Book Review: Code Girls by Liza Mundy

In an effort to work a little more nonfiction into my reading this year, I picked up the audio book to Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II when my store was sent a box of complimentary items that included both the audio and regular hardcover versions of this book.  Thank you, Hachette!

The title is pretty self explanatory -- this book is an overview of women’s involvement as cryptographers and cryptanalysts during the war, and the author does a creditable job of bringing these women’s stories to light.  More than 10,000 young women worked as code breakers during the war, but because they took secrecy oaths under penalty of death and also because most of the women were forced out of work once the war was over, their stories are not part of our shared lore and history of that war. Until now, that is.

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government started sending letters to young women attending various colleges in November 1941, inviting them to secret meetings where they were judged on various aptitudes for numbers, patterns, and languages, as well as their character. Those deemed worthy enough then pursued further training before being invited to Washington, DC, after graduation.

This book ranges from the thrilling to the mundane, talking about the desperation for breaking both the Enigma machine on the European front and the various Japanese codes on the Pacific front, but also ranging into the daily lives of these women -- the hardships they faced, but also the simple joys of having escaped the dreary confines of the proper lives they had, up until recently, been expected to assume.

One thing I enjoyed was hearing more about the involvement of Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges for the war effort (since they’re both local to me) both in terms of the number of their young women who joined the ranks of codebreakers and the training grounds that they became for female officers, once the Army and Navy decided to admit women.

While the author did a terrific job describing the raging sexism and misogyny that these women were facing, I would have appreciated hearing a bit more about the rampant racism of the age since the reader only gets to know white women and their contribution to the war effort. It remains mostly unspoken that it was only white women who were college educated at the time, and of good enough pedigree for the US government.

Erin Bennett was the reader for this book and while I don’t recall anything that stood out about her performance, she was a solid reader. Mundy’s research seems solid, based on the footnotes in the physical book, but I do wish that the narrative had been a bit more streamlined. There were multiple times when the narrative diverted to epistolary excerpts between one of the women codebreakers and the young man who was in love with her -- they didn’t advance the storyline and they weren’t interesting enough, either from a romantic or a historical point of view, to include them. Overall, however, this is a book I could easily recommend to the general reader, but particularly to readers of historical nonfiction and those interested in knowing more about the stories of those people who have traditionally been marginalized. 

Last Month in Review: November 2016

It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written a post like this -- a frame of time that could as easily be measured in years as months -- so I’m happy to be back in the saddle for some bookish blogposts. In chronological order, here is what I’ve read:

1. The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead by Chanelle Benz.  This book winz for great title and author name. This collection of short stories is very strong, and while the narrative voice varies from story to story, you can feel the unifying sensibility behind each one. Debut book. This author studied with George Saunders, and given that, the darkness in most of these stories is unsurprising.

2. Desperation Road by Michael Ferris Smith. Eh.  I was underwhelmed by this one.  I liked the story but felt I had read it in various permutations many times before. Man is released from prison, goes home, gets beaten up by the family who believes he deserves no mercy after what he’s done.  He crosses paths with a woman who turns out to have a unique connection to his past.

3. The Futures by Anna Pitoniak. First novel about a young couple trying to make it in Manhattan after graduating from Yale.  Another meh read for me.  The writing was good, but reading about how hard it is to be a young, white, Yale grad from a privileged background doesn’t exactly draw out my sympathy.

4. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. This book surprised me with how much I liked it.  I brought it with me on vacation for an easy beach read, and it was certainly that, but I LOVED reading all of the food and wine descriptions, as well as getting the inside scoop of what it’s like to be an underserver in an incredibly popular and well-respected NYC restaurant.

5. The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. Ugh. I picked this book up to read the day after the election because I wanted something that was sweet and charming and life affirming, all of which are adjectives that readers have applied to this book.  I thought it was pretty 2-dimensional and occasionally insipid. Very disappointed, since the premise of it is so good: a barge bookstore owner on the Seine doesn’t sell the book that the customer wants, he sells the book that the customer needs.

6. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett (audio). I had lunch with Ann Patchett at the end of September and spending that time with her made me want to go back and listen to her essay collection.  Despite being a bonafide novel reader through and through, this is probably my favorite work of hers. I love the honesty and clarity behind each piece.

7. American War by Oman El Akkad. Holy shit, this was a good book.  Set about 50-60 years in the future, this novel tells the story of Sarat Chestnut and her life before, during, and after the Second Civil War in America. Refugee camps, suicide bombers, the secession of the Magnolia States, plotting, politics, and intrigue.  This book was well written, brilliantly paced, and rather frightening. Put it on your radar now, as it will be published in April 2017. 

Audio Book Review: Wild Tales by Graham Nash

It may be a disappointment to my brother, who used to own a record shop, for me to admit in a public space that up until I was given a copy of this book to listen to, *literally* the only thing I knew about Graham Nash is that he comprised the "Nash" portion of the music group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I didn't know that he was British, I didn't know that he formed the band known as the Hollies.  Basically, I didn't know the second thing about this guy.

Which is probably why it took me more than 18 months after the book was published for me to get around to listening to his memoir.  Random House Audio sent me a copy back in September 2013 and it had been sitting on my shelf ever since, but when I was in between audio books last month, I gave it a go.

Graham Nash does his own narration, and he's a competent reader. I'm not sure that I'd sign on for him to narrate audio books in general, but this one came with a bonus: every time a line of lyric comes up in the text, Nash sings it instead of just reading it straight.  In this way, I came to realize that I knew far more of his songs (and the music of C, S, N, & Y) than I realized.

While the specifics of this book were new to me, the general content is about what I expected: celebrity memoir that was slightly dishy, slightly masturbatory, and filled with more than a little drugged stupor. Not particularly well written but occasionally engaging, in listening to this audio I felt like I was getting a history of popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Nash opens with the moment he meets David Crosby and Stephen Stills at Joni's house, where the "Joni" turns out to be Joni Mitchell.

He then backtracks to his childhood in the north of England, through the rise & fall of The Hollies until he leaves them to form Crosby, Stills, and Nash.  Neil Young comes in later, and along the way the reader gets Nash's personal impressions of such music greats as The Beatles, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and scads more.

Mostly I was left with the impression that Neil Young was an arrant asshole and that Graham Nash is unrepentantly sexist, and yet there were moments when I was completely carried away on his narrative.  I found myself coming home at night after listening to the book to do a little googling. Weary as I felt about reading about  all of the hash, heroin, and cocaine consumption, there were occasionally some instances of truly good writing--mostly when it came to describing music and songwriting. And several times over the last few weeks of listening to this book, I've found myself humming, whistling, or singing some of the songs that Nash and/or his bandmates have performed: Bus Stop, Carrie Anne, Love the One You're With, Southern Cross, Our House, Judy Blue Eyes, and more.

I'm glad that Random House Audio sent me a copy of Wild Tales, as I do feel it's important to occasionally read beyond one's usual turf.  There were times when I was very pleasantly surprised by where this book took the reader, and I feel much more knowledgeable about the formative tunes American music in two pretty turbulent decades when the entire social fabric of this country was changing.

What about y'all? Are you a fan of The Hollies? Of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young) in general, or of Graham Nash in particular? 

Get Your Okra On, Y'all!

This isn't going to be a cookbook review, so much as it will be a review of the author and the fun event I attended not long ago at Odyssey Bookshop. It's no secret that I'm Southern, and it's also no secret that until recently, okra was a vegetable that was rather hard to come by up here in the Kingdom of the Yankee. Thankfully that is about to change, and I think we can all be grateful to Virginia Willis, author of the new cookbook and cultural/culinary history, Okra. Her new book is getting all kinds of accolades, she is also a displaced Southerner living in my own town, and Virginia has precisely the right kind of persuasive and upbeat disposition to talk our local farm stand into growing more okra.

All the fixin's for an okra martini, including
locally made vodka and pickled okra garnish

My husband and I were already planning on attending the Okra event, but once we heard that Virginia would be pouring okra martinis and serving up some food for us, we were able to enlist some friends to attend, too.  She also demonstrated how to make pickled okra and the little fried okra cornmeal cakes that were delicious.  Better than hushpuppies or cornbread by far, and nothing's better than food served hot off the skillet!

Virginia is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who loves to incorporate French techniques into traditional Southern cuisine, but for this book, she did research on the cultural history of okra around the world and modified recipes from West Africa, India, the Caribbean, as well as the American south to include in the book.

Seriously, I cannot tell you how good these were.

I've been eating okra for most of my life now, but it wasn't until Virginia's event that I ever sampled it raw, and I just might be a convert.  I like the crunch of raw vegetables, but I've never cared much for their flavor, but okra is pretty mild, and it has a crispness factor similar to sugar snap peas or sweet bell pepper. If it weren't so expensive to buy up here, I might snack on it regularly during the summer months.

Did I mention that she's adorable?

Lots of people don't like okra because of the slimy (or mucilaginous, if you prefer) output that results when it's cut open, but there are ways to avoid it if you wish.  Like deep frying it, which is obviously the best way to eat okra.  OBVIOUSLY. Some dishes, like a traditional gumbo, depend on that same mucilaginous texture to thicken the stew.  I also learned from Virginia that for every culture around the world that grows okra, there's a recipe that pairs tomato with the okra, for the acidity in the tomato cuts down on the slime output. Food science.  It's nifty.

Well, that went down with tolerable ease

I'm not much of a cook myself, but I will do what I can to coax my DH to prepare some of the recipes in this book.  Especially since Virginia gave us the tip to shop at the Asian market in Hadley to find fresh okra year-round!  So basically I'm saying, eat okra, y'all.  It's yummy, it has a venerable tradition, and if you start now, you'll be ahead of the curve.  Okra is gonna be the new arugula and/or the new squash blossoms of 2016.  I can just feel it.

NB: This book was published as part of the Savor the South series from the University of North Carolina Press and DH and I each purchased our own copy to support the author and the event. 

Book Review: Gulp by Mary Roach

If you're looking for a work of serious non-fiction, or if you need a central driving narrative, keep on looking.  But if you like your nonfiction on the lighter side, with plenty of fascinating facts thrown in, and better yet, if you're not squeamish about humor derived from bodily functions, rush right out to pick up a copy of Mary Roach's latest work, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

In case the cover doesn't spell it out for you, Mary Roach's writing tends to the irreverent. I'd read one of her previous books (Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers) and so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect with this one: lots of biology, quirky research and some gross-out factors. I picked up this one to read on vacation a couple of months ago, and while it is not the kind of book that I can read straight through--I need a true narrative for that--I loved reading this one a few chapters at a time and feeling both enlightened and entertained simultaneously.

Roach (and one feels that growing up with this surname certainly was instrumental in developing the author's sense of humor) introduces the reader chapter by chapter to the entire digestive tract of the human body, soup to nuts, as it were, beginning with the relationship between scent and flavor/taste and ending with the excreta, with diverting stops in between for saliva, the art of chewing, and stomach acid, among other things. Her style is to jump right in and get involved with her research, whether that means sampling the muktuk (uncooked narwhal skin) offered by her Inuit hosts ("exquisite") or bearing the moderate discomfort involved in viewing her own appendix or ileocecal valve through modern surgical techniques.

Here's one sample of her trademark humor that doesn't involve any ick-factors: "Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment...This includes the animal known as us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. On the African veldt, unlike at the American food court, fats, sugar, and salt were not easy to come by. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food. And wide spreads in general."

This book is many things, but foremost it is fascinating, and that more than makes up for the occasionally off-putting sections that I don't recommend reading within an hour of eating.  Roach concludes, almost poetically, "Most of us pass our whole lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them a thought. This seems strange to me. How is that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect."

NB: I read an advance readers copy of this book provide to me at my request from my sales rep.  This book is published by W. W. Norton. 

Help Me Choose Some Vacation Reading!

Lovely Long Bay on Anguilla

I've got my annual Caribbean vacation coming up, and while I've been traveling to the islands often enough that I could practically pack in my sleep the night before leaving, one thing I spend lots of time agonizing over is which books to take with me. This year I'm also armed with an e-reader (Kobo Glo), which I plan to load up with some galleys, but I will also be packing a hefty number of physical books for our two week vacation. Yes, I can pack my snorkel gear and clothing sufficient for two weeks into a rollaboard suitcase, but I check another bag filled with books.  That's just the way I roll.

We're going to Anguilla again this year, an island we feel we're coming to know, little by little, after multiple (six? seven? I lose track) trips. We love this little place in the sun and we love our daily patterns there: read, eat, walk the beach, read, eat, swim, read, eat, snorkel, read, eat, explore. Repeat for the next fourteen days. Intersperse rum drinks at will. We love Anguilla for what it isn't (loud, crowded, jetskis, nightlife, casino) just as much as we love it for what it is (peaceful, quiet, friendly, beautiful beaches, and amazing food).

I'm a little behind in pre-reading my books for vacation.  No book makes it into my suitcase without my reading at a minimum the first two chapters to ensure its worthiness.  I used to read only the first chapter but last year I got landed with a couple of duds, and then some writing friends revealed to me that the first chapter is the most-revised and workshopped and often the best part of any book. Of course.  But that's where you come in, dear reader.  If you've read anything on this list that you think was excellent or a dud, please enlighten me.  Likewise, if there's a book out there that really blows your skirt up or creams your  Twinkie or [insert euphemistic metaphor of your choice here], please let me know.

I try to take books that are mostly not-yet-published, and they will mostly be fiction, but I try to work at least one YA, one short story collection, 1-2 works of nonfiction, and occasionally one classic into the mix for variety's sake. If a book will also double as a must-read for my husband it gets bonus points and an almost ironclad guaranteed spot in my bag.  Here are the ones on my long list:

For nonfiction: Gulp by Mary Roach, The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World by Matt Cross, and Headhunters on My Doorstep by J. Maarten Troost (I LOVE his books on the South Pacific.  His book on China didn't do much for my skirt OR my Twinkie, though). The latter is almost guaranteed a spot because (1) it isn't published yet and (2) my husband loves his books, too.

Vying for the short story position(s) are: The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham, This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila, and The Peripatetic Coffin by Ethan Rutherford.

My fiction offerings are pretty varied: Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman, Happiness Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta, A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes, Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat, and The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. And I'd be remiss if I didn't include Lamb by Christopher Moore.  Then there's anything I might pick up at BEA this week. The new Bill Bryson if I'm lucky.  Or possibly the new Paul Harding or Marisha Pessl.

My classic this year just may be The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  This is the book my husband asked me to read for Christmas in 2012.  We do this every year--we read a book of the other's choosing--and while I love this tradition, I am a little bummed that this is the book he picked for me out of all of the fantastic books he read last year. However, I may put off reading Grapes and take with me something a little more fun: Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, for example.

My YA options are wide open.  I had been planning on taking Code Name Verity, but it turns out that my bookstore just started a YA bookclub for adults and that's the first selection, to be discussed before we leave.  So that one is out.  The last few YA books that I went crazy for were The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde, and Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, so I'm open to most things: realistic, historical, or fantastical.

So what say you, gentle reader?  Which books should earn passage to Anguilla?

This is a photo from our "home" balcony on Anguilla

Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

Oh, my goodness.  I've been in a bit of a book-reading slump lately.  I say "book-reading" not to be redundant but rather to differentiate from my fanfic reading, which has most decidedly not been in a recent slump.  Up until today, it was taking me on average about three weeks to finish a single book, not least because I was actively reading about a dozen different ones and making no good headway in any of them.

Today, though, I began and finished David Sedaris' wonderful new essay collection, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. Maybe it's because it was purely fun to read and not something I had to read for work is what did the trick, but my goodness, I was positively chortling through most of it.  Much to my husband's and my cats's dismay; the former because he actually has to do work today and the latter because it's much more difficult for them to sleep on my lap when I'm doubled over and shaking with laughter.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sedaris once when he was on tour for Me Talk Pretty One Day, a terrible day in July in Jackson, MS, when the store's air conditioning wasn't working and there were no windows to open. He was a serious trouper and very good natured about it, and for which I admired him.  Since then, I've listened to most of his books on audio, and a couple of years ago at the same bookstore, I attended another reading: this one in the comfort of air conditioning, accompanied by $2 beers.  Sedaris told a bizarre poo-in-hand story that prompted me to write one of my favorite blogposts [because apparently I never moved beyond the scatological phase, developmentally speaking], which you can find here.)

 That same night, I remember that my husband and I were the first to laugh at one of jokes in his "book titles that take on a whole new meaning when you remove one letter" sketch: The Count of Monte Cristo. Since it was in Mississippi, perhaps the crowd initially went to Crisco (which admittedly isn't all that funny) and it wasn't until Sedaris, waiting for the other shoe to drop, kept saying, with emphasis, The *Count* of Monte Cristo. At which point the crowd just hooted.

Speaking of owls, I loved this book.  I almost wasted a perfectly good cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee over breakfast this morning by snorting most of it through my nose. My husband, driven to distraction, actually had to crank up his music in the studio today while working in order to drown out my laughter. (Though this gesture somehow loses some of its potency since it was Sibelius he was cranking up.)

As with any collection, some pieces are stronger than others, and I particularly loved "Author, Author" and "Laugh, Kookaburra." There are some darker, "imagined pieces" (for lack of a better term, since "fiction" doesn't quite fit) in between the first person essays/anecdotes that sometimes veered beyond Sedaris' traditional balance of humor and sardonicism into uncomfortable territory.

Anyway, here are some passages that spoke to me.  Maybe they'll speak to you, too.

On things he wants to say to parents when their children are being obnoxiously whiny: "Listen, I'm not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap the child across the face. It won't stop its crying, but at least now it'll be doing it for a good reason."

On those creepy old men at church who constantly ask young people if they're dating yet: "[They'd] even refer to newborn babies as "lady-killers" and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn't enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone."

"Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but for the life of him doesn't understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but I still don't get it.  Why take chances with money?"

On mocking people: "It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, 'Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.' If [the person's] criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she was just being petty and judgmental, then we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks."  (Oh, God, that's so true of me, too, that I read the passage twice and was embarrassed for both Sedaris and myself.)

Sedaris doesn't pull any punches when it comes to his observations of human behavior.  He must be uncomfortable to live with sometimes, but then he turns around and skewers himself with the same sense of vicious patheticism and I think, "well, okay, then."

NB: Little Brown will publish Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls later this month. I read an advance reading copy that was provided at my request from my sales rep. I will probably seek the audio version, too, for my car so I can enjoy it all over again!

Book Review: Home is a Roof Over a Pig: An American Family's Journey in China by Aminta Arrington

Huzzah, huzzah!  The first exhortation is because I finally finished this book.  The second one is because it's the first book review I've managed to post in 2013, which has actually been a fairly difficult year so far.  I started this book months ago and it took me this long to finish it not because it wasn't interesting or because I started it and put it down again, but because I was reading it in the smallest room in the house.  Every day. Sometimes twice a day.  I needn't go into more detail than that.

I find that most memoirs fall into one of two categories: a good story told by a mediocre writer, or a mediocre story told by a good writer, and Aminta Arrington's book falls into the former category.  Home is a Roof Over a Pig is her family's story of adopting a baby girl, whom they name Grace Amelie, from China and then moving there with their three small children in an attempt to give Grace a connection to her birth country. They also want their other two children to grow up with a wider world view than the typical American child's, as well as to give Grace's siblings a chance to know Grace's homeland and create a way for all of the children to share both American and Chinese identities.

Arrington's narrative style is mostly a conversational one and it serves her story well enough, though it does verge into the land of repetition on a regular basis.  It's when she tries to be more "writerly," for lack of a better word, that the writing really sticks out, but not in a good way. The chapters are more episodic rather than a linear narrative, and occasionally she jumps forward or backward in her timelines. That's okay, though, because her story is so interesting and unusual that I'd forgive the writing great deal more.

Aminta's husband Chris decides to retire from the military, giving them both a chance to re-invent their lives.  They can choose anywhere in the world to start over, and as Chris is facile with many languages and Aminta has always been interested in international relations, they know that the US is not where they want to be.  When Chris's older sons from a previous relationship move beyond their teens and their daughter Katherine is a baby, they decide to adopt a sister for her from China. During the adoption process, Aminta unexpectedly gets pregnant again with their son, Andrew, and soon the couple have three children under the age of three.

Now that Grace is a part of their family, deciding they should pick China as the place to raise their children is the easy part. The hard part is finding job placement for two adults with three small children, but in time a regional university in Shandong province called Taishan Medical College find teaching spots for Chris and Aminta, together with a tiny two-bedroom apartment in family housing. Though there are many frustrating moments when they doubt their decision to move to rural China, overall the family adapts fairly well to their new country, with the children adjusting in varying degrees and at varying speeds.  Soon they become entrenched in their neighborhood and in their teaching and church communities.

The title of the book comes from the Chinese character for "home," which Aminta learns is esentially the pictogram for 'roof' combined with the word for "pig," and that pig-farming was one of the earliest non-nomadic occupations for the ancient Chinese.  Thus, if you had a roof over a pig, you stayed put there and it was your home.  Learning tidbits about language like this is what made the book so fascinating for me. Like most Americans, I am not fluent in any language beyond my own, despite my own interest in language, dabbling in French, Spanish, and even Latin during high school and college, and taking an introductory course to linguistics in graduate school.  I may have no facility with it, but language has always interested me; learning a bit about a language whose characters are conceptual meanings rather than based on letters that combine into phonemes to create words was endlessly fascinating.

Beyond the language lessons, I especially enjoyed Arrington's stories about the young people taking her English classes--the cultural divides that become smaller and smaller as the book goes on, such as politics or the importance of family and maintaining cultural traditions, but also those that grow even wider, such as feminism, their respective views on Tibet, and the importance of independent thinking. Learning to understand (and respect) a worldview that is radically different from your own may be difficult, but both teacher and student know that it's essential to try, even, or perhaps especially, if you do not agree with it.

I'd recommend this book for people who are casually interested in China, international adoption, travel memoirs, memoirs about parenting or teaching, or simple readers looking for an unusual perspective.

NB: This book was published in hardcover in July 2012 by Overlook Press and I read an advance reading copy of it provided by my sales rep.

Book (P)Review: After Visiting Friends

(It's not your eyes--the photo on the cover is intentionally blurry)

Another friend in bookselling recently made a comment on her blog that there are just too many memoirs being published.  I tend to agree. She also went on to note that there are certainly exceptions to this rule. Again, I tend to agree. The problem with most memoirs is that the authors either don't have a good enough story to tell or they're not skilled enough to tell it well.  And don't even get me started on celebrity memoirs (Steve Martin's Born Standing Up being an exception to any rule. That man is a genius.).

So when I first saw the bound galley of Michael Hainey's After Seeing Friends, I was inclined to dismiss it.  Unknown author. Nondescript title.  I almost put it in the communal staff kitchen where all of the other unwanted galleys go, but then I saw who sent it to me: Wendy Sheanin, the adult marketing director at Simon & Schuster, whose tastes I trust.  And she'd tucked a handwritten note inside of the first page.  I'm a sucker for a handwritten note. And then I see an envelope hand-addressed to me tucked into the middle of the book.  Turns out that unknown-to-me Mr. Hainey is the deputy editor at GQ magazine and he's written me a note by hand on his letterpress stationery (I'm also a sucker for letterpress anything).

Naturally, After Seeing Friends made it into my tote to take home at the end of the day. Luckily for me, Mr. Hainey is possessed of a writing gift AND an interesting story to tell.  By the end of the first chapter I had dog-eared about half a dozen pages. That pattern continued throughout the book.  The GoodReads summary begins: "Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, was found alone near his car on Chicago’s North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack."

But was that the entire truth? Various obituaries in the city mention that the elder Hainey had died "after visiting friends," but who were these friends, and why didn't they attend the funeral? It is only when Michael has attained his father's age when he died that he decides to bring his full investigative journalism skills to bear to inquire into the circumstances surrounding his father's death. In Michael Hainey's search for what really happened the night his father died, it's not the 25-year-old cold trail so much as the stymying efforts of his father's former friends and colleagues that nearly prevent the story coming to full light.

Hainey travels from New York to the midwest and back so many times that I lost count, tracking down leads not only in Chicagoland, but in Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, and many points in between. Along the way, the reader gets a front-row show to the golden age of Chicagoland journalism: old school, hard core, and with a code of honor that makes the Mafia look like they're merely playing at it.

Eventually Hainey does get the information he's after, and his main reward is that in losing his lifelong idea of what his father was, he is lucky enough as an adult to truly know his mother; the facade she maintains for her children's sake finally crumbles. For me, though, the real turning point of the story is when he reconnects with his cousin and older brother, and then later attends what would have been his father's 50th high school reunion, where he comes to know his father and where he himself fits within the generations of Hainey family. While Hainey's is a very specific and intimate story, there's an element of the universal permeating his quest: how can we know ourselves if we don't know where we come from? How can we know ourselves if we don't consider our impact on the next generation?

If you are interested in the nature of memory and how it intertwines with history, do yourself a favor and read this book. 

Some of the passages I enjoyed:

On visiting his grandmother in the nursing home: "I gave her a chocolate cream. She raises it to her mouth. A tongue emerges, takes the candy. Like a tortoise I saw at the zoo. She bites, almost in slow motion, chews so slowly I swear I can feel her tasting it ."

A description of Chicagoland as America's meat processing capital: "This was the land of Swift, the kingdom of Armour. It was the beauty of the Industrial Revolution's assembly line turned inside out. Chicago as the disassembly line. Chicago--how fast and how efficiently as creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down."

A terrible truth, laid bare, when he and his brother are told about their father's death: "In that moment I think only one thing: how excited I am. Because my whole life up until then, my bother has never cried. Whenever I have cried, he's always teased me, told me I was a baby. I point at him and start to laugh and I say, 'Cry-baby! Cry-baby!' "

"So often I wonder--Do all brothers end up at Kitty Hawk? Flipping a coin to write history. One will fly. The other stands slack-jawed with awe. Maybe chasing his brother. The wind in his face now. The wind that lifts his brother."

Book Review: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

Nobody could be more surprised than I was that I picked up this book to read, much less found it engrossing from start to finish.  Pamela Druckerman's memoir, whose subtitle is One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, was both eye-opening and jaw-dropping by turn.  Let me clear: I am not a parent, and I have no plans to become one.  While babies might intimidate me, I actually really like children, so this is not coming from the perspective of some misanthropic grumbler who thinks children are the bane of an orderly and sophisticated existence. I consider myself rather fortunate that when I married my husband, I married into a family with grandchildren (ten at the current reckoning), so that I have all of the benefits of being a grandparent without first having been a parent. It's a pretty good gig if you can get it, that's all I'm sayin'.

But back to Bringing Up Bebe....I am astonished at the core differences between American and French parenting styles.  As someone who works with the public sector in a place that caters to families and children, it's been clear to me for quite some time just how different parenting is today from when I was raised.  Somehow American children have become tyrants over their parents, and parents seem to wear it as a badge of honor just how much they're willing to suffer for their children.  I can't tell you the number of times a family comes in to my store and the kid immediately kicks their shoes off.  The parent or nanny or guardian gently says, "Don't you want to put your shoes back on?" and has to ask it several times, and each the time the child refuses.  After all, the child is being asked if she wants to put her shoes on.  It seems like she has a choice, doesn't it?  And it's this endless stream of "choices" that are representative of the systemic problems in American parenting today, at least as I see it.  Because these commands in the form of requests seem to grant the child the right to say no to everything, and lo & behold, the parent actually backs down.

In my childhood, I wasn't given the option of not wearing a jacket when it snowed or of taking my shoes off in a store to run barefoot around it. "No" meant the same thing the first time I asked something as the fifth time I asked something (and I learned very quickly not to ask more than once). My mama had no truck with wheedling or whining with any of her kids.  But I see parents today constantly giving in to unreasonable demands from their children and I don't really understand how that paradigm shifted.

Yes, I understand that it's quite comfortable to criticize something when I'm on the outside looking in, but criticize I must.

Actually, for the first three months, French and American parenting styles are quite similar, as least as laid out by Druckerman: no sleep, multiple nightly feeds, all things revolve around baby, and breastfeeding. After that, though, the differences rear their ugly heads.  After the age of 3 months, French babies are taught to "do their nights" and to learn to live on the overall family's cycle while for Americans, the family usually continues to live on the baby cycle.  According to Druckerman, if a French baby isn't sleeping through the night and eating only four times a day by the age of 6 months, it's a cause for concern.   At first it sounded a little selfish and cruel, but I was eventually convinced that the French way is the saner way to do things.

Then there's the government-run support that that the state provides that lets French families get back to a normal lifestyle, except that the creche program is far superior to anything offered in the States (except, notably the day care run by the Department of Defense, which "accepts kids from the age of six weeks" and where "fees are scaled according to the parents' combined income" [104]), not least because the creche is subsidized.  Meaning that working class families can afford quality care for their children.  What's more, caring for children in France is a profession, a highly trained and licensed one at that, and it doesn't have the stigma that daycare does here in the US.  When children outgrow the creche program, they move on to preschool, which is also subsidized by the state.

The best single illustration I can give is the daily lunch preparation for creche attendees. This particular example was for a table of two-year olds:

 First, the teacher uncovers and displays each dish. The starter is a bright-red tomato salad in vinaigrette. "This is followed by le poisson," she says, to approving glances, as she displays a flaky white fish in a light butter sauce, and a side dish of peas, carrots, and onions. Next she previews the cheese course: "Today it's le bleu," she says, showing the kids a crumbly blue cheese. Then she displays dessert: whole apples, which she'll slice at the table. The food looks simple, fresh, and appetizing. Except for the melamine plates, the bite-sized pieces, and the fact that some of the diners have to be prodded to say "merci," I might be in a high-end restaurant (112).

Here in the States, it's mostly only the privileged who eat that well every day for lunch.  In France, that's a standard state-sponsored meal for all children. 

The United States likes to give a lot of lip service to so-called family values and how much children are held dearly.  We waste time and rhetoric focusing on the definition of family when we should be emphasizing what the values are.  Compared to other first world countries, we're shamefully behind.  Until we can provide a comparative level of health care, nutrition, and family support to all children regardless of socio-economic background that nations like France provide, we have no business talking about how we (as a state, not as individuals) value children.

One somewhat alarming thing noted by Druckerman is that the people of France haven't exactly embraced feminism, but she goes on to note that the state, at least, has:

There are structural reasons why Frenchwomen seem calmer than American women. They take about twenty-one more vacation days each year. France has less feminist rhetoric, but it has many more institutions that enable women to work. There's the national paid maternity leave (the United States has none), the subsidized nannies and creches, the free universal preschool from age three, and myriad tax credits and payments for having kids. All this doesn't insure that there's equality between men and women, but it does insure that Frenchwomen can have both a career and kids (192).

The only thing that I fundamentally disagreed with vis a vis the French parenting approach that Druckerman lays out is how quickly mothers stop breastfeeding their children (most give it up by the time their children are "doing their nights."  Aside from that, I was practically cheering in each chapter for the commonsense approach to raising children with autonomie, as it is called. I recommend this book for parents and non-parents alike, and I suspect I may get myself into hot water more than once by giving this book to any parents to be--or worse, handing it out to parents I know who are expecting a second child.

NB: I picked up an ARC of this book at Winter Institute, but the book was published by Penguin in February of this year.  Also, Druckerman seems to prefer the use of "Frenchwomen" to "French women" and I'm not sure why, since it's not considered standard English any longer, at least here in the US.

Last Month in Review: March 2012

March sped by in a blur.  Partly because work was so busy (think: preparing for Rachel Maddow event and conducting interviews for two job openings at the store), partly because both my husband and I contracted whatever gastrointestinal nastiness that was going around.  Let me put it this way...if I didn't have access Goodreads, I'd never be able to come up with a list of what I read last month!

1. Frances & Bernard by Carlene Bauer.  This was a manuscript that a buddy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt asked me to read, and it impressed me.  It's an epistolary novel involving two writers and it's serious and heartbreaking and lovely. I believe it is slated for publication this fall.

2. The Innocents by Francesca Segal.  Review here.

3. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. Review here.

4. The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. by Nichole Bernier.  I didn't expect to be caught up in this story, but I was.  I hope to review it one of these days.

5. The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger.  I expected to love this one, but I didn't.  I did like it, however.  It's a quiet domestic story of a young woman from Bangladesh and a man from upstate New York.  They meet online, then in person, and rush into a marriage that is almost impossible for any outsider (including the reader) to understand or be sympathetic to.

6. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. Holy cow, but this just might be the best narrative non-fiction that I've ever read.  I know I'm late jumping on this particular bandwagon, and I probably never would have picked it up if my husband hadn't asked me to read it for Christmas (we do that each year as a gift: read a book of the other's choosing).

7. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  Technically this was a re-read.  Comments here.

8. The Collective by Don Lee.  Very good novel, forthcoming from Norton.  Hopefully a review will also be forthcoming.

9. My Own Country: A Doctor's Story by Abraham Verghese.  I started this book back in December because my Book Blogger Secret Santa sent it to me, but I only read a chapter or so at a time.  I didn't love it, but I loved many things about it.  Verghese's novel, Cutting for Stone, is the best novel I've read in years and thus I wanted to be a Verghese completist.  It's also unusual in that it makes the second work of nonfiction I finished this month.

10. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Review here.  This was one of two audio books I completed in March.

11. Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling.  This was the second audio book I put away this month. This was a re-listen.  Musings here.

12. Love Story by Eric Segal.  Love means never having to say you're sorry you read this book.   As hard as it is to imagine, this book did NOT live up to my memories of it when I was a teenager.

13. Silver Swan by Jacynthe.  This is a Harry Potter fanfiction story of novel-length, narrated by Padma Patil and therefore unlike any other fanfiction I've read.  It features Cho/Ginny and has a bleaker than average ending, but it's fairly well written and I just wanted a pure escape at the end of the month during all of the Rachel Maddow madness.  If you want to read it, you can find it here.

Also-rans: I started but did not finish a collection of stories called Aerogrammes by Tania James.  I like short stories but I did not like these.

Book Review: The Lifespan of a Fact by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal

The Lifespan of a Fact is endlessly fascinating! I picked up an ARC of it from NEIBA last fall in an effort to increase my non-fiction reading. Let me try to explain how and why this book got published. Almost 10 years ago, John D’Agata wrote an essay called “About a Mountain” that was rejected for publication from various periodicals due to factual inaccuracies. Enter Believer magazine, who was willing to run the piece with a certain number of inaccuracies, as long as they knew exactly what they were and wouldn’t be surprised by anything post-publication. Believer puts their staff fact checker named Jim Fingal on the case, and over the next seven years the writer and the fact checker go back & forth, dickering about the nature of truth in an essay, where the line is drawn between journalism and narrative non-fiction, and out-and-out lying for the sake of Art. The result is this wonderful little book that prints both the relatively short article as well as much of the fact checking correspondence between John and Jim, which is sometimes aggressive, sometimes funny, and always interesting.

I had no idea until I read this book exactly what happens behind the scenes of any responsibly published nonfiction work. It’s clear to me now, though, that the fact checkers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world, no matter where we draw the line between journalism and creative nonfiction, and after reading this, I’ll never take them for granted again! The book itself has beautiful production values, printed in two colors on each page, with black being used for the original article and the verifiable facts, and a deep maroon for all of the parts that the fact checker challenged.

Sample page from book

NB: Norton published the book last week and it made the front page of the NYT Book Review.

Book (P)Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Jonathan Gottschall has written an extremely interesting and captivating book in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.  I was surprised upon picking up this book how little that is not story in our lives: there are the expected books of course, but also tv, movies, jokes, commercials, lies, gathering 'round the water cooler, advertisements, songs, conspiracy theories and even sports events; really, the list goes on.  Gottschall delves into the fascinating evolutionary, cultural, biological, and even neurological reasons why our species is defined by our storytelling, both communal and individual. 

Did you know, for example, that according to one study "heavy fiction readers had better social skills--as measured by tests of social and empathic ability--than those who mainly read nonfiction"? (I'm curious to know if readers overall have the same relative abilities compared to non-readers...)

This is by far the most compelling non-narrative nonfiction I've read in simply ages, and what's more, it should be required reading for every single reader and writer out there. 

NB: This book will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2012 and I received a copy at Winter Institute. It also happens to qualify for my third book of the year for the New Authors Reading Challenge for 2012, hosted by Literary Escapism.

My Top Ten Books for 2010

Since I read on average about 2-3 books per week (I include listening to unabridged audio here in this total), by the end of the year I've read somewhere in the range of 100-150 [would that I were a speed-reader and could get through that many more!].  Narrowing down to ten favorites is pretty difficult sometimes, but I love the chance that it provides me of revisiting beloved titles and characters that I encountered months ago, in the long, dark nights of January and the long, hot days of summer vacation.  Because I'm a bookseller and frequently read books months ahead of their publication date, I'm modifying this list to reflect the best books published in 2010, even if I might have read 1-2 of them in 2009.  By the same token, books forthcoming in 2011 that I've already read and loved will have to wait for next year's list. I did consciously try to include both fiction and nonfiction as well as some books published for young adults. In no particular order, other than my ability to recall them:

1) The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart.  For its heart, its whimsy, and its British charm & sparkle. Published in cloth in August 2010 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, given to me by my sales rep, Ann Kingman.

2) As Always, Julia: the letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon.  For its intimate look at two extraordinary women who wrote marvelously entertaining and worldly letters.  Published in cloth in November 2010 by Houghton Mifflin.  I picked up a comp copy of this book at NEIBA.

3) Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  For asking the haunting questions: how far would you go to save a stranger's life, and what would you do to preserve or sever that connection afterward?  Published in paperback in February 2010 by Simon and Schuster.  I bought this book to read on summer vacation, only to belatedly discover that my sales rep, John Muse, had given me a finished copy when it was published in cloth the previous year.

4) At Home: A History of Private Life by Bill Bryson.  For being a new book by Bill Bryson.  Does it need more reason than that to make my Top Ten list?  Okay, for being a non-fiction book written with his trademark humor and for his ability to draw startling & fascinating connections between two seemingly unrelated pieces of history.  Published by Doubleday in October 2010.  My Random House rep, Ann Kingman, pressed an advance reading copy into my hot little hands as soon as they were available (and for which I am forever grateful) AND she gifted me with a finished copy the day I met Bill Bryson because I was so pathetically enthusiastic about driving 4 hours to spend 30 minutes in his company.  I also purchased outright the audio version of it, ostensibly to give my husband for Christmas, but which in reality will take up residence in my car.

5) Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay.  For being a beautiful novel whose sense of place completely drew me out of my own circumstances and into the harsh world of dancing for the Bolshoi, whose glittery surface belies the treachery and betrayal and hunger lurking just beneath.  Published in cloth by HarperCollins in September, my sales rep Anne DeCourcey suggested I read the book for my store's signed first edition club.  I did, and we promptly selected it.

6) The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow.  For being a splendid debut novel that probes what racial identity means to a girl who seems to fit neither here nor there.  Published in cloth in March by Algonquin Books, one of my favorite small publishers, and given to me by Craig Popelars, who is the heart and soul of that company.  We also picked this book for our signed first editions club.

7) Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson.  For being a 21st-century novel of manners and for being so utterly delightful, charming, and old-fashioned.  Published in cloth by Random House in March 2010, I think I requested this book from my sales rep, Michael Kindness, but it's also possible that it arrived in the "White Box."

8) Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog.  For being the most provocative and readable book I've ever encountered on humankind's complicated relationships with animals.  No other single book has made me think more about what I'm eating or made me consider the socio-economic implications of our treatment of animals. Published by HarperCollins in cloth in September 2010 and discovered in the staff kitchen in the bookstore one day over lunch--it was an advance reading copy left by our sales rep, Anne DeCourcey.

9) Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta.  For being one of the best boarding school books I've ever read and for having a deliciously complicated protagonist in Taylor Markham, who is simultaneously curious & indifferent, strong & vulnerable.  This book was published in paperback in March 2010 by HarperTeen and I purchased it for a summer vacation read after the enthusiastic recommendation by Rebecca, my store's former children's buyer.

10)  White Cat by Holly Black.  For being such a pure-dee fun romp through magic and organized crime.  I love heist stories and this one was really good.  Published in cloth by McElderry books, a teen division of Simon & Schuster in May 2010.  I'm fairly sure that my sales rep, John Muse, gave me a copy of this one in advance reading copy form, but I also picked up a complimentary finished copy at a NEIBA educational session.

And one to grow on, because I couldn't stop at just ten, and because this book really was extraordinary:

11) Room by Emma Donoghue.  For being an utterly gripping and inventive book, for keeping my attention even when I became frustrated with the 5 year-old narrator, and for braving the psychological depths and twists inherent in long term hostage situations and their aftermaths.  Published by Little, Brown in September 2010.  I grabbed a galley of this book that came in the "White Box" and read it during a weekend of travel this summer.

I'd like to thank all of the wonderful sales reps in western New England who keep me in books all year long, those I've named here and all of the others who are always quick to send me titles I express interest in.  Without them, my reading life would be all the poorer!

An incredibly thought-provoking book

Proportionately, I don't read a lot of nonfiction each year. Maybe one work of nonfiction for every 10-15 works of fiction.  But boy howdy, every now and again I really hit the jackpot with a book that entertains, educates, and enthalls, and most recently it was with Hal Herzog's forthcoming book from HarperCollins,  Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.

 Herzog uses this book to explore the ambiguous moral complexities (or would that be complex moral ambiguities?) of the relationships people have with animals.  What are we to make of the fact that in 1933, the Nazi party signed into legislation the world's most comprehensive animal protection laws?  Why do so many people denounce cockfighting but think nothing of popping back a few fast food chicken nuggets made from hens whose lives are undoubtedly worse than the gamecocks'?  How is US Congress able to not recognize certain breeds of mice and rats as animals in the Animal Welfare Act, enacted in 1966 and still in place today?  Herzog's book leaves more questions than answers in this book that is endlessly fascinating, describing in surprising detail the ambivalence and ambiguities and complications we feel towards the animals we love, hate, and eat.  

He devotes an entire chapter to the "comparative ethics of fighting chickens versus eating them."  Herzog argues that fighting cocks live the life of Riley compared to the  "Dante-esque living conditions" of the COBB 500, a chicken modified by Tyson Chicken for its disproportionate breast meat.  He certainly convinced this reader (with help from Michael Pollan and Eric Schloss) that there are real evils in the mass production (read: torture) of chickens for the fast food industry that far outstrip the evils of cockfighting, and not just because of the sheer numbers.  So when he turns the discussion to issues of class and race, it becomes even more thought-provoking: "Why then is it legal for us to kill nine billion broiler chickens every year, but cockfighting can get you hard time in the federal penitentiary?"  After all, "factory-farmed chickens are exempt from virtually all federal animal welfare statutes INCLUDING the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1958" [emphasis mine]. Cockfighting in the US is mostly the domain of rural working class whites or urban working class people of color, so Herzog suggests that "society is much more likely to criminalize forms of animal abuse that involves minorities and the poor than animal cruelties that affect the wealthy." According to him, over 5,000 horses died at racetracks in the US in the years 2003-2008, and yet polls show that most Americans are not in favor of banning horse racing.  He concludes, rather succinctly, "like cockfighting, horse racing represents a confluence of gambling and suffering. But unlike cockfighting, thoroughbreds are the hobby of the rich."

There are dozens of other chapters, each of them fascinating and disturbing by turn, and I'd go so far as to recommend it to almost every category of mature reader I know.  As a bookseller, I'm not sure I can think of higher praise. 


Just read it.  Seriously.