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Author

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West  - (Gregory Maguire) - When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil? Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil..

Comment:

Comment pending. 

Fidelity: Five Stories  - (Wendell Berry) - With Fidelity Wendell Berry revisits the Port William membership, a fictional rural community in contemporary America. These five stories explore the love, trust, and wisdom of people modern society often neglects: small farmers, housekeepers, people who work the land and know their roots. Their "common" sense is their sense of community, compassion, and reverence for nature - values that must become common again if our society is to survive, if the earth itself is to survive. In "Pray Without Ceasing," Andy Catlett sits at his grandmother's side, seeing his violent family history through her eyes. Listening to her story, he comes to know his place as a child of forgiveness, a link between past and future. In "A Jonquil for Mary Penn," a young bride sits alone, sick with a fever and haunted by past decisions, and slowly remembers her newfound kinship. In "Making It Home," Arthur Rowanberry returns from World War II, travelling by foot across familiar land. "Now I know a mighty power that can pass over the earth and make it strange," he thinks as he moves from the work of destruction toward the work of creation. And In "Fidelity," Danny Branch "rescues" his father, Burley Coulter, from life-prolonging hospital machinery in a crime that has no name. These tales, and the people they tell of, are woven together by an unshakable love and faithfulness. This fidelity is present in Elton, Mary Penn's husband, who sees that his wife is ill and asks a friend to look after her, and in the men who walk into the late night to check on flooded neighbors in "Are You All Right?" And it is present in Henry Catlett, Danny Branch's lawyer, as he explains to the detective investigating Burley's kidnapping: "A man has disappeared from your world, Mr. Bode, that he wasn't in for very long. ..."He has disappeared into his people and his place, not to be found in this world again forever." Wendell Berry once again proves himself a master storyteller.

Comment:

Comment pending. 

The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism  - (Meghan Marshall) - "Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters - and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day - has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life." "Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era - Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them - she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne - but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray." Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era.

Comment:

Makes you want to be a transcendentalist.  What extraordinary, powerful, influential women - unrecognized by history.  Glimpses of Little Women, a generation later.

The Summer Guest  - (Justin Cronin) - "On an evening in late summer, the great financier Harry Wainwright, nearing the end of his life, arrives at a rustic fishing camp in a remote area of Maine. He comes bearing two things: his wish for a day of fishing in a place that has brought him solace for thirty years, and an astonishing bequest that will forever change the lives of those around him." "From the battlefields of Italy to the turbulence of the Vietnam era to the private battles of love and family, The Summer Guest reveals the full history of this final pilgrimage and its meaning for four people: Jordan Patterson, the haunted man who will guide Harry on his last voyage out; the camp's owner, Joe Crosby, a Vietnam draft evader who has spent a lifetime "trying to learn what it means to be brave"; Joe's wife, Lucy, the woman Harry has loved for three decades; and Joe and Lucy's daughter Kate - the spirited young woman who holds the key to the unopened door to the past." As their stories unfold, secrets are revealed, courage is tested, and the bonds of love are strengthened.

Comment:

Great characterizations, intertwining in complex ways.  A wealthy friend, used to controlling the present, controls the future with his last bequest.  Doing so affects the lives of a struggling, compelling family who own a piece of heaven in upstate Maine.  Oddly, the fishing camp seemed to me to be the central character, driving the plot.  This is a book about place, almost even more than the people who inhabit it.

 

 Some confusing flashbacks for those whose mind was otherwise occupied.  Necessary to look back to work out clues to the dates to get the whole message.  The conclusion - a too-tightly-perfected package, some thought.  For a first time novelist - a novelist to watch. 

Small Island  - (Andrea Levy) - "It is 1948 in an England that is still shaken by war. At 21 Nevern Street, London, Queenie Bligh takes into her house lodgers who have recently arrived from Jamaica. She feels she has no choice. Her husband, Bernard, whom she married to escape her dreary upbringing on a farm in the Midlands, was posted to India with the RAF during the war, but when the conflict was over he did not return. What else could she do?" "Among her tenants are Gilbert and his new wife Hortense. Gilbert Joseph was one of the serveral thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England after the war he finds himself treated very differently now that his is no longer in a blue uniform. It is desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door." "Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life - that's why she married him. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was." Queenie's neighbors do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. England may be recovering from a war but at 21 Nevern Street it has only just begun. 

Comment:

Comment pending. 

Poems New and Collected  - (Wislawa Szymborska) - .Described by Robert Hass as "unquestionably one of the great living European poets" and by Charles Simic as "one of the finest poets living today," Szymborska mesmerizes her readers with poetry that captivates their minds and captures their hearts. This is the book that her many fans have been anxiously awaiting-the definitive, complete collection of poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, including 164 poems in all, as well as the full text of her Nobel acceptance speech of December 7, 1996, in Stockholm. Beautifully translated by Stanislaw Bararnczak and Clare Cavanagh, who won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize for their work, this volume is a must-have for all readers of poetry. 

Comment:

Pointed poetry.  Memorable.

Her Fork in the Road: Women Celebrate Food and Travel  - (Lisa Bach, ed.) - Women’s relationship to food is passionate and obsessive, embracing and comforting, complex and frustrating. This savory sampling of stories — by some of the best writers in and out of the food and travel fields — journeys to the heart of this age-old relationship, taking the reader from the familiar kitchens of contemporary America to the far reaches of the globe. In France, an overly enthusiastic waitress serves M.F.K. Fisher the lunch of a lifetime to sustain her on a walk to Avalon. In Tunisia, Ruth Reichl dines at the home of a local, where the meal is eaten with one’s hands and a dash of sensuality. And, in Fiji, where the women are big and beautiful and walk like royalty, Laurie Gough encounters food as a grand and constant celebration.- Jump to the Traveler's Tales review.   

Comment:

Several stories were breath-taking.  Best of all were the memories elicited - food and family.  The strongest memories were of childhood and food.  

Red Dust  - (Gillian Slovo) - "Written with the pace of a thriller" (Times Literary Supplement), Red Dust is set in a rural South African town, where three people are about to meet their past. Sarah Barcant has left her law career in New York to assist an old friend as prosecutor on a Truth Commission hearing. Dirk Hendricks, a former police deputy, is being taken in handcuffs to the station where he once worked. There he will confront Alex Mpondo, the man he had tortured, who is now an MP. Author Biography: Gillian Slovo was born in South Africa, the daughter of anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First. She now lives in London.   

Comment:

Red Dust explores truth-telling as a way for a nation to heal it's wounds and allow victims and abusers to coexist in a productive society after apartheid.  It's a brilliant political concept that is still going on in South Africa - XXX years after regime change.  However healing it is for the society, the notion that it is necessarily healing for the victim is debunked by the author, for whom the experience was real.  Gilliam Slovo's activist mother was assassinated.  She and her sister attended the Truth Commission hearing as adults and the reality she got was not what she expected.  

Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul  - (Tony Hendra) - A key comic writer of the past three decades has created his most heartfelt and hard-hitting book. Father Joe is Tony Hendra's inspiring true story of finding faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman's husband to see a priest and be saved. Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he'd known at Catholic school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words "wrong" or "guilt," who believed that God was in everyone and that "the only sin was selfishness." During the next forty years, as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life -- the relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it. From the fifties and his adolescent desire to join an abbey himself; to the sixties, when attending Cambridge and seeing the satire of Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the seventies and successful stints as an original editor of National Lampoon and a writer of Lemmings, the off-Broadway smash that introduced John Belushi and Chevy Chase; to professional disaster after co-creating the legendary English series Spitting Image; from drinking to drugs, from a failed first marriage to a successful second and the miracle of parenthood -- the years only deepened Tony's need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death.  Jump to the New York Times review.   Second Review.  Daughter claims molestation.

Comment:

A page-turner, keeps you wondering where Tony Hendra is going with his tale.  Father Joe is  Hendra's confessor, fulfilling the role of gentle therapist whenever Hendra strays too far afield.  It seems to say more to me about Hendra, who seems to be especially dense about the meaning of his life, than about Father Joe, who seems absolutely certain about the meaning of his own.  Couldn't  we all use a retreat like Quarr, on the Isle of Mann - someplace beautiful and serene to think and receive a willing ear and a gentle slap upside the head when it's called for.  Everyone needs someone like Father Joe in their lives - a compass to help think things through.  What is unique about Hendra is that he had one single compass throughout much of his life.  Most of us seek out many such trusted souls and patch together our advice as our needs and seasons change.  Those, like Hendra who find one trusted soul experience a complete loss when they are gone, and may never learn how to mentor ourselves and identify guidance when they need it.  Mixed reviews from the group.

By the Lake  - (John McGahern) - It is a village flirting with the more sophisticated trappings of modernity but steeped in the traditions of its unforgettable inhabitants and their lives. There are the Ruttledges, who came from London in search of a different life on the edge of the village lake; John Quinn, who will stop at nothing to ensure a flow of women through his life; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, head of the local IRA as well as town auctioneer and undertaker; the gentle Jamesie and his wife, Mary, who have never left the lake and who know about everything that ever stirred or moved there; Patrick Ryan, the builder who never quite finishes what he starts; Bill Evans, the farmhand whose orphaned childhood was marked with state-sanctioned cruelties and whose adulthood is marked by the scars; and the wealthiest man in town, known as the Shah. A year in the lives of these and other characters unfolds through the observed rituals of work and play, of religious observance and annual festivals, and the details of the changing seasons, of the cycles of birth and death. With deceptive simplicity and eloquence, the author reveals the fundamental workings of human nature as it encounters the extraordinary trials and pleasures, terrors and beauty, of ordinary life.  Jump to the New York Times review.    Second review.

Comment:

This one got mixed reviews from the group.  Settings and picture of life in Ireland are stunning.  Characters too one-dimensional for many.  No plot, so slow-moving with seeming little pay-off.  It seemed too depressing to continue.

Transit of Venus  - (Shirley Hazzard) - The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women—seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal—becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties through the seventies; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.  Jump to the New York Times review of  Hazzard's latest book, The Great Fire.

Comment:

A Greek tragedy, discussed in bookgroup on the actual transit of Venus, June 8, 2004 (an event that occurs only twice in a hundred years).   This is a book that requires your full attention to read, yet each line is written so evocatively, it begs your thoughts to wander.   If you don't read it with concentration, you'll miss both the conclusion, and the point.  

 

Caro Bell is one of those women men can't forget - a serious Venus making the transit of her life, punctuated by the men who surround her (Ted Tice - scientist, real love unattained, he settles for Margaret ("The tragedy is the love that lasts."); Paul Ivory, playwright, dissembling husband of Tertia and doting father of Felix - she, his mistress, he, her master; Adam Vail, wealthy human rights activist ("A man with no axe to grind is a revolutionary nowadays. You only hold them to their proclaimed principles, she says.  That is what modern revolution means."), widower and father of the resentful Josie, they marry, providing Caro with a short domestic experience until his stroke.   Caro misses all the important clues that should inform her happiness, and the result is a sort of half life.  It is as if a lifetime of dodging Dora's gloom has caused her to focus on immediate happiness, an acceptable life, but missing all the clues to deep happiness.

 

Born in Sydney in 1931, daughter of a British diplomat, and employed as a clerk at the United Nations in the 1950s, Hazzard incorporates her sharply observed, cutting opinions of government into the novel.  When Caro first meets Adam Vail, he is interceding for British support on behalf of eight South Americans, who have been tortured and sentenced to death. 

"Two [British] officials had now entered the room with their air of punctilious humanity that portended refusal."  Having refused the request and visited the men's room to wash their hands, a senior official detains Adam and says, "But I'm certain there was an arrangement about lunch."  "A misunderstanding then."  "Consternation was real this time.  The lunch had been with a member of the cabinet.  If you would just wait while I ring up. Please. The supplicants had not pleaded for the lives of their martyrs with such abandon."  

 

America is the focus for much of Hazzard's political observation.  

Adam says, "Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.... Hence also a compulsion to account for ourselves."  

In casual conversation, Caro tells Una, "Josie's belief in her innocence is her warrant for doing harm."  Una says, "Like America."

Adam runs an interview exposing American corporate aggression in Latin America and allegations of clandestine efforts of the American government to oust Latin American leaders.  Caro overhears reporters discussing lying politicians and why the media fails to cover it, "Supposing I ran a story that night, saying the president is lying, is LYING, you want to imagine what they do to me.  Nobody's gonna take that kind of risk.  ...Can you imagine the calls from leadership, from the brass."

Hazzard weaves feminism into the mix, with the character of Valda, the state department clerk who refuses to run out and get the men sandwiches.  "Why aren't the other girls complaining,... It usually starts with one who notices the unfairness."  

 

Hazzard became a passionate opponent of the United Nations, detailing her opinion of its weaknesses in Defeat of an Ideal in 1973, and commenting on the Kurt Waldheim case in 1990 in Countenance of Truth.

Written in 1980 when she was nearly 50, Hazzard has woven a lifetime of observation and revelation into one novel, rich as chocolate that is too rich to eat more than one mouthful at a sitting.  This is one to re-read.

Crow Lake  - (Azar Nafisi) - Here is a story set in the wild terrain of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur - offstage. Centerstage are the Morrisons, whose tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive. Orphaned young, Kate Morrison was her older brother Matt's protegee, her fascination for pond life fed by his passionate interest in the natural world. Now a zoologist, she can identify organisms under a microscope but seems blind to the state of her own emotional life. And she thinks she's outgrown her siblings - Luke, Matt, and Bo - who were once her entire world.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Crow Lake is a fast and easy read, with a worthwhile message.   

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books  - (Azar Nafisi) - "We all have dreams - things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true." "For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading - Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita - their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran." Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi's class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of "the Great Satan," she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.   Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

This is a book that rolls three themes into one: women who bond together to survive emotionally, the history of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution from the women's perspective, all seen through the lens of great American literature.  What is the nature of control and freedom?  

 

There is an assumption that revolutionary change means more freedom, not less.  Within 5 years of the revolution, "the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother's time: the first law to be repealed, months before the ratification of a new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed a woman's rights at home and at work.  The age of marriage was lowered to nine...adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men."  "Interesting, how war and revolution have made us even more aware of our own personal ordeals - especially marriage, at the heart of which was the question of individual freedom, as Jane Austin had discovered two centuries before."  Mitra "was angry for the years she had missed, for her lost portion of the sun and wind, for the walks she had not taken with Hamid... You mean you don't have any sense of belonging here?" Mashid asked, looking defiantly at Mitra. "I seem to be the only one who feels she owes something to this place."  Taken with Nine Parts of Desire, these books provide some fundamental understanding of Western perspective of Iran and the Middle East.

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan  - (Benfey) - The quests for spiritual fulfillment of the figures profiled here unfold in extraordinary ways. Disaffected by the mercenary state of American culture in the Gilded Age following the Civil War, many of New England's intellectual elite sought a new social order from the largely unfamiliar Japan, a nation whose own intellectuals were in turn looking to shake off years of isolation and forge a new identity as part the international community. Cultural historian Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke (Degas in New Orleans), seamlessly braids the far-flung adventures of cultural importers/exporters from both countries and offers an enjoyable collection of eclectic and surprising historical narratives about such figures as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Adams. Benfey traces the importation of Japanese culture to the U.S. back to intrepid pilgrims like Herman Melville, who wrote of exploring Asia's "impenetrable Japans." This curiosity boomed in the cultural confusion after the Civil War, when many Americans felt that European philosophy could advance no further except through mysticism, which the exotic Japan was thought to offer. Benfey relates the lives of several Japanese eccentrics who likewise believed that a foreign culture might provide useful tools for a country similarly in the midst of dramatic change. The cultural exchanges that Benfey describes, at times comic, are tantalizing examples of how nations develop and in what ways they are able to learn from each other. Though Benfey sometimes meanders and indulges in digressions into the decadent lives of 19th-century Boston Brahmins, his account is consistently enjoyable and always informative. From Publishers Weekly.   Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Mung is a 14 year old fisherman in Japan whose 24 foot boat is hit by a typhoon and along with the rest of the crew are shipwrecked, only to be rescued by a New England whaling vessel.  He is educated and raised by the captain as a son.  Mung will eventually return to Japan, and play a role as interpreter, mistrusted by his countrymen. 

A Problem from Hell - (Power) - "A Problem from Hell" is a path-breaking interrogation of the last century of American history. Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation's past: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide? She provides the answer in the form of the suspenseful story of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, access to thousands of pages of newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power shows how those who urged U.S. action were thwarted again and again by ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

From Laura Secor's NYT book review, 

"Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish linguist who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941, coined the term ''genocide'' as a kind of speech-act. He meant not only to name a crime whose magnitude, combined with its sweeping singularity of motive, distinguished it even in the annals of coldblooded mass murder. He meant for the crime's very name to be a call for universal opprobrium -- one that would inspire, if it did not mandate, punishment and prevention. ... it was Lemkin who devised and lobbied tirelessly for the Genocide Convention, which the United Nations adopted in 1948. Defining genocide as the commission of certain crimes with the ''intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,'' the convention called for perpetrators to be punished and for contracting parties ''to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.'' Nervous about its own record on race, however, the United States did not become a party to the Genocide Convention until 1986, when President Ronald Reagan backed it as a face-saving measure following his visit the previous year to Bitburg cemetery, where 49 Nazi SS officers are buried. Even then, three Republican senators -- Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar -- attached so many reservations to the American signature that the convention would not meaningfully bind the United States to much of anything.

Power expertly documents American passivity in the face of Turkey's Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge's systematic murder of more than a million Cambodians, the Iraqi regime's gassing of its Kurdish population, the Bosnian Serbian Army's butchery of unarmed Muslims and the Rwandan Hutu militias' slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsi. (Power has room, in this substantial volume, for only passing mention of the massacres of similar and larger scale in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Burundi and East Timor, among other places.) This vivid and gripping work of American history doubles as a prosecutor's brief: time and again, Power recounts, although the United States had the knowledge and the means to stop genocide abroad, it has not acted. Worse, it has made a resolute commitment to not acting. Washington's record, Power ruefully observes, is not one of failure, but of success.

Powers finds an unlikely, bipartisan collection of men and women whose courage and moral commitment she admires. Among them are Henry Morgenthau, Charles Twining, Claiborne Pell, Madeleine Albright, Robert Dole and a group of junior State Department officials who resigned to protest American inaction in Bosnia. Senator William Proxmire regaled the Senate with a ''speech a day'' for 20 years, urging that the United States become a party to the Genocide Convention. Peter Galbraith, when he was a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fought fruitlessly for recognition and condemnation of the Iraqi Kurdish genocide, traveling at great personal risk to northern Iraq."

The liberal's dilemma - war is bad, but so is genocide.  At what point is it justified to enter another country to stop a genocide?  How do you know it's a genocide?  How many lives - what criteria makes it a genocide, and not just a civil war?  When do we ever enter such a situation selflessly - isn't there always some self-interest clouding the issue?  So much to think about.  So much to do.   This is our century's stain.  Can we prevent it from becoming its only legacy?

Prodigal Summer - (Kingsolver) - Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the countryside, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Live in Appalachia - be a farmer, a forester, an entomologist, a sought-after woman of a certain age - all vicariously through this page-turner of a woman's fantasy.  Prodigal Summer is a fecund lesson in the balance of nature.  To keep the balance, it's better to kill prey than predators, better to control pests naturally than not, and better to get to know your nemesis  than to fight the fight in your head - you just may find common ground and a new life.   

The Other Boleyn Girl - (Gregory) - When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family's ambitious plots as the king's interest begins to wane and she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king, and take her fate into her own hands.

Comment:

This is a 650 page page-turner.  The facts are historically accurate, but written like a soap opera starring Mary, her sister, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.  Only the thoughts are invented by the author.  Mary narrates each season of her life from the time she was 14 and already married to a courtier until 29 when she witnessed her sister's beheading. So engagingly written, even though you know the result, you find yourself hoping Henry will appear with a last minute pardon.  In 16th century England, children of the powerful are moved like pawns in the family's high-stakes war for ascendancy - to be discarded if the gamble fails.   Having been rejected by the King, Mary has a choice:  family loyalty and a privileged life at court which is entirely orchestrated for her, or marry a poor man and escape to a free life of hard work and isolation?  It reminds me of a plantation slave girl, is it better to toil in the hot fields and be among friends, or be a house slave, fed and dressed in fine clothes, but under the minute scrutiny of the Master?  The book depicts Anne as self-centered, scheming and powerful, but impossible to take your eyes off.  It helps to answer the question of how her daughter became the most powerful woman the world has ever seen.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague - (Brooks) - When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays. When villagers turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As she struggles to survive, a year of plague becomes, instead, annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders." Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. Year of Wonders is a detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

This is a compelling tale, but seems to me more of a year of terrors than a year of wonders.  If there was any redeeming action of wonder that came out of a town trapped for a year with the plague, it passed me by.  The rich and obnoxious Bradford family that fled escaped the plague - the poor who stayed had a 2/3 chance of death.  The minister who inspired the event turned out to have feet of clay.  Anna was clearly immune to the plague, if not the temptation of the distant Mr. Mompellion.  The small social experiment in which Faith befriended, taught and mentored Anna did give Anna an enriched, new life, but didn't appear to touch anyone else in the town.  The most interesting characters:  the herbalists Anys and Mem Gowdie, are killed off early in the book. Disappointing compared to it's  potential.  I had high expectations.   But in all, an interesting, engaging read, all the better based in historical fact.

The Da Vinci Code - (Brown) - While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others. In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can deipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive hysterical truth -- will be lost forever.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Fast and utterly compelling at the beginning - becomes more predictable toward the end.  It's a nice conjunction of  little-known history and scholarship wound around a mystery set in Paris and London.  Who WAS Mary Magdalene?  

War and Peace - (Tolstoy) - Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle - all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual's place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: "To read him... is to find one's way home ... to everything within us that is fundamental and sane."

Comment:

Never more true than now.  Timeless.  

The Tipping Point - (Gladwell) - "New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point." "Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics."--  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Individuals can change the tide of history in small and large ways.  Gladwell gathers psycho-social research from the last 50 years into a theory of how society changes, pointing out that it happens, not gradually, but in a cascade.  Certain types of influential people are the catalyst for an idea to catch on (connectors, mavens and salespeople).  Paul Revere was all three and incredibly effective in turning out farmers with guns to defend Lexington and Concord, literally overnight.  That other guy who rode the southern route made the same effort, with almost no results.  In addition to influential people, certain conditions nurture the change: packaging a message to make it irresistible to the target audience - what Gladwell calls "stickiness", and the environment of the participants, what Gladwell terms the "context".  It helped that Paul Revere's message  was delivered dramatically and in the middle of the night - that made it sticky.   The 'context' is the environment of the participants.  In the Revere example, it's an obvious context - the farmers saw themselves as separated English citizens being shot at by their own government.  They were primed to react to the message.  

 

Gladwell's 'context (part two)' is based on a theory by Robin Dunbar and bolstered by several convincing examples.   The theory says that social animals have a limitation on the number of others they can personally interact with as a community based on the size of the brain's neocortex.  For humans, the upper limit is 150 people.   There were seven different groups of Whigs just in Boston, the perfect type of organizational structure for everyone in the group to personally know everyone else's strengths.  So when a stable-boy overheard the British officers talking about moving tonight, he already knew that Paul Revere was the one to alert. Paul Revere was one of only two people in all of Boston who was a member of five of the seven groups - the perfect connector between these perfect-sized groups.  One wonders if connectors like Revere have a larger neocortex.  One also wonders if our society is getting easier to control by a few (who are organized) because we are less and less connected by small communities we know well (the small town, the neighborhood, the local union, the local political organization).  Local religious organizations, however, seem to continue to be effectively operating communities.  Technology has offered us the ability to quickly connect with strangers we don't really know.  Is it the appearance of connectedness without the result, or can it develop into a new kind of connectedness?  As humans, so much interpretation depends on personal contact: visual, audio and olfactory cues.  

 

The first time I read this book in 2002, it was a gasp of recognition that rang true, but the organization felt scattered and not well documented.  Gladwell believes the biggest problem in explaining something is to find just the right example - so it seemed at first just a series of examples.  Many were home runs, others added confusing clutter.  The second time through in 2003, I began to see the organization and documentation in spite of Gladwell's tendency to jump around.  My context had changed, and I was better primed to hear the message.  Moreover, this was now part of a small community - my bookgroup.  There is a lot here to think about.  This may be one of the few books I'll dog-ear for future reference.

 

Cheerful to think we can make a difference, depressing to think most don't bother to do more to support the things we believe in.

Wild Swans - (Chang) - This is an account of "China as seen through the eyes of women of three different generations: the author, who left China in 1978; her mother, a revolutionary who married one of Mao's soldiers; and her grandmother, concubine to a warlord." (Libr J) Index.  Annotation: The forces of history and the exceptional talents of this young writer combine to produce a work of nonfiction with the breadth and drama of the richest, most memorable fiction classics. Wild Swans is a landmark book, with the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic vision of a monumental human saga, which tells of the lives of Jung Chang, her mother, her grandmother, and of 20th-century China. 16-page photo insert.

Comment:

Reading this book is like watching a train wreck.  It's painful, but you can't put it down.  Jung Chang clearly is in awe of the strength and resourcefulness of both her mother and grandmother.  Written in 1991, their stories span eighty years of radical transition, which the women tread with courage, patience and finesse.  You get a clear detailing of China's history under Communism as it affected Chang's family of seven - front and center in the struggle.  This is an insider's description of how 90 million people centered in Sichuan allowed a handful to whip-saw an entire populace.  She analyses and describes her path to gradual realization of the truth at a time when truth could not been seen by people staring it in the face.  Most of humanity comes off as petty and self-serving - very few of the courageous survived.  Chang's memories are the vivid snapshots we retain of teenage moments.  These women are the ultimate survivors. 

The Quiet American - (Greene) - The Quiet American is a terrifying portrait of innocence at large. While the French Army in Indo-China is grappling with the Vietminh, back at Saigon a young and high-minded American begins to channel economic aid to a 'Third Force'. Fowler, a seasoned foreign correspondent, observes: 'I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.' As young Pyle's policies blunder on into bloodshed, the older man finds it impossible to stand aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and to himself: for Pyle has robbed him of his Vietnamese mistress.

Solar Storms - (Hogan) - Abused and relinquished by her mother when very young, Angel has been moved from foster home to foster home. A rebellious, hurt, and literally scarred teenager, she sets out to search for her birth family, her mother, and herself. Finding her way to the remote region where she was born, Angel reencounters the brittle cold world where her ancestors have withstood both the harsh dangers of nature and the incursion of hostile outsiders. Here she reunites with Agnes, her great-grandmother; Dora-Rouge, her great-great-grandmother; and Bush, the woman who adopted Angel's mother and raised Angel when she was a young girl. But before Angel can settle into her new home, this recently rejoined family of women sets off by canoe on a journey to their ancestral homeland in the far North, where a hydroelectric dam project is under way. There Angel finds herself caught in a conflict that threatens two indigenous tribes, their ties to the land, and Angel's very essence as she tries to resolve her inner turmoil over who she is and where she belongs. Robust and poetic, Solar Storms has the feel of a richly woven tapestry. Both as a story of love and family, and as a parable of the Native American quest to reclaim a lost way of life, the novel not only fulfills the enormous expectations raised by Linda Hogan's previous work, it surpasses it.  

A Sentimental Education - (Flaubert) - Frederic Moreau, a moderately gifted young provincial, is ambitious in many ways: he dreams of fame, of vast wealth, of literary and artistic achievement, of a grand passion. On the Paris paddle-steamer which transports him to his home town of Nogent-sur-Seine at the outset of the novel, he becomes transfixed by the demure Madame Arnoux and, back in Paris, cultivates her ebullient and enterprising husband in order to be near her. Frederic's devotion fluctuates like his other enthusiasms, and he is caught up in the intense pleasures and the inevitable ennuis of Parisian life.  

Magician of the Modern - (Gaddis) - Eugene Gaddis  (Non-fiction, 2000). Transcending the usual dusty confines of museum curatorships with unusual artistic range, grasp, ambition and flair, Austin (1900-1957) shone as director of Hartford's Wadsworth Athaneum and Florida's Ringling Museum. Born to a rich family, Austin married for social position, despite a flamboyant bisexual life (apparently reported matter-of-factly to his wife). By his late 20s he was already running the Athaneum, burning old paintings he disliked in the museum furnace and going on buying binges in Europe, usually snagging rare masterworks at bargain basement prices. In a typical case, he facilitated the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (recently thrice-revived) at the Athaneum, and helped arrange George Balanchine's arrival in America to found what became the New York City Ballet. (The choreographer took one look at Hartford in the 1930s and fled to Manhattan.) Gaddis (Austin Memorial: The First Modern Museum), who currently curates the Austin House museum at the Athaneum, points out that many of Austin's artistic friends, from architect Philip Johnson to historian H. Russell Hitchcock, were gay, but fails to detail whether Austin's work and sexuality were related. A pioneer in the appreciation of film as art, baroque painting and the links between 19th-century kitsch and modern art, Austin seems here an ever open-minded intelligence, unique in his time and even more valuable today, when his like would languish in the bureaucratic, hype-obsessed art world. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Atonement (McEwan) -  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. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for 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. But 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. Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. 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.  Booker shortlist.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment: 

Some found this elegantly written and stunning.  Others thought that Book 2 (the War) was a detour off the real thread and detracted from the power of the story.  There were a few that felt it was left to the reader as to the "real" ending.  As always, McEwan's writing is impeccable, but his characters leave me cold - even the admirable ones are vacant, leaving the reader fascinated by the end of the tale, but detached - it doesn't really matter.

Aging Well (Vaillant) -  Harvard Medical School has spent more than fifty years studying the basic elements of adult development, looking at life choices, health, and happiness in hundreds of individuals. Now, for the first time ever, the results of this unprecedented study are being made public, and they reveal an extraordinary set of conclusions about how men and women can lead a happier, more fulfilling, healthier life -- into their sixties, seventies, eighties, and beyond. Using these studies and the subjects' individual histories, George E. Vaillant, M.D., the director of the study, shows why some people turn out to be more resilient than others. His extraordinary conclusion is that individual lifestyle choices play a greater role than genetics, wealth, race, or other factors in determining how happy people are in their later life. And Aging Well reveals for the first time which lifestyle choices truly make a difference. Dr. Vaillant explores: the importance of marriage and the impact of divorce. New friends for new life situations. The role of play. Alcohol and other mood elevators. Making contact with new people. And dozens of other factors that can make a huge difference in life. Dr. Vaillant offers step-by-step advice about how we can change our lifestyle and live a more fulfilling, satisfying, and rewarding life in the later years. 

Comment: 

Do you leave reminders for yourself on your own answering machine?  Do you sign off by thanking yourself at the end?  Do wake up in the middle of the night and leave yourself a message so you don't have to write it down?  Apparently some of us do.  None of this has anything to do with the book - but it did spur one of the funniest evenings yet.

Bel Canto (Patchett) -  "Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening - until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots." "Without the demands of the world to shape their days, life on the inside becomes more beautiful than anything they had ever known before. At once riveting and impassioned, the narrative becomes a moving exploration of how people communicate when music is the only common language. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped."--BOOK JACKET  2002 Orange Prize for Fiction. 2002 Pen/Faulkner.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment: 

The novel as opera - infused with romantic, romanticized lovers caught in the perfect setting and circumstance - lush, isolated, contemplative.  Most loved this book.  For a few, too saccharine, too perfect.   Denouement seemed just tacked on - better left off for most of us.  Definite movement to make it an opera. A quick, enjoyable read.

The Sisters (Lovell) - They were beautiful, brilliant, gloriously eccentric, and their humor was legendary. Everything was perfect, except for their politics. This is the story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy, the eldest, was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; the ethereally beautiful Diana, married to the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and imprisoned without trial through most of World War II, was the most hated woman in England; Unity Valkyrie Mitford, born in the mining town of Swastika, Alaska, would become obsessed with Adolf Hitler, whom she met on at least 140 occasions. When war was declared between England and Germany, she shot herself in the head. The Mitfords had style, presence, and were extremely gifted: four would go on to write best-selling books. Above all, they were funny—hilariously and often mercilessly so. In this wise, evenhanded, and generous book, Mary Lovell captures the vitality and extraordinary drama of a family that took the twentieth century by the throat and became, in some respects, its victims. 16 pages of b/w photographs.--   Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

The six Metford sisters - some of us would have loved to have been around their dynamic swirl  - the rest of us cringe at the self-centered, elite and isolated lives they lead.  All of us were fascinated by the tale, the historical perspective and the glance into this world.  Lots to analyze with this damaged family whose motto seems to have been "never forgive, never forget".  Unity at 23 wasn't just obsessed with Hitler, he was her great friend and protector (lover?).  Decca (Jessica) wasn't just a Communist - she ran away at 17 to fight Franco in Spain just one day after meeting her escape route: Cousin Esmond.  She moved to the US to become the center of activist activity in San Francisco. The author only sought out in-house sources for her material and regurgitated the lot in a 600 page book that badly needed editing - an apologist for all of them.  The writing isn't great, but the story sure is.

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