ruling which Morrissey refutes point by minute point and the truth sleeps and the moon above goes on and on saying nothing. I’m stealing his words here. First of all because I couldn’t write it better, and secondly because I find myself so benumbed and glazed over by his intricate catalog of the law-suit's details that I haven’t got the slightest idea what it was all about anyway.

So what did you want? A Morrissey, who like you, looks back and winces at some of his extremes, feels grateful for the help that he’s had, understands that those who failed him were battling their own demons, and knows not everyone could be expected to completely understand? In 500 pages of fabulously clever prose (no matter how drearily self-centered or ploddingly repetitive the subject-matter, each sentence really does sparkle with miserable strangeness) Morrissey can be counted as generously owning up to only one mistake: when he said the Rolling Stones were absolute crap. He takes that back. If you want someone to offer you perspective on their life, why’d you buy Morrissey’s autobiography? He’ll relentlessly alienate you with his obsessive listing of the top chart position of every single he’s ever released, followed by an explanation of who in his life stupidly failed him by preventing the single from reaching number one. He’ll infuriate you with his inability to stay on the same topic or in the same city all the way through a paragraph, and you’ll feel ill at ease and self-conscious as you wonder if Michael Stipe ever said those things to him, or is this one of those encounters like the time Morrissey asked Charles if he ever craved to appear on the front of the Daily Mail dressed in his mother’s bridal veil? But when you meet him on the other side of 9/11 you’ll be relieved he never toned down a wrath that is brilliantly spent on an exploitative American foreign policy, habitual xenophobia and ridiculous TSA policies. Do these things really deserve our moderation and mature understanding?

The end arrives in a tableau of predictable narcissism: a series of concerts performed before adoring fans in Mexican manufacturing centers, crowds with hair greased up in a pompadour, chests emblazoned with the tattoo “Still Ill.��. Sure Morrissey wants to drive the point home that they still love him, they love him, he is a superstar, but perhaps without meaning it he also establishes that a life of episodic, undirected, uncontextualized misery, rage, and resentment is at home wherever the working classes are sliding further away from any tools with which to order their experiences and moderate their fury. Go with God, Moz. Yours may be the best use of an epically flawed personality the world has ever witnessed.
]]> 3.62 2013 Autobiography

author: Morrissey
name: Sara
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/10/01
date added: 2019/05/02
shelves:
review:
I recently heard a literary critic assert that an age of gaping income inequality and unpredictable markets has no place for the carefully constructed multi-plot novel; it is an age instead for the picaresque. Morrissey seems to have anticipated this sentiment by a few years, or perhaps a few decades, crafting an autobiography that meanders as delightfully as any sentimental journey Laurence Sterne ever took, producing just as many sensations in just as many bewildering contexts.

It all makes sense. If you were ever a Morrissey fan, it was because you desperately needed Morrissey’s complete refusal to qualify the experience of suffering, or give in to a viewpoint that would mitigate its full force by providing explanations, hesitations, apologies. Do you really want the person who lets you wail at the top of your lungs that you go and you stand on your own and you leave on your own and you go home and you cry and you want to die to suddenly reveal to you that, ten years on, he feels like, well, suffering through that made him a stronger and wiser person, and really, it wasn’t nearly so bad because after all, Manchester was a really happening town? Do you want the man who let you belt out that you smoke because you’re hoping for an early death to now tell you that he’s given up nicotine, and his health is much better? Of course not. Morrissey wouldn’t do that to you, and he doesn’t in this autobiography that dishes up a 1970s working-class Irish immigrant Manchester childhood in a giant bowl of collapsing buildings, sadistic teachers, psychotic serial murderers, faithfully grim grandmothers briefly relieved by 4 minutes of a Buffy Sainte-Marie performance on Top of the Pops, a New York Dolls album cover, half an hour spent in a feminist bookshop. The story of Morrissey’s life is a story of successive sensations, not an explanation of how all those sensations came to be assembled in that particular place at that particular time. And so the first 100 pages is as well written as any Smiths song or any memoir written in English in the twentieth century. Even if you haven’t got the faintest idea who Morrissey is or what country Manchester might be in, you should probably read it.

But a long, long time ago Morrissey told us that sixteen, clumsy and shy was the story of his life, and he wasn’t lying. His getting famous, however, makes it harder to pay attention to the basic plotline. Now Morrissey’s torturous sensations and unattainable longings emerge on the chronological map we share with him of the date the first Smiths album came out, what tour they were on when they broke up, who helped him write Suedehead and every interview NME ever published. Inserted on to our own grid of music history, cause and effect, before and after, Morrissey's ironclad fixation on his own experience as the nadir of all possible suffering comes across as at best arbitrary (in a world populated with humans, why was *his* the worst of all possible suffering?) and at worst, well, stupidly self-absorbed. Managers didn’t work hard enough. Lawyers never adequately explained it to him. So many people insisted on eating meat in front of him. There was a concert and another concert and another concert in which the fans loved HIM the best, they clamored for him as if they did not, the next week, attend another concert given by another star and clamor there as well. And then there was Mike Joyce's lawsuit. High court judges collaborate in muddy black pools of legal precision insufferably overdone, forcing each peg into an unsuitable hole and making the cold-blooded destruction of one unfortunate party seem fair, placing him in unimaginable peril, as it effectively served as an invitation to others to take action against him, all culminating in a 14-page close-reading of the trial’s ruling which Morrissey refutes point by minute point and the truth sleeps and the moon above goes on and on saying nothing. I’m stealing his words here. First of all because I couldn’t write it better, and secondly because I find myself so benumbed and glazed over by his intricate catalog of the law-suit's details that I haven’t got the slightest idea what it was all about anyway.

So what did you want? A Morrissey, who like you, looks back and winces at some of his extremes, feels grateful for the help that he’s had, understands that those who failed him were battling their own demons, and knows not everyone could be expected to completely understand? In 500 pages of fabulously clever prose (no matter how drearily self-centered or ploddingly repetitive the subject-matter, each sentence really does sparkle with miserable strangeness) Morrissey can be counted as generously owning up to only one mistake: when he said the Rolling Stones were absolute crap. He takes that back. If you want someone to offer you perspective on their life, why’d you buy Morrissey’s autobiography? He’ll relentlessly alienate you with his obsessive listing of the top chart position of every single he’s ever released, followed by an explanation of who in his life stupidly failed him by preventing the single from reaching number one. He’ll infuriate you with his inability to stay on the same topic or in the same city all the way through a paragraph, and you’ll feel ill at ease and self-conscious as you wonder if Michael Stipe ever said those things to him, or is this one of those encounters like the time Morrissey asked Charles if he ever craved to appear on the front of the Daily Mail dressed in his mother’s bridal veil? But when you meet him on the other side of 9/11 you’ll be relieved he never toned down a wrath that is brilliantly spent on an exploitative American foreign policy, habitual xenophobia and ridiculous TSA policies. Do these things really deserve our moderation and mature understanding?

The end arrives in a tableau of predictable narcissism: a series of concerts performed before adoring fans in Mexican manufacturing centers, crowds with hair greased up in a pompadour, chests emblazoned with the tattoo “Still Ill.��. Sure Morrissey wants to drive the point home that they still love him, they love him, he is a superstar, but perhaps without meaning it he also establishes that a life of episodic, undirected, uncontextualized misery, rage, and resentment is at home wherever the working classes are sliding further away from any tools with which to order their experiences and moderate their fury. Go with God, Moz. Yours may be the best use of an epically flawed personality the world has ever witnessed.

]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the Center of the Earth]]> 32829
The expedition descends into an extinct volcano toward a sunless sea, where they encounter a subterranean world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic marine life �� a living past that holds the secrets to the origins of human existence.]]> 240 Jules Verne 0553213970 Sara 4 3.87 1864 Journey to the Center of the Earth

author: Jules Verne
name: Sara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1864
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/01
date added: 2019/04/01
shelves:
review:
Sometime in the 1880s the English speaking world began experiencing ab backlash against high realism, with all its detailing of psychological minutiae and the minor daily interactions that may or may not lead any given character to marriage. Jules Verne was probably the biggest reason such a backlash could even develop. Why worry about who someone's mother is (no character in this book has a mother to be seen) or whether an engagement will culminate in a respectable wedding when you could instead be immersed in the raw terror of traveling down to the center of the earth to find out for yourself if it really has the molten hot core everyone says it has? Also, giants, mastodons, and super-human Icelandic peasants named Hans.
]]> Reading in the Dark 44309 New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
Winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International Award

Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."

Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.]]> 246 Seamus Deane 0375700234 Sara 5
Crystalline prose. A pleasure to read.]]> 3.76 1996

author: Seamus Deane
name: Sara
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/01
date added: 2019/02/23
shelves:
review:
"Why are you always saying my family is a bunch of informers? I think it's your family that's the informers"

Crystalline prose. A pleasure to read.
]]> <![CDATA[The Ocean at the End of the Lane]]> 15783514
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.]]> 181 Neil Gaiman 0062255657 Sara 3
Many Goodreaders love this book like the Bible of their own life. My hunch is that if you don't already have That Book -- you know, the one that gives you the sort of wisdom that you haven't encountered before and which throws the universe into a reassuring sort of alignment even as it forces you to confront tragedy -- this book will serve nicely. But I read The Little Prince almost 35 years ago, so this feels like a late arrival repeating what I've already heard.

Lots of ribbons, shreds of fabric, ribbons of material in this book. One might in fact think of it as entirely composed of strips of cloth and flesh.]]> 4.00 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane

author: Neil Gaiman
name: Sara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2019/01/01
date added: 2019/01/24
shelves:
review:
Being seven is terrifying and Neil Gaiman has lots of words to remind you of that quite precisely.

Many Goodreaders love this book like the Bible of their own life. My hunch is that if you don't already have That Book -- you know, the one that gives you the sort of wisdom that you haven't encountered before and which throws the universe into a reassuring sort of alignment even as it forces you to confront tragedy -- this book will serve nicely. But I read The Little Prince almost 35 years ago, so this feels like a late arrival repeating what I've already heard.

Lots of ribbons, shreds of fabric, ribbons of material in this book. One might in fact think of it as entirely composed of strips of cloth and flesh.
]]> Milkman 36047860
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.]]> 352 Anna Burns 0571338763 Sara 5
1) Nobody gets called by their proper first names in this book and only one character (as it turns out) is ever called by their last name.
2) The paragraphs can go on for pages.

Here’s what’s not experimental about this novel:

1) Its stunningly good, never predictable analysis of the power dynamics of powerful men who feel entitled to the bodies of the women around them.
2) Its very sharp observations about the damage done by one partisan sector to itself once a society has become entirely bifurcated by passionate partisanship.
3) Its refusal to ever consider “One day I will get out of here and transcend these parochial politics�� as a possible answer to any of the problems it encounters.
4) Its very fresh, highly readable voice.

Also, it takes bold brass knockers to write an entire book around a character whose besetting sin is her deep immersion in books. Talk about alienating your core audience! But this book works anyway, and is one of the best I’ve read this decade. Go read it. But not while you are walking around your hometown.
]]> 3.51 2018 Milkman

author: Anna Burns
name: Sara
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/01
date added: 2019/01/01
shelves:
review:
Reviews keep calling this an “experimental�� novel, but here’s the extent of its experimental nature:

1) Nobody gets called by their proper first names in this book and only one character (as it turns out) is ever called by their last name.
2) The paragraphs can go on for pages.

Here’s what’s not experimental about this novel:

1) Its stunningly good, never predictable analysis of the power dynamics of powerful men who feel entitled to the bodies of the women around them.
2) Its very sharp observations about the damage done by one partisan sector to itself once a society has become entirely bifurcated by passionate partisanship.
3) Its refusal to ever consider “One day I will get out of here and transcend these parochial politics�� as a possible answer to any of the problems it encounters.
4) Its very fresh, highly readable voice.

Also, it takes bold brass knockers to write an entire book around a character whose besetting sin is her deep immersion in books. Talk about alienating your core audience! But this book works anyway, and is one of the best I’ve read this decade. Go read it. But not while you are walking around your hometown.

]]> Turtles All the Way Down 35504431
Aza Holmes never intended to pursue the disappearance of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Pickett’s son Davis.

Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.]]> 290 John Green 0525555366 Sara 3
But John Green knows something about how young adults use the fiction that grips them the most, and that tends to be a lot less about plot than about grasping small bits of wisdom that can be imported into their own lives to illuminate them with some sort of larger meaningfulness. Slivers of Democritus, JD Salinger, and Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain all swim through this book, harvested by teen characters as they sort out their own lives. Maybe it will point a few readers in the direction of another author -- maybe it's just the bite-size piece they need, and nothing more.

So, if that's what you need, give it a read. If raw wish fulfillment about someone being in love with you for no discernible reason is what you need, give it a read. Also, if you like tuataras. Your call. ]]> 3.88 2017 Turtles All the Way Down

author: John Green
name: Sara
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/12/31
shelves:
review:
Ok, so the sort of wish-fulfillment tempered by self-aware dialogue that John Green produces so skillfully is available in spades in this book, which is both the attraction and the problem. The unusually articulate protagonist, hovered over by care-worn parental figures and tended to by exuberantly zany friends, spends so much time having encounters that highlight how well all their personalities play against one another that it's difficult to pay attention to the plot, which is ok, since it isn't really that strong, and doesn't exactly make that much sense.

But John Green knows something about how young adults use the fiction that grips them the most, and that tends to be a lot less about plot than about grasping small bits of wisdom that can be imported into their own lives to illuminate them with some sort of larger meaningfulness. Slivers of Democritus, JD Salinger, and Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain all swim through this book, harvested by teen characters as they sort out their own lives. Maybe it will point a few readers in the direction of another author -- maybe it's just the bite-size piece they need, and nothing more.

So, if that's what you need, give it a read. If raw wish fulfillment about someone being in love with you for no discernible reason is what you need, give it a read. Also, if you like tuataras. Your call.
]]> The City & the City 4703581
Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.]]> 312 China Miéville 0345497511 Sara 3
So. It's not the reading experience I was shooting for, which makes this perhaps more a review of what I wanted than a review of how good this book is. (Also, my reading of this book was disrupted by several weeks, more than once, so it might also be a review of HOW I read the book, which is to say, not propelled forward by suspense in one reading). But -- thinking about it in retrospect I can observer that the ultimate mystery (is there a THIRD hidden city in the city and the city?) says as much about the form of the book as the content. Is there one deeper message to be excavated from Mieville's brilliant scheme of two cities existing in the same space, a set-up that seems to scream for an allegorical interpretation? Mieville's refusal to satisfy any of his conspiracy theorist characters within the plot says something about his lack of interest in offering up one clear solid right answer to his readers about the meaning of the book. The pleasure and meaning comes from the repeated toggling back and forth between plot and idea, until one lives in a space made up of both, that still doesn't quite let you see full picture.]]> 3.90 2009 The City & the City

author: China Miéville
name: Sara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2018/08/12
date added: 2018/08/13
shelves:
review:
I have so little time to read for pleasure these days, and this was only my second "strictly for pleasure" book of the whole summer, and I wish I'd chosen another one, because it simply wasn't what I wanted. I went in knowing that it was a noir genre, and knowing that the two cities existed in the same space, and the problem is that I wanted it to be more Victorian than modernist -- I wanted more lavish details, more scenery, more character development. Instead I got spare suggestive gestures.

So. It's not the reading experience I was shooting for, which makes this perhaps more a review of what I wanted than a review of how good this book is. (Also, my reading of this book was disrupted by several weeks, more than once, so it might also be a review of HOW I read the book, which is to say, not propelled forward by suspense in one reading). But -- thinking about it in retrospect I can observer that the ultimate mystery (is there a THIRD hidden city in the city and the city?) says as much about the form of the book as the content. Is there one deeper message to be excavated from Mieville's brilliant scheme of two cities existing in the same space, a set-up that seems to scream for an allegorical interpretation? Mieville's refusal to satisfy any of his conspiracy theorist characters within the plot says something about his lack of interest in offering up one clear solid right answer to his readers about the meaning of the book. The pleasure and meaning comes from the repeated toggling back and forth between plot and idea, until one lives in a space made up of both, that still doesn't quite let you see full picture.
]]> <![CDATA[Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood]]> 25614847 ��
Look for Under Pressure, the companion guide to coping with stress and anxiety among girls, available now.

In this sane, highly engaging, and informed guide for parents of daughters, Dr. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct—and absolutely normal—developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Providing realistic scenarios and welcome advice on how to engage daughters in smart, constructive ways, Untangled gives parents a broad framework for understanding their daughters while addressing their most common questions, including

�� My thirteen-year-old rolls her eyes when I try to talk to her, and only does it more when I get angry with her about it. How should I respond?
�� Do I tell my teen daughter that I’m checking her phone?
�� My daughter suffers from test anxiety. What can I do to help her?
�� Where’s the line between healthy eating and having an eating disorder?
�� My teenage daughter wants to know why I’m against pot when it’s legal in some states. What should I say?
�� My daughter’s friend is cutting herself. Do I call the girl’s mother to let her know?

Perhaps most important, Untangled helps mothers and fathers understand, connect, and grow with their daughters. When parents know what makes their daughter tick, they can embrace and enjoy the challenge of raising a healthy, happy young woman.

BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD WINNER

“Finally, there’s some good news for puzzled parents of adolescent girls, and psychologist Lisa Damour is the bearer of that happy news. [ Untangled ] is the most down-to-earth, readable parenting book I’ve come across in a long time.�� The Washington Post

“Anna Freud wrote in 1958, ‘There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.�� In the intervening decades, the transition doesn’t appear to have gotten any easier which makes Untangled such a welcome new resource.�� The Boston Globe]]> 352 Lisa Damour 0553393057 Sara 3
My one great sadness about the book though is simply how very upper-class-bound its entire vision of girlhood is. If this is the 2010s version of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, it's one that starkly reveals how expensive acceptable girlhood has gotten. In contrast to Pipher's client examples of factory-worker dads and hippie moms grappling with two mortgages, Damour's young women are all over-scheduled and college bound. None of them have jobs, need to babysit siblings or save for college. Certainly Damour doesn't seem aware that large portions of the population don't go to college at all; their life trajectory merits no mention in the book. And the structuring conceit that holds her book together -- conversations with a mom-client, Maya, who retains her as a therapist simply to "have a place to talk frankly about [her daughter's] path through adolescence," -- suggests that in order to navigate female adolescence, one has to have extraordinarily good mental health coverage. So on the one hand I am grateful for the guidance that this book provides, but on the other hand I am in mourning thinking about how it presents upper-middle-class life as the norm, and has nothing to say about the commonalities that bind together the lives of young women from all socio-economic backgrounds. Maybe those don't actually exist in this country any more, but if they don't, then that should be a part of the discussion about how to emerge into healthy adulthood. Surely, at the very least, our daughters should be raised to be aware of class privilege and of how the uneven distribution of resources impacts everyone.b]]> 4.52 2016 Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

author: Lisa Damour
name: Sara
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2017/12/01
date added: 2018/07/25
shelves:
review:
This book, randomly suggested to me by a complete stranger at an open house for a high school that no child in my house will attend, actually overflows with great advice. I've pulled it off the shelf seven months after reading it to type up a quick review, and find myself reading over entire sections. Three things that really jump out at me now are 1) Damour's advice on how to help adolescent girls deal with the difficult adults in their lives, which means NOT TRYING TO FIGHT THE BATTLES FOR THEM. It was just reassuring to hear from a mental health professional that that's not a great strategy for encouraging independence, because a lot of times I have no idea what's even expected of a parental figure in 2017. 2) Acknowledging your own crazy. Damour has a great section on how to be a parent while owning your own shortcomings that was especially nicely done. Everyone's allowed to be a little crazy, as long as you acknowledge where your crazy spots are. 3) Finally, Damour's discussion of sex and romance will be super-useful for anyone whose own parents only spoke about sex in order to say "Just don't do it." Her breakdown of the costs and benefits of sex for teenagers was super-obvious, but if your own acculturation into how to talk about sex with teens was deeply weird, you might just need the super-obvious spelled out for you.

My one great sadness about the book though is simply how very upper-class-bound its entire vision of girlhood is. If this is the 2010s version of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, it's one that starkly reveals how expensive acceptable girlhood has gotten. In contrast to Pipher's client examples of factory-worker dads and hippie moms grappling with two mortgages, Damour's young women are all over-scheduled and college bound. None of them have jobs, need to babysit siblings or save for college. Certainly Damour doesn't seem aware that large portions of the population don't go to college at all; their life trajectory merits no mention in the book. And the structuring conceit that holds her book together -- conversations with a mom-client, Maya, who retains her as a therapist simply to "have a place to talk frankly about [her daughter's] path through adolescence," -- suggests that in order to navigate female adolescence, one has to have extraordinarily good mental health coverage. So on the one hand I am grateful for the guidance that this book provides, but on the other hand I am in mourning thinking about how it presents upper-middle-class life as the norm, and has nothing to say about the commonalities that bind together the lives of young women from all socio-economic backgrounds. Maybe those don't actually exist in this country any more, but if they don't, then that should be a part of the discussion about how to emerge into healthy adulthood. Surely, at the very least, our daughters should be raised to be aware of class privilege and of how the uneven distribution of resources impacts everyone.b
]]> In Gratitude 29243745 The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness ��
I got a joke in.
“So �� we'd better get cooking the meth,�� I said to the Poet.

In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given “two or three years�� to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the cliches and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship.

In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next-alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals -- and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers -- Lessing and herself.

From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.]]> 256 Jenny Diski 1632866862 Sara 4
Having been lifted out of a desperate childhood by the largesse of Doris Lessing, Jenny Diski had less than three years after Lessing’s death to explain this all, finally, without fear of rebuttal, a process considerably complicated by treatments for her own terminal cancer. That’s this book in a nutshell, one which could have been vastly improved by just two more years of time for Diski to write and edit and clear things up, but those were two years Diski wasn’t given. (And if she had them, who would have given them? What would be expected of her in return?) What we’re left with is a meditation on having been given a chance �� yes, by Lessing in all her overbearing awfulness, but also, in a theme Diski returns to again and again, by the welfare state now crumbling around her. Ingratitude (“In Gratitude�� get it?) being the theme of the memoir, I don’t feel impolite in saying it’s simply not enough �� the last third is thin and hasty, and you’ll feel frustrated about how poorly this book has been woven out of much shorter pieces written for the LRB. In the place of so much context that we’re looking for we get only unnecessary repetition.

But even in its inadequacy it’s so much more than almost every other memoir I’ve read, with laser-like sentences and Diski’s wry willingness to recognize all the ways other people involved in the memoir might have a reason to remember things differently generously sprinkled into her ultimate refusal to tell the story their way. When people carry on about Joan Didion, who just leaves me cold, I keep thinking they must really mean Jenny Diski.
]]> 3.75 2016 In Gratitude

author: Jenny Diski
name: Sara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2018/07/25
date added: 2018/07/25
shelves:
review:
To be rescued from peril completely and splendidly is only fabulous at the exact moment of rescue. What comes after is feeling limitlessly beholden to your rescuer and inadequate as an object worthy of such heroism. And of course resentment towards your rescuer for putting you in such a position. Especially if your rescuer is a Nobel-prize winning novelist: not just your rescuer but the authoritative narrator of the rescue itself.

Having been lifted out of a desperate childhood by the largesse of Doris Lessing, Jenny Diski had less than three years after Lessing’s death to explain this all, finally, without fear of rebuttal, a process considerably complicated by treatments for her own terminal cancer. That’s this book in a nutshell, one which could have been vastly improved by just two more years of time for Diski to write and edit and clear things up, but those were two years Diski wasn’t given. (And if she had them, who would have given them? What would be expected of her in return?) What we’re left with is a meditation on having been given a chance �� yes, by Lessing in all her overbearing awfulness, but also, in a theme Diski returns to again and again, by the welfare state now crumbling around her. Ingratitude (“In Gratitude�� get it?) being the theme of the memoir, I don’t feel impolite in saying it’s simply not enough �� the last third is thin and hasty, and you’ll feel frustrated about how poorly this book has been woven out of much shorter pieces written for the LRB. In the place of so much context that we’re looking for we get only unnecessary repetition.

But even in its inadequacy it’s so much more than almost every other memoir I’ve read, with laser-like sentences and Diski’s wry willingness to recognize all the ways other people involved in the memoir might have a reason to remember things differently generously sprinkled into her ultimate refusal to tell the story their way. When people carry on about Joan Didion, who just leaves me cold, I keep thinking they must really mean Jenny Diski.

]]> <![CDATA[Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand]]> 31451039
Having exhausted the plausible ideas, Rehmeyer turned to an implausible one. She followed the advice of strangers she'd met on the Internet. They struck her as crazy but they had recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome as severe as hers. Leaving behind everything she owned, she drove into the desert, testing the theory that mold in her home and belongings was making her sick. Stripped of the life she'd known and the future she'd imagined, Rehmeyer felt as though she were going to the desert to die.

But she didn't die. She used her scientific savvy and investigative journalism skills to find a path to wellness and uncovered how shocking scientific neglect and misconduct had forced her, and millions of others, to go it alone. In stunning prose, Rehmeyer describes how her illness transformed her understanding of science, medicine, and spirituality. Through the Shadowlands will bring scientific authority to a misunderstood disease while telling an incredible and compelling story of tenacity, resourcefulness, acceptance, and love.]]> 336 Julie Rehmeyer 1623367654 Sara 5
But if you got diagnosed with something as squiffy as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome�� are you entirely sure you’d know which one of those you were? What if being diagnosed with something so frustratingly vague and treatment-less actually turned you into a person vigilantly inhabiting both possibilities at the same time �� you might be a person afflicted with an illness no one understands, but you might be a person suffering from beliefs not properly grounded in external reality. As a science writer and MIT-trained mathematician, Julie Rehmeyer struggles to approach her life �� even her own devastating exhaustion, inability to concentrate and bouts of paralysis �� as open to scientific investigation and possible debunking. As a sufferer of a disorder that the CDC mistakenly categorized as psychological in the 1980s, and that the UK’s NHS, in an even larger error, deemed curable by cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise, Julie Rehmeyer respects and values institutions that have come by their knowledge through careful observation, well-designed studies, and a clear grasp of how biological systems work. At the same time, the biological system she actually inhabits ISN’T working, and those institutions can't explain why.

This is a tension that makes for an especially gripping memoir. Beyond documenting any one particular disorder (although this book does abound in up-to-date information on the scientific research being done on her particular disorder), this is a book that tracks one woman’s attempt to sort out the extent to which she will adhere to norms of rationality, viewing her life in a detached and scientific way, and to what extent she will listen to her intuition �� so closely aligned for Rehmeyer, as for all of us, with bodily sensation, spirituality, emotion, and attachment to others. Who do you trust when you experience irreducible exhaustion that doctors tell you is simply psychological? If the CDC declares the disorder to be entirely about misguided beliefs (as it once did - this no longer reflects the CDC's position on the illness, which they affirm is organic, not psychological), where do you turn when the therapy to changes those beliefs don’t help? And after such an experience, what beliefs �� in god, in science, in the possibility that another human being could be committed to loving you for life -- could ever be safe again?

The most brilliant thing about this book �� which is also the most brilliant thing about the way Rehmeyer seems to have lived her life �� is the way it situates illness as only one of many occasions humans have for understanding life as a balance between internal prompting and the systematic collection of external evidence. The survivor of both an unusually burden-filled, boundary-free parental dynamic and a childhood steeped in the methods of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, Rehmeyer comes to her illness already equipped with two useful tools: a deep familiarity with the experience of “conventional views being at odds with the most obvious truths about my life�� and the Christian Scientist-inflected belief that “deep attunement was a tool that could find unseen paths around seemingly insurmountable obstacles�� (47).

Don’t mistake this second outlook of Rehmeyer’s as related to the endless commands the chronically ill are give to “stay positive�� or “change your outlook�� in order to feel better. Rehmeyer describes her disposition toward illness as a sense that it might open “a window onto an aspect of the world I would never have experienced or appreciated otherwise, and that was something I could open myself to, embrace, experience deeply, allow to change me�� (48). In a world full of people whose obituaries announce that they “fought bravely�� against cancer or never let MS “get them down,�� Rehmeyer’s account of simply being open to what the disease might make of her is breathtaking. In a world where staying healthy is the closest thing we have to a universal morality, it might border even on scandal.

And in fact, Rehmeyer’s many dilemmas about where following her intuitions about her illness might cross the line into downright scandal offer the most compelling moments of this memoir. I hope it is no spoiler to say that Rehmeyer ultimately pursues a fanatically intensive protocol to eliminate almost any contact with mold, spending weeks in the desert, giving away most of her worldly belongings, buying a new car, and traveling with a gas mask and hazmat suit. She never lets us forget that she does this knowing full well that the protocol is not substantiated by any significant body of research. Even as she’s pursuing mold elimination she feels keenly that the choice somehow robs her of membership in a scientific world, making her a “them�� instead of an “us.�� The other compelling part of the account? That for Rehmeyer, mold avoidance actually works.

But this is far too complex and too true a memoir to be anything like a gospel for mold elimination or an announcement of a major breakthrough in a poorly understood illness. Rehmeyer points out that she’s coached ten people through the same protocol, and none of them improved in the same way she did. She is open about the psychological side effects of pursuing such a protocol, detailing the way psychological anxiety about mold quickly became more debilitating for her than her significantly debilitating physical reactions to mold. Rehmeyer’s memoir scrupulously avoids a teleology that is absolute health, or a one-sized-fits-all cure, or even an explanatory biological mechanism that will explain and legitimize the illness. There is no symptom for Rehmeyer that, produced as it may be by biological disorder, does not go on to acquire meaning because it exists in a world of culture, emotion, and narrative-making. And this is a good thing. Rehmeyer’s ability to hold her illness and its treatments up to the light, acknowledge the many competing possible biological explanations available through science, and then move on to show the difference they made in her spiritual and human development makes the book exemplary at showing rather than telling, how persons with chronic illnesses come to incorporate it into the broad contexts that envelop sick and healthy alike �� career aspirations, a failing marriage, the desire for children. There is no illness that is ever just illness and nothing else.

This book will be welcomed with open arms by a community of people with CFS/ME (as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome�� is more commonly called by those who suffer from it) as a book about them, and it would be churlish of me to regret that. No patient community has been more neglected and under-served by the medical institutions that are supposed to be helping them. Each person living with CFS/ME deserves a thousand times the small shreds of medical legitimacy that will come to their illness through this book’s publicity. But I do hope the book might also be appreciated for its intelligent and honest assessment that medicine alone can never be wholly sufficient for exploring and explaining what we think of as the foreign territory of chronic illness. Rehmeyer explains the title of the book, _Through the Shadowlands_, as signaling her dual citizenship: both in the world of health and science and in the world of sickness and sketchy treatments. It would be a shame for those of us who �� for now -- live only in one of these worlds to refuse her rich invitation to inhabit both.]]> 3.97 2017 Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand

Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand

author: Julie Rehmeyer
name: Sara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2017/05/01
date added: 2017/10/05
shelves:
review:
You most likely live in a world where the shadowy disorder known in the US as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome�� seems unfortunate albeit a bit suspect �� after all, your co-worker’s mom says she has it, and she seems like a nice person, but if she was really sick, wouldn’t the doctors be able to do something for her? So I COULD tell you to read this book to understand Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but really, your life is fine not knowing about someone else’s health problem. Some people probably get sick and doctors can’t figure it out, and some people are probably just hypochondriacs and slightly nuts.

But if you got diagnosed with something as squiffy as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome�� are you entirely sure you’d know which one of those you were? What if being diagnosed with something so frustratingly vague and treatment-less actually turned you into a person vigilantly inhabiting both possibilities at the same time �� you might be a person afflicted with an illness no one understands, but you might be a person suffering from beliefs not properly grounded in external reality. As a science writer and MIT-trained mathematician, Julie Rehmeyer struggles to approach her life �� even her own devastating exhaustion, inability to concentrate and bouts of paralysis �� as open to scientific investigation and possible debunking. As a sufferer of a disorder that the CDC mistakenly categorized as psychological in the 1980s, and that the UK’s NHS, in an even larger error, deemed curable by cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise, Julie Rehmeyer respects and values institutions that have come by their knowledge through careful observation, well-designed studies, and a clear grasp of how biological systems work. At the same time, the biological system she actually inhabits ISN’T working, and those institutions can't explain why.

This is a tension that makes for an especially gripping memoir. Beyond documenting any one particular disorder (although this book does abound in up-to-date information on the scientific research being done on her particular disorder), this is a book that tracks one woman’s attempt to sort out the extent to which she will adhere to norms of rationality, viewing her life in a detached and scientific way, and to what extent she will listen to her intuition �� so closely aligned for Rehmeyer, as for all of us, with bodily sensation, spirituality, emotion, and attachment to others. Who do you trust when you experience irreducible exhaustion that doctors tell you is simply psychological? If the CDC declares the disorder to be entirely about misguided beliefs (as it once did - this no longer reflects the CDC's position on the illness, which they affirm is organic, not psychological), where do you turn when the therapy to changes those beliefs don’t help? And after such an experience, what beliefs �� in god, in science, in the possibility that another human being could be committed to loving you for life -- could ever be safe again?

The most brilliant thing about this book �� which is also the most brilliant thing about the way Rehmeyer seems to have lived her life �� is the way it situates illness as only one of many occasions humans have for understanding life as a balance between internal prompting and the systematic collection of external evidence. The survivor of both an unusually burden-filled, boundary-free parental dynamic and a childhood steeped in the methods of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, Rehmeyer comes to her illness already equipped with two useful tools: a deep familiarity with the experience of “conventional views being at odds with the most obvious truths about my life�� and the Christian Scientist-inflected belief that “deep attunement was a tool that could find unseen paths around seemingly insurmountable obstacles�� (47).

Don’t mistake this second outlook of Rehmeyer’s as related to the endless commands the chronically ill are give to “stay positive�� or “change your outlook�� in order to feel better. Rehmeyer describes her disposition toward illness as a sense that it might open “a window onto an aspect of the world I would never have experienced or appreciated otherwise, and that was something I could open myself to, embrace, experience deeply, allow to change me�� (48). In a world full of people whose obituaries announce that they “fought bravely�� against cancer or never let MS “get them down,�� Rehmeyer’s account of simply being open to what the disease might make of her is breathtaking. In a world where staying healthy is the closest thing we have to a universal morality, it might border even on scandal.

And in fact, Rehmeyer’s many dilemmas about where following her intuitions about her illness might cross the line into downright scandal offer the most compelling moments of this memoir. I hope it is no spoiler to say that Rehmeyer ultimately pursues a fanatically intensive protocol to eliminate almost any contact with mold, spending weeks in the desert, giving away most of her worldly belongings, buying a new car, and traveling with a gas mask and hazmat suit. She never lets us forget that she does this knowing full well that the protocol is not substantiated by any significant body of research. Even as she’s pursuing mold elimination she feels keenly that the choice somehow robs her of membership in a scientific world, making her a “them�� instead of an “us.�� The other compelling part of the account? That for Rehmeyer, mold avoidance actually works.

But this is far too complex and too true a memoir to be anything like a gospel for mold elimination or an announcement of a major breakthrough in a poorly understood illness. Rehmeyer points out that she’s coached ten people through the same protocol, and none of them improved in the same way she did. She is open about the psychological side effects of pursuing such a protocol, detailing the way psychological anxiety about mold quickly became more debilitating for her than her significantly debilitating physical reactions to mold. Rehmeyer’s memoir scrupulously avoids a teleology that is absolute health, or a one-sized-fits-all cure, or even an explanatory biological mechanism that will explain and legitimize the illness. There is no symptom for Rehmeyer that, produced as it may be by biological disorder, does not go on to acquire meaning because it exists in a world of culture, emotion, and narrative-making. And this is a good thing. Rehmeyer’s ability to hold her illness and its treatments up to the light, acknowledge the many competing possible biological explanations available through science, and then move on to show the difference they made in her spiritual and human development makes the book exemplary at showing rather than telling, how persons with chronic illnesses come to incorporate it into the broad contexts that envelop sick and healthy alike �� career aspirations, a failing marriage, the desire for children. There is no illness that is ever just illness and nothing else.

This book will be welcomed with open arms by a community of people with CFS/ME (as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome�� is more commonly called by those who suffer from it) as a book about them, and it would be churlish of me to regret that. No patient community has been more neglected and under-served by the medical institutions that are supposed to be helping them. Each person living with CFS/ME deserves a thousand times the small shreds of medical legitimacy that will come to their illness through this book’s publicity. But I do hope the book might also be appreciated for its intelligent and honest assessment that medicine alone can never be wholly sufficient for exploring and explaining what we think of as the foreign territory of chronic illness. Rehmeyer explains the title of the book, _Through the Shadowlands_, as signaling her dual citizenship: both in the world of health and science and in the world of sickness and sketchy treatments. It would be a shame for those of us who �� for now -- live only in one of these worlds to refuse her rich invitation to inhabit both.
]]> The Intuitionist 16271 Librarian note: Click here for alternate cover edition
Two warring factions in the Department of Elevator Inspectors in a bustling metropolis vie for dominance: the Empiricists, who go by the book and rigorously check every structural and mechanical detail, and the Intuitionists, whose observational methods involve meditation and instinct.

Lila Mae Watson, the city’s first black female inspector and a devout Intuitionist with the highest accuracy rate in the department, is at the center of the turmoil. An elevator in a new municipal building has crashed on Lila Mae’s watch, fanning the flames of the Empiticist-Intuitionist feud and compelling Lila Mae to go underground to investigate. As she endeavors to clear her name, she becomes entangled in a web of intrigue that leads her to a secret that will change her life forever.

A dead-serious and seriously funny feat of the imagination, The Intuitionist conjures a parallel universe in which latent ironies in matters of morality, politics, and race come to light, and stands as the celebrated debut of an important American writer.]]> 255 Colson Whitehead Sara 5 3.64 1999 The Intuitionist

author: Colson Whitehead
name: Sara
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2017/05/29
date added: 2017/05/29
shelves:
review:
Immaculately plotted noir mystery with crystalline prose styling and razor-sharp observations on the stunning amount of faith on which modernity rests. Also, an intensive distillation of racial politics in America that avoids belabored historical exposition.
]]> <![CDATA[Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision]]> 505949 240 Lawrence S. Cunningham 0802802222 Sara 3
Lawrence Cunningham's very quick survey of what happened next in Merton's life raises the excellent point that Merton's long career of writing on monasticism, protesting war, composing beat poetry and exploring buddhist traditions of contemplation up-ends everything we think about a monolithic and conservative Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. Merton's prolific writing on monastic life in fact endlessly celebrated the need for a counter-cultural viewpoint, and the monastery as the place from which culture could be countered. What use is the monastic life, one anguished Benedictine once wrote him. No use, no use at all, Merton replies. That is precisely the point.

So what happened to Merton after he entered the Abbey of Gethsemane? He wrote a few things the monks thought he ought to. He kept requesting to leave the Abbey for travel or to cultivate his own isolation in a hermitage, and got turned down for about twenty years. He read a huge amount. He wrote lots, didn't revise much, could have benefited from a more intrusive editor, if Cunningham is to be believed. He was flawed and knew it. Joan Baez dropped in for a chat. He wrote huge volumes of letters to everyone in the century. He remained open, forever, to correction and new approaches. In the last few years of his life he spent increasingly more time in solitude in a hermitage on the Abbey grounds. In the last two years of his life, a new superior finally allowed him to travel. It was on his travels that he died, accidentally electrocuted.

]]> 4.03 1999 Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision

author: Lawrence S. Cunningham
name: Sara
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2016/05/01
date added: 2016/11/27
shelves:
review:
When last you left Thomas Merton he had finished surveying all of western culture, passed judgment on what was beautiful and eternal, what fleeting and hollow, rocked his way through Columbia and after a few false starts headed out to join a Cistercian monastery in Kentucky. The end of Seven Storey Mountain is all triumphalism about what is good and true and Catholic, and as the credits roll, the entire cast of pre-Vatican II American catholicism, black-and-white-kitted school nuns, devout young women heads bowed under mantillas, and wise parish priests, begins to move in from the wings.

Lawrence Cunningham's very quick survey of what happened next in Merton's life raises the excellent point that Merton's long career of writing on monasticism, protesting war, composing beat poetry and exploring buddhist traditions of contemplation up-ends everything we think about a monolithic and conservative Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. Merton's prolific writing on monastic life in fact endlessly celebrated the need for a counter-cultural viewpoint, and the monastery as the place from which culture could be countered. What use is the monastic life, one anguished Benedictine once wrote him. No use, no use at all, Merton replies. That is precisely the point.

So what happened to Merton after he entered the Abbey of Gethsemane? He wrote a few things the monks thought he ought to. He kept requesting to leave the Abbey for travel or to cultivate his own isolation in a hermitage, and got turned down for about twenty years. He read a huge amount. He wrote lots, didn't revise much, could have benefited from a more intrusive editor, if Cunningham is to be believed. He was flawed and knew it. Joan Baez dropped in for a chat. He wrote huge volumes of letters to everyone in the century. He remained open, forever, to correction and new approaches. In the last few years of his life he spent increasingly more time in solitude in a hermitage on the Abbey grounds. In the last two years of his life, a new superior finally allowed him to travel. It was on his travels that he died, accidentally electrocuted.

]]> Hamilton: The Revolution 26200563 Hamilton is as revolutionary as its subject, the poor kid from the Caribbean who fought the British, defended the Constitution, and helped to found the United States. Fusing hip-hop, pop, R&B, and the best traditions of theater, this once-in-a-generation show broadens the sound of Broadway, reveals the storytelling power of rap, and claims our country's origins for a diverse new generation.

Hamilton: The Revolution gives readers an unprecedented view of both revolutions, from the only two writers able to provide it. Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, a cultural critic and theater artist who was involved in the project from its earliest stages--"since before this was even a show," according to Miranda--trace its development from an improbable performance at the White House to its landmark opening night on Broadway six years later. In addition, Miranda has written more than 200 funny, revealing footnotes for his award-winning libretto, the full text of which is published here.

Their account features photos by the renowned Frank Ockenfels and veteran Broadway photographer Joan Marcus; exclusive looks at notebooks and emails; interviews with Questlove, Stephen Sondheim, leading political commentators, and more than 40 people involved with the production; and multiple appearances by President Obama himself. The book does more than tell the surprising story of how a Broadway musical became a national phenomenon: It demonstrates that America has always been renewed by the brash upstarts and brilliant outsiders, the men and women who don't throw away their shot.]]> 285 Lin-Manuel Miranda 1455539740 Sara 4
Owning Hamilton: The Revolution is the closest experience I've had to teenage liner-note veneration in the new millennium. And perhaps a live broadway musical is the only event sequestered enough from the live-streaming of modern culture to merit the sort of worship I once lavished on inaccessible pop stars whose albums might only be found after focused hunts across multiple record stores in several contiguous small towns. ]]> 4.45 2015 Hamilton: The Revolution

author: Lin-Manuel Miranda
name: Sara
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2016/09/01
date added: 2016/10/16
shelves:
review:
As an adolescent the experience of opening up a new vinyl record album, looking at all the pictures, studying the song-writing credits, and memorizing the lyrics was the closest thing to a sacred experience I had. And so now, in an age of mp3's, the world is disenchanted, flat, so easily accessed that all access is equal.

Owning Hamilton: The Revolution is the closest experience I've had to teenage liner-note veneration in the new millennium. And perhaps a live broadway musical is the only event sequestered enough from the live-streaming of modern culture to merit the sort of worship I once lavished on inaccessible pop stars whose albums might only be found after focused hunts across multiple record stores in several contiguous small towns.
]]> <![CDATA[The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection and Courage]]> 15894633 Is vulnerability the same as weakness? "In our culture," teaches Dr. Bren? Brown, "we associate vulnerability with emotions we want to avoid such as fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet we too often lose sight of the fact that vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity, authenticity, and love." On The Power of Vulnerability, Dr. Brown offers an invitation and a promise-that when we dare to drop the armor that protects us from feeling vulnerable, we open ourselves to the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives. Here she dispels the cultural myth that vulnerability is weakness and reveals that it is, in truth, our most accurate measure of courage.
"The Power of Vulnerability is a very personal project for me," Bren? explains. "This is the first place that all of my work comes together. This audio course draws from all three of my books-it's the culmination of everything I've learned over the past twelve years. I'm very excited to weave it all into a truly comprehensive form that shows what these findings and insights can mean in our lives."
Guidance and Insights for Wholehearted Living
Over the past twelve years, Dr. Bren? Brown has interviewed hundreds of people as part of an ongoing study of vulnerability. "The research shows that we try to ward off disappointment with a shield of cynicism, disarm shame by numbing ourselves against joy, and circumvent grief by shutting off our willingness to love," explains Dr. Brown. When we become aware of these patterns, she teaches, we begin to become conscious of how much we sacrifice in the name of self-defense-and how much richer our lives become when we open ourselves to vulnerability.
"In my research," Dr. Brown says, "the word I use to describe people who can live from a place of vulnerability is wholehearted." Being wholehearted is a practice-one that we can choose to cultivate through empathy, gratitude, and awareness of our vulnerability armor. Join this engaging and heartfelt teacher on The Power of Vulnerability as she offers profound insights on leaning into the full spectrum of emotions-so we can show up, let ourselves be seen, and truly be all in.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Cultivating shame resilience-the key to developing a sense of worth and belonging
- Vulnerability as the origin point for innovation, adaptability, accountability, and visionary leadership
- Our emotional armory-how we use perfectionism, numbing, and other tactics to avoid feeling vulnerable
- The myths of vulnerability-common misconceptions about weakness, trust, and self-sufficiency
- Discovering your vulnerability armor-recognizing what makes us shut down, and how we can change
- The 10 guideposts of wholehearted living-essential skills for becoming fully engaged in life
- Six hours of stories, warm humor, and transformative insights for living a life of courage, authenticity, and compassion from Dr. Bren? Brown]]> Brené Brown 1604078588 Sara 4 4.64 2013 The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection and Courage

The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection and Courage

author: Brené Brown
name: Sara
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/11/01
date added: 2016/04/26
shelves:
review:
Obviously, this isn't really a book. And it should probably be called something like "How to give up the idea that you're going to be perfect at everything and start experiencing your own life instead, or at least try to move in that direction, even though that process won't turn out perfectly either." Listen to it while cooking, over the course of several Sundays. You will find it engaging and comforting, and sometimes even a little funny.
]]> Allegiant (Divergent, #3) 18710190
But Tris's new reality is even more alarming than the one she left behind. Old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless. Explosive new truths change the hearts of those she loves. And once again, Tris must battle to comprehend to complexities of human nature - and of herself - while facing impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice, and love.

Told from a riveting dual perspective, ALLEGIANT, by #1 New York Times best-selling author Veronica Roth, brings the DIVERGENT series to a powerful conclusion while revealing the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of readers in DIVERGENT and INSURGENT.]]> 531 Veronica Roth 0007524277 Sara 3 3.59 2013 Allegiant (Divergent, #3)

author: Veronica Roth
name: Sara
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2015/07/01
date added: 2015/08/03
shelves:
review:
What if everything you knew about your world was a lie? What if my parents weren't really Amish? Also, what if the traffic around O'Hare Airport finally improved? Wouldn't that verge on the apocalyptic?
]]> Insurgent (Divergent, #2) 11735983
Tris's initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth's much-anticipated second book of the dystopian DIVERGENT series is another intoxicating thrill ride of a story, rich with hallmark twists, heartbreaks, romance, and powerful insights about human nature.]]> 525 Veronica Roth 0007442912 Sara 3 3.97 2012 Insurgent (Divergent, #2)

author: Veronica Roth
name: Sara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/07/01
date added: 2015/08/03
shelves:
review:
What, in the end, is the purpose of a life well-lived? I wish my Amish parents were around to tell me. Also, does anyone remember when it used to be creepy to date your former teachers?
]]> Divergent (Divergent, #1) 13335037
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.]]> 487 Veronica Roth 0062024035 Sara 3 4.13 2011 Divergent (Divergent, #1)

author: Veronica Roth
name: Sara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2015/07/01
date added: 2015/08/03
shelves:
review:
I am tired of being Amish. I think I will zipline off of the Hancock building instead.
]]> The Child Garden 258096 400 Geoff Ryman 0575076909 Sara 4 3.68 1989

author: Geoff Ryman
name: Sara
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Our Lady of Alice Bhatti 11787752
Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse, grade 4. It is only a few weeks since her release from Borstal. She has returned to her childhood home in the French Colony, where her father, recently retired from his position as chief janitor, continues as part-time healer, and full-time headache for the local church. It seems she has inherited some of his gift.With guidance from the working nurse’s manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings succour to the thousands of patients littering the hospital’s corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious ‘Gentleman Squad�� of the Karachi police. They fall in love; Teddy with sudden violence, Alice with cautious optimism.Their love is unexpected, but the consequences are not.

Alice soon finds that her new life is built on foundations as unstable as those of her home. A Catholic snubbed by other Catholics, who are in turn hated by everyone around them, she is also put at risk by her husband, who does two things that no member of the Gentlemen Squad has ever done �� fall in love with a working girl, and allow a potentially dangerous suspect to get away. Can Teddy and Alice ever live in peace? Can two people make a life together without destroying the very thing that united them? It seems unlikely, but then Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse...

Filled with wit, colour and pathos, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a glorious story of second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in unlikely places, set in the febrile streets of downtown Karachi. It is the remarkable new novel from the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.]]> 240 Mohammed Hanif 0224082051 Sara 3 3.43 2010 Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

author: Mohammed Hanif
name: Sara
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2015/04/01
date added: 2015/04/10
shelves:
review:
It's as if Mohammed Hanif mastered Rushdie's and Dickens's prose style so thoroughly that he figured out how to produce its general texture without the dense wordplay or figuration. You get all of the quirk with half of the work!
]]> <![CDATA[Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom]]> 489554 200 William S. McFeely 0393313778 Sara 1
The history of the black community of Sapelo Island, a coastal island off Georgia, is unquestionably riveting. Along with African-Americans who've lived for generations on the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina, they are considered part of the Gullah or Geechee community, whose relative isolation from main-land plantations left them with a distinct pattern of language and a specific set of cultural practices that seem to have been preserved largely intact from their African heritage. The Gullah community in the last thirty years has been increasingly fetishized as authentically African even at the same time that their continued cultural coherence has come under attack. Their long presence on coastal islands (which led to their unique culture) was made possible because not very many white people wanted to live there. Now that Atlanta has risen and air-conditioning has been invented, developers are eager to buy up their land to build ocean-side condos and golf courses, with a voracity that exploits the fact that Gullah titles to land often derive uncertainly from the mixed-up aftermath of the Civil War.

McFeely implies in the first chapter that his aim is to free Sapelo from some of its fetishization as "authentic" by writing a history which shows how they've interacted with the larger sweep of American history. He makes snide remarks about readers whose knowledge of Gullah culture comes solely from the Sunday lifestyle section of the newspaper, and sniffs about how many dead cars litter the island. But his own research confirms rather than overturns the continuities Sapelo’s people have with their very distant African past. A slave brought to the island plantation at the start of the nineteenth century really did practice a northern-African form of Islam, and left a handwritten book of elegant Arabic behind him, in order to pass the religion to his descendants. McFeely explains the process the Spaldings, owners of the nineteenth-century Sapelo plantation, used to incorporate newly arrived, traumatized slaves into small platoons of slaves already on the island, creating bonds that would prevent them from running away. The Spaldings relied on those bonds when they marched every able-bodied slave off the island (leaving behind half a dozen elderly slaves to fend for themselves) as the Union navy approached the island. They didn't want their property taken away. McFeely also shows how the bonds among the slaves pulled them back to the island, and back toward one another, as the antebellum south collapsed.

The most harrowing part of the book details the obscene series of promises made by the Union to freed slaves after the civil war, and then broken. General Sherman, concerned that large crowds of freed slaves would continue to follow the Union army wherever it went, made a declaration that every freedman could lay claim to a tract of land on which to support himself. In fact, he declared that the coastal islands of Georgia, and twenty miles inland from the coast, were open only to freed slaves, and that any non-military white man found in the territory would be punished for trespassing. Freed slaves came back to Sapelo, and with the guidance of black self-help groups from the North, began to cultivate their own land. Congress, however, had other ideas. Within 12 months, that land (neatly plowed and planted already) was back in the hands of the former plantation owners. The Federal Bureau that had been designed by Union generals to help re-settle freed slaves had been gutted, and would be entirely disbanded within a dozen years.

That's pretty much where McFeely's narrative leaves off. He tells us that Sapelo Island never fell into the pattern of sharecropping that impoverished and oppressed the bulk of the African-American population in the American south, but he doesn't mention if that makes them exceptional, or if all Gullah communities were similarly resistant. Given how central land rights are to the current Gullah struggles, this seems like a massive omission. McFeely mentions the effects of two nineteenth-century hurricanes, but barely covers twentieth-century historical developments of any stripe ,only noting very briefly that the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune spent much of the 1950s and 60s buying out land from under Sapelo inhabitants, so that he could turn the island into his own private game preserve.

What he gives us instead �� at great length �� are meandering and entirely clichéd reflections as he visits the island, meets its inhabitants, and attends its Baptist church’s 125th anniversary, and wanders its landscape. “Why am I not a stranger here? My skin color is too light; by island standards I’m rich, have a fancy education, and sound funny when I talk. Of course I’m an outsider . . . and yet I feel almost at home�� (156).

Look, dude. It’s called white guilt. Lots of white people have it and lots of white people talk about it. So much so that sometimes when white people talk about their white guilt, they forget to give any air-time to actual black experience. And that’s pretty much what’s happened here. I bought the book to find out more about, you know, _Sapelo’s People_ and instead I get baggy paragraphs where McFeely compares himself to Jimmy Carter (a previous white visitor to Sapelo’s First African Baptist Church); walks out on the sermon there because it seems interminable; memorializes a young man from the island who was shot and killed with the completely odd comment, “I had thought anyone with a body like that deserved the world�� (167). And he never lets you forget exactly how awkward he feels doing all of it, although he comes to the conclusion (multiple times, in multiple paragraphs) that in the end, some bridge has been crossed, some understanding has been reached between Sapelo’s people and himself. Who cares?
]]> 3.52 1994 Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom

Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom

author: William S. McFeely
name: Sara
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1994
rating: 1
read at: 2015/03/01
date added: 2015/03/29
shelves:
review:
Much evidence outside this book suggests that the author is an accomplished historian, a sensitive humanist, and absolutely on the right side of history when it comes to race relations in America. However, this book is terrible.

The history of the black community of Sapelo Island, a coastal island off Georgia, is unquestionably riveting. Along with African-Americans who've lived for generations on the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina, they are considered part of the Gullah or Geechee community, whose relative isolation from main-land plantations left them with a distinct pattern of language and a specific set of cultural practices that seem to have been preserved largely intact from their African heritage. The Gullah community in the last thirty years has been increasingly fetishized as authentically African even at the same time that their continued cultural coherence has come under attack. Their long presence on coastal islands (which led to their unique culture) was made possible because not very many white people wanted to live there. Now that Atlanta has risen and air-conditioning has been invented, developers are eager to buy up their land to build ocean-side condos and golf courses, with a voracity that exploits the fact that Gullah titles to land often derive uncertainly from the mixed-up aftermath of the Civil War.

McFeely implies in the first chapter that his aim is to free Sapelo from some of its fetishization as "authentic" by writing a history which shows how they've interacted with the larger sweep of American history. He makes snide remarks about readers whose knowledge of Gullah culture comes solely from the Sunday lifestyle section of the newspaper, and sniffs about how many dead cars litter the island. But his own research confirms rather than overturns the continuities Sapelo’s people have with their very distant African past. A slave brought to the island plantation at the start of the nineteenth century really did practice a northern-African form of Islam, and left a handwritten book of elegant Arabic behind him, in order to pass the religion to his descendants. McFeely explains the process the Spaldings, owners of the nineteenth-century Sapelo plantation, used to incorporate newly arrived, traumatized slaves into small platoons of slaves already on the island, creating bonds that would prevent them from running away. The Spaldings relied on those bonds when they marched every able-bodied slave off the island (leaving behind half a dozen elderly slaves to fend for themselves) as the Union navy approached the island. They didn't want their property taken away. McFeely also shows how the bonds among the slaves pulled them back to the island, and back toward one another, as the antebellum south collapsed.

The most harrowing part of the book details the obscene series of promises made by the Union to freed slaves after the civil war, and then broken. General Sherman, concerned that large crowds of freed slaves would continue to follow the Union army wherever it went, made a declaration that every freedman could lay claim to a tract of land on which to support himself. In fact, he declared that the coastal islands of Georgia, and twenty miles inland from the coast, were open only to freed slaves, and that any non-military white man found in the territory would be punished for trespassing. Freed slaves came back to Sapelo, and with the guidance of black self-help groups from the North, began to cultivate their own land. Congress, however, had other ideas. Within 12 months, that land (neatly plowed and planted already) was back in the hands of the former plantation owners. The Federal Bureau that had been designed by Union generals to help re-settle freed slaves had been gutted, and would be entirely disbanded within a dozen years.

That's pretty much where McFeely's narrative leaves off. He tells us that Sapelo Island never fell into the pattern of sharecropping that impoverished and oppressed the bulk of the African-American population in the American south, but he doesn't mention if that makes them exceptional, or if all Gullah communities were similarly resistant. Given how central land rights are to the current Gullah struggles, this seems like a massive omission. McFeely mentions the effects of two nineteenth-century hurricanes, but barely covers twentieth-century historical developments of any stripe ,only noting very briefly that the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune spent much of the 1950s and 60s buying out land from under Sapelo inhabitants, so that he could turn the island into his own private game preserve.

What he gives us instead �� at great length �� are meandering and entirely clichéd reflections as he visits the island, meets its inhabitants, and attends its Baptist church’s 125th anniversary, and wanders its landscape. “Why am I not a stranger here? My skin color is too light; by island standards I’m rich, have a fancy education, and sound funny when I talk. Of course I’m an outsider . . . and yet I feel almost at home�� (156).

Look, dude. It’s called white guilt. Lots of white people have it and lots of white people talk about it. So much so that sometimes when white people talk about their white guilt, they forget to give any air-time to actual black experience. And that’s pretty much what’s happened here. I bought the book to find out more about, you know, _Sapelo’s People_ and instead I get baggy paragraphs where McFeely compares himself to Jimmy Carter (a previous white visitor to Sapelo’s First African Baptist Church); walks out on the sermon there because it seems interminable; memorializes a young man from the island who was shot and killed with the completely odd comment, “I had thought anyone with a body like that deserved the world�� (167). And he never lets you forget exactly how awkward he feels doing all of it, although he comes to the conclusion (multiple times, in multiple paragraphs) that in the end, some bridge has been crossed, some understanding has been reached between Sapelo’s people and himself. Who cares?

]]> One Hundred Demons 29011 224 Lynda Barry 1570614598 Sara 5
Barry's microscopic collage-like detail make this visually a book that you can read again and again, without even coming close to feeling like you've completely covered all it contains. But it isn't just the visuals that accomplish this. "Magic Lanterns" and "Lost and Found" are both wise meditations on what story-telling and world-making means, how it happens, and why it makes us. Lynda Barry is one of the best modern theorists of fiction out there.]]> 4.17 2002 One Hundred Demons

author: Lynda Barry
name: Sara
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/03/29
shelves:
review:
If the experience of not having children has a literary canon, Lynda Barry's "The Aswang" would be its Hamlet. Barry's short story/ comic weaving together a monster from Filipino folklore and the ugly intergenerational relationship among the narrator's grandmother, mother, and the narrator herself would alone be worth the price of the book even if the rest of the book was unimpressive. It is not. Constructed around the conceit of real-life "demons" -- head lice, terrible boyfriends, the strange smells in other people's houses -- the stories in this book could be read as a series of roughly chronological stories connecting childhood experiences to adult identity, although the narrator clearly isn't exactly the same person in every story. The detailed truth of the stories will squeeze your ribcage in, making it a bit difficult to breathe, as Barry reminds you EXACTLY of the sort of minutiae that children grab on to in order to construct meaning in their lives. She gets everything right.

Barry's microscopic collage-like detail make this visually a book that you can read again and again, without even coming close to feeling like you've completely covered all it contains. But it isn't just the visuals that accomplish this. "Magic Lanterns" and "Lost and Found" are both wise meditations on what story-telling and world-making means, how it happens, and why it makes us. Lynda Barry is one of the best modern theorists of fiction out there.
]]> <![CDATA[The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition]]> 312248

Modern medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones.

It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring.

Before Being Mortal , there was The Illness Narratives . It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.]]> 304 Arthur Kleinman 0465032044 Sara 3
At its best, Kleinman's book offers case studies that recontextualize illness within its broader settings -- the attitudes entire families have toward weakness and pain, the ways that illness crosses currents with careers, children, marriages. It offers one or two hopeful glimmers of how understanding illness in its very wide context can relieve suffering. Certainly it offers chronically ill patients some sense of autonomy -- if you can't control the problems your body is causing, at least you yourself are in charge of determining what those problems mean.

At weaker moments Kleinman's book can seem entirely too utopian. Faced with a chronic-pain patient who is extraordinarily hostile to those trying to treat her, Kleinman fantasizes an entire ethnographic project in which family, caregivers and patient can collaborate on putting together how her pain communicates and what it might be saying. It's an idea that sounds truly fascinating, but leaves me wondering how it could ever be conducted, given the patient's hostility. And also, given the amount of time and energy that chronic illness drains away from those experiencing it, who would do it? Who would have the resources?

At its worst, Kleinman's book seems to forget that symptoms don't simply receive meaning from the pre-existing world -- they create meaning that wasn't there before and stamp it upon the sufferer's experience. Exhaustion, pain, immobility -- they aren't simply empty vehicles upon which we read the meaning of the wider world. Pain, immobility, and exhaustion distort meanings we would otherwise receive from the world. So, yes, it is important to ask that 65 year-old man how his father's fatal heart attack, his wife's expectations, and his career stage all inform his understanding of his pulmonary blockage, but it's also important to remember that simply having pulmonary blockage summons up pessimism, fear, and vulnerability that did not exist before. One's marriage and one's memories of one's father look differently if you are exhausted and no longer know if you will reliably live through the next five years.]]> 4.15 1988 The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition

The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition

author: Arthur Kleinman
name: Sara
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1988
rating: 3
read at: 2015/03/01
date added: 2015/03/27
shelves:
review:
It is doubtlessly a comfort to patients everywhere that Kleinman's book, addressed first and foremost to doctors and future doctors, does such an elegant job explaining how the medicalized procedure of getting a patient to describe their illness does violence to their overall experience of the illness. "*I* have the meaning of your illness, and you do not," it says. "The meanings you attach to it are irrelevant. And in fact, some of the symptoms you keep describing are irrelevant. I decide what matters in this narrative."

At its best, Kleinman's book offers case studies that recontextualize illness within its broader settings -- the attitudes entire families have toward weakness and pain, the ways that illness crosses currents with careers, children, marriages. It offers one or two hopeful glimmers of how understanding illness in its very wide context can relieve suffering. Certainly it offers chronically ill patients some sense of autonomy -- if you can't control the problems your body is causing, at least you yourself are in charge of determining what those problems mean.

At weaker moments Kleinman's book can seem entirely too utopian. Faced with a chronic-pain patient who is extraordinarily hostile to those trying to treat her, Kleinman fantasizes an entire ethnographic project in which family, caregivers and patient can collaborate on putting together how her pain communicates and what it might be saying. It's an idea that sounds truly fascinating, but leaves me wondering how it could ever be conducted, given the patient's hostility. And also, given the amount of time and energy that chronic illness drains away from those experiencing it, who would do it? Who would have the resources?

At its worst, Kleinman's book seems to forget that symptoms don't simply receive meaning from the pre-existing world -- they create meaning that wasn't there before and stamp it upon the sufferer's experience. Exhaustion, pain, immobility -- they aren't simply empty vehicles upon which we read the meaning of the wider world. Pain, immobility, and exhaustion distort meanings we would otherwise receive from the world. So, yes, it is important to ask that 65 year-old man how his father's fatal heart attack, his wife's expectations, and his career stage all inform his understanding of his pulmonary blockage, but it's also important to remember that simply having pulmonary blockage summons up pessimism, fear, and vulnerability that did not exist before. One's marriage and one's memories of one's father look differently if you are exhausted and no longer know if you will reliably live through the next five years.
]]> <![CDATA[George Eliot: The Last Victorian]]> 20562
In this intimate biography, author Hughes provides insight into Eliot's life and work, weighing Eliot's motivations for her controversial actions, and examining the paradoxical Victorian society which she documented to perfection in her novels.]]> 416 Kathryn Hughes 0815411219 Sara 2
On the one hand I want to recognize and applaud the fact that this book makes the life of Eliot accessible to the modern reader. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that it didn't do the *truly* hard but worthwhile task of making her full life -- both emotional and intellectual -- vivid and engaging.]]> 3.97 1998 George Eliot: The Last Victorian

author: Kathryn Hughes
name: Sara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1998
rating: 2
read at: 2015/03/01
date added: 2015/03/27
shelves:
review:
On the one hand, George Eliot was easily one of the most sensational women of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the millenium, and this bio makes her accessible to someone who read and liked _Mill on the Floss_, but doesn't know much about Eliot's contemporary world. On the other hand, George Eliot was a woman who lived intensely through ideas, and beyond explaining Eliot's falling away from orthodox Christianity, and then very obliquely nodding toward the fact that the notion of natural history informed her novels, this bio is strikingly mum on what Eliot read and how it informed her work. Instead, it's a chatty and gossipy, minutely attentive to George Eliot's hurt feelings, the changing dynamics of her friendships, and of course, the ups and downs of those endlessly speculated-upon romances with men. If you know nothing about Eliot's life, it's fascinating. If you know even a bit about Eliot's life, it's rather hackneyed. The book is premised on the idea that your emotional engagements with people are what shape you first and foremost, and the author's interpretations of Eliot's novels proceed accordingly. But Eliot herself didn't believe this -- at least not about the life that she was leading. Part of what made Eliot sensational and unorthodox and what led her to write at all was how intensely the ideas she encountered in books lit up her entire world. You'll get none of that from Kathryn Hughes's version of her life.

On the one hand I want to recognize and applaud the fact that this book makes the life of Eliot accessible to the modern reader. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that it didn't do the *truly* hard but worthwhile task of making her full life -- both emotional and intellectual -- vivid and engaging.
]]> <![CDATA[The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)]]> 1914973 In the Woods, itʼs six months later and Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad with no plans to go back—until an urgent telephone call summons her to a grisly crime scene. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Cassie must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more important, who was this girl?]]> 466 Tana French 0670018864 Sara 3
Ok. So, if you're going to write a mystery novel in which our protagonist-detective goes under-cover to solve a crime and describes the process as offering the same enjoyment as suddenly stepping into your favorite novel and hanging out with your favorite characters, you're going to run into problems. Someone who's enjoying an under-cover detective gig as much as they'd enjoy a realist novel is obviously not going to be whittling down the details into a lean set of The Ones That Matter. And this is part of the tension that French is consciously playing up in her novel -- we've got a detective who loves every detail and can't let any of them go. Unfortunately, since her voice is coextensive with the narratorial voice, that means French is asking us to read a novel that can't let any of the details go, even though we've picked this up expecting a mystery novel. And unfortunately French is a mystery novelist, not a realist novelist. The details her detective lingers over and savors just aren't that interesting. The people she befriends in her undercover operation are not in any way as engaging as the characters in my favorite novel. Or yours. Or anyone's. They talk too much. They don't say interesting things. I know too much about their clothes and their hobbies. The novel feels overwritten on a massive scale, and to be honest, I wound up skipping big chunks of paragraphs without having my understanding of the mystery compromised in any way.

So why three stars instead of one? One is that French is still astonishingly good at developing character psychology. She creates a complex character and the voice winds up being engaging even though the scenario of the novel is wildly implausible, and halfway through you just don't even really care if anything gets solved. The second reason is that I think French's mass market paperbacks are a stunningly good appraisal of Ireland's sudden galloping economic rise thanks to the EU, and fall due to the bank implosions of 2008. Even in a wildly overwritten mystery novel, French I think has her finger on the vibe of Irish globalization. ]]> 4.05 2008 The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2)

author: Tana French
name: Sara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/03/04
shelves:
review:
Here's the problem with writing a "realist mystery." The genre of realism demands superfluous detail, too many pieces of information, in order to mimic "real life" in which every moment offers us an excess of information and interpretive possibilities. We like realist novels because they give us the sense that other endings *could* have happened, even if they did not. A mystery has to offer us a surplus of details, but then give us the satisfaction of whittling them down into a core set of "ones that matter." The pleasures of realism involve ranging over an unruly mass of details, each one which could have mattered given even a slightly different set of circumstances. The pleasures of mystery novels, on the other hand, are of having a filter in which we can simply let the details that don't matter die.

Ok. So, if you're going to write a mystery novel in which our protagonist-detective goes under-cover to solve a crime and describes the process as offering the same enjoyment as suddenly stepping into your favorite novel and hanging out with your favorite characters, you're going to run into problems. Someone who's enjoying an under-cover detective gig as much as they'd enjoy a realist novel is obviously not going to be whittling down the details into a lean set of The Ones That Matter. And this is part of the tension that French is consciously playing up in her novel -- we've got a detective who loves every detail and can't let any of them go. Unfortunately, since her voice is coextensive with the narratorial voice, that means French is asking us to read a novel that can't let any of the details go, even though we've picked this up expecting a mystery novel. And unfortunately French is a mystery novelist, not a realist novelist. The details her detective lingers over and savors just aren't that interesting. The people she befriends in her undercover operation are not in any way as engaging as the characters in my favorite novel. Or yours. Or anyone's. They talk too much. They don't say interesting things. I know too much about their clothes and their hobbies. The novel feels overwritten on a massive scale, and to be honest, I wound up skipping big chunks of paragraphs without having my understanding of the mystery compromised in any way.

So why three stars instead of one? One is that French is still astonishingly good at developing character psychology. She creates a complex character and the voice winds up being engaging even though the scenario of the novel is wildly implausible, and halfway through you just don't even really care if anything gets solved. The second reason is that I think French's mass market paperbacks are a stunningly good appraisal of Ireland's sudden galloping economic rise thanks to the EU, and fall due to the bank implosions of 2008. Even in a wildly overwritten mystery novel, French I think has her finger on the vibe of Irish globalization.
]]> <![CDATA[Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)]]> 7093952
But on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn't show. Frank took it for granted that she'd given him the brush-off--probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again.

Neither did Rosie. Everyone thought she had gone to England on her own and was over there living a shiny new life. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank is going home whether he likes it or not.

Getting sucked in is a lot easier than getting out again. Frank finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind. The cops working the case want him out of the way, in case loyalty to his family and community makes him a liability. Faithful Place wants him out because he’s a detective now, and the Place has never liked cops. Frank just wants to find out what happened to Rosie Daly-and he’s willing to do whatever it takes, to himself or anyone else, to get the job done.]]> 400 Tana French 0670021873 Sara 4
But it might not be coincidence that the novel that relies on the most standard relationships winds up ringing the most false in terms of its attempts to allegorize the sudden wealth and abrupt recession that shapes twenty-first-century Ireland. The central mystery leaves us, along with our narrating detective, choosing between a solution that is about honoring the patriarchal family �� the one into which you’re born and from whom you descend -- and a solution that honors the conjugal family �� the one with whom you choose to move into the future. The choice should bear a great deal of weight in a book that frets and agonizes over how Ireland has forgotten its poverty-stricken past and tragically embraced an empty future of name brand clothes and HD tvs. Instead, in the logic of the plot, the choice becomes a no-brainer. The family that is ultimately honored and defended is the conjugal family, the one that moves into the future, and the patriarchal family is the pathological dead end toward which only Lot’s wife would turn back.

It’s a highly readable mystery, but French has been smarter in the previous books, and I wanted her to make more of the plot’s wider implications than she did.
]]> 3.98 2010 Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #3)

author: Tana French
name: Sara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/03/04
shelves:
review:
Tana French’s first two Dublin Murder Squad mysteries hinged pretty powerfully on the lure of the horizontal, affiliative group of friends �� Rob Ryan’s obsession with reproducing that feeling he had with his eleven-year-old best friends while trying to solve a murder in _In The Woods_, and Cassie Maddox’s sudden seduction into a circle of friends she investigates in _The Likeness_. So _Faithful Place_ feels like it might be on a bit more solid ground, hurtling Frank Mackey back into the family and neighborhood he’s been avoiding since age 19 to investigate the suddenly not-so-cold case of his teenage sweetheart’s murder. The familiarity of the “detective returns to the scene of family trauma�� plot helps pick up the pace in the book, which is leaner and quicker than her first two mysteries. Instead of depending on long lyrical passages to try and paint to the reader the attractions of a group of friends, French can rely on the shorthand of “mother�� “father�� “brother�� and “girlfriend.�� She can leave a lot about the importance of the relationships unsaid.

But it might not be coincidence that the novel that relies on the most standard relationships winds up ringing the most false in terms of its attempts to allegorize the sudden wealth and abrupt recession that shapes twenty-first-century Ireland. The central mystery leaves us, along with our narrating detective, choosing between a solution that is about honoring the patriarchal family �� the one into which you’re born and from whom you descend -- and a solution that honors the conjugal family �� the one with whom you choose to move into the future. The choice should bear a great deal of weight in a book that frets and agonizes over how Ireland has forgotten its poverty-stricken past and tragically embraced an empty future of name brand clothes and HD tvs. Instead, in the logic of the plot, the choice becomes a no-brainer. The family that is ultimately honored and defended is the conjugal family, the one that moves into the future, and the patriarchal family is the pathological dead end toward which only Lot’s wife would turn back.

It’s a highly readable mystery, but French has been smarter in the previous books, and I wanted her to make more of the plot’s wider implications than she did.

]]> Go Tell It on the Mountain 17143 Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.]]> 256 James Baldwin 0141185910 Sara 5
1) The Plagiaristic Attempt. Another goodreads reviewer said "This book feels like an epic and it's only 250 pages long." This strikes me as the most fundamental thing you need to know about this book.

2) The Point of Comparison Attempt: It's as if Hemingway came through and edited Faulkner, and then it turned out neither one of them were white men.

3) The Learn By My Example Attempt: If someone tells you, in 1997, that James Baldwin is a really, really good writer, don't wait until 2015 to actually read a book by James Baldwin.]]> 4.06 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain

author: James Baldwin
name: Sara
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/03/04
shelves:
review:
Three attempts at reviewing James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain:

1) The Plagiaristic Attempt. Another goodreads reviewer said "This book feels like an epic and it's only 250 pages long." This strikes me as the most fundamental thing you need to know about this book.

2) The Point of Comparison Attempt: It's as if Hemingway came through and edited Faulkner, and then it turned out neither one of them were white men.

3) The Learn By My Example Attempt: If someone tells you, in 1997, that James Baldwin is a really, really good writer, don't wait until 2015 to actually read a book by James Baldwin.
]]> <![CDATA[Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4)]]> 10805160 Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin �� half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned �� two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder Squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.

Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .]]> 533 Tana French 1444705105 Sara 5
And I hope I am not creating any spoilers by saying that after you read this book, you will never feel completely at ease with anyone complaining about vermin or wildlife in their house.

If you were thinking you should read a Tana French mystery, it’s fine to start with this one and not read any of her others.
]]> 3.92 2012 Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4)

Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4)

author: Tana French
name: Sara
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/03/01
shelves:
review:
Really does deserve to be canonized as **THE** allegory of the 2008 global financial crisis. It’s that good. Obsessively readable. A fabulously three-dimensional, deeply flawed narrator and engaging but not transparent characters leave us bouncing between two visions of modern economic morality: Are we right to submit to austerity, act cautiously, hew closely to the wisdom of the past, or should we think positively, dream big, and simply choose to act the role we want life to assign us?

And I hope I am not creating any spoilers by saying that after you read this book, you will never feel completely at ease with anyone complaining about vermin or wildlife in their house.

If you were thinking you should read a Tana French mystery, it’s fine to start with this one and not read any of her others.

]]> The Burning of Bridget Cleary 1086565 In 1895, Bridget Cleary, a strong-minded and independent young woman, disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first her family claimed she had been taken by fairies-but then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Bridget's husband, father, aunt, and four cousins were arrested and tried for murder, creating one of the first mass media sensations in Ireland and England as people tried to make sense of what had happened. Meanwhile, Tory newspapers in Ireland and Britain seized on the scandal to discredit the cause of Home Rule, playing on lingering fears of a savage Irish peasantry. Combining historical detective work, acute social analysis, and meticulous original scholarship, Angela Bourke investigates Bridget's murder.]]> 279 Angela Bourke 0141002026 Sara 4
Which means on the one hand that Bourke has chosen a crime that's so completely WEIRD that you'll be riveted, even if you've got no interest in Ireland at all. A husband desperately anxious about his wife's week-long illness, seeks out religious (priests), medical (doctors), and folk ("fairy doctors") help for her. And right at the moment when she seems to have turned a corner and gotten better, he burns her to death, claiming that the fairies have swapped his true wife out with a body double. Did I mention the part where 8 other people in the house look on and may or may not have assisted?

On the other hand, if you're a reader of murder mysteries, this book won't take you where you want to go -- what was their marriage like? Can we trust what their neighbors say? Did the husband get along with his in-laws? Instead, Bourke uses the incident to paint a picture of an Ireland becoming modern under English auspices that are also destroying a specifically Irish way of life. That means that Bourke brings in a lot of what reviewers of this book find irrelevant -- the Oscar Wilde trials, the developing police system in Ireland, the impending land bill, and a host of fascinating details on fairy lore and folk culture in Ireland. For better or worse, Bourke's not going to give you an episode of "Snapped."

And while "strong independent woman burned to death for failing to conform to the patriarchy" is the back-cover gloss on this book, I don't actually think Bourke is endorsing that interpretation over and above any others. She produces much striking evidence for why no one in the community would have told anyone -- judges, police, magistrates -- what actually happened or why it happened, and she also illuminates several occasions during which everyone could have easily coordinated the story they were going to tell officials. If there's any "what really happened" available, it would be that England, after 900 years of exploiting and abusing rural Ireland, couldn't realistically expect that anyone there was going to give them the real version of what went on, no matter how gruesome the crime.]]> 3.48 1999 The Burning of Bridget Cleary

author: Angela Bourke
name: Sara
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/02/23
shelves:
review:
ŷ�� readers won't like this because it's not a novel, nor is it the novelization of a crime -- we don't, in the end, get a window into individual motives and interpersonal relationships that led to the crime. In fact, Bourke's aim in writing the book is to show that our understanding and interpretation of individual motives in any given crime is always dependent on a broader cultural milieu. For Bourke, what makes the burning of Bridget Cleary important is that you can't understand it if you're going to use just one lens for thinking about it (for instance "modern justice" or "rural folkways"). The burning of the literate, financially stable, married, childless milliner in rural Ireland came out of a highly specific moment in which either lens was possible.

Which means on the one hand that Bourke has chosen a crime that's so completely WEIRD that you'll be riveted, even if you've got no interest in Ireland at all. A husband desperately anxious about his wife's week-long illness, seeks out religious (priests), medical (doctors), and folk ("fairy doctors") help for her. And right at the moment when she seems to have turned a corner and gotten better, he burns her to death, claiming that the fairies have swapped his true wife out with a body double. Did I mention the part where 8 other people in the house look on and may or may not have assisted?

On the other hand, if you're a reader of murder mysteries, this book won't take you where you want to go -- what was their marriage like? Can we trust what their neighbors say? Did the husband get along with his in-laws? Instead, Bourke uses the incident to paint a picture of an Ireland becoming modern under English auspices that are also destroying a specifically Irish way of life. That means that Bourke brings in a lot of what reviewers of this book find irrelevant -- the Oscar Wilde trials, the developing police system in Ireland, the impending land bill, and a host of fascinating details on fairy lore and folk culture in Ireland. For better or worse, Bourke's not going to give you an episode of "Snapped."

And while "strong independent woman burned to death for failing to conform to the patriarchy" is the back-cover gloss on this book, I don't actually think Bourke is endorsing that interpretation over and above any others. She produces much striking evidence for why no one in the community would have told anyone -- judges, police, magistrates -- what actually happened or why it happened, and she also illuminates several occasions during which everyone could have easily coordinated the story they were going to tell officials. If there's any "what really happened" available, it would be that England, after 900 years of exploiting and abusing rural Ireland, couldn't realistically expect that anyone there was going to give them the real version of what went on, no matter how gruesome the crime.
]]> The Interpreter 13800 304 Suki Kim 0312422245 Sara 3
However, I can also understand how this book winds up with only mediocre reviews on goodreads. It can't exactly make up its mind whether it wants to be a lyrical meditation on the radical ungroundedness of being the child of an immigrant, or whether it wants to be a gripping murder mystery. And while I admire its ambition for trying to combine the two, it really doesn't pull it off very well.

If you're going to pick up this book, I advise approaching it more as a dreamy lyrical meditation on the experience of immigration than as a mystery novel. It just doesn't do plausibility very well. Or even exposition. And I couldn't figure out if the dialogue was so very non-mimetic on purpose (perhaps the author trying to say something about the unreliability of the act of interpreting other people's words?) or whether it was just the product of a first-book author who wasn't really very good at writing dialogue.

I suspect another reason to read it is its obsessively detailed attention to NYC and associated boroughs' geography. Never does its heroine make a move without the narrator chiming in to tell you exactly what block of Morningside Ave she's on. I'm not convinced that served the coherence of the book, but I can see that providing real enjoyment for those familiar with the area.]]> 3.63 2003 The Interpreter

author: Suki Kim
name: Sara
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2015/02/17
shelves:
review:
I can understand how this book gained critical attention -- its particular lens on the immigrant experience in America is entirely free of cliche. When you look at the back cover and read that it is about a daughter of Korean immigrants in New York City, you'll have all kinds of vague ideas of what an author will inevitably do with that scenario, but Kim will not do any of those things that you expect. So -- much respect to her for that.

However, I can also understand how this book winds up with only mediocre reviews on goodreads. It can't exactly make up its mind whether it wants to be a lyrical meditation on the radical ungroundedness of being the child of an immigrant, or whether it wants to be a gripping murder mystery. And while I admire its ambition for trying to combine the two, it really doesn't pull it off very well.

If you're going to pick up this book, I advise approaching it more as a dreamy lyrical meditation on the experience of immigration than as a mystery novel. It just doesn't do plausibility very well. Or even exposition. And I couldn't figure out if the dialogue was so very non-mimetic on purpose (perhaps the author trying to say something about the unreliability of the act of interpreting other people's words?) or whether it was just the product of a first-book author who wasn't really very good at writing dialogue.

I suspect another reason to read it is its obsessively detailed attention to NYC and associated boroughs' geography. Never does its heroine make a move without the narrator chiming in to tell you exactly what block of Morningside Ave she's on. I'm not convinced that served the coherence of the book, but I can see that providing real enjoyment for those familiar with the area.
]]> <![CDATA[Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir]]> 12868761 318 Jenny Lawson 0399159010 Sara 5
This is a great way to deal with a taxidermy-filled and radon-enveloped childhood in small town west Texas, but an even more effective way of capturing the profound disconnect between an actual situation and your reaction to it that is generated by an anxiety disorder. Which Lawson happens to have. And it puts a reader like me in the situation of laughing completely helplessly along with Lawson’s entirely cock-eyed explanations of being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a completely unfunny degenerative disease that totally killed my own non-fictional father. Seriously. She starts talking about RA and how it’s treated with a drug that’s supposed to treat cancer but can cause cancer (and, incidentally, made my father completely unable to digest actual food like a human being) and I’m laughing so hard that I’m crying. Why DON’T they call RA something sexier like “The Midnight Death�� or “Impending Vampirism��? I’m gasping for breath between giggles. Let’s pretend this never happened.
]]> 3.89 2012 Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

author: Jenny Lawson
name: Sara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/01
date added: 2015/01/13
shelves:
review:
Jenny Lawson’s particular comedic gift is to pile contextual information on top of contextual information without actually managing to make the anecdote she’s relating yield any further to ordinariness than when she first began to tell it. She starts out casually mentioning that day she was stabbed by a chicken, but everything she tells you to help you understand how such a thing is even possible just makes the statement that much more ludicrous. Try it sometime �� can you manage to give an audience huge amounts of information about a situation without gradually reassuring them that this situation, too, is part of the everyday world? All of Jenny Lawson’s anecdotes hover just above the horizon of normal, and absolutely none of them, in spite of her copious explanations (footnoted. Parentheticized. Commented on by editors to whom she then talks back. Garnished with promises of what might be included in her NEXT book) settle down into typical experience.

This is a great way to deal with a taxidermy-filled and radon-enveloped childhood in small town west Texas, but an even more effective way of capturing the profound disconnect between an actual situation and your reaction to it that is generated by an anxiety disorder. Which Lawson happens to have. And it puts a reader like me in the situation of laughing completely helplessly along with Lawson’s entirely cock-eyed explanations of being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a completely unfunny degenerative disease that totally killed my own non-fictional father. Seriously. She starts talking about RA and how it’s treated with a drug that’s supposed to treat cancer but can cause cancer (and, incidentally, made my father completely unable to digest actual food like a human being) and I’m laughing so hard that I’m crying. Why DON’T they call RA something sexier like “The Midnight Death�� or “Impending Vampirism��? I’m gasping for breath between giggles. Let’s pretend this never happened.

]]> <![CDATA[Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]]> 7082 244 Philip K. Dick Sara 5
Highly readable, even for a special like me who doesn't habitually consume a lot of sci-fi.]]> 4.08 1968

author: Philip K. Dick
name: Sara
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/01
date added: 2015/01/13
shelves:
review:
You know how it is. You're already feeling demoralized because all you've got is an electric sheep while all your neighbors have real animals. Your wife is acting strange and has started intentionally dialing the mood organ to make herself feel despair -- complete and utter despair. You don't see how you're going to improve your situation. And then, when all you want to do is just get done with a day of work, all of the sudden you're forced to ask the big questions about who it is that Mercerism expects you to empathize with, when it tells you to have empathy.

Highly readable, even for a special like me who doesn't habitually consume a lot of sci-fi.
]]> <![CDATA[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God]]> 12958803 �� While attending services and various small group meetings at her local branch of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Luhrmann sought to understand how some members were able to communicate with God, not just through one-sided prayers but with discernable feedback. Some saw visions, while others claimed to hear the voice of God himself. For these congregants and many other Christians, God was intensely alive. After holding a series of honest, personal interviews with Vineyard members who claimed to have had isolated or ongoing supernatural experiences with God, Luhrmann hypothesized that the practice of prayer could train a person to hear God’s voice—to use one’s mind differently and focus on God’s voice until it became clear. A subsequent experiment conducted between people who were and weren’t practiced in prayer further illuminated her conclusion. For those who have trained themselves to concentrate on their inner experiences, God is experienced in the brain as an actual social his voice was identified, and that identification was trusted and regarded as real and interactive.
Astute, deeply intelligent, and sensitive, When God Talks Back is a remarkable approach to the intersection of religion, psychology, and science, and the effect it has on the daily practices of the faithful.]]> 464 T.M. Luhrmann 0307264793 Sara 5
T. M. Luhrmann, however, starts her deeply engaging, highly readable, extremely wide-ranging exploration of modern evangelical forms of prayer from a rather simple premise: OBVIOUSLY Christians, when they pray, don’t think that God is there in the same way that other humans are. So what habits of mind and emotional stances do they have to cultivate in order to understand themselves as communicating with a being whose reality lies mainly outside of sensory perception?

The first five chapters basically lay out Luhrmann’s fieldwork as an anthropologist embedded in a Vineyard Church in Hyde Park in Chicago. Luhrmann lays out the basic dynamics of the church, and the habits involved in individual members�� prayer lives with a deft touch: well-chosen quotes, two or three quick details to establish the personality of a given church-member, and a series of deeply engaging anecdotes make chapters two through five almost effortless to read, which is no small feat. These are intellectually dense chapters. Luhrmann constructs a systematic description of the ways that church members train each other to think about evidence of God’s engagement with their prayers, she rounds up the cognitive habits that help church members tune in to the cues they understand as pointing to this evidence, and she also uses the idea of “play�� to help explain the church members�� understandings of their interactions with God as vivid and self-constituting, but outside of the world of sense perception.

Here’s the most incredible thing about the book: in the chapters that follow she narrativizes a series of clinical studies that she conducted with psychologists to determine if some forms of prayer change how the brain works for those who pray. Spoiler alert: the answer is yes. Now, she could just have stopped there �� there’s a thriving industry of people who’ve explored the cognitive impact of Buddhist meditation and concluded it’s good for the brain, and then said, oh, you should do it too, then! But Luhrmann doesn’t treat cognitive science as if it was the timeless bottom line which can explain everything. Instead, she moves on to *historicize* the particular cognitive effects of THIS sort of charismatic, evangelical prayer to an intimately personal god in both the history of religion in America, and the gradually unfolding secular framework (a relatively new development) in which all Judeo-Christian religion now exists.

Ultimately, Luhrmann suggests that the cognitive skills involved in this particular kind of prayer are demanded by a modernity in which religion is seen as an individual choice, and thus requires intensive mental cultivation in order to be kept real. It is a world in which the necessary by-product of secularism isn’t a world where everyone is left alone to practice religion in peace, but a world where individuals now must perform the largest part of the tremendous labor of creating metaphysical realities, and they must do that work inside their own heads (as opposed, for instance, to a medieval world in which that metaphysical reality was created by individuals, but in extensive collaboration with the architecture, government, paintings, feasts and fasts, liturgy and liturgical calendars that structured their entire life). Charismatic evangelicals aren’t old-fashioned nut-jobs who crave a primitive world in which angels and demons prowled the earth: they are the product of a profoundly modern individualistic society in which, if you want to sustain belief in God, you’ve got to do it in your head. A lot. With great energy.

I’m not particularly well-read in the history of religion, and I found Luhrmann’s book also to be a lively and well-narrated introduction first of all to the twentieth-century American charismatic movement (which she covers in the first chapter) and second of all to a two-millenia-long history of Christian prayer (which she covers in chapter six). One of the most compelling points she raises (and this isn’t her argument �� other scholars have made it, I just hadn’t encountered it before, so it’s new to me) in covering the history of prayer is that the whole function of prayer changed when mass-printing and mass literacy emerged. Before one could come by a cheap copy of the scriptures, huge amounts of prayer were about committing scenes and messages from the scripture to your memory. After the rise of mass media, when you no longer needed to have your brain act as the mass repository for the whole of scriptures, suddenly what a Christian did when he or she spent time in the presence of God also changed.

It’s probably worth pointing out that Luhrmann studies a highly particular form of Christianity. What she explores as prayer does not entirely account for what all Christians do when they pray. The Vineyard church members are deeply preoccupied with prophecy, and spend hours praying so they can know stuff that is going to happen in the future (other Christians don’t even think that when the Bible talks about prophecy it means predicting the future: they see Biblical prophecy as speaking God’s truth to worldly power in a Martin Luther King kind of way). Luhrmann’s Vineyard Christians also spend so much time focusing on experiencing God’s unconditional love that they don’t seem to use prayer as a tool for repentance or reflecting on their wrong actions and requesting God’s assistance in their reform.

And then there’s this issue with battling demons and casting them out. Not only is this not a feature of your standard Sunday morning with the local Episcopalians, it’s a part of the evangelical faith which Luhrmann seems to not entirely grasp. It comes up in her chapter on the similarities and differences between hearing God’s voice and mental illness. She concludes that there isn’t really much of an over-lap, but then goes on to qualify her statement by narrating a few anecdotes where casting out demons suddenly became a preoccupation to a few church members, at which point the Christians involved suddenly seemed to be exhibiting pretty classical signs of mental illness. This analysis is the book at its most uncomfortable. I would guess that even the majority of committed Christians would �� at the least -- feel disoriented by the church members�� identification of demons, and more likely they, along with their secular friends, would feel that some of the procedures they followed for casting out demons verged on the abusive. That Luhrmann devotes maybe a third of one chapter to these episodes makes some of her earlier chapters on the church seem a bit skewed toward the positive and the vibrant at the expense of some more deeply upsetting content.

Still I’m going to rate this up there with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a book that probably will continue to rock my world for years and years after this.
]]> 3.94 2012 When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

author: T.M. Luhrmann
name: Sara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/01
date added: 2015/01/11
shelves:
review:
Christians who pray say they are talking to God, and folks who aren’t Christian respond um, but you’re talking to someone who’s NOT THERE. And then non-Christian folks get all confused. And then everyone feels awkward and changes the subject to something like football, unless one of the Christians happens to be one of those annoying ones who feel like they have to convert everyone, or one of the atheists happens to be one of those annoying ones who feel like they have to explain to Christians how deluded they are. It doesn’t seem like exploring the issue in a way that tries to take both points of view into account would be particularly calculated to get anywhere, would it?

T. M. Luhrmann, however, starts her deeply engaging, highly readable, extremely wide-ranging exploration of modern evangelical forms of prayer from a rather simple premise: OBVIOUSLY Christians, when they pray, don’t think that God is there in the same way that other humans are. So what habits of mind and emotional stances do they have to cultivate in order to understand themselves as communicating with a being whose reality lies mainly outside of sensory perception?

The first five chapters basically lay out Luhrmann’s fieldwork as an anthropologist embedded in a Vineyard Church in Hyde Park in Chicago. Luhrmann lays out the basic dynamics of the church, and the habits involved in individual members�� prayer lives with a deft touch: well-chosen quotes, two or three quick details to establish the personality of a given church-member, and a series of deeply engaging anecdotes make chapters two through five almost effortless to read, which is no small feat. These are intellectually dense chapters. Luhrmann constructs a systematic description of the ways that church members train each other to think about evidence of God’s engagement with their prayers, she rounds up the cognitive habits that help church members tune in to the cues they understand as pointing to this evidence, and she also uses the idea of “play�� to help explain the church members�� understandings of their interactions with God as vivid and self-constituting, but outside of the world of sense perception.

Here’s the most incredible thing about the book: in the chapters that follow she narrativizes a series of clinical studies that she conducted with psychologists to determine if some forms of prayer change how the brain works for those who pray. Spoiler alert: the answer is yes. Now, she could just have stopped there �� there’s a thriving industry of people who’ve explored the cognitive impact of Buddhist meditation and concluded it’s good for the brain, and then said, oh, you should do it too, then! But Luhrmann doesn’t treat cognitive science as if it was the timeless bottom line which can explain everything. Instead, she moves on to *historicize* the particular cognitive effects of THIS sort of charismatic, evangelical prayer to an intimately personal god in both the history of religion in America, and the gradually unfolding secular framework (a relatively new development) in which all Judeo-Christian religion now exists.

Ultimately, Luhrmann suggests that the cognitive skills involved in this particular kind of prayer are demanded by a modernity in which religion is seen as an individual choice, and thus requires intensive mental cultivation in order to be kept real. It is a world in which the necessary by-product of secularism isn’t a world where everyone is left alone to practice religion in peace, but a world where individuals now must perform the largest part of the tremendous labor of creating metaphysical realities, and they must do that work inside their own heads (as opposed, for instance, to a medieval world in which that metaphysical reality was created by individuals, but in extensive collaboration with the architecture, government, paintings, feasts and fasts, liturgy and liturgical calendars that structured their entire life). Charismatic evangelicals aren’t old-fashioned nut-jobs who crave a primitive world in which angels and demons prowled the earth: they are the product of a profoundly modern individualistic society in which, if you want to sustain belief in God, you’ve got to do it in your head. A lot. With great energy.

I’m not particularly well-read in the history of religion, and I found Luhrmann’s book also to be a lively and well-narrated introduction first of all to the twentieth-century American charismatic movement (which she covers in the first chapter) and second of all to a two-millenia-long history of Christian prayer (which she covers in chapter six). One of the most compelling points she raises (and this isn’t her argument �� other scholars have made it, I just hadn’t encountered it before, so it’s new to me) in covering the history of prayer is that the whole function of prayer changed when mass-printing and mass literacy emerged. Before one could come by a cheap copy of the scriptures, huge amounts of prayer were about committing scenes and messages from the scripture to your memory. After the rise of mass media, when you no longer needed to have your brain act as the mass repository for the whole of scriptures, suddenly what a Christian did when he or she spent time in the presence of God also changed.

It’s probably worth pointing out that Luhrmann studies a highly particular form of Christianity. What she explores as prayer does not entirely account for what all Christians do when they pray. The Vineyard church members are deeply preoccupied with prophecy, and spend hours praying so they can know stuff that is going to happen in the future (other Christians don’t even think that when the Bible talks about prophecy it means predicting the future: they see Biblical prophecy as speaking God’s truth to worldly power in a Martin Luther King kind of way). Luhrmann’s Vineyard Christians also spend so much time focusing on experiencing God’s unconditional love that they don’t seem to use prayer as a tool for repentance or reflecting on their wrong actions and requesting God’s assistance in their reform.

And then there’s this issue with battling demons and casting them out. Not only is this not a feature of your standard Sunday morning with the local Episcopalians, it’s a part of the evangelical faith which Luhrmann seems to not entirely grasp. It comes up in her chapter on the similarities and differences between hearing God’s voice and mental illness. She concludes that there isn’t really much of an over-lap, but then goes on to qualify her statement by narrating a few anecdotes where casting out demons suddenly became a preoccupation to a few church members, at which point the Christians involved suddenly seemed to be exhibiting pretty classical signs of mental illness. This analysis is the book at its most uncomfortable. I would guess that even the majority of committed Christians would �� at the least -- feel disoriented by the church members�� identification of demons, and more likely they, along with their secular friends, would feel that some of the procedures they followed for casting out demons verged on the abusive. That Luhrmann devotes maybe a third of one chapter to these episodes makes some of her earlier chapters on the church seem a bit skewed toward the positive and the vibrant at the expense of some more deeply upsetting content.

Still I’m going to rate this up there with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a book that probably will continue to rock my world for years and years after this.

]]> <![CDATA[Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins, #1)]]> 37100 263 Walter Mosley Sara 4
The result, while unquestionably lagging behind Raymond Chandler in the completely delightful analogy department, is far more compelling than Philip Marlowe's verbose alienation. Instead of the constant "he looked like the kind of guy who would . . . she seemed like the sort of gal who might . . . " suppositions that structure the description in The Big Sleep and underscore Marlowe as a guy who's seen everything but knows no one in particular, Walter Mosley's first-person detective narrator, Easy Rawlins lives with the people he has to deal with. In fact, huge swaths of them fought in the war with him. Or moved out to LA from Houston's Fifth Ward with him. He knows who runs the bar, who is out drinking hard to avoid going home to their entirely-too-big brood of children, who doesn't mind if you kiss their girls, as long as you don't touch their money. The result is a book peppered with miniature portraits -- the vagrant with cerebral palsy, the church-man who will have a few drinks with you and not say much at all -- that are almost entire books in themselves. The result is also a detective hero who has something to lose -- in this case, not only his place in a community teeming with personalities, but also the title to a house he actually has been able to buy with help from his GI benefits. What would happen if someone finally got around to killing Philip Marlowe? The book would end. What happens if someone shoots Easy Rawlins in the head? We're out of both a narrator and also a character to whom we've pinned our hopes about an America of upward mobility and gradually increasing civil rights.

The only reason I'm with-holding that fifth star is because plain and simple, I hate the sexual politics of noir fiction. Happy to take recommendations for any book that might revise or question them. ]]> 3.89 1990 Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins, #1)

Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins, #1)

author: Walter Mosley
name: Sara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2015/01/07
shelves:
review:
Walter Mosley's assignment: to take the genre of the lone, inscrutable noir gumshoe, and transform it into something that can manage the central fact of African-American existence: an oppression so thorough that no one man can stand on his own.

The result, while unquestionably lagging behind Raymond Chandler in the completely delightful analogy department, is far more compelling than Philip Marlowe's verbose alienation. Instead of the constant "he looked like the kind of guy who would . . . she seemed like the sort of gal who might . . . " suppositions that structure the description in The Big Sleep and underscore Marlowe as a guy who's seen everything but knows no one in particular, Walter Mosley's first-person detective narrator, Easy Rawlins lives with the people he has to deal with. In fact, huge swaths of them fought in the war with him. Or moved out to LA from Houston's Fifth Ward with him. He knows who runs the bar, who is out drinking hard to avoid going home to their entirely-too-big brood of children, who doesn't mind if you kiss their girls, as long as you don't touch their money. The result is a book peppered with miniature portraits -- the vagrant with cerebral palsy, the church-man who will have a few drinks with you and not say much at all -- that are almost entire books in themselves. The result is also a detective hero who has something to lose -- in this case, not only his place in a community teeming with personalities, but also the title to a house he actually has been able to buy with help from his GI benefits. What would happen if someone finally got around to killing Philip Marlowe? The book would end. What happens if someone shoots Easy Rawlins in the head? We're out of both a narrator and also a character to whom we've pinned our hopes about an America of upward mobility and gradually increasing civil rights.

The only reason I'm with-holding that fifth star is because plain and simple, I hate the sexual politics of noir fiction. Happy to take recommendations for any book that might revise or question them.
]]> <![CDATA[The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease and Heal Your Body]]> 17214445
The Paleo Approach is the first book ever to explain how to adapt the Paleo diet and lifestyle to bring about a full recovery. Read it to learn why foods marketed as "healthy"—such as whole grains, soy, and low-fat dairy—can contribute to the development of autoimmune conditions. Discover what you can eat to calm your immune system, reduce inflammation, and help your body heal itself. Find out which simple lifestyle changes—along with changes in diet—will make the biggest difference for your health.

There's no need to worry that "going Paleo" will break the bank or require too much time in the kitchen preparing special foods. In The Paleo Approach , Dr. Ballantyne provides expert tips on how to make the switch easily and economically. Complete food lists with strategies for the day-to-day—how stay within your food budget, where to shop for what you need, how to make the most out of your time in the kitchen, and how to eat out—take all the guesswork out of going Paleo. Simple strategies for lifestyle adjustments, including small steps that can make a huge difference, guide you through the most important changes to support healing. Do you have a complicated condition that requires medical intervention, medication, or supplements? Dr. Ballantyne also walks you through the most useful medical tests, treatments, and supplements (as well as the most counterproductive ones) to help you open a dialogue with your physician. Features such as these make The Paleo Approach the ultimate resource for anyone suffering from an autoimmune disease. Why suffer a moment longer? Reclaim your health with The Paleo Approach !]]> 432 Sarah Ballantyne 1936608391 Sara 1
Ok. On the one hand: Our primary model of medicine is about getting sick, then taking a pill to get better. That’s the dominant model mostly because it’s so easy to make profitable. For instance, if someone if someone has to stop eating processed foods in order to get well, what pharmaceutical company or doctor or hospital is going to make money from that? So obviously, no one who hopes to make a living in health care has much incentive to think about health outside of the disorder-cured-by-commodity paradigm of medicine. This is the arbitrary limitation of all medicine. There’s no particular reason why the body should only experience disorders whose cures depend on easily marketable solutions, and yet those are the only cures on offer.

So I am inclined to pay attention to folks like Sarah Ballantyne who claim to deal with more complex models of well-being, ones that don’t just involve a one-stop solution provided by an easily billable party. Ballantyne presents herself as providing an alternative to modern medicine, an alternative in which diet, stress levels, sleep quality, and exercise all play a part. All the same, out of eight lengthy and detailed chapters, only two deal in any way with what she calls “lifestyle�� issues, and both of those chapters inevitably return to the question of diet. Diet, they say, will ultimately help you achieve better sleep and a clearer mind. Diet is factor number one in illness, and all other factors follow from it. In the “trouble-shooting�� chapter, which she writes for folks who aren’t feeling better after three months on her diet, all of the ways to shoot trouble involve taking supplements or tweaking what you eat. Will having too much stress in your life keep your diet from working properly? She never considers the question. The extremely relevant question, “Are you, as an unwell person with an auto-immune disorder, wearing yourself out with the intensive food prep this diet requires?�� is never raised.

So, there’s that. Not an indication that the book is wrong, but a definite discrepancy between its lip-service to considering a complex set of factors, and its actual message that what you eat as at the core of all health. Now, I am pretty convinced that food is integral to health, or I wouldn’t have bothered to read her book at all. But I also wonder to what extent food conveniently re-creates all the dynamics of the swallow-a-pill model of healthcare, one where you pay organic grocers and free-range chicken farmers (and possibly bloggers-turned-nutrition-gurus like Ballantyne) instead of pharmaceutical companies. Is it possible Ballantyne inadvertently focuses too heavily on food because food aligns so nicely with our idea that health is something to be purchased and then consumed?

But what I find most objectionable about Ballantyne’s book is its disingenuous use of science to justify its recommendations. Sarah Ballantyne unquestionably has a very high-level training in science. But I also know the Paleo diet culture to be uncomfortably self-serving in its use of “scientific research.�� Hop on to Mark’s Daily Apple blog or listen to Chris Kresser’s podcast, and you’ll find them explaining all kinds of diet choices based on this “study�� they’ve read. There’s never any acknowledgement that not all studies are created equally, and or that scientific and medical studies conducted in good faith can still contradict one another. Rarely do Paleo enthusiasts mention how large the study was, whether it was peer-reviewed, or whether its findings were replicated in other studies. Was it a study involving 20 college-aged men (rather than, say middle-aged women, the population most prone to auto-immune conditions)? Was it conducted over two weeks or three months? In a northern city during the winter, or a southern one over the course of two seasons? Did a subsequent study question its findings? No matter �� what matters is that there was, indeed, a study, and so its results are to be trusted as science.

And again �� this doesn’t mean that everything Kresser or Sissoon writes is untrue �� it just means that they make decisions about which studies support their recommendations without disclosing to reader about how the decision was made. Ballantyne’s book suffers from the same habit. She offers us 20 pages of tiny-print bibliography, but no footnotes to show which of her claims are supported by which of the cited studies. And obviously, she’s making certain decisions about how she’s using the information. She cites lots of CDC and NIH-produced documents, even though clearly, neither the CDC or the NIH endorse the idea that the consumption of wheat leads to auto-immune conditions, an idea which forms the backbone of Ballantyne’s entire book. In fact, she basically comes out and says at one point, that, given what “we�� know about wheat’s toxicity, it’s surprising it’s even considered a food. Well, yes �� that’s an astonishing statement. Surely there might be one or two other studies out there that don’t support the notion that wheat is uniformly bad (For instance, the ones cited here: )? What led her to privilege the studies she cites over those studies?

I don’t mean to come off as dismissing her ideas entirely �� in fact, I am more sympathetic to them than I sound. However, in the end, she is selling a product (a handsomely produced but rather pricy book) to a stunningly vulnerable group of people who are not functioning well, who are in pain, and who are looking for some kind of hope. Wouldn’t it be slightly more honest to acknowledge that the data doesn’t all align one way? If she’s indignant that the doctors she dealt with early in her life never told her about how auto-immunity works, don’t we have an equal right to be indignant that she’s not giving us the entire picture?

I find it especially important to point out how biased her selection of “science�� is because this is a book that’s definitely aspiring to the authoritative status of a college science text-book. Weighing several pounds, more than a foot tall, full color diagrams of the lining of the small intestines, tables of the “most important�� cellular components of the immune system (despite the fact that the cellular components of the immune system are poorly understood even by the best researchers), somewhat superfluous sketches of the human digestive system from end to end. What is all that for? Well, to help you UNDERSTAND how the Paleo Approach is going to help you heal from auto-immune disorders, Ballantyne says. But I’m not so sure. First of all, I’m not sure because of the crowds of reviewers on ŷ�� who gush over the SCIENCE that Ballantyne includes AND who confess that they mostly just skimmed the most science-heavy chapters or skipped them all together. I don’t think the science IS actually working to explain things to readers �� I think the readers just like to know that it’s there, so they can feel that the book is authoritative.

But mainly I’m not so sure that her “scientific�� presentation of nutrition and auto-immune disease matters at all because the entire Paleo Approach, as she pitches it, basically boils down to not eating grains, legumes, nuts, dairy, or nightshades because they create permeability in your small intestine which can lead to auto-immunity over time. This is a process that has been observed, tested and verified through replicated studies when it comes to what happens when people with Celiac disease eat wheat. There have been preliminary results (definitely not as settled or as widely confirmed) suggesting a similar process occurs in juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis. But Ballantyne’s book requires us to accept that all grains, legumes and nuts (and dairy! And night shades!) behave **EXACTLY** as wheat behaves in the gut of a person with Celiac disease, no matter what auto-immune condition a person has. And maybe even if they don’t HAVE an auto-immune condition. After all, Ballantyne promises that if you’ve just been feeling tired lately, this diet will also help you. For a book whose sprawling structure aspires to the encyclopedic, that’s a stunning reduction of a whole spectrum of biology into just one single master-process.

And puzzlingly, the text-book specificity with which she describes auto-immunity and nutrition in the first three chapters gives way to hand-waving vagueness when it comes to explaining how to apply one’s understanding of those minute processes to one’s practice of eating. She offers long lists of foods to avoid and foods to eat for healing. But when it comes to the question of HOW to eat them �� what assortment and what schedule might optimize healing �� she simply demurs. Eat smoothies -- or don’t, if they upset your stomach. Think about the sugars in what you eat, but don’t get obsessive about it, unless you have diabetes. About one-fifth to one-quarter of the meat you eat should be offal, she recommends with unusual specificity, given that she doesn’t have any suggestions for how much meat you should be eating. She points out that lots of people have lots of recommendations for ratios of protein to carbs to fat, so just go with what works for you. Of course, she also warns that you can’t expect any significant healing to happen in less than three months on this diet, so exactly how you are supposed to tell what is “working�� for you is a mystery. This is where the “science�� of her book really comes off as completely irrelevant. On the one hand the Paleo Approach is so complex that it can be described to us only after we’ve plowed through an exhaustive three-chapter scientific dissection of all the hidden causes and minute chemical reactions that impact auto-immunity. On the other hand, the Paleo Approach is supposed to be so intuitive that Ballantyne acts as if we’ll just know instinctually how to munch our way to wellness after removing about 70% of what Americans consider food from our diet. There isn’t even a “sample meal plan,�� or “suggested meals,�� -- a pretty standard feature of even the most poorly designed diet books.

But the most hurtful omission in the book is Ballantyne’s complete failure to acknowledge how BEING ill might impact one’s ability to follow her suggestions. Indeed, the most bizarre feature of this book is that it doesn’t have anything to say about the actual experience of illness. Ballantyne mentions having a past history of asthma and joint pain, but there isn’t any moment in the book where she pauses to say “I know how hard this can be when you’re gasping for breath.�� Or “you might feel hopeless because Multiple Sclerosis is a terrible degenerative disease.�� Or “chopping all those vegetables will certainly be a challenge if you are suffering from the severe joint pain and excessive fatigue of lupus.�� She’s chock-full of breezy little affirmative nuggets like “It’s ok if you can’t do it all�� and “It’s ok to say no.�� But there isn’t any space in this voluminous book and its defying-all-the-odds tone for her to say “Maybe you are frightened of dying before your children are grown.�� “Maybe it’s hard for you to let go of the profound resentment you have against healthy people.�� And ultimately, that’s what makes me say this isn’t a book for sick people. I suspect that this book will be positively magnetic for people who are terrified of illness, or people who are in deep denial about the profound power illness has. I even �� in spite of the content of most of this review �� think it might be able to offer some advice on eating that can make *some* people feel significantly better. But in terms of addressing people who are actually experiencing illness, who are nakedly confronting the limits of their own individual power and trying to think realistically about how to cope, and about which of the limited number of decisions and actions available to them will matter the most �� this book has nothing to offer.]]> 4.34 2013 The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease and Heal Your Body

The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease and Heal Your Body

author: Sarah Ballantyne
name: Sara
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2013
rating: 1
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2014/12/30
shelves:
review:
If you want to know what’s wrong with this book, start with the fact that of those forty-odd ŷ�� members who gave it 4 or 5 stars and wrote a review of it, everyone uniformly praised how “science-based�� it was and only three of them mentioned actually committing to the diet it prescribed. A good portion of them also mentioned that they did not have an auto-immune condition. This is not a book for sick people �� not in its presentation, not in its advice, not in its worldview. It is a book that uses science to claim an authoritative status, but is disingenuous about its highly selective use of scientific information. It’s a book that spends a lot of time calling your attention to how complicated and intricate anatomical processes are, but in the end its recommendations really depend on only one of those processes. It’s also a book that beyond enumerating a list of foods to eat and not eat has very little to say about how to implement its extremely complex and difficult diet plan. Especially if you happen to be sick.

Ok. On the one hand: Our primary model of medicine is about getting sick, then taking a pill to get better. That’s the dominant model mostly because it’s so easy to make profitable. For instance, if someone if someone has to stop eating processed foods in order to get well, what pharmaceutical company or doctor or hospital is going to make money from that? So obviously, no one who hopes to make a living in health care has much incentive to think about health outside of the disorder-cured-by-commodity paradigm of medicine. This is the arbitrary limitation of all medicine. There’s no particular reason why the body should only experience disorders whose cures depend on easily marketable solutions, and yet those are the only cures on offer.

So I am inclined to pay attention to folks like Sarah Ballantyne who claim to deal with more complex models of well-being, ones that don’t just involve a one-stop solution provided by an easily billable party. Ballantyne presents herself as providing an alternative to modern medicine, an alternative in which diet, stress levels, sleep quality, and exercise all play a part. All the same, out of eight lengthy and detailed chapters, only two deal in any way with what she calls “lifestyle�� issues, and both of those chapters inevitably return to the question of diet. Diet, they say, will ultimately help you achieve better sleep and a clearer mind. Diet is factor number one in illness, and all other factors follow from it. In the “trouble-shooting�� chapter, which she writes for folks who aren’t feeling better after three months on her diet, all of the ways to shoot trouble involve taking supplements or tweaking what you eat. Will having too much stress in your life keep your diet from working properly? She never considers the question. The extremely relevant question, “Are you, as an unwell person with an auto-immune disorder, wearing yourself out with the intensive food prep this diet requires?�� is never raised.

So, there’s that. Not an indication that the book is wrong, but a definite discrepancy between its lip-service to considering a complex set of factors, and its actual message that what you eat as at the core of all health. Now, I am pretty convinced that food is integral to health, or I wouldn’t have bothered to read her book at all. But I also wonder to what extent food conveniently re-creates all the dynamics of the swallow-a-pill model of healthcare, one where you pay organic grocers and free-range chicken farmers (and possibly bloggers-turned-nutrition-gurus like Ballantyne) instead of pharmaceutical companies. Is it possible Ballantyne inadvertently focuses too heavily on food because food aligns so nicely with our idea that health is something to be purchased and then consumed?

But what I find most objectionable about Ballantyne’s book is its disingenuous use of science to justify its recommendations. Sarah Ballantyne unquestionably has a very high-level training in science. But I also know the Paleo diet culture to be uncomfortably self-serving in its use of “scientific research.�� Hop on to Mark’s Daily Apple blog or listen to Chris Kresser’s podcast, and you’ll find them explaining all kinds of diet choices based on this “study�� they’ve read. There’s never any acknowledgement that not all studies are created equally, and or that scientific and medical studies conducted in good faith can still contradict one another. Rarely do Paleo enthusiasts mention how large the study was, whether it was peer-reviewed, or whether its findings were replicated in other studies. Was it a study involving 20 college-aged men (rather than, say middle-aged women, the population most prone to auto-immune conditions)? Was it conducted over two weeks or three months? In a northern city during the winter, or a southern one over the course of two seasons? Did a subsequent study question its findings? No matter �� what matters is that there was, indeed, a study, and so its results are to be trusted as science.

And again �� this doesn’t mean that everything Kresser or Sissoon writes is untrue �� it just means that they make decisions about which studies support their recommendations without disclosing to reader about how the decision was made. Ballantyne’s book suffers from the same habit. She offers us 20 pages of tiny-print bibliography, but no footnotes to show which of her claims are supported by which of the cited studies. And obviously, she’s making certain decisions about how she’s using the information. She cites lots of CDC and NIH-produced documents, even though clearly, neither the CDC or the NIH endorse the idea that the consumption of wheat leads to auto-immune conditions, an idea which forms the backbone of Ballantyne’s entire book. In fact, she basically comes out and says at one point, that, given what “we�� know about wheat’s toxicity, it’s surprising it’s even considered a food. Well, yes �� that’s an astonishing statement. Surely there might be one or two other studies out there that don’t support the notion that wheat is uniformly bad (For instance, the ones cited here: )? What led her to privilege the studies she cites over those studies?

I don’t mean to come off as dismissing her ideas entirely �� in fact, I am more sympathetic to them than I sound. However, in the end, she is selling a product (a handsomely produced but rather pricy book) to a stunningly vulnerable group of people who are not functioning well, who are in pain, and who are looking for some kind of hope. Wouldn’t it be slightly more honest to acknowledge that the data doesn’t all align one way? If she’s indignant that the doctors she dealt with early in her life never told her about how auto-immunity works, don’t we have an equal right to be indignant that she’s not giving us the entire picture?

I find it especially important to point out how biased her selection of “science�� is because this is a book that’s definitely aspiring to the authoritative status of a college science text-book. Weighing several pounds, more than a foot tall, full color diagrams of the lining of the small intestines, tables of the “most important�� cellular components of the immune system (despite the fact that the cellular components of the immune system are poorly understood even by the best researchers), somewhat superfluous sketches of the human digestive system from end to end. What is all that for? Well, to help you UNDERSTAND how the Paleo Approach is going to help you heal from auto-immune disorders, Ballantyne says. But I’m not so sure. First of all, I’m not sure because of the crowds of reviewers on ŷ�� who gush over the SCIENCE that Ballantyne includes AND who confess that they mostly just skimmed the most science-heavy chapters or skipped them all together. I don’t think the science IS actually working to explain things to readers �� I think the readers just like to know that it’s there, so they can feel that the book is authoritative.

But mainly I’m not so sure that her “scientific�� presentation of nutrition and auto-immune disease matters at all because the entire Paleo Approach, as she pitches it, basically boils down to not eating grains, legumes, nuts, dairy, or nightshades because they create permeability in your small intestine which can lead to auto-immunity over time. This is a process that has been observed, tested and verified through replicated studies when it comes to what happens when people with Celiac disease eat wheat. There have been preliminary results (definitely not as settled or as widely confirmed) suggesting a similar process occurs in juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis. But Ballantyne’s book requires us to accept that all grains, legumes and nuts (and dairy! And night shades!) behave **EXACTLY** as wheat behaves in the gut of a person with Celiac disease, no matter what auto-immune condition a person has. And maybe even if they don’t HAVE an auto-immune condition. After all, Ballantyne promises that if you’ve just been feeling tired lately, this diet will also help you. For a book whose sprawling structure aspires to the encyclopedic, that’s a stunning reduction of a whole spectrum of biology into just one single master-process.

And puzzlingly, the text-book specificity with which she describes auto-immunity and nutrition in the first three chapters gives way to hand-waving vagueness when it comes to explaining how to apply one’s understanding of those minute processes to one’s practice of eating. She offers long lists of foods to avoid and foods to eat for healing. But when it comes to the question of HOW to eat them �� what assortment and what schedule might optimize healing �� she simply demurs. Eat smoothies -- or don’t, if they upset your stomach. Think about the sugars in what you eat, but don’t get obsessive about it, unless you have diabetes. About one-fifth to one-quarter of the meat you eat should be offal, she recommends with unusual specificity, given that she doesn’t have any suggestions for how much meat you should be eating. She points out that lots of people have lots of recommendations for ratios of protein to carbs to fat, so just go with what works for you. Of course, she also warns that you can’t expect any significant healing to happen in less than three months on this diet, so exactly how you are supposed to tell what is “working�� for you is a mystery. This is where the “science�� of her book really comes off as completely irrelevant. On the one hand the Paleo Approach is so complex that it can be described to us only after we’ve plowed through an exhaustive three-chapter scientific dissection of all the hidden causes and minute chemical reactions that impact auto-immunity. On the other hand, the Paleo Approach is supposed to be so intuitive that Ballantyne acts as if we’ll just know instinctually how to munch our way to wellness after removing about 70% of what Americans consider food from our diet. There isn’t even a “sample meal plan,�� or “suggested meals,�� -- a pretty standard feature of even the most poorly designed diet books.

But the most hurtful omission in the book is Ballantyne’s complete failure to acknowledge how BEING ill might impact one’s ability to follow her suggestions. Indeed, the most bizarre feature of this book is that it doesn’t have anything to say about the actual experience of illness. Ballantyne mentions having a past history of asthma and joint pain, but there isn’t any moment in the book where she pauses to say “I know how hard this can be when you’re gasping for breath.�� Or “you might feel hopeless because Multiple Sclerosis is a terrible degenerative disease.�� Or “chopping all those vegetables will certainly be a challenge if you are suffering from the severe joint pain and excessive fatigue of lupus.�� She’s chock-full of breezy little affirmative nuggets like “It’s ok if you can’t do it all�� and “It’s ok to say no.�� But there isn’t any space in this voluminous book and its defying-all-the-odds tone for her to say “Maybe you are frightened of dying before your children are grown.�� “Maybe it’s hard for you to let go of the profound resentment you have against healthy people.�� And ultimately, that’s what makes me say this isn’t a book for sick people. I suspect that this book will be positively magnetic for people who are terrified of illness, or people who are in deep denial about the profound power illness has. I even �� in spite of the content of most of this review �� think it might be able to offer some advice on eating that can make *some* people feel significantly better. But in terms of addressing people who are actually experiencing illness, who are nakedly confronting the limits of their own individual power and trying to think realistically about how to cope, and about which of the limited number of decisions and actions available to them will matter the most �� this book has nothing to offer.
]]> <![CDATA[Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So]]> 7816284 The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut continues his remarkable story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic account of coping with mental illness, finding his calling as a pediatrician, and learning that willpower isn’t nearly enough.

Here is Mark’s childhood spent as the son of a struggling writer in a house that eventually held seven children after his aunt and uncle died and left four orphans. And here is the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital to find his family forever altered. At the late age of twenty-eight—and after nineteen rejections—Mark was accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gained purpose, a life, and some control over his condition.

The brilliantly evoked events of Mark Vonnegut’s life are at once perfectly unique and achingly relatable. There are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world responsibilities of running a pediatric practice. At times he felt that his parents�� lives would improve if only they had a few hundred more bucks in their bank account, while at other points his father’s fame merely heightened expectations that he be better, funnier (and crazier) than the average person.

Ultimately a tribute to the small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by bipolar disorder, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So is a wise, unsentimental, and inspiring book that will resonate with generations of readers.]]> 224 Mark Vonnegut 0385343795 Sara 3 3.74 2010

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

author: Mark Vonnegut
name: Sara
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2014/12/17
shelves:
review:
No really profound insights here, although there are plenty of pithy aphorisms. But a pleasant read, often just as focused on what ails modern medicine and modern medical training (which Vonnegut approaches as a pediatrician and former member of the Harvard Medical School's admissions board) as on his grappling with mental illness. Very much in prosaic sympathy with his father's sparse sentences. And so on.
]]> <![CDATA[The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1)]]> 2052
This is an alternate cover edition.]]> 231 Raymond Chandler 0394758285 Sara 3 3.96 1939

author: Raymond Chandler
name: Sara
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1939
rating: 3
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2014/11/30
shelves:
review:
I started this book this summer, inspired I think by finishing Tana French's first Dublin mystery. I love every simile coursing through the prose, but I could not follow the mystery for the life of me. Also -- does he have to slap QUITE so many women? I finished the book this fall in the grips of severe bronchitis, just because the half-read book was still beside me on the bedstand. Marlowe drank a lot. I coughed a lot. I'm still not sure who killed the manservant who took the car out for a spin and wound up under water. After browsing around on the internet I find out that nobody knows who killed him. Here's a swig of Extra-Strength Robitussin right at ya, Raymond Chandler.
]]> <![CDATA[Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures]]> 16052012
From #1 New York Times best-selling author Kate DiCamillo comes a laugh-out-loud story filled with eccentric, endearing characters and featuring an exciting new format—a novel interspersed with comic-style graphic sequences and full-page illustrations, all rendered in black-and-white by up-and-coming artist K. G. Campbell.]]> 231 Kate DiCamillo 076366040X Sara 5
Quick-paced, with great illustrations, the book's prose is consistently varied and hilarious in its attempts to accommodate the multiple written worlds -- of comic strips, of science fiction, of romance novels, of poetry -- through which the characters interpret their lives. I'm sure kids will love it but really adults are the audience of the book. It permits us for 300 wacky improbable pages to imagine that all of the damage we inflict upon the children in our lives can be mitigated by windows that are always open -- even in winter -- and that when we say "I will always turn back to you," they will somehow find a way to know that we mean it.]]> 3.87 2013 Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Sara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2014/11/16
shelves:
review:
Probably the best book I've read this year. An eleven-year-old girl exercises the best control she knows how over her world by relying on the wisdom of super-hero comics, a habit even more crucial once she becomes responsible for a flying, poetry-writing, donut-loving squirrel. Chaos ensues, and neither squirrel nor eleven-year-old are trivialized in the ensuing plot.

Quick-paced, with great illustrations, the book's prose is consistently varied and hilarious in its attempts to accommodate the multiple written worlds -- of comic strips, of science fiction, of romance novels, of poetry -- through which the characters interpret their lives. I'm sure kids will love it but really adults are the audience of the book. It permits us for 300 wacky improbable pages to imagine that all of the damage we inflict upon the children in our lives can be mitigated by windows that are always open -- even in winter -- and that when we say "I will always turn back to you," they will somehow find a way to know that we mean it.
]]> The Fairy Ring 12707214
Frances was nine when she first saw the fairies. They were tiny men, dressed all in green. Nobody but Frances saw them, so her cousin Elsie painted paper fairies and took photographs of them “dancing�� around Frances to make the grown-ups stop teasing. The girls promised each other they would never, ever tell that the photos weren’t real. But how were Frances and Elsie supposed to know that their photographs would fall into the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? And who would have dreamed that the man who created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes believed ardently in fairies �� and wanted very much to see one? Mary Losure presents this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family’s archives. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control.
Back matter includes source notes, a bibliography, and an index.]]> 192 Mary Losure 0763656704 Sara 3
I'm not sure if the entire book would engage a young reader. The beginning definitely draws you in with the skill of all the best of the child-out-of-their-elements beginning -- think Mary Lennox at the opening of A Secret Garden or Anne Shirley newly arrived in Avonlea. Some of the later chapters, which track the fall-out of the most interesting parts of the story, might be less engaging for the young reader.

Still, I think the narrative, even when relating historic detail, is most interested in the incandescence of young pre-adolescent and adolescent girls' imaginative lives, and I think that will appeal to a certain set of readers who like fairies and old photographs.]]> 3.51 2012 The Fairy Ring

author: Mary Losure
name: Sara
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2014/11/16
shelves:
review:
There aren't that many true stories about how an 11-year-old and 16-year-old girls cleverly get the best of all of established civilization, but this is one of them. And the best part about it is that it comes with truly beautiful photographs that are integral to the story.

I'm not sure if the entire book would engage a young reader. The beginning definitely draws you in with the skill of all the best of the child-out-of-their-elements beginning -- think Mary Lennox at the opening of A Secret Garden or Anne Shirley newly arrived in Avonlea. Some of the later chapters, which track the fall-out of the most interesting parts of the story, might be less engaging for the young reader.

Still, I think the narrative, even when relating historic detail, is most interested in the incandescence of young pre-adolescent and adolescent girls' imaginative lives, and I think that will appeal to a certain set of readers who like fairies and old photographs.
]]> <![CDATA[The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America]]> 17139513 El desmoronamiento narra los últimos treinta años de la historia de Estados Unidos, la época del declive americano, a través de las vidas de varias personas: Dean Price, hijo de granjeros, que se convierte en un abanderado de la nueva economía en el Sur rural; Tammy Thomas, una obrera del cinturón industrial del país que intenta sobrevivir al colapso de su ciudad; Jeff Connaughton, miembro del círculo político de Washington, que oscila entre el idealismo y el atractivo del dinero, y Peter Thiel, un multimillonario de Silicon Valley que cuestiona la importancia de internet y construye una visión radical del futuro. Packer entrelaza estas historias personales con perfiles biográficos de las grandes figuras públicas de la época, desde Newt Gingrich hasta el rapero Jay-Z, y con collages de titulares de periódico, lemas publicitarios y letras de canciones, que captan la evolución de los acontecimientos y sus corrientes subterráneas.

El desmoronamiento es el retrato de una superpotencia a punto de derrumbarse, con élites que ya no son élite, instituciones que ya no funcionan y la gente corriente abandonada a su suerte. La historia narrativa y caleidoscópica de la nueva América es la obra más ambiciosa publicada en mucho tiempo.]]> 448 George Packer 1466836954 Sara 3
Still, Packer is an engaging journalist, and while the micro-portraits he intersperses between chapters feel a bit like mean-spirited (ok, I loved the skewering of Alice Waters, but Newt Gingrich really does seem like low-hanging fruit at this point), the extended portraits he does of Tammy Thomas, Dean Price and the mortgage collapse in Tampa, Florida are highly worthwhile reading, especially because none of them turn out in the ideologically predictable ways you initially expect. Still, the whole book seems a bit over-celebrated for something that, in the end, is just one journalist writing from the sidelines. The most heartbreaking plot-line in the whole book is one in which a Tampa journalist uncovers the very tip of a massive mortgage fraud, and is told by his newspaper that there’s simply no way they have the resources to cover it. And so the story goes untold. Wouldn’t the better book to write have been one that dogged the perpetrators of the mortgage fraud to jail, rather than one that takes the hardly brave or controversial stand that Joe Biden is pretty self-centered and Oprah is selling her viewers false consciousness?

I want to accuse the book of being a rather innocuous piece of post-2008 financial disaster porn, designed to be consumed on a plane between business trips by a person who feels bad about it all, but hasn't stopped pursuing their own business as usual. But then -- if the figure of Dean Price doesn’t break your heart and make you love America a little more, you have a heart of stone. So maybe I am selling the book 20% short.
]]> 4.13 2013 The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

author: George Packer
name: Sara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2014/05/01
date added: 2014/10/05
shelves:
review:
I think it's pretty much cheating to try and chart the ideological shifts and social changes that led up to and followed 2008’s massive financial meltdown while packaging it as “the unwinding,�� because the trope relieves Packer of trying to tie it all together. See? he says. Here is a story of a factory worker taking early retirement in Youngstown, an achingly idealistic eco-entrepreneur in North Carolina, a sharp but slightly too small-town journalist in Tampa and a politico turned financial wizard in DC, and the reason I cannot offer you a broad overview of how they all are intertwined is because they all demonstrate a trend in which things can no longer be tied together. Not exactly the biggest news since William Yeats' best lacked all intensity as they spun around on the rinse cycle in the turning gyre.

Still, Packer is an engaging journalist, and while the micro-portraits he intersperses between chapters feel a bit like mean-spirited (ok, I loved the skewering of Alice Waters, but Newt Gingrich really does seem like low-hanging fruit at this point), the extended portraits he does of Tammy Thomas, Dean Price and the mortgage collapse in Tampa, Florida are highly worthwhile reading, especially because none of them turn out in the ideologically predictable ways you initially expect. Still, the whole book seems a bit over-celebrated for something that, in the end, is just one journalist writing from the sidelines. The most heartbreaking plot-line in the whole book is one in which a Tampa journalist uncovers the very tip of a massive mortgage fraud, and is told by his newspaper that there’s simply no way they have the resources to cover it. And so the story goes untold. Wouldn’t the better book to write have been one that dogged the perpetrators of the mortgage fraud to jail, rather than one that takes the hardly brave or controversial stand that Joe Biden is pretty self-centered and Oprah is selling her viewers false consciousness?

I want to accuse the book of being a rather innocuous piece of post-2008 financial disaster porn, designed to be consumed on a plane between business trips by a person who feels bad about it all, but hasn't stopped pursuing their own business as usual. But then -- if the figure of Dean Price doesn’t break your heart and make you love America a little more, you have a heart of stone. So maybe I am selling the book 20% short.

]]> Texas Girl 22428754 232 Robin Silbergleid 1927335388 Sara 5
Robin Silbergleid’s memoir of pursuing single motherhood in her late twenties is, in fact, all about the drive �� about wanting something fiercely, with a an irreducible purity of purpose. Consciously uninterested in WHY a 27-year old single woman would want to have a baby (after all �� what married, heterosexual woman would ever have to explain to anyone WHY she wanted a child?), the memoir instead charts the shape and force of the desire itself. As such, Silbergleid’s work clears out narrative space for anyone whose libido didn’t take them hurtling in the direction of an opposite sex partner, 2.5 kids, and a white picket fence. An expert in hearing and believing her own desires, Silbergleid ably produces for us sharp prose portraits of the alternate relationships, unexpected pitfalls and new rituals that go with wanting what very few people want. How do you pick out a sperm donor? And should you wear lipstick? What is the most effective gift for the nurse who assists in your insemination? And what words explain the cathexis that inevitably takes place between you and the medical doctor who conducts you toward what you want the most?

Silbergleid writes in a feminist tradition that seeks to restore subjectivity to mothers �� to present them as thinking agents of their own experience, rather than as madonnas on pedestals or all-devouring natural forces. Likewise, the press that publishes her book, Demeter Press, is committed to publishing all manner of works, creative and scholarly, on motherhood. But in departing from over-worn narratives about mothers, Silbergleid covers a lot of ground important to those of us who don’t think much about maternity at all. The book is a stunning document on the under-explored territory of adult friendship. Silbergleid provides an elegant catalog of the barely perceptible symptoms involved in the slow dying of a longterm friendship, and proves an equally acute observer of the friendships that do survive the wreckage of our non-normative desires. This is a memoir that will challenge you to consider the things you really want the most and maybe make it a little easier to say them out loud, in words that can be made into stories. It’s also a memoir that, like any story about drives and driving, goes fast and doesn’t let you off. I pulled my copy out of my mailbox at 5 PM and only became aware of the real world around 2 AM, when I’d finally turned the last page. It is a great read.
]]> 4.44 2014 Texas Girl

author: Robin Silbergleid
name: Sara
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/07/01
date added: 2014/07/24
shelves:
review:
“I didn’t believe in fate. I didn’t believe in ‘it will happen when it is supposed to happen.�� . . . I didn’t believe in anything but the drive.�� (139)

Robin Silbergleid’s memoir of pursuing single motherhood in her late twenties is, in fact, all about the drive �� about wanting something fiercely, with a an irreducible purity of purpose. Consciously uninterested in WHY a 27-year old single woman would want to have a baby (after all �� what married, heterosexual woman would ever have to explain to anyone WHY she wanted a child?), the memoir instead charts the shape and force of the desire itself. As such, Silbergleid’s work clears out narrative space for anyone whose libido didn’t take them hurtling in the direction of an opposite sex partner, 2.5 kids, and a white picket fence. An expert in hearing and believing her own desires, Silbergleid ably produces for us sharp prose portraits of the alternate relationships, unexpected pitfalls and new rituals that go with wanting what very few people want. How do you pick out a sperm donor? And should you wear lipstick? What is the most effective gift for the nurse who assists in your insemination? And what words explain the cathexis that inevitably takes place between you and the medical doctor who conducts you toward what you want the most?

Silbergleid writes in a feminist tradition that seeks to restore subjectivity to mothers �� to present them as thinking agents of their own experience, rather than as madonnas on pedestals or all-devouring natural forces. Likewise, the press that publishes her book, Demeter Press, is committed to publishing all manner of works, creative and scholarly, on motherhood. But in departing from over-worn narratives about mothers, Silbergleid covers a lot of ground important to those of us who don’t think much about maternity at all. The book is a stunning document on the under-explored territory of adult friendship. Silbergleid provides an elegant catalog of the barely perceptible symptoms involved in the slow dying of a longterm friendship, and proves an equally acute observer of the friendships that do survive the wreckage of our non-normative desires. This is a memoir that will challenge you to consider the things you really want the most and maybe make it a little easier to say them out loud, in words that can be made into stories. It’s also a memoir that, like any story about drives and driving, goes fast and doesn’t let you off. I pulled my copy out of my mailbox at 5 PM and only became aware of the real world around 2 AM, when I’d finally turned the last page. It is a great read.

]]> <![CDATA[The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)]]> 28187 Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Percy Jackson is a good kid, but he can't seem to focus on his schoolwork or control his temper. And lately, being away at boarding school is only getting worse - Percy could have sworn his pre-algebra teacher turned into a monster and tried to kill him. When Percy's mom finds out, she knows it's time that he knew the truth about where he came from, and that he go to the one place he'll be safe. She sends Percy to Camp Half Blood, a summer camp for demigods (on Long Island), where he learns that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea. Soon a mystery unfolds and together with his friends—one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena - Percy sets out on a quest across the United States to reach the gates of the Underworld (located in a recording studio in Hollywood) and prevent a catastrophic war between the gods.]]> 377 Rick Riordan 0786838655 Sara 3
Unsettlingly, its "all for the preservation of western culture!" ethos is a bit fascist. But then again, I'm the grown-up who is pleased that the 8 and 10 year old are going to remember all those greek gods.

Also, if you are a grown-up, reading this book should probably unsettle you with the clear analogies it draws between the landscape of divorced/ single parenting and the landscape of completely capricious pre-Christian gods.

Mostly, I just liked that they used a Vegas hotel as the site of the Land of the Lotus Eaters. That was very clever.]]> 4.31 2005 The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)

The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)

author: Rick Riordan
name: Sara
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2014/07/01
date added: 2014/07/18
shelves:
review:
Listened to this on a long car-ride with an 8 and 10 year old. 8 and 10 year old unambiguously loved it. IT IS SO HARRY POTTER DERIVATIVE. But then again, Harry Potter is derivative. And it has all those greek gods, whose identities and mythologies the 8 and 10 year old are going to remember so much better than I ever did, now.

Unsettlingly, its "all for the preservation of western culture!" ethos is a bit fascist. But then again, I'm the grown-up who is pleased that the 8 and 10 year old are going to remember all those greek gods.

Also, if you are a grown-up, reading this book should probably unsettle you with the clear analogies it draws between the landscape of divorced/ single parenting and the landscape of completely capricious pre-Christian gods.

Mostly, I just liked that they used a Vegas hotel as the site of the Land of the Lotus Eaters. That was very clever.
]]> <![CDATA[Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence]]> 7624893 —Rosalynn Carter ��
“Trust there is no better guide to caregiving.��
��—Bill Moyers ��
Gail Sheehy, author of the groundbreaking Passages —which was a New York Times bestseller for more than three years—now brings us Passages in Caregiving. In this essential guide, the acclaimed expert on the now aging Baby Boomer generation outlines nine crucial steps for effective, successful family caregiving, turning chaos into confidence during this most crucial of life stages. ��ձ�> 416 Gail Sheehy 0061661201 Sara 1
As a narrative of her husband's decline and death, it is oddly static and uncompelling. Despite the theme of "passages," her treatment of her husband depends on pretty much the same repeated "but he had such a booming voice! Writers looked up to him!" chorus, regardless of what's going on.

As an advice book, the volume is much, much worse. Caregivers need to take care of themselves. Really? I bet no caregiver thought of THAT ever, without first ponying up $14.95 for a book. The opening chapter advises the caregiver, "Breathe. Really. I know your mother always told you that, but she was right -- it really works."

And that is pretty much the caliber of this volume. Sheehy avails herself of every commonplace on longterm illness and dying floating around in the 21st century American ether, and then SELLS it to you because, folks, she lived through this while following Hilary Clinton around on the campaign trail, so she REALLY KNOWS. There are some pages where she rounds up possible services you could pay for, if you could afford them, and if you lived in a major metropolitan area where they are available. But if your problem happens to be that you can't afford to pay for an eldercare lawyer, or you don't live anywhere near one (or, if your problem doesn't actually involve the elderly, a scenario Sheehy claims to cover in her book but does not), then those lists probably are only going to make you feel more hopeless and frustrated.

But here's the deal: one of the ŷ�� reviewers commenting on this book already pointed out, geez, if it's this hard for a wealthy woman with lots of connections and lots of family to deal with the longterm decline of her husband, what hope is there for the rest of us? That's the real truth of this book. Caregiving *isn't* manageable without longterm significant damage. Not for the wealthiest, and certainly not for the rest of us. As a writer with both cultural capital and access to influential politicians, Sheehy would have been doing a lot more good to lobby for widespread changes in employment policies and health care than she could ever do packaging up completely useless comments into a commodity for which other caregivers now shell out their over-strapped cash.

]]> 4.11 2010 Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence

Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence

author: Gail Sheehy
name: Sara
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2010
rating: 1
read at: 2014/04/01
date added: 2014/05/04
shelves:
review:
This book should probably be called "Passages in caregiving for exceedingly well-connected and wealthy people, plus some advice on all the neat things you can buy to help you if you have money" It is chock-full of information on how to conduct a bi-coastal marriage when one of the partners is dying of cancer, how to deal with the heart-break of needing to sell your SECOND house when one of you needs around-the-clock care, how poignant it is when scores of grateful writers and students stream to visit with the sick spouse, the distress of figuring out how to take your partner to his favorite jazz club once he needs a wheelchair . . . in other words, situations most of Sheehy's readers would probably trade a kidney for.

As a narrative of her husband's decline and death, it is oddly static and uncompelling. Despite the theme of "passages," her treatment of her husband depends on pretty much the same repeated "but he had such a booming voice! Writers looked up to him!" chorus, regardless of what's going on.

As an advice book, the volume is much, much worse. Caregivers need to take care of themselves. Really? I bet no caregiver thought of THAT ever, without first ponying up $14.95 for a book. The opening chapter advises the caregiver, "Breathe. Really. I know your mother always told you that, but she was right -- it really works."

And that is pretty much the caliber of this volume. Sheehy avails herself of every commonplace on longterm illness and dying floating around in the 21st century American ether, and then SELLS it to you because, folks, she lived through this while following Hilary Clinton around on the campaign trail, so she REALLY KNOWS. There are some pages where she rounds up possible services you could pay for, if you could afford them, and if you lived in a major metropolitan area where they are available. But if your problem happens to be that you can't afford to pay for an eldercare lawyer, or you don't live anywhere near one (or, if your problem doesn't actually involve the elderly, a scenario Sheehy claims to cover in her book but does not), then those lists probably are only going to make you feel more hopeless and frustrated.

But here's the deal: one of the ŷ�� reviewers commenting on this book already pointed out, geez, if it's this hard for a wealthy woman with lots of connections and lots of family to deal with the longterm decline of her husband, what hope is there for the rest of us? That's the real truth of this book. Caregiving *isn't* manageable without longterm significant damage. Not for the wealthiest, and certainly not for the rest of us. As a writer with both cultural capital and access to influential politicians, Sheehy would have been doing a lot more good to lobby for widespread changes in employment policies and health care than she could ever do packaging up completely useless comments into a commodity for which other caregivers now shell out their over-strapped cash.

]]> <![CDATA[The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars, #1)]]> 18209454 From Rob Thomas, the creator of groundbreaking television series and movie Veronica Mars, comes the first book in a thrilling new mystery series.

Ten years after graduating from high school in Neptune, California, Veronica Mars is back in the land of sun, sand, crime, and corruption. She's traded in her law degree for her old private investigating license, struggling to keep Mars Investigations afloat on the scant cash earned by catching cheating spouses until she can score her first big case.

Now it's spring break, and college students descend on Neptune, transforming the beaches and boardwalks into a frenzied, week-long rave. When a girl disappears from a party, Veronica is called in to investigate. But this is not a simple missing person's case. The house the girl vanished from belongs to a man with serious criminal ties, and soon Veronica is plunged into a dangerous underworld of drugs and organized crime. And when a major break in the investigation has a shocking connection to Veronica's past, the case hits closer to home than she ever imagined.]]> 324 Rob Thomas 0804170703 Sara 3
So �� the upshot is this: It’s a perfectly serviceable book. I came away with a feeling of genuine admiration for Jennifer Graham, who I’m guessing did most of the heavy lifting in novelizing the plot. The book doesn’t do anything that would rub a fan the wrong way. This isn’t world-class mystery-writing, but it’s solid. It’s not completely predictable. It’s got twists. And it let me hang out with characters I really, really liked for a few more hours than I thought I ever would. But I can’t imagine why anyone who wasn’t addicted to the television show would read it. It provides you with all the basic background on the characters, but the character development in the book in no way stands on its own. And you don’t get the zingy delivery of lines that made the show satisfying. In fact, the book itself is pretty thin on clever dialogue, and what little it has just looks dumb on the page. I give Rob Thomas and Graham props for realizing that what might fly in a television show full of hip, ironic actors really doesn’t work in paper-back form.

And there’s something kind of flattening about the book’s choice to go with a third-person narration sticking almost entirely to Veronica’s point of view, rather than the traditional noir choice of first-person. It really deflates the character of the book, because you don’t have a whole lot of Veronica-speak. I can see why they made that choice �� who can write a whole book in Veronica-speak? And even if you could do it, would all the words just lie there limply on the page without Kristin Bell delivering them? At the same time, having that third-party narration, that mediator between us and Veronica’s viewpoint, that notification that we really are relying on someone else’s vantage to see what Veronica sees �� it inserts a thin wedge between the reader and the sort of fantasy experience that the audio-visual versions of Veronica provide. Just once too often it made me have to admit that, yeah, this was someone else making it all up.

But on the plus side, the book does deliver some of the emotional resonance that made the television show so compelling. (After all, if you were *only* interested in mystery, you’d be watching Law and Order, not Veronica Mars). Unfortunately, the book coasts on emotional depth established in the tv show �� it doesn’t create it on its own, so again, non-VM fans: out of luck. And I guess that’s the best you can expect from a book whose charge is to preserve a fictional universe without bothering anyone too much.

Anyway, I promise take all of my criticisms back if Graham and Thomas can just promise to have Veronica go full-on Occupy Wall Street in the next one. C’mon folks �� someone who has spent her entire adolescence with a front-row seat the rigging of the class system, who now has probably $300,000 in student loans to pay back and no cushy salary with which to do it? Get Tom Morello and Elizabeth Warren co-writing credits for the next volume, and Rob Thomas, I am yours for life.
]]> 3.97 2014 The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars, #1)

The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars, #1)

author: Rob Thomas
name: Sara
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/04/01
date added: 2014/04/07
shelves:
review:
Veronica Mars was pretty much my favorite television series ever. Then again, I don’t like tv that much, and I don’t even see a lot of movies. So on the one hand, I thought the series was fantastic, and even after having seen the movie, I’m not ready to let go of the characters. On the other hand, I am forced to admit that a book series based on a canceled tv series after its movie sequel comes out 8 years later �� that’s kind of weird.

So �� the upshot is this: It’s a perfectly serviceable book. I came away with a feeling of genuine admiration for Jennifer Graham, who I’m guessing did most of the heavy lifting in novelizing the plot. The book doesn’t do anything that would rub a fan the wrong way. This isn’t world-class mystery-writing, but it’s solid. It’s not completely predictable. It’s got twists. And it let me hang out with characters I really, really liked for a few more hours than I thought I ever would. But I can’t imagine why anyone who wasn’t addicted to the television show would read it. It provides you with all the basic background on the characters, but the character development in the book in no way stands on its own. And you don’t get the zingy delivery of lines that made the show satisfying. In fact, the book itself is pretty thin on clever dialogue, and what little it has just looks dumb on the page. I give Rob Thomas and Graham props for realizing that what might fly in a television show full of hip, ironic actors really doesn’t work in paper-back form.

And there’s something kind of flattening about the book’s choice to go with a third-person narration sticking almost entirely to Veronica’s point of view, rather than the traditional noir choice of first-person. It really deflates the character of the book, because you don’t have a whole lot of Veronica-speak. I can see why they made that choice �� who can write a whole book in Veronica-speak? And even if you could do it, would all the words just lie there limply on the page without Kristin Bell delivering them? At the same time, having that third-party narration, that mediator between us and Veronica’s viewpoint, that notification that we really are relying on someone else’s vantage to see what Veronica sees �� it inserts a thin wedge between the reader and the sort of fantasy experience that the audio-visual versions of Veronica provide. Just once too often it made me have to admit that, yeah, this was someone else making it all up.

But on the plus side, the book does deliver some of the emotional resonance that made the television show so compelling. (After all, if you were *only* interested in mystery, you’d be watching Law and Order, not Veronica Mars). Unfortunately, the book coasts on emotional depth established in the tv show �� it doesn’t create it on its own, so again, non-VM fans: out of luck. And I guess that’s the best you can expect from a book whose charge is to preserve a fictional universe without bothering anyone too much.

Anyway, I promise take all of my criticisms back if Graham and Thomas can just promise to have Veronica go full-on Occupy Wall Street in the next one. C’mon folks �� someone who has spent her entire adolescence with a front-row seat the rigging of the class system, who now has probably $300,000 in student loans to pay back and no cushy salary with which to do it? Get Tom Morello and Elizabeth Warren co-writing credits for the next volume, and Rob Thomas, I am yours for life.

]]> Cat’s Eye 51019 Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, and artist, and woman—but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knots of her life.]]> 462 Margaret Atwood 0385491026 Sara 3
But wow -- this book was too long. A first-person-narrated kunstlerroman (kind of) about an artist who stumbles into her role as "important feminist painter," the book does a nice job of showing how art might evolve out of all manner of contingencies, but often winds up leading a public life under a more monolithic label (such as "feminist"), the relevance of which might not have much to do with the artist's process of creation.

And the book does a compelling job of showing how a variety of pressures -- the end of World War II, a love of the natural world, the psychological damage of bullying -- lead our heroine to feminism as a social movement, full as it is of other people whose motivations and attraction to feminist ideals seem somewhat inexplicable to her. It's a nice redemption of feminism from the "all feminists think X" formulation.

HOWEVER -- in erring on the side of contingency in feminist formation, the book also errs wildly on the side of the completely meaningless detail, buttressed by the banal. Yes, the topography of the heroine's childhood neighborhood, as suburbia is forged out of pasture land, is nicely done, bringing a historical moment together with the natural world. But the constant childhood observations of "boys do this/ girls do this. Boys do this/ girls do this" which ostensibly foreshadow our narrator's feminist apotheosis is entirely predictable. Boys smell funny, tell each other gross stories, play competitively with marbles and read comic books? I don't actually need to see that from the point of view of a seven-year-old. I get it already.

I also couldn't help but feel, two-thirds of the way through the book, that Atwood's choice of a visual artist as protagonist was inept. Each of our narrator's own paintings, as she describes them, are paintings with a story, ones she gradually unfolds to us in language, not pictures. With so many words, the narrator herself doesn't seem to believe that visual images were competent to deliver this story in the first place. ]]> 3.95 1988 Cat’s Eye

author: Margaret Atwood
name: Sara
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1988
rating: 3
read at: 2013/11/01
date added: 2014/03/17
shelves:
review:
I am a patient woman with a deep love of long books who almost never says, wow, that book was too long.

But wow -- this book was too long. A first-person-narrated kunstlerroman (kind of) about an artist who stumbles into her role as "important feminist painter," the book does a nice job of showing how art might evolve out of all manner of contingencies, but often winds up leading a public life under a more monolithic label (such as "feminist"), the relevance of which might not have much to do with the artist's process of creation.

And the book does a compelling job of showing how a variety of pressures -- the end of World War II, a love of the natural world, the psychological damage of bullying -- lead our heroine to feminism as a social movement, full as it is of other people whose motivations and attraction to feminist ideals seem somewhat inexplicable to her. It's a nice redemption of feminism from the "all feminists think X" formulation.

HOWEVER -- in erring on the side of contingency in feminist formation, the book also errs wildly on the side of the completely meaningless detail, buttressed by the banal. Yes, the topography of the heroine's childhood neighborhood, as suburbia is forged out of pasture land, is nicely done, bringing a historical moment together with the natural world. But the constant childhood observations of "boys do this/ girls do this. Boys do this/ girls do this" which ostensibly foreshadow our narrator's feminist apotheosis is entirely predictable. Boys smell funny, tell each other gross stories, play competitively with marbles and read comic books? I don't actually need to see that from the point of view of a seven-year-old. I get it already.

I also couldn't help but feel, two-thirds of the way through the book, that Atwood's choice of a visual artist as protagonist was inept. Each of our narrator's own paintings, as she describes them, are paintings with a story, ones she gradually unfolds to us in language, not pictures. With so many words, the narrator herself doesn't seem to believe that visual images were competent to deliver this story in the first place.
]]> <![CDATA[The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration]]> 8171378
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration�� within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.]]> 622 Isabel Wilkerson 0679444327 Sara 5
Wilkerson's great accomplishment, in terms of her historical argument, is presenting the twentieth-century migration of black Americans as comparable to the experiences of migrants coming to America from other countries. They too came from the agricultural old world, with its communal values and its strange and superstitious folkways, to the new world of urban modernity, crowded indifference and radical individuality. Here is the progress they made through hard work and and a raw determination so strong that it often alienated the very children for whom they made the change. By putting the 20th century black experience into the paradigm through which we understand the largely white-dominated American immigrant phenomenon, she makes visible much of what is assumed to somehow not exist in African-American communities -- a long history of individual initiative and agency, a background of commitment to family, a belief in America's promise of upward mobility. Wilkerson's argues fiercely that black participants in the great migration were *not* the traumatized, uneducated, drifting victims of racism and agricultural collapse that the sociological studies and government reports of the sixties and seventies tended to assume they were. In fact, she argues against that assumption so fiercely that at times it seems as if the whole point of her book is merely to celebrate the grit, the character, the triumph of the human spirit of the three main subjects of her book. They believed in personal responsibility, dammit, and they improved their lives as a result. They did, indeed, walk through three feet of snow just to get to work. Uphill. Both ways. And they LIKED it.

But if that is the foreground of Wilkerson's book, the backdrop is unmistakeably one in which the urban north (and west) practiced a racism that was deeply pernicious, if not as overt as it was in the south. Union practices and housing policies emerge as the two most viciously damaging racist structures that kept new black arrivals from getting ahead, even when they worked just as hard, were just as committed to their families, and had (as Wilkerson proves) more education than the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans who were their newly arrived counterparts in the big cities. Housing policies in particular, come off as so central to what kept urban blacks from cashing in on the American dream that I think I will try to read Beryl Satter's _Family Properties_ next, as I've been promised I can get more information on race and real estate there. Will it be as gripping as Wilkerson's book? No. People, NOTHING is going to be as gripping as Wilkerson's book is. ]]> 4.45 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Sara
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/01
date added: 2014/03/16
shelves:
review:
If you'll excuse my lack of creativity in opening lines, this book is really, really, really absorbing. Isabel Wilkerson is pretty much the mad genius of oral history, intertwining the life stories of three very distinct, very vivid, deeply memorable black Americans who left the south, one for New York, one for Chicago, one for LA. White readers will doubtlessly say all kinds of self-congratulatory stuff after having read this book, like, oh, the great migration is such an important and under-reported piece of American history, and my god, I never really understood how damn much racism blacks had to live through, even in the north, just to have the chance to work a job, live in a house and not get killed. And yeah, the book will teach you that too. But really, the reason you kept turning the 600+ pages of this book is not because you are some righteous American committed to the fair recording of all peoples' histories, but because you couldn't put it down. The stories are just too good. If you are looking for a book for a long plane ride that will make you forget you are on a plane, and that will suddenly make you see the houses, stores and roads of your everyday world through the eyes of the characters you've been spending so much time with -- this is that book. Read it.

Wilkerson's great accomplishment, in terms of her historical argument, is presenting the twentieth-century migration of black Americans as comparable to the experiences of migrants coming to America from other countries. They too came from the agricultural old world, with its communal values and its strange and superstitious folkways, to the new world of urban modernity, crowded indifference and radical individuality. Here is the progress they made through hard work and and a raw determination so strong that it often alienated the very children for whom they made the change. By putting the 20th century black experience into the paradigm through which we understand the largely white-dominated American immigrant phenomenon, she makes visible much of what is assumed to somehow not exist in African-American communities -- a long history of individual initiative and agency, a background of commitment to family, a belief in America's promise of upward mobility. Wilkerson's argues fiercely that black participants in the great migration were *not* the traumatized, uneducated, drifting victims of racism and agricultural collapse that the sociological studies and government reports of the sixties and seventies tended to assume they were. In fact, she argues against that assumption so fiercely that at times it seems as if the whole point of her book is merely to celebrate the grit, the character, the triumph of the human spirit of the three main subjects of her book. They believed in personal responsibility, dammit, and they improved their lives as a result. They did, indeed, walk through three feet of snow just to get to work. Uphill. Both ways. And they LIKED it.

But if that is the foreground of Wilkerson's book, the backdrop is unmistakeably one in which the urban north (and west) practiced a racism that was deeply pernicious, if not as overt as it was in the south. Union practices and housing policies emerge as the two most viciously damaging racist structures that kept new black arrivals from getting ahead, even when they worked just as hard, were just as committed to their families, and had (as Wilkerson proves) more education than the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans who were their newly arrived counterparts in the big cities. Housing policies in particular, come off as so central to what kept urban blacks from cashing in on the American dream that I think I will try to read Beryl Satter's _Family Properties_ next, as I've been promised I can get more information on race and real estate there. Will it be as gripping as Wilkerson's book? No. People, NOTHING is going to be as gripping as Wilkerson's book is.
]]> <![CDATA[Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder]]> 421518 Get Me Out of Here, reveals what mental illness looks and feels like from the inside, and how healing from borderline personality disorder is possible through intensive therapy and the support of loved ones. A mother, wife, and working professional, Reiland was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the age of 29—a diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and promiscuity. A truly riveting read with a hopeful message.]]> 436 Rachel Reiland 1592850995 Sara 4
This is perhaps the best memoir of this genre I have read for demonstrating that discipline is needed for full recovery from mental illness -- but also for carefully pointing out that what most people think of as "discipline" -- pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, "behaving," punishing yourself for misdeeds -- is actually a part of mental illness. In this book, real and healthy discipline always emerges as a part of one's membership in a community that really loves and values you.]]> 3.94 2002 Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder

Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder

author: Rachel Reiland
name: Sara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2014/01/12
shelves:
review:
I thought about not putting this on my reviews, because my penchant for mental health recovery memoirs is getting embarrassing, but -- this one was really good. Not falling into the fallacy of the "moment I was saved" nor falling into the "but I was a victim of my bad brain chemistry/ abusive childhood," Reiland narrates rather unemotionally what it takes to get from crazy to sane. In her case what it took was a loving, patient partner, a committed, ethical therapist who didn't buy into the health insurance industry's "20 sessions and then you're sane" rule, a community of people around her (sympathetic priests, a church choir, and a softball team all make contributions to Reiland's recovery). And most importantly, as Reiland stresses again and again, it takes commitment from the crazy person herself. She's very clear-eyed in distinguishing between the moments when she wanted to wallow in her sickness, and the decision she had to make every day that she was going to get better. Not one time, but the same decision every single day for four or five years.

This is perhaps the best memoir of this genre I have read for demonstrating that discipline is needed for full recovery from mental illness -- but also for carefully pointing out that what most people think of as "discipline" -- pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, "behaving," punishing yourself for misdeeds -- is actually a part of mental illness. In this book, real and healthy discipline always emerges as a part of one's membership in a community that really loves and values you.
]]> <![CDATA[Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me]]> 13542990 Cartoonist Ellen Forney explores the relationship between "crazy" and "creative" in this graphic memoir of her bipolar disorder, woven with stories of famous bipolar artists and writers.

Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.

Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to "cure" an otherwise brilliant mind.

Darkly funny and intensely personal, Forney's memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on an artist's work, as she shares her own story through bold black-and-white images and evocative prose.]]> 256 Ellen Forney 1592407323 Sara 3
Not true, readers will protest. She structures large portions of her book around her fears that controlling her depression will wind up sapping her of any artistic genius. Um, yeah. That's true. She spills a lot of ink on that. But her ultimate resolution of the issue is an astonishingly dry exploration through "the research" -- papers on creativity, biographies of artists and writers whom we think might have been bi-polar, popular books on depression. In fact, chapter 8, which is structured as the denouement of this struggle, is the least innovative -- and indeed the least graphic -- of the entire graphic novel. We get illustrations of the head of Forney surrounded by thought bubbles, then graphs, then some flow charts, then some more thought bubbles. That's it. The struggle she's having over her illness is just a struggle to organize the research in the right kind of way -- not a struggle to truly rearrange her entire understanding of what it means to be an individual human being with thoughts and impulses severely impacted by a chemistry beyond her control.

And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the young 20-something reader at which this book is aimed will thrive, will better understand their peers, will be more tolerant citizens for this attitude.

But it seems like something's been lost, some territory has been ceded. At the very beginning of the book, Forney peers into the DSM-IV's definition of bi-polar depression and says of herself "My own brilliant, unique personality was outlined right there, in that inanimate stack of paper. My personality reflected a DISORDER -- SHARED by a group of people" (19). Surely this sense of the "consumer" being reduced, dismissed, and homogenized should be part of the conversation about all sorts of mental illness. But in her sincere and well-placed efforts to be reassuring about mental illness as manageable without any sacrifice of selfhood, Forney sidesteps some of the thorniest questions that the construct of "mental illness" raises about identity in the modern world. ]]> 4.01 2012 Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me

author: Ellen Forney
name: Sara
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/11/01
date added: 2014/01/08
shelves:
review:
If I was rating this book for earnest good intentions and an ability to stay engaging while also outlining the basics of what you need to know about bi-polar depression, it would absolutely have 5 stars -- probably 6. It kind of makes me happy to think that there is a whole population of millennials out there whose first mental-health memoir is this book, because it's just so darn upbeat for a book about excruciating illness. For one thing, in marked contrast to its acknowledged forebears -- Kay Redfield Jameson's _An Unquiet Mind_ and William Styron's _Darkness Visible_ -- it is entirely divorced from a sense that Forney's illness exists in continuity with any childhood identity or life experience. A bohemian, loving mom divorced from an awkward but supportive dad feature in her memoir, but the childhood moments she briefly mentions reveal no early sense of wrongness, no dark hints of trauma, no secret fears. Bi-polar depression seems, for Forney, to be just this illness that she got, that she has to take medicine for, that is really super-inconvenient and occasionally embarrassing. It would be difficult, in fact to distinguish this book from say, a memoir about Parkinson's Disease, both peppered with advice about medical options for controlling your symptoms and staying positive.

Not true, readers will protest. She structures large portions of her book around her fears that controlling her depression will wind up sapping her of any artistic genius. Um, yeah. That's true. She spills a lot of ink on that. But her ultimate resolution of the issue is an astonishingly dry exploration through "the research" -- papers on creativity, biographies of artists and writers whom we think might have been bi-polar, popular books on depression. In fact, chapter 8, which is structured as the denouement of this struggle, is the least innovative -- and indeed the least graphic -- of the entire graphic novel. We get illustrations of the head of Forney surrounded by thought bubbles, then graphs, then some flow charts, then some more thought bubbles. That's it. The struggle she's having over her illness is just a struggle to organize the research in the right kind of way -- not a struggle to truly rearrange her entire understanding of what it means to be an individual human being with thoughts and impulses severely impacted by a chemistry beyond her control.

And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the young 20-something reader at which this book is aimed will thrive, will better understand their peers, will be more tolerant citizens for this attitude.

But it seems like something's been lost, some territory has been ceded. At the very beginning of the book, Forney peers into the DSM-IV's definition of bi-polar depression and says of herself "My own brilliant, unique personality was outlined right there, in that inanimate stack of paper. My personality reflected a DISORDER -- SHARED by a group of people" (19). Surely this sense of the "consumer" being reduced, dismissed, and homogenized should be part of the conversation about all sorts of mental illness. But in her sincere and well-placed efforts to be reassuring about mental illness as manageable without any sacrifice of selfhood, Forney sidesteps some of the thorniest questions that the construct of "mental illness" raises about identity in the modern world.
]]> <![CDATA[The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business]]> 12609433
Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.]]> 375 Charles Duhigg 1400069289 Sara 2
The first three chapters of the book are a moderately interesting magazine article on what we know about how habits are formed in individuals. They provide a primitive but workable way to think about our own habits, especially those we'd like to change.

As soon as Duhigg shifts into contextualizing habits in a broader culture, however, things start to fall apart. When he tells the story of Paul O'Neill changing fundamental habits during his time as Alcoa's CEO, one has to think that the main point of the story isn't about *habits* so much as it is about *values.* Paul O'Neill made employee safety the number one priority during his years at Alcoa, which required a massive change in work habits for everyone in the company. HOWEVER, one is tempted to suggest that these changes became permanent not because of some value-neutral structure of "habit," but because finally, management and workers were both proceeding from a fundamental value on which they could both agree.

Similarly, in his analysis of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, his classification of the bus boycott as a "habit" seems wildly misplaced. People rallied behind Rosa Parks because she had proven herself trustworthy and highly engaged in the community. That's what Aristotle would call the power of "ethos" -- the power to make an audience believe in you, because you've proven yourself to be the kind of person who says right things. I'm still kind of confused about what it might have to do with habit.

At any rate, the first 60 pages are good, so if you think the topic sounds compelling, buy the hardback second-hand or wait for it to come out in paper-back. And do stop to consider the possibility that not everything is about habit, no matter what Charles Duhigg says.]]> 4.13 2012 The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

author: Charles Duhigg
name: Sara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
review:
I'd have to think that the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal find this a notable book largely because the print is big, the stories are simple, and it has the nice, upbeat, pro-capitalist mood that makes it a fitting Christmas present for all of your employees if you are the head of a company with more than 60 workers. I read it in the time it took me to fly from south Florida to the central upper midwest, which I imagine is the amount of time most capitalists find it appropriate for their workers to read in a given month.

The first three chapters of the book are a moderately interesting magazine article on what we know about how habits are formed in individuals. They provide a primitive but workable way to think about our own habits, especially those we'd like to change.

As soon as Duhigg shifts into contextualizing habits in a broader culture, however, things start to fall apart. When he tells the story of Paul O'Neill changing fundamental habits during his time as Alcoa's CEO, one has to think that the main point of the story isn't about *habits* so much as it is about *values.* Paul O'Neill made employee safety the number one priority during his years at Alcoa, which required a massive change in work habits for everyone in the company. HOWEVER, one is tempted to suggest that these changes became permanent not because of some value-neutral structure of "habit," but because finally, management and workers were both proceeding from a fundamental value on which they could both agree.

Similarly, in his analysis of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, his classification of the bus boycott as a "habit" seems wildly misplaced. People rallied behind Rosa Parks because she had proven herself trustworthy and highly engaged in the community. That's what Aristotle would call the power of "ethos" -- the power to make an audience believe in you, because you've proven yourself to be the kind of person who says right things. I'm still kind of confused about what it might have to do with habit.

At any rate, the first 60 pages are good, so if you think the topic sounds compelling, buy the hardback second-hand or wait for it to come out in paper-back. And do stop to consider the possibility that not everything is about habit, no matter what Charles Duhigg says.
]]> <![CDATA[In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)]]> 237209
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.]]> 429 Tana French 0670038601 Sara 4
But that said, the thematic coherence of the book is finely wrought, not something that hits the reader over the head. What kept me engaged was almost entirely character-based. Even the "central" mystery driving the plot was not as compelling as just hanging out with the characters to see what they would say next. ]]> 3.75 2007 In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1)

author: Tana French
name: Sara
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2013/11/01
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
review:
This book is as good as everyone promised it would be -- a satisfying mystery woven out of terribly good prose. But far more than the mystery plot, it's the book's structure -- told in one voice, from one point of view, that is the most hypnotic. In her first-person narrator, Adam Ryan, French personifies the book's central preoccupation: everyone misinterprets the actual plot in which they are caught. Think you are in a plot about exorcising your childhood demons? You might actually be in a plot about forcing other people to live through entirely different pasts. Think you are having a work plot? Actually, you are having an intimate family plot. Think you are having a romance plot? Are you sure that romance plot involves you? And Ireland, as you ride that Celtic Tiger, you think you are having a plot of national redemption, but you are actually only having a plot about once again being caught up in international monetary interests that barely even understand that you exist.

But that said, the thematic coherence of the book is finely wrought, not something that hits the reader over the head. What kept me engaged was almost entirely character-based. Even the "central" mystery driving the plot was not as compelling as just hanging out with the characters to see what they would say next.
]]> <![CDATA[Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx]]> 385255 Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.

Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.]]> 409 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 0743254430 Sara 5
What you get instead from this book is a sense of the strong networks of *people* that shape individual lives in the Bronx, in households without access to money or cultural capital (another phrase that LeBlanc's subjects absolutely would not use). Every household is embedded in a radiating family of siblings' fathers, their aunts and uncles, your brother's posse, their girlfriends and their babies, the drug dealer who stands in front of your building, his boss, And sometimes just the girl who was good friends with your sister before she went to jail, and her kids, and now your sister's kids who she's taking care of. The political right might say what it wants about the poor needing to have more family values, but no one in this book lacks in family loyalty. In fact, in ways that LeBlanc draws into relief, most of their problems *stem* from the fact that no one gets left behind, no one ever gets thrown out of the family system, anyone in terrible trouble gets their $40, even if it means going to the loan shark who will charge you 100% interest. Basically, this is a book about raw, throbbing, naked family values and all of the damage and confusion and horror they create.

But it's also a book that's about dressing up to go out dancing, cooking an enormous Puerto Rican meal that smells so good that the guys out on the roof ask if they can buy some, getting a tattoo with your boyfriend's name on it, joking around with the neighborhood kids, being desperately in love, creating your own secret world with your lover right there in the bed where the two of you sleep, writing letters to friends, knowing everyone on your block, and loving that teeny baby so hard you think your heart is going to burst. Poverty and dysfunction don't come in unrelenting black and white colors, and, like all people in the world, everyone in the book has dreams and preferences and pleasures that make them genuinely interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I had trouble doing anything else but reading this book across a 48-hour period. LeBlanc knows how to tell a story.

And she also knows how to create suspense while avoiding any predictable plot lines. This book ends, as it begins, with a 16-year old girl. Even as you put it down you will still be wondering how it all turns out. But, in contrast to the language of sociology and bureaucracy that trucks in "outcomes" and "end results," LeBlanc's answer is that it doesn't end. Who, with dreams and an interest in tomorrow, thinks of their life as "ending up" at any one given point? ]]> 4.27 2003 Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

author: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
name: Sara
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
Adrian LeBlanc spent over a decade getting to know a network of people from the Bronx, and then wrote a book in which she tried her best to report their lives as *they* understood them. So you get the inside scoop on people whose lives you will feel tempted to explain with terms like "addiction" and "codependency" and "poverty" and "drug war" and "child abuse" but you won't ever see those terms unless one of the people she is describing uses them. Which they rarely do, because, get serious, middle class reader: even you, who know these terms, do not actually feel that the causes and consequences that shape your own life can be boiled down to abstractions.

What you get instead from this book is a sense of the strong networks of *people* that shape individual lives in the Bronx, in households without access to money or cultural capital (another phrase that LeBlanc's subjects absolutely would not use). Every household is embedded in a radiating family of siblings' fathers, their aunts and uncles, your brother's posse, their girlfriends and their babies, the drug dealer who stands in front of your building, his boss, And sometimes just the girl who was good friends with your sister before she went to jail, and her kids, and now your sister's kids who she's taking care of. The political right might say what it wants about the poor needing to have more family values, but no one in this book lacks in family loyalty. In fact, in ways that LeBlanc draws into relief, most of their problems *stem* from the fact that no one gets left behind, no one ever gets thrown out of the family system, anyone in terrible trouble gets their $40, even if it means going to the loan shark who will charge you 100% interest. Basically, this is a book about raw, throbbing, naked family values and all of the damage and confusion and horror they create.

But it's also a book that's about dressing up to go out dancing, cooking an enormous Puerto Rican meal that smells so good that the guys out on the roof ask if they can buy some, getting a tattoo with your boyfriend's name on it, joking around with the neighborhood kids, being desperately in love, creating your own secret world with your lover right there in the bed where the two of you sleep, writing letters to friends, knowing everyone on your block, and loving that teeny baby so hard you think your heart is going to burst. Poverty and dysfunction don't come in unrelenting black and white colors, and, like all people in the world, everyone in the book has dreams and preferences and pleasures that make them genuinely interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I had trouble doing anything else but reading this book across a 48-hour period. LeBlanc knows how to tell a story.

And she also knows how to create suspense while avoiding any predictable plot lines. This book ends, as it begins, with a 16-year old girl. Even as you put it down you will still be wondering how it all turns out. But, in contrast to the language of sociology and bureaucracy that trucks in "outcomes" and "end results," LeBlanc's answer is that it doesn't end. Who, with dreams and an interest in tomorrow, thinks of their life as "ending up" at any one given point?
]]> <![CDATA[Lost Girls: An American Mystery: An Examination of the Lives of the Victims of the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer �� Explore the Story Behind the Case as the Trial Unfolds]]> 16248146 Lost Girls is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.]]> 399 Robert Kolker 006218363X Sara 4
The second part of the book focuses on the murder investigation that ensues when all five women's bodies are found buried on a barrier island off of Long Island. It's not as interesting simply because there isn't much to tell -- the guys who seem to be the most likely suspects don't seem to have been investigated that thoroughly. The inhabitants of the isolated beach community where the bodies were found are somewhat zany and strange, but Kolker really doesn't have enough access to them to unravel what their eccentricities might tell us about the murders.

I really think this is the necessary companion book for Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_. The women in this book are champions of Sandberg's ethic -- they took responsibility for their own careers, didn't assume they could take time off for having babies, they negotiated pricing unapologetically, arranged for their own protection, eyed their competition warily, and had their minds on improving their trade. And, oh yeah -- they also got killed. If feminists are really going to have the conversation that Sandberg is trying to start, then we should probably include a fully representative sample of business women in our conversations.]]> 3.59 2013 Lost Girls: An American Mystery: An Examination of the Lives of the Victims of the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer – Explore the Story Behind the Case as the Trial Unfolds

Lost Girls: An American Mystery: An Examination of the Lives of the Victims of the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer – Explore the Story Behind the Case as the Trial Unfolds

author: Robert Kolker
name: Sara
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
The first part of this book was a very vivid, very gripping account of five rather young women, and what had led them to conduct a business in which they exchanged sex for money, primarily setting up their business deals over the internet. I give Kolker a lot of credit for truly rounding out the stories of women whose stories rarely get told, and making them likable without trying to cast them as saints.

The second part of the book focuses on the murder investigation that ensues when all five women's bodies are found buried on a barrier island off of Long Island. It's not as interesting simply because there isn't much to tell -- the guys who seem to be the most likely suspects don't seem to have been investigated that thoroughly. The inhabitants of the isolated beach community where the bodies were found are somewhat zany and strange, but Kolker really doesn't have enough access to them to unravel what their eccentricities might tell us about the murders.

I really think this is the necessary companion book for Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_. The women in this book are champions of Sandberg's ethic -- they took responsibility for their own careers, didn't assume they could take time off for having babies, they negotiated pricing unapologetically, arranged for their own protection, eyed their competition warily, and had their minds on improving their trade. And, oh yeah -- they also got killed. If feminists are really going to have the conversation that Sandberg is trying to start, then we should probably include a fully representative sample of business women in our conversations.
]]> <![CDATA[Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things]]> 7550814
Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study hoarding when they began their work a decade ago; they expected to find a few sufferers but ended up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of others. Now they explore the compulsion through a series of compelling case studies in the vein of Oliver Sacks. With vivid portraits that show us the traits by which you can identify a hoarder's piles on sofas and beds that make the furniture useless, houses that can be navigated only by following small paths called goat trails, vast piles of paper that the hoarders "churn" but never discard, even collections of animals and garbage; Frost and Steketee illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all of us. Whether we're savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, very few of us are in fact free of the impulses that drive hoarders to the extremes in which they live.

For all of us with complicated relationships to our things, Stuff answers the question of what happens when our stuff starts to own us.

]]> 290 Randy O. Frost 015101423X Sara 4
So, yeah. If you're wondering what would possess people to hoard years worth of newspapers, unlabeled videotapes and neatly folded, empty shopping bags to the point of being unable to use entire rooms in their houses, the first place you might look is at what "normal" people are doing with their stuff. Or you might consider what happens to our need for an irreducible particularity in the age of mass production; one hoarder in this book reported feeling overwhelmed by a sense that she had unfairly singled out one empty yogurt cup when she put it in the garbage -- what made that yogurt cup disposable, when another yogurt cup with all of the same attributes might have been saved somewhere else by someone else? Or you might consider the absolute arbitrariness of the boundaries that demarcate what we consider "me" and what we consider "not me." If your finger is "you," why is the object it just touched "not you"?

Hoarders take these questions seriously and Frost and Steketee do an outstanding job of outlining the challenges hoarding poses to some of our most basic assumptions about identity and ethics. They also do an elegant job of not reducing hoarding to just one thing. From the 16-year-old former foster child who compulsively steals objects from people she loves to the aging fashion designer who has requested so many clothes from industry colleagues that it can take him hours to get dressed; from the traumatized woman who crammed a room full of stuff that also, not coincidentally, happened to be the room in which she was assaulted by an intruder, to the successful, gregarious career woman who only confronts her hoarding when her ex-husband threatens to take her children away, hoarding isn't limited to just one mindset exhibited by a clearly identifiable "type."

Unfortunately for any concerned relatives or friends of hoarders who might read this book, being a relative or a friend of a hoarder *does* seem to be mostly one thing -- a feeling of profound despair, a wild urge to throw out everything the hoarder has, absolutely everything, no matter what it is, start again, commit to cleanliness, drive out all of the silver fish and roaches and rats and mold and dust. And yet, there's huge amounts of data that show that a clean-out on this scale often leads to severe depression in the hoarders, psychotic breaks, and even, in the case of older hoarders, death. Still -- children of hoarders have poor long-term outcomes and often -- like the children of other addicts -- leave home early rather than deal with their parent's disorders. Hoarders' marriages rarely last. When they have a choice, hoarders avoid family who are judgmental about their "stuff." Frost and Steketee illuminate how hoarders think, but they haven't yet found the tools that might help bridge the gulf between hoarders and the people who are trying desperately to find a safe but workable way to keep them in their lives.]]> 3.89 2010 Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

author: Randy O. Frost
name: Sara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
"Forty years ago, facilities for storing unused personal possessions were virtually nonexistent. Now nearly two billion square feet of space can be rented for storage in more than forty-five thousand facilities, and most of that space is already full. In March 2007, the New York Times reported that self-storage unit rentals had increased by 90 percent since 1995" (263).

So, yeah. If you're wondering what would possess people to hoard years worth of newspapers, unlabeled videotapes and neatly folded, empty shopping bags to the point of being unable to use entire rooms in their houses, the first place you might look is at what "normal" people are doing with their stuff. Or you might consider what happens to our need for an irreducible particularity in the age of mass production; one hoarder in this book reported feeling overwhelmed by a sense that she had unfairly singled out one empty yogurt cup when she put it in the garbage -- what made that yogurt cup disposable, when another yogurt cup with all of the same attributes might have been saved somewhere else by someone else? Or you might consider the absolute arbitrariness of the boundaries that demarcate what we consider "me" and what we consider "not me." If your finger is "you," why is the object it just touched "not you"?

Hoarders take these questions seriously and Frost and Steketee do an outstanding job of outlining the challenges hoarding poses to some of our most basic assumptions about identity and ethics. They also do an elegant job of not reducing hoarding to just one thing. From the 16-year-old former foster child who compulsively steals objects from people she loves to the aging fashion designer who has requested so many clothes from industry colleagues that it can take him hours to get dressed; from the traumatized woman who crammed a room full of stuff that also, not coincidentally, happened to be the room in which she was assaulted by an intruder, to the successful, gregarious career woman who only confronts her hoarding when her ex-husband threatens to take her children away, hoarding isn't limited to just one mindset exhibited by a clearly identifiable "type."

Unfortunately for any concerned relatives or friends of hoarders who might read this book, being a relative or a friend of a hoarder *does* seem to be mostly one thing -- a feeling of profound despair, a wild urge to throw out everything the hoarder has, absolutely everything, no matter what it is, start again, commit to cleanliness, drive out all of the silver fish and roaches and rats and mold and dust. And yet, there's huge amounts of data that show that a clean-out on this scale often leads to severe depression in the hoarders, psychotic breaks, and even, in the case of older hoarders, death. Still -- children of hoarders have poor long-term outcomes and often -- like the children of other addicts -- leave home early rather than deal with their parent's disorders. Hoarders' marriages rarely last. When they have a choice, hoarders avoid family who are judgmental about their "stuff." Frost and Steketee illuminate how hoarders think, but they haven't yet found the tools that might help bridge the gulf between hoarders and the people who are trying desperately to find a safe but workable way to keep them in their lives.
]]> <![CDATA[Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale for the Holidays]]> 941051 Every Person On The Planet is hilarious, touching, thoughtful, and uniquely beautiful. We think this is an altogether perfect book and you will too.]]> 128 Bruce Eric Kaplan 0743274709 Sara 5 3.70 2005 Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale for the Holidays

Every Person on the Planet: An Only Somewhat Anxiety-Filled Tale for the Holidays

author: Bruce Eric Kaplan
name: Sara
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
Edmund and Rosemary (but not their cat Dalia) feel socially obligated to throw a party, but like the rest of us, are kind of neurotic and hamstrung between inclination and etiquette. The results are both a transcendent sense of unity with one's fellow beings and a lot of dirty dishes and anxiety about those tiny quiches. This book might make you brave enough to throw that party you've almost talked yourself out of having.
]]> <![CDATA[Pigs in Heaven (Greer Family, #2)]]> 14250 343 Barbara Kingsolver 0571171788 Sara 3 4.00 1993

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Sara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2013/06/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
Oh, geez, I love Barbara Kingsolver for the way she can really *use* the random, completely ignored person you totally forgot to notice at the rest-stop off of I-90 and turn them into a fully fleshed out, eccentric, short-tempered but essentially good-hearted example of why there's hope for humanity. But why does the punchline to all of her books have to be that we don't need to worry about the racial lines that divide us because eventually one character or another is just going to wind up discovering that they ARE biologically and actually, members of the same ethnic or cultural group with whom they are having conflicts?
]]> Animal Dreams 77262 Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. With this work, the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland and Other Stories sustains her familiar voice while giving readers her most remarkable book yet.]]> 342 Barbara Kingsolver 0060921145 Sara 1 4.07 1990 Animal Dreams

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Sara
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1990
rating: 1
read at: 2013/05/01
date added: 2013/08/25
shelves:
review:
Let's say you are a completely unlikable medical-school-dropout who's had a somewhat unpleasant but not exactly trauma-worthy childhood who has returned to your hometown to teach biology to a group of poverty-stricken high schoolers while watching over your dad who is slowly sinking into dementia. That would essentially be the perfect time for hanging out at your best-friend-from-high-school's house all day, enjoying the company of her droll children, flirting with your inexplicably devoted Native American boyfriend, saving the town from an evil mining company by spear-heading a pinata-selling fundraiser, writing letters to your twin sister who's campaigning for a better life for the farmers in Central America, and also giving the occasional lecture about birth control to your high schoolers who nominate you for teaching awards and save you from being fired, all while kind of failing to do any actual caring for your father because it turns out the whole town is really hopelessy devoted to him and will do it all for you? Right? Right.
]]> The Fault in Our Stars 11870085
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.]]> 313 John Green Sara 3 4.13 2012 The Fault in Our Stars

author: John Green
name: Sara
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2013/03/01
date added: 2013/06/10
shelves:
review:
Was it a cringe-worthy tale of adolescent wish-fulfillment (who doesn't want to hear all their closest friends eulogize them?) further marred by stilted dialogue that would make most episodes of The OC look underwritten? Or was it a nice balance of sincere and ironic that speaks to adolescents (and not 40-year-olds), with a clever meta-fiction subplot? It's been 3 months since I've read it, and I still can't decide.
]]> <![CDATA[An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace]]> 11300085
Through the insightful essays in An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler issues a rallying cry to home cooks.

In chapters about boiling water, cooking eggs and beans, and summoning respectable meals from empty cupboards, Tamar weaves philosophy and instruction into approachable lessons on instinctive cooking. Tamar shows how to make the most of everything you buy, demonstrating what the world’s great chefs that great meals rely on the bones and peels and ends of meals before them.

She explains how to smarten up simple food and gives advice for fixing dishes gone awry. She recommends turning to neglected onions, celery, and potatoes for inexpensive meals that taste full of fresh vegetables, and cooking meat and fish resourcefully.

By wresting cooking from doctrine and doldrums, Tamar encourages readers to begin from wherever they are, with whatever they have. An Everlasting Meal is elegant testimony to the value of cooking and an empowering, indispensable tool for eaters today.]]> 272 Tamar Adler 143918187X Sara 4
It's also stylistically quite adept, and a real pleasure to read. There are a few moments where you wish Adler didn't keep attributing desires to foods (in Adler's account, an egg experiences almost as many spasms of wanting as a small child in FAO Schwartz) and that she didn't resort to the overly precious "happily raised animals" to describe grass-fed meat, but for the most part, it's kind of unfair that Adler can both cook and write with exceeding skill.]]> 4.18 2011 An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

author: Tamar Adler
name: Sara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/03/01
date added: 2013/06/10
shelves:
review:
You're a reasonably sincere person who believes that, for the sake of the planet and maybe your health, you should start cooking with actual ingredients instead of boxes of MSG. And you've trolled the farmer's markets and maybe tried your local CSA, and you've been game about all the strange vegetables and new cuts of meat, but, man -- you're not a cook by nature. You're always looking for recipes that will help you to use all of this stuff, but it still feels like you're just trying to keep a bunch of plates spinning all at once. Fresh food doesn't feel like a lifestyle -- it feels more like a chore. So you pick up this book, and there it is telling you what it's like to have a daily rhythm of using vegetables and broths and bones and spices. It's less about cooking with fresh food than it is about living with fresh food. And that's nice.

It's also stylistically quite adept, and a real pleasure to read. There are a few moments where you wish Adler didn't keep attributing desires to foods (in Adler's account, an egg experiences almost as many spasms of wanting as a small child in FAO Schwartz) and that she didn't resort to the overly precious "happily raised animals" to describe grass-fed meat, but for the most part, it's kind of unfair that Adler can both cook and write with exceeding skill.
]]> <![CDATA[How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers]]> 7902654
The author, who became ill while a university law professor in the prime of her career, tells the reader how she got sick and, to her and her partner's bewilderment, stayed that way. Toni had been a longtime meditator, going on long meditation retreats and spending many hours rigorously practicing, but soon discovered that she simply could no longer engage in those difficult and taxing forms. She had to learn ways to make "being sick" the heart of her spiritual practice and, through truly learning how to be sick, she learned how, even with many physical and energetic limitations, to live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy. Whether we ourselves are sick now or not, we can learn these vital arts of living well from How to Be Sick.]]> 191 Toni Bernhard 0861716264 Sara 5
This isn't a book with answers to any of those things at all. Instead it's a book that takes as its premise a reader in an irreducibly difficult situation. It then tries to communicate some ways that such a reader might cultivate compassion toward himself and toward the world around him, even when his difficulties can't be solved or magically dispersed. And I'd say for that reason, it's honest and it works. The author sticks closely to talking about herself, her own situation, reactions, and complicated feelings. This has the drawback (as other reviewers have pointed out) of perhaps making readers in more complicated situations (those with less money, those with small children) feel a bit alienated. At the same time, it keeps her from falling into the trap of simply telling people what to do. She says several times: this is what works for me. Maybe you can adapt some of it to your situation, but don't push what doesn't work.

The writing style is VERY clear and the bulk of the book is anecdotal, so it would not be hard for people with brain fog to follow a little bit at a time. And I can't get away from the feeling that this is a very, very, very smart book.

HOWEVER -- this might also not be a book for everyone grappling with a chronic illness. There were times when simply reading about her experiences of isolation and fatigue made me feel very hopeless about our own situation. She places the emphasis of the book on dealing with one's current situation, which may feel very disheartening to people who are still actively trying to seek a cure for themselves. There isn't anything in the book that advises ill people NOT to seek cures -- it's just that the book's main focus may not reflect the "we are going to overcome this no matter what" mindset you might have about your illness right now.

I certainly don't have the compassion that the author has sought to cultivate within herself. At times while reading the book I kept thinking "I don't know if I'm ready to be that good-hearted. I don't know if I'm ready to be that forgiving. Can't I just be angry and impatient a little while longer?" But I suspect if I am going to survive this current difficulty and not turn into a bitter person who likes no one and never has fun, I will probably need to bit by bit inch closer to the advice in this book. If you give this book a try, don't read it as if you were going to take all her advice on board instantly -- just browse it as information, and take it from there.]]> 4.19 2010 How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers

How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers

author: Toni Bernhard
name: Sara
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/03/11
shelves:
review:
My partner is quite impaired by a chronic condition about which the medical community knows little. The whole situation creates problems I really wouldn't have understood if I was simply watching a friend go through it. Do we try and talk about his condition to friends, to help them understand what's going on? Or do we keep our mouths shut because, let's face it, listening to people talk about their health problems is deadly boring (and if we had a choice, we would prefer to talk about something else)? Do we try and make social plans when we know 3 out of 4 times, my partner will have to cancel on them? But then again, that fourth time he has a great deal of fun. Do we try every hare-brained remedy that comes up on the internet (magnets! earth-friendly detergent! cultivating your gut flora!) in the hopes that something will help him, or do we try and adjust our lives to his present impairment and avoid the soul-crushing exhaustion that comes from chasing after every tiny promise of a cure? How do we tactfully decline medical advice from well-meaning friends who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about?

This isn't a book with answers to any of those things at all. Instead it's a book that takes as its premise a reader in an irreducibly difficult situation. It then tries to communicate some ways that such a reader might cultivate compassion toward himself and toward the world around him, even when his difficulties can't be solved or magically dispersed. And I'd say for that reason, it's honest and it works. The author sticks closely to talking about herself, her own situation, reactions, and complicated feelings. This has the drawback (as other reviewers have pointed out) of perhaps making readers in more complicated situations (those with less money, those with small children) feel a bit alienated. At the same time, it keeps her from falling into the trap of simply telling people what to do. She says several times: this is what works for me. Maybe you can adapt some of it to your situation, but don't push what doesn't work.

The writing style is VERY clear and the bulk of the book is anecdotal, so it would not be hard for people with brain fog to follow a little bit at a time. And I can't get away from the feeling that this is a very, very, very smart book.

HOWEVER -- this might also not be a book for everyone grappling with a chronic illness. There were times when simply reading about her experiences of isolation and fatigue made me feel very hopeless about our own situation. She places the emphasis of the book on dealing with one's current situation, which may feel very disheartening to people who are still actively trying to seek a cure for themselves. There isn't anything in the book that advises ill people NOT to seek cures -- it's just that the book's main focus may not reflect the "we are going to overcome this no matter what" mindset you might have about your illness right now.

I certainly don't have the compassion that the author has sought to cultivate within herself. At times while reading the book I kept thinking "I don't know if I'm ready to be that good-hearted. I don't know if I'm ready to be that forgiving. Can't I just be angry and impatient a little while longer?" But I suspect if I am going to survive this current difficulty and not turn into a bitter person who likes no one and never has fun, I will probably need to bit by bit inch closer to the advice in this book. If you give this book a try, don't read it as if you were going to take all her advice on board instantly -- just browse it as information, and take it from there.
]]> The Year of Magical Thinking 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 Sara 2
“Even as he lay unconscious on the floor, the thought that flashed through my mind was ‘We don’t have health insurance. How am I going to pay for this?’��

“After a week of sitting by my daughter’s hospital it became clear to me that if I didn’t go back to work, we would lose the house.��

“I found myself having to choose between mortgage payments and hospital bill payments. I contemplated declaring bankruptcy. I knew that all our saving, all our planning, had been wiped out, with no time for me to try and build them back up.��

Here are things Joan Didion says when her husband dies and her daughter repeatedly falls into tragic, unexplained comas:

“Then I realized that the Christopher to whom Lynn [Didion’s agent, who had rushed to Didion’s apartment after the death of her husband] was talking was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who ws the chief obituary writer for the New York Times.��

“[Every morning while her daughter was in the UCLA Medical Center] I listened to a sedate morning show called Morning Becomes Eclectic. Every morning at the Beverly Wiltshire I ordered the same breakfast, huevos rancheros with once scrambled egg. . . I went out to dinner every night I was in Los Angeles.��

“A few months after John died, in the late winter of 2004, after Beth Israel and Presbyterian but before UCLA, I was asked by Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books if I wanted him to submit my name for credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican summer conventions.��

That’s it in a nutshell. This is sort of the end-of-life equivalent of a chick flick, with fabulous restaurants, top-shelf hospitals, unceasingly sympathetic and well-connected friends, frictionless cross-country travel, comfortable four-star hotels and a host of memories of Hawaii, southern California, Paris, and New York City’s upper west side. Against this backdrop Didion makes unsurprising observations about death: mourning happens on a physical level. You will feel guilty when you finally get around to moving your dead partner’s belongings. Everywhere you go will remind you of him. But fed to us in crystalline sentences against the glossy backdrop of the American upper-class, it all seems so picturesque and really, really interesting.]]> 3.94 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking

author: Joan Didion
name: Sara
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2013/03/11
shelves:
review:
Here are things Joan Didion never says when her husband dies and her daughter repeatedly falls into tragic, unexplained comas:

“Even as he lay unconscious on the floor, the thought that flashed through my mind was ‘We don’t have health insurance. How am I going to pay for this?’��

“After a week of sitting by my daughter’s hospital it became clear to me that if I didn’t go back to work, we would lose the house.��

“I found myself having to choose between mortgage payments and hospital bill payments. I contemplated declaring bankruptcy. I knew that all our saving, all our planning, had been wiped out, with no time for me to try and build them back up.��

Here are things Joan Didion says when her husband dies and her daughter repeatedly falls into tragic, unexplained comas:

“Then I realized that the Christopher to whom Lynn [Didion’s agent, who had rushed to Didion’s apartment after the death of her husband] was talking was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who ws the chief obituary writer for the New York Times.��

“[Every morning while her daughter was in the UCLA Medical Center] I listened to a sedate morning show called Morning Becomes Eclectic. Every morning at the Beverly Wiltshire I ordered the same breakfast, huevos rancheros with once scrambled egg. . . I went out to dinner every night I was in Los Angeles.��

“A few months after John died, in the late winter of 2004, after Beth Israel and Presbyterian but before UCLA, I was asked by Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books if I wanted him to submit my name for credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican summer conventions.��

That’s it in a nutshell. This is sort of the end-of-life equivalent of a chick flick, with fabulous restaurants, top-shelf hospitals, unceasingly sympathetic and well-connected friends, frictionless cross-country travel, comfortable four-star hotels and a host of memories of Hawaii, southern California, Paris, and New York City’s upper west side. Against this backdrop Didion makes unsurprising observations about death: mourning happens on a physical level. You will feel guilty when you finally get around to moving your dead partner’s belongings. Everywhere you go will remind you of him. But fed to us in crystalline sentences against the glossy backdrop of the American upper-class, it all seems so picturesque and really, really interesting.
]]> Where'd You Go, Bernadette 12611253
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 324 Maria Semple 0297867288 Sara 4
Keep your eyes open for Morrissey and Buzz Aldrin cameos. Premium.]]> 3.91 2012 Where'd You Go, Bernadette

author: Maria Semple
name: Sara
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/01
date added: 2013/03/11
shelves:
review:
Around 11 PM I was having trouble falling asleep and picked up this book. At 3 AM I turned over the last page, and had to think a bit to remember my first name, age, or current location. This book has the unusual distinction of being totally blissfully absorbing and also completely hilarious. Go read it. Preferably in the next 18 months while its topicality is still fresh enough for you to remember why all the Chihuly jokes and TED Talk references are funny.

Keep your eyes open for Morrissey and Buzz Aldrin cameos. Premium.
]]> <![CDATA[The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend]]> 12510874

The Guardians opens with a story from the July 24, 2008, edition of the Riverdale Press that begins, “An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the station on West 254th Street.�� Sarah Manguso writes: “The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.��

The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso’s friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso’s fellowship year in Rome, Harris’s death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso’s marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris’s presence in and absence from Manguso’s life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.

]]> 111 Sarah Manguso 0374167249 Sara 4
Two sensations dominate this prose elegy: grief, obviously, and much less obviously, akathisia, a dauntingly abstract state of "torment, restlessness, pulling or drawing or twisting sensation." Akathisia is a known side effect of a range of anti-psychotic drugs, such as the one the narrator's dead friend was given the same day he jumped in front of a moving train. The narrator believes that it was akathisia that led her friend to jump, but akathisia's presence in the narrative is not the forensic solution to the mystery of her friend's death; its function is to mirror back the ineffability of grief itself. "If there were a way to describe the experience of this disorder (akathisia) more clearly, clinicians might better be able to diagnose it, treat it, and prevent its common outcomes" (37) she speculates at one point. But instead of performing this clinical task, her short work instead more precisely describes the processes of grief: "I want to set aside every expectation of how I should feel or act given that my friend had a bad death, and try to explain what has actually happened to me," she announces, quickly qualifying this ambition with "if, in fact, anything has actually happened to me at all." (86). Which is at the core of her anguish: grief can't be measured or accurately observed from outside. Grief, indeed, might not bear any logical relationship to the loss that prompts it. It is not, she observes, for the person who has died, and after a time, it is not even for the community of living who mourn him.

In attempting to communicate the mysteries of this suffering, Manguso veers close to hipster-twee in the first thirty or so pages, as she substitutes the observation of irrelevant details for statements of feeling. Hang in there. A deeper affect emerges in the last two thirds of the book, and it lends a resonance to the first thirty pages that they won't have on the initial read. ]]> 4.00 2012 The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend

author: Sarah Manguso
name: Sara
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/01
date added: 2012/12/31
shelves:
review:
If there you are mourning -- or need to mourn -- this is a brief but suitable companion.

Two sensations dominate this prose elegy: grief, obviously, and much less obviously, akathisia, a dauntingly abstract state of "torment, restlessness, pulling or drawing or twisting sensation." Akathisia is a known side effect of a range of anti-psychotic drugs, such as the one the narrator's dead friend was given the same day he jumped in front of a moving train. The narrator believes that it was akathisia that led her friend to jump, but akathisia's presence in the narrative is not the forensic solution to the mystery of her friend's death; its function is to mirror back the ineffability of grief itself. "If there were a way to describe the experience of this disorder (akathisia) more clearly, clinicians might better be able to diagnose it, treat it, and prevent its common outcomes" (37) she speculates at one point. But instead of performing this clinical task, her short work instead more precisely describes the processes of grief: "I want to set aside every expectation of how I should feel or act given that my friend had a bad death, and try to explain what has actually happened to me," she announces, quickly qualifying this ambition with "if, in fact, anything has actually happened to me at all." (86). Which is at the core of her anguish: grief can't be measured or accurately observed from outside. Grief, indeed, might not bear any logical relationship to the loss that prompts it. It is not, she observes, for the person who has died, and after a time, it is not even for the community of living who mourn him.

In attempting to communicate the mysteries of this suffering, Manguso veers close to hipster-twee in the first thirty or so pages, as she substitutes the observation of irrelevant details for statements of feeling. Hang in there. A deeper affect emerges in the last two thirds of the book, and it lends a resonance to the first thirty pages that they won't have on the initial read.
]]> The Cloister Walk 108681 The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world -- its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community -- can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. In this stirring and lyrical work, the monastery, often considered archaic or otherworldly, becomes immediate, accessible, and relevant to us, no matter what our faith may be.

* A New York Times bestseller for 23 weeks
* A New York Times Notable Book of the Year]]> 385 Kathleen Norris 1573225843 Sara 3
But this messiness and openness to mystery seeps out of the book as it progresses. In her discussions of gender she comes off as rigid and dogmatic -- and surprisingly, not even a very good writer. In her attempts to connect the goodness of monastic community to the community of her small town, she grows sanctimonious about the spiritual impoverishment of city living -- even though her own "small town" life is heavily punctuated by plenty of trips to cities, as well as month-long jaunts to Hawaii to hang out with her extended family. At about the halfway point, the author comes off as wise and reflective. By the end, the author comes off mostly as smug about her own point of view and way of life. Because of this, the book inadvertently also communicates the experience of living in community, an experience central to Benedictine life: in community we have to listen to people who are arrogant, judgmental, self-contradictory, and still be willing to admit that we learned something from them. ]]> 4.05 1996 The Cloister Walk

author: Kathleen Norris
name: Sara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2012/12/29
date added: 2012/12/31
shelves:
review:
This collection of meditations prompted by the author's year-long stay in a Benedictine monastery and her formation as a Benedictine oblate is at its best when it is examining the experience of living with liturgy. As a poet, Norris is deeply attentive to what it means to wake up every morning listening to the repetition of certain words, to return to the same words in the afternoon, and again in the evening, having one's whole year structured by the reading of certain passages at certain times. Her reflections on the book of Jeremiah and the Psalms are riveting; she wrestles with what is irreducibly mysterious and even frightening in the scriptures, and refuses to tame it into a neat message to take away from a quick Sunday sermon.

But this messiness and openness to mystery seeps out of the book as it progresses. In her discussions of gender she comes off as rigid and dogmatic -- and surprisingly, not even a very good writer. In her attempts to connect the goodness of monastic community to the community of her small town, she grows sanctimonious about the spiritual impoverishment of city living -- even though her own "small town" life is heavily punctuated by plenty of trips to cities, as well as month-long jaunts to Hawaii to hang out with her extended family. At about the halfway point, the author comes off as wise and reflective. By the end, the author comes off mostly as smug about her own point of view and way of life. Because of this, the book inadvertently also communicates the experience of living in community, an experience central to Benedictine life: in community we have to listen to people who are arrogant, judgmental, self-contradictory, and still be willing to admit that we learned something from them.
]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 482976 The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century.

"A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life... If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience... It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919... Their daughter, Francie, and their son, Neely, know more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." - Orville Prescott

"[A Tree Grows in Brooklyn] is that rare and enduring thing, a book in which, no matter our backgrounds, we recognize ourselves." - Anna Quindlen, from her Foreword

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.]]> 493 Betty Smith 0060736267 Sara 4
I think if I'd encountered this book in that age 12-17 window, it would have simply seeped into my psyche like all those narratives of bookish girls of ambition -- Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, that sort of thing. It might be that I've read the story too many times in other forms, and am just too damn old to have another one get under my skin. But I'd hand it to a patient bookish young teen, if I had the opportunity.]]> 4.35 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

author: Betty Smith
name: Sara
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2012/12/01
date added: 2012/12/30
shelves:
review:
This book totally should not work. It has an intense focus on material details of life among Brooklyn's poor in the first decade of the twentieth century -- want to know what sort of bread the very poor ate and how they bargained for it, what they tossed down the airshaft in their shotgun apartments, what sort of goodies you could get at a Democratic Party Machine's summer fun festival? It's all in here, in clear and obsessive detail. It's also a novel intent on exposing the mercilessness of poverty: school children are animals to one another, neighborhood women gang up on the local unwed mother, and schoolteachers spitefully trample on their students dreams. But through it all the book never entirely betrays the main characters' unshakeable faith in the absolute value of education and romantic love (not necessarily in that order). It shouldn't all work together in one book, but it does.

I think if I'd encountered this book in that age 12-17 window, it would have simply seeped into my psyche like all those narratives of bookish girls of ambition -- Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, that sort of thing. It might be that I've read the story too many times in other forms, and am just too damn old to have another one get under my skin. But I'd hand it to a patient bookish young teen, if I had the opportunity.
]]> <![CDATA[A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life : Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world]]> 97053 208 Parker J. Palmer 0787971006 Sara 3
Palmer's procedures are strongly grounded in Quaker spirituality, although he doesn't really talk about Quaker spirituality in any detail. The book is a useful tool of encouragement for anyone thinking about how to live a life that isn't divided between one set of values for the workplace and one set of values for private life -- it's just nice to keep company with a text that values authenticity in human beings. But the book is primarily concerned with how accountability groups operate, and for that reason it doesn't work like most books that tilt toward the spirituality and self-help genre, with their emphasis on individual reflection and change. What you need to discern your own truth, Palmer's book reiterates again and again, is interaction with others who are struggling to do the same thing for themselves. His book describes how such a process might work, but it emphasizes again and again that a mere book can't substitute for the process itself.]]> 4.06 2004 A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life : Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life : Welcoming the soul and weaving community in a wounded world

author: Parker J. Palmer
name: Sara
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2012/12/01
date added: 2012/12/27
shelves:
review:
I've been meaning to read some Parker Palmer, and wound up choosing this one simply because it was available as an audio book and was about the length of a long drive I had to make. The book is primarily focused on the logic behind and the procedures involved in "Circles of Trust," a method of group interaction Palmer relies on to help people discern the direction their lives should take. Palmer runs a retreat center that allows people to come and participate in such Circles of Trust. The book essentially outlines how similar small groups might operate to help their members listen to their own inner truths.

Palmer's procedures are strongly grounded in Quaker spirituality, although he doesn't really talk about Quaker spirituality in any detail. The book is a useful tool of encouragement for anyone thinking about how to live a life that isn't divided between one set of values for the workplace and one set of values for private life -- it's just nice to keep company with a text that values authenticity in human beings. But the book is primarily concerned with how accountability groups operate, and for that reason it doesn't work like most books that tilt toward the spirituality and self-help genre, with their emphasis on individual reflection and change. What you need to discern your own truth, Palmer's book reiterates again and again, is interaction with others who are struggling to do the same thing for themselves. His book describes how such a process might work, but it emphasizes again and again that a mere book can't substitute for the process itself.
]]> <![CDATA[The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss]]> 7821828 The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet�� in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

The netsuke—drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers—were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.

The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question�� appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she’d served even in their exile.

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.

]]> 368 Edmund de Waal 0374105979 Sara 5
Edmund De Waal’s careful excavation of the history of his uncle’s collection of netsuke �� small pocket-sized ivory carvings of small animals, objects, people in comic situations �� takes us on a tour of all these places, seeking out the ultimate insider’s viewpoint: the architectural vantage of the netsuke themselves, nestled in a curio cabinet inside the walls of his family’s houses over the past 160 years. The result is a work of breathtaking intimacy, one in which we come to know the Paris of the impressionist painters and glittering, turn-of-the-century Vienna not because we are tourists, but because we are houseguests, furtively surveying the rooms people live in, taking careful note of the furniture, paintings, and clothes, in order to try to catch a glimpse of where the netsuke are, who would be likely to have held them in their palm, whether each successive owner valued or neglected them.

And like houseguests, we come at the human characters in this drama only through brief tableaus permitted by laundry bills, choices in wall-paper, small birthday gifts, tableaus we assume are repeated regularly even when archival evidence is not around to catch them in the act. Mundane moments are the ones De Waal has access to, and he weaves them into rich conjectures about the rhythms of his family’s life, a life like everyone else’s, in which huge blocks of time must be spent on the ephemeral rituals of getting dressed, eating, rearranging the bedroom. De Waal deftly channels the complicated family history of an international financial dynasty, the arrival of a transatlantic modernist aesthetic, the tangles of European political alliances, and the repetitive surges of European anti-Semitism into this everydayness. His method isn’t far from that which he attributes to the netsuke’s own representations: “Inconsequential gobbets of reality [in which . . .] everyday life went on without rehearsal�� (79).

Feeding us history in such bite-sized gobbets, De Waal also accomplishes the almost-impossible in this age of Holocaust over-invocation: he communicates the cataclysmic disruption of the everyday that was Kristallnacht and its fallout. Yes, we knew that the Nazi genocide of Jews was horrible, but now we are standing in once-familiar and now empty rooms which, after decades of hosting small soirees and intimate dinners, failed to shield their inhabitants from mass murder. And now we know what catastrophe is, because we have also experienced the gentle sedimentation of years which it destroys.

But if objects are what allow us this understanding, the objects are also what allow De Waal to tell this story without being destroyed by it. “It is not just things that carry stories with them�� he points out, “Stories are a kind of thing, too. . . You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story�� (348-49). This detachability keeps the story from hurting too much. As De Waal questions what right he has to tell this story, a story other family members have tried to extinguish through name changes, religious conversions, the destruction of possessions and letters, he comes to the conclusion that, “objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost,�� and as it goes with netsuke, so too it goes with catastrophe (348-49). When we cannot bear a history anymore, we let our objects carry it away for a little while, taking it where they might with what distortions and omissions necessarily ensue.

This philosophy of objects promises both relief and preservation �� through objects we might leave our histories behind without losing them forever. But it raises the question of what happens to the stories of those whose objects are too slight and ill-constructed to carry their former owners�� stories into the future. At one point a family maid, Anna, emerges as a crucial character in the continuity of the narrative, but she is there only because of her brief custody of the netsuke, which she perceives to belong to someone else, not to her. “She is not written about, refracted into stories,�� De Waal admits. “She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers. . . I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her�� (282-83). Portable history, as it turns out, still belongs strictly to owners possessed of a certain fortune.
]]> 3.95 2010 The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

author: Edmund de Waal
name: Sara
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2012/01/01
date added: 2012/08/03
shelves:
review:
Paris. Vienna. Tokyo. London.

Edmund De Waal’s careful excavation of the history of his uncle’s collection of netsuke �� small pocket-sized ivory carvings of small animals, objects, people in comic situations �� takes us on a tour of all these places, seeking out the ultimate insider’s viewpoint: the architectural vantage of the netsuke themselves, nestled in a curio cabinet inside the walls of his family’s houses over the past 160 years. The result is a work of breathtaking intimacy, one in which we come to know the Paris of the impressionist painters and glittering, turn-of-the-century Vienna not because we are tourists, but because we are houseguests, furtively surveying the rooms people live in, taking careful note of the furniture, paintings, and clothes, in order to try to catch a glimpse of where the netsuke are, who would be likely to have held them in their palm, whether each successive owner valued or neglected them.

And like houseguests, we come at the human characters in this drama only through brief tableaus permitted by laundry bills, choices in wall-paper, small birthday gifts, tableaus we assume are repeated regularly even when archival evidence is not around to catch them in the act. Mundane moments are the ones De Waal has access to, and he weaves them into rich conjectures about the rhythms of his family’s life, a life like everyone else’s, in which huge blocks of time must be spent on the ephemeral rituals of getting dressed, eating, rearranging the bedroom. De Waal deftly channels the complicated family history of an international financial dynasty, the arrival of a transatlantic modernist aesthetic, the tangles of European political alliances, and the repetitive surges of European anti-Semitism into this everydayness. His method isn’t far from that which he attributes to the netsuke’s own representations: “Inconsequential gobbets of reality [in which . . .] everyday life went on without rehearsal�� (79).

Feeding us history in such bite-sized gobbets, De Waal also accomplishes the almost-impossible in this age of Holocaust over-invocation: he communicates the cataclysmic disruption of the everyday that was Kristallnacht and its fallout. Yes, we knew that the Nazi genocide of Jews was horrible, but now we are standing in once-familiar and now empty rooms which, after decades of hosting small soirees and intimate dinners, failed to shield their inhabitants from mass murder. And now we know what catastrophe is, because we have also experienced the gentle sedimentation of years which it destroys.

But if objects are what allow us this understanding, the objects are also what allow De Waal to tell this story without being destroyed by it. “It is not just things that carry stories with them�� he points out, “Stories are a kind of thing, too. . . You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story�� (348-49). This detachability keeps the story from hurting too much. As De Waal questions what right he has to tell this story, a story other family members have tried to extinguish through name changes, religious conversions, the destruction of possessions and letters, he comes to the conclusion that, “objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost,�� and as it goes with netsuke, so too it goes with catastrophe (348-49). When we cannot bear a history anymore, we let our objects carry it away for a little while, taking it where they might with what distortions and omissions necessarily ensue.

This philosophy of objects promises both relief and preservation �� through objects we might leave our histories behind without losing them forever. But it raises the question of what happens to the stories of those whose objects are too slight and ill-constructed to carry their former owners�� stories into the future. At one point a family maid, Anna, emerges as a crucial character in the continuity of the narrative, but she is there only because of her brief custody of the netsuke, which she perceives to belong to someone else, not to her. “She is not written about, refracted into stories,�� De Waal admits. “She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers. . . I do not even know Anna’s whole name, or what happened to her�� (282-83). Portable history, as it turns out, still belongs strictly to owners possessed of a certain fortune.

]]> <![CDATA[The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue]]> 82955 ��Newsday

From the acclaimed author of Country Girl: A Memoir
Kate and Baba are two ambitious Irish country girls in search of life: romantic Kate seeks love, while pragmatic Baba will take whatever she can get. Together they set out to conquer Dublin and the world. Under the big city’s bright lights, they spin their lives into a whirl of comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations, and reckless passions. But love changes everything. And as their lives take unexpected and separate turns, Baba and Kate must ultimately learn to go it alone.

A beautiful portrait of the pain and joy of youth, the ruin of marriage gone wrong, and the ache of lost friendship and love, this trilogy of Edna O’Brien’s remarkable early novels is more than just a harbinger of the stunning and masterly writer she has become.

��ձ�> 532 Edna O'Brien 0452263948 Sara 4
The trilogy actually encompasses three books �� The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. They follow the highly intelligent but spacy Caithleen and her forcefully self-centered “best�� friend Baba on a trajectory that huge numbers of Irish women’s lives took during those decades �� from farm to convent school to Dublin and finally into London. The books make no claims, however, as to their representative status. Instead, the first two books stay scrupulously grounded in the consciousness of Caithleen, our first-person narrator, who proves a good story teller, if a bad interpreter of what precisely the story means. All sorts of men crowd themselves into the orphaned Caithleen’s life, and part of the first novel’s tension comes from the judgments the reader will inevitably make about who might help Kate out and who might do her ill: judgments Caithleen seems unable to form for herself. But by the second book we’ve been served notice that our Jane-Eyre-inflected fantasies of upward mobility skew OUR perception quite badly, and it becomes apparent what Caithleen needs the chain-smoking, good-time-grabbing, light-me-a-cigarette-will-ya Baba for. What seems like Baba’s destruction of Caithleen’s chances to “make something of herself�� in the first book is decidedly revealed in the second book as a narrow escape.

I was a bit apprehensive about the third book, which abandons Caithleen’s first-person narration for chapters that, when dealing with Caithleen, are written with an elegant third-person omniscience, and when dealing with Baba, are written in Baba’s voice. The Baba chapters are among the funniest in a very funny trilogy. The Caithleen chapters are a bit sad �� not just because the content is sad, but because the author can no longer imagine Caithleen speaking for herself about what it’s like to be Caithleen. At some point Edna O’Brien escaped being Caithleen by becoming a world-famous author. That she doesn’t lazily award Caithleen the same ending is to her credit. That she can only approach Caithleen from the outside, using the compensations of her own much more worldly voice to bring her near us suggests something about Caithleen �� or thousands of women like her �� that got lost for good.

At the very end of the trilogy, Baba finds Kate reading “a newspaper article about women who for the purpose of scientific experiment had volunteered to spend a fortnight in an underground cave. Kate read: ‘Doctors in touch by telephone from an adjacent cave continue to be astonished at the physical resilience and lively spirits of the women, who were unknown to each other before the vigil began.’�� And that’s pretty much what the entire trilogy is about �� listening in from another cave, and discovering that even when buried underground, smothered in dark, small spaces, women keep chattering and laughing and carrying on.]]> 3.88 1986 The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

author: Edna O'Brien
name: Sara
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2012/07/01
date added: 2012/08/03
shelves:
review:
The smartest and most hilarious possible response to the catastrophe of being born female in the rural west of Ireland at mid-century.

The trilogy actually encompasses three books �� The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. They follow the highly intelligent but spacy Caithleen and her forcefully self-centered “best�� friend Baba on a trajectory that huge numbers of Irish women’s lives took during those decades �� from farm to convent school to Dublin and finally into London. The books make no claims, however, as to their representative status. Instead, the first two books stay scrupulously grounded in the consciousness of Caithleen, our first-person narrator, who proves a good story teller, if a bad interpreter of what precisely the story means. All sorts of men crowd themselves into the orphaned Caithleen’s life, and part of the first novel’s tension comes from the judgments the reader will inevitably make about who might help Kate out and who might do her ill: judgments Caithleen seems unable to form for herself. But by the second book we’ve been served notice that our Jane-Eyre-inflected fantasies of upward mobility skew OUR perception quite badly, and it becomes apparent what Caithleen needs the chain-smoking, good-time-grabbing, light-me-a-cigarette-will-ya Baba for. What seems like Baba’s destruction of Caithleen’s chances to “make something of herself�� in the first book is decidedly revealed in the second book as a narrow escape.

I was a bit apprehensive about the third book, which abandons Caithleen’s first-person narration for chapters that, when dealing with Caithleen, are written with an elegant third-person omniscience, and when dealing with Baba, are written in Baba’s voice. The Baba chapters are among the funniest in a very funny trilogy. The Caithleen chapters are a bit sad �� not just because the content is sad, but because the author can no longer imagine Caithleen speaking for herself about what it’s like to be Caithleen. At some point Edna O’Brien escaped being Caithleen by becoming a world-famous author. That she doesn’t lazily award Caithleen the same ending is to her credit. That she can only approach Caithleen from the outside, using the compensations of her own much more worldly voice to bring her near us suggests something about Caithleen �� or thousands of women like her �� that got lost for good.

At the very end of the trilogy, Baba finds Kate reading “a newspaper article about women who for the purpose of scientific experiment had volunteered to spend a fortnight in an underground cave. Kate read: ‘Doctors in touch by telephone from an adjacent cave continue to be astonished at the physical resilience and lively spirits of the women, who were unknown to each other before the vigil began.’�� And that’s pretty much what the entire trilogy is about �� listening in from another cave, and discovering that even when buried underground, smothered in dark, small spaces, women keep chattering and laughing and carrying on.
]]> It Chooses You 11266880 PennySaver, the iconic classifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the “Large leather Jacket, $10��? It seemed important to find out—or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay.

Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways.

Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July’s off-kilter honesty and deadpan humor, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.]]> 218 Miranda July 1936365014 Sara 3
July’s answer to this sort of writer’s block is to begin answering ads in the paper edition of the Pennysaver, ads selling goods for under ten dollars. And she makes forays into these computerless people’s homes (who else places ads in a newspaper circular, instead of placing them in Craigslist?), interviewing them and photographing them and the things they have for sale. This is where the book is at its most interesting �� people at the very margins of the economy are brought into focus with July’s visits, in all their nutty, enterprising, and occasionally disturbing glory. I could have read a book with three times as many visits as she paid, and still not gotten tired of just finding out who exactly is at the other end of that ad for tadpoles or a $10 leather jacket.

But in the end, this is a book about writer’s block, and not about the people she meets, and that is the book’s shortcoming. On the one hand, she is amazingly canny at underscoring the problem with a life conducted as if the internets were the real: “The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn’t occur to me what wasn’t there . . . Domingo’s blog was one of the best I’ve ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally�� (160). She recognizes her inadequacy in dealing with the non-internet-mediated world, commenting after one visit “the fullness of [that] life was menacing to me �� there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. [The seller] wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her�� (99). This is the sort of stunned incompetence I think a lot of us feel, who make our living moving blocks of text around a screen. And July keeps reminding herself to dwell in that moment and feel what it feels like.

But the ending doesn’t dwell in that moment and it left me with a feeling that her Pennysaver interviews wind up being mostly about her career. July thoughtfully acknowledges the possibly exploitative dynamic of her interviews as she narrates them, at one point even admitting that her interest made her kind of “creepy.�� But that thoughtfulness evaporates. The conclusion of the book winds up being an incredibly one-note celebration of how the people she met were “genuine�� and how, by finding them, she was able to make her own work more authentic. Which felt icky to me, as well as unimaginative. Plenty of people have already told that story before.
]]> 3.98 2011 It Chooses You

author: Miranda July
name: Sara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/01
date added: 2012/08/03
shelves:
review:
This is a book about writer’s block. The kind of writer’s block particularly inspired by the internet, where you surf the web and google your own name, or the name of an ex-boyfriend instead of finishing up whatever project it is that you are supposed to be finishing on the same machine.

July’s answer to this sort of writer’s block is to begin answering ads in the paper edition of the Pennysaver, ads selling goods for under ten dollars. And she makes forays into these computerless people’s homes (who else places ads in a newspaper circular, instead of placing them in Craigslist?), interviewing them and photographing them and the things they have for sale. This is where the book is at its most interesting �� people at the very margins of the economy are brought into focus with July’s visits, in all their nutty, enterprising, and occasionally disturbing glory. I could have read a book with three times as many visits as she paid, and still not gotten tired of just finding out who exactly is at the other end of that ad for tadpoles or a $10 leather jacket.

But in the end, this is a book about writer’s block, and not about the people she meets, and that is the book’s shortcoming. On the one hand, she is amazingly canny at underscoring the problem with a life conducted as if the internets were the real: “The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn’t occur to me what wasn’t there . . . Domingo’s blog was one of the best I’ve ever read, but I had to drive to him to get it, he had to tell it to me with his whole self, and there was no easy way to search for him. He could be found only accidentally�� (160). She recognizes her inadequacy in dealing with the non-internet-mediated world, commenting after one visit “the fullness of [that] life was menacing to me �� there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. [The seller] wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her�� (99). This is the sort of stunned incompetence I think a lot of us feel, who make our living moving blocks of text around a screen. And July keeps reminding herself to dwell in that moment and feel what it feels like.

But the ending doesn’t dwell in that moment and it left me with a feeling that her Pennysaver interviews wind up being mostly about her career. July thoughtfully acknowledges the possibly exploitative dynamic of her interviews as she narrates them, at one point even admitting that her interest made her kind of “creepy.�� But that thoughtfulness evaporates. The conclusion of the book winds up being an incredibly one-note celebration of how the people she met were “genuine�� and how, by finding them, she was able to make her own work more authentic. Which felt icky to me, as well as unimaginative. Plenty of people have already told that story before.

]]> The Rings of Saturn 434903 The Rings of Saturn �� with its curious archive of photographs �� records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.]]> 296 W.G. Sebald 0811214133 Sara 4
And that’s pretty much the entire “plot�� of this meditative account of a walking journey around a small slice of England. It is on the one hand, a work with an “unaccustomed sense of freedom.�� Let loose from the chronological and cause-and-effect rules of realist fiction, or from the instructional rhetoric of the travelogue, Sebald’s work is gloriously associative, skimming from tales of eccentric World War II vets, deep histories of country houses, 17th century maritime battles, the eruption of Mont Pelee, Roger Casement, the cultivation of silk-worms. It is, I confess, what I always thought traveling in a region with more than 100 years of history would be like �� all of history suddenly open and teeming, simply because you set foot in the place.

But destruction is also the theme, as it is in most of Sebald’s work, and it works to undermine the giddy sense of the transparency of all history that his work can also inspire. Relating a friend’s brief ability to grasp some detail of his childhood, the narrator observes, “Whenever a shift in our spiritual life occurs and fragments such as these surface, we believe we can remember. But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable�� (177). To have access to everything that has happened before is not a form of memory, but a sign of a profound destruction, already well underway.
]]> 4.26 1995 The Rings of Saturn

author: W.G. Sebald
name: Sara
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2011/12/01
date added: 2012/08/02
shelves:
review:
“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk. . . . I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.��

And that’s pretty much the entire “plot�� of this meditative account of a walking journey around a small slice of England. It is on the one hand, a work with an “unaccustomed sense of freedom.�� Let loose from the chronological and cause-and-effect rules of realist fiction, or from the instructional rhetoric of the travelogue, Sebald’s work is gloriously associative, skimming from tales of eccentric World War II vets, deep histories of country houses, 17th century maritime battles, the eruption of Mont Pelee, Roger Casement, the cultivation of silk-worms. It is, I confess, what I always thought traveling in a region with more than 100 years of history would be like �� all of history suddenly open and teeming, simply because you set foot in the place.

But destruction is also the theme, as it is in most of Sebald’s work, and it works to undermine the giddy sense of the transparency of all history that his work can also inspire. Relating a friend’s brief ability to grasp some detail of his childhood, the narrator observes, “Whenever a shift in our spiritual life occurs and fragments such as these surface, we believe we can remember. But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable�� (177). To have access to everything that has happened before is not a form of memory, but a sign of a profound destruction, already well underway.

]]> The Imperfectionists 6834410
Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.]]> 272 Tom Rachman 0385343663 Sara 3 3.55 2010

author: Tom Rachman
name: Sara
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/09/01
date added: 2012/08/02
shelves:
review:
Just really fine writing. This is how character development is done. Then again, because it is so completely about how character development is done, those looking to be wrapped in the long arms of a fully engineered novelistic plot will be disappointed. This is mostly a series of short stories whose satisfactions are free-standing. What the book gives you is a persistent feeling of having actually worked with these people with whom its pages are concerned, and a nostalgic but uninformed feeling of regret for the demise of print journalism.
]]> Gone Girl 8442457 What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?]]> 399 Gillian Flynn Sara 5
My answer is, yes, yes, yes, you should read this as soon as possible (preferably before you encounter any more possibly spoiler-heavy reviews) and yeah -- actually Gillian Flynn handles a trite scenario with extraordinary originality that comes from a deep, deep scepticism about the stereotypes that such a situation produces.

You will be drawn in by the rich characterization, the timely portrayal of a post-2008 landscape (this book has a scene involving roaming gangs of unemployed men who inhabit an abandoned shopping mall, fer cryin' out loud) and the pleasingly fresh prose. But you will wonder -- how could this book keep it up for 400+ pages? Surely it goes on too long?

So let me reassure you -- Flynn actually uses every single one of those 400 pages for a very unpredictable, very engaging exploration of the missing-white-woman media phenomenon, and the assumptions that underpin it. Pick it up. If you're an unironic Nancy Grace fan, if you're a conspiracy-minded Scott Peterson apologist, if you're a self-righteous intellectual who scoffs at the nation's preoccupation with suburban murder, it doesn't matter. You're going to enjoy the ride.]]> 3.93 2012 Gone Girl

author: Gillian Flynn
name: Sara
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2012/07/01
date added: 2012/07/29
shelves:
review:
Should you read this extremely celebrated, possibly over-hyped best-seller dominating summer reading lists in 2012? I mean, a woman gone missing and the husband as prime suspect -- that's not exactly an original premise, is it?

My answer is, yes, yes, yes, you should read this as soon as possible (preferably before you encounter any more possibly spoiler-heavy reviews) and yeah -- actually Gillian Flynn handles a trite scenario with extraordinary originality that comes from a deep, deep scepticism about the stereotypes that such a situation produces.

You will be drawn in by the rich characterization, the timely portrayal of a post-2008 landscape (this book has a scene involving roaming gangs of unemployed men who inhabit an abandoned shopping mall, fer cryin' out loud) and the pleasingly fresh prose. But you will wonder -- how could this book keep it up for 400+ pages? Surely it goes on too long?

So let me reassure you -- Flynn actually uses every single one of those 400 pages for a very unpredictable, very engaging exploration of the missing-white-woman media phenomenon, and the assumptions that underpin it. Pick it up. If you're an unironic Nancy Grace fan, if you're a conspiracy-minded Scott Peterson apologist, if you're a self-righteous intellectual who scoffs at the nation's preoccupation with suburban murder, it doesn't matter. You're going to enjoy the ride.
]]> Please Look After Mom 8574333 Please Look After Mom is a stunning, deeply moving story of a family's search for their missing mother - and their discovery of the desires, heartaches and secrets they never realized she harbored within.

When sixty-nine year old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, and vanishes, their children are consumed with loud recriminations, and are awash in sorrow and guilt. As they argue over the "Missing" flyers they are posting throughout the city - how large of a reward to offer, the best way to phrase the text - they realize that none of them have a recent photograph of Mom. Soon a larger question emerges: do they really know the woman they called Mom?

Told by the alternating voices of Mom's daughter, son, her husband and, in the shattering conclusion, by Mom herself, the novel pieces together, Rashomon-style, a life that appears ordinary but is anything but.

This is a mystery of one mother that reveals itself to be the mystery of all our mothers: about her triumphs and disappointments and about who she is on her own terms, separate from who she is to her family. If you have ever been a daughter, a son, a husband or a mother, Please Look After Mom is a revelation - one that will bring tears to your eyes.]]> 237 Kyung-Sook Shin 0307593916 Sara 3 3.89 2008

author: Kyung-Sook Shin
name: Sara
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2012/07/01
date added: 2012/07/25
shelves:
review:
Spare, clear prose tracking a family's reaction to an elderly mom gone missing. Well done, but not too many surprises. Some small glimpses of the arc of Korean history in the last fifty years -- from starvation conditions after the war to urbanized tech boom -- but the novel's focus stays tightly fixed on nuclear family dynamics.
]]> Sister 11950671 ��
When her mom calls to tell her that Tess, her younger sister, is missing, Bee returns home to London on the first flight. She expects to find Tess and give her the usual lecture, the bossy big sister scolding her flighty baby sister for taking off without letting anyone know her plans. Tess has always been a free spirit, an artist who takes risks, while conservative Bee couldn’t be more different. Bee is used to watching out for her wayward sibling and is fiercely protective of Tess (and has always been a little stern about her antics). But then Tess is found dead, apparently by her own hand.

Bee is certain that Tess didn’t commit suicide. Their family and the police accept the sad reality, but Bee feels sure that Tess has been murdered.�� Single-minded in her search for a killer, Bee moves into Tess's apartment and throws herself headlong into her sister's life--and all its secrets.

Though her family and the police see a grieving sister in denial, unwilling to accept the facts, Bee uncovers the affair Tess was having with a married man and the pregnancy that resulted, and her difficultly with a stalker who may have crossed the line when Tess refused his advances. Tess was also participating in an experimental medical trial that might have gone very wrong.�� As a determined Bee gives her statement to the lead investigator, her story reveals a predator who got away with murder--and an obsession that may cost Bee her own life.

A thrilling story of fierce love between siblings, Sister is a suspenseful and accomplished debut with a stunning twist.]]> 341 Rosamund Lupton 030771652X Sara 3
That's pretty much the plot of this book, which is a decent read, but hardly an amazing one. The dead sister whose murder must be solved is entirely too perfect, the live sister who must investigate her death entirely too riddled with predictable faults, and the results would be a little too predictable except for a somewhat irritating literary device that intervenes.

I'm not sorry I read it -- it lasted exactly as long as my air travel required it to last -- but I don't care whether I remember it or not in a week.]]> 3.72 2010 Sister

author: Rosamund Lupton
name: Sara
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/06/01
date added: 2012/06/27
shelves:
review:
If I'm remembering my Freud right, melancholia is the pathological distortion of mourning because it involves internalizing all the characteristics of the lost loved one, and then punishing oneself in the place of the loved one, for the loved one's abandonment.

That's pretty much the plot of this book, which is a decent read, but hardly an amazing one. The dead sister whose murder must be solved is entirely too perfect, the live sister who must investigate her death entirely too riddled with predictable faults, and the results would be a little too predictable except for a somewhat irritating literary device that intervenes.

I'm not sorry I read it -- it lasted exactly as long as my air travel required it to last -- but I don't care whether I remember it or not in a week.
]]> <![CDATA[Planting Noah's Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology]]> 380440 464 Sara Bonnett Stein 0395709601 Sara 4 4.33

Planting Noah's Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology

author: Sara Bonnett Stein
name: Sara
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2003/07/01
date added: 2012/05/24
shelves:
review:
Sarah Stein is clearly a crusty, pushy flinty kind of New England woman, who, even in a book written by herself, comes off sounding like someone you might want to talk to (especially if you had a question about native plants), but not live next door to. Still -- her tale of conversion from fancy rose-show horticulture to an obsessive love of native ecology is fascinating (earlier chronicled in the prequel to this book, _Noah's Garden_), and this book is a charming mix of narrative and concrete directions for how to go native in your own backyard.
]]> <![CDATA[Minding My Mitochondria: How I Overcame Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Got Out of My Wheelchair]]> 9065059 236 Terry Wahls 0982175086 Sara 3

In the talk she advocates the consumption of 9 cups of vegetables every day. This basic rule formed an important part of her surprising recovery from progressive MS (progressive MS is the kind you're not supposed to recover from).She went from being wheel-chair bound to doing long-distance bike rides.

Important caveats: The nine cups of vegetables were only a PART of Wahls' improvement in health. She also followed a regime that included muscular electrical stimulation, a still very experimental form of treatment for MS. She also takes significant supplements of algae and uses clay treatments and epsom salt baths, all for detoxification.

And perhaps most importantly, Wahls repeatedly says in this book that she's not trying to prescribe her regime as a definite, one-size-fits-all, miracle cure for MS or anything else. She's a medical doctor, so she repeatedly explains why it will be a long time before any of the results she got can be clinically reproduced. She also emphasizes repeatedly that context will vary from patient to patient, and each reader of the book needs to consider their own particular problems and resources. And she warns that they simply may not get the same results.

Ok, that said, I still think this book is a worthwhile read. I don't have MS myself, but I have family members with chronic health problems. One of my family members saw the TED talk, and was impressed enough to get interested. Eager to be of help, I immediately ordered and read the book.

As a book, this one's got limitations. It's self-published and it could really benefit from a professional editor. It's clear *enough* for a public lecture, or a set of seminar hand-outs, but its clarity as a book could be much improved. It would be nice if Wahls considered bringing out a third edition with a major for-profit press that could provide some of those services for her.

However, the information it contains is riveting. Starting with a basic biology lesson on the mitochondria, the part of each human cell responsible for the creation of energy, the removal of toxins, and "equipment replacement" (ie, deciding when cells live and when they die), the book goes on to detail how both nutrients and toxins affect this functioning. One of Wahls' basic premises is that vegetables -- especially dark greens and colorful vegetables -- provide micronutrients to the mitochondria in a way that is more efficient and simply higher volume than any number of vitamin supplements could ever be. Plus, she raises the point that there are plenty of micronutrients that we need, that science knows nothing about, and those are also available through food and not through supplements. Her secondary recommendation follows from these two ideas: She recommends that we consume only wild-caught fish, grass-fed meats, because grain-fed animals haven't had the proper nutrition either, and so provide little nutrition to those who consume them. She also recommends the regular consumption of (ick!) organ meats.

In sum, her basic recommendation: that we get rid of the refined sugars, refined grain products, and mass-manufactured foots in our diets and replace them with a nonstop variety of vegetables plus some grazing meat, wild-caught fish, and organ meats. Her book provides reasonably convincing scientific reasons for why this will create *some* improvements in almost everyone's life. I think the most enjoyable part of the book, in fact, was learning all of the various factors that contribute to brain function and energy levels in humans.

At the end of the book, I was convinced enough to commit to making major changes in my own diet (my god -- the kale! the kale!). About half the book is vegetable-intensive recipes to get you started on this road. (there are also food blogs aplenty, too, to help you out in this regard. Just start googling "sauteed kale" and you'll see what I mean).

But just as importantly, after reading this book I was intellectually stimulated enough to seek out some of the other books on nutrition that she recommends. Wahls is a smart woman who has a deep knowledge of and real passion for thinking about how food and toxins affect the human body, and that comes through quite clearly, even in this poorly edited book.

]]> 4.20 2010 Minding My Mitochondria: How I Overcame Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Got Out of My Wheelchair

Minding My Mitochondria: How I Overcame Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Got Out of My Wheelchair

author: Terry Wahls
name: Sara
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2012/02/01
date added: 2012/03/04
shelves:
review:
Like probably everyone else reading this book right now, I heard of Terry Wahls by getting a link to her Ted talk:

In the talk she advocates the consumption of 9 cups of vegetables every day. This basic rule formed an important part of her surprising recovery from progressive MS (progressive MS is the kind you're not supposed to recover from).She went from being wheel-chair bound to doing long-distance bike rides.

Important caveats: The nine cups of vegetables were only a PART of Wahls' improvement in health. She also followed a regime that included muscular electrical stimulation, a still very experimental form of treatment for MS. She also takes significant supplements of algae and uses clay treatments and epsom salt baths, all for detoxification.

And perhaps most importantly, Wahls repeatedly says in this book that she's not trying to prescribe her regime as a definite, one-size-fits-all, miracle cure for MS or anything else. She's a medical doctor, so she repeatedly explains why it will be a long time before any of the results she got can be clinically reproduced. She also emphasizes repeatedly that context will vary from patient to patient, and each reader of the book needs to consider their own particular problems and resources. And she warns that they simply may not get the same results.

Ok, that said, I still think this book is a worthwhile read. I don't have MS myself, but I have family members with chronic health problems. One of my family members saw the TED talk, and was impressed enough to get interested. Eager to be of help, I immediately ordered and read the book.

As a book, this one's got limitations. It's self-published and it could really benefit from a professional editor. It's clear *enough* for a public lecture, or a set of seminar hand-outs, but its clarity as a book could be much improved. It would be nice if Wahls considered bringing out a third edition with a major for-profit press that could provide some of those services for her.

However, the information it contains is riveting. Starting with a basic biology lesson on the mitochondria, the part of each human cell responsible for the creation of energy, the removal of toxins, and "equipment replacement" (ie, deciding when cells live and when they die), the book goes on to detail how both nutrients and toxins affect this functioning. One of Wahls' basic premises is that vegetables -- especially dark greens and colorful vegetables -- provide micronutrients to the mitochondria in a way that is more efficient and simply higher volume than any number of vitamin supplements could ever be. Plus, she raises the point that there are plenty of micronutrients that we need, that science knows nothing about, and those are also available through food and not through supplements. Her secondary recommendation follows from these two ideas: She recommends that we consume only wild-caught fish, grass-fed meats, because grain-fed animals haven't had the proper nutrition either, and so provide little nutrition to those who consume them. She also recommends the regular consumption of (ick!) organ meats.

In sum, her basic recommendation: that we get rid of the refined sugars, refined grain products, and mass-manufactured foots in our diets and replace them with a nonstop variety of vegetables plus some grazing meat, wild-caught fish, and organ meats. Her book provides reasonably convincing scientific reasons for why this will create *some* improvements in almost everyone's life. I think the most enjoyable part of the book, in fact, was learning all of the various factors that contribute to brain function and energy levels in humans.

At the end of the book, I was convinced enough to commit to making major changes in my own diet (my god -- the kale! the kale!). About half the book is vegetable-intensive recipes to get you started on this road. (there are also food blogs aplenty, too, to help you out in this regard. Just start googling "sauteed kale" and you'll see what I mean).

But just as importantly, after reading this book I was intellectually stimulated enough to seek out some of the other books on nutrition that she recommends. Wahls is a smart woman who has a deep knowledge of and real passion for thinking about how food and toxins affect the human body, and that comes through quite clearly, even in this poorly edited book.

]]> Faith 9592213 322 Jennifer Haigh 0060755806 Sara 3
The story dwells on a Catholic priest, accused of molesting a little boy within months of the Diocese of Boston's sexual abuse scandal breaking into the press. The story is told by his younger sister, and a great deal of the suspense in the novel comes from the "did he or didn't he" narration. But the emotional force of the story centers squarely on the accused priest's life, and that of his family, and so is also a tale about upward mobility for the working-class Boston Irish. Haigh draws the priest's brother, a police-man turned successful real estate broker, with an especially sharp perception of the emotional contours of becoming middle class. The sister-narrator herself is less well-fleshed out, often functioning as an almost omniscient narrator, which itself caused a bit of grinding in the tectonic plates of the narrative: there were times when I was distracted from the plot because I was wondering "How could you know this? When did you find this out?"

Haigh is splendid at outlining the place that the Catholic church - as a provider of education, social prestige, Bingo, and salvation -- takes in the life of this family, so that you do fully feel and believe the impact that the accusation has on all of them: the devout, the second-generation Easter Catholics, and the entirely fallen away. The novel is especially savvy about juxtaposing Catholic romanticism about the church with the dullness, the disappointment, and the downright evil that it also offers. When her novel culminates in a moment of true sacrifice, it is a breathtaking surprise because so little of her narrative has offered us reason to expect that someone associated with the church would choose to do the right thing; nonetheless, the culmination rings true to the novel's basic tone. I confess that this is probably the only novel I've ever cried over in my adult life.

But -- but. It isn't a novel which challenges the fundamental way that the sex abuse scandal has been narrated. The bad guys are still the bad guys at the end of the novel, and we don't actually have a clearer sense of why they're bad than we did when we started. By the end of the novel we are relieved to find out that we haven't been put in the uncomfortable position of having sympathized with or identified with any child molesters. In fact, the novel is a bit cheap in the way it substitutes the betrayal we think might have happened with another betrayal that the novel implies is lesser in some ways. And thinking about that makes me a bit ashamed that the novel made me cry along with it.]]> 3.84 2011 Faith

author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Sara
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/01/01
date added: 2012/01/31
shelves:
review:
I would give this book four stars for being a gut-wrenching but ultimately redemptive story of a family's tortured past, and about one star for its failure to provide any sort of nuanced commentary on the sexual abuse scandal in the American Catholic church.

The story dwells on a Catholic priest, accused of molesting a little boy within months of the Diocese of Boston's sexual abuse scandal breaking into the press. The story is told by his younger sister, and a great deal of the suspense in the novel comes from the "did he or didn't he" narration. But the emotional force of the story centers squarely on the accused priest's life, and that of his family, and so is also a tale about upward mobility for the working-class Boston Irish. Haigh draws the priest's brother, a police-man turned successful real estate broker, with an especially sharp perception of the emotional contours of becoming middle class. The sister-narrator herself is less well-fleshed out, often functioning as an almost omniscient narrator, which itself caused a bit of grinding in the tectonic plates of the narrative: there were times when I was distracted from the plot because I was wondering "How could you know this? When did you find this out?"

Haigh is splendid at outlining the place that the Catholic church - as a provider of education, social prestige, Bingo, and salvation -- takes in the life of this family, so that you do fully feel and believe the impact that the accusation has on all of them: the devout, the second-generation Easter Catholics, and the entirely fallen away. The novel is especially savvy about juxtaposing Catholic romanticism about the church with the dullness, the disappointment, and the downright evil that it also offers. When her novel culminates in a moment of true sacrifice, it is a breathtaking surprise because so little of her narrative has offered us reason to expect that someone associated with the church would choose to do the right thing; nonetheless, the culmination rings true to the novel's basic tone. I confess that this is probably the only novel I've ever cried over in my adult life.

But -- but. It isn't a novel which challenges the fundamental way that the sex abuse scandal has been narrated. The bad guys are still the bad guys at the end of the novel, and we don't actually have a clearer sense of why they're bad than we did when we started. By the end of the novel we are relieved to find out that we haven't been put in the uncomfortable position of having sympathized with or identified with any child molesters. In fact, the novel is a bit cheap in the way it substitutes the betrayal we think might have happened with another betrayal that the novel implies is lesser in some ways. And thinking about that makes me a bit ashamed that the novel made me cry along with it.
]]> The Mangan Inheritance 1158573 330 Brian Moore 0006548334 Sara 3
The pleasures of the book are ethnographic in nature. Moore summons up a 1970s actor's world and an impoverished Irish countryside with equal skill. Are these accurate pictures? I have no way of knowing, but they are well-fleshed out and engaging worlds, drawn up with what seems like no effort at all. The book is clearly conversant with a lot of other twentieth-century fictional accounts of the Irish countryside, so it will ring "true" to aficionados of mid-twentieth-century middlebrow Irish literature.

The book relies a bit too heavily on the idea that the sexual exploitation of young girls is somewhat comic, so I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone, even though it was unquestionably a well-written book. The logic of the plot ultimately exposes this comedy as problematic, but didn't really make all the ogling and heaving along the way worth it.

]]> 3.51 1979 The Mangan Inheritance

author: Brian Moore
name: Sara
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2012/01/01
date added: 2012/01/31
shelves:
review:
The somewhat aimless writer-husband of a recently dead movie-star travels to Ireland on the premise that he can discover whether or not he is indeed the descendant of Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. He is lured on by a mysterious photograph which might be of the original James Clarence Mangan, but happens to look exactly like our protagonist.

The pleasures of the book are ethnographic in nature. Moore summons up a 1970s actor's world and an impoverished Irish countryside with equal skill. Are these accurate pictures? I have no way of knowing, but they are well-fleshed out and engaging worlds, drawn up with what seems like no effort at all. The book is clearly conversant with a lot of other twentieth-century fictional accounts of the Irish countryside, so it will ring "true" to aficionados of mid-twentieth-century middlebrow Irish literature.

The book relies a bit too heavily on the idea that the sexual exploitation of young girls is somewhat comic, so I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone, even though it was unquestionably a well-written book. The logic of the plot ultimately exposes this comedy as problematic, but didn't really make all the ogling and heaving along the way worth it.

]]> Brideshead Revisited 30933 Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.]]> 351 Evelyn Waugh 0316926345 Sara 3
But writ large, the novel's focus is also the obscene luxury of the upper class in England. The plot in a perverse way is Waugh's attempt to ask "What was it all for?" at a moment when it was being bombed to smithereens during the Blitz. Waugh seems to be trying to incorporate the entire aristocratic system back into the larger logic of sacrifice demanded by WWII, without actually having to give up any of his pleasant memories of the outrageous luxuries they enjoyed.

I think I would have enjoyed this novel when I was going through my F. Scott Fitzgerald phase in high school -- in fact, the novel reads a lot like _Tender is the Night_ (in the first half) mashed up with _The Great Gatsby_ (in the second half). But, like both those books, it's a novel whose emotional center is largely focused on the age 18, promising you that what you love and crave at 18 will gradually shape your entire life. For those of us relieved to have critical and emotional distance from what we loved at 18, the tale's promise might not be so alluring. ]]> 4.01 1945 Brideshead Revisited

author: Evelyn Waugh
name: Sara
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1945
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/01
date added: 2011/12/31
shelves:
review:
While writing this book in 1945, Evelyn Waugh was suffering through a war injury compounded by war rations and war austerity. His obsessive attention to food, clothes, decor, luxury purchases, and even more food in this novel, he claims, came from the sense of privation generalized in the lean last years of the war in the UK. The early chapters of the novel, especially, read like an Oxbridge version of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, full of gorgeous meals and ridiculous purchases. And perhaps not coincidentally, men in love with each other saying witty meaningless things.

But writ large, the novel's focus is also the obscene luxury of the upper class in England. The plot in a perverse way is Waugh's attempt to ask "What was it all for?" at a moment when it was being bombed to smithereens during the Blitz. Waugh seems to be trying to incorporate the entire aristocratic system back into the larger logic of sacrifice demanded by WWII, without actually having to give up any of his pleasant memories of the outrageous luxuries they enjoyed.

I think I would have enjoyed this novel when I was going through my F. Scott Fitzgerald phase in high school -- in fact, the novel reads a lot like _Tender is the Night_ (in the first half) mashed up with _The Great Gatsby_ (in the second half). But, like both those books, it's a novel whose emotional center is largely focused on the age 18, promising you that what you love and crave at 18 will gradually shape your entire life. For those of us relieved to have critical and emotional distance from what we loved at 18, the tale's promise might not be so alluring.
]]> Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1) 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm Tóibín 1439138311 Sara 5
The first two hundred pages of the book are delicately written. Our main character, Eilis, has a way of understanding the suitors in her life as holding back, not giving in to a more ardent passion they feel, and that might be a good description of how Toibin treats both Ireland and Brooklyn. Clearly an intense amount of passion must have led him to gather so many period details (the book is surprisingly knowledgeable about the state of post-war women's nylons) but Toibin never feeds you more than you need. All the reviewers quoted in my paper-back edition of the book praise Toibin's faithful rendition of 1950s Brooklyn, but that seems like a silly thing to say -- what could any of these reviewers know about 1950s Brooklyn that didn't just come from books anyway? I think what they must be praising is his ability to plant one crucial period detail that evokes a whole ambiance, rather than trying to squeeze in 25 details that will prove how hard he researched the authenticity of his setting.

But it's the last 60 pages that are amazing. What might you think the point of a book would be, that sends a woman out to New York to go after her fortune, and then sends her back to sleepy, claustrophobic Ireland where she must confront the possibility of staying? That you can't go home again. That you can't escape your past. That the force of 1950s patriarchal culture is too strong even for an ambitious woman. That the condition of the emigrant is one of dwelling in two incommensurate worlds. No. No. No. None of these are the point of the book. Toibin avoids absolutely every cliche about the emigrant experience to deliver one of the most stunning fictions of the trans-Atlantic Irish world that has ever been written. No exaggeration. ]]> 3.71 2009 Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1)

author: Colm Tóibín
name: Sara
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2011/10/01
date added: 2011/10/19
shelves:
review:
I thought I'd read enough reviews of this novel before picking it up to know what I was getting into: in the depressed 1950s in Ireland, a somewhat wallflowerish, small-town Irish girl is sent by her family, perhaps against her will and definitely in contradiction of what she understands her personality to be, to Brooklyn, New York, to work. From what I'd heard about the book, she goes to New York, blossoms surprisingly, and then is forced to return to Ireland after a family crisis. That's kind of the plot, but that actually tells you nothing about the way this book unfolds.

The first two hundred pages of the book are delicately written. Our main character, Eilis, has a way of understanding the suitors in her life as holding back, not giving in to a more ardent passion they feel, and that might be a good description of how Toibin treats both Ireland and Brooklyn. Clearly an intense amount of passion must have led him to gather so many period details (the book is surprisingly knowledgeable about the state of post-war women's nylons) but Toibin never feeds you more than you need. All the reviewers quoted in my paper-back edition of the book praise Toibin's faithful rendition of 1950s Brooklyn, but that seems like a silly thing to say -- what could any of these reviewers know about 1950s Brooklyn that didn't just come from books anyway? I think what they must be praising is his ability to plant one crucial period detail that evokes a whole ambiance, rather than trying to squeeze in 25 details that will prove how hard he researched the authenticity of his setting.

But it's the last 60 pages that are amazing. What might you think the point of a book would be, that sends a woman out to New York to go after her fortune, and then sends her back to sleepy, claustrophobic Ireland where she must confront the possibility of staying? That you can't go home again. That you can't escape your past. That the force of 1950s patriarchal culture is too strong even for an ambitious woman. That the condition of the emigrant is one of dwelling in two incommensurate worlds. No. No. No. None of these are the point of the book. Toibin avoids absolutely every cliche about the emigrant experience to deliver one of the most stunning fictions of the trans-Atlantic Irish world that has ever been written. No exaggeration.
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