Rainy's Reading Room

Boomerang by Michael Lewis, 2011, * * * * *

2012-01-11T19:18:00.003-05:00

Michael Lewis possesses the rare storyteller's ability to make virtually any subject seem both lucid and compelling. In his new book, Boomerang, he actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating - even, or especially, to readers who rarely open the business pages or watch CNBC. The book could not be more timely given the worries about Europe's deepening debt crisis and the recent warning issued by Christine Lagard, managing director of the I.M.F. that "the current economic situation is entering a dangerous phase." Combining his easy familiarity with finance and the talents of a good travel writer, The book does not aspire to provide a broad overview of the debt crisis but does provide a sparkling prism by which to view the problem from a global perspective. In examining the cases of Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Germany, Mr. Lewis seeks to attribute the differing causes of economic turmoil and their varying outcomes to each country's distinctive national characteristics. Thus Iceland went mad on banking because, as a nation of fisherman, it has a culture steeped in macho risk-taking; Ireland went mad on house buying because as a nation beset by a history of oppression and exploitation, landowning was the ultimate escape from the past; Greece went mad on avoiding tax payments and collection because they are a nation built on feuding, nepotism and graft and Germany is left to pay the bill because they are a nation who likes the thrill of thrusting its clean fingers into other people's dirty laundry. Michael Lewis has a wonderful talent for distilling complicated stories, whether bond trading in New York (Liar's Poker) or a baseball-analysis revolution in Oakland, CA (Moneyball) in simple terms and with telling detail. Boomerang, adapted from a series of essays he wrote for Vanity Fair Magazine, does not disappoint on this score.

Steve Jobs by Water Isaacson, 2011, * * * *

2012-01-05T17:20:00.005-05:00

Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson, a former Managing Editor at Time Magazine, former Chairman and CEO of CNN and a biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin to write his autobiography while he was still alive. Mr. Jobs, the brilliant and protean creator whose inventions so utterly transformed the allure of technology, turned lessons he learned from his father about "doing things right"" into an all-purpose theory of intelligent design. Mr. Jobs, who founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak in 1976, began his career as a seemingly contradictory blend of hippie truth seeker" and" tech-savvy hothead." Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs as well as with friends, family, adversaries, competitors and colleagues, Isaacson has created a story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. The book takes us to a time when laptops, desktops and windows were metaphors, not everyday realities and describes how each of the Apple innovations that we now take for granted, first occurred to Mr. Jobs or his creative team. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. Skeptic after skeptic made the mistake of underrating Steve Jobs saying "Sorry, Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work" which Business Week wrote in 2001 or "The iPod Will Likely Become a Niche Product" as stated by a Harvard Business School professor. Steve Jobs had the last laugh each and every time. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair but his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be. His story is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership and values. Throughout the book Jobs is called rude, insensitive, mean, petulant, obnoxious, vengeful and a bully. Few dispute his genius and most agree with the nasty adjectives used to describe him but he was also charismatic. He was often quoted as having a "reality distortion field" -- in his presence reality was malleable and he was able to convince anyone of almost anything. Isaacson tells the story from the making of the first Apple computer to the Mac, the boardroom intrigues, NeXT computer, Pixar and the rebirth of Apple and the products he created in the past 10 years. The book raises the question of what it took to make the world's most iconic brand -- it is the stuff of legends!

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny, 2011, * * * * *

2011-12-15T14:38:00.002-05:00

This is the 7th novel in the Armande Gamache mystery series. In this book, Clara Morrow, now aged 50, is far beyond the age when most artists are discovered. Yet, on the evening that the novel opens, she is about to enter the prestigious Musee d'Art Contemporain on Montreal for a gala solo show of her work. Art experts and critics from the local scene and from as far away as New York, Paris and London are at the vernissage and Clara's party afterwards at her home in Three Pines, the lovely village near Montreal that is so small it does not appear on any map. However, the celebratory mood of the Three Pines party does not last, as early the next morning there is a discovery of a murdered woman's body Clara's garden. Three Pines may seem like a picture perfect postcard-of-a-place but it is a microcosm for the world outside. Usually evil arrives in town by traveling the road from the outside, but not always. The body is identified as Lillian Dyson, Clara's childhood friend who cruelly betrayed her while they were in art college. Clara claims that she has not seen or heard from her in over 20 years and there is a wide field of suspects. In addition, Clara's new-found success and Lillian's murder bring to a boil the problems of envy and lack of understanding that have plagued her marriage with Peter for several years. Louise Penny's mysteries are not about forensics, timetables, alibis or violent action --they are about the human heart and spirit; about envy, resentment and fear eating away at people, threatening friendships, marriages, partnership and other lives. They are also about love, forgiveness, and redemption offering hope for change and a forging new stronger bonds. Ms. Penny is a master of characterization; a genius at creating a world that we enter into and fully live in, and want to return to. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, disappointments and rancor that can eat a person up from within and specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they need help. As a murder mystery, there is little suspense and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for her eloquent use of language, analysis of people's psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Penny also explores what makes art memorable and what it is like to struggle creatively. A Trick of the Light is both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, 2011, * * *

2011-12-14T14:26:00.003-05:00

Amor Towles stylish, elegant and deliberately anachronistic debut novel transports you back to Manhattan in 1938, just before the sharp lines between social stratification were smudged by the leveling influences of World War II and the G.I. Bill. Rules of Civility takes its title from young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, all 110 of which appear in the novel's appendix. Like the literary touchstones he evokes -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss -- Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change. Towles uses the somewhat contrived device of a long flashback to tel his story, but it works. His starting point is the 1966 opening of Walker Evans' "Many Are Called" show at the Museum of Modern Art, attended by his then middle-aged urbane narrator and her husband. Among the photographs -- in which Evans captured New Yorkers on the subway with a hidden camera in the late 1930s --the narrator recognizes two shots taken a year apart, of a man she used to know named Tinker Grey. See these photographs send her back to reminiscences of the year she met Grey, a turning point in her life. Towles novel follows three main characters, Tinker Grey, Katey Content and Eve Ross and is about the randomness of chance and how most of us "have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options" which will determine the course of the resty of ouir lives . It is also about maintaining integrity and the capacity for wonder in the face of insidious monetary sway.Filled with snappy dialogue, sharp observations and an array of terrifically drawn characters with names like Dicky Vanderwhite, Mason Tate and Wallce Wolcott, Rules of Civility takes the readyer to Gatsbyesque parties on Long Island estates, jazz dives, lushly appointed Conde Nast offices, deluxe suites at The Plaza, posh restaurants and flop houses. The book reinforces the kind of improbable-but-true serendipity that plots the lives of people in their 20s - in whatever epoch - before they kow the weight that decisions made in a moment might have.

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene, 2011, * * * * *

2011-12-01T18:14:00.004-05:00

In 1991, age age 4, and with four children of her own, author Melissa Fay Greene ("Praying for Sheetrock,", "The Temple Bombing," "There Is No Me Without You," was struck by "a sudden onset of longing and nostalgia" for another baby. When her next pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, she and her husband, Don Samuel, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney, decided to adopt. No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is her new book about adopting a boy from an orphanage in Bulgaria (Jesse), and then a daughter and three sons from HIV/AIDS ravaged Ethiopia (Helen, Fisseha, and brothers Daniel and Yousef), absorbing each into their upper middle class Jewish Atlanta home. Post-adoption life proved to be challenging at best with language barriers, bed-wetting, raging tantrums, separation anxieties, and more. Greene sank into "post adoption depression syndrome" (something she'd never even heard of) convinced that she had "wrecked my dearest treasure, my family." Miraculously Greene recovers, her family repairs, and bonds thrive. The sprawling family journey is not without its pitfalls. The children fight - even come to blows - give each other the silent treatment, lie on occasions, break rules, and figure out how to download porn on their cellphones. The teenage boys also bypass Net Nanny and then get caught charging up the cable bill with XXX-rated movies. Ready with a band-aid box in hand, Greene is a culturally sensitive, boldly human antidote to the Tiger Mother. As too many of today's parents are caught in the blinding fog of over-achievement "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet" is filled with water balloons, newborn gerbils, dead chickens, spicy foods, baseball stats, frequent flyer miles, endless extended family and an unlimited supply of laughter and love. It is a sprawling, imperfect, courageous and joyful account of the adoption process, warts and all -- the heart wrenching trips to orphanages, frustrating delays, living parents, as well as the inevitable homesickness and culture clashes and sometimes rocky emotional terrain. Greene captures the family's triumphant shared delight in one another's differences.

In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, 2011, * * * *

2011-12-01T13:58:00.005-05:00

Erik Larsen has written a compelling book which takes its ominous title from Berlin's Central Park, the Tiergarten, which means "animal garden" and hearkens back to the days when it served as a royal hunting preserve. In this nonfiction saga, the verdant terrain plays a significant yet totally different role. It serves as a focal point for the horrifying rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and is the site of a dazzling social life, furtive trysts, plots, meetings, and machinations that took place within its secluded and leafy confines and in the lavish homes and embassies scattered along its perimeter. The story deals with a naive American family, William Dodd, a low-key history professor from the University of Chicago who becomes the first U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany in 1933, and his flamboyant and sexually charged daughter, Martha, who are thrust into the dangerous and strangely glamorous world of the "New Germany" and succumb to its eerie charm. Martha, a would-be journalist is fleeing an unhappy marriage and becomes totally smitten by the provocative allure of the volatile atmosphere, flagrantly indulging in numerous affairs with members of the diplomatic corps, the SS and the Gestapo and several high-profile American reporters and authors - Thornton Wilder and Carl Sandburg among them. She, like many others, wore blinkers as to what Hermann Goering, Heinrick Himmler, Hitler and their ilk were really up to, and though they realized it was a scary time, they either downplayed, ignored or simply accepted the brutality and dictates of the increasingly repressive regime and partied on. Dodd's assignment from President Roosevelt was to maintain the status quo in U.S. relations with Germany in order to placate a growing group of isolationists at home and an elite cadre in the U.S. State Department who were in denial over Jewish persecution and the threat of a looming war. Many of these men were anti-Semitic and pro-German. Culling through Russian and German archives, letters, diaries, memoirs, cables, newspapers, and interviews, Mr. Larson re-creates the decadence and peril of the period and details and diplomatic minefield facing the inexperienced, exasperated ambassador. Even Maratha eventually saw behind the shiny black uniforms, swastikas and Mercedes. She became a communist and Russian spy and ended up living alone in Prague for several years until her death in 1990 at 82. What is astonishing is how passive and clueless everyone seemed to be, assuming that Hitler and his entourage were childish puppets. This is a cautionary tale not to be missed.

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, 2011, * * * * *

2011-10-17T13:41:00.005-04:00

A lusty, rollicking, engaging-from-page-one memoir by the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York's East Village. Gabrielle Hamilton opened her restaurant without any prior experience as a chef but the life experiences she did have before that bold move, told here in honest detail, obviously made up for any deficiencies and provide material for an electric story. The youngest of five siblings born to a French mother who cooked 'tails, claws, and marrow filled bones' in a good skirt, high heels, and apron, and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Brothers circus, Hamilton spent her early years in a vast old house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. During Hamilton's teenage years her parents were often gone or distracted and following their divorce she lied about her age to get dishwashing and waitressing work. She is often drawn, or pulled, to the world of food and hospitality even when she struggles against it -- a battle suggested by the book's subtitle "The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. " Through feeding people Hamilton exerts contgrol over a life rendered chotic and undependable when her parents split -- she takes care of others in the way her parents didn't take care of her. This is clearest in her description of opening Prune, which illuminates how much more than menu planning goes into the creation of a restaurant. Ms. Hamilton nimbly cranks up her own literary time machine to transport us back to the hippie-ish world of rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s and New York city at the height of the coke-and-urban-cowboy era of the '80s. She conveys what it was like to be a rebellious delinquent in the making and to be young and poor in Manhattan surviving on stolen ketchup packets from McDonalds. She writes with spirited glimpses into the heart, mind and sweaty labor of a chef and the moment to moment drudgery of running a restaurant. Sometimes, however, Hamilton appears selectively guarded and evasive and maybe even a bit careless. In many places the book cries out for connective tissue that is missing and there are specific omissions that throw a reader off balance. Her marriage remains opaque, you lose track of her relationship with her father. When her mother reappears in the book after a long absence, Hamkilton vents a fury at her that she hasn't set the stage for. This is not a memoir with a neatly resolved ending. Ms. Hamilton is too devoted to grit and realism to allow her story to be neatly resolved. It is however a fiercely rendered book about food, travel, love, lost childhood, initiative, and self-reliance. It is a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency it makes up for in prose. It was impossible to put down.

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny, 2009, * * * *

2011-10-11T09:31:00.004-04:00

The Brutal Telling is the fifth entry into the Armande Gamache series by Louise Penny, set in the small Canadian village of Three Pines, which is not located on any map. The first chapter of this story opens deep in the forest when a conversation is overheard between a man identified only as "The Hermit" and Olivier Brule, the beloved owner of the village bistro. The tone carries hints of fantasy and the forest primeval as The Hermit warns, "Chaos is here,old son." There is an immediate sense of isolation and fear and then the story shifts to the village and the discovery of the The Hermit's body in the village Bistro. Enter Chief Inspector Gamache of the Surete du Quebec and the hunt is on. Once against Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are called in to strip back layers of lies, exposing both treasures and secrets. No one admits to knowing the murdered man but as secrets are revealed, chaos begins to close in on Olivier and Three Pines itself. How did Olivier make such a spectacular success of his business? What past did he leave behind and why has he buried himself in this tiny villge? Why does every lead in the investigation find its way back to him? As Olivier grows more frantic, a trail of clues and treasures -- from first editions of Charlotte's Web and Jane Eyre to a spider web with the word "WOE" woven in it -- the Chief Inspector goes across a continent in search of the truth and finally back to Three Pines for the "brutal telling." The Brutal Telling stands out from the standard issue police procedural books because intertwined with the familiar workings of a murder investigation are poetry, art, and culinary delights plus history, philosophy, & psychology. Readers new to the series will be as delighted as those returning. Llike a soothing cup of tea on a cold day, Louise Penny's literary mysteries should be sipped slowly and savored to the last drop.

To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal, 2011, * * * *

2011-09-29T20:55:00.006-04:00

Let's face it--we are a country that loves second chances. We want to rewrite our lives and swim against the current to recapture our pasts. That is certainly the case in Tom McNeal's hypnotic new novel to be sung underwater. His complex, often heartbreaking heroine tries to find the first love she left behind many years ago. Forty-four year old Judith Whitman has the veneer of a happy life, but there are cracks. Her job as an editor on a TV drama isn't completely satisfying; she regrets the way her daughter is growing up and her seemingly loving husband appears to be having a dalliance with a co-worker. Amid all this turmoil she experiences what she calls a "swerve" in life, and she begins thinking of her first love, Willy Blunt, a carpenter she fell in love with when she was 15 growing up in a small town in Nebraska. Judith begins to question her life, her choices and everything she has done since she was with Willy. She is so richly drawn, so quirkily compelling, that you are immediately invested in her. In one of the novel's strangest turns, she rents a storage unit and begins to turn it into a refuge, a kind of home away from home that might feed her yearning. She even takes on a secret identity. One day, pining for her past, she tracks Willy down using a private investigator and makes a pilgrimage back to what she considers the life she should have led. McNeal uses lyrical language and moves effortlessly through time to tell the twins tales of Judith's past and present. It's hard not to fall in love with Willy Blunt because he is a guy who expects the best from people and has a code of honor so strong that it seems shatterproof. However, just as you have given your heart to this story, McNeal breaks it with an ending that makes you feel cheated: a tacked-on shock that is a shame because everything that comes before is so ravishing. Still, McNeal captures the flush of first love and the endurance of real devotion even as he probes deeper questions: Who are we with the ones we love and who are we without them? Heatbreaking, messy and incredibly sad, to be sung underwater is so vivivly written that it takes you to a place where all your perceptions seem dizzyingly altered. Which is, of course, exactly like love itself.

Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, 2001, * * * *

2011-09-21T16:15:00.004-04:00

With the recent publication of Alexandra Fuller's new book Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness I realized that I had never read her 2001 debut memoir Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight. In this book she recalls in vivid, often excruciating detail, coming of age in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) as a long civil war raged in neighboring Mozambique and her own country slid down the violent path toward an independent African Nationalist regime. Alexandra Fuller arrived with her parents and elder sister Vanessa in Rhodesia in 1972, seven years after Ian Smith had made his disastrous unilateral declaration of independence in opposition of black majority rule. Her parents are British expatriates who had lived previously in both Kenya and Rhodesia and they move to a struggling farm in the remote Burma Valley on the eastern border with Mozambique, where Robert Mugabe's Shona Zanu guerrillas are launching cross-border raids at the start of the bush war, killing farmers on their isolated settlements. By the age of five "Bobo" (Alexandra) and her sister Vanessa are taught to strip, clean and load the semi-automatic rifles their parents sleep with at night. They are also taught opera and Shakespeare and while there never seems to be enough to eat, there are African servants, stables, boarding schools and country clubs. When independence finally arrives in 1980 and Mugabe pursues reconciliation with the remaining whites, the Fullers decide to stay in Zimbabwe to manage another ruined farm, but their lives are a chain of calamities and woes; three of their five children die, the weather is relentless and debilitating, and Fuller monitors her mother's decline into alcoholism and mental breakdowns. She writes with wit and a tough, self-revealing honesty of the loneliness, boredom and poverty of their life -- and of the long nights after the generators have been swtiched off and the continued fear from land mines, wild animals, and civil wars. Like many first-time writers, she invents her own idiom, and experiments with alliteration, compound adjectives and short verbless sentences. Yet once she relaxes into her style, the exuberance and readability of her narrative compels the suspension of critical judgment. The Boston Globe commented in their review: "the extremely personal and unguarded understatement of this memoir is far more powerful than any sociopolitical analysis or apoligist interpretation could hope to be." I cannot improve on that.

A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer, 2010, * * *

2011-09-16T14:25:00.001-04:00

Lauren Belfer's medical thriller begins in December 1941, three days after the Japanese assult on Pearl Harbor. Claire Shipley, a photojournalist working for the phenomellay successful Life Magazine, has come to the Rockefeller Institute in New York to record one of the earliest trials of a new medication called penicillin. Highly effective in experiements involving baterial infections in mice, the country's brightest doctors and researchers are racing to find a cure that will save the lives of thousands of wounded American soldiers and countless others. Claire's assignment introduces her to the world of Jamie Stanton, a dedicated physician at Rockefeller and his younger sister Tia, a mycologist, who are involved in the research of this "miracle" drug. Claire is a single mother haunted by the death of her young daughter, which might have been prevented by this drug, and by her divorce years ago. Belfer uses the urgency of Stanton's mission -- finding a means of mass-producing penicillin - to add drama to the romantic attraction that develops between Claire and Jamie. The novel's tension increases as Jamie is called away by the government to oversee top secret research for the military in laboratories throughout the nation. As the race for lucrative pharmaceutical patents on penicillin's cousins heats up, Claire's father , a wealthy tyconn, begins to play a significant role in the narrative. A Fierce Radiance is an ambitious story, combining medical and military history with commercial rivalry, espionage and thwarted love. Belfer captures the uncertainty and spirit, the dreams and hopes, of a nation at war. It is a tale of love and betrayal, intrigue and idealism, and yet the ending fell far short of my expectations.

Wendy And The Lost Boys by Julie Salamon, 2011, * * * *

2011-09-15T19:37:00.004-04:00

When playwright Wendy Wasserstein died in 2006, a lot of theater lovers grieved. Many of them were people like me -- a woman, baby-boomer, product of the same kind of New England woman's college that Wasserstein attended and around the same age. It was easy to believe that Wasserstein's plays, especially her Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy The Heidi Chronicles were about me and people I knew. It was a common perception. The truth, however, was that Wasserstein had a tremendously troubled life and much of that trouble -- a brash and insensitive mother, high-achieving siblings, a trail of gay men she loved and lost -- made their way into her plays. All of that comes together in Salamon's provocative book, and although it's not likely to surprise those who followed Wasserstein's glistening but dark social commentaries, it paints a portrait of a woman who never made peace with herself or her world. At first glance Wendy Wasserstein seemed to have it all - she grew up well-off in Brooklyn and then on Manhattan's Upper East Side, went to private schools, Mount Holyoke College, and the Yale School of Drama. Salamon draws a deft picture of a woman plagued by ambition and insecurities, struggling with weight, craving a man and children but sabotaging herself over and over with gay men who could not fill those needs. Salamon presents a fair description of a close but scarily dysfunctional family. It's tempting to want to conflate Wendy Wasserstein with the vivid and charismatic women she created for the stage -- real life is always messier. The best biographies revivify their subjects while immersing you in their world. Wendy And The Lost Boys puts Wasserstein's most complex character -- the driven, social, secretive, confessional, comic, endearing, restless, cookie-fueled, weight conscious woman that she was --center stage under the bright lights. It is a riveting production.

A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny, 2008, * * * *

2011-09-08T23:01:00.002-04:00

July in Quebec can be quite hot and Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his beloved wife Reine-Marie are looking forward to spending their anniversary at their favorite inn -- Manoir Bellechasse. When the Gamaches arrive they are a bit suprirsed to find the inn almost full due to a booking by an extended family named Finney, who is planning a ceremony to memorialize their late father. It would be an understatement to label the Finneys as dysfunctional. There is so much animosity among the four gtrown children, their spouses and their mother that it is a wonder they can coexist on the same planet. The emotional powder keg is obvious to Gamache and his wife as they begin to doubt the restorative brenefits of their holiday thinking that it would have been better to go to Three Pines, the wonderful village that is the fictional setting for most of her books. Louise Penny has created in her "Inspector Gamache series" a clever combination of a police procedural and a cozy mystery novel. Having a bona fide policeman as a protagonist lends a feeling of credibility and legitimacy to the pursuit of the wrongdoer, yet the nature of the deed divorces the tale from that of drug dealing, serial killer, or great conspiracy. The novel is a classic "locked room" mystery with the available suspects limited to those at the inn at the time the crime was committed. The author has done an interesting thing with the main characters in her series. Instead of introducing them dully in the first of the series, she lets the situations in which they become involved gradually explain what has happened in their lives prior to the first novel in the series. In this way she is able to avoid the tedium of reintroducing each character in each book and possbily boring her growing cadre of readers. She carefully plants an enigmatic seed in the beginning chapters of the book which reveal more about her major players as the novel progresses. I am a huge Louise Penny fan and am glad that my friend Phebe introduced me to this wonderful writer and series.

The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar, 2009, * * * *

2011-09-07T22:12:00.001-04:00

Umrigar (The Space Between Us) continues her exploration of cultural divides in this beautifully written and incisive novel about an American couple's experience in India. Frank and Ellie Benton have just lost their seven-year-oldd son Benny, after a short illness, and are unable to cope with this horrific loss. When Frank is offered an assignment running a factory in Birgaug, India, a coastal village near Bombay, the Bentons decide to leave Ann Arbor, Michigan and try to start life anew. While Frank tackles the barriers faced as an educated, wealthy American in charge of a Third World work force, Ellie, a therapist, basks in her new life making friends and volunteeering her services at a nearby clinic -- determined not to let grief define her life. Frank's world brightens when he befriends Ramesh, the charming, inquisitive son of the Bentons' housekeeper and cook. Ramesh soon becomes a surrogate for Benny in a relationshiop that simultaneously boosts Frank's spirits and breaks his heart. Umrigar digs into the effects of grief on a relationship and the many facets of culture clash -- especially American captialism's impact on a poor country. However, it is the tale of how Frank's interest in Ramesh veers into obsession and comes to a devastating end the provides the gripping story. The Weight of Heaven is a hauntingly beautiful story about cultural divides and misunderstandings, about loss and working through grief. It is one of those rare books that forces you to take stock of your life and about the things that matter most. The Weight of Heaven is a bold, beautifully rendered tale of cultures that clash and coalesce.

Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, 2010, * * * *

2011-09-07T12:24:00.004-04:00

Piet Hoffman is a devoted husband and the father of two young sons. He's also an ex-con who has been working undercover for the Stockholm police for nine years. Code named "Paula," Piet has risen through the ranks of the Polish mafia and is chosen to lead the Poles' effort to control the supply of amphetamines in Sweden's prisons. To do that, Piet must get himself arrested and sent to a maximum security prison, wipe out the existing supplier, and keep himself alive until he has all the information needed for the police to move on the gang. Before he goes to prison he haplessly witnesses a murder during a drug deal gone terribly wrong. While Inspector Ewert Grens investigates the murder he runs into the secret agenda run by another group within the police department. Roslund, a former journalist, and Hellstrom, a former criminal, have concocted a brilliant thriller that posits a nearly literal invasion of Sweden by East European criminals allied with former state security agents. Combine that with a morally compromised police department and Ministry of Justice effort to combat the invasion, and you have a genuine crisis. Piet's growing fear of discovery or betrayal and his angst at this beloved wife's ignorance of the work rachet up the story's tension page by page and make the novel difficult to put down. Named the Swedish Crime Novel of the Year in 2009, Three Seconds is a stunningly well-written police procedural that is combined with a psychological suspense novel. At times the suspense was so well drawn that I had to put the book down to regain my composure. It is a gritty, breathtaking story of colliding cases featuring corrupt officials, a barely sane investigator, and a nimble and likable ex-con. It is a compelling book that has long lingered in my mind.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, 2011, * * *

2011-09-07T08:40:00.004-04:00

Dr. Marina Singh, the 42-year old research scientist who is the heroine of State of Wonder - Ann Patchett's most far-flung yet somehow least exotic book, is in her office at a large pharmaceutical company in Minnesota when the book opens. Marina is having an unremarkable affair with Mr. Fox, the company's bland CEO, when he arrives to tell her that her research partner, Dr. Anders Eckman, has died of a fever in a remote part of Brazil. The letter announcing Ander's death comes from Dr. Annick Swenson, a fierce if not exactly irreproachable figure who was a medical school professor of Marina's at Johns Hopkins. Swenson was so tough that she stopped Marina's medical career in its tracks and now Swenson is holed up in a remote outpost in the Amazonian jungle, working for Marina's pharmaceutical company, where she is supposedly creating a new fertility drug that will be worth a fortune. Marina is expected to go to the jungle and get the lay of the land to find out about drug development and what happened to Anders. There are many detours on the way and not until Dr. Singh comes face to face with Dr. Swenson does this meandering novel find its focus. In books like Bel Canto and Run Ms. Patchett found amazing ways to coax unrelated elements into magically coherent narratives and make them all matter. In this case, Dr. Swenson is far and away the book's best realized character but you have to drift past many secondary figures and tropical scenery before her presence is really felt. It takes the toughness of Dr. Swenson, the sci-fi edge of the drug research, and the partial awakening of the once-timid Marina to jolt State of Wonder up to the level of Ms. Patchett's usual work. Perhaps the temptations of the Amazon are overwhelming for any writer with such a gift for animating her surroundings and the allusions to other works too great to overcome.

Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell, 2010, * * * *

2011-08-25T17:39:00.003-04:00

Caldwell (A Strong West Wind) has managed to do the inexpressible in this quiet, fierce work -- create a memorable offering of love to her best friend, Caroline Knapp (Drinking: A Love Story) who died of lung cancer at age 42 in 2002. The two met in the mid-1990s and Caldwell said that finding Caroline was "like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend and then having her show up at your door funnier and better that what you had conceived". Both single, writers, and living alone in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Caldwell was then book critic for the Boston Globe), the two women bonded over their dog runs at Fresh Pond Reservoir, traded lessons in rowing (Knapp's sport), and swimming (Caldwell's sport) and shared stories, clothes, and general support as best friends. Morevover, both had stopped drinking at age 33 and both had survived early traumas -- Caldwell had polio as a child and Knapp suffered anorexia. Their attachment to each other was deeply and mutualy satisfying. Unfortunately, Caldwell's health began to falter in March of 2002 when she was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She died in June of that same year. Caldwell is unflinching in depicting her friend's last days and writes of her own grief and desolation with moving grace. Gail Caldwell presents a raw emotional account of what it is like to have a best friend say goodbye far before her time, but the story is less about loss and more about the triumphant life these two shared together as best friends and confidantes. Their friendship teaches us that the importance of relationships is not just in having them, but in developing them with the people that complement us best. The book is a remarkable story about the intersection of two kindred spirits.

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, 2010, * * * *

2011-05-03T19:59:00.001-04:00

Secret Daughter is an unflinching yet compassionate story of mothers and daughters in a story that moves between two worlds and two families -- one struggling to survive in the fetid slums of Mumbai, India and the other grappling to forge a cohesive family despite diverging cultural identities in Northern California. The main characters are two mothers: Kavita Merchant, the impoverished villager who knows too well what happens to unwanted girls, and Somer Whitman, the American pediatrician who marries a fellow physician born in India. Somer's infertility leads her and her husband, Krishnan Thakkar, to adopt Kavita's baby, Asha, from the Indian orphanage where Kavita had surrendered her. Gowda describes the cultural fears and shocks confronting a Western woman in India, followed by the insecurities attending Somer back home as she strives to mother a child who looks like Krishnan, but not her. The story alternates viewpoints between Kavita and Somer, with occasional chapters told through the eyes of their husbands. Later, a teenage Asha takes over much of the narrative as she journeys to India to meet Krishnan's family and search for her identity -- unaware that her birth mother never stopped wondering about the daughter she gave up. The sounds, scents and sights of India are vividly drawn, pulling you deeply into a culture that many have only glimpsed in movies like Slumdog Millionaire. Two worlds collide, then meld, in a story that intimately considers how we all are shaped, through fate or free will, nurture or nature, by the astounding power of family love.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, 2010, * * * *

2011-05-03T11:59:00.001-04:00

From the 1936 Olympics to WWII and Japan's most brutal POW camps, Hillenbrand's heart-wrenching new book is thousands of miles and a world away from the racing circuity of her bestselling book Seabiscuit. The hero of this book is Louie Zamperini, a young Italian-American from Torrance, California. He was expected to be the first person to run a four-minute mile and after an astonishing but losing race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. The war ended those dreams forever when, as an Army Air Corps bombardier, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific in May 1943. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with is pal and pilot, Rusell Allen "Phil" Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the 'theater of cruelty' that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelst theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control. of Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist, know as "the Bird." By war's end Louie was near death when the camp was liberated in August 1945 but he was not free. Haunted by his dreams, he was obsessed with vengenance, and drank to forget. Untimately Louise had a defiant and unbreakable spirit and with the help of his wife, Cynthia Applewhite, he builds a new life. In one of several sections where Hillenbrand steps back for a larger view, she writes movingly of the thousands of postwar Pacific PTSD sufferers who got no help for their as yet unrecognized illness. It is impossible to condense the rich, grandular detail of the narrative of the atrocities comm itted against American POWs in Japan and the courage of Louie and his fellow POWs. Hillenbrand's triumph is that in telling Louie's story she tells the stories of thousands whose suffering has been mostly forgotten and restores to our collective memory the tale of heroism, cruelty, life, death, joy, suffering remorselessness and redemption.

Stoner by John Williams, 1965, * * * * *

2011-05-03T09:50:00.005-04:00

Stoner is written in the most plainspoken of styles...its hero being an obscure academic who endures a series of personal and professional agonies. Yet the novel is utterly riveting because the author, John Williams, treats his characters with such tender and ruthless honety. You care about the characters whether you want to or not. It is a novel of academia, unfulfilled hope, and a life not completely led. It is basically a simple novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher but, for some reason, is fascinating. Its hero, William Stoner, is the son of hard-wroking, dirt-poor farmers from whom he inherits a taciturn stoicism born of sheer adversity. Stoner enters the university in 1910 to study agriculture but his life change irrevocably when he comes upon literature in a sophomore survey course. His future mentor humiliates him by asking him to explain Shakespare's Sonnet 73, a poem about love and loss that foreshadows his own future. Only two passions matter in Stoner's life, love and learning, and in a sense he fails at both. Stoner's deeply ingrained reticence is a keystone of the novel. This is the story of an ordinary man, seemingly thwarted at every turn, but also of the knotty integrity he preserves and the deep inner life behind the impassive facade. Caught in an empty shell of a marriage, though too stoical to end it, he bonds deeply with his young daughter until his resentful wife evicts him from his daughter's life. Stoner responds with a helpless sense of resignation but in his 40s begins an affair with a talented scholar half his age, which leads to an interlude of unlooked-for happiness. Though the affair is broken up by Stoner's academic nemesis, who threatens scandal, it offers a hint of paradise that hovers dreamily over the rest of the novel. Few stories this sad could be so secretly triumphant, or exhilarating. Williams brings to Stoner's fate a quality of attention, a rare empathy, that shows us why this unassuming life was worth living.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman, 2009, * * * *

2011-03-16T20:45:00.001-04:00

The last normal moment that Mia, a talented cellist, can remember is being in the car with her family. Then she is standing outside her body beside their mangled Buick and her parent's corpses, watching herself and her little brother being tended by paramedics. As she ponders her state ("Am I dead? I actually have to ask myself this"), Mia is whisked away to a hospital, where, her body in a coma, she reflects on the past and tries to decide whether to fight to live. Via Mia's thoughts and flashbacks, Forman (Sisters in Sanity) expertly explores the teenager's life, her passion for classical music and her strong relationships with her family, friends and boyfriend, Adam. Mia's singular perspective (which will recall Alice Sebold's adult novel, The Lovely Bones) also allows for powerful portraits of her friends and family as they cope. "Please don't die. If you die, there's going to be one of those cheesy Princess Diana memorials at school," prays Mia's friend Kim. "I know you'd hate that kind of thing." Intensely moving, the novel will force you to take a look at your life and the people and things that make it worth living. A sophisticated, layered, and beautiful story about the power of family and friends, the choices we all make and the ultimate choice Mia commands. I truly appreciated her family and friends where everyone is their own character with specific traits and quirks and, amazingly, this is not a dysfunctional, but loving, family. Although this is listed in the library under Young Readers, I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, 2010, * * * * *

2011-03-14T13:04:00.003-04:00

On December 8, 2007, Amy Rosenblatt Solomon collapsed on a treadmill prior to going to work and died from an asymptomatic heart condition. Roger Rosenblatt and his wife Ginny drove from their Long Island home to be with Any's husband and their three grandchildren: six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, aka "Bubbies." The memoir take place during the year that follows Amy's death, as Roger and Ginny, called "Boppo" and "Mimi" by their grandchildren, quickly reaccustom themselves to the choreography of the everyday and the extraordinary including bedtime stories, talking toys, playdates, homework, family vacations, holidays and nonstop questions. As he marvels at the strength of his son-in-law, a surgeon, and the tenacity and skill of his wife, a former kindergarten teacher, Boppo attends each day to "the one household duty I have mastered" - preparing the morning toast perfectly to each child's liking. If there is one shortcoming to "Making Toast," it is that the writing often feels dispassionate. The descriptions of tough times don't match up with the calm, unemotional explanations. However, the memoir commands your attention by other means, including the format -- there are no chapters -- only journal style entries each of which makes your heart ache. "Making Toast" is a bleakly beautiful scatter plot of grief which is a balm to read.

The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, 2005, * * * *

2011-03-10T18:37:00.000-05:00

The Swallows of Kabul is a dazzling novel written with compassion and exquisite detail about the memtality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world, Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of an Algerian army officer named Mohammed Moulessehould who adopted a woman's pseudonym to avoid military censorship. He only revealed his true identity after leaving the army in 2001 and going into exile in France. Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of wealthy shopkekepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, who was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq, and is now dying of sickness and despair. The novel brings readers into the hot, dusty streets, of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair. However, the way that reality is narrated and ultimately redefined, once more proves the power of fiction to turn our despair into hope, to restore our stolen sense of dignity and humanity and to desire life when death seems to be the safest refuge.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, 2009, * * * * *

2011-03-10T17:59:00.001-05:00

It is Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, in the early 1950s and Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. When a job is offered in America it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life -- until she begins to realize that she as found a sort of happiness. As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn. In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Toibin has created a memorable heroine and in Brooklyn he has written a luminous novel of devastating power. The portrait Toibin paints of Brooklyn in the early '50s is affectionate but scarcely dewy-eyed. Eilis encounters discrimnation in variouis forms -- against families, againsts blacks, against Jews, against lower-class Irish -- and finds Manhattan more intimidating than alluring. Toibin's prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are interesting and believable. As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where home really is, Brooklyn has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis's struggle.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee, 2008, * * *

2011-03-10T17:37:00.001-05:00

Former Elle editor Lee delivers a debut novel dealing with the rigors of love and survival during a time of car, and the consequences of choices made under duress. Claire Pendleton, newly married and arrived in Hong Kong in 1952, finds work giving piano lessons to the daughter of Melody and Victor Chen, a wealthy Chinese couple. While the girl is less than interest in music, the Chen's British expat driver, Will Truesdale, is certainly interested in Claire, and vice versa. Their fast-blossoming affair is juxtaposed against a plot line beginning in 1941, when Will gets swept up by the beautiful and tempestuous Trudy Liang. The novel then follows through his life during the Japanese occupation. As Claire and Will's affiar becomes common knowledge, so do the specifics of Will's murky past, Trudy's motivations and Victor's role in past events. The rippling of past actions through to the present lends the narrative layers of intrigue and more than a few unexpected twist. Lee covers a little-known time in Chese history without melodrama, and deconstructs without judgment the choices people make in order to live one more day under tortuous circumstances.

Father of the Rain by Lily King, 2009, * * * *

2011-03-10T17:12:00.002-05:00

You know you are in for some heavy weather when a novel takes its title from the Book of Job "Hath the rain a father?" Lily King's third novel, Father of the Rain, is a moving drama about a daughter's attachment to a destructive, but often disarmingly charming father and about how that bond is pelted by the storms of divorce and alcoholism. Father of the Rain covers 34 years in the life of Daley Amory, bookended by the summer of Richard Nixon's resignation and President Obama's election in 2008. The political markers are significant, spanning an age of cynical disenchantment with the Establishment to an augury of unexpected hope. The novel is set in an affluent East Coast seaside town, where Gardiner Amory has a life that revolves around dogs, tennis, martinis, a swimming pool, and step families. A Harvard-educated broker, he is a racist, anti-Semite, and sexist. King is skilled at zeroing in on the nitty-gritty dynamics of the intense father-daughter relationship, but it is her sympathetic ancillary characters and two strategic jumps in her narrative that add texture and save it from claustrophobia.

Breath by Tim Winton, 2009, * * * *

2011-02-02T13:13:00.005-05:00

In Breath, Tim Winton, evokes an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one's limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It is a story of extremes--extreme sports and extreme emotions. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrill-seeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. Their mentor's past is forbidden territory and his American wife's peculiar behavior indicates an unknown illness, possibly physical or mental. Winton excels at conveying the shadowy side of his country's beauty, the way even the most ordinary landscape can exert a paralyzing hold. Tim Winton is the prolific Australian author of nine novels, three short-story collections, six children's books, and three nonfiction books. This novel is a paean to surfing but it treats elemental themes of fear and friendship, loneliness and boredom, the lure and danger of life lived intensely, and the broken promises of adolescence sliding into middle age. The sensitivities and vulnerabilities of adolescence are depicted here with deft and painful accuracy.

Room by Emma Donaghue, 2010, * * * * *

2010-11-06T14:01:00.002-04:00

At the start of Donoghue's powerful new novel, Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier as a 19-year old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard - the "Room" of the title. To Jack, "Room" is his entire world. It is where he was born and grew up and it's where he lives with his "Ma" as they learn, read, eat, sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts hims safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when the kidnapper , dubbed "Old Nick" by Jack, visits. Seen entirely through Jack's eyes and childlike perceptions, the developments in this novel are astonishing. Ma proves to very resourceful, creating exercise games, makeshift toys, and reading and math lessons to fill their days. However, she knows that this is not enough - not for her or her son. She devises a bold escape plan that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work. Although Donoghue brilliantly protrays the psyche of a child raised in captivity, the story's intensity cranks up dramatically when Jack is introdced to the outside world. While there have been several true-life stories of women and children held captive, little has been written about the pain of re-entry. Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between a parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, 2010, * * * *

2010-11-04T15:28:00.005-04:00

Freedom is a close cousin to Franzen's previous novel - The Corrections - a social-realist epic about a depressive, entropic midwestern family being swallowed and digested by the insatiable anaconda of modernity. The Corrections told the story of the Lamberts—Arthur and Enid and their three children. Freedom tells the story of the Berglunds—Walter and Patty and their two children. Instead of St. Jude (a proxy for St. Louis) we have St. Paul. Instead of a dubious get-rich-quick scheme exploiting the post-Soviet chaos in

Lithuania

, we have a dubious get-rich-quick scheme exploiting the war in

Iraq

. Like its predecessor, Freedom is heavy on psychology and extramarital affairs and earnest speechifying (capitalism, overpopulation,

Israel

). Freedom tells a lot of stories, and it spreads them over many decades and several continents. It tracks the rise of a rock star, the gentrification of a city neighborhood, the tragic death of a basketball career, the suburbanization of a nameless country pond, and the dirty birth of an international bird sanctuary. The book’s central drama, however, is an old-fashioned love story: the tumultuous lifelong relationship between Walter and Patty Berglund. Walter is a nature lover who works hard to suppress his anger and provide for everyone around him. Patty is a college basketball star who blows out her knee and becomes a housewife. Each fills certain gaping spiritual holes for the other until eventually, over the years, their relationship becomes hellaciously complex. As the novel progresses, you see this relationship from many different perspectives—Walter’s, Patty’s, their son Joey’s, their friend Richard’s—and each view subtly tweaks the story, swinging blame, exposing motives, recasting villains as heroes and heroes as villains. It made me think, many times, of one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite edicts about fiction: that the good stuff can make readers feel less lonely.

Ape House by Sara Gruen, 2010, * * *

2010-10-12T08:22:00.002-04:00

Sara Gruen's last novel, the enchating circus-set Water for Elephants in 2006, became a bestseller primarily through word of mouth, and I expect that most book clubs in America have read it. As this book opens, a family of bonobos is happily ensconced at the fictional Great Ape Language Lab at the University of Kansas. They are adoringly cared for and studied by Dr. Isabel Duncan, who calls them her family. Gruen delicately and profoundly brings life to that oft-quoted statistic -- Bonobos and humans share 98.7% of their DNA. In this book, when it comes to the bst human qualities -- empathy, good humor, the ability to adapt, loyalty -- the apes win easily. Gruen gives each of her apes a distinct personality, and just as with people, it gets to the point where all she has to do is to described a behavior, and we know which member of the pack she is talking about. She exquisitely depicts their gentleness, humor and curiosity, as well as their tendency to pettiness. The plot, however, doesn't really matter. It involves a misguided animal rights group, a nasty explosion, a reality TV show, a journalist and a would-be author. Yet it is truly about the aples, the humans and their interactions and similarities -- sometimes mouth-gapingly shastly, sometimes hold-your-sides hilarious. Gruen must have picked up a thing or t wo about the circus from Water for Elephants as she navigates the tightrope above the minefield topics of animal rights, evolution, and seriouis vs. tabloid journalism and more.

Still Life by Louise Penny, 2005, * * * *

2010-10-11T23:07:00.004-04:00

The residents of a tiny Canadian village named Three Pines are shocked when the body of Miss Jane Neal is found in the woods on Thanksgiving. Miss Neal, the village’s retired school teacher and a talented amateur artist, has been a good friend to most of the townsfolk, so her loss is keenly felt, At first, her death appears to be a tragic accident … it is after all, deer hunting season and it appears that a stray hunter’s arrow killed her. Some folks, however, are suspicious and Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, of the Montreal Surete is called in to investigate. His team soon finds that the seemingly peaceful and friendly village hides some dark secrets. This is the first is yet another series that I was late to the game on and I can’t wait to read the second in the series A Fatal Grace. The characters are delightful and Louise Penny makes mayhem seem delightful. Still Life introduces readers to an engaging series hero in Inspector Gamache, who commands his forces - and this series - with integrity and quiet courage, but produces a new writer of traditional mysteries in the person of Louise Penny.

Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian, 1981, * * * * *

2010-10-04T16:12:00.006-04:00

Not everybody had a good time as an evacuee during the Second World War, but for eight-year-old Willie Beech, suddenly transferred from a deprived London background into the heart of the country, it is literally a lifeline. Willie is dumped on grumpy old Tom Oakley, the sharp-tongued widower, but he soon finds that Mister Tom is fair and friendly. Tom had heard of “ungrateful” and “wild” but Willie is different. He is so malnourished he can’t keeper a proper meal down, he wets the bed, he can’t read or write and he shivers and trembles a lot. Willie's needs are clear. And, to the intense interest of the entire village of Little Weirwold, Tom Oakley's stern manner melts slowly away as he takes on the task of raising Willie Beech. It's a voyage of discovery for both of them. Willie learns how it feels to have a proper home and friends, and Tom confronts the grief of bereavement which caused him to withdraw from village life all those years ago, when his young wife and baby son died. The whole project nearly founders when Willie's mother recalls him to London. Returning reluctantly, Willie faces unspeakable horrors before he is rescued by Tom, who travels through an air-raid in London to search for him. This book is a gentle and moving story about the developing relationship of trust and love between Willie and Tom and is an engrossing and poignant story with sunlight to balance the darkness. I was amazed that I had never heard of the book before but would highly recommend it for adults as well as young readers.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005, * * * *

2010-09-22T10:22:00.004-04:00

From the acclaimed author of "The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy, now thirty-one years old, lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbe, even comforted-by their isolation, but also describes scenes of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work. Whether you consider this a love story, mystery, or science fiction, this poignant novel will hit you where you live. Ishiguro once again shows himself to be the master of the emotional epic. His spare but evocative prose draws you in, word by word, sentence by sentence, and by the time the ending is revealed, it's like losing hold of a beloved balloon and watching it float away. We can naively believe that once out of sight, it will continue on its journey, but the grimness of reality tells us otherwise.

Still Missing by Chevy Stevens, 2010, * * *

2010-09-22T09:50:00.004-04:00

In psychiatric sessions, Annie O'Sullivan, a 32-year-old realtor with a nice boyfriend and a demanding mother, describes her year-long ordeal as the captive of a rapist. Annie was about to close up an open house for a property when an affable guy who introduced himself as David showed up. In short order, David kidnapped her and held her hostage in a remote mountain cabin. There, he raped her daily, regulated every moment, and forced her to 'play house.' The intense plot alternates between Annie's creepy confinement, her escape, and her attempts to readjust to real life. Still, Annie knows that a large part of her soul is 'still missing.' Every day since her escape she feels closer to the edge, completely ready to snap from the fear, grief, guilt, and horror that she lives with. .Chevy Stevens weaves a story of utter horror as we follow Annie through her year of captivity, and through the days that follow her escape as she tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Annie makes a good protagonist as most people will be able to identify with her, having seen enough episodes of "CSI" and "Law and Order SVU". Annie intellectually knows all the things an abducted woman "should" do, and yet faced with the impossibility of her situation, she finds that all she really *can* do is just hold on and survive. The story is set on Vancouver Island and pulsates with suspense that gets a power boost from the jaw-dropping but credible closing twist.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman, 2010, * * *

2010-09-08T13:30:00.004-04:00

When I read the description for The Cookbook Collector, I was interested in reading about two sisters and their relationship with each other. Part of what made these two sisters interesting was how different they were - Jess is the free-spirited, tree loving, vegan sister, the perpetual student who flits aimlessly through life with a generous heart and a luminescent beauty that attracts people to her. Emily, the older sister, is the total opposite who at 26 is the CEO of Veritech, a promising dot.com. When the Publishers Weekly folks start tossing Jane Austen's name around, I expect a well-written, gentle comedy/satire. When a cover looks like an oil painting, I expect depth and quality. When the title includes the word COOKBOOK, I expect a soothing read. This is not that book. Ultimately, this is a book about a bunch of yuppie techies working 24/7 during the dot com bubble from 1999 through 2002. Given the present economy, I simply don't think readers are going to relate to that period today. The novel weaves back and forth between the various story arcs Emily and her business; her boyfriend Jonathan and his high-tech company; their relationship with each other; Jess and her environmental activism; Jess and her job at Yorick's, a bookstore run by a wealthy older man named George who is sort of commitment-phobic. In addition, there are numerous other threads which touch on themes such as Jewish mysticism, family secrets, cooking, and house restsoration. Overall, the quality of writing is above average but the multiple story arcs are uneven and insufficiently explored. It is an easy read, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The Good Son by Michael Gruber, 2010, * * *

2010-09-04T22:29:00.003-04:00

Bestseller Gruber (Forgery of Venus) explores America's political involvement in South Asia and the bloody religious and ethnic fanaticism associated with the region in his seventh novel. Sonia Laghari, a Pakistani-American writer and psychologist, sets up a conference on peace in Kashmir, 'the most terrorist-infested place on earth,' only to have her and her small group of pacifists abducted and held captive by terrorists, who may or may not be manufacturing nuclear weapons. All but doomed to a public beheading, Sonia uses her familiarity with Islamic doctrine as well as her knowledge of Jungian psychology to get into the heads of the captors. An additional story thread deals with her son, Theo, who is planning to rescue his mother. Once a member of the Afghan forces that fought the Russians, he is now doing black ops for the United. States Army. Although very competent in what he does, Theo seems less realistic than other characters in the story. The story is well told, but still lacks sympathetic characters. In fact, the overall story at times appear convoluted, almost as if Gruber isn't sure what should come next and the bombshells at the end strain credulity. However, the characters and labyrinthine plot line, not to mention the absorbing history of modern jihadism and the U.S. war on terrorism, make for an interesting thriller.

Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah, 1999. * * * * *

2010-09-04T20:22:00.002-04:00

Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel and manipulative Eurasian stepmother who makes Snow White's stepmother looks like a pussycat. Chinese proverbs scattered throughout the text pithily convey the traditional world view that prompted Adeline's subservience. Determined to survive through her enduring faith in family unity, Adeline struggled for independence as she moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States. A compelling, painful, and ultimately triumphant story of a girl's journey into adulthood, Adeline's story is a testament to the most basic of human needs: acceptance, love, and understanding. With a powerful voice that speaks of the harsh realities of growing up female in a family and society that kept girls in emotional chains, Falling Leaves is a work of heartfelt intimacy and a rare authentic portrait of twentieth-century China. Had she not escaped to America, where she experienced a fulfilling medical career and a happy marriage, her story would be unbearable – like an Asian version of Mommy Dearest.

Intuition by Allegra Goodman, 2006, * * * *

2010-09-04T19:15:00.003-04:00

Sandy Glass, a charismatic publicity-seeking oncologist, and Marion Mendelssohn, a pure, exacting scientist, are codirectors of a lab at the Philpott Institute dedicated to cancer research and desperately in need of a grant. Both mentors and supervisors of their young postdoctoral protégés, Glass and Mendelssohn demand dedication and obedience in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. When the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, a young postdoc in a rut, begin to work, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectations. But Cliff’s rigorous colleague — and girlfriend — Robin Decker suspects the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it. With extraordinary insight, Allegra Goodman brilliantly explores the intricate mixture of workplace intrigue, scientific ardor, and the moral consequences of a rush to judgment. She has written an unforgettable novel. If you’ve read about Intuition in the media, don’t be fooled. Yes, there are parallels between its plot and high-profile scientific scandals, but at heart it’s not about fraud. It’s about blurred lines: What is scientific genius, and what is leaping far beyond the data into the universe of imagination? Which mini-deviations from protocol are troubling and which are not? How can we tell if someone has crossed the line from embracing intuition for scientific good or departed the world of science altogether? A novel that sparks questions like these would make good fare for students in Ph.D.-granting science programs but Intuition is for everyone.

The Savage Garden by Mark Mills, 2007, * * *

2010-09-04T18:32:00.004-04:00

Two murders committed 400 years apart form the core of British author Mills's second novel (after Amagansett, which won a CWA Dagger Award). In 1958, Cambridge undergraduate Adam Strickland, who's studying a curious Tuscan Renaissance garden for his art history thesis, is equally intrigued by both the garden of the Villa Docci estate and its elderly owner, Signora Francesca Docci. Built by the villa's first owner, Federico Docci, in 1577, the garden was intended as a memorial to his wife, Flora, who died when she was only 25. In the course of his research, Adam begins to sense that events, both past and present, are not as clear-cut as they appear. In particular, he discovers that there are several versions of the death of Signora Docci's oldest son, Emilio, who was shot by the villa's German occupiers at the end of WWII. In Mills' hands this becomes a grandly written literary thriller that I found alternately fascinating and frustrating. It was frustrating because the opening sections move much too slowly and although each description of a statue or a landscape or a painting is lovely, there are far too many of them. My other objection is that much of Mills' plot is simply far-fetched where too many connections in The Savage Garden, like those in Sherlock Holmes stories, are more clever than plausible.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl, 1998, * * * *

2010-08-20T18:16:00.002-04:00

At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world....If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people, and the love of tales well told. The memoir recalls childhood time spent with her mom, who was "taste blind" but "could make a trip to the supermarket sound like an adventure"; teenage fun with friends, including a non-Jewish boyfriend, who referred to her scrumptious matzoh brei as "fried cardboard"; dinner parties and a growing dedication to civil rights activism during college. Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters that shaped her world and her tastes, from the gourmand Monsieur du Croix, who served Reichl her first soufflé, to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s, including famed chef Alice Waters. Spiced with Reichl's infectious humor and sprinkled with her favorite recipes, Tender at the Bone is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist's coming-of-age

Atonement by Ian McEwan, 2002, * * * * *

2010-08-20T17:11:00.003-04:00

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. Briony committs a dreadful crime, the guilt of which will color her entire life. In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. However, never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London’s World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound, and profoundly moving exploration, of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, 1976, * * * *

2010-08-20T15:31:00.003-04:00

Maupin's tale of a newcomer to San Francisco, the naive and reserved Mary Ann Singleton, and her misadventures with the residents of Barbary Lane (Mrs. Madrigal, the gay and proud Michael, the liberated Mona, etc.) is the stuff of Dickens' serials, brought to the 1970s in a flash of humor, adventure and out-and-out 1970s wackiness. First appearing as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle in the late 1970s, this six-volume collection provides a vivid flashback to that city and that time. Indeed, the series was written at a time when San Francisco's sense of itself and its community had not yet been swallowed by the consumerism of the 80s and 90s, and into the Dot-com economic revolution that eventually evaporated. Maupin, instead, takes you into an intensely tight-knit circle of friends and neighbors at Barbary Lane (the real Macondray Lane) on the slope of Russian Hill. There is a glimpse into gay life in the city in the pre-AIDS era. Maupin's writing is light and funny, self-referential and self-deprecating. I have read and re-read and re-re-read the entire series over and over again and have never failed to be entertained by the characters or the situations they find themselves in. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed a singular trail through popular culture - from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel to a television miniseries on both PBS and Showtime that entranced millions. Tales of the City is both a wry comedy of manners and a deeply moving portrait of a vanished era.

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed by Michael Kodas, 2008, * * *

2010-08-10T16:45:00.009-04:00

Michael Kodas, a journalist for the Hartford Courant and several other Connecticut people collaborate with a successful climber of Everest to make an attempt at the summit of the one mountain every mountaineer hungers to put on their resume. The book chronicles two parallel climbs,on opposite sides of the mountain - Mr Kodas's party, and a party fully funded by a wealthy transplanted Bolivian doctor from the Washington, D.C. area. There is pure tragedy in the doctor's party as he hired a guide whose credentials he trusts but who turns out to be the lowest sort of glory hound. Mr Kodas's party, not even starting out with all members on level footing, descends into a bickering, acrimonious mess, with sabotage, missing equipment, and cruelty thrown into the mix. Most of the book seesaws between the tale of the doctor, left to die by an unscrupulous guide, the doctor's daughter's subsequent and dogged efforts to find the truth, and Mr Kodas's trials with the fractious and foreboding leader of his expedition. High Crimes is a gripping and fascinating story proving that little has changed on Everest since Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into Thin Air was published over a decade ago. It is often difficult to comprehend what drives people to want to crawl up the face of a mountain, literally hanging in space, aware that they are courting frostbite, storms, failure, and death, from the capricious mountain they yearn to conquer. As it turns out, the mountain is almost the least of their worries!

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, 1997, * * * * *

2010-08-09T11:24:00.008-04:00

On May 10, 1996, writer Jon Krakauer found himself quite literally on top of the world when Outside Magazine sent him to Nepal to climb Mount Everest on a guided expedition and write about it. Krakauer thought he had a good angle. In the 43 years since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had become the first men to reach the 29,028-foot summit, Everest had become perceived as so routinely surmountable that a trip to the top was available to any fit climber with some mountaineering ability and the $65,000 cost of an expedition ticket. ''Hey, experience is overrated,'' guide Scott Fischer told him. ''We've got the Big E figured out....I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit.'' As Into Thin Air makes painfully clear, getting to the top is only half the battle, and overconfidence may be a good climber's most lethal enemy. Hours after Krakauer summited Everest a storm led to the deaths of two of his teammates as well as their guides, Rob Hall and Andy Harris, plus Fischer himself, who was leading a separate group up the mountain. Krakauer explores camaraderie of climbers, the commercialization of Everest, and the all-too-exploitable culture of the Sherpas, who are hired to haul equipment, supplies, and sometimes climbers as well. You are with him every step by debilitating step.

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, 2010, * * * * *

2010-07-31T09:45:00.006-04:00

Orringer's stunning first novel far exceeds the expectations generated by her much-lauded debut collection, How to Breath Underwater. In this WWII saga, Orringer illuminates the life of Andras Levi, a Hungarian Jew of meager means whose world is upended by a scholarship to the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris. There, he makes an unlikely liaison with ballet teacher Claire Morgenstern (ne Klara Hasz), a woman nine years his senior whose past links her to a wealthy Hungarian family. Against the backdrop of grueling school assignments, work at a theater, budding romance, and the developing kinship between Andras and his fellow Jewish students, Orringer ingeniously depicts the insidious reach of the growing tide of anti-Semitism that eventually lands him back in Hungary and into forced labor camps and beyond, shedding light on how Hungary treated its Jewish citizens. Throughout the hardships and injustices, Andras's love for Klara acts as a beacon through the unimaginable devastation and the dark hours of hunger, thirst, and deprivation . Orringer's triumphant novel is as much a lucid reminder of a time not so far away as it is a luminous story about the redemptive power of love." As Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay stated on the back cover, “To bring an entire lost world — its sights, its smells, its heartaches, raptures and terrors — to vivid life between the covers of a novel is an accomplishment; to invest that world, and everyone who inhabits it, with a soul, as Julie Orringer does in The Invisible Bridge, takes something more like genius." Orringer has a gift for re-creating distant times and places from a Paris suffused with the scents of food and sounds of American jazz, to the camraderies and cruelties of the Hungarian work camps. The ticking clock of history keeps the story urgent and moving forward, and the result is, against all odds, a Holocaust page-turner. I could not put it down.

My Life In France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme, 2006, * * * * *

2010-07-28T14:50:00.005-04:00

Most Americans know of Julia Child via the parodies of her cooking show --- a frowsy, big-boned matron with a trill in her voice, hacking up a chicken with more zest than is called for, most likely because she's been chugging the cooking sherry. Well, that was, on occasion, a fair take on Julia Child, the jolly chef who taught her fellow citizens the joy of French cooking on public television. But Julia Child was much more than a precursor of Martha Stewart. She was a revolutionary who had the great good fortune to find herself living in Paris with no job and nothing more compelling than a tentative interest in cooking. She signed up for classes at Cordon Bleu, got hooked, and soon found herself, with two friends, working on a book we now take for granted but was then unimagined --- an authoritative guide to French cooking for Americans. Published 40 years ago, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One has never gone out of print and it never will. Julia Child died in 2004. Of her 11 books, none was a memoir but she kept scribbles and letters, and at the end of her life, she began to shape this book with her grandnephew. Like almost everything she touched, My Life in France is a triumph --- insightful, poetic, deadly accurate about people, and, above all, tasty. But this is not a celebrity memoir. This book is called My Life in France for a reason --- the passages at Julia and Paul Child's home in the South of France lift off the page and surround you with laughter, wit and joy. This is a book about life - a wise life, a life of beauty, art, invention, and love. You can learn a lot from a life like that.

Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan, 2007, * * * * *

2010-07-27T12:36:00.004-04:00

Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. The novel is an intricate analysis of Mamah's emotional torments as an intellectual in her own right, wife, mother, friend, and member of society. It also touches on the human aspects of Wright in addition to his artistic talent and eccentricities. Throughout the novel, Mamah explains the artistic or philosophical underpinnings of Wright's extravagant views. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. The novel also explores the development of the feminist movement in the United States and Europe and Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes, 2010, * * *

2010-07-26T12:55:00.003-04:00

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also jungle rot, leeches dropping from tree branches, malnourishment, drenching monsoons, mudslides, exposure to Agent Orange, and wild animals. Brigade members not only face punishing combat but grapple with racial tensions, competing ambitions, duplicitous superior officers, bitterness, rage, disease, alcoholism, and hubris. When the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all consuming terror of combat and it is visceral. However, while the story is well written and compelling, it feels false in the end, more like a screenplay for Platoon or Full Metal Jacket than a novel that would rank alongside Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Marlantes is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, who clearly understands his playing field (including military jargon that can get lost in translation). By examining both the internal and external struggles of the battalion, he brings a long, torturous war back to life with realistic characters and authentic, thrilling combat sequences but too much happens too quickly, and often with too much foreshadowing. There is a lot to like in this book but a better editor could have slimmed it down and made it more focused.

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Gelman, 2001, * * * *

2010-07-21T17:22:00.008-04:00

In a small cemetery deep in the jungle of Borneo, two men climb into a freshly dug hole and retrieve the bones of a long-dead grandmother. An American guest joins the procession from the cemetery to the elaborately decorated village square for a traditional ceremony that will properly send Grandma off on her journey to the next world. A few years earlier the American guest, Rita Golden Gelman, a children's book author and the mother of two grown children, was living in a comfortable suburban home, dining in elegant restaurants, and attending glamorous parties and only dreamed of traveling to exotic places and experiencing other cultures. When her marriage failed, she decided to live her dream, sold all her possessions and, at forty-eight, took off to see the world. Although she's not athletically gifted or independently wealthy, Rita has climbed mountains, paddled up rivers, and subsisted for a year on what many people spend in a few months. In Tales of a Female Nomad, Rita shares how she has created a spectacular life, filled with interesting people, enlightening experiences, and fascinating adventures. She's observed orangutans in the rain forests of Borneo, served as an unofficial tour guide in the Galapagos, taught herself the Indonesian language, and forged many lasting cross-cultural friendships. Dynamic, vivacious, and a marvelous weaver of tales, Rita celebrates her glorious transformation from an unfulfilled suburbanite to a liberated and incredibly self-assured woman of the world. More than a travel memoir, Tales of a Female Nomad is the story of a woman's rebirth which proves beyond a doubt that anyone can cast away the burdens of conventional life at any age and continue — or begin — to thrive. I know most people rave about Eat, Pray, Love but for those, like me, who never gravitated to that book, this is a truly remarkable read that deserves recognition.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, 2010, * * *

2010-07-19T16:54:00.004-04:00

A family drama with stinging turns of dark comedy, the latest from Udall (The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint) is as comic as it is sublimely catastrophic. Golden Richards is a polygamist Mormon with four wives, 28 children, a struggling construction business, and a few secrets. He tells his wives that the brothel he's building in Nevada is actually a senior center, and, more importantly, keeps hidden his burning infatuation with a woman he sees near the job site. Golden, perpetually on edge, has become increasingly isolated from his massive family — given the size of his brood, his solitude is heartbreaking . Since the death of one of his children, Golden is not only lonesome but also many other things that, ideally, he would not be: indecisive, feckless, withdrawn and hesitant. Though it takes more than 200 pages to notice, the novel is set not in current times but in the 1970s. Golden’s children do not wrestle with technology, cable TV or the Internet; nor are they caught up in the culture wars nor are they cut off from modernity. This is a novel about family and modern America with a protagonist trying to balance home life, work, the demands of society, and the wayward tugs of the heart – he just happens to have four nuclear families, which makes his midlife crisis and potential affair a little more complicated than most. Udall is willing to tackle big issues and write a broad tale, and it is a good read. However, there is an edge that is missing – everything is a touch too neat and tidy, and maybe there's a little extra sugar on the bitter pills.

The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston,1994, * * * * *

2010-07-19T14:04:00.005-04:00

The Ebola virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard experts are terrified. It is airborne, it is extremely contagious, and in the winter of 1989, it seemed about to burn through the suburbs of Washington D.C. At Fort Detrick's USAMRIID, an Army research facility outside the nation's capital, a SWAT team of soldiers and scientists wearing biohazard space suits was organized to stop the outbreak of the exotic "hot" virus. The grim operation went on in secret for eighteen days, under unprecedented, dangerous conditions. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story in depth, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their outbreaks in the human race. From a remote African cave hot with Ebola virus, an airplane over Africa that is carrying a sick passenger who dissolves into a human virus bomb, and the confines of a Biosafety Level 4 military lab where scientists risk their lives studying lethal substances that could kill them quickly and horribly, The Hot Zone describes situations that used to be taken as science fiction. As the tropical wildernesses of the world are destroyed, previously unknown viruses that have lived undetected in the rain forest for eons are entering human populations. The appearance of AIDS is part of a larger pattern, and the implications for the future of the human species are terrifying. Although this book was written in 1994 this book brings up an all-important point -- we are only an airplane ride away from the outbreak of a pandemic. It is very possible that a highly contagious disease may break out and cover the earth in a matter of days leaving a large portion of the population dead, making the premise behind Stephen King's novel "The Stand" not so far fetched after all. Given the recent outbreaks of SARS, avian flu, and Swine flu, this book is extremely relevant for out times. I need to thank my daughter, the scientist and future virologist, for reminding me about this book.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow, 2010, * * *

2010-07-19T09:29:00.003-04:00

Durrow's debut novel draws from her own upbringing as the brown-skinned, blue-eyed daughter of a Danish woman and a black G.I. to create Rachel Morse, a young girl with an identical heritage growing up in the early 1980s. After a devastating family tragedy in Chicago. Subsequent to the event, she goes to live with the paternal grandmother she's never met, in a decidedly black neighborhood in Portland, Ore. Suddenly, at 11, Rachel is in a world that demands her to be either white or black. As she struggles with her grief and the haunting, yet-to-be-revealed truth of the tragedy, her appearance and intelligence place her under constant scrutiny. Although I have heard people say that this is a "social consciousness" novel about being mixed-race, that is not what I felt. It seemed more to be a novel about a lonely, confused, girl seeking an identity--as an individual even more than as a mixed-race person--through idolizing the mother she lost before she was old enough to really know her. It's difficult to tell, or maybe to believe, what identity Rachel finally finds and the first part of the novel felt very slow and distant. The second half of the novel touchingly covers the nuances of Rachel's development: her feelings, her conflicts with her judgmental but well-meaning grandmother, and her relationship with a liberal white college boy. The novel explores the complexities of racial identity and relationships in general but still appeared to be more of a “young readers” book.

Run by Ann Patchett, 2007, * * * *

2010-07-08T17:47:00.004-04:00

Bernadette and Bernard Doyle were a Boston couple who wanted to have a big lively family. They had one boy, Sullivan, and then adopted two black boys, Teddy and Tip. Mr. Doyle is a former mayor of Boston and he continues his interest in politics, hoping his boys will shape up one day for elected office, though none of them seems especially keen. Bernadette dies when the adopted kids are just four, and much of the book offers a requiem to her memory in particular and to the force of motherhood in lives generally. One night, during a heavy snowfall, Teddy and Tip accompany their father to a lecture given by Jesse Jackson and after the lecture, Tip gets into an argument with his father and walks backwards into an oncoming car. The car appears out of nowhere and so does a woman called Tennessee, who pushes Tip out of the car's path and is herself struck in the process of saving Tip. When Tennessee is taken to hospital, her daughter, Kenya, is left in the company of the Doyles. Relationships begin both to emerge and unravel, disclosing secrets, hopes, fears. Run shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met. As in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, 2007, * * * *

2010-07-08T15:57:00.001-04:00

It's not laws or constitutional theory that rules the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia have constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. Toobin distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. In 1979, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong published The Brethren, an eye-popping look into the closed world of the Supreme Court under then-Chief Justice Warren Burger. Toobin captures the personalities, rivalries, politics and principles that drive the court's decisions. With the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, this book should be required reading.

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson, 2004, * * * * *

2010-07-08T15:30:00.005-04:00

This superlative journalistic narrative tells of John Chatterton and Rich Kohler, two deep-sea wreck divers who in 1991 dove to a mysterious wreck lying at the perilous depth of 230 feet, off the coast of New Jersey. Both had a philosophy of excelling and pushing themselves to the limit; both needed all their philosophy and fitness to proceed once they had identified the wreck as a WWII U-boat. As Kurson, a writer for Esquire, narrates in his debut work, the two divers next undertook a seven-year search for the U-boat's identity inside the wreck, in a multitude of archives and in a host of human memories. Along the way, Chatterton's diving cost him a marriage, and Kohler's love for his German heritage helped turn him into a serious U-boat scholar. The two lost three of their diving companions on the wreck and their mentor, Bill Nagle, to alcoholism. (Chowdhury's The Last Dive, from HarperPerennial in 2002, covers two of the divers' deaths.) The successful completion of their quest fills in a gap in WWII history — the fate of the Type IX U-boat U-869. Chatterton and Kohler's success satisfied them and a diminishing handful of U-boat survivors. While Kurson doesn't stint on technical detail, lovers of any sort of adventure tale will certainly absorb the author's excellent characterizations, and particularly his balance in describing the combat arm of the Third Reich. Felicitous cooperation between author and subject rings through every page of this rare insightful action narrative. Readers energized by the suspense and adventure of The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air will be captivated by this remarkable account of wreck diving and discovery. Kurson narrates a compelling story in which lives are lost and history is rewritten.

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann, 2009, * * * * *

2010-06-28T20:18:00.004-04:00

Let the Great World Spin is a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. There are dozens of intimate tales and threads at the core of Let the Great World Spin. On one level there’s the funambulist, Philippe Petit, making his way on a high wire across the World Trade Center towers. However, as the story in the novel moves forward, the “walker” becomes less and less of a focal point and you begin to care more about the people down below, on the pavement, in the ordinary throes of their existence. There’s an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects; a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son blown up in Saigon; computer hackers who "visit" New York in an early echo of the Internet; an artist who has to learn to return to the simplicity of love; and a Bronx hooker who has brought up her children in “the house that horse built”--“horse” of course being the heroin that was ubiquitous in the '70s. The stories are interwoven so that it is one story..on one day.. in one city.. and yet it is also a history of the time. In Let the Great World Spin, you can’t ignore the overtones for today. Suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an act of redemption and beauty. I didn’t want to stop turning the pages.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson, 2010, * * *

2010-06-18T08:59:00.004-04:00

It is always cause for celebration when a debut author bursts on the scene with an original and whimsical novel that is bound to capture attention. And this novel -- Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- has much to recommend it. Major Pettigrew is a very proper and delightfully droll widower of 68 who resides in the quaint village of Edgecombe St. Mary in Sussex, England. He is also the father of Roger, a posturing and preening young man who has incorporated none of the values of his father. The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. The two of them must navigate the gossip and outright prejudice of their stilted society. It is also a charming English comedy of manners and, in places, a laugh-out-loud read. A scene, for example, where the atrocities of "Pakistani Partition" are reduced to a bad-taste dinner show or where the favored ducks of schoolchildren are chosen as prey for a duck hunt are spot-on. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand touches on many big issues: the clash of culture and religions, the greed of unbridaled globalization, the tension between fathers and sons, and family dynamics in general. At its heart, though, it is an old-fashioned love story and an ode for anyone who refuses to give up on life or love at any stage of life.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson, 2010, * * *

2010-06-10T14:51:00.002-04:00

As the final installment of Stieg Larsson's trilogoy, I wish I could say that this book was of the same caliber as that of the prior two books, but in my opinion, it was not. The book picked up right where the last, The Girl Who Played With Fire, left off, with Lisbeth Salander in the hospital being treated for her injuries. Mikael Blomkvist continues to sleuth on her behalf in order to expose those who have made her life hellish and attempted to frame her for all manner of crimes. All of the other familiar characters from the prior books return but the overall feel of the book is that it was the least edited and least considered of the three. This would make sense if Larsson had intended to go back and do some more tweaking and editing before publication, but he was obviously unable to do so following his death. There are entire sections of the book that meander on and on with no apparent purpose with regard to moving the story forward – these sections would have benefited greatly from some serious editorial paring. There are also way too many characters who have not appeared before, and like a Russian novel, you needed 3x5 cards to keep track of them and how they fit into the plot line. I simply could not put down the previous books, but I was nowhere near as riveted by this one. For the ending alone, this story is worth reading and I wavered between a 3-and 4- star review for this reason. Ultimately, I considered whether the book, standing alone without the previous two, would be a 4-star book, and I don't believe that would be the case. Anyone who has read the first two books simply will not be able to deny themselves the final installment, nor should they. It is a great loss that Mr. Larsson passed away before he could really fine-tune the final book, and before he could write another.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, 2006, * * * *

2010-05-31T10:40:00.003-04:00

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its ownway of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell. Jacob was there because his luck had run out, orphaned and penniless, he had no direction until he landed on this locomotive ;ship of fools. It was the early part of the Great Depression, and everyone in this third-rate circus was lucky to have any job at all. Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, was there because she fell in love with the wrong man, a handsome circus boss with a wide mean streak. And Rosie the elephant was there because she was the great gray hope, the new act that was going to be the salvation of the circus; the only problem was, Rosie didn't have an act and, in fact, she couldn't even follow instructions. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and ultimately, it was their only hope for survival. Surprising, poignant, and funny, Water for Elephants is that rare novel with a story so engrossing, one is reluctant to put it down; with characters so engaging, they continue to live long after the last page has been turned; with a world built of wonder, a world so real, one starts to breathe its air.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave, 2009, * * *

2010-05-29T10:12:00.005-04:00

Some 50 years ago, the region near Nigeria’s Atlantic coast provided the setting for Chinua Achebe’s haunting novel of a world torn asunder by the vicissitudes of Anglo-imperial expansion. To capture the tragedy of colonialism in that account, “Things Fall Apart,” Achebe looked to Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” for inspiration: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. Chris Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian, puts a modern-day spin on Achebe’s concerns with his immensely readable and moving novel. While the pretext of “Little Bee” initially seems contrived — two strangers, a British woman and a Nigerian girl, meet on a lonely African beach and become inextricably bound through the horror imprinted on their encounter — its impact is hardly shallow. Rather than focusing on postcolonial guilt or African angst, Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers’ conceptions of civility, of ethical choice. Sarah O’Rourke might appear to be an insipid character, with her career at a British magazine, her Batman-costumed young son, her uninspiring lover and her gentrified Surrey lifestyle. When juxtaposed with the Nigerian refugee called Little Bee — whom we first meet behind the razor wire of a British immigration center — Sarah is unsympathetic, even tiresome. But that impression changes partway through the novel when a flashback to Africa reveals her fortitude. London, with its dizzying abundance and multiculturalism, looks like a parallel universe when compared with the impoverished Nigerian village where Little Bee grew up. Yet it’s this same village that instilled in Little Bee the skills and values needed to help her navigate toward her own scarred survival. Like Little Bee, Sarah is a survivor. But the lessons of the past are not enough to steer either woman to safety. Instead, in a world full of turpitude and injustice, it is their bold, impulsive choices that challenge the inevitability of despair, transforming a political novel into an affecting story of human triumph.

Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point by David Lipsky, 2003, * * * * *

2010-05-27T09:53:00.003-04:00

David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone writer and an award-winning novelist, chronicles daily life at the U.S. Military Academy during the most tumultuous period in its history. In 1998, West Point made David Lipsky an unprecedented offer: stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America's most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars, and training exercises, from arrival through graduation. By telling their stories, he also examines the Academy as a reflection of our society: Are its principles of equality, patriotism, and honor quaint anachronisms or is it still, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, the most "absolutely American" institution? During arguably the most eventful four years in West Point's history, Lipsky witnesses the arrival of TVs and phones in dorm rooms, the end of hazing, and innumerable other shifts in policy and practice known collectively as The Changes. He uncovers previously unreported scandals and poignantly evokes the aftermath of September 11, when cadets must prepare to become officers in wartime. Absolutely American spotlights a remarkable ensemble of characters: a former Eagle Scout who struggles with every facet of the program, from classwork to marching; a foul-mouthed party animal who hates the military and came to West Point to play football; a farm-raised kid who seems to be the perfect soldier, despite his affection for the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe. Many of them thrive under the rigorous regimen; others battle endlessly just to survive it. This was a fascinating, funny and tremendously well written account of life on the Long Gray Line -- a superb description of modern military culture, and one of the most gripping accounts of university life I have ever read. As the cadets finally graduate and launch their careers, you may feel like a proud parent or friend standing in the crowd and cheering their accomplishments

Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders, 2009, * * * *

2010-05-24T16:34:00.009-04:00

A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," and the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. for which she currently serves as a consultant The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through another world as unknown as it is unexpected. Patients want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. "When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is, ‘What is wrong with me?’" The ability to give this unfamiliar place a name, restores a measure of control, independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose illness and disease. Yet mistakes are still made, diagnoses missed, and symptoms or tests are misunderstood. Through dramatic stories of patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of understanding the patient’s story, the challenges of a good history & physical; the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. Dr. Sanders chronicles the real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical mysteries while illustratating the art and the science of diagnosis.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande, 2010, * * * *

2010-05-24T16:17:00.005-04:00

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies--neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. Harvard Medical School prof and New Yorker scribe Gawande (Complications) notes that the high-pressure complexities of modern professional occupations overwhelm even their best-trained practitioners; he argues that a disciplined adherence to essential procedures — by ticking them off a list — can prevent potentially fatal mistakes and corner cutting. He examines checklists in aviation, construction, and investing, but focuses on medicine, where checklists mandating simple measures have dramatically reduced hospital-caused infections and other complications. He's at his best delivering his usual rich, insightful reportage on medical practice, where checklists have the subversive effect of puncturing the cult of physician infallibility and fostering communication and teamwork. Gawande gives a vivid, punchy exposition of an intriguing idea: that by-the-book routine trumps individual prowess. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help.

White Tiger by Aravind Adiger, 2008, * * * *

2010-05-14T15:41:00.002-04:00

In his debut novel, Aravind Adiga takes on some hefty issues: the unhappy division of social classes into haves and have-nots, the cultural imperialism of the First World, the powder-kegged anger that seethes among the world's dispossessed, and entrapment. The plot centers on Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in 'the Darkness,' a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord's westernized sons, Ashok. It's in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there's a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which his ambition plays out. A key metaphor in the novel is the "rooster coop". Balram recognizes that those who are eaten are trapped inside a small and closed cage--the rooster coop--that limits their opportunities. Even worse, they begin to internalize the limitations and indignities of the coop, so that after awhile they're unable to imagine they deserve any other world than the cramped one in which they exist. Balram's dream is to break free of his coop, to shed his feathers and become what for him is a symbol of individualism, power, and freedom: a white tiger. But as he discovers, white tigers have their own cages, too. Of course, it's not simply the Balram's of the world caught in the rooster coop. Adiga's point seems to be that even the world's most privileged suffer from a cultural and class myopia that limits perspective and distorts self-understanding. The White Tiger is a good tonic with which to clear one's vision and spread one's wings.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis, 2010, * * * *

2010-05-13T12:30:00.004-04:00

When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine, and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread. That area belongs to the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking. The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling book Liar's Poker. Who got it right? He asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? What qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, 2004, * * *

2010-05-13T10:22:00.003-04:00

In this fourth novel from Whitbread winner Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum), private detective Jackson Brodie — ex-cop, ex-husband and weekend dad — takes on three cases involving past crimes that occurred in and around London. The first case introduces two middle-aged sisters who, after the death of their vile, distant father, look again into the disappearance of their beloved sister Olivia, last seen at three years old. A retired lawyer, who lives only on the fumes of possible justice, next enlists Jackson's aid in solving the brutal killing of his grown daughter 10 years earlier. In the third "cold" case, the sibling of an infamous ax-bludgeoner seeks a reunion with her niece, who as a baby was a witness to murder. Jackson's reluctant persistence heats up these cold cases and by happenstance leads him to reassess his own painful history. The cases are all quite dark, and Atkinson does a good job of conveying the sense of sorrow and loss that surrounds each. Jackson pursues them without a lot of hope but with due diligence and as in so many procedurals, discovers threads to each that went unexplored. The chapters hopscotch between the different storylines, and the plot unravels in the manner of a good airplane or beach read but it's pretty easy to pick up the clues Atkinson drops, and thus, figure out the conclusion well before the ending and the conclusion to the book wasn't as satisfying as it could have been. It was good but not great.

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks, 2009, * * *

2010-05-12T13:29:00.006-04:00

In London, three weeks before Christmas 2007, the lives of several characters intersect and intercut each other. With savage accuracy, the story skewers the banking industry and the subprime mortgage crisis while also touching on the evils of Islamic fundamentalism, the British school system, reality TV, role-playing computer games, and critics who delight in giving bad book reviews. The financial explanations are well researched and accurate, but they slow down the plot. The main characters are a hedge fund manager trying to pull off the biggest trade of his career and a Scottish-born student led astray by Islamist theory but the other characters, among them a Tube driver, a soccer player, a book reviewer and a barrister get short shrifted in the novel. I found this book to be unfailingly depressing where all of the characters are either unpleasant or totally obnoxious and it represents a sad commentary on the author's apparent opinion of the greedy, shallow, and class conscious inhabitants of today's United Kingdom. All of this might have been good anti-bourgeois fun, along the lines of recent novels by Jonathan Dee (The Privileges) and Adam Haslett (Union Atlantic) that also feature criminal financiers, if Faulks hadn’t confused the moral calculus by introducing terrorism into the story In the end, most of the characters and story lines felt like they were added to fatten the book as if a student was trying to satisfy a teacher’s requirement for a 10-page term paper and ultimately the book ends with a thud. Perhaps, however, there is something to be said for not giving a formulaic ending - everything continues "as is" despite upheavals in the world and with the characters.

The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them by Amy Dickinson, 2009, * * *

2010-04-15T17:46:00.006-04:00

I am one of Amy Dickinson;s biggest fans – having become familiar with her from reading her nationally syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" and from hearing her wit and wisdom as a featured guest on NPR's weekly news quiz “Wait.Wait…Don’t Tell Me.” Her motto is "I make the mistakes so you don't have to" and in The Mighty Queens of Freeville Amy Dickinson shares those mistakes and her remarkable story. Dickinson traces her own personal history, as well as the history of her mother's family whose members make up the 'Mighty Queens' of Freeville, N.Y., the small town where Dickinson was raised, and where she raised her own daughter, following stints in New York, London, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. After she found herself a reluctant single parent, her mother, aunts and sisters helped her to pick up the pieces when her life fell apart, and to reassemble them into something new. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates, teaches Sunday school, and moves across the country with her daughter and their giant tabby cat. A tale of promise postponed and scrappy survival, Amy Dickinson's glorious triumphs are like rabbits pulled out of a hat, one after another after another. Full of hope and humor and big simple truths, it is a story told with grace and without a trace of cynicism. This is a book you will love and one you will be truly sad to finish.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by R.Skloot, 2010, * * * * *

2010-04-14T10:47:00.005-04:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the tale of a 31-year old black mother of five in Baltimore, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue sample from her cervix to research and they spawned the first viable, indeed immortal, cell lines ever grown in a laboratory. These cell lines have since spawned a multibillion dollar industry - yet her descendents have received no financial compensation and cannot even afford health care. Until Rebecca Skloot, a science reporter, began her 10-year quest to learn about the woman whose cell line had saved millions of lives, the woman behind the HeLa cells was virtually unknown. HeLa cells (named for the first two initials of Henrietta Lacks's first and last names) have been responsible for unlocking the secrets of cancer and various viruses and have been essential to the development of in vitro fertilization, the polio vaccine, cloning and gene mapping. The interactions between Skloot, a white woman, and the initially wary Lacks family contribute to this fascinating story and what emerges is a sweeping account of race, gender, ethics, class, economics, science and medical treatment and how they intersect in an unequal health care system. In her summary Ms. Skloot discusses Myriad Genetics, a company that holds patents on several genes, including two genetic markers for breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2. In a wide reaching ruling by a federal judge delivered on March 29, 2010, those patents were struck down in an argument stating that genes are products of nature and thus occur naturally. This book could not be more relevant.

Life in the Balance: A Physician's Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss with Parkinson's Disease and Dementia by Thomas Graboys, 2008, * * * *

2010-04-01T13:35:00.002-04:00

At the top of his professional game at 49, as a renowned Boston cardiologist on both the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the staff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Thomas Graboys began having unusual physical and mental symptoms. As he was at a personal nadir, following the death of his wife, he at first ignored the signs. However, despite his best efforts to control the situation, first through denial, then by reducing his private-practice patient load, the symptoms doggedly progressed. In the meantime, he remarried. When he passed out on his wedding day, he knew his problems were more serious than he wanted to admit. Before long, he was diagnosed with the double whammy of Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, an associated degenerative disease. In this stirring and chilling memoir, he takes an unblinking look at himself as his mind and body suffer unrelenting hits from those progressive illnesses. This is an unflinching memoir of a devastating illness as only a consummate physician could write it including reflections by Graboys’ daughters, sons-in-law, and other members of the families blended by his marriage. In his joint roles as physician and patient, Dr. Graboys finds a way to convey hope, optimism and an appreciation of what it means to be truly alive. A remarkable book.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, 2010, * * * *

2010-03-31T14:24:00.004-04:00

In So Much for That, Lionel Shriver tackles large subjects — marriage, illness, and the failure of the American healthcare system — and dissects them with her astute and critical insights. Since selling his handyman home repair business and netting over $700,000, Shep Knacker has fantasized about what he calls “The Afterlife” - taking his family off to a faraway, third world country, where his savings will last them forever and they can lead the good life. This dream is shattered when his wife is diagnosed with cancer. Lionel Shriver recounts the intertwined stories of several characters suffering from serious medical conditions and, in the process, creates a harrowing picture of the fallout that the current health care and insurance system can have on middle-class people struggling to care for their families. There is one farcical plot development that is poorly woven into the emotional fabric of the story, but Ms. Shriver's understanding of her characters is so intimate and unsentimental that it lofts the novel over such bumpy passages. She turns her schematic outline into a visceral and deeply affecting story, a story about how illness affects people’s relationships, and how their efforts to grapple with mortality reshapes the arcs of their lives.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick,, 2009, * * *

2010-03-23T10:00:00.007-04:00

Seduction, marriage, money, sex, drugs, murder... Set in rural Wisconsin in 1907, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for a “reliable wife” However, when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the simple, honest woman that Ralph is expecting. She is complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Driven by a mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, Ralph marries Catherine anyway. The story of Ralph and Catherine is wicked and tense, presented as a series of sepia tableaux, interrupted by flashes of bright red violence. Robert Goolrick's novel purports to be a suspenseful seduction set in a world that has gone temporarily off its axis. A Reliable Wife is a nearly forensic look at love in all its incarnations, damages, deceptions, and obsessions, run through with points of light and pinned with ruinous truths. Although I read this book in one sitting, the story is not believable, least of all the character's "over the top" raging passions. At times it reads more like a "bodice ripping" soap opera.

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, 2009, * * * *

2010-03-18T15:14:00.004-04:00

Set just after the events of September 2001, the novel deals with anxiety and disconnection of a post-9/11 America, and focuses on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in 'the Athens of the Midwest,' is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. The novel is full of mordant humor in shades of gray to charcoal, a quirky, self-deprecating heroine who notices both too much and not enough about the people in her life, depictions of contemporary American mores and fripperies, and finally, a double examination of the fragility of love's intent. As the year unfolds Tassie's own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall, 2009, * * * *

2010-03-17T18:29:00.002-04:00

Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world's greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong. Isolated by savage terrain, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author trains for a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder. Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body.

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman,1989,* * * *

2010-03-17T18:00:00.005-04:00

Winner of the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction, this extraordinary bestseller is still the most incisive, thought-provoking book ever written about the Middle East. Thomas L. Friedman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, and now the Foreign Affairs columnist on the op-ed page of the New York Times, drew on his ten years in the Middle East to write a book that The Wall Street Journal called "a sparkling intellectual guidebook... an engrossing journey not to be missed." Friedman, although Jewish, has many misgivings about Israeli actions in their conflicts of the past several decades and is not afraid to tell the truth when detailing Arab atrocities. Friedman's account of Hafez al-Asad's massacre of his own people in the town of Hama, Syria, is one that should be read by every Westerner -- especially those who think the Jews, aided by America, simply "stole" a small plot of Arab land from an otherwise friendly group of people. Now with a new chapter that brings the ever-changing history of the conflict in the Middle East up to date, this seminal historical work reaffirms both its timeliness and its timelessness.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson,2009,* * * * *

2010-03-12T11:40:00.002-05:00

Fans of intelligent page-turners will be more than satisfied by Larsson's follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which introduced crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and punk hacker savant Lisbeth Salander. This time Blomkvist has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business leaders and government officials. On the eve of publication, the two people responsible for the story, Dag Svensson and his girlfriend Mia Johansson, are found brutally murdered in their Stockholm apartment. Salander, who has a history of violent tendencies, becomes the prime suspect after the police find her fingerprints on the murder weapon. Blomkvist plunges into his own investigation of the murders while Salander is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey. The two central characters transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader's mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability These are addictive thrillers and everyone I know who reads them gets hooked. I can’t wait for the third and final installment: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy, 2009, * *

2010-03-11T13:47:00.003-05:00

Charleston, S.C., Gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Also, given the incredibly ugly episodes among some of the characters in their teenage years, it is not plausible that as adults they were regularly socializing and calling each other "friends." There are also so many “high drama” episodes that the book began to seem like the plot of a soap opera as opposed to a story that one could imagine as true. I was looking forward to Conroy’s first novel in 14 years, and although mesmerized by the main character, I was not overly impressed.

Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom, 2010, * * * *

2010-03-11T13:18:00.003-05:00

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times-bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship. Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe. Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in a whole book.

Provenance by Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo, 2009, * * * * *

2010-03-04T11:39:00.002-05:00

A decade-long art scam that sullied the integrity of museum archives and experts alike is elegantly recounted by husband-and-wife journalists Salisbury and Sujo. In 1986, when struggling painter and single father John Myatt advertised copies of famous paintings, he never imagined he'd become a key player in one of Britain's biggest art frauds. Myatt soon met John Drewe, the consummate con man. Drewe told Myatt he was a lecturer in nuclear physics, a consultant to the ministry of defense, a descendant of the Earl of York, a weapons expert and an art collector. None of it was true. It could have been the basis for the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley. Soon Drewe passed off Myatt's work as genuine, including paintings in the style of artists like Alberto Giacometti, Ben Nicholson, Georges Braque and Nicolas de Staël. When buyers expressed concern about the works' provenance (the history of the ownership) Drewe used a painstaking process to ginn up receipts for prior purchases; created catalogs for exhibitions that never took place; and fabricated records for restoration work. In a master stroke, he smooth-talked his way into the files of the prestigious Tate Gallery in London, where he inserted some of his phony documents into the existing archives. The files remain tainted to this day. Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. However, this not fiction! Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, 2009, * * *

2010-02-26T17:47:00.004-05:00

In my continuing fascination with the Amazon, I just finished The Lost City of Z. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, the New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve one of the great exploration mysteries of the twentieth century. What happened to the famous British explorer, Percy Harrison Fawcett? Fawcett disappeared, under unknown circumstances in 1925, when he ventured into the Amazon hoping to discover an ancient lost civilization in the uncharted jungles of Brazil, a place known only as “Z”. Grann's book is primarily concerned with Fawcett's last expedition, but he recounts Fawcett's entire career. It is hard to imagine what it took to strike out into the absolute unknown--with little or no communication with civilization--sometimes for years at a time. Fawcett and his companions routinely faced starvation, intense thirst, insect infestation, poisonous snakes, piranhas, and indiginous tribes not welcome to outsiders. Mr. Grann’s style is chatty but really adds little to a story that needs absolutely NO padding. The basis for this book is a 2005 article he wrote, and that may be a more distilled account. In addition, maps and photos would have greatly helped. This book reminded me of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer – if I ever had illusions about the allure of the Amazon, it is completely gone. Brad Pitt has optioned the book rights for a major motion picture and the story of Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett has recently been told on CBS's Sunday Morning on CBS.

Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Rain Forest by Mark Plotkin,1994, * * * * *

2010-02-26T10:47:00.004-05:00

For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. The Amazon is the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet, as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, Mark. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest which has a fragile ecosystems that is succumbing to overdevelopment. He combines the Darwinian spirit of the great writer/explorers of the nineteenth century with a very modern concern for the erosion of this environment and the vanishing culture of native peoples. His research has been featured in Life, Newsweek, Smithsonian, Time, and the New York Times as well as PBS's Nova and the Academy Award-winning documentary Amazon. Western medicine is just beginning to value the curative powers of plants and herbs found in the Amazon rain forest and this story is truly an anthropological adventure that also vividly clarifies what destruction of the rain forests may ultimately cost humanity

House of Happy Endings: A Memoir by Leslie Garis, 2007 * * * *

2010-02-23T16:41:00.004-05:00

Artfully stitched like a well-made quilt, Leslie Garis's memoir encompass three generations - her grandmother Lilian, who wrote the early Bobbsey Twins, grandfather Howard Garis, who created and virtually became Uncle Wiggily, and her father Roger Garis, a playwright, novelist and magazine writer. Along with her mother and brothers, they all inhabited a vast home in Amherst, Massachusetts, known as "The Dells", where Robert Frost and Tennessee Williams were frequent visitors. Roger Garis, Leslie’s father, aimed higher than his parents, but withered in their shadows, descending into mental illness characterized by raging mood swings, drug abuse, and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. In this spellbinding memoir , Lesie Garis chronicles how the years damaged her father, mother; and brothers. In lesser hands, the quarrels, litigation and violence might control the narrative, as the family copes with disappointment, financial stress, nervous breakdowns, physical illness and death. However, Garis's capacity for conveying the family's vibrancy and vigor triumphs with unsentimental affection, grace and painful honesty. I was privileged to know Mabel Garis, Leslie’s mother, when I lived in Amherst and this story is a true testament to her character.

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, 2009, * * * *

2010-02-19T15:05:00.003-05:00

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq which he called “the surge”. He said: “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences.” A skeptical nation listened and among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed "The Rangers". About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them. For the 2-16, waning violence still meant wild firefights, nerve-wracking patrols through hostile neighborhoods, trash piles that could hide an IED, and dozens of comrades killed and maimed. Finkel's firsthand view is limited, however, as the soldiers' perspective is one of constant reaction to attacks and crises with little sense of exactly how and why the new American counterinsurgency methods calmed the Iraqi maelstrom or what constitutes a success. This book combines the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and is an unforgettable work of reporting. David Finkel has produced a story not just about the Iraq War, but of all wars. Finkel's firsthand description presents an honest, painful and beautifully rendered account of the American experience in Iraq. .

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreier, 1925, * * * *

2010-02-19T13:41:00.002-05:00

This novel by Theodore Dreiser presents Clyde Griffiths, an ordinary young man who is the discontented offspring of a family of street preachers. Readers are immersed in his social background so they can understand how dreams of improving his economic status and social relevance are involved when Clyde is accused of a vicious murder. Dreiser offers the reader complex insinuations about the extent of Clyde's guilt which result in an examination of sexual hypocrisy, financial pressures, and governmental dishonesty. Even to the end, before his execution, Clyde's inability to comprehend his own blame is a true representation of human nature. Dreiser's triumph is his talent to provide a magnificently ominous picture of how evil can sneak up on a situation and render it poisonous. Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an overturned boqat and the body of a 20-year-old named Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in upstate New York. Chester Gilletee was put on trial, convicted, and executed by electric chair in 1908. The murder rial drew international attention and the book was the inspiration for the award-winning film "A Place in the Sun". This is an American Classic.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, 2009, * *

2010-02-17T12:39:00.006-05:00

This book's narrative takes place over a twelve-hour period and is set within the hidden chambers, tunnels and temples of the Freemasons. Freemasonry is a fraternal organization that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century and now exists in various forms all over the world. The various forms all share moral and metaphysical ideals, which include, in most cases, a constitutional declaration of belief in a Supreme Being. As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Dr. Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn and a disturbing object--artfully encoded with five symbols--is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom. While this all sounds fascinating, The book follows similar patterns in plot as Brown's previous books, which is wont to happen when the the same main charater is utilized. However, I was never convinced that Dan Brown could surpass the success of The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons, and was disappointed in the writing inThe Lost Symbol. Yet again, Dr. Robert Langdon is called upon to save the world from some menacing threat that only he can uncover but the mysteries and secrets of the Freemasons didn't engage me as the other books had.

Shibumi by Trevanian, 1979, * * * * *

2010-02-15T10:32:00.005-05:00

Nicholai Hel is the world’s most wanted man. Born in Shanghai during the chaos of World War I, he is the son of an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father. As the protégé of a Japanese Go master. Nicolai survived the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world’s most artful lover and its most accomplished—and well-paid—assassin. He is a genius, a mystic, and a master of language and culture, with a secret determination to attain a state of effortless perfection known only as "shibumi". Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his exquisite mistress, Hel is unwillingly drawn back into the life he’d tried to leave behind. Hel is soon being tracked by his most sinister enemy—a supermonolith of international espionage known only as the Mother Company. The battle lines are drawn: ruthless power and corruption on one side, and on the other . . . "shibumi". Behind the spectacular writing, and a rousing adventure story, there are some unique human questions. At its core, Shibumi is about finding personal peace in an imperfect world. The writing is so good, you are willing to indulge the author and believe in Nicolai Hel and his world. Nicolai Hel is an unlikely 'everyman' in a strange morality tale. This book was referred to me by my sister and is one of my all-time favorites.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, 2001. * * * * *

2010-02-13T13:32:00.003-05:00

When London was stricken by the bubonic plague in the years 1665-1666, the houses of plague victims were sealed and guarded, locking in the well with the ill, allowing no access to food, water or human comfort. It was quite extraordinary then that the small village of Eyam, Derbyshire, encouraged by the young Rector William Mompesson, voluntarily quarantined themselves in their own "wide green prison." Gerladine Brooks, former war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, and bestselling author of March and People of the Book visited Eyam in the 1990s and inspired by the story, crafted this riveting novel. The narrator is 18-year-old Anna Frith, who emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. After a flea-infested bolt of cloth arrives from London, the plague is manifested in Eyam, and through Anna's eyes we see how she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders." This is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history, written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing "an inspiring heroine" Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read.

The Gift of an Ordinary Day - Some Thoughts

2010-02-10T16:54:00.007-05:00

I don't usually make comments aside from book recommendations. However, as the snow keeps falling in New England, I am reminded of the gifts and wonders of an ordinary day. As NYC was proactive and canceled public schools and many events in the wake of the storm, Fairfield County, CT followed. The result has been a profoundly beautiful day broken up only by the frequent need to shovel. It is a small price to pay, however, for living in New England - and we are not in Washington, D.C. which has been inundated with snow and has basically come to a standstill. We lived there for a decade and it always amazes me how ill equipped our nation's capital is to deal with snow! I spent the day listening to Juan Diego Florez sing the great aria "Ah! Mes Amis" from Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment, watched a documentary called The Audition on Pubilc Television, caught up with friends, cooked a wonderful Moroccan tagine, did the New York Times crossword puzzle, and listened to old Podcasts of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR News Quiz. It does not get much better than this - except for remembering that it is technically still a work day.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, 1995, * * * * *

2010-02-10T16:35:00.005-05:00

Snow Falling on Cedars, set on a scenic island off Washington State, known for its fishing and its strawberries, begins and ends with the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto who is charged with the murder of fellow islander and fisherman Carl Heine. Taking place just after World War II, the novel deals with lingering wartime prejudices when the island's Japanese Americans were "resettled" in California for the duration of the fighting and when even those white islanders who might have once been favorably disposed to their Japanese counterparts struggle to reconcile their post-war relationships with their neighbors after the war. Guterson takes on so much with this novel starting with the trial at the center of the book. He explores a forbidden affair, intense prejudice, war wounds of both the physical and emotional sort, hopes, dreams, struggles, and finally the healing of a community. The narrative flows seamlessly between past and present and from trial testimony to deeply personal memories with vivid prose that makes it possible to see, smell, and even taste the surroundings of San Piedro Island. A phenomenal West Coast bestseller, winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, this enthralling novel is at once a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, the story of a doomed love affair, and a stirring meditation on place, prejudice, and justice.

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, 2007, * * * *

2010-02-10T11:21:00.004-05:00

A New Yorker staff writer, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jerome Groopman unravels the ultimate medical mystery: how doctors figure out the best treatments — or fail to do so. On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within twelve seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong — with catastrophic consequences, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make and explores why doctors err. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking, offering direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country's best physicians, and his own experiences as a doctor and patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together

Snowflower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, 2006, * * * *

2010-02-10T09:48:00.003-05:00

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, or “old same., in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’ s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that dates back 1,000 years, that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. See's novel details Lily and Snow Flower’s imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. In the summer of 2006 I spent six weeks in Seattle on business and the venerable, independently owned Elliot Bay Books recommended this book to the entire City of Seattle. It has since become a favorite book club selection.

Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank, 2008. * * * *

2010-02-10T09:32:00.004-05:00

Let's face it: we all want to know about “the Rich”. We know they're different than us, but how? We want to pry, but we're too polite or inhibited to ask, even if we get the chance, which is increasingly rare since they're walling themselves off in gated estates, floating around on mega-yachts or hiding behind the telephones at Christies auctions. Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal has unleashed Robert Frank , its "wealth reporter," to explore this subject.. "Richistan" is the colloquial term Mr. Frank uses to describe the booming numbers of wealthy andit reads like the best travel writing, full of colorful and interesting stories and providing insights into exotic locales. Robert Frank has been loitering on the docks of yacht marinas, pestering his way into charity balls, and schmoozing with real estate agents who sell mega-houses, all in order to capture the story of the twenty-first century’s nouveau riche. As Frank reveals, there is not one Richistan but three: Lower, Middle, and Upper, each of which has its own levels and distinctions of wealth —the haves and the have-mores. As the New York TImes Book Review stated "like an anthropologist in the Amazon basin, Frank goes native but instead of a loincloth, he dons a white tuxedo.” I can't remember the last time I've had so much fun with a work of non-fiction as I did reading Richistan

Final Salute:A Story of Unfinished Lives by J. Sheeler, 2008,* * *

2010-02-08T15:19:00.005-05:00

Based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, Jim Sheeler's shines an unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead. Final Salute Is a stunning tribute to the soldiers who have died in Iraq and their devastated families. Sheeler spent two years shadowing Maj. Steve Beck, a marine in charge of casualty notification, as he delivered the news of battlefield death to families. The reader is put in Beck's shoes as he walks up to houses, delivers the knock on the door dreaded by every military family, and tries to comfort distraught spouses and parents. . After the knock on the door, the story has only begun. From the beginning, Major Beck decided, if he was going to do this job, he would do it his way, the way he would want it done if he were the one in the casket. He learned each dead Marine's name and nickname; touched the toys they grew up with, read the letters they wrote home and held grieving mothers in long embraces. This is an achingly beautiful, devastatingly honest story of the true toll of war. Jim Sheeler weaves together the stories of the fallen and of the broken homes they have left behind and also tells the story of Major Beck and his unflagging efforts to help heal the wounds of those left grieving. Above all, it is a moving tribute to our troops, putting faces to the mostly anonymous names of our courageous heroes, and to the brave families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, 2008 * * * * *

2010-02-05T20:42:00.005-05:00

In this international bestseller, a crusading journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, joins forces with a 24-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker, Lisbeth Salander, to investigate the whereabouts of a woman missing for over 40 years from one of the wealthiest families in Sweden. As mesmerizing as it is insightful, The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo is a multi-layered, multi-character tale full of social conscience and compassion, with insight into the nature of moral corruption. At its core, it is a fascinating character study of a young woman who easily masters computer code but for whom human interaction is almost always more trouble than it is worth. Be warned, however, that the issue most dominating the novel is shocking sexual violence against women. Larsson's other major elements include corporate malfeasance that threatens complete collapse of stock markets and anarchistic distrust of officialdom - how prescient! The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is part of the Milennium Trilogy which includes The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Air Castle That Blew Up. A murder mystery, family saga, love story, and a tale of financial intrigue wrapped into one satisfyingly complex and entertaining novel.

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner, 2009, * *

2010-02-04T15:30:00.002-05:00

Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That's what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they're both nine years old. However, in the wake of betrayal during their teenage years, Val is swept into the popular crowd, while mousy, sullen Addie becomes her school's scapegoat. Flash-forward fifteen years where Valerie has found a measure of fame and fortune working as the weathergirl at the local TV station and Addie lives alone in the house she grew up in. She is caring for a troubled brother, trying to meet Prince Charming on the Internet, and has just returned from Bad Date #6 when she opens her door to find her long-gone best friend standing there, a terrified look on her face and blood on the sleeve of her coat. Best Friends Forever is a story about betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets, living through tragedy, finding love where you least expect it, and the ties that keep best friends together. Jennifer Weiner is known for being the doyenne of “chick- lit" and this book has been referred to as a sad and sweet turn on Thelma and Louise. Although I loved the movie, I did not love this book as I found the characters shallow and the plot predictable.

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, 2002, * * * *

2010-02-04T10:37:00.003-05:00

All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo. Set during the 1991 Gulf War, but about contemporary Egypt, Alaa Al Aswany's novel follows the lives of several of the building's inhabitants. The diverse characters include the pious son of the building's doorkeeper. the impoverished squatters on its roof, the tattered aristocrat, the gay intellectual, and the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy the ground floor. Each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt - an Egypt where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies. It is also the Egypt where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail. Al Aswany explores the abuses of power and the corruption that permeate Egypt, from the highest levels of government and business down to the employment of the police as paid thugs in domestic disputes. The novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained one of the best selling novels in the Arabic language since.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt, 1994 * * * * *

2010-02-03T15:44:00.003-05:00

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath, reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of non-fiction. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the 'soul of pampered self-absorption'; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These characters act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else. This book is sublime, seductive, brilliantly conceived and masterfully written. It is definitely a modern day classic.

The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama, 1995 * * * *

2010-01-31T18:24:00.005-05:00

On the eve of the Second World War, a young Chinese painter, named Stephen, is sent to his family's summer home in Japan to recover from tuberculosis. He will rest, swim in the salubrious sea, and paint in the brilliant and shore light – it will be quiet and solitary. He is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener, and the “samurai” of the title – a man devoted to finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world. Stephen is a noble student. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secrets and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy. But it is the four local residents he meets - a lovely young Japanese girl and three older people. What then ensues is a tale that readers will find at once classical yet utterly unique. Stephen has his own adventures, but it is the unfolding story of Matsu, Sachi, and Kenzo that seizes your attention and will stay with you a long time.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 2009, * * * *

2010-01-31T13:34:00.003-05:00

In her tale of an aspiring white writer in 1960s Mississippi who decides to secretly compile the untold stories of black domestic workers, Kathryn Stockett attempts to work out her own complicated feelings about race relations in her native South. She throws herself into the attempt with gusto and gravitas, a risk that pays off to a point. Skeeter Phelan is a misfit, a 24-year-old college grad growing uneasy with the social hierarchies of home; the two black women who risk their lives and livelihoods to help collect the interviews she seeks, Aibileen and Minny, two black maids, are sympathetically if somewhat predictably, drawn while the the white characters have the least dimension. Other characters feel stock and could have used more dimension. There is also the matter of a white author writing in “black” voices. It is easy to understand black idioms as an aesthetic choice but the white characters appear free of the linguistic quirks that white Southerners have. There's also the narrative rut of downtrodden but world-wise blacks showing white people their own souls, leading them out of a spiritual wilderness to their better selves. The Help has much more on its mind than that, but it doesn't always avoid going down a road too well traveled Despite my comments, it was still one of the best reads I had last year, and I have no doubt that a great movie will be made from this story.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman, 1997, * * * *

2010-01-30T10:38:00.004-05:00

In Merced, CA, which has a large Hmong community, Lia Lee was born in 1981, the 13th child in a family coping with their plunge into a modern and mechanized way of life. The child suffered an initial seizure at the age of three months which her family attributed to the slamming of the front door by an older sister. They felt the fright had caused the baby's soul to flee her body and become lost to a malignant spirit. The report of the family's attempts to cure Lia through shamanistic intervention and the home sacrifices of pigs and chickens is balanced by the intervention of the medical community that insisted upon the removal of the child from deeply loving parents with disastrous results. This compassionate and understanding account fairly represents the positions of all the parties involved. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. According to Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author and professor of bioethics and medicine at Yale, “there are no villains in Fadiman’s tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented in all their humility, frailty and nobility”. An intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration of two cultures in uneasy coexistence. Fadiman's book is a superb, informal cultural anthropolog, eye-opening, readable, and utterly engaging.