| Unless otherwise
attributed, all summaries are taken from the publisher's
summary. All comments are original material.
Mr.
Pip - (Lloyd Jones) -
The resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to
transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered
by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one
white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of
much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and
begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s
classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that
imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the
mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the
adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city
whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted
landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply
forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially
threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring
alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where
even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is
the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.. New
York Times review
-
Brutal violence like that in Congo, chaos
brought on by revolution and repression, living on an isolated
island of grass huts and few possessions, where traditional
education is a mute point - this is Matilda's
environment. Very recently, there were teachers, an economy
and an outside world. Matilda is like Grace, a generation
before her: smart, hungry for learning, ready to experience the
world beyond. But the island never left Grace, and then she
came back damaged. When Matilda decides to leave the island,
(like Pip, fate is kind to her and gives her a way off) she
believes she will never look back. But then she remembers
the lessons she learned watching Mr. Watts. Like your life
experiences, your voice can never be taken away from you.
She decides she will try to return home. Perhaps Mr. Watts
learned this lesson from Grace. Jones
writes of a small island - a part of Papa New Guinea.
Infidel
- (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) - Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life
story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia,
and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the
Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West.
Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following an Islamist's
murder of her colleague, Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the movie Submission.
Infidel is the eagerly awaited story of the coming of age of
this elegant, distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political
superstar and champion of free speech. With a gimlet eye and measured,
often ironic, voice, Hirsi Ali recounts the evolution of her beliefs,
her ironclad will, and her extraordinary resolve to fight injustice
done in the name of religion. Raised in a strict Muslim family and
extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female mutilation, brutal
beatings, adolescence as a devout believer during the rise of the
Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four troubled, unstable countries
largely ruled by despots. In her early twenties, she escaped from a
forced marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she earned
a college degree in political science, tried to help her tragically
depressed sister adjust to the West, and fought for the rights of
Muslim immigrant women and the reform of Islam as a member of
Parliament. Even though she is under constant threat -- demonized by
reactionary Islamists and politicians, disowned by her father, and
expelled from her family and clan -- she refuses to be silenced.
Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story
tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to
become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western
governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious
pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.
- Comment:
Based on statistical averages, the CDC estimated 138,000 women and children
immigrants to the U.S. have had female genital mutilation
performed (1990). While federal law makes FGM illegal in the U.S.,
only 19 states have any law addressing this. No reporting is required
if such mutilation is noted in a girl. Only Nevada makes sending a
child out-of-country for FGM illegal. Forced marriages are also unreported in the
U.S.
In Infidel, Hirsi Ali asks many hard questions
about integrating immigrants into a nation. What values should
require conformity / integration / assimilation, and what should be
tolerated as a part of multi-culturism?
Learning the language? Religious
freedom? Individual freedom? Values of health
and safety? Education?
Employment? What does government fund or subsidize? What's OK
if privately funded? What's OK for adults...for
children? What public efforts should be made to promote these values?
Ayann is part of a conservative think-tank in the United States:
American
Enterprise Institute, and currently lives in the Netherlands where
she can receive government-provided security.
From Ayaan Hirsi Ali's article, "It's
Time Lily-Livered Europe Stood Up to Muslim Bigots", The First
Post, May 5, 2009.
"...American observers like Caldwell, Bruce
Bawer, Walter Laqeur and many others who go to Europe and write
candidly about these things [abuse of women] can return to America,
where they can write on another topic, keep their jobs and their
social networks.
Europeans who do the same thing as Caldwell, often
face a campaign of ostracisation from their own compatriots. They
run the risk of losing their jobs or not being promoted or not
getting invitations to the circles of which they are a part. The
more stubborn, like Geert Wilders, get prosecuted, and access to a
neighbouring country is even denied.
In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of
Islam. It is because the Europeans of today--unlike their forbears
in the Second World War--will not die to defend the values or the
future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final
sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape
into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has
to do is walk into the vacuum."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at
AEI.
Black Swan Green
- (David Mitchell) - From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a
sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the
old on the cusp of the new.
Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old
Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a
dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short
story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is
anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted
in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the
summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the
Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden
and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva
van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both
more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his
dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is
discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran Lps,
and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies
camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer
to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.
Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the
stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest
and most effective achievement to date.
Black Swan Green is a coming of age story of a 13 year old
boy who is a struggling stutterer and secret poet (pen name- Eliot
Bolivar) living in a rural village in England
in 1982. Both are handicaps designed to guarantee he will be
picked-on. At 13, he survives by trying to keep these secrets,
and by becoming invisible. By 14, he has been exposed to much,
and figured out a thing or two. But this is not just a book
about adolescence. The book also speaks to the nature of
men, women, conflict and war, secrets and truth and how they are
inter-related.
Jason's minutes are consumed by keeping 'Hangman' at bay by
choosing alternate words to avoid stuttering. Jason Taylor is not one
of the cool kids, but not on the looser bench either. (A 'maggot',
according to Unborn Twin, another of Jason's internal voices.)
He has one shining moment of cool-dom, learned from the king of cool
- his cousin Hugh, who "fits his body like a
glove". All the kids are gathered around as Jason
uses Hugo's trick to taunt the village mean man, who would shoot you
as soon as look at you. That buys him initiation into the 'Spooks',
the village bad-boy club, only to plummet all the way to the looser
bench when he is spotted going to the movies with his mother, who is
loudly complaining that he should have used the bathroom before.
Now he spends his days trying to be invisible to avoid a pounding by
the village bullies - his former club members, with Ross Wilcox at the
lead. "Gang-ups need blood as fuel." If you don't
bleed, show fear, will the gangs die from lack of oxygen? Could
the 'Spooks' also be hiding secrets, making themselves
invisible? Fire and invisibility are strong symbols all
through the novel.
When the village adults gang together to fight becoming a
designated housing site for Gypsies, Jason finds a kinship with the
Gypsies, who catch him while he's hiding from the village boys. He
slides down the bank and into their quarry in pure fear. When
the Gypsies threaten and grill him as to why the village boys he's
hiding from don't like him, Jason tells the truth, "They don't
like me. I'm not one of them. That's enough." Around the
fire, Jason gets a sculpture from a fellow 'silent artist',
acknowledgement of his fear, and acceptance as one of them.
Both Jason and the Gypsies are outsiders. He discovers that
the Gypsies don't want a designated housing site, either. If only
they could discover this about each other. Like Julia and Jason who
each envied the other's room but never brought it up- so silly -
they could have just swapped, if they had spoken the truth.
Jason offers his advice to the Gypsies, "The villagers are
scared of you, if only they could meet you around the fire, like
this". Is avoiding conflict as simple as
communicating, speaking the truth?
Clem Ostler is a Knife Grinder, a Gypsy, a Carnie, Alan Wall's
uncle and son of a prizefighter who staked everything his family
owned in his last fight, even though he could've just fought for
money. Why not skip this fight? He had to fight. No
prizefighter can turn and run, and no Gypsy can either. Reputation's
everything. Sometimes maintaining a reputation can lead you where
you don't want to go. Perhaps the complexity of the truth is
better than the simplicity of a reputation that is hiding
secrets. Is there an analogy here for countries, as
well? Clem asks his dad why he'd bet his family's
trailer instead of just the money. He said, "Fighting just for
money wasn't enough. Only fighting for everything he loved - his
wife, his family, his home, ...only then could he take the
pain." The men fight like boys on the pond, like Ross for
his girl, like Uncle Brian for the British economy, losing to the
Japs, like England for the Falklands. The price is often paid
by the women: like Debby Crombie weeping for Nick Yew's death and
having his child. Or old Mrs. Gretton in the forest shack, forgetting
forever that she lost her brother in WWII. Easier to pretend that
he's still here. The thing is, when you fight, it had better
be for something valuable, so you can take the pain enough to
win.
Understanding other outsiders is the beginning of the turning
point for Jason. With the Gypsies, he also finds wisdom and
support. "The Goose Fair is literally magic...It turns my
weakness into power". Jason finds 600 pounds in a wallet that
belongs to Ross Wilcox. What joy, what sweet revenge against
his enemy! Now he can secretly replace his Omega and his
parent's won't ever have to know he smashed it. Then Jason discovers
that his torturer is in turn tortured by a man dangerous enough to
kill: his own father. Once Jason know Ross's secret, Ross looses his
power over Jason who returns the wallet to the 'poor kid'.
That act of understanding is the first step that allows Jason to
stand down his other torturer, Neal Brose, the golden boy to all the
teachers at school. He gets advice from a teacher that helps him
take the next step. Mr. Kempsey's note: "Gather
intelligence. Don't pander. The independent befriend the
independent. Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be
eighty". Standing up to someone in power, speaking the
truth. Jason wishes he could stand up to his father like his
sister Julia does. (When he finally tells her this, Julia
reveals she's scared all the time.) Jason's dad wishes he
could stand up to his boss, and once he's fired, gets some
satisfaction by returning his company computer via the window.
Nobody at school dares to stand up to the latest bully, demanding
cash or you get pummeled. Jason decides to take
action against Neal Brose.
Rule One is 'Blank out the consequences'. The act of publicly
crushing Neal Brose's prize calculator in the vise during shop class
means there's no turning back for Jason. "Does 'extortion' mean
beating someone up if they don't give you money, sir?"
"I had to show Brose I'm not afraid of him." Just
find what's true, hold it up and take the consequences. Sadly,
Jason's grand victory empowers him to ridicule some younger
second-years. Is that the way of boys, of human nature? Once you're
up a peg, you have to dump on those below a peg? Mr. Nixon's
going to expel Neal Brose. Now they'll really want to kick my face
in. In for a pound already, Jason takes Neal's seat, right up at the
front of the class, and empowers another 'looser' to sit up front as
well. Even Hangman is giving Jason a pass today - he's not
stuttering. Miss Lippets (who seems a truly gifted teacher) leads a
lesson on secrets: Secrets are true. You kill a secret by telling
enough to change what the secret's about. Not all secrets are
ethical to share. For good or ill, reputation is what gets damaged
once a secret is out. Tell the truth about Neal and he stops being a
golden boy in the eyes of the teachers. He also stops being a
hard-knock in the eyes of other kids. "He's screwed and
buggered", Jason tells his teacher. Miss Lippetts loves
her job, on good days. Courage begets courage and Jason starts
to talk back to Unborn Twin (I'm not a maggot), and he
gets the girl at the
Black-Swan-Green-Grand-Christmas-Village-Hall-Disco (with some
fashion advice from big sis Julia). Secrets affect you more than
you'd think - you're not in charge of them, they're in charge of
you."
As Jason is saying goodbye to Black Swan Green, he has one last a
revelatory walk through the forest. Not everything is as it
once seemed. Nothing is static. Just as the Gypsies turn
out to be philosophers and artists, the meek boy grows bigger and
turns on the strong one, even Squelch may not be the idiot everyone
knows him to be. As Jason is tramping through the forest, he
sees Squelch, who "came to see the swan".
"Black Swan Green hasn't got any swans. That's the village
joke", says Jason. As a giant swan lands in the pond, like a
mutant angel falling to earth, ducks heckle the swan, but a swan
only notices what it wishes to. Neither does Squelch - nothing
bothers him. "Sorry, Mervyn," he tells
Squelch. "You were right." The swan bends her
neck exactly how Dad does after a very long drive. Then Jason
closes the circle on some of the mysteries of the past year.
He finds the "witch" who healed his leg last year.
She's just an old lady who's had a stroke. He confesses to her
blank/unjudgemental mind his guilt over Ross loosing his leg.
Is he responsible? Is Ross? Then he notices he doesn't stutter
in front of Mrs. Gretton, the gifted healer. Suppose it isn't
the Hangman who causes it? S'pose it's the other person? The
other person's expectations. It seems so obvious. If I can reach
this state of not caring how long it takes me to speak, hangman'll
remove his finger from my lips. Jason has grown enough to put the
whole thing together. As he grows older, it's as if he's
returning to a childhood home that now looks so much smaller.
He learns that his vast wood is really only a few acres. Has
the black swan turned green?
"Once you notice that hidden step and fix it, you think,
Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all, then BUMP! Down you go,
a whole new flight of hidden steps. There's always more." Jason
finally tells his dad his big secret: that he has smashed granddad's
vintage Omega. "Ah, it doesn't matter." Not the
reaction he's expecting. Then dad tells his secret, the one that
takes superhuman effort to get out, "Your mother and
I..." This is the secret that has lasted the length of a
novel. Anyone who's been there knows what it means when your dad
starts referring to mom as 'your mother'. Cynthia is still the
love of his dad's life, a woman he met even before he met Jason's
mother. Before the announcement of their divorce, Jason is
invisible at home, so as not to trigger another argument between his
parents. After the announcement Jason becomes split between his
parents. Mum's on one side with Julia, Dad's on the other with
Cynthia. "If I don't jump one way or the other, I'm going to
fall into bottomless blackness." Does he need to take
sides? Cynthia says, he's welcome at their house,
anytime. In essence, he has just turned fourteen, and he is
homeless. The novel ends with Julia's advice,
"It'll be all right. In the end, Jace." "It
doesn't feel very all right", he says. "That's because
it's not the end."
Adolescence and lack of self-awareness may end, but divorce never
does. It's just another 100 year war, with ramifications
through time. Jason may resolve his feelings for each, but
he'll still be managing one against the other, running to two
places, having to care for two instead of the two of them taking
care of each other. He will, that is, unless they can manage
to tell the truth and communicate directly with each other.
Jason wonders what would have been if his dad just told the truth
about Cynthia in the first place, and married her instead of
Mom? Where would that leave him? The book seems to
provide simple answers to wars of all kinds, but it doesn't, really.
How will Jason survive his family disintegration? Julia
reveals she knows his secret about Bolivar, the poet. She
tells him, "He's got literary promise, tell him to stick with
it." If he stops hiding this secret, he'll be telling the
truth about himself. Mentors like Madame de Crommelynck
who crack open the door to a new world will be able to find him and
help him find his true voice. The only antidote to family
dissolution is to discover your true nature and to nurture it.
Every reader knows by this time that Jason's true path probably
isn't becoming a forester, as he reveals to his dad. Jason is
a born writer. Pursuing that will be the making of him.
Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the
Table
- (Ruth Reichl) - 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. Beginning with Reichl's mother, the notorious
food-poisoner known as the Queen of Mold, Reichl introduces us to the
fascinating characters who 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. 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. New
York Times review
-
Comment pending.
The Pickup
- (Nadine Gordimer) - Who picked up whom? Is the pickup
the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his
impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful
businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she
despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a
garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to
aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably
relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and
of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists
on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a
marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to
her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed
by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his
family. In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again,
to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by
a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the
omnipresence of the desert. A novel of great power and concision,
psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a
story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where
love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself. New
York Times review
-
Comment pending.
Brokeback Mountain
- (Novella by Annie Proulx, originally in Close Range: Wyoming
Stories) - Annie Proulx has written some of the most
original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and
for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her
masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come
together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one
summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated
tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper
catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids
because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and
frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important
thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.
The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its
publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was
included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and
haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between
two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent
intolerance.
-
Comment pending.
Exit Lines
- (Reginald Hill) - In this Dalziel-Pascoe murder mystery,
three elderly men die violently on the same rainy night--and the only
clues they leave behind are their final words. These words may help
explain their sudden deaths, but do they point to the real murderer?
Detective-Inspector Peter Pascoe and his boss,
Detective-Superintendent Dalziel, are determined to find out.
-
Comment pending.
Gilead
- (Marilynne Robinson) - "In 1956, toward the end of
Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an
account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa
preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine,
saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to
fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War,"
then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his
right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension
between his father - an ardent pacifist - and his grandfather, whose
pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics
from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted
to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story
of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his
tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton,
his best friend's wayward son." This is also the tale of another
remarkable vision - not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of
life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged
in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through
generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
2005 Pulitzer, 2004 Ntl Book Critics Circle Jump
to the New York Times review.
Second
review.
-
Comment pending.
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 pending.
-
-
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