The Eighty-Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts

This July, not unlike last July, was a bit of a weird reading streak for me.  I don't read a whole lot of short stories, and I don't read a whole lot of non-fiction, but this July featured a little of both.  The randomizer (Because who makes decisions when computers can do it for you? Er, please contact me for use of that unique tag line when you're coming out with your next "robots take over the world" comedy) helpfully chose for me a book that, if I chose my own books, would probably not have made it off the shelf anytime soon but was well worth reading.

 

The Eighty-Dollar Champion is one of those horse stories that should unquestionably become a Disney movie.  When Dutch immigrant Harry de Leyer arrives at a horse auction in Amish Country Pennsylvania on a cold February day, the best horses have already been sold to the highest bidders and the bidding is over.  No horses are around except for the ones that didn't sell that are being loaded up and sent away to be killed.  Not wanting to return to Long Island, where he teaches schoolgirls to ride at The Knox School, empty handed, Harry spots a plow horse with a certain look in his eye that he's sure will make a good teaching horse.  Eighty dollars later he's bound for home with a worse for the wear horse that is about to become a part of his growing family. 

Snowman turned out to be just the calm, patient mount Harry had hoped for, quietly teaching new riders the skill.  But when Harry tries to sell him to a local farmer to free up room in his stable during the off season, Snowman proves himself to be much more.  Little did de Leyer know that his affable plow horse had a penchant for jumping and the heart of a champion that would lead the pair to fame and fortune in the dangerous sport of show jumping.  

Elizabeth Letts didn't necessarily do Snowman's story many favors.  Bulked up with unnecessary historical background (this just in, horses falling out of popular use for transportation by the 1950s) and a grating amount of repetition, likely in the name of creating some dramatic effect, fall flat.  A little dramatic tension, a little reminder here and there of the significance of Snowman's success is understandable, but Harry de Leyer and Snowman's story is so inherently heart-warming and triumphant, there's really no need for Letts to go the extra mile to point out its significance.  She goes many extra miles, however, to the point of her cumbersome sentimentality becoming downright patronizing. 

Were in not for the inherent attractiveness of the story of a horse bound for death who defeats the odds to become a great show jumper, I might have laid this book aside unfinished.  Happily, the meat of Letts' account of Harry's determination and skill as a horseman and Snowman's joy in jumping and eagerness to please the man who rescued him from an early death was enough to keep me hanging on.  There's no doubt that Snowman's story might be a little lesser known, but it is easily as inspirational as any horse story going.  By the end, I was happy to have "met" the irrepressible Snowman and the man who saw Snowman's worth long before he urged the horse to show jumping greatness. 

Tomorrow, he would hitch her up to the wagon to lug corn to the silo, and he knew the horse would plod along, as quietly as before.  But just because you are hitched to a burden does not mean that you do not sometimes want to fly.

If At Birth You Don't Succeed by Zach Anner

Look, everyone, it's time for another rarity!  A blog post from me?  Yes!  But no, actually, a blog post from me where I review a non-fiction book.  I'm terrible about reading non-fiction.  I have great intentions.  I'm terribly interested in so many topics covered in non-fiction books.  I even acquire a decent amount of them.  When it comes to reading them, though, I tend to fall a little (er, a lot) short.  And when I do read them, they're usually memoirs or, at least, memoir-esque.

If At Birth You Don't Succeed by Zach Anner is a charming amalgamation of memoir, humor, and (dare I say it?) self-help.  When a pitch for the book landed in my inbox, I was unfamiliar with Zach Anner, who got his start on a short-lived travel show on the OWN network and now has a significant internet following on YouTube.  Anner was born prematurely and has cerebral palsy - the "sexiest of the palsies."  Instead of letting his disability keep him down, Anner decided not to take life quite so seriously.  For him, being handicapped is no excuse for not getting out there, traveling the world, and living life with abandon.  Life might be full of disasters waiting to happen, but for this guy, that just makes more opportunities for a good laugh.

Anner's book is refreshingly open, honest, and vulnerable.  He doesn't gloss over the struggles of his disability to paint a "flowers and rainbows" pictures of his life.  Instead, in a book rich with gratitude for all the opportunities the technology age has provided for him, Anner shows readers that it's when things don't go quite to plan on his life's journey that he has had occasion to roll with the punches, find the humor in life, and show what he's really made of.

The chronology of If At Birth You Don't Succeed is a little wonky.  Instead of opting for the linear, Anner dips in and out of his memories, usually drawing a lesson out of them by the end of each chapter that can be the slightest bit preachy.  The chronology is a little hard to get used to, but in the end I was totally won over by this guy who was irrepressibly optimistic even at his lowest point and who is using the achievement of his life goals to make the world a little funnier and a little better place.  If At Birth You Don't Succeed is a book that will make you smile.  It's funny, uplifting, and also a sweet tribute to all the people whose love and care helped propel Zach on the path to his success.

(I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration)

The Happy Christian by David Murray

A few months ago, before the wretchedness of another freezing cold winter finally melted into the beautiful spring I see outside as I write this, I did something I don't do a whole lot of, I accepted a Christian book for review.  It probably doesn't make any sense for my blog, I don't share a lot about my Christian faith here, even though it undoubtedly means a lot to me and is at the heart of who I am (and want to be!), so I know I probably don't have a big audience for such a review here.  That said, I am a Christian, and this past winter I was struggling with unhappiness in a major way for no especially apparent reason, so when the pitch for The Happy Christian: Ten Ways to Be a Joyful Believer in a Gloomy World appeared in my mailbox, I suspected it could be just the sort of book I could benefit from reading.  I don't intend to preach at anybody, but I hope you'll bear with me while I share about a good book that's not my usual fare.

It's tough to be happy, even in a time and place where a lot of people have relatively more peace, more wealth, and more freedom than ever.  We live in a world where, thanks to the 24 hour news cycle, we can be bombarded by bad news literally all the time.  Time or distance no longer separate us from the pain of the world at large, which is great if we can pray and even physically lend a hand, but can also lead to sense of hopelessness as images of catastrophe and injustice come to us from all over the world.  Even without that, there's our own brains that start to work against us, trained from a young age to critique and pick out the bad and set about the project of correcting it, it's not always easy for us to zoom in on the good in any situation.  In our daily race against the clock to accomplish all the things on our to do list before another day is lost, it's all too easy to get down and depressed about all the things we're not doing and all the less than ideal situations we can't fix until pessimism is always the order of the day.  Murray observes all this in The Happy Christian and then gets down to applying gospel truths and modern positive psychology in a series of "formulas" meant to help us escape from the downward spiral of hopelessness it's too easy to get trapped in.

Murray's decision to marry up psychology with biblical teaching is an interesting and effective one.  Murray's chapters are filled with the scientific value of optimism, prescriptions for how much negativity can be mixed with positivity to still live a hopeful, happy life, and scientific evidence for the daily practice of more positive habits that can be exercised by Christians in conjunction with their faith.  In the course of it all, Murray makes a good case for how modern positive psychology is is right in line with God's will and promise for our lives.

Though I appreciated the psychology aspect, I was much more in tune with the chapters that leaned more on biblical teaching.  The chapter about our daily duel with our to-do lists that always ends in disappointment was cast in a different light when Murray reminds readers that Jesus's work, the hardest and most important, is already done.  Additionally, the chapter about taking more joy in our work by doing everything with passion and honesty to the glory of God, and how that can give meaning and purpose to even the most insignificant of jobs, really hit home.  Murray even closes with a very prescient topic for this day and age: diversity.  In this chapter he makes a great case for God's desire to reach all nations and for how diversifying our communities and our churches is key in future joy as we each stand to reap the benefits of plugging in every race and culture's strengths into a united church.

On the whole, I was impressed and encouraged by Murray's book and came away with some great insights.  Additionally, I was impressed that Murray, in addition to providing solid reasoning and theology, took the next step and provided readers of The Happy Christian with practical and often biblical ways to start introducing more hope and positivity into our lives, a practical aspect missing from too many Christian books.  I'd encourage anybody who is wondering why happiness seems to be a little too hard to hold onto, to give Murray's book a read and hope that it changes your perspective the way it changed mine.

Whatever you will complete or not today, rest in the only work that will never need to be done again.  Rest in the fact that Jesus has done the most impossible job in the world, done it perfectly, and made it available.  Take it.  Enjoy it.  Build your life on it.  Let it change your whole view of your life and work.  Use His work to put your work in perspective.  Believe His work is counted as yours.  Despite all that you fear and dread about the next ten hours - a critical boss, a vicious competitor, a looming deadline, a complaining customer, an impossible sales target, unrelenting children, monotonous drudge - you have Christ's perfect work credited to your account.  Yes, it is counted as yours, as if you did it.  Are you humble enough to receive it?

(Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a free copy for review consideration.)

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson

It's happened at last, I've finally tackled my first Bill Bryson book, not to mention my first non-fiction of the year.  It happens that I own a stunning amount of Bryson's books and have read, until now, approximately none of them.  Such is the practice of the inveterate book hoarder. I mean, collector.  Of late, the helpful randomizer which I shamelessly rely on to choose my next read, rather than agonizing over whether to start this or that book of my overgrown collection, finally dictated that it was time to dust off my Bryson collection and give The Lost Continent a read.


Bryson, a native Iowan, abandoned the American midwest of his youth at the earliest opportunity to seek out a more refined and exciting life in England.  In the mid-80s, he returned to the United States, deciding to embark on a road trip to revel in an odd sort of nostalgia for the wretched vacations of his youth, and also to discover the ideal American small town of movies. As Bryson embarks on his tour of his native nation, I'll admit I was a little nervous.  I'm all for cynicism and sarcasm if it comes from a place of humor, but off the starting block Bryson comes off as a little too mean-spirited, shamelessly generalizing midwesterners into a group of well-meaning dimwits and deriding small towns a little too harshly for not being the idealized Hollywood small town.

However, as Bryson continues on his adventure, I found him a little less grating and a good deal more laugh out loud funny.  As he tours the unlikely tourist hotspots of the east side of the nation, I found myself giggling aloud more than once.  He revisits a few places from his childhood vacations discovering them to be both more and less attractive than they were the first time around.  He muses on his father's cheapness, peppers the narrative with random anecdotes that pass his time on the road, and makes critically funny observations about what he finds in each of his destinations.

I wandered through the crowds, and hesitated at the entrance to the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum.  I could sense my father, a thousand miles away, beginning to rotate slowly in his grave as I looked at the posters...  The admission fee was five dollars.  The pace of my father's rotating quickened as I looked into my wallet and then sped to a whirring blur as I fished out a five-dollar bill and guiltily handed it to the unsmiling woman in the ticket booth.  "What the hell," I thought as I went inside, "at least it will give the old man some exercise.

The best parts, for me, were when Bryson stumbles across places I recognized, mostly because most of the places I recognized were either so astutely, if cynically, observed by him or, uh, he actually liked them.  His trip to Lancaster, PA - the tourist capital of Pennsylvania Amish country - is accurately and hilariously rendered, though it's kind of depressing on the whole.  For example, this is, in all reality, what one does in Lancaster, when one has tired of dodging buggies on the traffic choked roadways... 

I kept eating.  It was too delicious to pass up.  Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open.  I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in.  It was grotesque.  Food began to leak from my ears.  And still I ate.  I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime.  Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.

Also, imagine my surprise that Bryson passed through my very own small hometown, and for once, actually seemed to like it.  He does, however, comment on the shopping mall that was built nearby in my youth, and speculates that the shopping mall will cause the dereliction of another good small town.  I'm happy to report, the town is fine.  The shopping mall, on the other hand?  Pretty derelict.  I feel as if Bryson would be pleased by this fact.

I enjoyed Bryson's tour of the east with funny commentary and investigation of various and sundry small towns, and, honestly wish he would have stopped there.  Instead, a little over halfway through the book, Bryson heads west in the springtime, and the book loses its focus.  Small towns disappear as Bryson grumpily traverses the National Parks of the west pursued by one miserable weather system after another.  Readers are disappointed along with him as he finds many of the stunning landmarks of the west obscured by fog and is dispirited by having to drive absurd distances to get to towns where the one restaurant is closed for the evening.  The ending simply wasn't as humorous and kind of dragged along devoid of purpose until he nears home and discovers that maybe he's loved this great nation without fully realizing it all along.

This book is definitely more suited to the sort of person who likes to play Cards Against Humanity than to the red-state American patriot who will doubtless be offended by Bryson's codgery handling of his trip around their beloved nation.  However, if you're the sort of reader who can take his observations with a grain of salt and even see the occasional, sometimes unfortunate, truth in some of his harsher appraisals, there's a good chance you'll get a kick out of this book.  At least the first half.  All in all, even if this isn't Bryson's best, which I doubt it is, I'm still glad to have much of the rest of his catalog on hand for the next time I'm in the mood for a laugh out loud funny travelogue.       

Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while I can be caught reading some Christian non-fiction, I always thought that if I was going to be reading a book by fairly prodigious Christian author Tim Keller, it would be The Reason for God. Instead, I ended up reading Counterfeit Gods with a few of the other ladies from my church. It ended up being a very fortuitous time for me to be reading such a book, and I liked it quite a lot.  It's Sunday, so what better day to post a little post about a Christian book, amIright?

In Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller explores the danger of idols for Christians. Maybe at first thought when you hear the word "idol" you're thinking of a statue or even an American Idol, but Keller's book is about all the good things in our lives that can go wrong when we desire them more than we desire God. Keller's book breaks down the ways we can idolize everything from love to success to money and power and beyond. None of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, that is, until we would give anything to have them.

This book is about a very important topic, especially for Christians who are worried they might be falling too much in love with the things of this world. I loved how Keller reasons through his topic, not necessarily starting with point A and passing through points B and C to get to D, rather choosing a main point and circling to get to it, if that makes any sense at all. It requires a little extra work on the part of the reader, but the payoff, in my opinion, is enormous. Keller's chapters are packed with examples of idolatry from history both recent and distant as well as a biblical example that manages to both illustrate his point about the idol in question while successfully speaking to the Bible's relevance through the ages as we pursue the same idols our Biblical forbears struggled with. This is a great book for a Christian who wants to grow closer to God by revealing and blotting out the many things we chase after that can't satisfy us in the way only God can.

(No disclaimer.  This one's from my stacks.)

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Stand back, world, I'm about to attempt to review an e-book.  This just in, I am absolute crap about reviewing e-books.  At this point in my sad, feeble blogging life, I am nearly always about 8 to 10 books behind when it comes to reviewing because reviewing books is hard and requires peace and quiet, and also I am a lazy procrastinator.  In an attempt to guilt myself into reviewing them, I leave all 8 to 10 books taking up precious real estate on my desk until I do right by them, so obviously, if I'm going to review a book, it's going to be one that's cluttering up my desk, right? 

Now, I have attempted to clutter up my desk with my Kindle, but it doesn't seem to have the right effect, and eventually it needed a charge, and it vacated my desk anyway.  Nonetheless, since NetGalley probably hates me (or probably should), I really should attempt to do the impossible and review e-books.  Speaking of impossible (watch out for this great segue), I thought it was going to be impossible for me to finally read Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink.  It's kind of a long book and non-fiction, too, which I tend to read at an even more glacial rate than my norm.  This is where I discovered another perk of ye olde e-reader.  Regardless of how long a book is, you can't tend to focus on it when you're reading it on a Kindle (or other device of your choice).  This was brilliant at keeping me from fixating on the length of the book instead of the quality.  Anyhow, let's try this review thing.

Five Days at Memorial, as I'm fairly sure you've probably heard, is Sheri Fink's non-fiction account of five days at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during and following the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.  Fink spends the first portion of the book re-telling of the events as they unfolded based upon the accounts of the people who were there.  It should be no surprise that under the natural disaster conditions things got ugly, but things got even uglier still through lack of disaster preparedness, abysmal communication, difficult circumstances for evacuation; all of which created a dire situation that put doctors in a position to decide who lived and who died.  The second portion of the book is dedicated to the aftermath: the investigation of what happened and why, the perspectives on who was right and wrong, and an account of the criminal proceedings against the doctors and nurses who decided that euthanasia was an option under the circumstances.

Five Days at Memorial is an impressive book.  The first half of the book, the part that offers a comprehensive re-telling of the events of the five days features the kind of writing that actually keeps readers on the edge of their seats.  Despite having some foreknowledge of the catastrophe, I couldn't help but rush through the pages, hungry to see whether the staff at the hospital could overcome nearly insurmountable challenges to evacuate their patients and staff.  The latter half of the book loses a little steam as it plunders the details of the investigation and criminal proceedings, but I was still impressed with the comprehensive look at what followed the disaster and the balanced perspective Fink offered.  Dr. Anna Pou, one of the most controversial figures of the events at Memorial, never looks completely like a villain or a hero in Fink's account.  Whenever you might be tempted to see her one way or the other, the perspective changes and any opinion you might have of her is conflicted again.

As somebody who has spent the last seven years working in a hospital, I was totally appalled by so much of this book.  I'm glad I didn't read most of it in public because I'm certain my mouth was hanging open in shock during much of the reading.  The appalling unpreparedness of the hospital, the inadequacy of communication and rescue efforts, the backward leadership of the evacuation, and the very obvious moral ambiguity of "relieving the suffering" of those who were thought to be close to death or even just too difficult to evacuate in Fink's account are jaw-droppingly shocking to read about.  That she could bring all this to light and still leave me with sympathy toward the over-burdened staff making morally questionable decisions is a credit to Fink's skill as a writer and journalist.  This book truly is a must-read for anyone who would be tempted to rely on the very fragile constructs of safety that we blindly choose to rely upon every day and for everyone who takes in disturbing disaster footage on television and thinks, "That could never happen here."  It can, and it did, and this is a book that displays it in compelling fashion.

(I received a copy of this book compliments of the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration.)

Paperboy by Tony Macaulay

Tony Macaulay spent his formative years growing up in the working class neighborhood of the Upper Shankill in Belfast during the Troubles of the 1970s.  On the one hand, Macaulay's youth is typical.  He's eager to follow his brother into an early career of delivering the nightly Belfast Telegraph, he wears the dreadful clothes that were all the rage during the 1970s, gets picked on by his brothers, lives to steal kisses from the lovely Sharon Burgess at the disco, and is in love with the Bay City Rollers, but in a totally "manly" way.  On the other hand, Macaulay's youth is spent in a Belfast divided by Peace Walls, plagued by acts of terrorism afflicting everything from bus routes to phone booths, and is fiercely divided between Protestant loyalists to the British government and Catholic supporters of a united Irish Republic whose differences don't seem all that distinct to Macaulay or to us, for that matter.

And yet, as you will learn in these slightly less fragile pages, I was happy with my calling.  I was a good paperboy.  I delivered.

Okay, so the absolute best thing about Paperboy is that Macaulay is hilarious.  I can't remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud so often. For this reader, humor is hard to hit spot on in a book.  Many authors, I find I don't quite get their sense of humor or their efforts seem forced.  Not so in this case.  Macaulay's humor easily encompasses both the laughable foibles of his young career as a paperboy as well as the decidedly more serious points of living in a dangerously divided Belfast during the seventies.  The easy hilarity in the stories of young Tony jumping fences in his coin-stuffed platforms and parallels to achieve paperboy seniority, waiting for the last guitar lesson of the night behind a girl whose parents were hoping for her to be the next Tammy Wynette (thereafter referred to as "Pammy Wynette"), and kicking a member of the Bay City Rollers as the only "manly" way of expressing appreciation for the band is the stuff laughing out loud is made of. Still extra giggles are reserved for the low income things that shouldn't be funny but are - like all the home improvement projects completed by his dad with supplies he "borrowed" from the foundry where he works and the many would-be affordable things purchased for a weekly fee from the Great Universal Club Book.

Paperboy is an appealing book that's more about Macaulay's youth and career as a paperboy than it is about the Troubles that plagued the city of his childhood.  That it deals with the Troubles as more of a sideline ever-present reality in young Tony's life rather than as a focus is more a blessing than a curse.  Macaulay does a fantastic job of capturing his own childlike perspective in that he's learned to live with being searched for weapons when entering a store, expecting that milk bottles will soon become petrol bombs, and  not being able to get home because paramilitaries are bombing buses and have vandalized every phone booth for a couple miles. 

I sometimes looked through the employment pages to see what I might do when I graduated from newspaper delivery, but there was never anything.  Then I noticed that there were always more death notices than job advertisements in the Belfast Telegraph, so I came to the comforting conclusion that by the time I was eighteen years old, enough people would have died for me to get one of their jobs.

The downside to dealing with the Troubles on the side, of course, is that if readers go into the book mostly ignorant of the conflicts driving the Troubles, they might well emerge similarly ignorant. Macaulay scores some points for how he successfully immerses readers in his life in 1970s Northern Ireland, but doing so perhaps assumes that readers understand more about recent Irish history than they do, and the conflict, which is probably more or less bewildering to people in the know is mind-boggling to the more ignorant.  Macauley's book definitely gave me incentive to dig into the historical background, but some of the book might be lost on people who aren't interested in doing a little extra legwork to set the scene, so to speak.  

Overall, Paperboy is a laugh-out-loud funny read about one pacifist paperboy's childhood in the scary streets of 1970s Belfast.  It's a childhood that might well remind you of your own in spots but for the bombs and the barricades, one that might inspire you to discover more Irish history, and might also remind you that we wouldn't all be so different from each other if we weren't hiding behind the real and imagined walls of the uncompromising ideologies we've created.

(E-galley provided by publisher in exchange for my honest review)

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Non-fiction?  Who let non-fiction into the reading pile?  Well, it was bound to happen, my little Random.org trick that I use to choose my next read finally chose for me a non-fiction book from my collection.  What's more shocking, though, is that I didn't cheat and say "eh, not that one, maybe I'll just try and draw another number.  No one has to know."  Nope, I actually read the non-fiction book Random.org chose from my LibraryThing.  And I read it relatively fast.  And it was really good, if a little outdated because I should have read it years ago (but probably still truer than ever).  Thanks to Barbara Ehrenreich for showing me, yet again, that there's a non-fiction lover lurking within me!

Nickel and Dimed is a work of investigative journalism in which author Ehrenreich travels to a few different American locales under contrived circumstances to discover what it's like to live on the almost poverty-level wages many American workers earn at their occupations.  During stints as a waitress in Key West, a maid in Maine, and a Wal-Mart "associate" in Minnesota, Ehrenreich discovers that even given an edge of a lump sum of cash to start with and a car, living on the poverty-level wages millions of Americans are expected to subsist on is no easy feat.  Lodged in pay-by-the-week motels, suffering from the prodigious aches and pains that accompany low-wage labor, sometimes with hardly enough food to get by, and often even in fear for her safety, Ehrenreich offers a very enlightening look into the lives of the working poor.

The book itself is compelling.  Ehrenreich's writing style is extremely engaging and has such a great flow to it that it's actually hard to put down, a quality I'm always looking for in non-fiction and rarely finding.  The book is also peppered with footnotes elaborating on Ehrenreich's experience in the low-wage world with hard data related to low wage workers both in the locales in which she works and across the United States.

As for the content, some of it is truly eye-opening while some of it is borderline offensive to anybody who is working or ever has worked a low-wage job.  Ehrenreich exposes the pitfalls that come with having to take a job that is nearby even if it pays peanuts because you don't have a car (and likely never will at the wage you're making).  She reveals that many low-wage workers, because they don't have a month's rent and security deposit can't ever get a real apartment and are forced to rely on flea-bag pay-by-the-week motels, sometimes cramming whole families into a motel room or even a car if funds for the motel run out.  She shows how hourly employees are subject to the whims of mostly useless middle managers who demand a level of work that is practically slavish.  She delves into the demeaning world where drug tests are required, there is constant (often unwarranted) suspicion of worker drug use and theft, and worker belongings are subject to search when they are on the premises all for a paltry $7.00/hour, if that.  Ehrenreich discovers that low-wage workers are virtually invisible to the people they're serving as waitresses or maids and almost hopelessly trapped in a hamster-wheel of never having enough to get by, much less any savings to rely on in times of crisis.

On the other hand, PhD-holding Ehrenreich seems to need her book as much as any of the rest of us privileged folks.  If you've ever had to take a job as a waitress or a maid or a big-box store employee in your life, you might find yourself more than a little offended by Ehrenreich's surprise at the fact that "even" low-wage workers are smart, capable, and take pride in their work.  While it's easy to relate to Ehrenreich's bewilderment that a co-worker is continuing to work despite injury, she's obviously looking at it from the perspective of someone who has a cushion to fall back on rather than a worker who faces the very real possibility of being out on the street if she can't recover enough to keep her job.  Especially irritating to me, however, is Ehrenreich's account of her time working at Wal-Mart, where she flounces in, attempts to stir up some pro-union sentiment, suggests that low-income women all have the same sad haircut, engages in some vaguely patronizing speculation about the lives of the customers who frequent her department, and then seems to more or less glibly return to her life of privilege.    

Despite its flaws, though, Nickel and Dimed is a very compelling book and one that everybody in a America whose income allows them some measure of comfort and safety needs to read. If nothing else, it will make you think twice about leaving that bigger tip, not taking the maid that cleans your hotel room for granted, and maybe not wreaking thoughtless havoc on the shelves of the store where you're shopping.  More than that, Ehrenreich's book helps us to become re-acquainted with the people our incomes allow and encourage us to ignore and is the kind of book that can and should drive change in a "prosperous" country that is leaving a huge segment of its population behind.

 (No disclaimer required - I bought it!)  

Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates

It's that time of year again.  Actually, it hasn't been this time of year for quite some time, but I've missed it.  I'm speaking, of course, about the springtime, when I, for some reason, love to read a good prison memoir.  Shakespeare Saved My Life is just one link in a chain of very excellent prison-driven stories that tend to find their way into my hands in April/May, like Picking Cotton and Orange is the New Black.  There's just something about the prison system that proves to be fascinating to me, so when an e-mail landed in my box offering me this memoir of a college professor's time taking Shakespeare into maximum security solitary confinement, I knew I was read to "return to prison."

Dr. Laura Bates, professor of English at Indiana State University, once thought prisoners in long-term solitary confinement were beyond rehabilitation.  She thought education in prisons should focus on first-time offenders, those more likely to return to society and change their ways as a result of what they'd learned.  That all changed when she finally succeeded in opening the doors to the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility's Solitary Housing Unit (SHU), where she came face to face with some of the most dangerous of inmates and determined to teach them Shakespeare.

Bates went into SHU not knowing what to expect, and emerged with an unlikely group of Shakespeare scholars with a decidedly unique perspective, not the least of which is Larry Newton, a convicted murderer serving out a life sentence whose several escape attempts keep him from even joining the group that Bates was able to convene in SHU. Bates quickly realizes Newton's gift for unpacking Shakespeare's meaning and taps his thoughts to produce workbooks for other prisoners and even her university students. This work is life-altering for both Newton and the many students whose Shakespeare discussions cause them to look at their lives and their incarceration with new eyes.

I have mixed feelings about Shakespeare Saved My Life.  Considering the fact that it is a book about the remarkable insights even a very uneducated prisoner can bring to Shakespeare, its style seemed almost patronizing to me, as it might to its other non-incarcerated, more educated readers.  The chapters are very short, and the writing style is very uncomplicated.  There's a bit too much telling mixed in with the showing.  Telling me outright why education is valuable to and should be given to prisoners is not necessary if you do a good job of showing me, which Bates certainly does.  Likewise, Bates need not go on explicitly extolling what an insightful Shakespeare scholar Larry Newton is when she's already done a fine job of revealing through his speech and his writing how very able he is to decode Shakespeare and introduce the Bard to his fellow inmates.  Bates seems to push a little too hard, and at times, the belaboring of her points felt condescending, which is bizarrely incongruous with a woman who so successfully brought Shakespeare into what should have been a very hostile environment. 

Despite my confusion over the writing style, I found the content of Bates' memoir to be fascinating.  I struggled with Shakespeare through high school, and even after college struggled to draw meaning from Hamlet without the help of a commentary.  Even now I hesitate to wade any further into Shakespeare's work because I fear that so much of its meaning would elude me, and I doubt my feelings are unique among a good percentage of the population.  This makes it that much more impressive that not only did Bates find a collection of willing students in supermax, but she also found a group who actively engaged with Shakespeare's work and discovered that much of its meaning could relate to their lives.  Bates' experiences are a powerful testament as to why education should be available in prison, despite many arguments against it, some of which were yet echoing in my mind even as they were about to be ably disproved.  As Shakespeare's work speaks to prisoners who are supposed to be beyond rehabilitation, Bates shows that their lives are changed, and so, to her surprise, is her own.

(Thanks to the publisher, Sourcebooks, for providing me with a copy for review.)

Driving the Saudis by Jayne Amelia Larson

Jayne Amelia Larson's memoir starts out the way anybody's story of trying to pursue their dream might start.  Girl moves to LA to try to make it in the film industry.  Girl gathers mountains of debt while failing to gather mountains of job offers.  Girl takes utter crap job to pay the bills.  It's a common story, but the utter crap job that Larson takes is a boon to her readers because she's not waiting tables or cleaning toilets, rather she's chauffeuring a pack of rich Saudi royals.

As it turns out, a truly awful job for Larson makes for an engaging memoir that proves to be both entertaining and enlightening.  Life among the Middle East's most filthy rich is bizarre to say the least.  The Princess heading up the party spends most of her days shopping in high end stores with family, friends, and servants and demands that the chauffeur for each participant follow along as the party walks between stores.  A tea set gets its own expensive hotel room.  Women who, at home, are expected to be covered from head to toe to go out in public, who may not even be looked upon by a man not related to them, suddenly throw off their restrictions, not to mention most of their clothes once they hit American soil.  Larson is responsible for catering to her employers' every demand, no matter how ludicrous, and standing at the end of a long road, is that beacon of freedom - the unfathomably large tip the Saudis are rumored to pay for a job well done - a tip Larson is counting on and slaving toward in hopes of keeping her creditors at bay.

Driving the Saudis is a fascinating book, really.  On one hand it is a memoir of a woman pushed to the brink by an unbelievably demanding job, but also a woman who found unexpected friends in the servants to the royal family.  On the other hand, the book proves to be an enlightening look at a culture that can rarely be seen from the inside. Larson's book is compact and well-paced, moving from one anecdote of her time with the Saudis to another fluidly in such a way that never loses the reader's interest.  Larson's tales of the Saudis are wild, mind-boggling, and occasionally funny, but Larson never seems to lose sight of the fact that these are people she is writing about and shines a light on the paradoxical lives of the Saudi women who have more money at their disposal than most of us can even imagine in a lifetime but whose lives are fiercely constrained by a society ruled by strict Muslim law. 

I fully expected Driving the Saudis to be an entertaining read, but I was surprised again and again by Larson's unique insights into the lives of both the rich Saudi royals and their servants, who are little more than girls working to send money home to their families.  Driving the Saudis is an amusing romp among the rich, but it's also a fascinating snapshot of a culture that could hardly be more foreign to us. 

(Thanks to Free Press for sending me a copy in exchange for my honest review.)

Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg

I have a confession to make.  I should have read this book several years ago.  I don't mean that in the, "This book was so good, I should have read it long ago!" sense either.  Back when I first started blogging, actually it's probably part of what got me going, I did the Elle Reader's Prize.  This used to involve any schmuck off the street filling out a form to apply, after which, if you were so fortunate as to be chosen, Elle Magazine would send you three books of their choice.  Then you, amateur book reviewer, would rank them and write eensy reviews of them with the chance that your very own reviewlette would appear in the magazine, which a few of mine actually did much to my excitement.  I read some great books this way, and some very terrible ones, too. 

Now, somehow I managed to do a fiction and a non-fiction jury in the same year.  I say "somehow," but this more than likely involves them asking me and me saying, "Sure, why not?" despite the fact that I'm more of a fiction girl, I mean, if you hadn't noticed.  Anywho, the whole 3 book thing went okay.  Two were great, the third was just okay but its full-length review has gotten me more blog hits than any other one post on the blog you see before you.  Then, though, then, at the end of the season there was the Grand Prix in which all 6 of the year's top books from the monthly juries would drop into your mailbox with a very limited time to read all and pick a favorite.  Turns out, when you do a non-fiction and a fiction jury, twelve excellent looking books would land on your doorstep.  This is staggeringly awesome, and also, how you say, hard to handle if you are a big, slow reader like yours truly.  I, ahem, picked a favorite, but I may have neglected to read all of my non-fiction selections.  I managed 4 out of 6 non-fiction selections, and as it turns out, I don't need to feel bad because, well, this one would not have unseated the one that I chose.  ;-)

Nonetheless, this book has been waiting on my shelves, and Random.org helpfully picked it for me.

Her Last Death is Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir of her rocky history with her mother.  It starts in what we are to take as the present when Sonnenberg has finally settled down to family life with her husband and two boys in Montana.  It's there that she gets the call that her mother has been seriously injured in car accident, and it speaks volumes from the start that when she receives the call, she doesn't believe it's true.  Sonnenberg faces the choice of whether to rush to what could be her mother's deathbed or not.  At its heart, Her Last Death is, perhaps, an excuse for why she eventually couldn't bring herself to go.  As Sonnenberg unpacks her memories of her effusive, overbearing mother who was addicted to painkillers, cocaine, and sex, who lied without a second thought, who stole her teenage boyfriends, who introduced her to cocaine at a young age, readers will find themselves ultimately sympathetic and disgusted with both mother and daughter.

I didn't love Her Last Death, but there is that certain something about it that drew me in.  Sonnenberg's writing is fluid and draws out the essence of her twisted childhood with skill.  Well-chosen anecdotes are strung together to reveal the dynamic of a dangerous mother-daughter relationship.  Sonnenberg actively loathes her mother, loves her, is frightened by her, is disgusted by her and is impressed by her.  She wants to hold her mother at a distance but has a daughter's desire to share her biggest news with her mother even if she knows hurt will follow every time she makes a connection.  Sonnenberg's memoir captivates with the same power of an Augusten Burroughs memoir, not because it's so enjoyable, but because it's well written and simply hard to look away from these train wrecks of lives so well depicted. 

I was enthralled by Sonnenberg's depiction of her early childhood with her wildly unpredictable mother.  However, as Sonnenberg herself grows to adulthood, having affairs with married teachers and escaping into meaningless sex, I lost much of what sympathy I had for her which made the latter half of the book a bigger challenge.  I was often disgusted by her behavior and unwilling to believe that her mother was at the root of the problem, which seems to be her desired angle.  Certainly, a bad mother can damage a child, but at some point, the child grows up and has to take responsibility for her own actions which it seemed to take Sonnenberg an awful long time to do.  Her Last Death is a fascinating and well-told story of a relationship, indeed it often is a well-balanced account of a mother's pros and cons, but when readers begin to lose sympathy for the memoirist, Her Last Death loses its bite.

(Does this require the old disclaimer?  I got this book for free from Elle magazine, like, four years ago in exchange for my honest opinion (which I failed to formulate because I only just read it now), but it was, well, four years ago, so who even cares?  There, we have been duly disclaimed, just in case.  ;-) )

Little Princes by Conor Grennan

I have a confession to make. For most of 2011, I was frightened of reading non-fiction. You may have heard the one about how I'm a slow reader, especially slow by book blogging standards. After a few so-so non-fiction reads that dragged down the pace of my already turtle-ish reading speed to a distinctly unenjoyable creepy crawl, you might be able to understand my reluctance to take a chance on anymore non-fiction that had the potential to easily derail my reading momentum.

The thing is my reading past is littered with some extremely fantastic non-fiction reads, but for most of 2011 I let a few bad apples ruin the whole crop for me. Despite my irrational fears and probably against my better judgement, I requested a copy of Conor Grennan's Little Princes for review from William Morrow Paperbacks. When I'm not pathologically avoiding non-fiction, Grennan's story of rescuing trafficked children in Nepal is just the sort of non-fiction to which I'm drawn. Just my luck, it arrived in the mail just after I'd finished tearing through Mockingjay and was ready for something totally different. Something...perhaps non-fiction? I'm so glad that all the planets aligned, and I picked up this book for my last read of 2011 because I loved it and I think maybe, just maybe, it's broken through my foolish fears and opened up the world of non-fiction for me again.

Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
by Conor Grennan
William Morrow Paperbacks

Conor Grennan's unexpected journey began with a trip around the world. To quiet the naysayers who thought spending his life savings on world travel was a touch on the irresponsible, self-indulgent side, some volunteering was in order. To his credit, Grennan didn't elect to spend his time comforting koalas, he signed up for a few months volunteering at an orphanage in civil war-torn Nepal. There he discovered that many of Nepal's orphans are not orphans at all but children trafficked away from their distant homes for the gain of men who would promise desperate parents a safe haven for their children. These parents, believing they could save their children from becoming drafted into the Maoist rebel army and have them be educated and fed in distant Kathmandu to boot, sacrificed everything to send their children to "safety." Safety, however, turned out to be more like slavery to the greedy men who were pleased to line their own pockets with the profits from begging children and destitute families.

Little did Conor realize how much he would come to love the kids at the Little Princes Children's Home in Godawari, kids who would pile on new volunteers at the least provocation, who good-naturedly ribbed culture-shocked Conor, kids who were so far from home and family but who managed to be joyful anyway. Little did he expect that after his year of world travel, he would find himself returning to Little Princes for another stint of volunteering. He could hardly have imagined that seven trafficked kids he promised safety would see him rejecting the luxuries of first world living in favor of returning to Nepal to start a children's home of his own and to attempt an improbable quest to reunite trafficked children with their parents in the distant, isolated region of Humla.

Grennan's story is downright inspiring. He draws out the kids' personalities vividly in his writing, and it's easy to understand how one could be passionate about saving them despite the odds. Grennan's memoir is peppered with humor, with suspense, danger, and even a surprising and genuine love story.

Most impressive, though, is Grennan's honest telling of his story and the transformation of his character from his first time stepping through the gate at Little Princes to who he became through working at the would-be impossible task of finding 7 missing children among thousands. Grennan tells it like it is starting with his not-so-honorable reasons for volunteering in the first place, giving us all the embarrassing details of trying to fit into a new culture with a bunch of kids whose names he can initially barely remember, and not shying away from the huge emotional attachment he had to these kids after only a few weeks. He makes no secret of initially using his volunteering in Nepal story to woo women at bars, is unapologetic about his non-interest in getting married and having kids of his own. By the time the last page is flipped, readers will feel like they really know Conor Grennan, that they were there watching as stopped being a something of a self-involved boy and became a passionate, self-sacrificing man. Readers won't be able to help liking him, despite and perhaps because of how freely he describes his failings alongside his triumphs.

Little Princes somehow manages to be a compulsively readable story about a painful problem, a tribute to children with spectacular resilience, and a portrait of an average guy who became a hero for children in Nepal.

And in even more good news, if you happen to buy a copy, not only will you have the pleasure of reading a fantastic book, part of the proceeds will go to Grennan's non-profit, Next Generation Nepal, to keep doing the good work that you'll be reading about in the book.

(Thanks to William Morrow Paperbacks for sending me a copy for review!)

Dear Bully edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones

Happy Halloween, everyone! I don't have a creepy, gothic Halloween-y tale to share with you today, but that's not to say that I didn't read a book about something scary. There's not much scarier than a school bully, or a grown-up bully, or, well, any bully at all, and Dear Bully is chock full of them...


The statistics are staggering, jaw-dropping things. "Every seven minutes a child is bullied on a school playground, with more than eighty-five percent of those instances occurring without any intervention." Sure, everybody has probably dealt with a bully or been a bully sometime in their life, but bullying is so ingrained in our consciousness that it's foolishly viewed as some twisted rite of passage, a character-building opportunity to emerge on the other side as a stronger, thicker-skinned person, a person better equipped to deal with the difficult people life is guaranteed to throw at you.

Instead, though, we have hundreds of thousands of kids who are terrified to go to school lest they be bullied. Instead, we have kids who have been so isolated and demeaned by bullies at school and online that "a child commits suicide once every half hour" and more than 100,000 who bullies have made to feel so powerless that they feel they need to carry guns to school. If merciless torture of anyone who is even the slightest bit different is a rite of passage, then it is surely a rite that is far too heavy a burden on kids growing up today. Dear Bully is a compilation of 70 stories from YA authors about their experiences with bullying both as the bullied and as the bully. It is an assurance to kids that have been made to feel totally alone that they aren't and call to action for a nation that has turned a blind eye to bullying for too long.

The stories in Dear Bully come from a variety of well-known YA authors including Lauren Oliver, R.L. Stine, Alyson Noel, Megan McCafferty, and many more come in a variety of forms, as poetry, as stories, as letters, and even in pictures. Each is powerful in its own way, and the collection as a whole runs the full gamut of emotions, causing horror at the cruelty kids are capable of, tears at the bravery and kindness of those courageous few who were willing to step into the crosshairs of bullies to rescue their friends, and even smiles of relief at these many talented authors who emerged from their torturous days of middle and high school to take refuge in and write stories that would help the kids that they once were learn that the lies bullies tell couldn't be further from the truth.

If I have one complaint about some of the stories, it is that they depict mind-blowing abuse, show teachers and parents ignoring or brushing off bullying situations, describe how totally isolating bullying can be and then exhort kids to step up to stop it. While I understand the sentiment, this is one of the things that is so easy to write about in hindsight but so difficult to do at the time of the bullying. It's easy to say that you should tell the teacher or you should befriend the bullied or you should stand up to the bully, and really these are the kinds of things that should be done and should make a difference. That said, after you've just told a story where a bully beat you up or told atrocious lies about you that alienated all your friends, and the teacher said, "pull yourself together" when told the situation, it seems like a pretty hard sell to get kids to take a stand.

Aside from this one gripe that only applies to a few of the pieces, I would say that this collection is a must read for everyone who has ever dealt with a bully, been a bully, had a friend or a child who is or might be a victim of a bully's cruelty. The stories succeed in showing bullied kids that they aren't alone, that things do get better. Others reveal the intense regret that schoolyard bullies might one day come to feel once they emerge from an environment where being unique couldn't be more wrong. All endeavor to show kids that regardless of the pain words might inflict, they are worthwile and loved, that it's possible to stand up for themselves, and that doing what's right, even when it might be downright terrifying, can be the most liberating of all.

(Thanks to Eric and Co. at Planned TV Arts for sending me a copy of Dear Bully for review!)

Crossing the Heart of Africa by Julian Smith

Do you ever have those books that seem like they take you an eon to read and you don't understand why? I mean, of course you've got chunksters and the books you know are packed full of beautiful, complicated prose that need extra reading time and you know from the outset to expect it. What about those books, though, that are fairly uncomplicated, fairly enjoyable, and yet just seem to go on and on despite being of average length? I'm afraid that Julian Smith's Crossing the Heart of Africa was just such an experience for me. Despite liking it enough, it seemed to go on and on for me. Perhaps it's because I let myself get out of the habit of reading non-fiction, even nice narrative non-fiction with hefty doses of memoir, usually my favorite non-fiction to tackle. I worry the amount of days I unwittingly put into reading Crossing the Heart of Africa has clouded my opinion of a book that ultimately has much to recommend it, but enough of this navel gazing, let's start at the beginning.


In Crossing the Heart of Africa author Julian Smith tells two intertwined stories. The first is that of somewhat lesser-known African explorer Ewart Grogan, who, in 1889, pledged that he would make the first crossing of the African continent from south to north in order to win the hand of his true love, Gertrude, a woman well above his social station. Smith gives us a version Grogan's treacherous journey which will end with Gertrude's uncle's blessing upon their matrimony. Alongside Grogan's story is Smith's recounting of his own journey across modern-day Africa following Grogan's route, a journey that despite the passage of more than a hundred years, is still fraught with danger and difficulty, but for entirely different reasons. Rather than earning his love's hand, though, Smith's journey is his last act as a "free" unmarried man. As he traverses the continent, Smith also reflects upon his 7 year relationship with Laura, the woman who is about to become his wife.

Smith's relationship reflections are easily my least favorite part of the book and, in my opinion, add little to it. Smith's disclosures are never inappropriate, but in ways they feel almost too personal to the point that I worry that if it had been me Smith was getting married to, I'd have been uncomfortable to have the nooks and crannies of our relationship dissected on the page. Smith, in his reflections, also reveals himself to be the sort of total commitment-phobe that I find difficult to understand. I found it difficult to wrap my mind around someone who, after 7 years and numerous "Aha! I love you!" moments would still be dragging his feet about the part with the rings. I'm afraid these things distracted me from what is, on the whole, a very good book.

I'd never heard Ewart Grogan's story before, and Smith does an excellent job of giving Grogan's story new life. He captures the highs and lows of Grogan's trip, a journey made difficult by everything from disease to cannibals to volcanic wasteland to lack of supplies and hostile natives at every turn, but also a journey made spectacular by its opportunities for seeing incredible, virtually untouched wilderness, the thrill of the hunt of species that were practically the stuff of legends, and, of course, the reaching of the ultimate goal - a marriage to Gertrude. Smith reveals, in Grogan, a still young man of extreme determination and intelligent, practical leadership, and, in Africa, a still wild land of tribes both friendly and unfriendly, laboring under the great and lesser burdens of colonialism.

Weaved into Grogan's story is Smith's own journey through Africa via a similar route to Grogan's. Smith's journey is fraught with trials of its own, though his near-death experiences are considerably more limited than Grogan's. Smith's is a story of still-rugged wilderness, packed and undependable "public" transportation, friendly eager-to-please people who might just be friendly or might just be so desparate to get out of Africa that any American looks like a walking chance at a U.S. visa. On his trip, Smith finds an Africa riddled by violent conflicts that keep him from following Grogan's route exactly and an African continent marked by countries with struggling economies that offer few opportunities to their citizens, no matter how industrious.

Crossing the Heart of Africa is an entertaining re-telling of a death-defying adventure and a study in contrasts. Smith gives an interesting side-by-side look a Africa's past and its present that allows us to draw our own conclusions about what has really changed in Africa in a century marked by struggle and corruption. At the same time, Smith offers us a snapshot of practical modern love juxtaposed against the romantic ideas of a different time that might well have us longing for days when a woman's heart and her hand in marriage was considered something worth earning.

(Thanks to Erica at Harper Perennial for the review copy!)

Family Sentence: The Search for my Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad by Jeanine Cornillot

I know it's hard to believe, but I think it's about to happen. I'm going to review a book that was written for an adult audience. It's been over a month, but hopefully I've been the only one counting. We have my quest to catch up with LibraryThing Early Reviewer books to thank for this one.


Family Sentence is Jeanine Cornillot's tale of growing up with a father in prison. Growing up, Jeanine's world is sharply divided. There's the world she knows, the one where she lives in a house dominated by women in suburban Philadelphia where men are absent and foreign to her. The other part of her world is a little more uncertain. Summers, growing up, she spent with her Cuban grandparents in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Most of her Miami relatives speak no English and Jeanine, despite being half Cuban, knows no Spanish. Despite having her cousins for interpreting, the language barrier and her decidedly un-Cuban looks make her own relatives a little foreign to her despite being bound by blood.

Jeanine's father, a self-professed Cuban revolutionary determined to free Cuba from Castro's rule, was in prison for all of the childhood she can remember for the crime of bombing an Air Canada ticket office. All that she knows of her father she learns from his infrequent letters and a few family trips to visit him in prison during her summers in Miami. All the rest, she makes up as she goes along. She worries and wonders about her father's life in prison, imagines a family reunion that she's certain will never happen while she's still a child, and she perpetrates tiny acts of terrorism in school hallways imagining the revolutionary blood that runs through her veins and bonds her to a father who she doesn't know and will never understand.

Family Sentence is a book about a girl growing into a woman and trying to piece together the disparate pieces of her identity. It's also the story of a girl trying to know a father who is distant and perplexing even when he volunteers answers to any question she might have. It's a story about reconciling the myth of a dad, who by his ideals and through a daughter's loving but ignorant eyes has become larger than life with a real person who has lived an imperfect life without the regrets readers would expect.

Cornillot tells her story with brutal honesty, painting the naive girl she was, desperate to look and seem more "Cuban" for a father who could barely be bothered to remember her when they were apart. She brings her young self to vivid life with many anecdotes of her young life complete with her girlhood imaginings and her childish quirks like her penchant for saying "that's a crime" about anything that seems slightly unjust. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like the anecdotes get away from her, and that makes for the book's one flaw that it's easy to get lost in the individual anecdotes and lose track of where Cornillot is going with the larger narrative of her life with and without her father. However, the book seems to collect itself in its final chapters as Jeanine reunites with her father as a teenager and a young adult and all the myths and misconceptions she had about her father collide. Ultimately, Cornillot's is a compelling memoir that draws us into her life and tells a personal story that every kid who's ever idolized a parent only to grow up and discover a fallible human being can relate to.

Review copy received from Beacon Press via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Green Books Campaign: Operating Room Confidential

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 200 bloggers take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled or FSC-certified paper. By turning a spotlight on books printed using eco- friendly paper, we hope to raise the awareness of book buyers and encourage everyone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the discussion on "green" books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner! A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

It's been a while since I've done anything even mildly activisty or socially conscious on my blog (for shame, I know), so when I got an e-mail inviting me to be a part of the 2010 Green Books Campaign, I jumped at the chance. Since I'm still far too in love with my "old-timey" books printed on paper to trade them in for an e-reader, the next best thing seems to be to get on the bandwagon with printing books in as environmentally-sustainable a manner as possible.


The book I chose to read for the Green Books Campaign is Operating Room Confidential by Paul Whang. It is printed by ECW Press on FSC Certified paper, 98% of which comes from recycled materials. FSC certification ensures that forest products used are from responsibly harvested and verified sources (FSC.org). I chose Operating Room Confidential from a list full of intriguing environmentally friendly options because it plays into my day job, which I am forced to work at to fund my book habit. If you don't know, I work in a surgical pathology lab at a pretty busy hospital and, as a result, have a fair few interactions with surgeons. Besides still being in the dark about much of what happens behind the operating room doors, I was eager to see how Whang's impressions of surgeons matched with my own experience.

Dr. Whang is an anesthetist at a busy Toronto hospital and, as such, has the opportunity to observe the goings-on during many operations performed by a variety of surgeons. With a candid, conversational tone peppered with anecdotes and insider observations Whang guides us through a day in the operating room in a way that is both entertaining and informative. Whang covers topics ranging from the daily protocol of the operating room (the 5 second rule applies to nothing, for the record), the types of patients doctors fear the most (lawyers, other doctors, doctors' family members), personality types of the various medical specialties, as well as some cold hard information about what to expect if you, yourself, are about to go under the knife.

At the start, I very much enjoyed Dr. Whang's exposure of the daily happenings of the operating room. His observations and anecdotes are told with insight and wit, and I learned some interesting things, some of which confirm a good deal of what you see on Grey's Anatomy isn't so far beyond the pale. I definitely found myself in agreement with many of his comments on hospital hierarchy and the frustrating disconnect between administration and the people actually doing the hard work of caring for patients on a daily basis. I am, however, happy to report that my hospital differs from Whang's on the food front. He comments at length, in a very funny section, about the terrible lack of quality in hospital cafeteria food.

As I came into the home stretch of the book, though, it began to lose my interest a bit. Toward the latter end of the book, Whang spends a good deal of time giving us information, some of which is valuable and some of which consists of surgery details that I almost wish I could un-read. Whang's in depth description of his function as an anesthetist, what good anesthesia looks and feels like for the patient, and how to aid recovery with good pain management are valuable and, I think, comforting for those about to undergo surgery. On the other hand, his very detailed descriptions of, for example, the minutiae of knee or hip replacement surgery made me cringe and I would heartily recommend not reading these portions if you foresee these sorts of surgeries in your future. The idea of having one of these mostly routine procedures one day in my hopefully distant future distresses me more than ever having read the details.

I do think knowledge and a certain amount of preparedness is definitely helpful when it comes to undergoing and recovering from a surgical procedure, and Operating Room Confidential does a good job of providing us with this information. That said, though, there is a point past which ignorance is bliss, and I fear that, just a time or two, Whang's explanations go beyond that point. Other than these few instances, though, Operating Room Confidential is an engrossing and honest portrait of what goes on behind closed doors, both the good and bad, and I would recommend it to anybody who's ever been curious about the innermost workings of a hospital. The faint of heart might just want to skip that last chapter. ;-)

(Thanks to the publisher for providing my copy in conjunction with the Green Books Campaign).

Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman

I like to go to prison in the springtime. It's not deliberate, really, I mean, how many people go to prison on a regular basis on purpose? Fear not, despite my unintended love for spending springtime in jail, I promise I don't have a criminal record. Other than a parking ticket or two, the record's squeaky clean. What I'm talking about here, is my tendency of late to read a really excellent, compelling memoir about prison and the failure of the American justice system while flowers bloom and birds chirp. It's hardly even something I realized I was interested in until I read my first "prison in springtime" book last year, Picking Cotton, a most excellent and revealing book. This year, as you may guess, the prison book is Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman. While prison is a place I hope to never go, and the justice system something I never hope to tangle with, having the doors to prison thrown open via the written word is something I find myself eager to embrace.

Orange is the New Black: My Year In a Women's Prison
by Piper Kerman
Spiegel & Grau

Piper Kerman is young, reckless, and lovelorn as a young Smith College grad when she allows her lover to pressure her into smuggling drug money. Soon after her one nerve-wracking foray into crime, she leaves her lover and returns to normal life in the U.S. desperate to forget her one indiscretion. Years on, living in New York with her soon-to-be fiance and earning a living as a freelance producer, Kerman is surprised and distraught when her past catches up with her in the form of two customs officers and a court date in Chicago, where she is charged with drug smuggling and money laundering. With the War on Drugs in full swing, making mandatory minimum sentences for any and all drug crimes regardless of circumstances at least ten years, Piper's best option is to plea guilty to her crime and hope for a much more lenient sentence. When all is said and done, Kerman finds herself reporting to Danbury, Connecticut for a year in minimum security women's prison.

What follows is Kerman's compelling, all-too-human story that uses her unique situation to lay bare the broken prison system and its often unexpectedly sympathetic captives. Within the pages, Kerman brings to light the awful feeling of exposure and powerlessness that come with a prison sentence. Despite being in a relatively low security portion of the prison system for a relatively short stretch of time, Kerman is struck by the humiliating rituals of the prison and her sudden downgrading to something less than human immediately upon her arrival within prison walls.

While Kerman doesn't excuse the crimes of the women she gets to know and even love within the prison walls, she does much to humanize and create sympathy for a subset of society struggling within the system. For many of the women she meets, making money in the underground economy is the only way of making any money at all, and the prison system does very little to help them succeed in a crime free life on the outside. As much as these women look forward to freedom, a feeling of trepidation lurks as they stumble through "exit" classes that do laughably little to address the practical aspects of living and working in a world that has continued to change in their absence. Kerman notes that the teachers of the classes, while occasionally well-meaning, could hardly propose a way of even finding an apartment in which to live upon release.

Orange is the New Black is at once profoundly revealing and effortlessly entertaining. Kerman has a vivid, honest voice that doesn't drift into self-pity but instead keenly observes the people around her both good and bad. She paints compelling and empathetic portraits of the prisoners that shared her life and made her time within the prison system bearable. At the same time, though, she shines a light on the dark corners of a life behind bars that most of us hope never to experience. Orange is the New Black is just the sort of book that people really do need to read, and it's just our luck that Kerman's book is nearly as entertaining as it is important.

(My copy's from LibraryThing Early Reviews, in case you're wondering!)

Complications by Atul Gawande

Wow, is it a bad sign when I can't even think of anything worth writing in my "opening monologue" here? Last week was a fun week with all the time consuming yet worthwile link posts, but now I think it's about time to get down to the business of review writing. After all the link posts, this should be quick and painless, right? I received a copy of Complications by Atul Gawande as a Christmas gift. It's a book I'd been meaning to read for quite a while, especially given my unexpected career in the medical field. I work in a surgical pathology lab, which means, in a nutshell, that if you come to "my" hospital you won't know me or see me, but chances are I've seen a part of you (i.e. your skin biopsy, your appendix, your gallbladder and the list goes on). So, I'll admit straight off the bat, that my work, occasionally alongside surgeons and always in conjunction with them gave me a particular interest in this book. With that said, however, I think that this book is an engaging and worthwile read for anyone who has or might in the future be treated by a doctor. In other words, of course, I mean everybody should read it.

Complications is a collection of essays about Atul Gawande's experience as a surgeon and his acute observations of how the medical establishment is failing and succeeding. Gawande's essays offer us a look into the murky depths of practicing medicine that we fail to understand and appreciate despite our often frequent contact with the system. Broken up into three sections, Gawande's essays explore doctors' fallibility, unknowns and mysteries that often crop up in the treatment of patients, and, finally, uncertainty itself, a prospect we often fail to consider given the perpetual technological advancement that seems inherent in practicing medicine.

Gawande engages the reader using frequent case studies of patients he and his colleagues have encountered. These serve to draw the reader in and also as great jumping off points for Gawande to tackle the struggles and questions that plague both doctors and patients about the state of medicine today. In Complications, Gawande contemplates the mystery of pain, questions how we do and essentially must entrust patient care to doctors in training, the improbable victory of a surgeon's instinct over facts and logic, and many more fascinating topics.

Complications is an important book. It's a book that asks us to consider the fact that even the doctors who are treating us are merely fallible human beings who know a lot but are often forced to rely on gut instinct in a crunch which may work to the benefit of the patient but may also work to their detriment. It's a book that reminds the rest of us, as patients, that we have an important role to play in our own healthcare. All this, and it also features the sort of compelling, easy to understand writing that makes Complications almost impossible to put down.

In the Country of Brooklyn by Peter Golenbock

Aloha, everyone! I'd apologize for my absence, but I think I already did that. I've been busy spending all my savings on Christmas presents and car repairs, and in a few weeks, I'll be busy spending the rest of my savings on a new car (unless there's one in my driveway on Christmas morning with a gigantic bow on it - ha! That's a nice fantasy...) and a new laptop (as for the old one? hard drive failing). Luckily I've still got my dad's relic (it runs Windows 98! YouTube is phasing out its browser! Ha!) to type out the occasional review and to hack away futilely at the backlog in my Google Reader (even with the occasional comment so everyone will know I'm still here...somewhere). Amid the strife that this month has brought me, I've also been engaging in lots of Christmasy fun in NYC and at day long Christmas parties and attending a delightful "holiday brunch" at work and, of course, listening to Christmas music nearly non-stop and have thus managed to regenerate a good deal of holiday cheer that I thought was lost forever from a week or few of almost laughable bad fortune which prompted my loving father to rename me "black cloud."

And today, I have even more reason to celebrate because I've finished it. My arch-nemesis review copy. Peter Golenbock's epically huge oral history of Brooklyn, In the Country of Brooklyn, which I so foolishly requested from LibraryThing Early Reviewers not realizing how ginormous it would be. Now this book has been skulking about in various states of "readness" for probably more than a year, serving as the considerable base of most of my "reading now" piles that I'm not actually reading. As a Christmas gift to myself, I decided to finally get this monkey off my back (or, well, at least off my bedroom floor) and give my sad and pathetic reading page totals a boost for the year with its well beyond considerable 663 pages. The two of us have such a long history, that I almost don't know how I'll finally review it, but I think I'll manage....


In the Country of Brooklyn is Peter Golenbock's compilation of dozens and dozens and dozens and possibly a few more dozen interviews he conducted with various residents of Brooklyn throughout its last almost-century of history. Through the spoken experience of various average and important personages of Brooklyn through the years, Golenbock attempts to give us a sense of an exciting and progressive place, home to the entire spectrum of immigrants that eventually found their way to the United States, that spawned a variety of political activists, sports heroes, as well as an impressive array of cultural contributions. Golenbock uses his interviews to comment on Brooklyn's struggle and ultimate willingness to integrate its diverse population, the struggle to get government to recognize and respond to the needs of its people, its present efforts to rejuvenate parts of the community that have fallen into disuse and disrepair, and, given its length, much, much more.

Golenbock must have taken an incredible amount of time to speak with his many subjects and transcribe their words, and it shows. This book is packed with the thoughts and memories of countless people connected in some way to Brooklyn. These interviews make up the meat of the book. Most are interesting, and many are downright compelling. In addition, there are past and present pictures of Booklyn as well as of each of the interviews' subjects which is another definite addition to this book.

That said, if you're going to read this book, read it for the interviews. Golenbock's background and assorted "filler" information is at times, unfortunately, downright painful to read. Golenbock's wild generalizations and obvious political intrusions will bother any serious historian and any average person who happens to disagree with his views. The book's organization is also sorely lacking. While the interviews are a pleasure to read, Golenbock seems to struggle to make them coalesce around any sort of main point. Indeed, some of the interviewees, while interesting, seem to have only the most fleeting of connections with Brooklyn which, it seems, Golenbock might have been attempting to include in an effort to define Brooklyn in a certain way that doesn't quite seem to pan out. Instead what we have is a massive tome that, once you've passed the midway point, seems to drag on to some uncertain destination that is never reached. With a good edit for page count and organization and perhaps an overhaul of Golenbock's background information, In the Country of Brooklyn, with all its potent first person accounts, could have packed quite a punch, but as it stands, it will leave real history buffs wishing for something a little more substantial.

Disclaimer: In the Country of Brooklyn was sent to me at no cost by Harper Collins/William Morrow in conjunction with LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm

I've been such a slacker with my book reviews lately. I'm reading good books, but my motivation to review them has been pretty minimal. Maybe because I'm eager to get back to those other good books I'm reading (and inevitably failing to review in a timely fashion). Right now I'm operating under the assumption that if I just sit down and begin to type mindlessly, a review will magically come to me.

Today's selection, I guess, is a little something different for me. Pete Fromm's Indian Creek Chronicles was a total impulse buy at a library book sale on the "Friends of the Library" preview night - also referred to as the snatch and grab. If it looks like it has any potential at all, you must snatch and/or grab it to prevent it from being snatched and/or grabbed by some other person. I spend a great deal of money at library book sales as a result of this tactic. The selling point for me on this one was its setting, the Montana/Idaho wilderness. Ever since driving to Montana in the middle of the winter, books revolving around Montana and South Dakota and the other less boring states my father and I drove through on our perilous journey have a much greater hold on me, and this one won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book of the Year. Despite my total lack of knowledge about this award, it somehow made the book seem that much more alluring. Anyhow, I agreed to trade it after reading it to someone at Bookcrossing, so I really need to get this review done and ship it out.


Midway through his college career as a wildlife biology major at the University of Montana, Pete Fromm's life takes a little detour. Fueled by his love of exploring nature solo, and most of all, by his college roommate's books full of romanticized feats of mountain men, Fromm makes a spur of the moment decision to apply for a job guarding salmon eggs. For seven months. In an isolated wilderness. In the dead of winter. More than anything, Pete Fromm wanted some mountain man stories of his own to tell, and getting paid to guard a couple million salmon eggs seemed just the way to do it. So, after one thoughtless phone call, endless supply shopping, and a few too many booze-fueled going away parties, incredibly amateur mountain man Fromm found himself preparing for months of total isolation with nary a clue as to what surviving alone in the wilderness would entail.

It's nearly mind-blowing that a tale that has at its core the unbelievable isolation and boredom of an Idaho wilderness winter would be so captivating a read. Fromm's stories and his descriptions of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness capture the rawness and cruel beauty of its winter that oft goes unobserved. With revealing descriptions of the scenery accompanied by powerful tales of wildlife surviving a hostile environment where survival seems impossible, Fromm reveals the dangerous magnificence of this wintry landscape in a way that few, if any, others ever could. Fromm himself is a sympathetic narrator as he seems to get on-the-job training in "mountain manhood." We go along with him as he learns hard lessons about what works and what doesn't, what it looks and feels like to hunt for food for survival, and, of course, that being a mountain man isn't nearly as fantastic as it seems in all the books, not to mention that he probably should have brought a few more than six books along when he agreed to spend 7 months virtually alone.

Fromm's constant inner battle between loving and owning his untouched wilderness and his desperate desire to get out and see another human face is all too convincing. When spring comes and people start entering the place he has come to think of his own, it feels, even to us, like an invasion of sorts. Foolish though his endeavor may have seemed at the outset, in the end, Fromm certainly emerged with the great mountain man stories he was looking for and much more.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book for a senstive, thoughtful, and appreciative perspective on a place and time that we could hardly hope to experience on our own. A warning to faint hearted animal lover: Fromm doesn't shy away from the details of his hunting or of the natural behavior of the wildlife he observes, which, of course, involves some killing and eating. I'll admit that there were moments that make me cringe, but I also think that to have left them out, Fromm would have done his memoir of his experience a great disservice since all of these instances seemed to be a crucial learning experience.

At one exposed bend of the river, where the wind had cleared the ice of all but the newest snow, I saw the trail of an elk that had run down the mountain and crossed the river. Its tracks showed how it leaped the last bit of riverbank, landing on what looked exactly like more snow. But on the ice, all hell had broken loose. The elk's front feet had shot to the left, while his back legs had done the splits. He held on for what must have been a long time, his feet making wild looping patterns on the ice, but then the snow had been wiped clean by the big broad side of the elk spinning over the ice.

I laughed, translating what must have occurred, and I wished I'd been just a few minutes earlier, that I could have seen the mighty, majestic elk take such a pratfall.

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In completely unrelated news, Book Blogger Appreciation Week is fast approaching. I'm eagerly hoping to be able to make more time to be more involved with it this year considering what an awesome event it was last year. If you're a book blogger and you haven't rolled over there to sign up, get to it! It's an especially great week to be a book blogger. Many thanks to Amy and the whole crew that are busy making this year's BBAW what will be, I'm sure, another great success.

A few days ago, with surprise and glee I noticed an e-mail in my box informing me that I'd been nominated for a BBAW award in the category of Most Humorous/Funniest blog. Thanks so much to whoever nominated me! Even if that is all the other further it goes, it's an honor (and have I mentioned how surprised I was??) to be nominated. Thanks again for thinking I'm funny...and saying so! =D