Reading Roulette: Fourth Pick

The latest group of books to come up in my random selection of books to read includes a wide selection:

Coronets and Steel, Sherwood Smith

Aurelia Kim Murray is a California girl who wishes there were more to life. And there is. For Kim is part of a royal family from a tiny eastern European country, and soon finds herself swept up in the romance and mystery she always wanted-and more, because there's something very different about her bloodline and the magical nature of her ancestral country.

I am sure this got on to my list because of Crown Duel.


Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis

Twelve-year-old Katherine Ann Stephenson has just discovered that she’s inherited her late mother’s magical talents, and despite Stepmama’s stern objections, she’s determined to learn how to use them. But with her eldest sister Elissa’s intended fiancé, the sinister Sir Neville, showing a dangerous interest in Kat’s magical potential; her other sister, Angeline, wreaking romantic havoc with her own witchcraft; and a highwayman lurking in the forest, Kat’s reckless heroism will be tested to the utmost. If she can learn to control her new powers, will Kat be able to rescue her family and win her sisters their true loves?

In this charming blend of Jane Austen–era culture, magical whimsy, and rollicking adventure, readers will find a true friend in the refreshingly unladylike Kat Stephenson.

Stephanie is an online friend and I have had this series in my sights for a while. Now I have the kick in the ass I needed to actually read the first one! I confess, I read the first 100 pages already while I was on vacation. It was the perfect choice.


The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire, Anthony Everitt

Emerging as a market town from a cluster of hill villages in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Rome grew to become the ancient world’s preeminent power. Everitt fashions the story of Rome’s rise to glory into an erudite page-turner filled with lasting lessons for our time. He chronicles the clash between patricians and plebeians that defined the politics of the Republic. He shows how Rome’s shrewd strategy of offering citizenship to her defeated subjects was instrumental in expanding the reach of her burgeoning empire. And he outlines the corrosion of constitutional norms that accompanied Rome’s imperial expansion, as old habits of political compromise gave way, leading to violence and civil war. In the end, unimaginable wealth and power corrupted the traditional virtues of the Republic, and Rome was left triumphant everywhere except within its own borders.

Everitt paints indelible portraits of the great Romans—and non-Romans—who left their mark on the world out of which the mighty empire grew: Cincinnatus, Rome’s George Washington, the very model of the patrician warrior/aristocrat; the brilliant general Scipio Africanus, who turned back a challenge from the Carthaginian legend Hannibal; and Alexander the Great, the invincible Macedonian conqueror who became a role model for generations of would-be Roman rulers. Here also are the intellectual and philosophical leaders whose observations on the art of government and “the good life” have inspired every Western power from antiquity to the present: Cato the Elder, the famously incorruptible statesman who spoke out against the decadence of his times, and Cicero, the consummate orator whose championing of republican institutions put him on a collision course with Julius Caesar and whose writings on justice and liberty continue to inform our political discourse today.

Rome’s decline and fall have long fascinated historians, but the story of how the empire was won is every bit as compelling. With The Rise of Rome, one of our most revered chroniclers of the ancient world tells that tale in a way that will galvanize, inform, and enlighten modern readers.

This one I requested on audio CD and will be going with me in the car to Chicago, since I have at least a fourteen-hour drive ahead of me. I very much enjoyed Everitt's biography of Hadrian.

Why am I doing this?

Book Review: Call of the Mild [2012]

When Call of the Mild, by Lily Raff McCaulou, came up in my first Reading Roulette draw, I couldn't remember what had prompted me to put it on my To Be Read list in the first place. It's the account of an East Coast reporter in her early twenties who takes a job in Oregon and, after dipping some toes in the water via fly fishing, begins to hunt game.

I am not a hunter. I've never been hunting. In fact, I'm a vegetarian. I'm not really cool with killing things in order to eat them, although I know that the production of my tofu and so forth probably comes at the cost of some animal lives (see Michael Pollan, repeatedly quoted in Call of the Mild). Nevertheless, I approached this book as something that might broaden my horizons--both in terms of what I usually read, and the subject matter.

In addition to providing sometimes humorous descriptions of her first encounters with hunting and guns, McCaulou frequently describes her struggles with the ethics of hunting. Her thesis is encapsulated by these passages:

The chase fosters a special relationship, a direct connection between predator and prey. Yet that closeness does not infringe upon the predator's willingness to eat the prey. Instead, killing and eating the prey becomes an expression of that relationship's specialness. (207)

Animals die whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we eat them or not, whether we participate in their deaths willfully or indirectly. To me, hunting my own meat feels like saying grace before a meal and really, for the first time in my life, meaning it. (209) 

Whether you agree with this justification/explanation, her stories and tidbits were interesting enough to get me through the book. McCaulou never seems completely comfortable with her identity as hunter, no matter how much she works to understand it. Some of her assertions were downright troubling:

As a conservationist, it pains me to think of someone pulling the trigger on a rare tiger. But if the astronomical price tag for hunting one tiger raises enough money to protect hundreds of them, isn't that doing more good than harm? (172)

I don't agree with the idea of sacrificing one for the good of the many, nor am I fully on board with "In a sense, hunting is a final frontier of feminism. As women make up a growing percentage of American hunters, we quietly lay claim to a party of humanity that has been dominated by men" (239). Still, this book does provide a lot of food for thought, and maybe McCaulou's continuing internal conflict over the act of taking animals' lives is what makes her a good hunter. Guilt is a continuous thread through the book, yet it doesn't dissuade her from continuing on her path--from rabbits to pheasant to larger birds and finally big game.

Grade: B-

It's not you, it's me. When it comes down to it, I just don't care that much about hunting, although McCaulou does make a compelling argument for hunting as a way of better understanding the natural world--and that hunters ought to be the staunchest of environmentalists. McCaulou's narrative of her activities is interspersed with many digressions on related topics and stories about friends and acquaintances, sometimes feeling like a series of essays rather than a cohesive whole. But I'm glad I read it, even though I never would have gotten through it if not for this project.

My favorite part of this book was completely unintentional. In a passage on cross-country skiing, she describes what she does to keep herself entertained during the seemingly repetitive exercise:

Once I get too tired to be anything but practical, I make mental lists of articles I want to write. Next, I compose pneumonic devices to remember my lists. (180)

I'm going to file that typo away for a rainy day laugh.

This is a thing in a lot of states, including MA, where I live: Becoming an Outdoors-Woman (BOW)

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ETA: Now I do remember how this book got on my TBR list--I read a review in the course of collection development, and thought it looked interesting. This is how a lot of books end up on my list.

Book Review: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern [2011]

In a remote European monastery in 1417, an Italian book-hunter named Poggio Bracciolini unearthed a rare manuscript from Roman times. It was a ninth-century copy of a much older work, De Rerum Natura ("On The Nature of Things") by the poet Lucretius (c. 99-50 BCE). Stephen Greenblatt uses this rediscovery as a springboard to explore the history of human inquiry over two thousand years. This is not a modest undertaking, but Greenblatt moves with ease from the personal details of Bracciolini's experience as an Italian humanist and apostolic secretary to larger set pieces such as the destruction of Alexandria's written treasures and the excavation of Herculaneum, entombed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

De Rerum Natura contains many deeply polarizing ideas, some of which are still contentious today--for example, the notion that the soul dies with the body and there is no afterlife, or the assertion that the pursuit of pleasure should be humankind's guiding principle. Greenblatt demonstrates that these ideas (along with more scientific but no less inflammatory concepts such as the existence of atoms and the idea that the universe was not centered on humanity) were not unprecedented, but grew out of the teachings of Epicurus, of whom Lucretius was a disciple. These concepts might be unsettling to our culture--still largely guided by precepts of self-denial, even if we do not adhere to them--but they were nothing short of incendiary upon their reintroduction into a Renaissance society dominated by the Catholic church. Many who embraced them after Bracciolini's discovery were persecuted as heretics.

Greenblatt leads a fascinating journey of discovery, tracing a set of ideas from antiquity to Thomas Jefferson.

Grade: A

I came to the conclusion that I was an atheist on my own, without consulting learned texts or reading up on the subject. I had some conversations with friends about faith, and was raised in a very faith-conscious place (Utah) even though my parents were not actively religious in any way. My mother had a very personal relationship with spirituality, which I never shared, and died as a Buddhist. But while listening to this book, the concepts being discussed spoke to some deep part of me, saying "You are not alone. Other people have come to these conclusions before you." It's not as if being an atheist is exactly embraced here and now in American culture. I can only imagine living in a time where thinking these thoughts, let alone voicing them, might lead to death. What a lifeline Lucretius's work must have represented to those who were almost completely isolated in their beliefs.

Random Thoughts:

I listened to the book's audio version, and (to my untrained ear) the narrator Edoardo Ballerini did a fantastic job of all those tongue-twisting Italian names.

This book was an excellent way to warm up to my 2012: Year of Nonfiction challenge, in which I am going to try to read as much nonfiction as fiction. I will talk more about it when I post about the statistics of my 2011 year in reading.

ETA: My paper copy finally came in, and it was worth it (as usual) to take a look at it even though I listened to the audio version. It has glossy photographs! And many pages of notes and bibliography at the back! And it has an index (*swoon*).

Dead Mother: No
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Book Review: Bossypants [2011]

Among people of my acquaintance, Tina Fey is seen as a kind of celebrity Everywoman. Even though her life undoubtedly includes photo shoots and awards shows and running a popular television show and occasionally moonlighting on Saturday Night Live, she still manages to seem "normal," almost like one of us. She's not tall, or freakishly skinny, she has a scar on her face, and she's funny. That's why Fey's memoir Bossypants was hotly anticipated as the book that would allow us to learn more about our famous sister.

Bossypants chronicles Fey's childhood in suburban Philadelphia, her move to Chicago and time with Second City, and her years with SNL and 30 Rock through a series of loosely connected stories. While her narrative is unabashedly written from a female perspective--from her first period to her first trip to Planned Parenthood for a Pap smear to the question of whether she should have a second child--it is also presented in the wry, self-deprecating way that one would expect from her writing: "nowhere in the pamphlet did anyone say that your period was NOT a blue liquid." Fey is keenly aware of her position as a woman in a male-dominated industry, and Bossypants works best when she is using her story to dissect the double-standards and stereotypes she's encountered. This is not a good book in which to find "dirt" on other celebrities, but it is an excellent glimpse into the life of a smart, hilarious, and driven woman who is balancing a career and personal life, just like the rest of us.

For a memoir, though, Fey provides remarkably little information about her childhood and family. I was looking forward to learning about her past, and certainly that was accomplished--in terms of her career. As for her early childhood, Fey spends a brief chapter and quickly moves on. Despite the fact that the book is dedicated to Fey's mother, there are only the barest hints of her presence in the narrative. Fey mentions her brother very early on ("My brother is eight years older than I am. I was a big surprise."), but there is no sense of how their relationship functioned as children, or whether they even interacted at all. There is a chapter on her father, Don Fey, but that's the exception in this glossed-over part of her history. She talks about Christmas at her in-laws' house, but never introduces a contrasting picture of Christmas with her family. It's as if Fey is completely comfortable talking about her professional failings and, to some extent, her personal feelings about her career and motherhood, but she's unwilling to cross a certain boundary of privacy. This is completely understandable, but it means that even after an entire book, I still got the sense that I was somehow missing the real Tina Fey.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the book! There were several times I laughed out loud, and I definitely appreciated Fey's understated humor. Bossypants is a quick and fun read, and since Tina Fey is a celebrity, I am looking forward to her follow-up memoir that addresses all the gaps I whined about above.

Grade: B

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Dead Mother: No

Book Review: Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race [2010]

I confess, I picked up the audio version of Earth (a production of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart) because I was curious about how well they could translate such an image-heavy, textbook-style package into an audio format. It turns out that a huge amount of the content got lost in translation, but the audio book is a bite-sized (only three CDs) bit of humor that goes down easily and leaves virtually no lasting impression.

Earth is addressed aliens visiting our planet at some point after we have finally killed ourselves off by (in decreasing order of likelihood): ecological catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, pandemic, robot rebellion, rapture, black hole, shark-bee mutation, or alien invasion. My favorite other possibilities included "rising nitrogen levels leading to simultaneous mass auto-erotic asphyxiation" and "chocolate." Topics covered include geography, life, society, commerce, religion, science, and culture. The printed version is stuffed full of a dizzying variety of infographics, pictures, captions, bulleted lists, call-outs, and diagrams. In fact, the print version might best be consumed in small doses; I can't imagine trying to read it all the way through as if it were a normal book.

The audio version, on the other hand, is narrated with enthusiasm by Jon Stewart and the rest of the Daily Show cast, and it delivers the excerpted material with the flair and wit (wry asides + low humor) characteristic of the show. Some of the narration seemed so spontaneous that it was difficult to imagine reading it as printed text. A few of my favorite moments:

"Saturn: God liked this planet. So he put a ring on it."

"North America was Earth's newest continent, formed c. 1492."

"Mountains were the features on topographical globes that made our fingers feel all tingly. But in person they are foreboding death-towers that offered us little but hardship and, three months of the year, excellent skiing."

Grade: B- (in other words, better than I'd Rather We Got Casinos)

Random Thoughts:

This is the first time I've read a book where the audio version and the print version were almost completely different animals, and I'm not entirely sure I approve. I would really like to know the thought process behind what was stuck in the audiobook and what was left out, because paging through it seemed puzzlingly random.

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Dead Mother: No, the Earth is the only one left alive

Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks [2010]

I am not very comfortable with stories about mothers dying of cancer. It hits way too close to home, and it's something I'd prefer not to think about at all. Ever. However, since I know that approach is not only unrealistic, but unhealthy for me as well, once in a while I challenge myself with something that I know will probably be painful. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, met that criterion, as well as being well reviewed and available on CD: Win-win-win! I have also been trying to read a bit more nonfiction lately, especially since I enjoyed The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher so thoroughly.

Immortal Life is the kind of "relaxed" nonfiction in which the author-narrator takes us on a voyage of discovery that infuses dry, scientific facts with the flavor of human interest. Journalist Skloot had been fascinated as a student by the mystery of the woman behind the HeLa cell line, which has been used to develop the polio vaccine and test cancer therapies, and for a host of other biomedical advances over the last sixty years. Scientists have spent entire careers working with HeLa, but virtually none of them (not to mention the general public) were aware that the relentlessly growing cells originated from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks.

In 1951, Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and a doctor at the Johns Hopkins clinic removed part of the tumor (without her knowledge or consent) before she was treated with radiation therapy. The sample of her cancerous cells grew "like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions." Scientists had been struggling to develop self-perpetuating cell lines for years, and Henrietta's cells provided them with an endlessly growing crop on which to perform experiments (some of them vicious and illegal, such as when Henrietta's cancerous cells were injected into healthy patients without their consent). HeLa, as the cells became known, soon spread to laboratories around the world.

In the meantime, the Lacks family had lost Henrietta to a brutally painful death from uremia soon after radiation treatments failed to cure her cancer. Her autopsy revealed that tumors "the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls." Her children, most notably Deborah Lacks, around whom Skloot frames her story, grew up knowing almost nothing about their mother. It was decades before the Lacks family (struggling to survive in Baltimore) was made aware of the existence of HeLa, which by that point had become a profit-making enterprise and scientific standard. Deborah's brothers reacted with anger, but Deborah was fueled by a desire to discover everything she possibly could about her mother and her dead sister, Elsie, who had been institutionalized and died in the 1950s.

As Skloot comes to a careful truce with the Lacks family and helps Deborah on the slow and painful road to knowing her mother, she intersperses chapters on the scientific developments of cell culture and the discoveries it facilitated. Skloot strikes a careful balance between ethics and the importance of scientific research as she investigates the history of informed consent and presents the "science" part of the story in approachable prose. The combination of these informational chapters with the narrative of Henrietta and Deborah is amazingly effective. I would definitely recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to anyone interested in accessible nonfiction, the history of medicine, African-American history, or just someone looking for a good, moving story. I admit, I cried more than once while listening in the car.


Grade: A

Random Thoughts:

One of the most amazing things about this story is the fact that so many of the principals were still alive, despite the fact that Lacks died in 1951. For example, Skloot was able to interview the doctor who examined Henrietta and removed her cells. Lab assistants, researchers, family members, and others who were touched by Lacks (or HeLa) were still available for Skloot's research. The book was at least ten years in the making, and at times yielded some amazing and improbable discoveries, especially where Deborah's sister Elsie was concerned. It makes me wonder what on earth Skloot will write about next, since she became a primary character in Immortal Life.

Skloot is donating proceeds from the sale of the book to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which has just given out its first grants to some of Henrietta's descendants.

I listened to the book on audio CD, and the narrator was certainly able, but I would also recommend picking up the book to see the eight  pages of color photographs, which do a great deal to bring life to the people that Skloot describes.

I may be the only one who thought this, but if there had been another season of The Wire, they could have centered it around the interaction between Johns Hopkins and the citizens of Baltimore.

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Dead Mother: Yes

Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher [2008]

I have not read much nonfiction in 2010, in contrast to my somewhat regular consumption in 2009, but Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective has been on my TBR list for several years now. When the folks at Unshelved noted that the audio version was narrated by Simon Vance, that was all the incentive I required to put it on my holds list immediately.¹

In a country house in 1860, three-year old Saville Kent was brutally murdered and his body disposed of in a privy, most likely by a member of the household. Suspects in what came to be known as the Road Hill Murder included Saville's father, governess, and siblings. After local police bungled and obstructed the investigation, detective-inspector Jack Whicher was sent from London to work the case, which had gained fervent national interest due to detailed and sensational newspaper accounts. When Whicher identified Saville's sixteen-year old half-sister Constance as the murderer, but was unable to produce anything but circumstantial evidence, his career was seriously jeopardized and the family's privacy was permanently shattered. The solution to the mystery, unraveling in the eye of a scandal-hungry public, took intriguing twists and turns over the course of the next century.

The book is nonfiction that reads more like fiction. On the surface, it's about a crime committed in Victorian England, but Summerscale uses the murder to tease out the complicated relationships between public and private spaces, between the working and middle classes, between husband and wife and first families and second families, and most importantly to examine the rise of the detective, both historically and in popular literature. Along the way, the reader learns word origins, peculiarities of Victorian behavior, historical tidbits, and a little bit about the religious controversies of the late 1800s. A fascinating read.

Grade: A-


Random Thoughts:

As an ex-Victorianist-in-training, I often had the sensation that I was reading someone's dissertation, particularly because she tied it so strongly to detective and sensation fiction like The Moonstone and Lady Audley's Secret. Therefore, I spent a lot of the book thinking about how much grueling research Summerscale must have conducted in order to generate such a well-nuanced depiction of not only the crime itself, but the overall atmosphere of Victorian society. She uses weather reports, railroad schedules, portraits of the people involved, and other primary sources to set the scene with minute details for each stage of the investigation. One of the reviews described her approach to the material as "fastidious," and that pretty much nails it. The voracity of Victorian appetite for sensation (fed by and resulting in a constant stream of newspaper articles) no doubt gave her an absolute wealth of information from which to generate her story. The overwhelming amount of information about the case also points to a public fascination--on the level of an OJ or similar trial today--with murder and scandal that clearly did not develop as recently as one might have theorized.

The pros of reading The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher in print form include the photo pages, as well as voluminous end notes that reveal the scholarly approach behind Summerscale's fiction-esque narrative. The pros of listening to the audio book: Simon Vance. The audio version also has an insert that depicts the floor plan of Road Hill House, which is pretty cool, even though you wouldn't necessarily be scanning it while driving.

For more about how the book was written, see Bookslut's lengthy interview with Summerscale here.

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Dead Mother: Yes

¹Seriously, I am strongly considering checking the catalog for whatever Simon Vance has narrated and putting it on my list. I know him primarily as the dreamy voice of the Temeraire series, but I am more than willing to listen to him talk to me on just about any subject. Needless to say, I follow him on Twitter.

Book Review: Cleaving [2009]

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession is Julie Powell's follow-up to the wildly popular Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (which I will confess up front that I have not read, though I did see the movie). There was a slight tremor in the publishing and book blogging world when the release of Cleaving was delayed so as not to coincide with the release of the Julie and Julia movie, allegedly because the publisher didn't want to flood the market with Powell's books beyond the planned movie tie-in editions. I thought then, and believe even more firmly now, that Cleaving was delayed because someone, somewhere was afraid that its subject matter would have a negative impact on movie ticket sales. I actually think the reverse might be true, but all of this is simply to point out that there was a lot of hype surrounding the book by the time it was finally published in late 2009. As I write this review, I will attempt to ignore this and address the book, and Powell's voice, on its own merits.

The title, Cleaving, is by far my favorite part about the book. It has a clever double-meaning embedded in one (rather old-fashioned) word, given that the two-fold subject of the book is Powell's infidelity and her introduction to the craft of butchery. Throughout the first portion of the book, entitled "Apprentice," Powell makes (sometimes strained) connections between her training as a butcher and her breakup with the enigmatic "D":

To clean a skirt steak . . . It's a time-consuming process, slicing gingerly at all the stringy bits, judging just how clean is clean enough . . . It takes me a while of picking off the bloody bits that remain to realize that I'm not the tearer, but the thing that's been torn away. And I pick and I pick and I pick at these connecting shreds that cling to me. [pp. 54-59]

I hate to say it, but Powell's prose sometimes reminded me of Pamie's unsent teenage love letters. There is so much painful, dramatically worded honesty strewn about the book that I often felt as if I had accidentally cracked open a personal diary that should have remained buried at the bottom of a hope chest.

After the success of Julie and Julia, Powell received a phone call from "someone I'd not heard from in years, a half-remembered murmur coming across the line, sparking uncomfortable memories of a handful of long-ago nights I'd nearly succeeded in forgetting." This person, whom Powell spends the bulk of the text simply calling D, returns to her life and sweeps her into his bed, despite the existence of her mild-mannered and supportive husband, Eric. The details of the affair, and its dissolution, are parceled out between scenes of butchery. After she concludes her apprenticeship, Powell (still feeling restless), leaves the country to visit famous meat-tourism destinations of the world.

Just to be clear, I don't have any problem with adultery as a subject of this book. Heck, it's refreshing that Powell is offering a female perspective, particularly from someone as internet-famous as she is, on the nitty-gritty of an extramarital affair (or at least its brutal aftermath). What I do take issue with is the way she represents herself: as helpless and completely lacking in agency as D has his way with her. She is equally responsible, yet time and time again she refutes her agency and absolves herself of guilt. She's an adult who has made certain choices, and she should accept the responsibility. Similarly, I have no problem (even though I'm a staunch vegetarian) with the many descriptions of meat, entrails, blood, etc., but it was hard to feel at some point that they were relevant to anything. If I'd wanted to read that much about joints and boning (see what I did there?), I would have checked out Practical Meat Cutting and Merchandising. There were recipes, too, but I largely ignored them. At some point, it became so difficult to want to continue reading (because of Powell's attitude, rather than her subject matter) that I stopped--for four months. Even though I was past the apprenticeship part and into the part where Powell wandered the globe in search of herself/to get away from the mess she had created at home, I had used up my reserve of goodwill such that it took that long to force myself to finish.

Apparently I have a lot to say about this book, and it's true that this review has been in the works for a very long time. I will attempt to make some conclusion other than *headdesk*. To borrow a word from Simon Cowell, the book as a whole reads as more "indulgent" than "intriguing." Julie and Julia was successful, I think, because it had a clear goal: cook all of Julia Child's recipes in one year. It had an anchor: Julia Child. It had a narrative arc that took Powell from her humdrum life to this revelation: "Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world . . . It's joy." Unfortunately, Cleaving has none of these things. It has only Powell, who comes off as a woman who has no idea what she wants and is determined to find something that gives her an elusive feeling she is searching for. At the end of the book, she is officially a butcher, and nominally back with her husband, but there is no feeling of closure, or satisfaction, or revelation as there is in her previous book. She has experienced several things, over the course of two years and 300 pages, but has she actually learned anything? It's not clear.

Grade: C-

Dead Mother: No
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Book Review: Official Book Club Selection [2009]

I freely confess that am an unabashed fan of the stand-up comic Kathy Griffin. I watch My Life on the D-List whenever I get the opportunity (damn you, Charter Communications! Bravo should be a core channel!) and I have seen her perform live at Foxwoods and Boston's Symphony Hall. I enjoy her profanity-laden style of storytelling, even though sometimes I am not so familiar with the pop culture events that she references. Written in a conversational style, Griffin's memoir traces her life from her early days as a binge-eating kid with dreams of showbiz stardom through her many "dues-paying" years in LA to her eventual (semi-) stardom, with pit stops to discuss her abusive brother, unfortunate taste in men, and plastic surgery. Peppered with humorous anecdotes about stars and life in Hollywood, and marked by some curious omissions (Celebrity Mole, anyone?--never mentioned), Griffin's memoir nevertheless portrays a surprisingly human woman who is realistic about the casualties of her career-driven life and who genuinely, touchingly, loves her parents.

Grade: B (B+ for the audio version)

Random Thoughts:

I started by reading a paper copy of Official Book Club Selection, but ultimately switched to the audio version (read by Griffin herself), which was much more satisfying than trying to imagine her distinctive voice. However, I've just learned that the audio copy is abridged(???), which seems very un-Kathy-like. It certainly wasn't edited for language, I can tell you that much.

One of the best parts of the book--off the cuff celebrity skewerings--will also be its ultimate downfall as the references quickly become dated. However, this is all the more reason for Griffin to write a subsequent memoir, this time including even more delicious gossip and entertaining stories about her rise to (semi-) fame.

Dead Mother: N

Book Review: 84, Charing Cross Road [1970]

Who could fail to be charmed by the wit and warmth of Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road? Hanff reproduces in the book (with some excisions) her correspondence with the staff of Marks & Co., Booksellers, most notably Frank Doel, who was chiefly responsible for sending her books she requested over the course of nearly twenty years. In return, she sent both teasing, sometimes outrageous responses ("this is not pepys' diary, this is some busybody editor's miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys' diary may he rot") and supplemental food for the book shop's staff, a luxury in post-war England. The letters are humorous, educated, and vibrant, and it is heartening to watch them grow from simple business transactions to signs of genuine friendship between Hanff and various employees of Marks & Co. The only downside: not enough letters, even in the "Deluxe Gift Edition." Seriously, it only took me about 45 minutes to read.

Grade: A-

Random Thoughts:

In her memoir The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Hanff finally visits England and sees the sites she's always read about--alas, after the shop has closed. I've added it to my list.

Also, "epistolary" is a cool word.

Also also, people who liked The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society should probably read this.

Book Review: American Parent [2009]

Thankfully, American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland has much more substance than Home Game, although its flaws might actually tend in the other direction: I now know much more than I ever wanted to about 19th century psychological and physiological theories. Written by journalist Sam Apple, this memoir of a first-time father's exploration of the "baby industrial complex" is both hilarious and occasionally moving. Apple investigates the booming market for baby products, naming, water and hypnobirthing techniques, lamaze, labor and labor coaches, circumcision, colic, child care, and baby education, all while illuminating the historical basis from whence various theories of child-rearing arose. Although he touches on Pavlov, Ferber, attachment parenting, and name-checks Baby Einstein, Dr. Spock, and Freud (sometimes at great length and at the risk of losing the reader's attention), the real gems of the book come when Apple stops investigating and describes the experiences that he and his wife shared during and after pregnancy. For example, just after their child is born:

I remember that I wondered if I had already bonded with our baby and that I wasn't sure, and that even though I didn't know what exactly a bond was supposed to feel like, I felt terrible about not feeling one and then briefly felt better when Jennifer admitted that she also didn't know if she had bonded, and that Jennifer and I then wondered if our failure to bond instantly meant that we would turn out to be the most monstrous, unfeeling parents of all time.

Ultimately, reading American Parent makes one feel as if--despite the many theories on parenting--baby development is still a largely nebulous field, and raising children is characterized by contradictory advice, uncertainty, and fear. All of which is hopefully tempered by joy.

Grade: B+

Random Thoughts: Despite mentioning Dr. Spock several times and giving us the personal history of any number of baby experts (past and present), Apple never delves any farther into Spock's theories or popularity. It was a very curious thing.

Book Review: Home Game [2009]

In the past few months, I have been trying to read as many new books as possible in an attempt to "stock up" mentally for the anticipated time, which will probably stretch years, when reading for pleasure is a luxury rarely enjoyed. Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Moneyball author Michael Lewis, is the first book I've read that might actually be somewhat pertinent to the coming Time of Reading Restriction. The book is a series of journal entries, most adapted from articles published in Slate, which chronicle Lewis's thoughts and experiences after the birth of each of his three children. These short entries are often humorous, and Lewis blithely assumes that we will find his lack of parental acumen amusing. Though there are occasional glimpses of a caring father beneath the veneer of self-pity, what he wants to get across is the (he believes) difficulty fathers have connecting with newborns: "After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it." Home Game is a slight but entertaining afternoon amusement.

Grade: B-

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle [2007]

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, is a memoir by Barbara Kingsolver, with help from her husband and teenage daughter, in which she chronicles the family's commitment to spending a year growing their own food and buying other necessities as close to home as possible. We had been meaning to check it out for some time--it was very popular last year at about this time--and finally listened to the audio book while traveling to, from, and within Canada. Kingsolver is a breathy, but earnest narrator, and Stephen and Camille also perform their parts adequately. I was under the misapprehension when we started that Kingsolver would be departing somewhat from her everyday life in order to take on this project; perhaps going from a bustling city life to a quiet one in the country. In reality, she and her husband are quite familiar with the farming life, and she describes seed catalogs, weeding, egg production, and other agrarian topics with the ease of long familiarity. The book is a strident case for the local food movement. Eating and buying locally, according to the authors, is not only more environmentally friendly (broccoli from California or bananas from South America cost millions of dollars in fuel to ship to our neighborhood grocery store each year) but also supports the local community of farmers (a disappearing breed?), and just plain tastes better. In other words, it is just not worth it to eat that pale, waxy tomato in January when you'll be inundated with tasty organic varieties in August. However, it is difficult to imagine never eating fruits or vegetables (such as bananas) that simply aren't grown here.

Kingsolver does a good job of building narrative suspense (through the interesting vehicle of turkey reproduction), but the book is frequently repetitive, hammering home again and again the importance of local foods until you want to yell "OK, I get it!" and move on. Those of us who already spend a part of the summer canning, and can relate to the yearly tide of zucchini that cannot be given away fast enough, are not really among those that need to be converted. Aside from the redundancy, the glimpses of Kingsolver's family life (which would no doubt be more interesting to me if I had read any of her other books) are charming, and the family pictured on the back of the audio book looks exactly as I imagined it. Listening to the book while driving through the picturesque potato fields of Prince Edward Island proved to be the perfect match of subject matter and backdrop; I can only hope that the next time I am moved to pick up a banana, I will have the fortitude to put it down and wait until I can get one in season, perhaps in Brazil.

Grade: B+

ETA: They are enriching lives online here. It looks like a good starting point for exploration of local food resources.

Book Review: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles [2008]

Taking a break from my usual fictional fare, I picked up Jennifer 8. Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Lee frames the story around the curious 2005 Powerball event in which over 100 people won Powerball prizes based on their use of numbers from a Chinese restaurant's fortune cookie. I didn't say Chinese fortune cookie here because one of the things Lee discovers on her global trek to discover the secrets of Chinese food is that fortune cookies were invented by the Japanese. The book is full of similar (potentially useful) trivia, such as the fact that Chinese food is served on all seven continents, including Antarctica, or that American produced soy sauce doesn't actually contain soy. Although the book sometimes feels more like a series of loosely connected essays or articles, peppered with anecdotes (Lee is a New York Times reporter) on the same subject, she does make a convincing case for American Chinese food as a distinctive cuisine as uniform and, well, American as McDonald's (which Chinese restaurant franchises outnumber two to one). The sheer amount of Lee's research and care becomes apparent upon viewing her extensive notes and bibliography. It is clear that the project was something more than a standard food "gimmick" book for her, instead it is a meditation on what it means to be Chinese and American, and to sit at the crossroads of these cultures:

I'd never really grasped the widespread fascination with genealogy in America, since I knew exactly when my family showed up in the States. But this journey had become my own genealogical search: an investigation into how Chinese immigrants, like Chinese food, have embedded themselves in places around the world. They have adopted Italian first names, Thai last names, and, in Jamaica, Roman Catholicism (the church usually ran the best schools) . . . As I moved from culture to culture, I met Chinese people who listened to reggaeton and danced salsa in Peru, played guitar in reggae bands in Jamaica, and spoke Hindi in India. Yet in some sense, despite generations in other countries, we acknowledged each other as Chinese--even when we spoke no common languages.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a frequently amusing, always informative, thoughtful meditation on our food culture.

Grade: A-

ETA: Jennifer 8. Lee is blogging here.

Book Review: Wishful Drinking [2008]

I guess I would call myself a Carrie Fisher fan, or at least a Star Wars fan, but I couldn't be more relieved that I got Wishful Drinking from the library rather than purchasing a copy for myself. As vacation reading goes, this memoir certainly fulfilled its purpose--though only for an hour and a half or so--it was fluffy and I've already pretty much forgotten everything I just read. The main problem is that it reads like it was directly transcribed from the one-woman stage show from which it is adapted, like a rambling monologue, with pieces that just don't work very well in text form. The various pictures inserted to illustrate various points ultimately make you realize that the book is really as insubstantial as a piece of dandelion fluff. Even the Star Wars and Paul Simon anecdotes end up being a little humdrum, and as for her new reliance on electro-shock therapy . . . the less said about that, the better.

Grade: D+

Book Review: I'd Rather We Got Casinos [2009]

I'd Rather We Got Casinos and Other Black Thoughts, by the Daily Show's Chief Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore, isn't something that I would have spent money on, but I did check it out from the library and got a few hearty chuckles. The book is a collection of essays, (completely fake) interviews, and random thoughts on race, some of which are amusing, some of which are a little head-scratching, and most of which go on a little too long. However, there are some hilarious moments, such as Wilmore's repeated attempts to get the NAACP on board with his plan to change "African-American" to "chocolate" ("At least four out of five black people like it and an impressive five out of five nonblacks do. In other words, everybody loves chocolate!") and the intriguing essay "How Come Brothas Don't See UFOs?"

Grade: C+