WORDSWORDSWORDS COMMENTS ON SOME BOOKS

A

2005-10-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

ABLOW, KEITH RUSSELL

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. KAPPLER:... (1994)

True account of an anesthesiologist who continued practicing for decades despite considerable evidence that he was a murderer. Written by a doctor who was also the friend of one of Dr. Kappler’s victims.

(June 2000)
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ACHEBE, CHINUA

THINGS FALL APART (1958)

Remarkable novel about a village in Africa, where the main character, Okonkwo, distinguishes himself ultimately by standing up to the intrusive British church-and-state combination that is making alarming inroads into the native culture by using persuasion and force. Okonkwo loses his life in the conflict, but the action in this novel makes a strong statement.

(10 September 2001)

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ACKERMAN, DIANE

A SLENDER THREAD (1997)

Author’s account of her experiences as a suicide-prevention hotline counsellor--in upstate NY? A moving narrative even though it is clearly an amalgam of her hotline counselling experiences thrown together with Ackerman’s observations of squirrels, as well as other material done for various periodicals. Her gifted writing makes the amalgam work, in my opinion.

(25 March 2002)

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ALEXANDER, SHANA

HAPPY DAYS: MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, MY SISTER AND ME (1995)

This book is a memoir and a tribute to the author's parents and sister. Her father was Milton Ager, a composer who wrote such songs as "Happy Days Are Here Again" and "Ain't She Sweet"--and who was a good friend of the Gershwins and other well-known composers of the era. Her mother, Cecelia Ager, was a columnist for Variety.

The narrative gives a fascinating glimpse into the show business world--a family for whom money wasn't much of a problem, who ate their meals in restaurants, and who were always, more or less, among the rich and famous.

This isn't just a collection of dropped names. It is also a fond recollection of people who were important to the author.

(7 January 2011)
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AMIS, MARTIN

EXPERIENCE (2000)

Semi-autobiography by one of the sons of the writer Kingsley Amis. Interesting recollections of his father, as well as of Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, & other good friends. Moving account of the tragedy of Martin’s cousin Lucy Partington, who was brutally murdered at 21 but whose fate was unknown for 20 years. In spite of its grimmer aspects, this is often an amusing book.

(7 January 2002)

"HEAVY WATER" AND OTHER STORIES (1998)

Maybe I'm not a Martin Amis fan. I found these stories difficult to read. The author tries too hard to be witty and trendy--though he often succeeds.

"The Janitor on Mars" is set in the future. The janitor on Mars proceeds to tell the people on earth how very insignificant we are--and how very doomed.

"Straight Fiction" sets up a world where being straight is considered as unusual as being homosexual once was. Amis runs this idea much too far into the ground, I thought.

(11 March 2011)

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ANGELL, MARCIA, MD
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES: HOW THEY DECEIVE US, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT (2004)

The author was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, following the editorship of Arnold Relman, MD, who happens to be Marcia Angell's lifetime partner and a frequent collaborator in other publications.

There isn't a word about multiple sclerosis in this book but there is considerable discussion of Neurontin, which is often used for MS spasticity.
The author finds that Neurontin usage has been expanded for many off-label situations where it isn't effective.

This book argues that the pharmaceutical industry in the US has entirely too much money and power--and that it is involved in many questionable practices that are enhancing its money and power at a rapid rate, such as its heavy involvement in continuing medical education (CME) programs for doctors, in sponsoring medical conferences, and in providing free samples and other gifts to doctors routinely.

She points out that 32 percent of the sales revenue for the drug industry goes to "marketing and administration," while a much smaller percentage goes to research and development--and yet we US consumers are often told that the drug industry "must" be highly profitable because how else can the US be on the cutting edge in medical research?

She demonstrates that the US is not a leader in medical research by mentioning that most truly innovative drugs in recent years have come from research outside the US. As for the efforts of the US drug industry, its major output nowadays is so-called "me-too" drugs, which are slightly modified copies of existing drugs that can be marketed as new drugs, thus enabling the industry to continue making a profit on a drug that has reached the end of its patent protection period.

The research that is done in connection with drug development is often flawed, Dr. Angell notes. For instance, for FDA approval a new drug needs only to be compared with placebo. The author makes a strong case for requiring that a new drug be compared with existing drugs (as well as with placebo).

She also would like to see more Phase IV studies done.

This book is full of good ideas and facts. Anybody concerned with the high cost of drugs in the US would be interested in it.

(5 June 2009)
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ANGELOU, MAYA
GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME (1974)

This second part of Maya Angelou's autobiography is eminently worth reading. (The first part, dealing with her childhood, is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and is also very absorbing.)

Now Maya (Marguerite, known as "Rita" often in this book) is in her late teens and on her own with a baby and no husband. She is in California, drifting from jobs as a waitress and a dancer to being a madam (on a small scale) to turning tricks herself. All the while she is trying desperately to hold onto her infant son, who has to be cared for by other people much of the time.

She is worldly wise in many ways but in other ways astonishingly naive and vulnerable, as in her readiness to believe a pimp's sorry line.

Maya Angelou has a rare ability to laugh at herself, to see herself from a perspective that usually only other people would have.

This is a true story that needed to be told--and needs to be read.

(16 October 2005)

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APPLE, MAX

ROOMMATES: MY GRANDFATHER'S STORY (1994)

True account of the author’s Jewish immigrant grandfather who, when over 100 years old, helped to save the author’s disintegrating family life. Max Apple teaches English at the college level in Houston, went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, married and had two children, but his wife became severely disabled by multiple sclerosis and went to live with her own parents, where she soon died. The grandfather’s gentle but ironic humor often saves the day with the family. This book was made into a movie, "Roommates." Excellent book.

(27 August 1999)

AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS
THE MAN BEHIND THE BOOK: LITERARY PROFILES (1996)

Political correctness might dictate that the title of this book should have been The Person behind the Book, particularly since some of the authors discussed are women, but that is just a passing comment...

Auchincloss presents brief essays on several authors in an attempt to demonstrate a link between an author's life and his work. I'm not sure that his essays do demonstrate such a link, but I feel that the link is always there.

He has far more respect for T. S. Eliot than Eliot deserves, in my opinion, and so my opinions of Auchincloss are probably prejudiced. But his discussion of Sarah Orne Jewett (whose Country of the Pointed Firs is a remarkable but neglected work) is enlightening, and so are his remarks on Harold Frederick (The Damnation of Theron Ware).

I've read only one novel by Louis Auchincloss and am not an Auchincloss enthusiast, but his literary comments in this book are usually sensible and well worth reading.

(22 December 2007)
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2005-07-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

BAKER, NICHOLSON

DOUBLE FOLD: LIBRARIES AND THE ASSAULT ON PAPER (2001)

The author is very perturbed about the way in which libraries are rushing to put so many books and newspapers on microfilm and, in the process, destroying the original works. The libraries insist that they are doing this of necessity because microfilming a volume entails "disbinding" it and thus rendering it useless, for all practical purposes. Also, there is the process of "embrittlement," by which every book eventually becomes brittle and crumbles, or so the theory goes.

Baker points out that a microfilmed version is NOT an exact copy of the original, that the reader needs special equipment to read it, and that it is almost always much less readable than the original. He also disputes the notion, often stated in the library world in recent years, that books will "crumble" and turn to dust. He sets out to prove that the kinds of paper most books are printed on will never crumble or turn to dust. He stops just short of accusing librarians and archivists of conspiring to rid the world of books in their zeal to save space (and therefore money).

This is an absorbing and provocative book, written with wit and verve.

By the way, the author has bought up the runs of several US newspapers with his own funds and seems to have rescued them from the discard pile, for a while at least....

(14 November 2008)
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BALISH, CHRIS

HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT OWNING A CAR: SAVE MONEY, BREATHE EASIER, & GET MORE MILEAGE OUT OF LIFE (2006)

The author is a journalist who is responsible for the HOW TO LIVE WELL series of books. I haven't read any other books in the series.

As I'm writing this, the local TV news is featuring a story about a deadly car crash in the vicinity. The accident-proneness of vehicles isn't a major point made in this book but it very well might have been.

The author makes a very persuasive case for living without owning a car. He acknowledges that a rented car can come in handy on occasion for some people, but he cites relevant statistics to show that the typical car-owner is spending entirely too much money and having entirely too many hassles in his life as a result of the "convenience" of owning a car.

He discusses the options: carpools, shared rides, public transit, bicycles, and walking. He gives exact references for additional information.

I was nearly one hundred percent in agreement with the points in this book. I don't share the author's enthusiasm for motorcycles as an alternative to cars, however. The noise they're responsible for is unacceptable, but that's just one person's opinion.

I've never owned a car and never driven one much either--so Chris Balish is preaching to the converted here.

(15 March 2010)
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BANKS, RUSSELL

AFFLICTION (1989)

This novel--said to be partly autobiographical--is the story of the downfall of one Wade Whitehouse, the narrator's brother, who works as a well-driller and the chief of police in a very small New Hampshire town.

Ironically, as Wade goes downhill in an alcoholic plunge into memory blackouts, paranoia, and typical impulsive displays of temper and volatility, one of his suspicions that is actually right on target is ignored by the community as they recoil from evidence of his deterioration: he has rightly surmised that a man's death during a hunting trip was no hunting accident but murder. So far as we know, the murder never comes to light.

In addition to being an absorbing (but grisly) story, this novel is a cri de coeur against the kind of bullying machismo that prevails in so many American male social relationships. The author focuses on hunting traditions, and his picture of hunting season in New Hampshire is horrifying.

(3 July 2007)

THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF: THE STORIES OF RUSSELL BANKS (2000)

This is a fine collection of stories, with many previously published stories now revised. They are arranged thematically rather than chronologically.

They are stories of working people in New Hampshire, chiefly, and in fact some of them are so brief that they seem as if they might have been fragments of a novel that never got written. Many of the stories involve the town of Catamount, New Hampshire, and a particular trailer park with a focus on specific characters--a man who lives on the ice every winter so he can fish through the ice, for instance.

There are often alcoholic husbands and fathers bumbling through their sad lives. There are divorces aplenty in these stories. One of the longest stories (and one of the best, in my opinion) is "The Guinea-Pig Lady," about the trailer park.

The last story in the volume, "Lobster Night," is grim indeed, but then Banks is not an upbeat writer.

A few of the stories have the quality of parables, and these became annoying for that reason. Sometimes Banks is too much like a sociologist. But on balance this collection was absorbing reading, true to life and sober and clear-headed.

(17 September 2007)

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BARNES,DJUNA

NIGHTWOOD (1937)

Rather frankly racist and anti-Jewish novel, with two prefaces by T. S. Eliot, praising it to the skies. The plot doesn't hang together well, and the characters are devoid of motivation. Occasional patches of "poetic" writing, but still a shockingly overrated work.

(12 February 1999)
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BAUSCH, RICHARD

REBEL POWERS (1993)

This started out to be an interesting story about a Vietnam Air Force vet with a wife and two children who has to go to prison in Wyoming for stealing a typewriter. The first-person narrator for most of the story is seventeen-year-old Thomas, the older child, though when he wasn't present at a scene, he imagines what might have happened.

Lisa, the other child, is seven or eight years old but often makes comments that no child that age would make (in my opinion). Thomas himself often sounds like a much younger person in the dialogue, especially with his younger sister.

"Mother" (their mother) feels that they must move to the small town in Wyoming to be closer to their father during his two-year sentence, and much of the story concerns their train trip on the way west and some people they meet en route, notably one Penny Holt, who appears to be quite rootless and very much in need of a family to belong to. She attaches herself readily to "Mother," and Thomas eventually develops a crush on her though she's considerably older than he is.

They establish themselves in a boarding house in Wyoming where they have very little privacy--and where none other than Penny Holt turns up in search of them. She settles right in to their family, clinging to "Mother" as to a very close friend.

Penny had been going to Kansas to see her boy friend who was imprisoned for draft evasion (it is the late 1960s). That hasn't worked out, and so Penny is again at loose ends.

Before "Father" gets released from prison--long before the two years have elapsed--there is curiosity in the boarding house about why he is there, and a story gets started that he is doing time for protesting the Vietnam war. It is a lie that I kept expecting to become the center of interest in the story (what would happen when the truth came out?) because there is much heated discussion among the characters about what constitutes a "loyal" American and whether the Vietnam war is justified. However, the issue simply dwindles away, and the story rambles on without any further exploration of the question. In effect, the rest of the action goes forward as if the lie about "Father" were true.

If having lived a lie has anything to do with his tragic end, this isn't made clear at all. We aren't even sure whether he has ever found out about the falsehood.

"Father," upon release, is so shattered by his experiences (Vietnam, the US prison), apparently, that he's reduced to a very confused state--and has a drinking problem.

In the last part of the book, the author seems almost too eager to tie up the loose ends and wrap up the story. He seems to have ceased to care much about his characters by this time--after having piqued our interest in them.

On the whole, this is a sadly jumbled book.

(6 August 2009)
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BAXTER, CHARLES

BELIEVERS: A NOVEL AND STORIES (1997?)

Among the stories here, I thought "Believers" was good. Some other stories dabble in "magical realism," alas.

(4 September 1998)
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BAYLEY, JOHN

IRIS AND HER FRIENDS

The author, a novelist, discusses his relationship with his failing wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch--a disciple of the German writer Elias Canetti--as she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. A very touching portrait of a devoted husband trying desperately to do what he can in the face of his wife’s increasingly incomprehensible behavior (she is ultimately consigned to a "home," where she dies).

(15 May 2003)
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BEATTIE, ANN

      THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE (2002)

This novel about a dysfunctional family involves a doctor who despises his wife and children. Eager to maintain his status as The Doctor, but womanizing almost to the point of obsession, he inflicts cruelty (mostly verbal but fiendishly brutal) on the members of his family.

The story starts out being told by Nina, one of the doctor's two children. She seems a bit too preoccupied with her brother's philanderings, about which we hear a great deal. Andrew, the brother, has been bedding down women he knew in high school at a rapid rate.

Other narrators, Andrew among them, give us the rest of the story. Gradually we learn about the doctor's wife's alcoholism and other horrors of this family, who are sad--and probably only too true to life.

(8 November 2008)

     PARK CITY: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES (1998)

Interesting stories about contemporary people, though some of the endings dangle maddeningly. Some stories were published before in SECRETS AND SURPRISES and WHAT WAS MINE and elsewhere.

(31 December 2001)
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BEERS, DAVID

BLUE SKY DREAM: A MEMOIR OF AMERICA'S FALL FROM GRACE (1996)

Interesting personal account of the author's experience growing up in the 1950s as a child of a Lockheed engineer in the aerospace industry enclave in California. Well-written and thoughtful, with reflections on the effects the decline in military spending has on the employees in that industry. This writer gives vivid and detailed pictures of important aspects of his childhood: Catholicism on his mother’s side; his father’s lapses into abusive behavior; the sameness of the suburb they lived in.

(17 July 1999)
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BELKIN, LISA

SHOW ME A HERO: A TALE OF MURDER, SUICIDE, RACE, AND REDEMPTION (1999)

Lisa Belkin, who writes for the New York Times, was living in the general vicinity of Yonkers, NY, in 1992 and took an interest in an announcement of a lottery being held there for townhouse apartments in a new subsidized-housing development.

The construction of these 200 units, which would go to low-income residents (and everyone in Yonkers understood that the residents would be African-American or Hispanic), was possible only after a protracted four-year battle involving a judge, the mayor, and the people of Yonkers.

It seems a classic case of "NIMBY." In an effort to end a clear pattern of segregation, the housing was to be built in a middle-class, "white" area of Yonkers, much to the dismay of those who preferred the status quo.

Belkin focuses her attention on several persons involved in the conflict at the grass-roots level as well as on the very young mayor, Nick Wasicsko, and his wife. Several women whom the author writes about were applicants and eventual residents of the new housing.

The book is similar to There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, and the author expresses her indebtedness to that book.

People whose lives are too chaotic for them to be able to articulate their thoughts ought to have others speaking up in their behalf. Lisa Belkin--and Alex Kotlowitz and a few others--are trying to do just that.

It's about time.

(15 January 2011)
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BESTON, HENRY

THE OUTERMOST HOUSE: A YEAR OF LIFE ON THE GREAT BEACH OF CAPE COD (1928)

Henry Beston deserves to be better known if this book is typical of his writing. A beautifully constructed and lyrically written paean to nature, it tells of his year spent in a cabin on Cape Cod. He was not trying to emulate Thoreau. He freely acknowledges that his cabin was moderately comfortable. He was trying to get a sense of the natural world as it developed throughout a year on Cape Cod.

He doesn't preach at us. In fact, I don't recall that he used the word "spiritual" once in this book. He doesn't philosophize. He observes and reports on what he sees--whether it's the no-see-ums or the piping plover.

I see that he has been compared to Annie Dillard, but Annie Dillard's writing can't begin to approach Henry Beston's, but then I've never been an Annie Dillard fan....

(23 November 2007)
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BINCHY, MAEVE

     EVENING CLASS (1996)

Interesting novel involving an Italian language class.

(26 December 1998)

     LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE

Good novel tracing the lives of two women, one Irish and one English, from the World War II years of their childhood through their subsequent romances, marriages, and widowhood.

(23 November 1998)

     NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS (2004)

Sometimes I get cynical about Maeve Binchy and wonder if she has an eye on the movies in some of her novels. This is one of them. Set in Greece, which is always good for scenic shots (clear blue skies, the Mediterranean, ruins--who could ask for more?), its characters include a few Greeks who are almost too sage and perfect to be believable, especially the aging Andreas.

Several tourists--from England, Ireland, the United States, and Germany--are brought together in this part of Greece when a tragic boat fire kills 24 people, many of whom are known to the townspeople. All of the visitors are fairly young, and it turns out that all of them are running away from situations they found intolerable.

Soon their old lives are catching up with them, and decisions have to be made. It is astonishing how appropriately everybody behaves in this novel. It is as if they are marionettes whose strings are controlled by a crew of social workers. For things get wrapped up by the end of the novel, new pairings-off are transpiring, and a couple of long-gone sons are returning to the fold.

This novel has one very strong message: Families ought to stay close to one another. Families ought not to allow their closest relatives to stray far afield, no matter how great the lure of other parts of the world.

A very conventional message, to be sure, but Binchy presents the story in a tolerable way that is also enjoyable, even right down to the scenes with dancing Greeks that put one in mind of "Zorba the Greek" and other movies showcasing the Greek way of life.

(2 April 2008)

     THE RETURN JOURNEY (1998)

This is a collection of Binchy short stories. I had never read any of her shorter works, and I have to say I prefer her novels.

These are interesting, quiet stories about families and relationships. But they are a bit thin and slight. I wish she had fleshed them out more.

(18 November 2007)

TARA ROAD

A fairly good novel about two troubled women who swap houses for a summer. One woman is an American who has recently lost her teenaged son, the other is Irish, and her husband has left her and the two children because he is involved with a much younger woman who is pregnant.

(28 February 2000)
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BLOOM, CLAIRE

    LEAVING A DOLL'S HOUSE: A MEMOIR (1996)

Interesting recollections by British actress Claire Bloom, who knew a number of famous men, including Charles Chaplin and Sir Lawrence Olivier. Much of the memoir concerns her husband of many years, the writer Philip Roth, and her objections to him are understandable and probably well-founded.

(10 April 2004)
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BLUM, DEBORAH

   GHOST HUNTERS: WILLIAM JAMES AND THE SEARCH FOR SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH (2006)

Deborah Blum has undertaken a formidable task here but she has succeeded admirably. A problem confronting her must have been how to present William James in a favorable light without disparaging his long-lasting interest in psychical research and still treat the subject of psychic phenomena respectfully though not necessarily credulously.

William James, along with numerous other notable figures in philosophy, psychology, and even the "hard sciences," was interested in finding out how much truth lay in the claims of psychics, especially mediums and clairvoyants.

To that end, the American and British Societies for Psychical Research were founded, and many learned articles on the subject appeared in print. Some academics were dismayed that William James would have lent his name and time and energy to an enterprise that many regarded as crackpot and fraudulent.

This book will do nothing to settle the question of the legitimacy of psychic experiences, but that is not its aim. The jury is still out on the matter, anyway--even after the passage of a century. What it does do is explore the extent of James's involvement in the struggle for respectability that psychical research faced in the early 20th century.

To understand James's position on psychical research, one has to understand his insistence on remaining open to any and all ideas, no matter how wild they might seem--and Deborah Blum clearly does understand this. She does not waste time castigating the members of the scientific community who had only contempt for psychical research. She presents their views as simply another perspective on the matter.

She reveals some facts that may not have come to light up to now--among them, the lengths to which the investigators would go in their efforts to prevent their chosen mediums from cheating. They sometimes tied the medium up or subjected the medium to noxious stimuli in an effort to find out if her trance state was real. Perhaps surprisingly, the mediums hardly ever objected to all of the hoops they were made to jump through.

Another aspect of the studies comes out in Blum's description of some of the actual sittings or seances. These could become intimate in ways that went beyond Victorian mores. A medium might sit in the lap of one of the investigators, for instance. This sort of detail never found its way into William James's writings on psychical research so far as I know.

This was a fascinating account.

(6 December 2007)
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BOEHM, ERIC H.

WE SURVIVED: 14 HISTORIES OF THE HIDDEN AND HUNTED IN NAZI GERMANY (2003)

Originally published in 1949, this book presents fourteen accounts by survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. The accounts contain enough specific detail about the situation in Hitler's Germany to give a chilling comprehension of the horrors involved in life in a totalitarian regime.

(18 August 2008)
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BOTSFORD, GARDNER

A LIFE OF PRIVILEGE, MOSTLY (2003)

The author, who died in 2004 in his 80s, was an editor for the New Yorker magazine for some 40 years. This memoir is a briskly told account of his life there, with his World War II experiences thrown in for good measure.

As the stepson of the magazine's owner, Raoul Fleischmann, he was always open to the accusation of having obtained his position through his family connection. The extent to which this happened isn't made clear in the narrative, but he succeeds in diverting our attention to some of the "dirty little secrets" about the apparently close-knit New Yorker group.

By far the lengthiest account in the book concerns the disintegration of the author's close relationship with the editor-in-chief, William Shawn, as Shawn seemed stubbornly resistant to finding a replacement for himself. The portrait of Shawn is very unflattering indeed.

(4 September 2009)
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BOWEN, ELIZABETH

TO THE NORTH (1932)

"To the North" turns out to be a very bone-chilling title, but the reader will learn this only towards the end of the story, which advances in a very measured way to its conclusion, in which some lives become unravelled by the events of a few abrupt, unstoppable, harrowing moments.

In the end we are left to imagine what will happen next. The action of the story takes place in a world where everything can be meticulously planned and very little just happens in a spur-of-the-moment way.

Celia meets a man on a train, and they strike up an acquaintance. This happenstance event sets the rest of the story in motion, for it is Markie, the man Celia has met on the train, who is the catalyst.

How the author gradually shows Markie to us may be one of the most effective accomplishments of this novel. At first he seems pleasant and "acceptable" as someone fit to associate with the genteel and well-bred Emmeline and Celia and their set. But we start seeing interchanges between Markie and his sister--who is also his landlady--for instance, and later between Markie and a woman he knows that show him to be cruel and deceitful.

It is not that he is socially "beneath" Emmeline and Celia. It is that he is heartless. Though we can see that Emmeline and Celia are somewhat shallow and self-absrobed, still we can't help feeling that they should steer clear of this man.

Elizabeth Bowen's strong point here seems to be character development. She deftly delineates each character tellingly, using subtle brush strokes. But in the catastrophic scene at the end she stumbles, I think.

The scene seems painfully long.

I intend to reread this book. I'm not sure I've read it carefully enough the first time. Some writers deserve to be read with considerable care, and Elizabeth Bowen is one of them.

(16 June 2010)
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BOYLE, KEVIN

ARC OF JUSTICE: A SAGA OF RACE, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND MURDER IN THE JAZZ AGE (2004)

The author, who is a historian, has written an account of a 1925 case in which the celebrated Clarence Darrow was the lawyer for the defense.

Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys and infant daughter, an African-American family, moved into a bungalow they had bought in an all-white area of Detroit. Ossian Sweet had had a difficult struggle to become a doctor and was keenly interested in establishing his family in comfortable surroundings. He also knew that there had been recent race-hatred incidents involving similar housing battles in Detroit. Getting wind of similar opposition to his family's move, he gathered nine friends and relatives (including two brothers) in the bungalow as the family was moving in. He showed them firearms he had accumulated in the event of serious trouble.

There was serious trouble. A mob of some 400-600 white people assembled outside the bungalow and began throwing rocks. A window shattered. Gunfire came from inside the bungalow--first firing above the crowd, then closer into it, and one man was wounded, another killed.

Eleven African-Americans, including Ossian and Gladys Sweet, were put on trial for murder, as a group. The NAACP and several prominent African-Americans were very involved in the case (W. E. B. Dubois, James Weldon Johnson, and others), and eventually Clarence Darrow agreed to work for the defense.

The carefully chosen jury (of 12 white men) couldn't come to a decision, and there was a mistrial. The second time around, Darrow insisted on having each of the eleven defendants tried individually. The first to be tried was the brother of Ossian's who was the only person to have admitted firing a shot.

He was acquitted at last, and this meant that the other defendants were also allowed to go free, but it was a long and emotionally stressful time for those involved, with the defendants having to spend considerable time in a Detroit jail.

Not long afterwards, Gladys Sweet contracted TB, probably during her stay in the crowded jail. It was transmitted to the Sweets' daughter, who died while still in infancy. Gladys Sweet also died, a few years later.

Ossian Sweet remarried a couple of times but then divorced. In the end, not yet an old man, he shot himself to death.

This is a very tragic story that sheds light on the disgraceful era when "restrictive covenants" were becoming common in the US housing market. The racism that has been rampant in the US housing situation for generations is still with us today in spite of some corrective legislation over the years.

(13 May 2008)
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BOYLE, T. CORAGHESSAN

TALK TALK (2006)

The plot of this novel revolves around identity theft. Dana Halter, a deaf woman who teaches, and her boy friend, Bridger Martin, are caught up in a chaotic mess, with Dana thrown in jail because someone has assumed her identity. A man named William Peck Wilson has been using the name Dana Martin--and living in high style, along with Natalya, his Russian girl friend and her daughter Madison.

Dana and Bridger set out in pursuit of the identity thief because they realize that the police aren't going to be of much help. After all, identity theft is a "victimless crime."

It's an exciting story, well told. The ending strikes me as unsatisfactory, however. It is jarring. The way William Peck Wilson behaves at the end isn't like the character we have seen up to that point. It's as if the author felt obliged to end the story but didn't quite know how. It seems slapdash.

And the story has all of the signs of a novel wanting desperately to be a movie--including a couple of car chases.

But it was interesting anyway, and the author presents the problems facing a deaf person with sensitivity and empathy even as he's moving the action-packed story forward.

(24 March 2011)

WITHOUT A HERO: STORIES (1994)

Absorbing stories, some parodic, most with humorous elements.

(1 June 2001)
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BRAY, ROSEMARY L.

UNAFRAID OF THE DARK: A MEMOIR (1999)

The author has told her story and told it well--a story that needed to be told in this time when the needy are constantly being accused of laziness and other character flaws.

Rosemary Bray, born in 1955, was raised on the south side of Chicago. Her father was present in the household although his was a presence of dubious value, for, seething with rage against white people, he beat his wife and four children regularly. Rosemary and her mother and the other children lived in terror of his anger.

She never indulges in psychobabble in this narrative, never portrays herself as an abused child, as we so often find authors of memoirs and autobiographies portraying themselves. She just lays out the facts, along with her emotional responses to them. Her mother had to put the family on welfare even though there was a male "breadwinner" in the house. His "breadwinning" was sporadic--and he was a compulsive gambler.

When Rosemary was in 7th grade, she was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Francis W. Parker private school on Chicago's north side. She was plagued by mixed feelings about traveling to an entirely foreign part of town--a "whiter" part of town--for school and about associating with fellow students whose lives were radically different from her own. However, she survived her years at Francis Parker--and went on to undergraduate studies at Yale University, where she met the man she eventually married.

She became a book editor/reviewer for the New York Times.

This was a totally absorbing book.

(14 October 2007)
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BRENNAN, MAEVE

THE ROSE GARDEN: SHORT STORIES (2000)

The stories in this collection were almost all originally published in The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. They are quiet narratives, often with the non-endings that were part of the standard New Yorker style. The most successful ones, in my opinion, are set in Dublin. Others take place in New York.

The last several stories in the collection concern Bluebell, a dog, and just miss being slight and whimsical. The author clearly has a talent for describing animals in a perceptive and original way.

(6 September 2008)
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BRONSON, PO

THE NUDIST ON THE LATE SHIFT (1999)

Aside from now being outdated, this collection of anecdotes about employees in the burgeoning Silicon Valley software industry does little except for giving the author an opportunity to rhapsodize over what he perceives as a breathtakingly awe-inspiring revolution in the way we communicate information. He also gushes repeatedly about the vast fortunes being made nearly overnight by some of the computer-savvy young men who make up most of that industry.

His style is so annoying that I can't say I enjoyed this book. He likes trendy expressions, and so we have "way cool," "studly engineers," and "paradigm shift," to name a few.

( 3 February 2008)
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BROOKNER, ANITA

A FRIEND FROM ENGLAND (1988)

Told in the first person by one Rachel Kennedy, this is the story of her association with Heather, a younger woman who is the daughter of Rachel's accountant, Oscar.

This is probably meant to be a story with an unreliable narrator, but even if it isn't, and we're supposed to take Rachel as behaving in ways we can sympathize with, her motives for the close association with Heather remain murky.

Rachel appears to be a less-fortunate hanger-on in the prosperous circle of people surrounding Heather and her parents, and she perceives her continuing to be included in their circle as Heather's parents' attempt at providing their only daughter with a friend.

Rachel perceives her own role--we learn increasingly as the story proceeds--as something of a self-appointed advocate for Heather's parents, however. Heather marries a young man who (it is hinted) might be a homosexual, and the marriage falls apart shortly after the splendid wedding.

The hints at the young man's inadequacies, by innuendo but with no explanation of the facts, no real evidence, are troubling. But it is Rachel's version we are getting. She senses that Oscar, Heather's father, shares her doubts about the young man, but again, no more is done with this idea.

Heather, a taciturn and constantly poised young woman, doesn't seem especially inclined to like Rachel. When she leaves her marriage and promptly takes up with an Italian man whom she marries, with little or no intention of keeping up contact with her family in England, Rachel volunteers to go to Italy to try to persuade Heather to visit her very ill mother.

Rachel sees herself as carrying a torch for the values that Heather's family are desperate to maintain. After all, they have put a lot of effort into raising this one daughter, and now she is turning her back on them by marrying and living in a foreign country, taking up with her husband's family while letting her own sink or swim back in England. Where is her sense of familial obligation? Rachel will be the one to bring her to her senses.

I don't know how other readers reacted to this story, but I was struck by Heather's parents' sad acquiescence to the situation. They raised their daughter so that she could have the same opportunities for happiness that they had had, they said. The implication is that there were no strings attached to their parenthood.

But this goes right by Rachel. When she finds that Heather has accepted the gift of freedom that her parents have so generously given her--that she still loves her parents but wants her life as she has made it--Rachel is probably defeated once and for all so far as this relationship is concerned.

We never find out if she delivered the gifts to Rachel's mother as Rachel asked her to do. It is hard to say whether this omission was intentional on Brookner's part, or whether we are to believe that Rachel's failure to mention it is part of her somewhat addled view of the world.

Somehow this story doesn't quite come off. Heather is too perfectly poised, and Rachel's place in the group seems to vacillate. Sometimes she is a businesswoman who is doing fairly well, but at other times she is almost shrieking out her anger because people like her have to work hard all their lives while people like Heather's family have everything they want.

It isn't clear just where this novel is going.

(13 January 2012)

     LEWIS PERCY (1989)

This novel is a reflective analysis of a marriage--specifically, a marriage entered into by Lewis Percy, a retiring scholar who frequents libraries, and a woman who seems right to him in spite of having a "disability" that appears to be primarily agoraphobia--and being encumbered by a protective mother and her long-term lover.

We watch as Lewis Percy's life is dominated by this trio, but as time goes by he gets lucky.

This is a happy story, and its surprise ending is still believable--and satisfying.

I have one quibble. Brookner describes one of her characters as having "splendid Jewish teeth." Isn't this on a par with a comment like "He doesn't look Jewish" or "She has a Jewish schnoz"? And nowadays isn't it objectionable to call attention to racial and ethnic stereotypes, even if they're flattering ones? I had never before heard of Jewish teeth as being exceptional in any way, and I can't think why they would be.

It doesn't help particularly to know that Anita Brookner is Jewish, either.

(23 January 2012)

     DOLLY (1993)

A woman narrator recalls her aunt Dolly--her mother’s brother’s wife--an older woman of European background who exploits women, including the narrator, in her greedy quest for men and material things. A surprisingly sympathetic study of a character. Beautifully written.

(5 September 1999)

     A PRIVATE VIEW (1994)

Novel about a man reaching retirement age but losing his best friend, with whom he had made retirement plans. Troubling encounter with a brassy and rude much younger woman who insinuates herself into his life by a scam involving her being "permitted" to stay in another tenant's flat in the building he lives in. Absorbing.

(2 November 1998)

     ALTERED STATES (1996)

Told by a first-person narrator, a man whose wife has killed herself after giving birth to a stillborn baby. Alan Sherwood, the narrator, is selfish and egocentric, with a self-destructive but very persistent yearning for a selfish and inconsiderate woman, Sarah, who eventually marries money, lives in France, and vanishes from Alan’s scene. It is hard to say just what the center of this novel is. Most of the characters aren’t especially likable.

(1 September 1999)

     VISITORS (1997)

Thea May, 70, a widow living alone, extends hospitality to Steve Best, who is to be the best man for her American granddaughter’s wedding. The unsettling visit by Ann, the granddaughter, and her fiance, David, and the best man, with the revelation that the marriage has been necessitated by Ann’s pregnancy, leads Thea to come to terms with her aging and eventual death. Very good book.

(18 February 2000)

        FALLING SLOWLY (1998)

This is a moderately bleak story about two aging sisters and the arrangements and rearrangements in their lives as their situations change. Miriam works as a translator, and her sister Beatrice has been an accompanist but loses her job and begins to show signs of failing.

Miriam carries on an affair with the handsome man who was designated to give Beatrice the bad news about her employment. We watch as Miriam becomes increasingly desperate in her attempts at holding onto her married lover.

The events in this story are sad, but Brookner depicts them with interesting insights and attention to nuances that give them an importance beyond being sad.

(26 April 2011)

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BROOKS, GWENDOLYN

REPORT FROM PART ONE (1972)

Like Report from Part Two, this is a somewhat loosely assembled collection of reminiscences, poems, and letters, along with a considerable number of photos.

Here we get glimpses of the poet's childhood in Chicago, of her early years of adulthood, and of the breakup of her marriage. We see how large a role she must have played in the Black arts scene in Chicago over many years. She was instrumental in organizing a writing workshop for some members of the Blackstone Rangers, a South Side gang, for instance. Her diligent and generous efforts at inspiring poetry-writing and an appreciation for poetry in children have been amazing.

She makes a strong case for her belief that integration is not the whole answer for American Black people. She herself believed in integration at one time but later abandoned it in favor of an interest in promoting Black culture as an independent entity deserving far more respect than it was getting.

Hers is not an angry voice but a discouraged, resigned and realistic one. She feels integration has been too slow a process, with results that have only minimal significance. She believes that Black people have to see themselves as beautiful and assertively powerful before real progress can be made.

This book came out in 1972. Events of the last 39 years seem to be proving her right. Racial prejudice is still abroad in the land, sometimes hiding in corners and veiled, sometimes very much out in the open.

At one point in this compendium of interviews, snippets of poems, and memories she suddenly gives a brief but very graphic description of a Mississippi lynching. Placed as it is in the book, it can only shock the reader, and I suspect that her intent was to let this bit of grim reality pack as much of a wallop as possible.

(24 June 2011)

REPORT FROM PART TWO (1996)

Without having read Report from Part One, I may be in no position to judge this 1996 work, which is a compendium of some of Gwendolyn Brooks's poems and other writings, including quite a number of brief introductory speeches she gave in her capacity as poetry consultant for the U. S. Library of Congress.

Much of the writing here is "official." It was written for various occasions and has to say nice things about people. But there is a portrait of her mother that is quite readable, and some of the events in the life of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks have been remarkable and are described here.

There is a vignette involving the author Susan Sontag that shows Sontag in a very unflattering light, for instance.

As one of the pre-eminent Black voices on the literary scene in the 20th century, Gwendolyn Brooks deserves to be taken seriously. In fact, all of her opinions in this collection are well worth reading. They are original, well argued and thoughtful. Her reflections on single parenthood, for instance, are outspoken and persuasive.

And, for the record, Gwendolyn Brooks dislikes the term African-American, preferring Black (with a capital B).

5 July 2010
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BROWNLEE, SHANNON

OVERTREATED: WHY TOO MUCH MEDICINE IS MAKING US SICKER AND POORER (2007)

The author, a reporter, has written a very persuasive book arguing that in the US, one reason for skyrocketing medical costs is simply that we expect too much medical care--far more than we really need. In fact, she maintains, with medical care less is often more--and she demonstrates how too much medical care can actually harm the patient, as when invasive medical procedures are done unnecessarily.

She sees the flaws in a system that encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible in a day and would like to see primary care doctors restored to their former status instead of disappearing from the scene. She sees many advantages in a system where doctors are salaried.

Like another author on this topic, Marcia Angell, MD, she deplores the creation of "new diseases" or "pre-diseases"--osteopenia being one of her examples. The rise to prominence of osteopenia (said to be early osteoporosis) as a "pre-disease" has led to widespread prescribing of somewhat risky drugs like Fosamax.

This is an excellent book, much needed just now, when the US health care system is being closely scrutinized and found to be seriously wanting.

(20 September 2009)
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BROYARD, ANATOLE

KAFKA WAS THE RAGE: A GREENWICH VILLAGE MEMOIR (1993)

Terrible account of the author’s life. He never met a sexual encounter he doesn't insist on including in this short work. The author is said to have been revealed as a "person of color" though he successfully concealed his racial identity all his life. Race is not touched upon in this book.

(20 April 2001)
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BUMILLER, ELISABETH

THE SECRETS OF MARIKO: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A JAPANESE WOMAN AND HER FAMILY (1995)

The author, a Washington Post reporter, wanted to give a picture of the daily life of a typical Japanese woman, and--during an extended 1991 stay in Tokyo with her husband and children--she found Mariko Tanaka, 44, a housewife and mother who agreed to be interviewed for a year. With the help of an interpreter, the author carried on conversations with Mariko and her husband and three children as well as with Mariko's elderly parents, who lived in the same house.

Japan, which bans immigration, is still a very homogeneous society, and some features of its rigid, structured lifestyle are probably difficult for outsiders to understand.The author tells us that Japanese is among the most difficult languages in the world, and we catch glimpses of some of its difficulties when she tells of the special vocabularies that are used only in particular situations--"sublanguages" that exist within the main language but are reserved for certain purposes (when respect is called for, for instance).

Mariko works almost nonstop and rarely has a moment for herself--a situation probably common to housewives and mothers everywhere but taken for granted in Japan, where the men work till midnight in office jobs. Mariko's husband, a "salary man," seems typical, although the stress of such incessant work clearly takes its toll, for he occasionally disappears on drinking binges.

Mariko, in addition to being the chief cook and bottlewasher for her husband and children, helps with the care of her aging parents. She is active in the PTA and in local religious festivals. She works half-time as a meter reader, a job she enjoys for the opportunity it provides her to get out and meet other people.

Sometimes Elisabeth Bumiller describes Mariko's preparations for a family meal in detail, and we become aware of a diet that seems almost totally devoid of desserts but rich in seafood and vegetables.

Japanese politeness is celebrated the world over. In Japan courtesy takes forms that would strike a Westerner as extraordinary. For instance, there is the custom of staying in touch with your children's elementary school teachers year after year by having one of the class mothers be in charge of an annual get-together. This thoughtfulness toward a child's former teacher is also meant to provide a greater sense of continuity in the child's experience. This makes eminent good sense to me.

Elisabeth Bumiller has shown a fascinating world where the people lead their lives in a peace-loving, graceful, practical way. I found this book captivating from beginning to end.

(7 April 2003)
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BUSCH, FREDERICK

     GIRLS

Novel set in upstate New York about a campus cop whose marriage isn’t going well since the couple’s infant daughter was a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Fanny, his wife, is a nurse. The couple are apparently unable to have another child and are finding the loss overwhelming. Jack, the main character, has a macho streak, is given to beating up on suspects he dislikes, and has a chip on his shoulder about academics. Some of the parodic treatments of academese are right on target in this novel.

Jack as a character is a bit of a puzzle--his motivations aren’t always clear. Why he falls into an affair with a woman professor isn’t made plain, especially as his wife, whom he still loves, knows about it.

The action of the novel centers around Jack’s attempt to solve the case of a missing teenaged girl. He succeeds in the attempt but the outcome is tragic, though the reader has been prepared for the outcome well in advance. An absorbing book.

(20 November 2002)
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BYATT, A. S.

    A WHISTLING WOMAN (2002)

Maybe A. S. Byatt and I are just not kindred spirits. I've read one or two of her other novels and felt the same irritation that I felt with A Whistling Woman....

There are too many characters in the novel to keep track of. The author herself doesn't keep very good track of them, either. But then she's dealing with the vast panorama of a university in the 1960s, with an anti-university springing up in its vicinity. On its property, as a matter of fact, and wouldn't you know? The university wins out over the little band of rebels in their encampment.

A. S. Byatt is rather emphatically on the side of the university in spite of her attempts at making satiric thrusts at both sides. The implication here is that the rebels' "real" objective is to ease their own lives by forcing the university to soften up its foreign-language requirements.

My biggest problem with this novel is that the characters don't come alive. They aren't fleshed out enough. There is too much going on here, and Byatt is apparently eager to show off her knowledge of just about everything under the sun.

The result is a novel that is showy but without much depth. Perhaps I would care more about the main character, Frederica, if I had read the rest of the quartet of novels involving her. But I doubt it.

(25 March 2006)

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C

2005-07-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

CAMPBELL, BEBE MOORE

SINGING IN THE COMEBACK CHOIR (1998)

This book was a bestseller, and I have a hunch that the author was aiming at the bestseller list as she wrote it. It has all of the earmarks of a book written with sales in mind--and of course a movie version.

I wish she hadn't taken this route but who can blame a writer for trying hard for sales?

In spite of this reservation, I liked the book. It tells an unflaggingly interesting story, told in a lively way with witty dialogue. Maxine is a woman in her thirties, married to Satchel, a lawyer, and they are both African-Americans living in Los Angeles, where Maxine is the executive producer of a successful TV show resembling "Donahue."

Maxine, pregnant with the couple's first child, makes a couple of trips back to Philadelphia, where the grandmother who raised her still lives. Lindy Walker, the grandmother, was a well-known singer but she has had a stroke and appears to be descending into depression and alcoholism.

Maxine tries hard not to meddle in her grandmother's life but she is drawn into the specifics of her life, renewing old connections in her former neighborhood and pulling together the strands that will enable Lindy to stage a comeback.

Meanwhile, the pressures of her job are mounting, and eventually she has to face the failure of the show--but everything turns out beautifully because she's having a baby anyway.

The standard social-work line is overdone in this book. If Bebe Moore Campbell had done less analyzing and limited herself to telling a good story, this book would have been much better. She has an excellent command of contemporary conversational language. If only she could have let the characters speak without providing commentary.

(19 February 2010)

YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE (1992)

The world needed Bebe Moore Campbell, who died a few years ago at the age of 56. I read her memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad, a while back--a very absorbing account and well told.

This novel, which takes place in Mississippi and Chicago, begins with the murder of a black teenager, Armstrong Todd, by a white man (abetted by his father and brother) seeking to avenge an imagined bit of flirtation between Armstrong and the white man's wife, Lily.

This part of the story sounds like the Emmett Till case but I don't know if the author had it in mind. It doesn't matter, for it is the kind of incident that was all too common in the south for centuries.

It is Armstrong's untimely death that shapes the lives of many of the other people in the novel, and we follow them into early old age. Armstrong's mother and grandmother, his father, and then there are the whites, whose lives are shown running parallel to those of the segregated black people in the story--Lily and her husband and his brother.

The author has not written a diatribe against white people though she very easily might have. She has understood the white people in her story. She has the rare gift of seeing why her enemies might be the way they are and of explaining them to us.

Along the way she gives us glimpses into routine examples of what it was like to live in a segregated world--the missed medical care, the missed education, the closed doors that black people faced every day of their lives and still face all too often in the US.

Bebe Moore Campbell has beautifully written a story that enhances the reader's perception of the way people have been--and still are--in the real world.

(12 December 2009)

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CAMPBELL, DENELE PITTS

NOTES OF A PIANO TUNER (1997)

Brief collection of pleasant reminiscences by a woman who became a piano tuner after having learned piano-tuning from her father. She tells of her experiences tuning pianos in homes and churches in the Ozark Mountains. She writes well and has something interesting and amusing to say--far more than can be said of many published writers.

(21 February 2005)
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CAMUS, ALBERT
THE FIRST MAN (1995)

This beginning of an autobiographical novel was published more than 30 years after the author's untimely death. Camus's daughter explains in an introductory note that the family hesitated to publish such a raw and clearly unfinished work earlier because the climate of opinion at the time of her father's death was hostile in spite of his Nobel Prize. The family felt that the imperfections in this fragmentary start of a novel would be glaring enough to make unfavorable criticism only too easy.

However, eventually the decision was made to publish it as it was, complete with the author's marginal notes to himself.

It is a fascinating and often beautiful work, fragmentary though it is. Camus has chosen to write an autobiography casting himself in the third person, possibly in order to gain objectivity as he wrote. In the story he is Jacques, a boy whose father died in World War I and who lives with his nearly illiterate and severely hearing-impaired mother and his grandmother (his mother's mother) in Algeria.

The family is not just poor but abjectly poor. But Jacques comes under the influence of a remarkable schoolmaster who arranges for him to go to the lycée on a scholarship.

At 13 he is put to work at a paying summer job because his grandmother believes he should contribute to the family income. He has to lie about his age even to get a job. A showdown comes after he has had to mislead his employer into thinking he will be a permanent employee when he himself knows very well he will be returning to the lycée. At the end of the summer he finds he can't follow his grandmother's advice and just walk off without returning. His employer learns that he has lied but takes a certain amount of pity on him and at least sends him packing with his final paycheck, which he might have kept.

The part of the novel that exists centers around Jacques's experiences in the poverty of Algeria--and around his developing courage in standing up to the stern grandmother who has beaten him regularly. The schoolmaster has beaten him too, but it is the grandmother's power that is the more formidable.

The writing is extraordinarily self-revelatory for Camus, who normally writes very restrained prose in his fiction. The style is so different from his other writing that one is tempted to wonder if he might have been experimenting with using James Joyce or Faulkner as a model. Or maybe his intention was to let all of the experience escape on the page and later to tighten up the writing.

The most remarkable passages are those dealing with the Algerian setting. He makes it come alive, much as he did so memorably in The Plague, set in the town of Oran.

His was not a religious childhood although he went through the first communion ritual--but only because it was just what one did at that time and in that community. His family paid no attention to masses, rosaries, or priests and never prayed. They were too busy trying to survive to have much energy or time left over for anything else.

This start of a novel provides fascinating glimpses into the mind of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a man who spoke out repeatedly against tyranny and totalitarianism in its many manifestations.

(16 June 2011)
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ČAPEK, KAREL
WAR WITH THE NEWTS (1936)

An amazingly prescient novel, a work of fantasy that envisages an increasingly powerful group of newts who have been trained by humans to talk. Slaves may be the obvious analogue to the newts, but the story is not so simple as that. While it is at it, the novel takes ironic pokes at Americans, racism, and nationalism, while maintaining its very strongly pro-Czech stance. Written only two years before the author's untimely death, and during the ominous rise of Nazism in Germany, this book is grim and all too perceptive about humanity.

(1 December 2005)
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CARROLL, DAVID L. & DORMAN, JON DUDLEY, MD, LIVING WELL WITH MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS: A GUIDE FOR PATIENT, CAREGIVER, & FAMILY (1993)

Reading this book in 2009 is a strange experience. The "disease-modifying drugs" appear to have been unknown in 1993, when this book came out, for they aren't mentioned here. Also, MRIs were still new at the time.

So the book is badly in need of updating, but it is full of practical common-sense advice and is particularly good as a resource on exercises.

(28 June 2009)
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CATHER, WILLA

SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL (1940)

Short novel about a Virginia family in 1856, with Sapphira, the mistress of the household, turning against her favorite slave girl, Nancy. Nancy, in danger of being raped by a visiting nephew of her master’s, manages to escape to Canada by the Underground Railroad with the help of Sapphira’s daughter Rachel Blake.

Good book, though it almost seems as if Cather might have lost interest in it when only half done, for its epilogue seems tacked on as an afterthought, meant perhaps just to wind up the book.

(9 March 2002)
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CHEEVER, SUSAN

     NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE: MY LIFE AS A DRINKER (1999)

Life story of the daughter of writer John Cheever, exploring her family’s struggle with alcoholism and refusal to face it. This is a very privileged woman’s history but honestly told.

(23 July 2001)

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CHERNIN, KIM

     THE OBSESSION: REFLECTIONS ON THE TYRANNY OF SLENDERNESS (1981)

This is a very thorough and thoughtful exploration of the modern woman's obsession with being thin, an obsession that has shown no sign of waning over the decades since this book appeared.

The author has mined the psychological literature, especially material in the Freudian camp, but she isn't just parroting psychoanalytic theory here. Her idea is that women inherently have so much power--to conceive, bear, and nourish children--that we inspire fear, and with fear often comes a wish to stifle us, to keep us subservient.

She has very little explanation for how the world got this way but offers many persuasive examples of ways in which it is this way. It is not her objective to go into the historical and economic developments that helped this situation to come into being. Rather, she is interested in persuading us that the emphasis on being thin is dangerous, manipulative, controlling, and very unfair--and ought to come to an end.

She gives special attention to anorexia nervosa, and this is one place where an updated version of this book would be very helpful, for considerable work has been done on investigating eating disorders in recent years.

(2 May 2010)
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CHILDERS, THOMAS

THE SHADOWS OF WAR: AN AMERICAN PILOT'S ODYSSEY THROUGH
OCCUPIED FRANCE AND IN THE CAMPS OF NAZI GERMANY (2002)

The author of this account of Roy Allen's World War 2 experiences after his plane was shot down is a professor of history who has written other books about Nazi Germany. Roy Allen, as the pilot, was the last crew member to parachute out of the plane, and he lost track of the rest of the crew for quite a while. He found shelter with a French family who were sympathetic to the Resistance at a time when France was overrun with Germans and opposing the occupying Nazis was very dangerous.

Eventually Roy was caught in his attempt to escape from France and return to his unit--and he was sent to Buchenwald, where he languished (and nearly died) for many months, although he should have been in a camp for military prisoners of war. His situation improved only as the war was ending.

This is a moving account, containing highly detailed descriptions of everyday life at Buchenwald. I have read other accounts of concentration camp life, but this one offers a closeup look at the routines and the horrors of the prisoners' unimaginably nightmarish existence there.

(3 February 2007)
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CHOPIN, KATE

   "THE AWAKENING" AND SELECTED STORIES

The author was a turn-of-century writer, and she has recently become the darling of the feminists. Her writing contains much Southern bigotry.

(9 August 1998)
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CLEMENS, SAMUEL L. [MARK TWAIN]

    A MURDER, A MYSTERY, AND A MARRIAGE (1876; published 2003)

This very brief narrative was written as a skeleton plot for a writing contest Mark Twain envisaged as a way of attracting readers to his friend William Dean Howells's magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. Twain would provide the skeleton plot, and other invited established writers--including the unlikely Henry James--would supply their own stories based on the skeleton plot. Nobody ever submitted an entry, and the project died--with Twain's story lying unpublished until 2003.

It has appeared now with excellent commentary by Roy Blount, Jr., who fills us in on a number of relevant details about Twain's life and attitudes.
The story itself is slight and somewhat corny, but it was meant only as a skeleton plot. For reasons that are obscure, Twain used the occasion to poke fun at Jules Verne's novels--and this segment of the brief narrative is hilarious.

(8 August 2009)

    LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (1939; 1962)

These posthumously appearing essays and fragments underwent drastic restoration in the 1962 version. By this time Clara Clemens, the author's daughter, had given permission to publish an unexpurgated edition. Here we presumably have the "real" Mark Twain, bitterly cynical and opposed to organized religion.

(10 February 2006)

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COHEN, RICHARD M.

     BLINDSIDED: LIFTING A LIFE ABOVE ILLNESS: A RELUCTANT MEMOIR (2004)

The author, who happens to be married to Meredith Viera, the TV news broadcaster and talk-show host, was also in the TV news business until multiple sclerosis and other disorders entered his life. He tells his story, with considerable discussion about the impact of his illness on his wife and three children. After the MS diagnosis, he was found to have colon cancer, which returned later. The surgeries and their complications, and the pain of the colon cancer, made their family life difficult, but Richard Cohen takes a wryly humorous view of himself and freely owns up to his mistakes.

His father is a doctor who also has MS, and his grandmother had MS as well (although she apparently never realized it).

This is a well-told and honest account of coming to terms with chronic illness.
(7 January 2008)
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CONRAD, JOSEPH

    THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS": A TALE OF THE SEA (1897)

James Wait, the man on board the “Narcissus” who holes up, allegedly too ill to work for most of the voyage, astonished me by the way he subjugates most of the men, playing on their pity and fear in order to get them to serve him. Even more surprising was his accomplishing this in spite of being black and therefore contemptible in the opinion of most of the others.

The author of the preface supposes that the story’s theme is the demoralization of the men by James Wait and his illness (or “illness”). Towards the end of the voyage he is accused of malingering, which he admits, but it is soon obvious that he actually does have TB. Eventually he dies, but not before at least one of the men has had the bright idea of trying to take advantage of his vulnerability by robbing him, and not before the idea has become current that a dying man on board is bad luck and has caused the ship to be becalmed. I fail to see that the men are demoralized at all. The final judgment on them (by the narrator) is that they were a good lot.

At first I thought that the story would concern the resentment of a closed community whose labor is needed for its own survival when one of its number is or pretends to be unable to work, but this is only a secondary motif. In fact, in spite of the occasional murmurings of resentment to the effect that the others were having to do extra work on account of the disabled man, who would still collect his pay while doing nothing, but the others would get no extra pay for their extra contributions, the ultimate result of the severely strained voyage seems to be that they all come through it unscathed. So even on board ship, where the number of hands needed for a given voyage has to be very carefully calculated, the group can endure the incapacity of one of its number and even the laziness of numbers of others without any harm and can even find the time and resources to shower the disabled man with sympathy, visits, and gifts, even though James Wait is unlikable and imperious in the extreme.

It is the possibility that he might not live to set foot on land that inspires the crew to so much compassion, and indeed he does not live.

(25 March 1986)
_________________________

COUPLAND, DOUGLAS

GENERATION X (1991)

Dag, Claire, and Andy are the three main characters--all in their twenties, with Dag the narrator. These young adults have parents who are apparently far from indigent or indifferent, but they feel alienated from their families. These people hold McJobs, and in their spare time (of which they have a great deal) they pop pills carelessly and indulge in pointless fantasies as if they might be undiscovered literary geniuses just waiting to happen. They have easy mobility--they travel around freely in planes and take cars as a given. They gloom, they sulk, they come up with vague but probably meaningful remarks.

This is Kerouac all over again, and I found Kerouac tiresome. Generation X seems to be accusing the older generation of having created a bleak world, but some members of the older generation may be horrified at the self-absorption they must have fostered in their offspring by letting that TV stay on so much of the time and by subscribing to the idea that one's children are the center of the universe. This is what those children have grown up to be--navel-gazers par excellence.

(1992)
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COURTIER, MARIE-ANNICK

COOKING WELL: MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS (2009)

This cookbook is part of a series called Cooking Well, with each cookbook intended for a specific disorder (osteoporosis is one). I haven't looked at any of the other books in the series and so don't know if some recipes are repeated in other volumes.

The Foreword is by Vincent F. Macaluso, MD, who is a neurologist specializing in MS who also has MS. Dr. Macaluso is also listed as being on the BiogenIdec National Faculty, and he takes Tysabri. The author's credentials are less clear, but she dedicates the book to two friends who have MS.

A paperback book of 150 pages for about $9.00--not a bad deal, you say? Maybe for some it will be a treasure, but I'm returning my copy for a refund.

I was hoping for some helpful recipes. I am glad that the nutrition information for each is included, but I'm not sure how accurate some of it is. A granola recipe calls for "muesli cereal" without specifying what kind--or even what ingredients go into the muesli--leading me to question the nutrition information for the granola because there are so many varieties of muesli out there, and many people use their own muesli recipes, which can differ widely in their calorie counts and other nutrition information.

The first 38 pages of the book are taken up by general advice and nutrition information--mostly of the standard sort that is widely available. I'd have welcomed more suggestions on how to open jars and bottles safely, how to avoid getting burned or over-exposed to kitchen heat, and how to do basic tasks with fumbling hands, dim eyesight, and general unsteadiness.

The recipes should please vegetarians as there are over 35 recipes that do not involve meat, poultry, or fish.

However, many people with MS don't have the money for the kinds of ingredients called for in these recipes--and often they don't have the means of visiting the places that sell some of the more obscure ones: anchovy fillets, cilantro, wild rice, Portobello mushrooms, almond meal, flaxseeds, ginger root, wild smoked salmon, Pecorino cheese.

Nor can it be assumed that someone with MS has a blender, a food processor, a microwave oven, as many of these recipes assume.

The 6x9-inch format is a handy size, though I'd have preferred a spiral-bound book that could lie flat. Also, many bits of important information are set in black type against a fairly dark gray background, which is difficult to read.

Some of the recipes seem so slight that I wonder why they were included--except perhaps to bulk up the book. Cottage Cheese, Raisins, and Walnuts (1 serving) is an example. And there is no index--a big shortcoming, in my opinion. If you want to see if the book includes a recipe for chicken cacciatore, for instance, you can find out only by leafing through its pages until you find it.

And though the author knows the meaning of "brunoise," I had to look on the Internet to find out what it meant. It was in no print dictionary I own. I've read a few cookbooks over the years and never encountered this term, but I'm not a gourmet cook. It would have been nice if the book had included an alphabetical glossary of terms like brunoise and bouquet garni. Bouquet garni is defined in the thirty-five pages of informational text preceding the actual recipes, but it's hard to find. Every cookbook that uses the term seems to have a slightly different description of what a bouquet garni is.

Many of the recipes are for 4 servings and are usually simple enough for a mobility-impaired person to manage, given the right ingredients and equipment. And that's the problem.

All too often material about MS or for someone with MS seems to assume that the person with MS is fairly prosperous. It's time to put an end to that idea and recognize that this disorder isn't limited to people with high incomes. Unfortunately, this book doesn't serve the needs of everyone who might have MS, and that is a great shame.

(3 July 2009)

________________________________
COYLE, PATRICIA K., MD, and HALPER, JUNE
MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF PROGRESSIVE MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS (2001)

Since this book came out ten years ago, its information is often out of date. For instance, Rebif was not available in the US as a disease-modifying therapy for MS when this book appeared. And the authors' recommendations on PSAT and mammography testing are no longer current.

But the book is full of common-sense advice on the management of this chronic and disabling disorder.

(17 July 2011)
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CUMMINGS, BRUCE [BARBELLION, W. N. P., pseud.]

THE JOURNAL OF A DISAPPOINTED MAN (1919)

I read this book in 1980 but it was memorable. It is one of the earliest known accounts by someone with disseminated (multiple) sclerosis. The author, who was British, lived from 1889 to 1919. He tells of discovering that his brothers had concealed his diagnosis from him.
This is his actual diary although there is not much detail about his symptoms. What he does say is harrowing.

Some photos of him can be found at http://www.google.com/search?q=W.+N.+P.+Barbellion+photos&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&prmd=ivnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=gpCmTernNYGdgQez4In0BQ&ved=0CBcQsAQ&biw=775&bih=307

(3 August 2004)
UPDATED 7 July 2009:
Someone who commented here has called my attention to two Websites where this book is available for Internet reading:
http://www.archive.org/details/journalofdisappo00barbuoft
and
http://www.pseudopodium.org/barbellionblog
Many thanks to Katja!
________________________

D

2005-07-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

DASH, LEON

     ROSA LEE: A MOTHER AND HER FAMILY IN URBAN AMERICA (1996)

A very absorbing factual account of four years (1990-1994) in the life of Rosa Lee Cunningham and her family. Rosa was an African-American woman living in Washington, D.C., but with roots in rural North Carolina. The book covers several generations of her family in an attempt to trace the pattern of drug use, shoplifting, prostitution, and poverty.

It is particularly noteworthy that, of Rosa's eight children, only two escaped from the "underclass" world of drugs, crime, and poverty from which they came, and that seems to have been because each encountered a person who influenced them at an early age (a teacher for one, a social worker for the other).

A question might be raised about this author's approach. Why focus on people who exemplify such a negative stereotype as most members of this family? In these times, is the (African-American) author helping the cause of seeking racial justice? Isn't he just adding fuel to the fires of those who oppose civil rights?

I'm not sure that that is really a valid criticism. The author treats his subjects with respect and dignity--but without getting totally immersed in their lives himself. He demonstrates that Rosa Lee made many bad choices in her life, but he also points out the limitations on her own ability to see that she might have had a wider range of choices than she knew. This was a woman who, while living in the nation's capital, was totally unaware of President Clinton's inauguration--or even of who he was. She and most of her family did not regard the political system as in any way connected to their lives. "What difference would participation make? Everyone knows that the white man is always going to come out on top" is the attitude.

The glimpses this book gives of the very old African-Americans still in North Carolina--their memories of their lives as sharecroppers and of their almost total subjection to the whites who owned the land--are remarkably telling and heartbreaking.

This book has an important subtext. One of the main obstacles in the lives of Rosa Lee and her family has been their functional illiteracy. Ashamed to admit that they cannot read well enough to understand a typical document, they find themselves signing contracts without knowing what they have committed themselves to. And yet they might have been passed along through the primary grades in school ("socially promoted"), and no teacher or school system is held accountable for this colossal failure to do its job.

The author mentions two works by Gunnar Myrdal that he found helpful in understanding the problems of race in the U.S.: American Dilemma and Challenge to Affluence. However, Rosa Lee is not a sociological tract and is not larded with quotations or footnotes. It is a straightforward work of reporting, readable and clear in spite of numerous details that might have been confusing in the hands of a less capable writer.

This nonfiction account by a Washington Post reporter ran in a somewhat different serialized version in the Washington Post in 1994. There was also a PBS-TV "Frontline" special, "The Confessions of Rosa Lee," based on this work.

(3 September 2002)
________________________________
DAVIS, HOPE HALE

     GREAT DAY COMING: A MEMOIR OF THE 1930s (1994)

Hope Hale Davis, who died at the age of 100 in 2006, has left a very absorbing memoir of her life in the 1930s, when she was working for the US government while also being a member of the American Communist Party. She and her husband were willing to follow the Party's orders, though as time went on they seemed to realize that adhering to a structured ideology was compromising their independence.

Her husband's hospitalization for schizophrenia occupies a large part of this memoir, and it is heart-breaking. He was in two different institutions, though whether he was hospitalized against his will is a question--because the doctors and his family, including his wife, conspired to deceive him into accepting hospitalization.

By some carefully orchestrated maneuvers, this confused and deeply troubled man was strongarmed into a situation where he was held prisoner--for his own protection, of course, but the fact of being shut up was very nearly intolerable for him.

Just as he was starting to make progress with the (then new) insulin shock treatments (which his family had to fight very hard to get for him), he was left unattended in the hospital--and killed himself.

Just as Hope Hale Davis and her husband had been docile in their acceptance of Party directives, they were equally docile in accepting whatever the hospital authorities and psychiatrists told them. As time goes on, though, the author of this memoir became less willing to do as she was told and began to speak up.

This is a remarkable book and well worth reading.

(25 September 2006)

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DAVIS, LINDA H.

     BADGE OF COURAGE: THE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE (1998)

This seems to be a thoroughly researched and balanced biography of the American author, Stephen Crane, who died very young (of pulmonary tuberculosis) but who had produced several remarkable contributions to American literature.

This study of Crane contains interesting details about the writing of many of Crane's works--including his well-known short story "The Open Boat," which, we learn, was based on an experience Crane himself had.

He was admired by and a friend of several very notable writers: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ford Madox Ford (Hufer), and he knew Theodore Roosevelt personally--though not always amicably.

If Crane doesn't quite come alive in the pages of this biography, it is probably because of a lack of self-revelatory material. He was apparently not a diarist or letter-writer, and the common-law wife who survived him (Cora, who was a madam of a brothel) doesn't seem to have been inclined to communicate much, either.

(7 October 2007)
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DESAI, ANITA

     FASTING, FEASTING (1999)

This is a beautifully told novel about an Indian family. The parents (seen as one entity--"Mamapapa"--by their children, so united is their front) are very determined not to lose face, to keep their status, regardless of the consequences. The son is sent to the United States to college in Massachusetts. His perspective on the American scene is clear-headed and bitingly critical at the core, without being overtly preachy.

(2 August 2007)
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DICKENS, CHARLES

    OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (1864-65)

Our Mutual Friend is a long and uneven novel. I thought it was going to be “about” greed, but no sooner had I come to this conclusion than Dickens began turning it into a rather sappy love story in which he pulled rabbits out of hats every which way just so that the plot could somehow be contrived to work out to the readers’ satisfaction. Several conflicting wills, people in disguise, and cheap melodrama are all piled on at the end.

There are some important characters he can’t seem to make up his mind about. It’s hard to swallow the inherent goodness of Eugene and Mortimer, the two lawyers, towards the end after we’ve seen them under a cloud through most of the book. And what are we to make of Bella and her family? The apparently lovable Bella, so kind and agreeable towards her father and others, nevertheless has no compunction about declaring herself entirely mercenary in her pursuit of marriage, and she gets her wish—a rich husband, with all the trimmings. This whole plot line and the way it evolves into a “happy” ending seems thoroughly to undercut the argument about money’s being the root of all evil and greed’s being one of the most pernicious poisons to the human spirit. Dickens can’t allow the “happy ending” without considerable folderol at the very conclusion about how it isn’t “really” John Harmon’s money now but Mr. Boffin’s (however, it is carefully noted that John Harmon has received a goodly sum through Boffin’s generosity—quite enough for Bella and the insufferable baby to have their fancy house, etc.) and even about how much of the last third of the action—Boffin’s change toward miserliness, etc.—was all trumped up just to teach Bella a lesson about the worst aspects of money and greed.

This is very hard to take. I felt cheated at this point, for I was taking Boffin’s miserliness and its consequences very seriously all along. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that Bella has been chastened and taught the lesson when she comes away with all of the trappings money can buy. Is money an evil, or isn’t it? Or is it only an evil in the hands of someone who hasn’t learned Bella’s lesson? If that is the point, it seems a very weak point to hang 900 pages on.

A better ending, one more in keeping with many of the very grave issues raised by other incidents in the story, might have been for none of the likable, sympathetic characters to end up rich. But I gather Dickens’s own life showed a conflict between a social conscience and an impulse to make money, which he did rather successfully. Our Mutual Friend has some elements of the potboiler, in fact: the violent scenes, the pie-in-the-face type of revenge, the contrived plot.

Still, it contains what must be one of the more sympathetic treatments of a Jew in the literature of the time.

And Dickens apparently intended the portrait of Betty Higdon as an expression of outrage at the Poor Laws. I’m still unclear about why she refused to go to a doctor when that was suggested, but she sticks in the mind as a telling example of the plight of the poor and homeless, and the author’s postscript makes it clear that the arguments then being advanced in favor of not helping the destitute were a source of outrage to him.

As a matter of fact, the same arguments are still circulating today, in these “enlightened” times: there are no really poor, and if there are any, it’s their own fault for not being enterprising enough to succeed. But the whole matter of Betty Higdon gets lost in the mire of plot contrivance, murder and mayhem, and saccharine love stories that closes the book.

A book that purports to be an outcry against the way the unfortunate are treated ought not to reward any of its characters with wealth—unless such rewards are meant as an ironic underscoring of the point about poverty. Here, they don't seem to have that function

(29 January 1985)

    HARD TIMES

Mr. Josiah Bounderby is a wealthy and boastful manufacturer who owns a factory employing Stephen Blackpool--an honest, hard-working power-loom weaver, married to a dissolute, drunken woman. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind runs a school, where Mr. McChokumchild is a teacher. Sleery’s circus troupe also figures in this memorable novel, a tale that reflects the author’s bitter outrage at the horrors of industrialization and of the education system.

The sentence "Coketown was a triumph of fact" appears in this novel, introducing an unforgettable paragraph of graphic description of the growth of a slagheap to the detriment of the town life.

(1986?)

     THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER (1869)

An interesting collection of essays that probably need considerable annotation. Dickens shows a typical Victorian fascination with death--he visits a Paris morgue and is haunted and sickened by the image of one drowned man he saw there, for instance. He is at his most charming when he deals with annimals (dogs, birds, donkeys). Among the pieces is one about being on board ship with 800 Mormons who are emigrating to Salt Lake.

One essay includes a few remarks that would probably be regarded as racist nowadays, though in his time they probably were not. He even uses the "n-----" word ("n------ songs," I believe was the phrase), but my impression is that in England at that time, and quite possibly in large parts of the U.S., the word lacked the derogatory nuances it since acquired. One has to wonder how true this is, however, when considering how widespread the racist attitude was at the time....

(5 July 2008)

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DOCTOROW, E. L.

     THE BOOK OF DANIEL (1971)

Novel based on the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case, emphasizing its effect on the two children--a boy and a girl in the story. The writing style is frenetic and hard to take.

(29 May 1998)
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DOMANICK, JOE

     TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE: THE LAPD'S CENTURY OF WAR IN THE CITY OF DREAMS (1994)

This is a fairly comprehensive account of the Los Angeles Police Department, including a considerable section on its history. The author is a journalist, and this book is based on a series of articles he wrote for the Los Angeles Weekly.

The beating of Rodney King receives close attention. The author clearly believes that the Los Angeles Police Department is an example of law-enforcement personnel who have entirely too much power and are abusing it.

This book is instructive reading for anyone concerned about police brutality and the increasingly militaristic posturing of our nation's urban police departments.

One carping criticism: I wish the author had stayed away from the phrase "equally as." It crops up more than once.

(10 August 2004)
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E

2005-07-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

EARLEY, PETE

     CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE: DEATH, LIFE, & JUSTICE IN A SOUTHERN TOWN (1995)

This is a journalist's account of two murders of young women in a small southern Alabama town, Monroeville, that happens to be the hometown of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In fact, the author prefaces each section of his book with quotations from the Harper Lee novel. His account concerns a wrongfully convicted man who spent six years on Death Row before he was finally freed.

It is a very long and involved account, and we never learn who actually did commit the two murders. The author captures the daunting complexity of legal procedures just by following the story on and on, through the maze of conflicting stories, many from less-than-reliable witnesses.

The narrative seems like a fairly realistic representation of the way things probably were in the lives of the many people named. I'm not sure that the author's representation of Southern African-American speech is accurate, and I have a question about the wisdom of using the n------ word.

I'm assuming that the author's justification for his frequent use of this highly objectionable word is that this is the way these people talked, or even that this is an accurate transcription of their exact words.

Mark Twain got away with this idea (in Huckleberry Finn, for example), but he was writing before we had become fully aware of just how loaded this word is. Sometimes verisimilitude has to take a back seat to the spirit of the times, and the spirit of these times has--gratifyingly--been to bury this word as fast as we possibly can--not to forget that it existed but just to see to it that its use stops.

Representing its use in speech--even in speech that purports to be an accurate representation of the way these particular people actually spoke--does nothing toward eliminating the word from our vocabulary. There are other ways of conveying the bigoted attitudes of some of the people in this account. We don't have to read the n------ word to get the point, thanks.

(25 July 2010)
_________________________________

EGGERS, DAVE

     HOW WE ARE HUNGRY: STORIES (2005)

I am not sure about the title of this brief collection of very brief stories because there is no story called "How We Are Hungry" among them, but this book has been a best-seller.

Most of the stories are fairly slight and lack much plot, but they show the author's ready wit. "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself" consists of a couple of blank pages--a trick that has been tried before but it still may be good for a chuckle.

"Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" was the most interesting story of the lot, in my opinion. It is an account of a woman's experiences on a mountain-climbing expedition to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and if I ever aspired to go on such an expedition, reading this story has thoroughly cured me of that wish. I suspect that the story accurately represents contemporary mountain-climbing conditions: too many expeditions cluttering up the mountainsides, and too many amateurs or poorly trained persons endangering the lives of others. This story was bone-chilling and well-done.

(27 January 2009)

     A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS (2000)

This apparently autobiographical novel received wide critical attention, perhaps because its author had founded a successful magazine, McSweeney's--but also because Dave Eggers had something to say that readers found interesting.

Born in 1970 and raised in the prosperous Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Eggers had the bad fortune of losing both parents to cancer within a short time--and having his younger brother to take care of thereafter. His other (older) brother and older sister are helpful, but it is Eggers himself who does the day-to-day living with the younger brother, who ranges in age from 7 to his teens in the course of the book.

They move to San Francisco, but questions about his parents' deaths keep troubling him--particularly the whereabouts of their "cremains." Towards the end of the book, he finally locates his mother's ashes, and it may be when he is casting them into the lake that his anger at the world comes to the foreground.

The book ends on an angry note, but the readers will understand if they've read the rest of the book attentively. We can share his anger at the friend (John) who refuses to pull himself together and keeps trying self-destructive measures. We can understand how overwhelmed with responsibility Eggers must have been--and we can feel how much he loves his younger brother.

This is a remarkable book that deserves a careful reading, even though comparisons with J. D. Salinger will be unavoidable.

27 November 2006
_____________________________________________

EHRENREICH, BARBARA

     BAIT AND SWITCH: THE (FUTILE) PURSUIT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM (2005)

Barbara Ehrenreich has again gone undercover, this time for about ten months as a white-collar worker seeking employment. After creating a new identity, she attends networking conferences and workshops and samples job fairs.

She perceives that white-collar workers, even highly qualified ones, know that they are at the mercy of potential employers and are often willing to go to considerable lengths when it comes to personal makeovers. Ehrenreich herself consults with an expert about her dressing and makeup style.

She learns what to say (and not say) and how to say it. One person advises her that "to survive, you need to know where the bodies are buried." This statement suggests the cutthroat nature of some of the dealings in connection with obtaining jobs in white-collar occupations.

She also finds herself sitting in workshops that turn out to be meant exclusively for Christians, where the participants are voluble in their homophobic and anti-Semitic agenda. She speaks out in opposition to this approach but acknowledges that it might not be illegal.

In closing, she speculates about why white-collar workers can't rise up in protest against the kind of treatment they routinely put up with--like having to leave a job with no advance notice, coming to work one day and finding your desk cleared out. She sees union organizing as a possibility for the white-collar work force but she also realizes that so far most attempts at organizing white-collar unions have had little or no success.

Excellent book, very informative.

(23 March 2009)

     NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA (2001)

Fascinating and excellent account of the author’s attempts at living on the income from several successive low-paid jobs in succession in the US--Maine, Florida, etc. Her observations about Wal-Mart are especially telling--and horrifying.

(30 December 2002)
___________________________________________________
ELIOT, GEORGE [MARY ANNE EVANS]

     SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE (1857; 1988)

Three sketches of village clerical life. The last one, "Janet’s Repentance," is a remarkable exploration of alcoholism and an abusive marriage.

(10 June 2003)
___________________________________________________

EPSTEIN, HELEN

     WHERE SHE CAME FROM: A DAUGHTER'S SEARCH FOR HER MOTHER'S HISTORY (1997)

A sad but interesting account of the author's investigation of her mother's life. Her mother, of Czech Jewish heritage, survived imprisonment in several concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of her survival tactics in the camps was to claim that she was an electrician--although she was a dressmaker. Helen Epstein probably captures the tense atmosphere in Prague as the Nazis tightened their noose.

(26 June 2006)

___________________________

EVANZZ, KARL

     THE MESSENGER: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIJAH MUHAMMAD (1999)

Thoroughly documented--with several appendices, this book seems to be an accurate portrayal of Elijah Muhammad. Evanzz is not on a soapbox for Elijah Muhammad by any means. He reveals the Black Muslims as a community that harbors murderers and thugs.

(6 October 2003)
___________________________________________________

F

2005-07-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

FAULKNER, WILLIAM
    MOSQUITOES (1927; 1955)

This novel, Faulkner's second, originally appeared in 1927. It is a truly bad book, complete with ugly racial stereotypes & the n----- word, plus a character usually referred to as "the Semitic man." However, the Jewish characters seem to represent the "voice of reason" in the book, and maybe Faulkner is speaking through them. He puts an assortment of people on a yacht on Lake Pointchartrain, where they proceed to behave inexplicably and abominably. Are they all drunk, or what?

Very little of the Faulkner style is evident here. Towards the end a few passages take off into the tiresomely overwritten style that he indulges in in the Sartoris novels and THE SOUND AND THE FURY and ABSALOM, ABSALOM! ("Not yet despairing because not yet desiring, he nursed his remorse in a silence that was so profound...," for example).

In the Introduction I learned that Faulkner got fired as a Scoutmaster for drunkenness; that he fabricated his military record--not just once or twice in passing remarks but making a lifetime project of it, even going around in an outfit designed to look like an RAF uniform, which he’d had made for himself. He was in the RAF but never a pilot as he went around claiming to have been.

(1 March 2003)
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FISHKIN, SHELLEY FISHER
   LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY: REFLECTIONS ON MARK TWAIN    AND AMERICAN CULTURE (1996)

Interesting comments on Mark Twain and the Mark Twain industry, especially the Hannibal, Missouri, tourist trade. The author does a good job of demolishing the critics of HUCKLEBERRY FINN who contend it is a racist novel.

(10 May 2000)
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FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: A LIFE IN LETTERS (1994)

The author’s letters. Interesting but sad as he becomes increasingly imploring in his need for ready money--so "his" daughter (always "my daughter," never "our daughter") can stay on at Vassar, so he won’t have to "put" Zelda in a "public asylum," and so on. Fitzgerald reveals himself to be the whiny spoiled child one always suspected he was, and undoubtedly anti-Semitic despite a sort of friendship with S. J. Perelman. Letters to Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and other notables.

(3 August 2001)
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FITZGERALD, PENELOPE

   THE GOLDEN CHILD (1977)

The author takes us into the world of a museum--this one in the midst of staging a popular exhibit to display a gold-covered doll that was important to a pre-Christian culture.

The story soon becomes a murder mystery and moves along at a fast clip. There are entertaining passages, and the story is replete with the author's wry humor.

However, she may have got carried away towards the end, when she has one of the main characters, Waring Smith, wounded by a gunshot but apparently wandering around in a business-as-usual mode in spite of being covered with blood for quite a while. We never find out if his wound was tended to. There are quite a number of such loose ends in the story, but most of it is pretty good fun anyway.

(7 April 2011)

THE BOOKSHOP

Short, quietly excellent novel about a widow in a small East Anglian town who decides to open a bookshop. Without any love story, this is an extraordinary disclosure of a triumph of human greed and lust for power.

(8 May 2001)

HUMAN VOICES (1980)

This short novel takes us into the lives of some employees of the BBC during World War II. The plot revolves around Sam Brooks, who is in charge of recorded programs but who has too great a liking for young women employees (his "seraglio," as some of his colleagues call his collection of young women). The novel has quiet humor and good sense.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) began her writing career at the age of 60. She herself worked at the BBC during World War II, and this book is almost certainly based on her own experience. She has probably captured much of the atmosphere of war-ravaged London, including the ever-present danger of unexploded bombs.

However, the plot of the story doesn't quite jell. Pathways are opened up in the story, only to trail off into nowhere. (What become of Lisa Bernard and her baby, for instance?) Still, this was a novel well worth reading.

(1 April 2005)
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FORSTER, E. M.
THE LONGEST JOURNEY (1922)

Said to be Forster’s own favorite among his works, this novel is definitely not my favorite. Although it contains interesting observations about the English public school system and about child bullies, the plot is contrived, probably faulty, and hard to follow.

Ricky, the sensitive, lame protagonist, marries a woman who turns out to be "legacy-hunting" and who persuades him to hide his knowledge that another man is really his half-brother. Steve, the "earthy" half-brother, turns out to stand for Good, as does Ricky’s friend. Characters, including Ricky himself, die off in droves in this story, with very little attention given to their deaths--creating an oddly unreal impression throughout the absurd narrative. Very disappointing.

(6 January 2004)
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FOWLES, JOHN
THE MAGUS (revised edition, 1977)

A long novel, set mainly in Greece. It seems to have been changed considerably since its first edition. The story is larded with phrases and whole sentences and paragraphs in Greek or French, untranslated, and every section is prefaced by a quotation from the Marquis de Sade.

When I read a work of fiction, I expect to find an interesting story with characters who capture my attention. In this book, the narrator/protagonist seems so incredibly dense and stupid in the way that he knocks his head against a stone wall throughout this novel that I found him tiresome.

Fowles said that the original title of this book was The God Game. I have a notion that he might have written this book intending it to be an allegory about God's nature (God as a sadist). It's the only way this story can make much sense.

Fowles also mentions having been influenced by Alain Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a misty story of Platonic search for a vision of perfection that can never be grasped. This pointless but endless quest seems to be the "problem" of Urfe, the protagonist in The Magus.

The Magus is an intellectually pretentious work, in my opinion. Moreover, I had the uncomfortable sensation that the author had his eye on the cinematic possibilities when he set the story in Greece. The uncomfortable sensation turned into downright annoyance by the time I got to the dramatic pageant, with characters dressed up in masks of animal heads.

(27 July 2005)
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FREEMAN, GREGORY A.
LAY THIS BODY DOWN: THE 1921 MURDERS OF 11 PLANTATION SLAVES (1999)

In Georgia John S. Williams, a white farmer, owned a plantation worked by black men whom he had bailed out of jail. In exchange for their debt to him, they were bound to do his bidding--in perpetuity, as it turned out, for the debt was never regarded as paid, and Williams locked his peons up at night to insure that they couldn't escape. He and his sons (who ran sub-plantations of the same type) were always well armed, and bloodhounds were at the ready in case any black man tried to get away. The peons were beaten cruelly and often. Some were killed.

Since peonage was against the law (though it was a frequently overlooked law throughout the south at the time, since it was a way for the south to keep the slave economy it had existed on before the Civil War while nominally acknowledging that the former slaves were "free"), federal investigators showed up on Williams's plantation, looking into the matter of peonage there.

Williams was concerned that they might have found out too much, and so he determined to end the lives of 11 black men whom he regarded as most likely to reveal his guilt. Accordingly he ordered his overseer, a young black man named Clyde Manning, to help him kill these men. Manning clearly did not want to kill the men, but Williams emphasized that he had no choice: "It's your neck or theirs, Clyde," he said, and Manning knew he meant it.

The men were bludgeoned to death or dropped live off a bridge in pairs, chained together, along with stones to weight them down.

The evidence surfaced later, and Williams was convicted--a strange turn of events in Georgia of that time, when it was highly unusual for a white man to be convicted on the testimony of a black hired hand.

Later Manning was convicted too. Both men went to prison, Manning to die of tuberculosis only a few years later after serving on a chain gang while incarcerated.

This story is riveting--and gives a very grim picture of life for black people in the south after the Civil War.

One question I was left with was whether the reader is supposed to believe that Williams's family scenes during the courtroom (his weeping wife, his children clustering around him) were authentic and spontaneous, or staged for the sake of persuading the audience. I am inclined to believe that they were entirely staged, but I wish that the author had dealt with this question. The scenes (and there were several) have a Norman Rockwell quality that is almost too poignant to be real, given what we know for a fact about John Williams: that he was a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.

(22 December 2005)
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FUSSELL, PAUL
BAD; OR, THE DUMBING OF AMERICA (1991)

Amusing incisive commentary on contemporary mores and style.

(1 June 1998)

DOING BATTLE: THE MAKING OF A SKEPTIC (1996)

The author's autobiography, with a particular emphasis on his service in World War II. Growing up in Pasadena, California, he was in for a rude awakening when he entered the military. Later he went to graduate school and became a professor of English, concentrating on the 18th century and Samuel Johnson. Fussell's self-critical approach prevents this book from being arrogant or supercilious. He offers many refreshing if pessimistic perspectives on the American scene.

(17 August 2005)

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G

2005-07-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH
THE CULTURE OF CONTENTMENT (1992)

An essay by the well-known economist, arguing that the US is dominated by a moderately well-off class of citizens who embody "the culture of contentment"--a smug willingness to wall themselves off from the major problems besetting the society today. He views the US military as having an alarming independence and power and is concerned about the lopsided budgeting of vast amounts of resources on largely unnecessary defense buildups. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has had to look for "threats" elsewhere to justify the continuing outlay of resources for national defense. Galbraith regards the US as being in an increasingly untenable position when it comes to defense spending and the failure to address fundamental socioeconomic problems.

(3 September 2005)
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GARR, TERI
SPEEDBUMPS: FLOORING IT THROUGH HOLLYWOOD (2005)

This account of her life by the actress/dancer Teri Garr interested me primarily because she has multiple sclerosis and became an MS ambassador for a large pharmaceutical company that produces one of the immunomodulatory injectable drugs now being widely used to retard the progression of the disease.

Her account treats the MS rather lightly and in passing, it seems to me. Mainly her story concerns her career in acting. She comes across as a likable person, one who can laugh at herself.

She maintains that a couple of her friends decided that she had MS before she was even diagnosed with it--and that they spread this rumor around, thus impeding her chances of getting more work in Hollywood as an actress. This backstabbing by her presumed friends must have been hard for her to tolerate. The more usual course of events is for the person who finds out he/she has MS to try to conceal it from employers for as long as possible--and to find that friends and relatives remain in denial about the diagnosis even after they've been told about it.

(15 November 2007)
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GAWANDE, ATUL
COMPLICATIONS: A SURGEON'S NOTES ON AN IMPERFECT
SCIENCE (2002)

A surgical resident reflects on several instances where medical mistakes were made--and on the difficulty of finding the right treatment for a patient in a world where there are so many variables.

(3 September 2005)
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GILBERT, SANDRA M.
WRONGFUL DEATH: A MEDICAL TRAGEDY (1995)

An English professor is suddenly widowed when her husband--also an English professor, at the University of California at Davis--dies just after successful surgery for prostate cancer. This is her account of the probable hospital/doctor errors responsible for his death and of her malpractice suit.

(15 May 1998)
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GINTHER, JOHN ROBERT
BUT YOU LOOK SO WELL (1978)

I read this book in 1980 but still remember it. The author, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but was not told of the diagnosis until many years later. The diagnosing doctor told Ginther's wife, who agreed to withhold the information from him. This book is out of print now but is an instructive eye-opener when it comes to the way things are sometimes done in medicine.

(1 August 2004)
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GLASGOW, ELLEN
THE WOMAN WITHIN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1954)

Ellen Glasgow is probably not as well known as she should be. Her novel Vein of Iron has virtues that many American novels lack--not the least of which is a firm entrenchment in a realistic view of the world that doesn't dwell on the sordid or the sensational but that quietly stresses some hard truths about life as it moves forward for most people.

She wrote this autobiography piecemeal in her final years and intended it for posthumous publication. She was a native of Richmond, Virginia, and knew at first hand the way in which the Civil War was affecting both the southern landowners and former slaves.

She tended to be sickly as a child, and was probably more cosseted than a child in a less prosperous family would have been. There is a strain of self-pity running through this account but it is muted and--to me anyway--tolerable.

In her literary career she knew many eminences on the American and Anglo-American literary scene and she provides vignettes of James Branch Cabell (a lifelong friend), Henry James, and others.

(22 October 2009)
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GODWIN, GAIL

    FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER (1991?)

This novel concerns a central character whose mother leaves her and her father for no clear reason—and is later killed in an accident. (1999)

While reading this book I had hopes of finding out why this clergyman’s wife left her husband and daughter to go off with a woman friend. But now I’ve finished it, and only one question was resolved: by all accounts the two women weren’t lesbians. That hadn’t been my concern. I was wondering how the mother could justify just taking off like that. Over a year passes before the fatal accident—and during that time she and the woman friend go to England for an extended stay. In other words, enough time without visits has passed so that it is clear that the break will probably be permanent.

The story ambles on through the daughter’s life, taking her up to her early twenties and her father’s sudden death. There is a long segment about a community issue, with the parishioners and the various clergymen all getting into it, and I don't know if the author intends us to sympathize with the Episcopal church’s extremely emotional reaction to a threat of losing their cherished hundred-year-old Christ figure that adorns the church’s front yard. It seems to be all that these people can get worked up about: saving this piece from demolition by land developers. As the plot thickens and the statue is vandalized by being hacked to pieces—leading fortuitously to a wondrous ecumenical reconsecration service—I felt sure Godwin wrote this part with a straight face. We’re not supposed to be sitting there as readers saying, “Is this what matters to Christian folk? Statues and buildings, the priestly stoles and chasuble, this fascination with rituals and holy water?” We never learn who the vandals were, either, though for a while there is much speculation.

This is the way the whole book is: It raises questions, then cheats us by dropping them and trusting we won’t notice this sloppiness. And it isn’t an open-ended novel the point of which is that there are no answers. Not at all. At the end Godwin appears to be very neatly tidying up all the loose ends—except that she isn’t. She tidies up only those of the most recent sections of the book, leaving all the earlier ones untended to. Such a book is an insult to the reader.

20 February 1992

    EVENSONG

This novel, the sequel to FATHER MELANCHOLY’S DAUGHTER, rubbed me the wrong way and went on too long. The married couple, both of whom are members of the Episcopal clergy, are a bit too angelic to be interesting. Also, the author seems primly intent on demonstrating that she can write a "respectable" novel about "nice," "caring" people and still coyly toss in a few reminders that she knows the Facts of Life.

In places, this novel reads like a sermon. It is replete with high Anglican theology, and its characters have a laughably prosperous life in spite of a welter of Problems thrown at them as the novel proceeds.
There are some very obvious flaws in plot development, too: a problem with which the main characters wrestle for a large part of the story is whether a lay-brother "monk" who descends on them from a known monastery is who he claims to be. Had these characters taken the obvious step of contacting the monastery--easy enough in 1999, surely--to check out his story, there would have been almost no plot to this novel. Why did these supposedly eminently sensible and intelligent characters not do so? Why was the possibility never even broached? If Gail Godwin is trying to be the American Barbara Pym, she fails at it.

(24 August 2001)
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GOLDHAGEN, DANIEL JONAH

     HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE       HOLOCAUST (1996)

This study of the Germans' behavior during the Nazi Holocaust is an angry book, and I'm not sure how fair it is. Goldhagen is trying to answer the question that has troubled many people ever since the Holocaust: How could ordinary Germans not have known that Jews and other "undesirables" were being slaughtered by the millions right in their midst? And if they knew, why were there almost no protests?

Goldhagen's answer is that ordinary Germans did indeed know. In fact, he claims, many were all-too-willing participants in the slaughter. One of his chief points is that although the Germans charged with the responsibility for the actual killing often could have opted not to do any killing of Jews, they went ahead anyway and took part in the brutal murders. He maintains that the typical German had been taught a virulent form of anti-Semitism from birth--and therefore had no problem at all with falling in with the murder of the Jews. The goal of the Nazis was the total annihilation of all Jews, all over Europe. The ordinary German subscribed to this goal whole-heartedly, or so Goldhagen says.

Moreover, the Christian churches either went along with the Nazis' programme or were silent about it--a silence that was assumed to mean assent.

Another of Goldhagen's points is that the Nazis backed down when people protested enough--and here he uses the example of the Nazis' euthanasia plan. Therefore--he argues--if some Germans had objected as they did to the euthanasia plan, they could have persuaded the Nazis to put a halt to their plans for annihilating the Jews.

This book is a damning indictment of the German people before and during World War II. The author stresses that Hitler was putting forward an anti-Semitic programme as early as 1920 in his public speeches and writings. The passage of time (over 20 years), with Hitler and his followers constantly hammering home their message of hate, seems to have persuaded most Germans to go along with the ideas of National Socialism.

I do not know enough about the impact of the resistance and protest movements that did exist in Europe and even in Germany at the time, but the White Rose is one group that has been celebrated ever since the end of the war. Surely people must have known at the time that the three young people who were arrested in connection with this group's efforts (at passing out anti-Nazi leaflets) were beheaded the day after their sentencing. This fact alone says something about the atmosphere of repression that must have prevailed in Germany at the time.

Goldhagen does not deal with any of the protest movements except for a couple of passing remarks--for example, one about the attempt on Hitler's life.

The author does not simply report that a certain number of Jews were shot at a certain camp during a certain time. He gives us the reactions of some of the officers who were in charge of the actual shooting.

He devotes particular attention to the death marches--emphasizing how pointless they were unless the objective was to kill Jews by wearing them down, gradually and with bestial cruelty.

Germany (the reader can only conclude) must have been ruled by a collection of extremely sadistic madmen who were fiendishly clever in their methods of persuading other Germans to take part in torture and murder.

There can be no adequate response to these grim facts. I'm reminded, though, of an article in the Scientific American that I read many years ago, about some experiments with crowding rats. When rats were crowded too close together, they became fiercely aggressive toward one another. Maybe the events of the Holocaust are merely a harbinger of human life as it will eventually be lived, when there will be too many people on this planet.

(5 March 2007)
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GOLDSMITH, MARTIN
THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY: A TRUE STORY OF MUSIC AND LOVE IN NAZI GERMANY (2000)

The author tells the story of his parents--both musicians who fled Hitler's Germany after spending some years playing in the Kulturbund, which was apparently a showcase cultural group made up entirely of Jewish actors and musicians. They were able to escape the worst horrors of Nazi Germany for this reason--and eventually they came to the United States, where his mother played viola but his father gave up the flute.

The author's grandfather was aboard the St. Louis on its voyage (with 900 Jews aboard) to Cuba, where it was turned away, and no other country would take in the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Since my piano teacher was among those on board the St. Louis, I have always had a horrified interest in its sad story. Goldsmith's father and brother eventually found a "home" in France, where they lived on the brink of starvation--and sent beseeching letters to George and Rosemary (the new American names for Martin Goldsmith's parents) in America, pleading for liberation from their tormented existence.

This part of the story left me puzzled. Clearly some of the correspondence never reached the persons involved--possibly because of the intervention of the Nazi censors. But what is left unexplained is whether George and Rosemary could or would have helped George's father and brother. That they did not help them--and that they met their deaths in a concentration camp--seems to indicate cruelty in George and Rosemary, and yet they are portrayed sympathetically. There has to be more to this story than we find out here.

If they couldn't help, why couldn't they? This should have been explained.

(2 October 2008)
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GOOD, JEFFREY & GORECK, SUSAN
POISON MIND (1995)

True account of a Florida family poisoned by their next-door neighbor, a Mensa member. Appalling but absorbing.

(1 February 1999)
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GORDIMER, NADINE

   WORLD OF STRANGERS (1958)

I've become fonder of Nadine Gordimer's writing after reading this novel. It bothers me, in a schoolmarmish way, that she hasn't straightened out the difference between "as" and "like," but otherwise I liked this story.

I'm not sure how much the reader is supposed to like the main character, Toby Hood, who has come to Johannesburg because his family's publishing business has sent him there. I didn't like him much, but the story being told is an interesting one.

Toby becomes friends with an angry African man and with some of his friends as well. The author describes in considerable detail a world most readers won't have known--where even friendship between the black and white races was illegal.

Surprisingly, though the book was banned in South Africa for 12 years, it is not even a thinly veiled polemic for an end to apartheid. Gordimer is simply telling a story and rooting it in the real world as she's known it.

One of the last segments of the book, in which Toby goes on a hunting trip with some other men, contains some powerfully understated scenes that will probably impress upon the reader's mind the cruelty and senselessness of the whole custom of hunting. There is no preaching here, and the blood and gore involved aren't highlighted.

But the point is beautifully made.

And, since Toby is perhaps the most liberal white man in the story, what does his participation in the guinea fowl hunt say about white men except that the best of them are still cruel?

Perhaps I am reading more into this story than is there, but if that isn't what it is suggesting, then what is the hunting scene doing in the story?
Before that there are some scenes involving horse racing. It looks as if Gordimer is saying that the sports indulged in by white people in South Africa are the expensive domains of a cosseted few and often have their basis in cruelty to animals.

In the meantime, the black Africans, whose country it was in the first place, are being treated almost like slaves. Their country has been usurped by a foreign power.

Courageous people like Nadine Gordimer have persisted in spelling out what apartheid really has done. She has told an interesting story that has important things to say.

(21 June 2010)

     THE HOUSE GUN (1998)

I probably haven't read enough fiction by Nadine Gordimer to be able to comment meaningfully about it, but The House Gun bothered me.

Yes, it's excellent that she's a white South African writer who is portraying the "new" South Africa, where blacks are prominent lawyers and have whites as their friends. But there is more to this story than its depiction of a new order, with the old one still poking through in the form of older people who haven't yet acclimated themselves to the changes.

There is a story about a young white man whose parents believe in his goodness. He has been an only child, been raised by two intelligent, well-educated parents, who have assured him that they will always be there for him, no matter what happens.

His mother is a doctor, and humanitarian concern plays a large part in his parents' lives even though they haven't been political activists. When it turns out that Duncan, the son, seems to have murdered a young man with whom he was living, the reaction of all who knew Duncan is that he could not have done violence to another human being.

That being so, and we are made to believe that, why does Gordimer allow his case to be so flimsy? There are no witnesses to the crime. The only "evidence" is that the gardener on the premises (one of the least important characters in this book) saw him coming from the house and saw him drop "something" in the grass. Later the house gun was retrieved from the grass, and Duncan's fingerprints were on it. That is the sum total of the evidence.

The house gun, however, has been handled, possibly by everyone in the house the night of a party the previous night. Duncan has no recollection of the shooting or of wanting to kill Carl Jespersen, the victim. The psychologists theorize that he "blanked out"--was under stress so great that he was acting rationally but with loss of memory for what he did.

The case for his extreme stress is very convincing. But I'm not persuaded that, given the information we are given, he committed the crime. I kept waiting for the author to give us more information, but it is never forthcoming.

At one point Hamilton Motsamai, the lawyer for the defense, mentions in passing that someone of Duncan's personality type might actually be willing to admit to committing a crime committed by somebody else--for altruistic or romantic reasons, for instance. However, this possibility is dropped as the novel proceeds, and it never comes up again.

I still think that is exactly what might have happened. We never find out much about the relationships among the four other people living on the premises--except for Duncan's affair with Natalie. Carl Jespersen is fleshed out slightly towards the end, but the others are shadowy.

Any one of them might have killed Carl Jespersen. Or some unknown person, even the gardener, might have had a reason to want him dead--and been happy to see Duncan take the rap.

The story, if it is supposed to move forward like a murder mystery, doesn't answer some basic questions. Instead, Gordimer uses the judge and the lawyer as mouthpieces for long-winded opinions on current economic and sociological problems.

At the end of the story we are seeing Duncan serving time for a crime I'm not sure he committed--and yet the book is set up so that we are supposed to believe that he did kill Carl. I just can't buy it.

(28 January 2010)

"LOOT" AND OTHER STORIES (2003)

I'm probably not qualified to assess this collection of stories since I've read very little of the author's other work. I found the stories very hard to follow, but I have a strong hunch that their effect may depend largely on the way they are laid out on the page--the paragraphing, for instance.

It isn't always clear who is talking or thinking what in a recorded version of this book.

The stories often deal with race in South Africa. One story, for example, tells of a "coloured" (mixed-race) couple who adopt a white baby who was left anonymously at a church.

Nadine Gordimer deals with important themes, and I'm sorry to say I didn't like these stories more. She seems almost to be writing a sociological treatise at times instead of telling a story. I found her style tiresome.

(14 November 2009)

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GORDON, LYNDALL
    A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART (1998)

Lyndall Gordon has augmented the vast Henry James industry with a seemingly well-documented study and a somewhat original theme: that the inner life of Henry James may have been shaped by the untimely deaths of two women who were clearly important to him, though not necessarily in a romantic way (this question is left undecided)--his cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple, who died very young, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom James may or may not have had a romantic liaison in middle age--who threw herself from a window in Italy and died.

Gordon makes a considerable case for these two women's strong influence on Henry James. She also wisely leaves the matter of James's possible homosexuality in the realm of the possible (but probably unknowable).

However, I have a quibble with this book that casts some doubt on the validity of her research and her thesis, and that is her treatment of Willliam and Henry James's attitudes toward Jews. She quotes (in passing) a remark by William James where Jews are compared to "maggots," and later, in a different context, she makes the unsubstantiated remark that Henry James was anti-Semitic--and lets it go at that. Nowhere in this book, or in its bibliography, is there any evidence of Henry James's anti-Semitism. Is the reader to assume that Gordon has such evidence? Why should the reader assume this?
It would not be so very surprising if evidence of Henry James's anti-Semitism would turn up. But where has it turned up for Lyndall Gordon?

(26 May 2007)

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GOUDGE, ELIZABETH
THE SCENT OF WATER (1963)

This British author, who died around 1984, has written a quietly remarkable story of a few people in a village--one a middle-aged woman who arrives there to settle after inheriting property from a cousin she hardly knew. The story revolves around her attempt to find out more about her cousin through reading the journal she left, and to come to terms with her own faith, as well as to care for the cousin’s collection of charming "little things"--miniatures.
What starts out to be a rather pedestrian tale about things turns out to be much more--a story with an underlying symbolism that doesn’t hit the reader over the head but runs subtly through the narrative.

(12 March 2003)
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GOULD, JENNIFER
VODKA, TEARS, AND LENIN’S ANGEL: MY ADVENTURES IN THE WILD AND WOOLLY FORMER SOVIET UNION (1997)

The author, a reporter for the VILLAGE VOICE, relates her many and varied experiences in Russia and some of the Caucasus regions, including Georgia. Interesting but not always well written.

(23 October 2001)
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GRAHAM, KATHARINE
PERSONAL HISTORY (1997)

Autobiography of the woman who owned and ran the WASHINGTON POST, a family-owned enterprise, during the Watergate era and later, through a long and bitter pressmen’s strike. In spite of some friends of dubious value--Henry Kissinger, Clare Booth Luce, and others--her life has been influential and useful, and she has approached it with a balanced perspective and humor--even when dealing with her husband's suicide.

(2 December 1999)
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GRAY, FRANCINE DU PLESSIX
THEM: A MEMOIR OF PARENTS (2005)

Francine du Plessix Gray has written a lively and graceful account of the lives of her parents--her father, her mother, and her stepfather, Alexander Liberman. After leaving Europe during the war, her mother (Tatiana) became a highly regarded milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue, and her stepfather soon established himself in a position of considerable authority at Vogue magazine.

Many names are dropped in this account, for Gray's parents were keen participants in the world of high fashion and celebrity. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, was a close friend of theirs. But Gray drops names in ways that make it clear that she isn't trying to impress her readers.

In fact, she takes a dim view of her parents even while being very fond of them. She knows that they are vain, cowardly people who have often kept much too close an eye on the main chance--discarding friends when they cease to be of use to them and partying away their lives. The care of the child Francine is often in the hands of other people, but this book isn't about accusing her parents of neglect.

She seems to have accepted her childhood for what it was, taking the good with the bad and graciously giving her parents the benefit of the doubt.

Her mother had been the great love of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky before marrying du Plessix. The book gives glimpses into life in revolutionary and Soviet Russia that are perceptive and extraordinary.

(13 April 2011)
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GREENE, GRAHAM
THE COMEDIANS (1966)

This novel takes place in the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier’s reign of terror and is about a man who inherits a hotel in Port au Prince and his adventures with Jones and Smith, two men he met on the voyage to Haiti. Perhaps a bit too obviously oriented toward a Hollywood version but still a thoughtful work.

(12 October 1999)

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
A very funny novel. The narrator, Henry Pulling, has led a routine life as a bank manager until the death of the woman he had always known as his mother. This woman's sister--his Aunt Augusta--attaches herself to him at this point and reveals that her sister was not Henry's real mother. For most of the novel we do not know who his real mother is, and the questions connected with this mystery would occupy most readers' minds although they do not form the core of the story. (Is his mother someone we already know? Why was the secret kept for so long?--and so on.) Instead we find out more about the intrepid Aunt Augusta and her lovers--especially "Wordsworth," as she calls Zachary, a West Indian black man.

Aunt Augusta, who tends to be involved in somewhat shady international escapades, is a globetrotter, and so we are taken to Istanbul and Uruguay as her mysterious missions occur.
The question of Henry's real mother ceases to matter much--though most readers will have figured it out long before the story ends--and the revelation comes in an oblique, offhanded way, as if to emphasize how little it has to do with the lives being played out in the story.
(7 February 2004)

THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (1939)

This novel was written as a potboiler, by the author's own admission. He was working simultaneously on The Power and the Glory but needed more money--and cranked out 2,000 words a day to write The Confidential Agent.

Maybe Graham Greene was incapable of writing a bad book, for this thriller has much to recommend it--though it isn't among my Graham Greene favorites (Brighton Rock, A Burnt-Out Case, and The Heart of the Matter are at the top of the list for me).

The story centers around D., who enters England from an unnamed country that is at war (Spain?) as a former professor of Romance languages of some distinction, now charged with a mission of procuring a coal contract for his country. His is a dangerous job, as we soon learn, and he is being very careful.

A love story is combined with a thriller here, and perhaps it is this combination that prompted Greene to designate this novel as one of his "entertainments."

There is a seedy, tired atmosphere pervading the action in this story--an atmosphere Greene excels at creating. It is somewhat like the seediness in Conrad's spy story, The Secret Agent. Greene isn't borrowing from Conrad but mining the same territory, which must be a fertile ground, for it also attracted Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima.

14 January 2009

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GREGORY, DICK
NIGGER (1964)

The well-known comedian’s autobiography, telling of a fatherless childhood in desperate poverty, his struggle to make a living as a comedian, his marriage and children, including the loss of an infant son, and his involvement in the civil rights movement both in Chicago and in the South.

(23 July 2000)
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GREIDER, KATHARINE
THE BIG FIX: HOW THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY RIPS OFF AMERICAN CONSUMERS (2003)

This book has some rabble-rousing features but it rests on a foundation of apparently solid facts. And maybe rabble-rousing is what is needed.

The book came out eight years ago. The author would probably find more horror stories now because I don't think that the situation has changed for the better since 2003.

Greider explores the ways in which drug companies pursue sales of their products through aggressive marketing to doctors--and through elaborate legal maneuvers that result in bigger profits for the drug companies. Her point is that drug companies should be working in the public interest since their products affect people's health, and yet they are often working against the public interest.

She also discusses DTC (direct-to-consumer) marketing, which has been responsible for the costly attention-getting ads that are flooding the airwaves and magazines.

An informative book.

(14 May 2011)

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GRISHAM, JOHN
THE INNOCENT MAN: MURDER AND INJUSTICE IN A SMALL TOWN (2006)

I'm too much of a snob to read very many John Grisham works, which are usually best-sellers. But since this one is an account of an actual case, I overcame my snobbishness long enough to get through it.

There's some stylistic sloppiness in the writing (Grisham is much too fond of using "and such" for my taste, for instance), but it's an absorbing story highlighting the US justice system's extreme unfairness in some instances.

Ron Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, served more than a dozen years, many of them on death row, for a murder he hadn't committed. So did another man--while the actual murderer wasn't discovered, even though there was considerable evidence pointing toward him.

Ron Williamson had had a drinking problem before his imprisonment for murder in the early 1980s, but because a psychotic condition seems to have developed during his prison stay, he was sometimes medicated with psychotropic drugs that took their toll on his health. For many years he was subject to fits of screaming protests of his innocence, but nobody was listening--and the only effect his protests had was (sometimes) to land him in a treatment center for a while. As a rule, though, his mental derangement was left untreated.

When the case was finally corrected and Ron was freed, he won a sizeable settlement by suing the legal system. His alcoholism continuing, he gave money away with a liberal hand, moved around frequently, and in general was a pathetic figure. It wasn't long before liver cirrhosis caught up with him, and he died, in his early 50s, a victim of the justice system.

The real killer and rapist of Debbie Carter was a man who had been helpfully supplying the local police with drugs like cocaine. The police and apparently some lawyers and judges were instrumental in ignoring or covering up mountains of evidence that would have brought this man to trial--and exonerated Ron Williamson and the other man.

This is a tragic story from beginning to end--and a damning indictment of the way the US justice system functions.

(22 May 2008)
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GROOPMAN, JEROME, MD
HOW DOCTORS THINK (2007)

The author is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and has had a very distinguished career in medical research as well as in his writings about medicine.

In this book he isn't protecting his colleagues from criticism. In fact, he often subjects them to criticism, and it is refreshing in a time when the medical profession often seems like a closed circle of people determined to defend their turf.

Are doctors wrong in their diagnoses? Surprisingly many are, according to this book.

Are doctors influenced in their choice of treatments by the lavish gifts showered on them by the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries? Yes indeed, Groopman demonstrates--singling out spinal fusion as an example of a procedure that is often done unnecessarily for the relief of low back pain.

Are entirely too many MRIs being ordered? Most definitely. And just how accurately are MRIs read by the experts? Tests have been done that have shown that MRI readings are often astonishingly inaccurate.

The author analyzes ways doctors think because they're in the habit of thinking in those ways, and ways in which better doctors think because they are curious enough and daring enough to venture into the realm of less obvious possibilities when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.

This was an interesting and valuable book.

(18 March 2009)
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H

2005-07-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

HABEGGER, ALFRED
MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS: THE LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON (2002)

This comprehensive biography seems to be thoroughly researched, and the author is at pains to correct the dating of Emily Dickinson's letters. In one of several appendices, there is a sad list of deaths from tuberculosis. In 1850, 22% of the deaths in Massachusetts were due to tuberculosis, the author tells us.

The author is sympathetic to his subject though it is clear that her behavior was often enigmatic, as were her writings. He spends perhaps too much time demolishing other biographers of Emily Dickinson, but it is probably a welcome corrective to what passes for scholarship when he hammers away at those critics who have tried to establish her as a lesbian.

He also makes it quite clear that her refusal to become a Christian, in a community often swept by enthusiasm for revivals, could have contributed to her reasons for choosing to live apart from the rest of the world for most of her days.

(20 March 2008)

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HACKWORTH, COL. DAVID H.
ABOUT FACE: THE ODYSSEY OF AN AMERICAN WARRIOR (1989)

The book is an account of the author’s life in the Army, including Korea and Vietnam, and of his ultimate disillusionment. He lied about his age in order to join the Army at fifteen. In June 1971, however, Colonel Hackworth, by now a much-decorated, career military man whose officer status didn’t come from West Point, went public with his criticism of the Vietnam War—on nationwide ABC-TV, where he was interviewed on the “Issues and Answers" program.

(May 27, 1991)

    (in collaboration with Tom Matthews)
    HAZARDOUS DUTY: AMERICA'S MOST DECORATED LIVING SOLDIER REPORTS FROM THE FRONT AND TELLS IT THE WAY IT IS (1996)

Excellent collection of reports from several recent arenas of US military exhibitionism: Iraq, Serbia, etc. Hackworth is outspoken in his criticism of the US overemphasis on military spending.

(16 February 1999)
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HAMILTON,JANE
A MAP OF THE WORLD (1994)

A novel about two young couples and their children on a Wisconsin dairy farm.

(19 December 1998)
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HARDY, THOMAS
WESSEX TALES

A collection of Hardy's shorter tales set in his Wessex country. These stories tend to revolve around grim themes, and some have a ghostly element. Reading these stories before tackling Hardy's novels would provide a good introduction to the Wessex customs and speech--and to Hardy's somber view of the world.
(30 October 2005)
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HELLER, JOSEPH
CATCH AS CATCH CAN: SELECTED STORIES AND OTHER WRITINGS (2003)
This book is a compilation of various writings by the author, published several years after his death. Some of the stories seem slight, but the material about Catch-22 was very interesting.
In particular, there is considerable information about the making of the movie--enough for me to want to see the movie, after all.
Heller may go down in history as one of those authors who had only one good book in them--but what a book it was. And in Catch as Catch Can it is like encountering beloved old friends to find the familiar characters--Yossarian, Chaplain Tappman, and Major Major, among others--who made so many of us laugh until we ached in the '60s.
(5 November 2009)
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NOW AND THEN: FROM CONEY ISLAND TO HERE (1998)

This autobiographical book sheds light on some of the originals for characters in Heller's CATCH-22, more than thirty years after the publication of that acclaimed novel.
Heller tells of his childhood in Depression-era New York--specifically, Coney Island, where he was part of a fairly close-knit Jewish community. The memoirs go into detail about the Coney Island atmosphere. Heller himself was in World War II, and it is clear after reading Now and Then that much of the experience in Catch-22 is actually very similar to his own.
This memoir largely omits the war, however, and concentrates on Heller's early years: his childhood friends and their activities, the local characters, some of his family.
This was a well-written and absorbing book. I should think that a reader unfamiliar with Catch-22 would find it just as interesting as I did. The book is filled with many humorous anecdotes and observations, and it is well worth the reader's undivided attention.

(18 February 2003)
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HENRIKSSON, ANDERS (comp.)
NON CAMPUS MENTIS: WORLD HISTORY ACCORDING TO COLLEGE STUDENTS (2001)

I would recommend this compilation of student boners as authentic and very funny. When I say "authentic," I mean that these are clearly not "made up" boners but the real thing-- snippets from college students' writing that show how very wrong people can get things sometimes when they might be trying their hardest to get them right.
I have read other collections of boners in the past, and as a former college teacher myself, I had collected a few of my own. However, the selections in this book have been culled from several collections by professors and are a treasure-trove of gems such as "Russia was crushed under the Mongol yolk."
The book includes some maps--for instance, one of "Middle Evil Times," with "vacant Bishop Bricks" designated.

(7 June 2002)
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HERSEY, JOHN
    HIROSHIMA (1946; 1986)

This book first ran as a long article in the New Yorker in 1946, with the entire magazine given over to it--no editorials or other articles. Though I didn't see it, I suspect that the ads were still included....

Hersey focused on six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing (August 1945), and forty years later he wrote a follow-up essay on their lives.

I'm not sure how he chose the six people he interviewed. The Japanese are nothing if not polite, and so maybe it's not surprising that he could find any Hiroshima citizens courteous enough to talk to an American so soon after the American-generated catastrophe that had hit them.

However, one of the six wasn't Japanese. He was a German Catholic priest/missionary. Another of the six was a pastor of a Baptist church. I have questions about whether one-third of the interviewees ought to have been Christian since the population of Hiroshima at the time must have been predominantly non-Christian.

I wouldn't quibble about this if it weren't for the enormous instant popularity of this work of Hersey's. Einstein immediately ordered a thousand copies, for instance. And the New Yorker and Hersey must have known well in advance of publication that this subject was going to draw large numbers of readers. Everyone must have wanted to know more about the disastrous new bomb.

Hersey gives considerable attention to the "Hiroshima maidens," the women whose faces were badly disfigured by keloid scars as a result of the bomb--some of whom were brought to the US for plastic surgery.

One has to wonder if the author is taking it upon himself to atone for the US by showing how fundamentally kind most of us are. I was looking for more information on the effects of the bomb blast and its radiation on its victims. These are explored too but by 1986 the information could have been much more detailed.

But as a piece of reporting that had to be done, Hiroshima is a well written, balanced account. It gives the facts without sensationalism or preaching.

Hersey seems sensitive to the Japanese people. He emphasizes the silence observed among the people in the aftermath of the bomb. He sees it as a manifestation of the stoicism and resignation to one's fate that are part of many Oriental world-views. Without any information about what had happened to them, the citizens of Hiroshima carried on as well as they could--and it was often their remarkable caring for one another that saved people from even worse fates.

Most people alive today can't recall a time when the world didn't live in the shadow of the explosions that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hersey is aware that there is no going back to that earlier time. Interspersed with his narrative are announcements of more bomb tests, of more countries that have acquired the bomb, and of the hydrogen bomb.

This book ought to chill every one of its readers to the bone, but apparently not enough people have read it. Or if they read it, they weren't chilled enough by it. We may have abandoned our intention to build bomb shelters, and schoolchildren no longer seem to have the air raid drills that were part of my generation's experience, but sixty-five years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear war is still very much a part of the picture.

(31 October 2010)
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HIASSEN, CARL
    TEAM RODENT: HOW DISNEY DEVOURS THE WORLD (1998)

This is such a short work, really a pamphlet, that it has no sections. Its author is really angry about the way in which Disney enterprises are taking over the scene in Florida. A native Floridian, he makes a very good case for his concern and outrage.

His point is that Disney's vision of the world--as touted by the "imagineers"--is one where all animals, even mice, are fuzzy, cuddly, lovable and cute. And above all, they are fake. With this unnatural view of the way things are (because they "ought" to be that way), the Disney people have proceeded to buy vast tracts of land and appropriate it to their carefully organized tourist-trap scenes, and have branched out to create a planned community called Celebration.

Nature and natural events have a way of disrupting some of Disney's plans, and Hiassen takes a fiendish delight in any disruption that comes along. He sees the Disney people as probably so powerful as to be unstoppable, but he at least has been willing to express his outrage.

A bitter but often very funny book.

(August 31, 2011)
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HIGHTOWER, JIM
    THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES: THEY'VE STOLEN OUR COUNTRY & IT'S TIME TO TAKE IT BACK (2003)

The author is a public radio commentator and journalist--and served as the Texas Agricultural Commissioner from 1983 to 1991. He knows whereof he speaks.

Whether he's talking about food or sweatshops or Wal-Mart or the Bush family, he seems always to be on firm ground, with mountains of facts at the ready.

And he's very funny. Maybe you have to share his populist point of view to think so, but I found his style hilarious. He is speaking out on behalf of the many ordinary people in the US who are increasingly enraged at the growth in the power of big corporations throughout the land.

He takes particular aim at George W. Bush. Like his fellow Texan, Molly Ivins, he has an awareness of Dubya's general ineptitude that is based on knowledge of his record in Texas before rising to national prominence. It isn't a pretty picture.

This is a frankly rabble-rousing book, but sometimes there needs to be rabble-rousing if anything is to be accomplished. Its polemical nature is buffered by its humor--with chapter titles like "Never Have So Few Done So Much for So Few" and its no-nonsense, gritty language.

A winner of a book.

(20 May 2010)
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HILL, BETH ANN
MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS Q&A: REASSURING ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS (2003)

A brief book, probably useful for somebody recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, by an author who has MS herself. She includes a handy list of all of the MS centers that have the blessing of the National MS Society, on a state-by-state basis.

There are some errors in the book--Betaseron was not originally known as Copolymer 1, as Hill states. (Copaxone was called Copolymer 1.) But by and large the book would be a valuable practical guide for somebody for whom MS is new.

(25 July 2007)
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HIMES, CHESTER

      RUN MAN RUN (1966)

A very absorbing and suspenseful story about a black man in New York City who knows that a cop is stalking him in order to kill him because he knows too much. He has witnessed the cop's murder of two of his co-workers. The cop has a drinking problem and has forgotten where he parked his car. In his drunken fog, he assumes that it has been stolen, accuses a (black) man of stealing it, and shoots him dead. Then he feels obliged to shoot a co-worker who has witnessed the murder.

I have only one quibble, and maybe it's not a legitimate quibble anyway, but I've never heard "mother-raper," a phrase the author uses frequently. I suspect that the more common term couldn't get past the censors at the time (1966), and "mother-raper" was Himes's invented substitute.

(2 January 2008)
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HIRSCH, ROBIN
     LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI: CREATING A LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF HISTORY (1995)

The author owns a restaurant in Greenwich Village and has had many adventures in several countries, but the focus of this memoir is on his parents' generation. His parents met at a dance at the Hotel Kempinski in Berlin in Nazi Germany, and left for England in the mid-1930s. Some of their closest relatives perished in the camps.

This history, as Hirsch demonstrates, casts a long shadow and has pervaded his life, as he moved from being a callow youngster ashamed of his family's German accents to a young man horrified and awed by what he can deduce has been their experience, an experience he himself would never begin to be able to imagine living through.

His renditions of his family's speech are well done, often slyly but affectionately humorous. He hasn't always seen eye to eye with his father, particularly, but it is clear that he respects him.

Sometimes the writing becomes a bit ponderous, and there are entirely too many sequences of sentences starting with "And..." This stylistic quirk--quite possibly derived from the language of the Bible--has been tried by all too many writers in recent decades but it almost never works well.

But this one quibble shouldn't mar an otherwise absorbing and well-told narrative.

(3 August 2011)
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HISS, TONY

THE VIEW FROM ALGER'S WINDOW: A SON'S MEMOIR (1999)

Tony Hiss is fairly well known and accomplished as a journalist, having written "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker, but he is also known as the son of the alleged spy Alger Hiss. This account is his defense of his father, dealing mainly with the several years Alger Hiss spent in prison and using as the principal material for the book Hiss's letters to his wife and Tony from prison.

Tony Hiss makes no serious attempt at disproving the charges against his father. His case for Alger Hiss rests on the assumption that any man who showed so much compassion and integrity in his dealings with people, especially his family, couldn't possibly have been a spy for the Soviet Union. Letting people see the human side of Alger Hiss is the son's purpose.

The book would be most interesting for a reader familiar with Witness, the lengthy book by Whittaker Chambers that was very instrumental in Hiss's downfall. Tony Hiss asserts that Chambers's story was a tissue of lies, but he offers no guesses about what might have motivated Chambers to make his accusations and produce such an elaborate story.

I have no idea whether Alger Hiss was guilty or innocent. Historians are still disputing this issue, which may never be satisfactorily resolved. The picture of him that this book draws is of a man who loves nature and his family--and who never once mentions Communism in his letters.

The Hiss family had friends in high places, who helped them financially and emotionally. Without their help, one can imagine that the family might have been thoroughly destroyed. As it was, Alger Hiss and his wife ultimately separated, but by the end of the narrative the reader feels that those who were most affected by Hiss's conviction and imprisonment managed to survive the ordeal.

9 December 2006
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HOLLEY, BYRON E.
VIETNAM 1968-1969: A BATTALION SURGEON'S JOURNAL (1993)

Mainly a collection of the author’s letters to his fiancee or wife, from his year as a combat medic in Vietnam. Colonel David Hackworth was in command of his battalion.

(10 April 2000)
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HOLTZ, WILLIAM
THE GHOST IN THE LITTLE HOUSE: A LIFE OF ROSE WILDER LANE

An account of the life of the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, with considerable evidence that Rose Wilder Lane ghost-wrote most of the famous author's LITTLE HOUSE books.

(September 1995?)
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HOOVER, HELEN
A PLACE IN THE WOODS (1969)

In the 1950s Helen Hoover, a metallurgist, and her husband Adrian, an artist, decided to leave their Chicago jobs and adopt a rugged lifestyle in the Minnesota woods. They were by no means the only couple to make this choice (the Nearings come to mind), but the author's extraordinary talent for observing and describing wild creatures makes this account stand out.

Many of the practical details of the Hoovers' woods establishment remain unclear at the book's end, but if taken at face value, their experience has to be seen as a remarkable achievement in the pertinacity with which they managed to triumph over difficulty after difficulty.

(13 June 2008)
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HOWARD, CLARK
HARD CITY (1990)

The autobiography of a boy growing up on Chicago's streets--with his drug-addicted mother vaguely and hopelessly on the periphery of his life.

(1996?)
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HURSTON, ZORA NEALE

EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS: NEGRO FOLKTALES FROM THE GULF STATES (published 2001)

The celebrated anthropologist author died in obscurity, and only decades later was the manuscript of EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS found. It seems to have been readied for publication but some decisions about what to include had not yet been made.

Hurston carefully collected these folktales on her travels through the Gulf states in the 1920s, and they are reproduced here as she transcribed them. She retained the speech patterns of the narrators from whom she heard the tales, and now that some of the unique aspects of African-American speech are fast disappearing, Hurston's work should become increasingly important.

Some of the tales are merely a sentence in length. A few are derived from European sources, but Hurston has tried to exclude "Pat and Mike" stories and other obvious borrowings. By and large, the tales are unique to the African-American experience--a world where animals talk and the white man is the enemy. It is in some of these tales, in fact, that the ex-slaves and their descendants can enjoy a small triumph over the white oppressing class by constructing narratives in which the master is bested or destroyed.

Many contemporary African-Americans have no use for the older "handerchief-head" dialect, but they are doing themselves a disservice by rejecting an important part of their past. These tales show a rich culture that flourished in spite of the formidable obstacles that stood in its way. Zora Neale Hurston believed in preserving this culture, especially that of "the Negro lowest down" on the ladder, and she made strenuous efforts toward finding and recording its strong oral narrative tradition.

(26 December 2008)

TELL MY HORSE: VOODOO AND LIFE IN HAITI AND JAMAICA (1937)

I was looking forward to reading another one of Zora Neale Hurston's excellent books, but unfortunately the recording of this one was marred by very poor sound quality in a large and important section of it.

Therefore I probably missed some important information. Still, the beautiful writing shines through in this anthropological work dealing with customs in Haiti and Jamaica. Hurston seems to have blazed new trails in her field--anthropology--by insisting on being present at rituals from which she normally would have been excluded and by refusing to be content with "staged" events.

While exploring life in Haiti and Jamaica, she manages to inject some very perceptive remarks about the US racial situation.

This book probably deserves to be among the classics of anthropological writing.

(15 February 2008)
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HUSTVEDT, SIRI

WHAT I LOVED (2003)

This is a novel that keeps getting wrapped up in analyzing. Maybe Hustvedt is more of an analyst than a novelist, more a commentator than a storyteller. There is a long section appended to the book showing the extensive research the author has done, for instance. Most novelists don't bother to tell us about what sources they used for their material.

It is yet another novel (there seem to be quite a few of these nowadays) where decades pass and we follow the central characters on into their old age. Leo Hertzberg is the narrator, and he is telling us about his wife Erika, their son Matthew, and the apparently very talented artist Bill Wechsler and his family, who share the building the Hertzbergs live in in New York.

There is considerable detail about the contemporary New York art scene, and about the implications it can have when a crime is at issue, for instance: the ambiguities created when men dress as women and vice versa, the uncertainties involved in staged works of art that are reproductions of violent scenes. (What happens when a real murder seems to have been committed, and an artist who specializes in violence-riddled hoaxes meant to shock the spectators seems to be the prime suspect?)

These are just a few of the "large" questions raised in this novel. The author also explores the mysteries of anorexia and drug addiction while she's at it.

There are a few explicit sex scenes early in the book, but she gives up on those soon enough, maybe just because her characters are aging.

There is also the tragic death of the Hertzbergs' son Matthew.

So this story covers a lot of territory--too much for my taste. The author has tried to do too much in one novel.

(26 April 2010)

YONDER: ESSAYS (1998)

These essays on a variety of topics may have appeared elsewhere before being compiled into this brief collection, but if so, there is no indication of where they were previously published.

Siri Hustvedt discusses her Norwegian heritage, the paintings of Vermeer, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, among other subjects. She is especially interested in the concept of "yonder" as neither here nor there but in between.

Some of her symbol-hunting seems a bit fanciful, but she writes well. She has published a number of novels too, and this collection of essays prompts me to try them as well.

(16 October 2008)
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I

2005-07-03T20:02:00.000-07:00

IEZZONI, LISA I.
WHEN WALKING FAILS: MOBILITY PROBLEMS OF ADULTS WITH
CHRONIC CONDITIONS (2003)

The author, a medical doctor who happens to have multiple sclerosis, has written a thoroughgoing overview of the typical mobility problems faced by adults with chronic conditions such as MS. She focuses on some of the people she interviewed, in particular, usually letting them speak for themselves.

The book includes helpful appendices.

(29 January 2008)

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IRVING, JOHN
UNTIL I FIND YOU
I don't usually comment on a book if I haven't finished it, but just so I won't make the mistake of reordering this one, I'm reporting that I got to side 7 of the tapes and then gave up. Either I shouldn't read two long novels by Irving so close together in time, or Irving has gone too far with this one. It is smarmy and boring and too long, in my opinion, though it has funny moments.
(4 April 2009)

A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR (1998)

A long novel that may be trying to cover too much territory for its own good...

Marian and Ted Cole have lost their two sons in a car crash some years before the start of the novel. It will be a long time before the reader finds out the details of the accident. In the meantime we have Marian being almost obsessive about the many photos of the boys that she has hung throughout the house--so obsessive that even their third child (conceived and born after the accident), Ruth, at the age of 4, is keenly aware of every detail in them.

Ted, it seems, is very unlikable. He's an expert squash player who has built his own squash court at home in such a way that he is guaranteed to win. He writes stories for children for a living and is highly successful, even though the snippets of the stories given to the reader make them sound creepy and disturbing to a child. Ted is creepy and disturbing. On the pretext of taking photos of little girls in the neighborhood, he routinely moves to photographing their mothers--lonely suburban housewives whom he easily seduces and takes demeaning pornographic photos of them.

His wife Marian can perhaps be forgiven for having a torrid affair with Eddie, who at 16 has been hired by Ted as a "writer's assistant." A problem here is that Eddie falls perpetually in love with Marian--and can't forget her for the next 37 years.

Marian somewhat inexplicably (in my opinion) walks out on Ted and her four-year-old daughter and disappears for several decades, surfacing eventually as a writer with a nom de plume. Meanwhile, Eddie has also become a writer--and so has Ruth Cole.

The horror of this situation and of some of its tragic consequences is more or less forgotten about in the latter half of the novel, where we move forward into the daughter Ruth's adult life.

The plot is much more involved than the partial outline given here. Unfortunately the novel has too many signs of an author with his eye on big sales and movie rights. Irving doesn't spare us the smarmy details we've come to expect in contemporary novels and films: we get more than enough pubic hair, masturbation, urination, explicit descriptions of sex---anything the reader might require to satisfy prurient interests.

Free speech allows writers to say whatever they want, and that is great. But some readers might just get a little tired of so much undressed explicitness thrown at us repeatedly. Some of us might feel like saying, "Enough already! We've been there and done that."

It would have gone over better in this book if Irving hadn't resorted to cheap cliffhanger statements designed to make the reader aware that what was coming next was Important--and to all-too-frequent substitutes for characters' names, like saying "the four-year-old" for "Ruth," and "the sixteen-year-old" for "Eddie." Is this being done because he feels we're likely to forget their ages, or what?

Also, there is careless writing here. Irving seems not to know the difference between "convince" and "persuade" because he repeatedly uses one when he means the other, for instance.

I find it unbelievable that Marian, who is one of the most sympathetic characters in the book, would have left her four-year-old daughter in the hands of her creepy father Ted. We are expected to believe that Marian loves Ruth--and that she walks out on her because she is afraid of losing this child too. We never find out just what she has been doing in the 37 years of her absence, either, except that she has been evolving into a writer of novels.

The story has its absorbing moments and its funny parts too, but in general it is probably not worth the time it takes to get through it.

(14 February 2009)

MY MOVIE BUSINESS: A MEMOIR
I came to this book after having read a number of John Irving's novels and having seen one or two movie versions of them. I believe that the subtitle A Memoir misled me into supposing I would learn about Irving's life. Instead, the book is very short and contains only a few snippets of information of the author's life. Primarily it is an account of the problems in making a movie of The Cider House Rules, not one of the Irving novels I had read. There is also a less extended account of the filming of A Son of the Circus, which I had read.

My Movie Business would interest movie buffs, probably, but I found it disappointing.
Also, I had an unpleasant sensation that Irving was doing too much name-dropping in this book. He has become acquainted with some big-name movie stars, but somehow this fact failed to interest me. The book puts Irving's novels under a bit of a cloud, in my opinion. I started to wonder if he had written them with too much of an eye on their movie-making potential....

A SON OF THE CIRCUS

Dr. Daruwalla, a Canadian orthopedist, has to reacquaint himself with a double murder that occurred twenty years before, in his native Bombay.

(1997)
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ISHIGURO, KAZUO
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (1989)

It's probably not a good idea to see the film adaptation of a novel before reading the book. I had seen the excellent movie that was made from this novel, and when reading the novel I couldn't stop myself from seeing and hearing the characters as they'd been shown on the screen.

The book has many nuances that couldn't have been conveyed in a movie, particularly when it comes to Mr. Stevens, the narrator, a butler in what he regards as a distinguished house in England around the time of World War 2.

From the outset Stevens seems overly punctilious and perfectionistic, but the extent to which he carries his rigidity becomes clear only as the story unfolds. He unwittingly reveals himself to have shut himself off from most human emotion, though at times he creeps around the edges of it, as when he imagines that Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, is crying behind her door.

The relationship with Miss Kenton is essentially a thing of the past at the time the story commences, which is many years later, with Stevens on a motor trip that will take him--incidentally--on a visit to the former housekeeper who has now been married many years and has a grown daughter. But we get glimpses of past interactions between Stevens and Miss Kenton, and these show a relationship that could have blossomed but never did, quite probably due to Stevens's rigidity and general obtuseness.

This is a story of a missed chance, and it is very sad. Stevens's own loyalty to his master, Lord Darlington, which is steadfast in spite of Lord Darlington's unmistakable Nazi connections, shows us a man for whom the occupation--he would call it a profession--of being a butler is paramount, taking precedence over everything else.

Small wonder then that he can't see his way clear to make overtures to Miss Kenton even though she gives him several opportunities.

The author has done a masterful job of capturing the way in which the English can use extreme good manners to freeze a person out, to cut a person down to size, and for any number of other hostile purposes. The dialogue seems flawless, and as we hear more and more from Stevens, we become more aware of how impossible his situation is. Butlers have probably died out as a breed nowadays, and it may be just as well for all concerned....

21 October 2011
_____________________________
IVINS, MOLLY

     SHRUB (2000)

Molly Ivins has long been one of my favorite commentators on the US political scene. She is a Texan, deep in the heart of the land of George W. Bush (and let's not forget his dad), and she has been keeping up with the Texas political scene for quite a while.

It isn't a pretty scene, and Texas has "Dubya" to thank for some of the worst ugliness. "Dubya" loves the death penalty, for example. He also has an astonishingly bad environmental record.

She exposes our current President for what he is: a rich boy who doesn't know much about anything, but who has dozens of well-off and well-placed cronies going to bat for him as needed.

She paints an appalling picture--and this was in 2000, BEFORE this man became President, BEFORE he was reading "My Pet Goat" to a group of schoolkids during the al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, BEFORE the Iraq war he so deceitfully and disastrously started, and BEFORE his shameless treatment of the Katrina disaster.

Maybe we should have paid closer attention to Molly Ivins.

(9 June 2006)

(WITH LOU DUBOSE)

     BUSHWHACKED: LIFE IN GEORGE W. BUSH'S AMERICA (2003)

Written during Dubya's Presidency, this book is a collection of Molly Ivins's articles providing the readers with valuable background about his activities on the Texas political scene. Ivins has clearly followed the second Bush's career for a long time--and she has probably never found anything commendable about him and his record.

This country is still reeling from the damage done by Dubya and his cronies. Molly Ivins was one of the few voices of reason heard in the land.

(23 November 2009)

    WHO LET THE DOGS IN? INCREDIBLE POLITICAL ANIMALS I HAVE   KNOWN (2004)

We couldn't spare Molly Ivins. There is nobody on the scene who could even attempt to replace her. But unfortunately she has left us.

At least we can still enjoy her essays, such as those in Who Let the Dogs In?

The book is a compendium of essays written both before and after "Dubya" attained the Presidency. Molly Ivins was warning us about him long ago. Not enough people listened to her.

She has special fun with Tom DeLay, who--she likes to remind her readers--is a bug exterminator by profession. Her book contains moving tributes to Barbara Jordan and several other notable persons who have died in recent years.

(1 May 2008)

   (with Lou Dubose)BILL OF WRONGS: THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA'S FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS (2007)

This posthumously published book gives details on several deplorable recent instances of human rights violations by the US government.

It includes extensive references.

(October 4, 2011)
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J

2005-07-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

JAMES, HENRY

THE GOLDEN BOWL

This very subtle story seems to concern the way we can delude ourselves and others by telling only that part of the truth that we want to tell, while realizing that if a very shocking portion of it is omitted, we have behaved deceptively (some would say lied). Charlotte Stant chooses not to mention her affair with the Prince when she is asked to marry Adam Verver, and the Prince and Fanny and Colonel Assingham likewise choose silence, although all must be quite aware that because of the circumstances (Adam Verver’s being the father of the Prince’s new wife, who is also Charlotte’s best friend), it is a fact that deserves to have become known.

This is one of my favorite novels.

January 19, 1989
THE AWKWARD AGE

Novel about a young woman competing with her mother for an eligible young bachelor. Nanda Brookenham, who is about 18 or 19, is a "modern" young woman. Vandebank (Mr. Van) is a young, attractive man who has no means. Wanting to maintain his warm relationship with Nanda’s mother, Mrs. Brook, he declines an offer from Mr. Longdon that amounts to a bribe: Mr. Longdon will endow Mr. Van with his considerable fortune if he will marry Nanda.
Other characters people the stage: Nanda’s spendthrift brother Harold, her good friend Tishi Grendon, and Aggie (Agnesina), who is a near-caricature of the pure, sheltered young woman.
James has said that his intention was to write this novel as if it were a play. Thus the action--what there is of it--takes place entirely in a few rooms and consists mainly of dialogue.
This is not among my favorite Henry James works.
(1993)

COMPLETE STORIES: 1864-1874 (Literary Classics of the United States, 1999)

This is the first of four volumes of James's short stories and represents his earliest published short fiction. The volume has 972 pages and so is quite a substantial collection. Some of the stories did not make it into the New York edition, and the reader familiar with James's later work will see why they might have been set aside.
These stories are interesting for the light they shed on the later Henry James. They contain many of his later fascinations. Several of them take place in Italy. A number of them are padded with material that sounds more like a travelogue--except that it's all so beautifully written that I for one didn't mind in the least.
Alas, there are some ugly traces of "polite anti-Semitism" here, too. Vague sneers sneered in passing are still sneers. It looks increasingly as if anti-Semitism was an all-pervasive spirit of the times, "something in the air" that had always been there, perhaps? The ruling classes had to have ways of preserving their status as The Ruling Classes, and making sure that they differentiated themselves from those who didn't share their folkways or religious heritage was probably a fairly effective way of excluding newcomers from their exclusive circles. After all, what Jewish writers has English literature had before the 20th century? Benjamin Disraeli is one who comes to mind. But were there any others?

(31 January 2005)

COMPLETE STORIES, 1874-1884 (1999)

A recent biographer of Henry James made the unsubstantiated statement that James was anti-Semitic. Ever since reading the statement I've wished that the biographer had been more specific. In this collection of stories, however, I see why the biographer felt no need to provide chapter and verse to back up the assertion of James's anti-Semitism.

It is not a rabid or florid anti-Semitism. That much can be said for it. But it is there, just as it is there in many writers of this time and place. Maybe it can be dismissed and chalked up to the provincialism of the time, but I'm finding this difficult.

"Professor Fargo," one of the stories in this volume, includes a stereotypical "little Jew" who is interested only in money. In "Eugene Pickering," somebody is married to "a vicious Jew." And the first-person narrator of "Impressions of a Cousin," who reveals herself to be less then reliable as the story proceeds, makes frequent references to what she presumes is the Jewishness of one of the male characters whom she dislikes.

These stories do show James exploring one of his favorite themes--the contrast between the American scene and the European--particularly in "An International Episode." And "The Ghostly Rental" shows his apparent fondness for the ghost story--and might lend support to those who see "The Turn of the Screw" as primarily a ghost story.

"Longstaff's Marriage" has definite similarities to the story told in The Wings of the Dove: a dying young woman is in danger of being exploited for her money.

THE OUTCRY (1911)

Very seldom read, this last of James's novels began life as a play--and seems not to have withstood the transition to a novel very well. Most of the novel consists of dialogue, with very little action. Even as a play, it probably would have failed.

James is using the style that has come to be known as "late Henry James," which served him well in The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. Why it doesn't work so well here may have something to do with the theme. The other novels concern major human events (the death of Milly Theale, for instance). The focus of interest in The Outcry is a painting--with a rather slight romance perking around the edges of the story.

The Outcry is a comedy that gets almost blunt in its mockery of the English upper class. It very pointedly reveals its characters to be greedy for American money--or perhaps for any money. The American in the story (Breckinridge Bender, who has deep pockets and a wish to impress the world with them) doesn't come off well either.

He is said to be modelled on J. P. Morgan. James gives us a deft caricature of a basically trusting and simple man who happens to have a great deal of money and a wish to collect a major work of art.

The big problem of the story is whether the work he wants, which is the property of Lord Theign, is a fine Moretto, as has always been believed, or actually the eighth work by Mantovano, who has always been believed to have done only seven paintings in his lifetime.

James thought he made up the artists' names but learned later that there really was a painter named Mantovano. This error caused him some embarrassment, by all accounts, but then he didn't often make mistakes---and had no Google search engine at his command.

The action of the story, such action as there is, is so often interrupted by the appearance of the butler on the scene that I wonder if this was intended to contribute to the humor of the situation--or was it so routine at that time and in that place as not to be notable? The reader becomes keenly aware that at this high level of society, people must always have had to be on their guard about what they said because of the possibility of a servant's appearance--and so very important interactions between persons often had to be postponed or cut short.

There is a larger theme at work here, too: the controversy about the proprietorship of major works of art--a controversy that was current at the time because it seemed to the English that Americans were buying British works of art and carting them off in large numbers, to the detriment of the British national heritage.

James clearly regards the entire dispute as a pointless excuse for nationalistic fervor that could easily backfire on the English. One character in the story mentions the Elgin marbles to demonstrate that, after all, the English have done their share of walking off with the art works of other countries.

I found this novel interesting though its style is often convoluted and difficult.

(24 July 2009)

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Mme Merle and Gilbert Osmond are fascinating studies in evil, greed and manipulation. Pansy Osmond is somewhat annoying as the palely delineated angelic offspring of Mme Merle and Osmond. Isabel Archer’s dilemmas are very true to life. This book improves on being reread.

(8 June 2002)
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JOHNSON, DENIS
JESUS' SON: STORIES (1992)

This writer, who seems to have been widely acclaimed, deals with the world of the drug-addicted. This is a very short collection of stories that seem chiefly to show the author’s wealth of experience with the sordid and the desperate. The stories lack point, lack plot, and lack character depth.

(26 June 2000)
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JONES, EDWARD P.
LOST IN THE CITY: STORIES

Excellent stories about black people in Washington, D.C., in modern times.

(11 September 1999)
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K

2005-07-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

KAMINER, WENDY
I'M DYSFUNCTIONAL, YOU'RE DYSFUNCTIONAL: THE RECOVERY
MOVEMENT AND OTHER SELF-HELP FASHIONS (1992)

By 2007 the author's observations may seem somewhat dated, since the current evangelist Christian scene and the self-help movement have changed slightly, but her points are still worth considering.

Wendy Kaminer sees an alarming relationship between the type of submission required by the self-help movement and the tenets of totalitarianism. She believes that the self-help movement probably originated with Alcoholics Anonymous, with its emphasis on acknowledgment of a higher power, but she finds AA to be a very useful organization for its purposes. Her quarrel is with the later offshoot groups that have sprung up, encouraging people in a sense of victimhood: Overeaters Anonymous, EST,
etc.

These groups believe in feelings but not in rational thought, and this is Kaminer's bone of contention. Groups and books that preach the "feel good/stop blaming yourself" doctrine may have their uses, but ultimately they are saying nothing.

A particular target of Kaminer's criticism is James Dobson, of "Focus on the Family." Reading Kaminer's book, with its skewering of the pundits of the evangelical Christian and self-help movements, was refreshing, in an era when these pundits are often quoted in the media as if they are oracles.

Bravo, Wendy Kaminer.

(8 August 2007)
________________________________

KARON, JAN
AT HOME IN MITFORD: THE MITFORD YEARS, VOL. 1 (1994)

The first in a series about a small town in North Carolina. Its main character is the Episcopal rector, Father Tim.

The author alienated me early on with her folksy, heart-of-gold boy of 11 who often mentions "taking a dump." And the rector and several of the heart-of-gold characters are frequently in the praying mode. Some readers (myself among them) will find this goody-goodyism cloying.

Southern race problems seem never to have existed in this world--the large cast of characters includes one devoted black servant of the Aunt Jemima stereotype.

This prolific and popular writer offends me.

(29 April 1999)
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KARR, MARY
THE LIARS’ CLUB: A MEMOIR (1995)

Apparently a true account of the author's East Texas childhood (1960s?-1980s?) with both parents succumbing to severe drinking problems. Well written, in general, with a humor and a grace that keep this narrative from being mawkish or self-pitying.

One quibble: The author--and her editors--have trouble with the "lay-lie" distinctions--an annoyance in an otherwise good book, one that probably should be read by every young adult who thinks his own childhood was deprived.

(24 October 2002)
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KAYSEN, SUSANNAH
GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1993)

True account by a young woman who spent nearly two years diagnosed with mental illness and locked up at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. Good.

(3 July 1999)
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KEIZER, BERT
DANCING WITH MISTER D: NOTES ON LIFE AND DEATH (1994)

An interesting account based on a Dutch doctor’s notes about his practice involving patients in a nursing home for the terminally ill, where he often assists in legal euthanasia. The author, born in 1947, lives in Amsterdam.

(7 September 1999)
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KELLEY, VIRGINIA and MORGAN, JAMES
LEADING WITH MY HEART (1994)

This autobiography by the mother of President Clinton is a well written and interesting account of an eventful life. Married four times and determined to enjoy life, Virginia views her own faults and accepts herself as she is. She admits to being a party animal with a special fondness for playing the horses. There is a frankness, an out-in-the-open quality to her story that makes it highly believable and refreshing.

She says very little about Hillary and Chelsea, and there is only one reference to race relations in the entire narrative--surprising for someone who lived her entire life in southwest and central Arkansas. The one reference is to an incident that is clearly meant to show that this family was not guilty of race prejudice....

Bill Clinton's half-brother (ten years younger), Roger, spent time in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Their mother believes that her maternal instincts had led her to "enable" Roger and to overlook some obvious signs of the trouble he was involved in. She blames herself, at least in part, for Roger's problems.

I liked this straightforward woman. She presents herself as she was, acknowledging her shortcomings without being unduly apologetic.

The book appears to have been written when she was already under a death sentence from the cancer that ended her life.

(21 June 2007)
____________________________________
KIDDER, TRACY
HOME TOWN

An account that focuses on the lives of several residents of Northampton, Massachusetts, with special emphasis on Tommy O'Connor, a policeman whose best friend and fellow cop, Rick Janacek, is accused of molesting his daughter. O'Connor feels obliged to testify for the prosecution in the case because Rick has acknowledged a drinking problem so severe that he was having blackouts and therefore could not have known what he might have done. The reporting is very nonjudgmental throughout this book.

(24 July 2004)
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KINGSOLVER, BARBARA
PRODIGAL SUMMER (2001)

This highly praised novel has many admirable qualities. It is tightly constructed, focusing in turn on three story lines. The seemingly separate characters turn out to have lives that interconnect in surprising ways.

Two of the central characters are women who are so strikingly similar, however, that I kept expecting them to merge somehow, if only by meeting one another and finding how similar they are. But Deanna and Lusa don't meet. They are both so intensely committed to saving endangered species and preserving and appreciating the wilderness in this world, though, that they are almost too much of a good thing. As the novel develops we find still another woman, Nannie Rawley, who is equally involved in getting on her soapbox and preaching against pesticides and for wild animals.

I kept wishing for a more interesting story and less preaching and information. The novel all too often seems like a very transparent showcase for the author's considerable knowledge of biology, and her characters are tiresomely long-winded mouthpieces for her perspectives on nature and the environment. Even when a reader shares these views, such a large helping of information about moths, snapping turtles, chestnut trees, and other flora and fauna is too much.

One comes away feeling stuffed to the gills with Kingsolver's store of information and her very definite opinions about nature. What I really had wanted was an interesting story about interesting people.

For people we get a tomboy named Crystal who is entirely too much like Harper Lee's Scout and Mark Twain's Huck to be very original, and a couple of crusty but amusing Appalachian old folks--and a couple of horny women whose adventures in bed the author loves to describe in detail.

Her main point in the book is that summer can be a time when the urge to procreate is irresistible. All right, fine. But why do so many contemporary writers feel obliged to describe human couplings in vivid detail? When explicit descriptions of sex began appearing in fiction and poetry--after the initial shock wore off--authors were experimenting with this new territory, but by now it's becoming clear that there are only so many ways to describe sexual relations, and they've all been used. It's a rare book that can include explicit sex scenes that are very original or that contribute much to the rest of the story.

We don't really need to know all of what goes on in a character's mind or life, do we? What about letting the characters have a few closed doors--and leaving a few things to the reader's imagination?

(20 October 2010)

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

An absorbing novel about a missionary in the Congo and his family--a wife and four daughters--told from the family members’ various points of view. A damning indictment of American Christian missionaries’ efforts in the Third World, but subtly stated and therefore all the more effective.

(24 January 2002)
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KLEMPERER, VICTOR
I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS, 1933-1941 (1998)

This fascinating diary came out in English translation (from the German, by Martin Chalmers) only a few years ago. Victor Klemperer (cousin of the renowned conductor, Otto Klemperer), an "assimilated" German Jewish philologist, lived with his non-Jewish wife Eva in Dresden during the Nazi years, and he decided to keep a journal of daily experiences in the Third Reich. Having read a number of Holocaust accounts by survivors and eyewitnesses, I came to this book with some awareness of the horrors of Nazi Germany. However, Klemperer's book provides a unique perspective on the scene.Klemperer is evidently a very intelligent, reflective, and well-educated observer of the daily indignities suffered under Hitler. He is also a victim of many of these indignities and brutalities, although I am fairly certain that he escaped being shipped to a concentration camp. (Volume 2 of his journal, covering 1941-1945, is also available.)

He makes the reader keenly aware of the shortages of basic supplies and of how adroitly citizens devised ways around some of the more oppressive rules in the Third Reich. He himself was imprisoned for eight days merely for accidentally neglecting to darken one window during a blackout, and he gives a detailed account of his experiences in prison, including the progression of his own feelings about incarceration from fear to acceptance and resignation to elation at the prospect of freedom.

While giving details about the daily struggle for transportation, money, essentials, and communication, he also keeps a running record of what he calls "LTI" (for "Lingua Tertii Imperii"--the language of the Third Reich). He carefully notes the most popular Nazi terms and gives examples of the frequency of their use. He seems completely aware that the Reich government is systematically lying to the populace--about German "victories" in Russia and elsewhere, for example.

(6 January 2003)
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KOTLOWITZ, ALEX
THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE: STORY OF TWO BOYS GROWING UP IN THE OTHER AMERICA (1991)

An account of life in the Ida B. Wells public housing project in Chicago, with an emphasis on the effect of this restrictive environment on the children compelled to dwell in it.

(1991?)
____________________________________
KUNSTLER, JAMES HOWARD
THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF AMERICA’S MAN-MADE LANDSCAPE (1993)

Generally a good argument for a less impersonal design of buildings and cities--though I have trouble concurring with the author's promotion of building apartments over commercial establishments.

(9 August 2001)
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L

2005-06-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

LAHIRI, JHUMPA
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH: STORIES (2008)

Jhumpa Lahiri has a fine eye for telling details, but aside from that and her ability to let a story flow forward as if on its own momentum, I can't say I admire her fiction.

The problem may be the subject matter. She's probably writing about what she knows best--the situations faced by East Indians who find themselves in the United States--and she is probably giving an accurate and detailed picture.

These East Indians are very, very privileged. They come to the US and take jobs at MIT or Wellesley College. They go to Swarthmore. They live in the most affluent areas in or near Boston. The situations they are facing all too often involve spending immense sums of money.

They have excellent cameras at the ready. They think nothing of traveling all over the map.

It's not that only the indigent have stories worth telling or hearing about. It's that these particular stories have the effect of highlighting the vast gap between the well-off and the poor in the world, even though I suspect that this was by no means the author's intention as there seem to be almost no characters with money problems in these stories.

However, she is calling attention to an entirely new way of life on this planet. People can now live with a toehold in one country or in several, never really at home in any country but always resettling, thinking nothing of crossing oceans frequently. Geography gets terribly in the way of the working out of their lives, and there is the dilemma. Friendships and even marriages no longer bind people as they once did. People can just pack up and leave for some distant land. They can do this because they have to--or sometimes just because they want to.

(8 September 2011)
___________________________________

LANDER, DAVID L. AND MONTGOMERY, LEE

FALL DOWN LAUGHING: HOW SQUIGGY CAUGHT MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS AND DIDN'T TELL NOBODY (2000)

This is a very short account by the actor who became known for playing the role of Squiggy on a sitcom, the "Laverne and Shirley Show." Since I've never seen the show and have almost no knowledge of it, I can't say much about this book as it pertains to the show.

Aside from that, however, David Lander tells about the gradual onset of symptoms of multiple sclerosis, about how he refused to admit anything was the matter--and about how he felt obliged to conceal his diagnosis from those around him, for fear of losing out on opportunities for employment.

This fear was very well-founded, as he demonstrates by telling of incidents where he was given the brushoff by potential employers as soon as his diagnosis came to light.

Eventually, as he decided to go public with his diagnosis, he became a "goodwill ambassador" for the US National MS Society.

There are better accounts of a person's confrontation with MS. This one is slight--and some of the statements are incorrect.

And he states that he began on Betaseron but later switched to Avonex. He never explains why he made the change, but I would have liked to know the reasons.

Still, his likable and ebullient personality comes through in this book, which he lightens with a great deal of humor.

(8 January 2008)

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LARDNER, GEORGE, JR.
THE STALKING OF KRISTIN: A FATHER INVESTIGATES THE MURDER OF HIS DAUGHTER (1995)

A Boston art student in her early twenties is stalked, then brutally shot and killed by an ex-boy friend. Her father tells the story and blames the judicial and law-enforcement systems for not preventing his daughter's murder.

(March 1998)
_______________________________
LARDNER, RING, JR.
I'D HATE MYSELF IN THE MORNING: A MEMOIR (2000)

This memoir by the son of the well-known humorous writer Ring Lardner seems to have been written when the author was 85 (he died in 2000). He was a celebrated screenwriter--and a member of the "Hollywood 10," who had to serve a prison sentence as a result of his alleged Communist activities. For 15 years he was blacklisted in Hollywood, too.

In this book he gives an account of his struggle to restore his employability--as well as numerous interesting anecdotes about various movie producers he worked with and stars he knew (Katharine Hepburn, for one).

He also tells about his work on the movie M.A.S.H.

Sometimes he seems self-pitying in this memoir, but perhaps he deserves to pity himself. Many people turned their backs on him in an hour of need.

(16 January 2007)
____________________________

LE CARRÉ , JOHN
THE NIGHT MANAGER

Jonathan Pine, who has several aliases, is the night manager/hotelier but has a range of other hats he wears as he pursues "Dicky" Roper, the Bad Guy in an international arms-for-drugs trading setup.
A well-written book and probably well constructed, but I found the language of espionage hard to follow in spots. It would probably be better to have read more in this genre.

(1 March 2002)
_____________________________
LEE, CAROL ANN
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF OTTO FRANK (2003)

The author gives a balanced and well-researched account of the life of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, weaving her way through a maze of very intricate situations in order to determine who might have betrayed the hiding place in Holland where the Frank family hid with some friends during World War 2.

She portrays Otto Frank as an exceptionally conscientious and capable person whose concern for his family was always uppermost in his mind. He himself was imprisoned in a concentration camp but he was luckier than the other members of his family. His wife and two daughters did not survive to see the liberation of the camps.

Much of the account is devoted to the aftermath of the discovery of Anne's diary--including Otto Frank's efforts at preventing the diary from being published or dramatized in ways that would harm the people involved or that would misrepresent the facts. There is also considerable detail about the conflict with the writer Meyer Levin, who developed such a proprietary feeling about Anne Frank's writings that he presented serious problems for Otto Frank and his friends.

The most interesting part of the account (to me) involved Tonny Ahlers, the man who probably betrayed the Frank family by letting the Gestapo know about their hiding place. The author argues very persuasively that Ahlers was probably the betrayer, and in doing so provides us a very clear glimpse into the scurrilous activities of a snake of a man who profited by providing information to the Nazis.

(7 August 2010)
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LEFF, LAUREL
BURIED BY THE TIMES: THE HOLOCAUST AND AMERICA'S MOST IMPORTANT NEWSPAPER (2005)

The author, a journalist and professor of journalism at Northeastern University, has made a meticulous study of coverage of the Holocaust by the New York Times--and has come up with some very disturbing conclusions. This book was reviewed negatively the New York Times in 2005, but I think that Leff raises some serious issues.

She has found that stories about the fate of European Jews under Hitler rarely reached the first page of the Times during World War II--and that when there were stories, they were worded so as to minimize descriptions of the effect of Nazi policies on the Jews, repeatedly making the situation sound as if European Christians, political adversaries of the Nazis, and other groups were being equally adversely affected, and ignoring the Nazis' repeated rantings about making Europe "Judenrein."

She offers several possible explanations for the de-emphasis of the Jewish plight--one being that the paper's owner, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a vehement opponent of Zionism and a strong believer in Judaism as a religion rather than a peoplehood. He quite probably thought that with these convictions he was helping to counteract Hitler's insistence on referring to the Jews as a race, but Leff shows that a very unfortunate effect of Sulzberger's convictions was that reports of the losses of Jewish rights, property, and life in Europe were treated almost as if they didn't matter much.

Sulzberger himself was often generous to relatives in Europe who were in danger of falling victim to the Nazis, but sometimes he refused help that he could easily have given. He could have used his influence as the head of the most widely read newspaper in the US in many ways and might even perhaps have put a stop to some of the Nazi atrocities, but--Leff implies--possibly because he was afraid that a Jewish-owned newspaper would be accused of being too "pro-Jewish," he leaned over backwards to avoid page-one stories that would have brought the horror home to far more readers.

It is easy to be smart in retrospect. Perhaps Sulzberger knew all too well the deep strain of anti-Semitism in American life at the time, and maybe he was right in downplaying the Nazi campaign against the Jews. For instance, I came across this, which appeared in Time magazine in 1930:

With her plump, black-eyed brood, Jewess after rich Jewess scuttled out of Germany last week, filling trains de luxe with wails and confusion. Mother-instinct knew the meaning of Jew-Baiter Adolf Hitler's election victory fortnight ago, when his Fascist 'Brown Shirts' leaped fearsomely from ninth to second place among German parties.
From "Strap Helmets Tighter!" , Time, September 29, 1930.
Written some three years before Hitler came to power, this paragraph is laden with anti-Jewish sentiment and appeared in a very widely read newsmagazine. Any reader of Leff's book would do well to think about what Sulzberger may have been up against at the time.
(30 August 2009)
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LERNER, BARRON H.
WHEN ILLNESS GOES PUBLIC: CELEBRITY PATIENTS & HOW WE LOOK AT MEDICINE (2006)

This book is a collection of articles about thirteen "celebrity" patients--some of whom were famous before they became ill, while others became celebrities on account of their illness. The author reflects on how the rise of "celebrity patients" affects the way medicine is practiced, remarking that one sure way to call attention to a disorder and possibly increase funding for it seems to be to have a celebrity associated with it. Whether this is always for the good is an open question....

So we have discussions of Lou Gehrig, whose name is now often attached to the disease that killed him, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and another baseball great, Jim Pearsall. The author also focuses on Steve McQueen, John Foster Dulles, Arthur Ashe, and Barney Clark (the first artificial heart transplant patient).

Also included is the story of the Libby Zion case, which has been treated in more detail in The Girl Who Died Twice (1995) by Natalie Robins, which I read years ago. Libby Zion died unnecessarily and quite unexpectedly at the age of 18 at New York Hospital, and her father launched an energetic campaign to find out what really happened and to oppose the traditional hospital system of overworking residents and interns to the point where they become too dangerously fatigued to do a competent job--a situation where a hapless patient like Libby Zion all too often suffers.

For someone who hasn't seen the popular movie Lorenzo's Oil, the material about Lorenzo Odone is particularly interesting. Lorenzo's parents were so determined not to lose their son, who wasn't expected to get through his childhood once his adrenoleukodystrophy was diagnosed, that they bent every fiber to find a cure. The "oil" they discovered appears to have been of only limited usefulness for a very limited number of patients, but Lorenzo did survive until the age of 30. And his parents' efforts led to the establishment of the Myelin Project, which is still functioning, for the purpose of finding a cure for demyelinating disorders.

The author of this book is a doctor at Johns Hopkins University.

(18 June 2009)
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LESSING, DORIS

THE CLEFT (2007)

I may not have paid enough attention to what was happening in this novel, but it just didn't hold my attention. I'm not a fan of fantasy novels. The Cleft is set in an imagined world that is before Roman times and is narrated by a Roman. We don't find out much more about any of the characters. They are featureless silhouettes presumably set against an eternal sky.

But the whole thing just doesn't seem to work. At least it didn't work for me. The imagined world of the Clefts--prehistoric women creatures who have no use for men--wasn't something I wanted to know more about. I was curious about how they reproduced without men, but apparently they didn't. Or at one time they did but they lost that capacity. Or something.

(6 February 2011)

THE SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK (1973)

Kate Brown is a 45-year-old woman who has raised four children successfully (with a highly successful husband in the background) and who finds herself suddenly without a real purpose in life. Fortunately she has extraordinary language skills and experience that catapult her into a fairly important job as a simultaneous translator.

It is after that job ends that her real troubles begin. She launches an affair with a considerably younger man whom she hardly knows, but it never gets off the ground because the young man falls seriously ill. The illness is never identified, and she leaves the young man to his illness after a while, presuming that he is now having good care. The young man and his fate are never again mentioned in the story.

This seems to me to be a serious flaw in a novel about a woman whose whole life has been devoted to caring for and about others, in the time-honored role of women. So far as we know, she never gives him another thought.

The novel appears to veer off in several directions without ever bringing them together: the translating job and the people involved there, the young man, and finally what happens when Kate returns--now ill herself--to England and temporarily shares a flat with a much younger woman, Maureen, who is clearly a daughter substitute.

Maureen is particularly hard to believe in. She is shown repeatedly to be flirtatious and flippant, and yet she seems to be genuinely interested in hearing every detail of Kate's past. Maureen has three boy friends on tap and is trying to decide which one to marry. Maureen and her boy friends enter the story at about the halfway point, and this late appearance may be part of the reason why I had trouble being very interested in her. Moreover, she doesn't really connect with Kate or Kate's family, about whom we already know quite a bit.

This is a well-told story of one woman's way of dealing with becoming an empty-nester, but the author tends to explain and to analyze too much. I wish she had paid closer attention to interweaving the several strands of the plot.

(6 July 2009)

AFRICAN LAUGHTER: FOUR VISITS TO ZIMBABWE (1992)

The author reports on her four visits to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992. She had moved to Southern Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe later) at the age of 5, in the 1920s, but became a political exile as a result of her opposition to the white supremacist government. In 1949 she moved to England, where she remained. But after 25 years in exile, she made several visits to Zimbabwe, and this book is an account of what she found.

The accounts are informative and beautifully written, organized loosely around a "theme" of African laughter, seemingly. The author sees laughter as a characteristically African response to hardship. She clearly writes from an abiding love for this part of the world and its people.
A very absorbing book.

(4 March 2005)

UNDER MY SKIN

Interesting account of the author’s early life (volume 1 of her autobiography--going to about 1949). Her formative years in Southern Rhodesia, her participation in the Communist Party, her two marriages and three children are described.

(26 March 2001)

WALKING IN THE SHADE: VOL. 2 OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1949-1962 (1997)

Describes very interesting times in the life of this liberal English writer.

(27 February 2001)

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
Boring!

(December 1996?)
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LITTLE, CHARLES E.
THE DYING OF THE TREES: THE PANDEMIC IN AMERICA'S FORESTS (1995)

Using examples such as the dogwood and sugar maple, the author pleads for more efforts to save U.S. trees, which are gravely endangered by the effects of air pollution.

(29 June 1998)
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LIVELY, PENELOPE

     MAKING IT UP (2005)

A fascinating collection of stories where the author has imagined situations that might have developed if her life had taken a different course at one point or another.

Each story has a unique setting, and perhaps the most interesting one is "The Temple of Mithras," about an archeological dig. The author is clearly knowledgeable in a number of areas, but she doesn't use her fiction as a vehicle for showing off. Instead, she explores the human interactions perceptively and in depth.

(21 November 2010)
    THE PHOTOGRAPH (2003)

Warning: Contains spoilers.

There is a mystery implicit in this novel--though it isn't stated as a question anywhere in the story, and this seems a bit unfair to the reader. We find out immediately that one person important to everyone in the story has died a few years ago, but we're never told what she died of. It's as if it isn't relevant. But for a younger person such as Kath in the story, it of course will be relevant.

Towards the end of the story it comes out, but by then the reader has probably guessed that her death was a suicide. Fragments of her conversations keep drifting back to haunt the others--her husband, her sister and brother-in-law.

Once this fact--of her suicide--is finally on the table, we're still wondering why this strikingly attractive and appealing woman would kill herself.

It is never explained in the story, but we can put together a life of aimlessness, of semi-obligatory fun-loving cheerfulness, of searching for love and not finding it and draw our own conclusions.

Towards the end of the story, the author gives us some sessions with Kath's best friend, who hasn't figured in the story at all up till then, and who turns out to have known Kath far better than anyone else on the scene.

In fact, she is almost obnoxious as she dishes out fact after hitherto unknown fact about Kath to the inquiring family members who approach her. Kath, who was childless, had suffered two miscarriages--all unbeknownst to anyone but the best friend, for instance.

The plot is set in motion when Kath's husband Glyn happens across a photograph showing Kath and another man holding hands among a group of people. Glyn learns that the man is Nick, Kath's sister's husband, and becomes obsessed with tracking down details of Kath's past as his fear that his wife was promiscuous while he was engrossed in his career overcomes him.

The "lesson" here is that he never took the time to get to know his wife well. And that even her sister was so busy overshadowing her that she never knew her well either. That the affair with Nick was probably very brief just makes Kath's tragedy all the sadder.

The story resembles The Great Gatsby in some ways. Kath is built up, writ large--the astonishingly attractive woman who doesn't even seem to realize how beguiling she is. But what we see of her is glimpses. Because she is dead, she will remain mysterious, having left behind shreds of herself as preserved in the memories of the others.

But do we need an authorial voice telling us that those others are paying tribute to Kath by discussing her as they are doing in this book? At times Penelope Lively gets too analytical with her characters, and they themselves could use more fleshing out. They are a well-off bunch, intellectualizing their way through life because they have the time and the temperament to be cool and politely distant about everything they do.

One wishes that they could have been more likable....

(2 February 2010)

     SPIDERWEB (1998)

A novel about Stella, a 65-year-old woman anthropologist who is settling down in a small English village after many years in the field, Spiderweb catches the reader up in its network of connections among its characters. The spiderweb is meant to refer to the many paths Stella's life has taken over the years, to the ways in which they might intersect, but it might as well refer to the structure of the novel itself.

Usually it proceeds as a straightforward narrative, interwoven with some flashback scenes. But sometimes we are given snippets of phone conversations, letters, newspaper advertisements and articles, and these too contribute to our understanding of the story.

There are only about a dozen characters on the scene, and the author casts a magnifying glass over some of them so that we can get a good look at them. Most telling are the sections focussing on the family of two teenage boys and their parents Karen and Ted Hiscox, Stella's neighbors.

Karen Hiscox is a very clearly depicted "toxic mom"--one who is giving her children a world where nothing is true, nothing makes sense, a world over which she tyrannizes by means of her ability to shout other people down until they give up. She succeeds with a terrifying consistency with her husband and two sons, ages 14 and 15. It isn't surprising but it is very chilling when the boys turn out to be full of meanness and hatred--and take it out on Stella's dog, for no reason other than the handiness of the family's gun and their own seething rage.

Since this is an anthropologist's story, with many reflections about what anthropology is, maybe it's not surprising if the reader keeps hoping that the community will intervene to prevent more catastrophes as a result of the sick family situation presided over by Karen Hiscox.

The community does not. Another catastrophe occurs, and at the end of the novel it looks as if the Hiscox family will be able to go right on being the flaming tinderbox we've already witnessed.

A remarkable book that says something important about the way families can be in our society--with the society turning a blind eye. It isn't a preachy book by any means. It just shows some situations as they probably all too often are.

(9 January 2011)
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LODGE, DAVID
OUT OF THE SHELTER (1970)

The author was born in 1935, and so apparently was the protagonist of this novel, which is autobiographical in many details.

Shaped for all time by the blitz that affected him in several important ways, the young man at the center of this story struggles to find out why his older sister seems to have alienated herself from the family by staying remotely in Heidelberg.

(3 October 2009)
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LOSEE, R. E.
DOC: THEN AND NOW WITH A MONTANA PHYSICIAN (1994)

The author telling his own story is capable of self-deprecatory humor, as in his account of his discovery about a common knee problem and his venture into the world of publication in a medical journal.

(8 February 1999)
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LOVELL, MARY S.
THE SISTERS: THE SAGA OF THE MITFORD FAMILY (2001)

Ever since reading and liking Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death, I've wondered how she and her sisters--two of whom were known for being Nazi sympathizers--could have come from the same family. This biography doesn't answer that question, and there may be no answer. But it does reveal how they got along--or didn't get along--with one another throughout their lives.

Jessica was always rebellious, and ultimately joined the Communist Party, to the consternation of her high-born English relatives. She eventually left the CP, but she finely honed her skills as a muckraking journalist and became both prosperous and respected as a writer.

Diana and Unity were the most vocal enthusiasts for Nazism in the family, though brother Tom and father David also were sympathetic to Hitler's government, at least at first. Unity appears to have had a frank crush on Hitler--and was able to act on her feelings by frequenting Hitler's favorite hangouts often enough to be noticed, and she became his very much favored friend, though not his lover, by all accounts.

Reading this book, with its references to the Mitford family relationship to the Churchills, one suspects that Hitler was exploiting Unity and her crush. He was surely far too shrewd to have allowed himself to be bowled over by an English debutante, no matter how young and beautiful she was. He may have been on the lookout for any news of Winston Churchill or British war strategy in his sociability toward Unity.

Unity shot herself, as she had said she would, when living in Germany began to be less attractive once England and Germany were at war. She botched the job, though, and was left with severe brain damage for the rest of her days. The Mitfords rallied round and took care of her in her final years.

This biography seems to be a balanced and thoroughgoing study of this group of six sisters.

(24 November 2008)
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LOXTERCAMP, DAVID
THE MEASURE OF MY DAYS: THE JOURNAL OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR (1988)

The author, a family practice doctor in Belfast, Maine, has decided to keep a journal for a year, and we learn about some of his patients, about his background, about his interests--his Roman Catholic faith, his wife and daughter, brewing his own beer, running.

It is an interesting and well written journal. But if you're not a Roman Catholic, and especially if you're not a Thomas Merton enthusiast (I'm neither), you might not find this book to be your cup of tea. By a rough estimate, about one third of this book is given over to discussion of the Church and Thomas Merton.

There was something pretentious and annoying about the way in which Loxtercamp insists on his piety in this journal. But maybe I just don't have the proper outlook on the practice of medicine. I have to give him credit for not turning the book into an anti-abortion diatribe.

(30 October 2007)
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LURIE, ALISON

     TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES (2005)

This is a novel of academia, set at the fictional Corinth University and involving two childless couples. Jane Mackenzie is getting desperate as the wife of Alan because for well over a year Alan has been incapacitated due to a back injury and is depending on her for entirely too much--while hating every minute of his dependency.

Much is said about his pain. We are reminded of it at every turn. We are even told that physical therapy has been part of the picture. But where is a doctor who is trying to give this condition a name and to do something about it? I can't help wondering why a fairly prosperous couple would put up with so much pain since they clearly have access to medical care.

But there might not be much of a story if we learned that Alan had degenerative disk disease (or whatever) and would have to have surgery.

Instead we have the emergence on the scene of a new couple--Henry Hull and his presumed wife Delia Delaney, who is one of the fellows attached to the humanities center that Jane manages. The author can't quite decide if she shares Jane's view of Delia through most of the novel--that Delia is an overindulged prima donna with absolutely no consideration for others and an alarmingly oversized ego--or a more sympathetic take on her that comes to Jane later on: that Delia is somewhat pathetic and starting to show her age.

The reader is left therefore with two conflicting views of Delia unresolved. The story is interesting in a way but predictable. We can see that Jane and Henry are going to try to pair off once it becomes known that Delia has cast her spell on Alan.

(27 September 2009)

FAMILIAR SPIRITS: A MEMOIR OF JAMES MERRILL & DAVID JACKSON (2001)

Never having read much of James Merrill's poetry, I won't comment except to say that Lurie's perceptive observations on her two friends in this memoir are very much needed if the reader is to understand them. James Merrill was very much the more successful of the couple, and it was perhaps his success that led to the decay of the relationship between him and David Jackson.

This is a sad story, and the two men's long-lasting fascination with the ouija board is especially hard to fathom--and sad. One has to wonder about a society that enables some of its adults to live so prosperously as artists who can give free rein to their self-destructive tendencies when there is so much hunger and genuine need everywhere in the world.

(24 March 2004)
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LYNCH, THOMAS
THE UNDERTAKING: LIFE STUDIES FROM THE DISMAL TRADE (1997)

The author, a poet and an undertaker, gives his perspective on undertaking. I often disagreed with him but the book is revelatory. I still have problems with the whole practice of embalming and entombment of the dead. Of course Lynch does not share my opinion that there is something grisly and morbid about this cultural phenomenon, and these essays do not persuade me to feel more kindly towards undertakers.

Death is too catastrophic an event to be wallowed in as the funeral-home industry would like us to wallow in it: with "viewings," expensive caskets with satin lining or what-have-you, and all of the other grief-industry products that are imposed on the bereaved at the very time when they are most vulnerable.

I can't share in the general applause Lynch's book has received.

(7 July 2004)
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M

2005-06-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

MAC DONALD, BETTY
THE PLAGUE AND I

This is an account of the author's stay in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Seattle in the 1930s. Very informative and surprisingly amusing. The author is best-known for THE EGG AND I, which became a well-known movie.

(3 May 1998)
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MALCOLM, JANET
IN THE FREUD ARCHIVES (1984)

This short book originally ran as a long essay in the New Yorker.

It is an interesting account of a battle over the letters of the late Sigmund Freud. It revolves around the entry on the psychoanalytic scene of one Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, an apparently brilliant Sanskrit scholar who decided to concern himself with Freud's papers--and to become a psychoanalyst, although he failed to win acceptance in the tight community of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

In fact, he went too far in some of his claims and theories--and suffered a very abrupt fall from grace (he was to have had full custody of the Freud archives on the death of Anna Freud) when some of his theories cast Freud in an unfavorable light.

His theories, supported by considerable evidence, were not so very damning, or at least that is how the author tells the story. Masson's arrogance and abrasiveness must have made him a difficult person to deal with. He has abandoned his work in psychoanalysis since the events narrated here.

The author takes a nonjudgmental approach to her topic. She is by no means squarely in Masson's corner. The result is an account that shows the limitations of the field of psychoanalysis and of its practitioners.

October 11, 2011
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MANNING, OLIVIA
THE BALKAN TRILOGY (Part I of THE FORTUNES OF WAR): THE GREAT FORTUNE (1960), THE SPOILT CITY (1962), FRIENDS AND HEROES (1965)

I fail to understand why Olivia Manning isn't better known. I've read The Balkan Trilogy and its successor, The Levant Trilogy, years ago and am rereading them now. Manning is a careful, sensitive writer who grounds her story firmly in its political and geographical setting and who delineates her characters in often amusing detail.

The story she tells seems to be largely autobiographical: Harriet Pringle is a young British woman recently married to Guy, who is sent to teach English in Bucharest just as Hitler's armies are on the march through Europe.

The young couple soon acquires a circle of friends and acquaintances, particularly since Guy is almost too gregarious. Bucharest has its share of royalty who are down on their luck--among them the gourmand Prince Yakimov. In her presentation of Yakimov the author shows her skill--casting a deeply flawed person in a light that inspires compassion in the Pringles and, undoubtedly, in the readers.

The characters are clearly aware of the existence of concentration camps and of the dangers faced by Bucharest's Jews. The Pringles conceal a young Jewish man, Sasha, but eventually have to realize that he will never believe that they didn't betray him.

If the trilogy has a weakness, it may be in the relationship between Harriet and Charles Warden, an English officer temporarily stationed in Greece. Up until the appearance of Charles, Harriet has been a level-headed person, but her attraction to Charles and her insistence on continuing the friendship even though Charles is clearly trifling with her and being unpleasantly impatient about his pursuit of her are not adequately explained. It is hard to believe that Harriet would be dazzled by his military status.

The novel has an array of self-seeking characters whose shortcomings come to light as time goes by, and Manning almost seems to be smiling wryly in the background as their cowardice and duplicitous natures are exposed.

January 2, 2012

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MARTIN, JUDITH
MISS MANNERS' BASIC TRAINING: THE RIGHT THING TO SAY (1998)

I always enjoy Miss Manners, who delivers her etiquette recommendations with a lot of humor. This short work seems to be a compilation of some of her newspaper Q&A columns. It is full of useful advice.

I disagreed with her on only one point. She is somewhat in favor of the person who wants to make a friend over, but I find any attempt at "makeovers" offensive and intrusive, as well as presumptuous and arrogant on the part of the person who wants to do the makeover. Only if a person earnestly requests a friend for advice on appearance, style, or whatever, should the friend venture some (very cautious) remarks. But that's just my opinion...

(8 August 2007)
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MAYNARD, JOYCE
WHERE LOVE GOES (1995)

Drivel, by the writer who "told all" about her affair with the writer J.D. Salinger. This book, a novel about divorced single parents, makes no mention of Salinger, however.

(3 January 2000)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD: A MEMOIR (1998)

Maynard's autobiographical memoir with a focus on her association with J.D. Salinger - in his 50s when she was 18 - including very specific physiological details about Maynard's sexual relationships, childbirth experiences, and abortion.
This book seems to me to be in very poor taste. Can one blame the reclusive J.D. Salinger for being furious at her?

(16 November 2001)
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MC DONALD, EILEEN

BREAKDOWN: SEX, SUICIDE AND THE HARVARD PSYCHIATRIST (1994)

In 1991 a Harvard medical student's suicide attracted nationwide media attention when it was revealed that the young man had been involved in an unconventional type of psychotherapy with a Harvard-trained woman psychiatrist, who had caused him to "regress" to his childhood by insisting that she was his mother.

This sad case, which was settled out of court when the psychiatrist, Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, paid $1 million to the young man's family, the Lozanos. She gave up her medical license as well.

It seems that Paul Lozano and his family were probably telling the truth about Dr. Bean-Bayog and her unconventional therapy. There has been too much evidence for the story to be false: flashcards used by the psychiatrist, gifts (books for toddlers, a teddy bear, etc.) she gave to him, for instance.

Her office notes on her sessions (often four sessions a week) with Paul Lozano corroborate his account that she was convinced that Paul had been abused by his own mother in childhood even though there is little evidence of any abuse except for an occasional spanking and possibly the use of a belt. On the other hand, by his own admission, Paul made things up in his conversations with her--perhaps just to have something to talk about, to become a more interesting case for her.

Paul's Mexican-American mother had several other children and was especially proud of Paul's achievements. He had been an outstanding athlete, had gone to West Point and then to Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Bean-Bayog was from an elite family with professional and academic ties going back at least to her parents' generation. When she came under attack for her unconventional and exploitative therapeutic methods, many of her colleagues and friends supported her in spite of the tragic outcome her patient suffered.

Dr. Bean-Bayog had been seeing this patient on credit. At one point he paid a large sum towards her bill, but the total owed was considerably higher than the amount he had paid. She notified him that she could no longer see him unless he paid, but this notice was given after four years of a very intense therapeutic relationship--and her termination of the connection is said to have contributed to the depression that drove him to kill himself.

Just how intense the relationship was may always be open to question. Paul claimed that it had become a sexual relationship, using her private notes--lengthy passages of sadomasochistic pornography involving Dr. Bean-Bayog and Paul--as supporting evidence. However, the psychiatrist maintained that he broke into her house and stole the papers from her private files and that he had never seen them before.

This book seems to be a piece of responsible reporting. It favors Paul Lozano's side of the dispute but does not do so in a shrill way. It is thoroughly documented, and the author freely admits that all of the facts will never be known.

How can they be, in a one-to-one association such as psychotherapy? The book raises troubling questions about the uses of psychiatry and the power psychiatrists have. A patient turning to a therapist for help is often desperate and vulnerable. The psychiatrist is respected and even revered. If the psychiatrist is persuaded that the patient needs to work on recovering "repressed memories" of abuse in childhood, the chances are that the patient will somehow recover at least a few repressed memories. Or reasonable facsimiles thereof....

It has been shown repeatedly that the human memory is faulty, maybe far faultier than most of us realize. Relying on "repressed memories" has been shown to be very dangerous, and yet such reliance has resulted in court convictions.

Dr. Bean-Bayog supposedly helped Paul Lozano to dredge up repressed memories of physical and sexual abuse by his mother. Other members of the family considered these "memories" absurd, but her belief in them may have served to depress Paul's state of mind even further.

The author of this book should be commended for calling attention to the glaring problems involved in psychiatry as it is currently practiced in the United States.

(14 May 2009)
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MC DONALD, JANET
PROJECT GIRL (1999)

The author of this remarkable memoir spent the better part of her adult life living in Paris. The account takes her life up to the point when she decides to move there. (The author died in 2007 at the age of 53.)

She was one of a family of seven children born to an African-American couple who believed in having strong family ties, even though they were living in a housing project in Brooklyn. At the time the project's occupants were chiefly the working poor. Later these people would be supplanted by the welfare-dependent poor, who--McDonald makes clear--tended to be more troubled people, more inclined to be involved in drugs and crime.

Some of Janet McDonald's sisters and brothers got trapped in the drug scene at an early age. Janet herself discloses that she took heroin--though the extent of her use of it isn't made clear.

Through some prodigious efforts and her own inherently high intelligence, she enrolled in Vassar College and eventually went to law school at NYU. During her student days, however, she was raped--and the case against her assailant dragged on for decades and poisoned her life. She was also arrested and jailed for arson--for setting a series of fires in her dormitory.

She gives explicit details about her family life and her student life and even her experiences in therapy. She clearly expresses her rage at white people and at anyone who treats her with condescension or a wish to play oneupmanship games.

Details about the rape are missing, however. Ordinarily I would be glad that they weren't included. Reading details about another person's suffering is always difficult, and the intimate details that would be included in a description of a rape are even more difficult. Perhaps it was out of an understandable desire for privacy that she omitted this information. Perhaps it was because apparently her book has been aimed at a young adult audience.

There is one thing wrong with this picture. She brings up the rape and her feelings about the rapist repeatedly throughout the book as the case continues. The incident is clearly a major event in her life. And yet, in describing the court case, she tells us only that the other side maintained that this was merely a case of consensual sex between a couple of law students. She makes no attempt at disproving this claim.

We are told that when she'd first moved into a nearly-empty dorm as a law student, another law student knocked on her door and invited her out. When she declined, he said, "Do you realize you're going to get raped tonight?" And then he raped her. That is all we find out.

We need to know if she invited him in to her room and if so, why. We are told that he threatened to kill her, but this information is tucked into a much later mention of the incident. So he raped her by using force and while threatening to kill her.

I'd be willing to take her word for it except for one thing. She continued to make a big issue of the incident--and went on doing so for decades. I'd like to know a little more about why this was considered a case of rape.

It seems to me that he might have sweet-talked her into cooperating to some extent and turned on the force only at the end--in which case it isn't exactly rape, not in the usual sense.

Or is it? The author became a lawyer but although her specialty wasn't criminal law, I think she owed it to the reader to go into this gray area.

She is clear-eyed about herself and her faults, in general. She is not a self-pitying whiner by any means. However, she doesn't make it clear what prompted her to commit acts of arson, either, or how she went about setting the fires.

This is a very interesting book, full of insight. I just wish it had been more forthcoming on a couple of issues.

(25 January 2011)

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MEHTA, VED
MAMAJI (1979)

Like the other autobiographical works by Ved Mehta that I have read, this one portrays an exceptionally loving and close-knit family struggling against many difficulties of living in India. Even sufficient income and being part of a respected caste did not protect this family from falling victim to tragic circumstances--and sometimes to the double-dealing of other people.

Ved was the fifth of the eight children born to Mamaji (Shanti Devi) and Daddyji, who was an "England-returned" doctor. They lived primarily in Lahore--and in summer quarters in Simla--until Partition. This book covers the years from about 1880 to shortly after 1937, the year when the three-year-old Ved contracted meningitis and was left blind.

The author never boasts of his achievements, but they have been considerable. That Ved at 15 travels to the United States to go to a school for the blind in Arkansas, the only school among dozens he applied to that accepted him, and that eventually he went to Pomona College, where he was such an outstanding student that he won a fellowship to Oxford--and later became a staff writer for the New Yorker, are facts we know only if we've read some of Ved Mehta's other works. I will list those I have read below, for I would like to be reminded of the titles of these gracefully written and reflective books so that I can return to them.

Together they form an awe-inspiring tribute to Ved Mehta's exceptional family.

(10 March 2009)

FACE TO FACE (1957)
Ved Mehta's autobiography.

DADDYJI (1972)
A portrait of the author's father, a medical doctor who served on committees involved in preventing tuberculosis--as well as fathering eight children.

VEDI ( 1982)

When Ved was five years old, his father sent him to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay, 1300 miles away from home, and he spent four years there among other blind children, learning to get along on his own--and to read Braille English.

SOUND-SHADOWS OF THE NEW WORLD (1986)

This is Ved Mehta's account of his years at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, where he spent his adolescence and enlarged his experience considerably.

UP AT OXFORD (1993)

Ved Mehta's years at Oxford are explored here, and he freely admits to feeling inadequate in comparison with his fellow students, who seem to have impressive achievements. Socially and culturally, he is obliged to adapt and even to emulate the British. As this has been the fate of many an Indian confronted with the British Raj or with the vestiges of it, his account will probably be a familiar story to many an upper-class Indian. It is told with exceptional sensitivity and attention to detail.

_____________________________

MILFORD, NANCY
SAVAGE BEAUTY: THE LIFE OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Since I didn't know much about Edna St. Vincent Millay before reading this biography, I'm not really able to assess its accuracy, but by and large it seems to be an even-handed study of this poet's life. There are a couple of maddeningly obscure passages, and at least one place where the biographer lets her own biases intrude unnecessarily.

Also, the book ends abruptly when "Vincent" falls down a flight of stairs to her death. I'd have welcomed details about the aftermath: Was the literary world in general grieved by the news of her death? Or indifferent? After all, she was a friend of Edmund Wilson's and numerous other literary eminences. Was there no memorial service? Were there no tributes to her? What was said?

More analysis of her poems might have been helpful, too. But this author skirts around the issue of whether Millay was a "great" poet or just a very good poet. Clearly she regards her subject as a "good-enough" poet (good enough to merit a lengthy biography), but what she has established in this book is that Edna St. Vincent Millay and at least one of her two sisters were alcoholics, and that Edna was addicted to morphine in her last years.

The book is especially strong in giving the family dynamics at work--the way in which family members succeeded in wounding one another at their most vulnerable times and in their most vulnerable spots. Edna Millay is revealed as very human--limited, and even cosseted. She died, widowed and childless, in 1950, but she had won considerable stature as an American poet.

(18 October 2004)
_________________________
MILLER, JOHN E.
   BECOMING LAURA INGALLS WILDER: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LEGEND (1998)

This biography of the well-known author of the Little House books for children isn't especially well written or edited and is replete with material garnered from the social pages of the local newspaper, evidently.
We learn that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a clubby sort of woman when once established in Mansfield, Missouri. We learn very little about the actual writing of her books.

Another biographer has recently claimed that Mrs. Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, actually ghost-wrote much of her mother's fiction.
This biography by John E. Miller seeks to establish Laura Ingalls Wilder as the primary author, with considerable editorial help and advice from her daughter.

(3 May 2004)
___________________________
MILOFSKY, DAVID
     PLAYING FROM MEMORY (1982)

This is a novel about Ben Seidler, a professional musician who develops multiple sclerosis. As he becomes increasingly disabled, the plot turns around how he and his family deal with the changing situation in which they find themselves. His friends and colleagues gradually dwindle away. Dory, his wife, has to make major adjustments. Ben develops a new closeness with his son as they mail chess moves back and forth.

This is not a story for the squeamish: bedsores spawning maggots aren't for the faint of heart. Not an upbeat story but sadly realistic.
(1982?)
____________________________
MISTRY, ROHINTON
      A FINE BALANCE (1995)

This is a long novel but it will not disappoint readers interested in an accurate picture of India after the Raj--specifically, in the years 1975-1984, covering the "State of Emergency" declared by Indira Gandhi.

The book does not pretend to be a panoramic survey. It is a gracefully and carefully told story with a few characters given to us in considerable detail. Although we do not often enter into their minds, so much happens to them that to have included their interior monologues would have been to burden the story with far more than it could have borne.

Dina Dalal, a Parsi woman trying to live independently since becoming a widow, is at the center of the story. It is around and through her that the other characters become known to us.

One might expect such a novel, revolving around a woman from a more prosperous Parsi family, to include other characters in her class. But the author keeps them very much on the sidelines (Dina's restrictive brother, for instance, enters into the story only insofar as he helps or obstructs her plans). Instead, we are given a closely detailed account of the lives of Manekh, Dina's nephew, a student who comes to live with her as a paying lodger, and more especially Omprakash and Ishvar of the chamaar caste of tanners and leather-workers (formerly untouchables), who are trying to rise in the world by becoming tailors. They too occupy Dina's rented house for periods of time as she employs them--illegally so far as her landlord is concerned--to sew for her so she can maintain her at-home sewing business by delivering a specified number of sewn garments to the woman with whose business she is under contract.

But many disasters strike these ill-fated people, and the author is unsparing in the details, which are vivid and plentiful, but never gratuitous, never seeming to be there for their effect. It would have been all too easy for the author to play to the gallery here by giving an unending spectacle of gore and sexually explicit scenes. There are grim and freakish incidents, but the author's story and the compassion it inevitably elicits remain the abiding concern of this narrative.

We care about the fates of Dina, Manekh, Om, and Ishvar--and of Monkeyman, Beggarmaster, and even Ibrahim. Sometimes their fates are almost unbearable to witness, but they have the terrible power of verisimilitude. In this novel we learn about forced sterilization.

The novel is not preaching for any school of thought--just presenting the horror of the way in which a poorly run, modern bureaucracy can ruin people's lives, riding roughshod over the individual and failing to grasp any part of his particular situation.

The sixteen section headings might mislead a casual observer into thinking that this will be a quiet, orderly story: "City by the Sea," "For Dreams to Grow," "In a Village by the River," "Small Obstacles," "Mountains," "Beautification," "Return of Solitude," "Family Planning," "The Circle Is Completed," for example. There is an especially grim irony lurking behind "Small Obstacles," "Beautification," and "Family Planning." There is an epigraph from Balzac, reminding us that this is truth being told. It might be the author's intention to remind us--even while diverting us with his story--that the lives of most people in the world are not as easy or pretty as our own, that even such matters as the hygiene we like to take for granted in the more developed parts of the world have been a luxury far beyond the reach of many in India.

Rohinton Mistry has arranged these disparate lives in a masterful way that seems harmonious to the reader although the lives themselves are often on the brink of chaos.

The edition I read had no footnotes or glossary but the text has many Indian words not found in a standard English dictionary. As the book proceeds, sooner or later their meanings become clearer. In fact, the lack of explanatory notes made it possible to become immersed in the story without distractions.

(4 November 2003)

     FAMILY MATTERS (2002)

In this novel about a Parsi family in modern Mumbai, the author gives us a view of three generations living under one roof--after a fashion. At first the novel seems focussed on the 79-year-old Nariman Vakeel, formerly a professor of English, who now has Parkinson's disease and needs the help of his grown children: Roxana, his daughter, and Jal and Coomy, his stepson and stepdaughter.

In the first part of the story Nariman is able to communicate, but as time goes by his comments become less and less intelligible, and finally cease altogether--at which point he is truly a captive of the relatives who have become his somewhat reluctant caretakers.

Towards the end he dies, and he is probably quite aware of his family's limitations, though we do not know for sure how aware he is. We do not get into Nariman's mind. His daughter Roxana and her husband Yezad, and their two sons Murad and Jehangir, prove to be far more compassionate towards him than Jal and Coomy, whose plot to bash holes in their house just so that Nariman won't be able to live there illustrates the cruel lengths people will go to in order to avoid being thrust into the role of caregivers for ailing relatives.

Though their plot is eventually exposed, they have already managed to deliver Nariman by ambulance into the hands of Roxana and Yezad, who have no choice but to take him in. They have far less space for him but they make arrangements. Family life is strained but not nearly so heartlessly as it was for Nariman when he was at Jal and Coomy's place. Murad and Jehangir react to their grandfather sensibly and treat him with respect.

There is a tragedy, but it serves to resolve some of the family's conflicts by bringing everyone who is left together under one roof. Yezad decides to return to the traditional Parsi (Zoroastrian or Zarathustrian) religious traditions, which are very elaborate and specific. As he becomes increasingly exacting in these diligent observances, the reader senses, through his two sons' only faintly stifled skepticism, that the author himself may have doubts about the value of the concept of preserving Parsi "purity."

This book, like A Fine Balance, contains a number of elements that will be incomprehensible to an ordinary English-speaking reader, but they contribute to the sensation of being truly immersed in part of Mumbai life.

(8 May 2005)
_________________________________

MITCHARD, JACQUELYN
BREAKDOWN LANE (2005)

A novel where the central character has multiple sclerosis is seldom found, but this is one. The author does not have MS but her best friend does.

Julianne, the protagonist, writes a syndicated advice column in addition to being a talented dancer, and a wife and mother of three. Her husband Leo suddenly decides to join an "intentional community" elsewhere, and we learn later that he is interested in a younger woman who is part of that community. He has exchanged e-mails with her (she is named Joyous--Joy for short), and the only reason we find this out is because Leo and Julie's kids read his e-mails after his departure, in an attempt to find him.

For he has misled them into believing that he's supplied valid addresses and phone numbers when he hasn't. He apparently wanted to disappear from their lives.

One flaw in this story is the length of time it takes his family to mobilize their forces toward locating him. Many months pass before any action is taken in this regard.

Meanwhile, Julie is developing peculiar symptoms, which turn out to be those of multiple sclerosis, and she starts taking a weekly shot (probably Avonex) that cripples her for a couple of days every week.

Eventually the two older children take off surreptitiously and find Leo and his community. Not only does he have a new woman partner--they already have a baby and are expecting another. His own parents are so outraged that they stand behind Julie in her battles with Leo throughout the story.

Julie also has a couple of women friends who are in psychology and who invariably say the right thing just when she is most in need of hearing common sense and worldly wisdom. This patter of sociological rhetoric weighs down the book, in my opinion, and could easily have been dispensed with.

At about this point, along comes--surprise!--a knight in shining armor, in the form of a man who knew Julie in grammar school and who has had a lifelong crush on her, even though he's been married and widowed and has a daughter. Now (wouldn't you know?) he's fortuitously employed as a medical doctor, a plastic surgeon doing no end of good in the world. AND he's got a wad of money that must be endless.

The next thing we know, he's buying a new car for Julie's son Gabe, throwing a wedding in Las Vegas and flying Gabe's Thai girl friend over for several days from Thailand for the occasion, giving Julie an eye-popping diamond ring, and on and on. And Julie is well on her way to becoming a famous writer, with the publication of a book of her poems.

I don't know what the author's purpose was in writing this story. Since she's written other novels, maybe it was to provide an entertaining story for her readers, one with a relentlessly upbeat happy ending.

I have nothing against happy endings, but this one is laying it on too thick. Single moms with a potentially disabling neurological disorder don't usually marry rich doctors who are perfect in every imaginable way.

Not everyone with MS is as well off as Julie is throughout the story, either. Nobody in this crowd is hurting financially. I believe in treating rich people to stories about themselves. But if you're going to write a story about someone with MS, why not write one about a person who feels the financial pinch that is the lot of so many who have this disorder?

This book is moderately well written, and the author is especially good at dialogue. She has clearly been listening carefully to children and teenagers, and she represents their wit and manner of speaking with a keen ear.

(7 November 2007)
__________________________

MITFORD, JESSICA
THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED (1998)

An update of Jessica Mitford's well-known American Way of Death (1963), which dissected the US funeral industry (and evidently made a dent in its profitability). The updated version is just as informative and amusing as the 1963 book was. Mitford scathingly attacks the industry's exploitative greed and hypocrisy and strongly favors much simpler, less ostentatious ways of saying farewell to the dead.

(21 April 2005)
_________________________________
MOODY, ANNE
COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI (1968)

This is the author's account of her Mississippi childhood and youth--spent coping with the difficulties of being black in the South in the 1950s and 1960s and participating in the civil rights movement.

(7 August 1998)
______________________________________
MOODY, RICK
DEMONOLOGY: STORIES (2001)

Stories in a variety of styles. Some magical realism, some imitation James Joyce? Two of the stories in this short collection deal with a young man whose sister dies unexpectedly. Moody has a liking for the macabre detail. A mixed bag.

(10 December 2002)
_______________________________________

MOORE, LORRIE, ed.
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 2004: SELECTED FROM US AND CANADIAN MAGAZINES (2004)

Unlike some annual short-story anthologies, this one is limited to the twenty stories selected by the editor, and to my way of thinking, it makes for a more readable and enjoyable volume than the more comprehensive collections.

Lorrie Moore has chosen well. Some well-established writers are represented here: Annie Proulx, John Updike, Edward P. Jones, John Edgar Wideman. Also represented are Sherman Alexie and T. Coraghessan Boyle (both with stories revolving around drinking).

One story, "Docent" by R. T. Smith, is an amusing parody of the Southern idolization of Robert E. Lee, cast in the form of a lecture delivered to an audience of tourists by an aging Southern matron.

Angela Newman's "All Saints' Day" was particularly fine, a story about children and a Sunday school pageant where each child chooses a Biblical character to represent, and one girl and her sister decide to "do" John the Baptist and Salome--to the dismay of the Sunday school leaders.

(10 June 2007)
________________________________________

MOORE, MICHAEL
   STUPID WHITE MEN...AND OTHER SORRY EXCUSES FOR THE STATE OF THE NATION! (2002)

Michael Moore is the gadfly many love to hate, but I'm a fan. I came to this book just after watching the Royal Albert Hall version of Les Misérables (for the third or fourth time). The spirit of both works is remarkably similar--rambunctious and funny but full of rage.

This book began to appear in 2001 but then September 11 happened and publication was postponed, as the author explains here:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/fahrenheit-911

I can't think of a woman writer who has criticized other women to the extent Moore is willing to hold (white) men accountable in this book. He is particularly intent on skewering the Son of a Bush, as he calls the second Bush to preside over the US.

Another complaint of his is that the Democrats have been behaving too much like Republicans in recent years, and he backs this up with a detailed list showing what percent of each Congressperson's voting record followed the Republicans' positions on the issues.

This book needed to be written. In days when the right-wing seems to be overrepresented in the media, there aren't enough Michael Moores rabblerousing. More power to him.

(10 April 2010)
__________________________
MUKHERJEE, BHARATI
    DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS (2002)

The author tells the first-person story of Tara, one of three "desirable daughters" born into a very prosperous Bengali family. The three daughters are groomed and cosseted with top-quality education and ultimately turned out into (usually) arranged marriages.

Except that there's a secret that comes out in the story--one of Tara's sisters had an illegitimate son. And on this fact, which comes out into the open when a young man claiming to be that son appears on the scene.

Things take a downhill turn then. But somewhere in the middle of the novel, it is as if Mukherjee has lost interest in her characters for the events become somewhat confused.

However, the book is packed with interesting facts about Indian customs and beliefs and lore. The author writes a fast-paced narrative and is especially adept at handling dialogue.

She is dealing strictly with Indians of the very top levels on the economic and social ladder. These are people who think nothing of flying all over the world. Their highly trained minds are in demand wherever they go. Money flows freely. The narrator's comments on their lives are often tinged with a sarcasm that lets the reader know that she (and Mukherjee herself, most likely) is capable of standing back and looking at this world in perspective, seeing its shallow materialism--as is particularly evident in the sections dealing with the sister who gave up her baby and went on to a life of fame and prosperity.

I have read other work by Bharati Mukherjee and have found her always well worth reading.

December 10, 2011

___________________________
MUNDY, LIZA
MICHELLE (2008)

This brief biography of Michelle Obama, by a Washington Post reporter,
may have been written to give a boost to the Obama campaign. Be that as it may, it is moderately informative though only occasionally somewhat critical.

Still, maybe there is little to criticize in the First Lady. She comes across here as very special indeed--a woman with incisive intelligence, humor, and know-how who cares intensely about the concerns of women and children.

The discussion of Michelle Robinson's childhood is sketchy, and her parents and even her brother pretty much disappear from the book by the time she reaches adulthood.

I'd have appreciated more emphasis on her remarkable father, who worked as a laborer at a Chicago patronage job all his life--and died at the age of 56, having had multiple sclerosis for years.

(6 July 2011)
_____________________________
MUNRO, ALICE

    HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE: STORIES (2001)

The stories by this contemporary Canadian author deal with characters and situations that are off the beaten path. The last story in the volume, "The Bear Went over the Mountain," concerns a woman whose husband has institutionalized her for her dementia--and the attachment that develops between another resident of the institution and herself. The stories are affecting and well told.

(15 January 2006)

    LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN (1971)

This is Alice Munro's only novel, and it reads almost like a collection of short stories strung together in a loose chronological order. The main character is Del Jordan, a girl who--like the author--grows up in Canada in the 1930s-1940s.

The story is about her coming of age--specifically, the way in which she lets her romantic interest in a boy sidetrack her so that she doesn't win a college scholarship.

The characters here are drawn with a finely observant eye--and Munro is particularly adept with Del's best friend, the callous and often cruel Naomi.

Passages in the novel dealing with both religion and sex are forthright and illuminating. Munro has some important things to say here and says them resoundingly and clearly.

November 24, 2011

   THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: STORIES (2006)

In this beautifully written collection of stories Munro is exploring her own family's history. She is upfront about having tinkered with the facts at times, but one suspects that most of these narratives are largely autobiographical.

Her ancestors came to Canada from Scotland, and she must have listened well and done considerable research to be able to describe such episodes as their voyage to America in so much detail.

The stories are arranged so that they move closer to the present as the reader progresses through the book. These stories are very honest and touching and well told.

(6 June 2010)

   RUNAWAY (2004)

More superb stories by this writer, whose books are best-sellers in Canada. These stories take place in the Canada of various times between the 1960s and the present.

The focus is always on a woman, and the characters are usually unexceptional, but their lives are tangled by the kinds of complications that many readers will find familiar from their own lives.

The author deals with her characters in a sensitive way and expresses herself well, without any of the stylistic gimcrackery or touches of magical realism that characterize much of contemporary fiction.

She is content to tell a story and tell it well.

(25 March 2007)
_______________________________________
MURDOCH, IRIS
   THE BLACK PRINCE (1973)

Maybe I'm just not an Iris Murdoch fan. This book was well reviewed, and it seems well constructed and well written.

The central character, one Bradley Pearson, who has suffered from writer's block for many years in spite of a very keen desire to write, is a tiresome, self-deluded windbag. Amazingly he still has friends who seem to be on hand as needed to help him.

The book revolves around Bradley Pearson and his network--his ex-wife, a sister, a couple who are long-time friends, and their daughter, primarily. There is also his ex-wife's brother.

These people go in for melodrama in a big way. The couple, Arnold and Rachel Baffen, get into knock-down-drag-out fights, and early on--according to Bradley, who comes upon the scene--Arnold has been brutal with Rachel.

Later there is a suicide--and then there is a murder.

Bradley Pearson may or may not be a reliable narrator. The reader is probably meant to realize this from the outset, and if the reader fails to, by the end of the narrative there will surely be doubts.

But if Bradley's account can't be depended on to be accurate, can we assume that his story of finding Rachel Baffen to be the victim of her husband's violence is true?

By far the most tiresome part of this novel, in my opinion, is Bradley's infatuation for the nubile daughter of Rachel and Arnold. Having already bedded Rachel, he proceeds to woo the daughter without giving a second thought to Rachel. At 58 he is clearly feeling the waning of his masculine powers--hence his pathetic attempt at making himself seem younger by lying about his age to the Baffen daughter, Julian.

He insists that they love each other but it is quite clear that this is an instance of lust and little else, at least on Bradley's part. That he is going through an emotional crisis is also clear, but I had problems developing much sympathy for him.

While she's at it, Murdoch uses the occasion of this book to do a bit of showing off of her literary knowledge. I found this irritating. I wish she'd just been content to tell a good story. She hasn't done so.

(24 April 2009)

THE WORD CHILD

This novel concerns a man with a real flair for languages, who is embittered at his failure to make the grade academically, a man with hatred so close to the surface that he is constantly seething, a man who has no qualms about declaring his love for whatever woman he is with, regardless of her marital status, or about having several affairs going on at once, a man who jealously guards “his” space everywhere—at work, at home—and manipulates other people shamelessly in order to achieve his goals—above all, a man who leaves destruction in his wake without even seeming aware of what he’s doing—and who wins points by violence, or the threat of violence, in spite of being among supposedly civilized people.

(March 1988)

N

2005-06-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

NATHANSON, LAURA, MD

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN KILL YOU: A PHYSICIAN'S RADICAL GUIDE TO CONQUERING THE OBSTACLES TO EXCELLENT MEDICAL CARE (2007)

The author has been a pediatrician. She lost her husband a few years ago due in part to some mismanagement of his medical data. She gives details about his illness as she proceeds with her collection of valuable suggestions for anyone facing medical procedures.

Her book is very valuable because she is speaking with insider knowledge. She knows enough about hospitals and doctors to be aware of where the potential problems are.

She urges patients to get hold of their medical records AND to comb through them carefully, being alert for errors and omissions. She recommends substituting the words thing and thingy for nouns and adjectives that are "medicalese" in any medical report, then rereading it in order to get at the kernel of language that is understandable to the layperson.

Radiologists' reports seem especially apt to have important omissions, possibly because the radiologist is typically remote from the actual patient.

Dr. Nathanson also recommends having a spouse or relative or friend with you in the hospital to act as a "sentinel." She gives special attention to the long waits as hospital inpatients are taken for Xrays and other procedures and outlines specific details about how best to transport the person to and from the location and what to do while waiting. She stresses the importance of making sure that any catheters or IVs connected to the patient will be trouble-free during the long waits.

Her fundamental message is one that needs to be stressed: Patients shouldn't accept medical procedures and advice unquestioningly. They should question the qualifications of the persons they are dealing with. They should question the substance of anything in writing concerning their case. They should even make sure that any specimens taken are actually theirs and not somebody else's, as mistakes do happen.

(4 May 2011)

____________________________

NÉMIROVSKY, IRÈNE
SUITE FRANÇAISE (2006)

This remarkable work of fiction, which consists of the first two parts of what was to be a five-part novel, came to light only recently although it was written in 1942. The author, originally Russian Jewish but living in France for many years though without French citizenship, was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where she soon died, at the age of 39. Her husband met a similar fate though he survived without imprisonment for long enough after her incarceration to make many futile efforts at finding her. The couple left two daughters, and one of them rescued this manuscript at the time of her mother's deportation--but could not bring herself to read it until many years later.

The book includes some correspondence, including letters from Irène Némirovsky as well as letters exchanged between her husband and various authorities and friends (and her publishers) as he tried to save his wife.

She had already published several works of fiction in France and was fairly well known.

The novel segments here concern French characters struggling under the Nazi occupation--including a household where a German officer is billeted. He turns out to be handsome, well bred, a talented musician, and polite to a fault. He is also married. The tension in the story is created by the way in which Lucile, the young married woman living in the house with her mother-in-law while her husband is a prisoner of war, fights to keep herself from falling in love with him.

I kept waiting for the German officer's "true colors" to come into focus, but apparently the author meant for him to be an admirable person. (Reading the notes and correspondence, we find out that the German officer would eventually be killed, thus ending the problem posed here--of whether he and Lucile really loved each other enough to forsake their spouses and get together after the war.)

Knowing the circumstances in which the author was writing--in fear for her and her family's life under the Nazi occupation--one wonders if she was reluctant to include anything even vaguely critical of the Nazi regime. While she includes mention of people shot by the Nazis, she says nothing whatsoever about Jews.

The author's own story is so catastrophic that it is difficult to be objective about her fiction....

(12 December 2008)

__________________________
NEXØ, MARTIN ANDERSON
PELLE THE CONQUEROR - VOL. 1: CHILDHOOD and VOL. 2: APPRENTICESHIP (1903)

A strong theme in this story seems to be the author's perceived need for socialist reforms. Pelle’s adolescence and early manhood are spent as an apprentice cobbler. Both volumes end with Pelle’s turning his back on his aging and indigent father in order to seek adventure elsewhere. The story has been made into a fine movie.

(30 November 2000)
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NOVAC, ANA [nee ZIMRA HARSANYI]
THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF MY YOUTH: MY SIX MONTHS IN AUSCHWITZ
AND PLASZOW (1992? 1997?)

Ana Kovac was a Hungarian Jewish girl of 14 when she was taken from a train and shipped to Plaszow and then Auschwitz. Already an aspiring writer, she used whatever scraps of paper or notebooks she could lay her hands on to record her journal while she was held in the camps.

Most of her written record was apparently destroyed because it was illegible, but this volume contains what was salvageable. This is a remarkably perceptive work, written under conditions of extreme deprivation and suffering. Some of the details aren't always clear, but the author reconstructed the remnants of the journal after the passage of many years.

She conveys specific details about life in Plaszow and Auschwitz that are often missing in Holocaust memoirs--what the diet was like, what clothes the prisoners were allowed to wear, for instance.

19 October 2006
__________________________________________

NULAND, SHERWIN B.
THE DOCTORS' PLAGUE: GERMS, CHILDBED FEVER, & THE STRANGE STORY OF IGNAC SEMMELWEIS (2003)

This is a very tragic story of a doctor whose extraordinary discovery of the cause of childbed fever, which had taken a heavy toll in maternity wards, wasn't accepted by his colleagues. It is also the story of how one brilliant man's personality may have been an obstacle to successful promulgation of his ideas. Ignac Semmelweis was practicing in Hungary at a time (his dates are 1818-1865) when the medical profession was structured rigidly and hierarchically. This rigidity may have been another obstacle to the success of his ideas.

He discovered that puerperal fever was caused by the unhygienic practices of medical professionals, who were in the habit of attending women in labor right after handling cadavers in post mortems without bothering to wash their hands. Semmelweis was of course right when he called those doctors who refused to take this hygienic measure "murderers," but it wasn't a way to win supporters for his cause.

Semmelweis apparently became so agitated by the situation he found himself in that he had to be committed to an insane asylum, where he died only two weeks later, quite possibly as a result of having been brutally beaten.

The author (who is a medical doctor) has written an absorbing and informative account of this remarkable man.

(7 October 2008)
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O

2005-06-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

O'BRIEN, DARCY
MURDER IN LITTLE EGYPT (1989)

Shocking account of a doctor in the Southern Illinois area known as "Little Egypt" who turned out to be a murderer.

(1997?)
____________________________

O'BRIEN, EDNA
    IN THE FOREST (2002)

This novel is based on a real case, which apparently happened too recently (1994) for emotions to have cooled down because the author reportedly got into hot water about her fictional treatment of the people involved.

The names have been changed, and the author does not pretend that this is a factual account. There is an author's note at the end giving a few details about the real case.

In the novel a young man, Michan O'Kane, who has been headed for trouble from a very early age, coming from a dysfunctional family, is so unhinged mentally that he kills a young woman and her small child as well as a priest. Volatile and prone to fly into violent rages, he is at large in the Irish countryside until he is finally captured and sentenced to life in prison.

Without being at all sympathetic to O'Kane, the author has been able to represent what might have been his mental state at various times during his killing spree and immediately after it. Whether this was his real mental state is never made clear. I would like to know how much of the novel has been built from facts and how much from O'Brien's imagination.

Did she have access to interviews with the real killer where he revealed his thought processes? Did she perhaps talk to him herself? Or to people who knew him? Have O'Kane's statements in the novel been made up completely, paraphrased, or directly quoted from the real killer's own?

These questions matter, however, only if we are interested in the novel as an accurate portrayal of the mind of a killer. Maybe an imagined representation is as good. What really matters here is that O'Brien has given us a pretty clear notion of what it must be like to live in a world where the line between the real and the unreal isn't drawn, and the picture of that mental landscape is terrifying.

I have one quarrel with this book, and it may seem like a small point, but given the frequent use of racial slurs in many mainstream books even nowadays, I should mention that finding the word "pickaninny" in use in this novel, even though it is used only once, was disheartening. This word may have been somewhat acceptable (among white people) in the 1940s but it certainly should have passed from common parlance by now.

(6 September 2010)
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O'BRIEN, MARK
    HOW I BECAME A HUMAN BEING: A DISABLED MAN'S QUEST FOR INDEPENDENCE (2003)

The author was paralyzed from the neck down by polio at the age of 7--and died at 49 after spending the rest of his days in an iron lung, one of only about a hundred polio survivors still living in an iron lung.

He was born into a loving family, but as his parents grew older they could no longer care for him and he was sent to a nursing home. This book makes some powerful arguments against nursing homes. This man's experiences should make anyone think twice before considering one as an option.

He got out because he was very determined to have a life--to become a human being, as the title indicates. And he did. He got his degree at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to graduate school. In journalism, he had a chance to interview the eminent physicist severely disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Stephen Hawking.

He was usually so isolated that his caregivers (whom he hired) were often his only human contact, and his quest for independence included a quest for romantic love or at least sexual involvement. As happens too often (usually unfortunately) with many people in similar situations, he fell in love with some of the caretakers.

He is very explicit about the choices he made and how they turned out. This much description might not be to every reader's taste.

This man must have been very remarkable, and his book calls attention to a much-neglected and forgotten segment of the population--persons stricken with polio.

They are forgotten now because the polio vaccine put an end to infantile paralysis, but there were those for whom the vaccine didn't come along soon enough. In my childhood young people were still getting polio. Some weren't afflicted as severely as Mark O'Brien but many have had to struggle with post-polio syndrome in the years since the onset of their polio. Not a pretty picture at all.

(20 April 2010)
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O'NEAL, LINDA, TENNYSON, PHILIP, WATSON, RICK
   MISSING: THE OREGON CITY GIRLS; A SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF
      ABDUCTION AND MURDER

In 2002 Ashley Pond, aged 12, vanished before reaching the school where she was in seventh grade. Some weeks later, a neighbor and classmate of hers, Miranda Gaddis, 13, disappeared under similar circumstances. Time was passing, and it looked as if the police and the FBI were following the wrong leads.
Linda O'Neal and her husband Philip Tennyson became involved in the case because Linda was a step-grandmother to Ashley and, as a private investigator, she considered herself qualified to pursue an investigation into the circumstances of the girls' disappearance on her own.

Almost from the start, she cast a suspicious eye on one Ward Weaver, whose daughter Mallory was a good friend of Ashley's--and in fact Ashley had virtually lived in the Weaver household for about a year because she didn't get along with her mother. Weaver had custody of Mallory and lived with a girl friend at the time. He had been so extraordinarily nice to Ashley (and to several other friends of Mallory's) that Linda was suspicious. She became more suspicious on discovering more facts about Weaver--for instance, that his father, a very violent man, was on death row.

It took a long time and a near-murder to bring the law authorities around to Linda O'Neal's point of view about Weaver, but when Weaver tried to rape and kill yet another girl, they began investigating in earnest and discovered the bodies of the two missing girls, whom Weaver had brutally murdered.

Details of the aftermath of Weaver's arrest are given, and the various family members' appalled and sorrowing reactions are explored. The book closes with an impassioned lecture by O'Neal about the need for everyone to be alert for any telltale signs of child abuse or pedophilia among people we deal with every day.

This is a very riveting account of a horrible tragedy told by someone who seems to know what she is talking about. Implicit in what she says is an awareness that as the world becomes more densely populated and impersonal, there is an increasing need for people to make an effort to connect with and know one another better.

It is interesting that the law enforcement personnel failed to catch the signs of Ward Weaver's involvement in the girls' disappearance but those who knew the family relationships and some of the history of the persons involved were the ones who got to the truth and revealed it.

(5 March 2009)

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ORLEAN, SUSAN
THE ORCHID THIEF (1998)

The author's report on her trip to Florida to meet accused orchid thief John Laroche. The book contains much information about orchids, the Florida swamp country, and the Seminoles.

(15 June 2001)
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OZICK, CYNTHIA

   A CYNTHIA OZICK READER (1996)

This is a sizeable collection of poems, stories, and essays, every one of them quite readable.

Ozick's densely packed prose is witty and always to the point.

The two Puttermesser stories are particularly funny--about a woman lawyer with the last name of Puttermesser who creates a golem.

In the essays, "Mrs. Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and Her Nurse" was particularly interesting as I had just read a book about Virginia Woolf's relationships with the servants. Here Ozick makes a strong case for Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, as her principal caretaker.

Her essay on Edith Wharton is based on her reading of the R. W. B. Lewis biography that appeared in the 1970s to wide acclaim. It revealed an affair between Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton. Ozick turns her attention to Wharton's more mundane everyday life--and comes up wondering how Wharton managed to write so much while being in charge of a large number of servants, several residences, dogs, and a very troubled husband, in addition to traveling widely.

She suggests that Wharton's fiction often rode along on the coattails of Henry James and claims that her much-praised Ethan Frome--one of the rare works where Wharton's characters are not upper class--is slight and overrated.

I tend to disagree with her evaluation of Ethan Frome, but it's been years since I read it. It held up well in the classroom as a book for discussion in college English classes, and it is a radical departure from most of Wharton's other fiction, but maybe some of us have given it higher marks than it deserves....

Above all, Cynthia Ozick takes Henry James and Edith Wharton to task for their snobbery. Speaking as a New York Jewish writer with roots on the Lower East Side, she is understandably resentful of the sort of
élitism whereby she was obliged to have her speech monitored when she was a school girl--she was taught not to drop her final r's, but she points out that speakers of Oxbridge English make a point of dropping their final r's, for instance.

Ozick's work is saturated with Jewish lore and Yiddish phrases. (Ozick has translated several works from Yiddish into English.) Judaism is clearly a part of her personality, and she has contributed some of its richness to the literature of our time.

September 18, 2011

   FAME AND FOLLY: ESSAYS (1996)

Cynthia Ozick discourses on a variety of topics, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Saul Bellow, Isaac Babel, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in these essays.

All of them are well worth reading. Her comments are incisive and original. She gives special attention to instances of anti-Jewish sentiment in such revered figures as T. S. Eliot--who up until recently had been regarded as considerably less fascistic than his good friend Ezra Pound. Some little-known facts about Eliot that show more of his fascistic tendencies, and Ozick highlights these as she also reveals him to have recreated himself with a keenly ambitious eye on success in the literary world.

The work of Isaac Babel has received too little attention over the years, and Ozick's essay should help to establish it among the more remarkable literary endeavors of the 20th century. (Babel was born in 1894 and probably executed in 1940 at the Lyubanka prison in Stalin's Russia). For more on Babel, see:

http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/Publications/Babel.htm

(16 August 2009)

     HEIR TO A GLIMMERING WORLD (2004)

Cynthia Ozick has a knack for spinning an interesting yarn, and she does a fine job in this novel with a first-person narrator, who finds herself "hired" (but with only occasional meager pay) as an "amanuensis" by a refugee from Germany (it is the mid-1930s) named Mitwisser. Mitwisser was a noted scholar in Germany, as was his wife, now in a demented state. Mitwisser's specialty is an obscure Jewish sect.

He is very much the head of a household that includes his wife and five children, and hovering on the periphery is the mysterious James, their very generous benefactor. The book's title in the UK is The Bear Boy, referring to James, the original "bear boy," the child model for a series of very popular children's books. James's tragedy--finding his status as the original "bear boy" too heavy a millstone around his neck--is at the center of this story, although other characters' lives that are of almost equal interest are touched on and picked up again and again throughout the narrative.

Ozick has captured the eccentricities of her characters and brought them to life.

(31 August 2008)

P

2005-06-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

PAGE, TIM
DAWN POWELL: A BIOGRAPHY (1998)

After reading a couple of works by Dawn Powell, I wanted to know more about here, and this biography is a comprehensive account of her life. It also provides a fairly thorough discussion of her work.

Whether she deserves lasting fame or obscurity is still an open question, apparently. In her lifetime she knew many important people, including Edmund Wilson, who championed her work, and John Dos Passos, a good friend of hers for many years. Her adult life was spent in New York, where she seemed to many to be the embodiment of Greenwich Village.

Life wasn't all beer and skittles for Dawn Powell, however. Though her marriage to a successful man lasted until his death, the couple's one severely autistic child was born at a time when autism wasn't yet recognized or treatable.

A very readable and responsible study of a 20th century American writer.

(12 November 2011)
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PALEY, GRACE

JUST AS I THOUGHT (1998)

This book is a compendium of Grace Paley's essays and talks spanning the years 1950 to the 1990s, and through them we probably get a well-rounded picture of the author, who died in 2007 in her 80s.

She grew up in the Jewish tradition in the Bronx, and came from a family of socialists. She became a well-known writer of fiction and essays, published often in such publications as the New York Review of Books.

An energetic participant in the anti-war movement, the women's movement and the struggle for racial justice, she never hesitated to speak out and to appear at rallies and demonstrations. She spent time in jail--and the book contains information about these experiences.

It also includes brief tributes to some writers like Kay Boyle and Isaac Babel. She concludes the book with an account written by her father of his time spent as a political prisoner in Russia that is informative and grimly humorous.

(21 February 2011)
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PARKER, DOROTHY
COMPLETE STORIES
Dorothy Parker's fiction might have been expected to seem dated nowadays, since she has so often been thought to exemplify the spirit of the 1920s-1930s. But her stories have held up amazingly well over the years, in my opinion. This collection, which includes the well-known "Big Blonde," contains many interesting gems of stories that are more than mere period-pieces. Dorothy Parker takes aim at hypocrisy and the monied classes in the US, at smugness and triteness and insensitivity.

"Arrangement in Black and White" (1927) is probably a fictionalized account of an incident involving Paul Robeson--and she skewers the liberals who strain to prove their lack of race prejudice while revealing the same stereotypical thinking that they deplore.

The author is perhaps at her best when portraying drinking people--the repetitiousness of their conversations, the sadly tiresome behavior.

Dorothy Parker's wit and perception are unique.

(17 September 2004)
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PATCHETT, ANN
BEL CANTO (2001)

In this novel we have a group of people from various parts of the world thrown together in the home of the Vice President of a Latin American country, who is the host for a recital by a world-famous operatic soprano in honor of the birthday of a Japanese businessman who is one of her enthusiastic fans.

The festive occasion is ruined by the appearance of a group of young terrorists who take the entire group hostage at gunpoint.

The story revolves around the changes that occur during the many months of captivity, and at the point where the terrorists become humanly lovable and love affairs start blossoming among the trapped people, the story starts to come unglued.

Patchett can't seem to dislike any of her characters. It is her insistence on sweetness-and-light that grates on my nerves. Her Roman Catholic orientation, showing up in the form of an almost saintly priest among the group, who stays on of his own free will, and in the form of frequent references to the Catholic practices of many of the characters, does not bring Graham Greene readily to mind, either. Greene grapples with the problems involved in being a Catholic in modern times. Patchett grapples with the protocol of the confessional, the sign of the cross, and all of the other paraphernalia of the religion--the frills and furbelows, as it were.

Roxanne, the diva, is almost too good to be true. She is kind and generous to a fault, loving, admirable--and possessed of a superior talent and training.

By some peculiar twist that is left unexplained, the man with whom Roxanne has been having an affair during the captivity is not the man who marries her in the end, but by the time the reader reaches the end of this sad excuse for a story, there is only a sense of relief at being rid of this insufferable cast of characters.

(22 April 2008)

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PINKWATER, DANIEL

CHICAGO DAYS, HOBOKEN NIGHTS

Very amusing collection of brief essays by the National Public Radio commentator. The essays amount to an autobiographical sketch. Pinkwater began by studying to be a sculptor.

(17 November 2004)
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POGANY, EUGENE
IN MY BROTHER'S IMAGE: TWIN BROTHERS SEPARATED BY FAITH AFTER THE HOLOCAUST (2000)

This family memoir is one of the most revealing Holocaust recollections I have come across. The author has compiled everything he could find out about the lives of his father and his uncle, the twin brothers who were separated by faith.

The book deals as calmly and logically as is probably possible with the interface between Judaism and Roman Catholicism as it was reflected in Hungary during the Second World War and specifically in the author's family.

The family was Jewish but not particularly devout. They were among the many Hungarian Jews who regarded themselves as Hungarians first and as Jews only very secondarily. Like many German Jews and Jews in other European countries as well, they were bewildered and stunned as anti-Semitism began to flourish in their homeland.

This memoir goes back to the days before World War I. Gabriella, the twins' mother, and her husband Bela convert to Christianity for seemingly practical reasons. Bela as a veterinarian finds it difficult to get a civil service post because he is Jewish. Becoming a Christian makes it possible for him to find employment. But the couple were not just converting to Christianity for convenience. They were entirely sincere, and raised their twin boys as well as their daughter to be Roman Catholics.

Miklos, the author's father, wanted to become a priest at one time. Later his brother Gyorgy did become a priest. When the Jews of Hungary found themselves in increasing danger of being sent away, Miklos, as a baptized Christian, was given a special dispensation of sorts--an assignment to a Christian labor camp. Gyorgy meanwhile was in Italy for health reasons, easily obtaining an indefinite extension of his stay there from his religious order--and finding a niche for himself by serving a very saintly Padre Pio, who was thought to be destined for beatification and who had received the stigmata.

In spite of her Christianity, Gabriella was sent to Auschwitz, where she reportedly died in a gas chamber, clutching a wooden crucifix. Miklos survives Bergen-Belsen--but emerges having lost his Christian faith and returned to Judaism.

Many years go by, and the twins do not meet. Miklos moves to the United States with his family, and his twin brother remains in Italy. Through the author's urging, the brothers meet late in life when the priest makes a visit to New Jersey. The author also urges his father to return to the Hungarian towns that were familiar to him--hoping that his father will dredge up some of the emotions that have been so long suppressed.

Whether this was wise on the author's part is questionable. His father was in his 80s when he made the trip to Hungary and visited his parents' graves--Gabriella's "grave" being merely a headstone with her name on it.

Miklos and Gyorgy never settle their differences but can at least debate them. Miklos can no longer believe in a benevolent God or in some mysterious divine purpose behind the Holocaust that would have made it understandable. Gyorgy takes the traditional Catholic view and cannot see that the Church's non-response to the Holocaust was as damnable as Miklos claims.

The book presents the facts objectively, but the evidence is too clear to be denied. It wasn't just the Germans invading Hungary who were responsible for the vicious treatment of Hungary's Jews. It was the Hungarians themselves, only too glad to help the Nazis in their anti-Semitic campaigns (and to avail themselves of whatever they could steal from the terrified Jews who were fighting for their lives).

This kind of story needs to be told--again and again.

(25 May 2009)
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PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE
PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER (1939)

Rereading these three beautifully constructed novellas after many years, I'm struck by how well they've held up over time. In one way or another each is about a currently not very fashionable segment of society--white southerners, using the language they would have used at the time, and some readers might object to finding the words nigger and Negro cropping up in them now and then. But, as with the controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn on this score, one has to look at the context. Who is using these words, and why? The character using the words is always someone who would have used no other words. We can't pretend that these people are any different from the way they really might have been if we're talking about verisimilitude, and in fiction we often are talking about verisimilitude.

Race is not really a theme in any of these novellas. The one I liked least, "Old Mortality," concerns a well-heeled Southern family and has the earmarks of an autobiographical tale. It's well known that "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is largely autobiographical, but I found it much more interesting and satisfying.

A young woman who has recently met and fallen in love with a soldier about to be sent off to fight in World War I falls ill in the flu epidemic and is near death. The young man comes to her aid in every way he can. The story has a bit of a political subtext too. The woman has been upset by being pressured at her job to buy Liberty bonds, and indeed the pressure to buy these bonds, with an emphasis on patriotic duty, is very powerful and ubiquitous, we see as the story unfolds. Like at least one of her colleagues at work, she doesn't make enough money to afford to buy a Liberty bond, and yet she is worried that she might lose her job if she doesn't comply.

The author doesn't wear her politics on her sleeve. Instead she weaves it into the fabric of her stories.

Similarly, in the stark economics of the Texas farm where "Noon Wine," the best of the three stories in my opinion, the reader can see how grimly thoughts of money have to dominate the lives of the characters--Olav Helton, the hired man with no known past from North Dakota, and the farm couple who are very fortunate to have found such a hard working helper.

The tragic unravelling of this story proceeds at a measured pace but the groundwork for every incident in the story has been carefully set up.
We get a glimmering of a problem with Mr. Helton when he is found violently shaking one of the Thompson children. The Thompsons' reaction to this is not to be upset about child abuse (as might have been the case nowadays) but to want to be the ones who discipline their own children. They are angry at Mr. Helton for seeming to usurp their power.
That there could be a lone man arriving at a farm from North Dakota with only a small collection of treasured harmonicas is entirely believable in the Texas of the 1920s-1930s. That there could be a farm family like the Thompsons is especially believable.

The novella is a notoriously difficult form in which to write. It is hard to provide enough detail about your characters to make them live in the reader's mind. In these three tales, Katherine Anne Porter has wisely chosen to limit her cast to a very few people. If "Old Mortality" is less successful than the other two, it may be because there are more people in it to keep track of.

(20 March 2010)
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POWELL, ANTHONY

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (in 12 volumes)

Anthony Powell's 12-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, has autobiographical elements, and over twenty of the 400 characters have been identified as real persons (George Orwell and John Galsworthy among them). However, one can read through the dozen volumes with appreciation without this knowledge.

Powell lived from 1905 to 2000, and Dance goes up to the 1960s; it was published between 1951 and 1975. It is the story of a generation of Britons, mostly upper-class and often involved in arts and letters.

Powell has no axes to grind. These twelve novels are not a reflection on a dying breed, nor do they hark back nostalgically to any good old days. The "theory" underlying Powell's series, if there is one, is implied in the painting by Nicholas Poussin of the same name--or at least in Powell's interpretation of that painting. He seems to regard life as a dance in which, as time passes, the people with whom you have been connected keep reappearing and disappearing.

The narrator, Nick Jenkins (standing in for Powell himself, we can assume), is a decent person who, like Powell, is pushing no special agenda of his own. He tells what happened--and helps us to keep track of the characters. He is an actor on the stage, too, of course, and his actions show a consistently decent and modest person, not given to introspection.

Though a modern writer, Powell keeps violence and sex off the stage. They happen, and he doesn't attempt to pretend that they don't--but he spares us the details. I found this very refreshing after exposure to many novels and television programs where nothing is left unsaid or unshown.

World War 2, for example, is covered in Dance without a battle scene. For the most part, we are shown the world of the officers and their jockeying for status and promotion. Powell/Jenkins neither rails against the British upper class nor defends it. He just shows it--warts and all, but without dwelling on the warts. Other worlds do keep intruding, and as we move closer to the present, these other worlds seem to be about to triumph.

Widmerpool is the character who occupies the center of the stage, doing so increasingly as time passes. In the earlier volumes he seems the least likely to do anything remotely unconventional. Stuffy, inclined to play it safe, even to be a snitch when it is to his advantage (and to disregard any harm he might be doing to others in his ambition and zealous attention to rules and regs), Widmerpool is the quintessential bureaucratic stickler. It isn't really out of character when he later joins a cult with rigid rules--although the rules dictate conduct that would be unacceptable in his more traditional social setting.

These books are well written and beautifully paced. They capture an era, and they embody a fascinating theory of time, experience, and character. There is an Anthony Powell Society Website, where you learn that in 1979-1982 the BBC did a radio adaptation of three of the novels, and in October 1997 BBC's Channel 4 ran a dramatization of the entire twelve novels in four two-hour episodes.

(14 August 2003)

volume 1: A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING

A group of English schoolboys launch this series of twelve novels. These boys will be followed through the next several decades of their varied lives.

(8 July 2002)

volume 2: A BUYER’S MARKET

Here we follow the narrator, Nick Jenkins, into early adulthood and his resumed association with Stringham, Widmerpool, and other school acquaintances.

(1 August 2002)

volume 3: THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD

volume 4: AT LADY MOLLY’S

volume 5: CASANOVA’S CHINESE RESTAURANT

It is the time of the Spanish Civil War. Nick Jenkins is now married.

(19 June 2003)

volume 6: THE KINDLY ONES

The "kindly ones" is a translation of the name for the Furies, the Eumenides. Set in England just before the outbreak of World War 2, this segment involves a suicide--as well as the death of Nick's Uncle Giles.

(26 June 2003)

volume 7: THE VALLEY OF BONES

Kenneth Widmerpool reappears, now outranking Nick in the military. It is still during World War 2.

(3 July 2003)

volume 8: THE SOLDIER’S ART

This segment continues the characters' Second World War experiences--with no battle scenes whatsoever. We see Widmerpool’s nonstop rise to prominence.

(6 July 2003)

volume 9: THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS

The end of the war, and Widmerpool's relationship with Pamela Flytton is explored.

(10 July 2003)

volume 10: BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM

This volume deals with postwar experiences. The title is a nickname for Bagshaw, one of the characters. Pamela ditches Widmerpool for a writer, whom she eventually ditches, too, destroying his manuscript as she leaves. Pamela is such a bitch that Widmerpool begins to look increasingly tolerable and sympathetic.

(31 July 2003)

volume 11: TEMPORARY KINGS
More obnoxion on Pamela’s part.

(8 August 2003)

volume 12: HEARING SECRET HARMONIES

Climaxed by the death of Widmerpool, which is reported to Nick as having occurred while Widmerpool was running in one of the events peculiar to the mystic cult he belonged to, this last novel treats the characters as they reach their seventies.

(14 August 2003)
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POWELL, DAWN
MY HOME IS FAR AWAY

A largely autobiographical novel about three sisters growing up in the Midwest, their mother having died and their father a fun-loving alcoholic who vanishes and reappears in their lives, as they are bounced around among various relatives. A really good book, especially in delineating sibling rivalry and human foibles.

(27 July 1998)
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PROSE, FRANCINE
GOLDENGROVE (2008)

This short novel is narrated by a 13-year-old girl, Nico, whose sister has drowned. We see how she and her parents respond to this shattering event--and how she goes along with her sister's boy friend's delusion that she can replace her sister Margaret in his life.

Aaron, the boy friend, is about 18 and has just finished high school. As Nico and Aaron have their brief but very uneasy relationship, the reader probably becomes keenly aware of the vast emotional gulf between a 13-year-old and an 18-year-old. Otherwise, their transactions with one another border on the smarmy and unnatural, and we can only breathe a sigh of relief when the association ends.

The story leaves too many important loose ends to be very satisfying. For instance, although an autopsy is apparently done, we never find out just what caused the sister's drowning. Was it the heart condition she already knew she had? Or did she drown for some other reason? In the light of subsequent events in the story--Nico's chest pains and visit to a heart specialist, for instance--it would have been better to establish the exact cause of her sister's death.

Then too there is the connection with the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem beginning, "Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?..."

So far as I can tell, the "connection" comes down to the sister's name and the fact that the father's bookstore is named Goldengrove. At various points in the book it sounds as if the connection is about to have some significance, but it doesn't. Nico tries hard to wring some emotional resonance from it but it doesn't quite succeed. For one thing, the Margaret in the poem is mourning, not dead.

Most of the narrative focuses on the summer following the drowning, but then suddenly Nico is wrapping things up by telling about a few incidents involving her husband and children, many years later. The book ends on an upbeat, life-affirming note, but have we learned much about this particular loss and the grief that these people felt? Or does what we have learned matter?

(14 August 2011)
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PYM, BARBARA

THE SWEET DOVE DIED (1978)

This novel is about what fools aging women can make of themselves over much younger men. Here there is an aging woman who is in love with a man twenty years younger, who inevitably hurts her because he thinks of her as a mother.

(December 28, 1987)

QUARTET IN AUTUMN (1977)

The author delineates the way people have of feeling obligated to one another while not really wanting to associate with one another—the sense of duty that prompts so many social interactions.

(3 December 1986)

JANE AND PRUDENCE

A quiet novel about two women friends--one a clergyman’s wife, the other a younger, unmarried woman.

(1986?)

SOME TAME GAZELLE

Pym’s first novel, about two middle-aged sisters, Harriet and Belinda Bede, both spinsters, who care about each other.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES

Pym’s last novel--she died in January 1980--about life in an Oxfordshire village, with older and younger characters, rectors, widows, and others.
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2005-06-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

R

2005-06-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

RABAN, JONATHAN
WAXWINGS (2003)

The author, who I understand from reading another of his books is transplanted from the UK to the Seattle area, has written a novel about a man transplanted from the UK to the Seattle area.

For me, part of this novel's charm was the explicit detail in which descriptions of the area are given. It might not have as much appeal for readers who don't live in this region, but it is a solid story, absorbing and well-told, with a generous amount of humor injected into a serious tale.

The protagonist is one Tom Janeway, a professor at the University of Washington. His wife Beth leaves him, and then he is falsely accused of being involved in the disappearance of a girl simply because he happened to be in an area where the girl was seen last.

It doesn't take long for his career to tumble down into ruins--and at the same time he finds himself at the mercy of a Chinese illegal alien who is supposed to be working on restoring his house.

It is his uneasy relationship with this man, Chick, that is the most complex part of this story. The author has a gift for dialogue and conveys Chick's attempts at "trendy" English in a way that makes them seem unforced and authentic.

Finn, Tom and Beth's four-year-old, also comes through talking and acting very much like a real four-year-old--and shows his talent for acute perception by cutting through his parents' attempts at lying to him about the divorce.

As the author moves the story along, he manages to skewer many elements of US society--including well-meaning child therapists and teachers, hustlers (like Chick) who are always on the lookout for money to be made, divorcing parents who try to sugarcoat the situation to their children, just to name a few.

(5 March 2008)

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REHM, DIANE
FINDING MY VOICE (1999)

An autobiography by an Arab-American woman of Christian background who married, had children, and went into public radio broadcasting, having her own talk show for over 20 years. The book contains much information about her struggle with the onset of spasmodic dysphonia, which crippled her voice until a treatment was found.

(3 October 2002)
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REICHL, RUTH
TENDER AT THE BONE: GROWING UP AT THE TABLE (1998)

The author is a restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. This book is a partly fictionalized account of her life as the daughter of a manic depressive mother known as the Queen of Mold, then as a member of the West Coast commune scene in the 1970s. The focus is on the development of Reichl’s interest in food and cooking.

(23 October 1999)
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REMNICK, DAVID

REPORTING: WRITINGS FROM THE NEW YORKER (2006)

The author, who has been the editor of the New Yorker, presents a collection of his essays and profiles published in that magazine between 1991 and 2006.

The pieces are long, thoughtful and observant. He has given informative profiles of Vaclav Havel, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Mike Tyson, among others--as well as of a husband-and-wife team who are translating some of the major Russian works into English.

His remarks about Mike Tyson--who incidentally has captured the interest of the celebrated fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates--are especially valuable as reporting. He scrupulously avoids passing judgment on Tyson and is content to present the facts at hand. Even the fact that Tyson bit off a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear during a match is presented without horror, without admiration: this happened, this is how it was, and you can make of it what you will.

A book I found well worth reading.

(4 May 2009)

(DAVID REMNICK, ed.)

WONDERFUL TOWN: NEW YORK CITY STORIES FROM THE NEW YORKER (2000)

A large assortment of stories from The New Yorker, published between the 1920s and the present and all dealing with New York City in one way or another. Some very well known writers are represented here--John Cheever, Ann Beattie, Woody Allen, John O’Hara, Philip Roth, James Thurber, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger (whose story here must have preceded his famous novel Catcher in the Rye), Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, E. B. White and many others. I liked most of these stories.

(9 November 2006)
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RENDELL, RUTH

A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES (1998)

A murder "mystery" with a twist. We see most of the story through the eyes of the murderer, and the question, instead of "Whodunit?", becomes "Will he get caught, and if so, when and how?"

In Teddy (the murderer) the author does a close study of a warped mind, without delving too closely into its causes--which is a refreshing omission in this era of explaining all dysfunction by childhood trauma. We see that Teddy comes from a family where the dominant atmosphere is a cold indifference, and we may not be surprised when he turns out to be a very cold and indifferent adult.

He has artistic leanings, and in general he seems overly concerned with visual effects. He is deeply disturbed by his own impotence, but overlying this sense of failure is apparently the notion that people can be arranged like puppets on a stage: dressed and draped and posed according to his whim.

If some people are putting obstacles in your path, he reasons, he can just whisk them off the stage--by killing them.

It seems sometimes as if his luck is a little too good. I wonder at how much he gets away with. But the author goes to considerable trouble to provide the details needed to establish verisimilitude, and she does so without any undue smarminess--even though some of the situations in the story are grisly.

A very absorbing story. I liked another of Rendell's novels, Kissing the Gunner's Daughter.

(1 January 2006)
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ROBINSON, MARILYNNE
HOUSEKEEPING

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson has flashes of beauty and thought that are remarkable, but the grammar and the transitions and possibly the verisimilitude are poor, and the ending ruins the entire book for me.

Having posited a woman who is a drifter, and the woman narrator following in her footsteps, the author sets up the inevitable clash between the forces of respectable society and the drifting free spirit who wants no part of society’s restrictions. Like any hoboes, these woman thumb their noses at the comforts of life in a home, the world of church, neighbors and school. But what is false, to me, is the ending. The author states again and again that families can’t be separated because—she likes to believe—memory is insistent and will always make its claims known. Perhaps that is what she and I find it comforting to believe because our own memories are insistent and true. What she doesn’t recognize—and it would have made a far sadder but more realistic story—is that people who are determined to follow the herd will be very adept at forgetting even the warmest memories of a past but disgraced family.

Towards the end of the novel the narrator, Ruth, then a teenager, casts her lot with Sylvie, the drifter aunt, while her younger sister Lucille flees to the world of respectability and acceptance by the town. Then Ruth and Sylvie begin to feel superior to other people, in their isolation and their freedom from the shackles of home and responsibility. Then, as if to prove their superiority, the author ends the novel by harking back to Lucille and clearly indicating (from Ruth’s point of view, of course) that Lucille would forever be haunted by her memories of—and longing for—Sylvie and Ruth. But nowhere before then has there been any hint whatsoever that Lucille had any desire to do anything but escape from Sylvie. I can’t believe that Lucille will ever do anything but wallow in her respectability. There will be no nostalgia for the drifting life.

But maybe the reader is supposed to see that Ruth’s sense of superiority is just a bit of wishful thinking on her part—that no one will envy her her “free” life or even remember her...

(written October 1, 1981; posted November 21, 2008)

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ROGERS, MARY BETH
BARBARA JORDAN: AMERICAN HERO (1998)

A balanced biography, though short on personal details (perhaps because Jordan guarded her privacy fiercely), about the distinguished Texas Congressional representative, her service on the Watergate judiciary committee, her devotion to LBJ--and her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, which she hid from everyone for 15 years but eventually had to make known because someone inadvertently revealed it.

She died of leukemia brought on by taking Cytoxin for the MS.

She was a phenomenon: a black woman from Texas who succeeded in politics--and a very able and intelligent person.

(8 September 2003)
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ROIPHE, ANNE
FRUITFUL: A REAL MOTHER IN THE MODERN WORLD (1996)

A somewhat overwritten paean to motherhood from a well-to-do participant in the women’s liberation movement of the sixties.

(4 September 1999)
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ROTH, PHILIP
INDIGNATION (2008)

It's been quite a few years since Philip Roth made a name for himself with Portnoy's Complaint, which was known for the explicitness with which it dealt with some of the smarmier aspects of life. There were those who maintained that Roth was exploiting the shock value of his willingness to treat the smarmy in a work of fiction, but those carping critics have probably shut up by now and are currently yawning their way through the many movies and books that revel in the smarmy.

Coming along in 2008, Indignation, in which Roth is still mining the smarmy vein, seems old-hat and tiresome, as if the author had never managed to get out of the somewhat sophomoric groove he began in, with Portnoy.

It's such a short novel, too, that it almost seems as if Roth himself may have become tired of it after he'd developed a few characters and scenes.

There is Marcus Messner, who died at 19 but who tells the story from a vague afterlife. His account of transferring to an Ohio college after a year in a cosmopolitan college in Newark, his home town, shows him up against a thinly veiled anti-Semitism on the part of the administration and his own uncertainty about which classmates, if any, he can trust.

The best part of the book, I think, is the long encounter between Marcus and the dean, where Marcus scores some points in favor of ending compulsory chapel attendance and deftly parries some of the dean's more intrusive questions.

But the smarm is laid on pretty thick. If other readers enjoy lots of smarmy details, this book will be just the thing. To me, it was one more example of an overgrown boy's getting away with writing scenes that are mainly for shock value.

(21 September 2010)
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RULE, ANN
THE STRANGER BESIDE ME (1980)

An interesting study of convicted killer Ted Bundy of Tacoma, WA, by this writer of vampire stories, etc., who lives in Seattle and who became a good friend of Bundy’s while both were working on a crisis line in Seattle.

Bundy was executed in Florida in 1986 but the book ends before his execution. The author gives no real clue about what might have driven Bundy to kill.

(23 August 1999)

BITTER HARVEST: A WOMAN'S FURY, A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE (1997)

A true account of a doctor-couple, two of whose three children die in a fire set by their mother in fall of 1995 in the Midwest. Poorly written.

(29 October 1998)
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RUSHDIE, SALMAN
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN (1981)

This book often verges on poetry, with its amazing flair for repeating images and whiffs of themes that run through the book like a finely woven mesh, getting more and more intricate as the book unfolds, but not in an incomprehensibly Joycean way. All the reader has to do is grab hold of each thread and hang onto it to make the book rewarding.

I was very taken by this book---I don’t often like modern books—in spite of its considerable raunchiness. The raunchiness belongs, though. It is part of what the author is trying to say, I feel.

Rushdie seems to capture beautifully the teeming populousness of modern India—its sounds, smells, and colors, its masses of humanity. Maybe India—his India—is the future of the rest of the world. This is what we are all on the verge of becoming, shortly: brutalized, rendered primitive and animal-like.

This is the ending of the book:

…because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children [those born in 1947] to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes and to be unable to live or die in peace.

He is speaking of the relative few born at a particular moment, but by extension (I think) he means his generation as a whole, and perhaps all succeeding generations.

He talks, too, of fatalism and the “fatal disease of optimism,” and he has thought up a new word, sperectomy, to designate the excision of hope from the human spirit.

(October 1985)
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