My Favorites

Memoir, Biography, and History

6 CDs. Richard Russo’s memoir of his mother. Loved it! See more under ‘Reading and Writing,’ and ‘Excerpts.’

9 cassettes. Wonderfully read by Jay O. Sanders. This was my favorite book of the year. You do not have to understand basketball terminology, or have been a basketball player, to be moved by it. It is about fathers and their sons, coaches and their players, and will make you marvel at Pat Conroy’s ability to create scenes from his childhood. The book, he says, is about “passing through the silent eye of the storm that was my childhood.” I know he has forgiven his father (detailed in a book written this year about his father’s death). I find that nothing short of amazing.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson

19 CDs. Sometimes I had to turn off the audio for a time, as the details of, say, a lynching, were just too awful to contemplate. The narrative was marred by repetition (for which I blame the editor), but overall I thought this was an important story, well told.

I liked this book because we need to remember this (and more) about our country: “There was a colored window at the post office in Pensacola, Florida, and there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. White and colored went to separate windows to get their license plates in Indianola, Mississippi, and two separate tellers to make their deposits at the First National Bank of Atlanta. There were taxicabs for colored people and taxicabs for whites in Jacksonville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and all of Mississippi.”

The title of this book is taken from Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth: "I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom."

4 CDs. A wonderful friendship evoked. After getting back in the car after walking their dogs, Caroline would sometimes say to Gail, "Let's take the long way home." I didn't think any book about a friendship would measure up to Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty, but this is just as good in its own way.

7 CDs. This won the National Book Award in the Nonfiction category. As I was reading it, I thought (hoped) it was fiction. It is just too sad, being confronted with how people live. Not for someone looking for an enjoyable read. (Bob adds: “See Falkland Road, by Mary Ellen Mark.”)

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticant

9 cassettes. Wonderfully narrated by Robin Miles (who also narrated Cane River, which I loved several years ago). This is Danticant’s memoir about her father and his brother, her Uncle Joseph. She was raised in Haiti by her parents till age 4 when they left to establish a new life in America, so, from 4 to 11, she was raised by her Uncle Joseph and Aunt Denise. National Book Award nominee in non-fiction.

11 CDs. The author is very unprepared when she sets out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But, to her credit, she does persevere, and hikes 1100 miles. She was chronically short of money (on those occasions when she got into a town), having tucked all she had into each of her resupply boxes (a $20 bill per box). (Bob also read or skimmed this.)

Parts I & II (36 CDs in all). I am glad to now be informed about William H. Seward, as I plan to take the tour of his house in Auburn, NY sometime soon. And, it goes without saying, I am learning much about Lincoln and the Civil War. At year’s end, I am about to finish this book. I happened to be reading the Gettysburg Address section on November 19^th, the 150^th anniversary of that speech, to the day.

Subcategory: Graphic Memoirs

A graphic memoir. A simple story, nicely told, with very pleasing drawings. Alan was born in California in 1925. He served in Europe during WWII. He returned to California for awhile, but then moved to France, learned the language, became a translator. He lived out his life there. Just a few years before his death he happened to meet Guibert, who appreciated Alan’s WWII stories, and combined them with his own drawings to create this book. (Bob recommends Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer.)

I continue to love Bechdel’s “comic book” illustrations and style. But, this didn’t have the impact that her first book, Fun Home, had. She has a nice dedication: “For my mother, who knows who she is.” In the book, she tries to “untie the snares of a fraught past.” (says Lawrence Weschler in his endorsement).

This is another graphic memoir, very much in the tradition of Alison Bechdel’s one about her mother (see above). Whereas Bechdel’s brought child psychologist Donald Winnicott into the narrative, this one cuts back and forth between Mary Talbot’s childhood (daughter of renowned Joycean scholar James S. Atherton) and the childhood of Lucia Joyce (James’ daughter). Not entirely successful, but the drawings by Mary’s husband Bryan are quite nice.

Martin always knew he (b 1949) and his older brother Bernard (b 1947) were the children of Holocaust survivors. But he never really heard his mother's whole story until he was 40. When his mother Gusta came to stay with him for a few weeks while recovering from a broken foot, he sat her down and got her to tell her story on videotape. He never went back to it until years after she had died. He transcribed her words and used his skills as a book illustrator to create this graphic memoir. A sample, from her village life before the war: "We have the only well in the street. Even Isia, my youngest brother, remembers when the Father has it built. It was a good new well. ... Monday was the Yerid. This is what we are calling the market in Germakivka. I go to the Yerid anytime we need something for the house." By December of 1941 all the Jews had to move out of their village. By December of 1942, she and two bothers and a sister were hiding in the forest, and they managed to hide there for two long winters.

Fiction

A young boy’s ship journey (three weeks) from Ceylon to England at the impressionable age of 11 in 1954 is recounted years later, by the grown man. He evokes the great adventure that he remembers it being. The boy makes two friends right away and describes a cast of other colorful characters. “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my life, who would alter me,” Ondaatje writes. Although this is fiction, it is intriguing to note that the author journeyed by ship from Ceylon to England in 1954 at age 11.

Paper copy, a gift from Lisa Jadwin. Also listened to much of it on CD (10 CDs).

If this were a movie, the tagline could be taken from one of the sentences in the book: "Publicity had its price, but so did silence." Robin Decker, a postdoc at the Philpott Institute (run by Medelssohn and Glass), starts having suspicions that Cliff suppressed some of his findings (those that didn't fit with the otherwise promising results).

Not To My Taste

I skimmed big chunks of this. Frankly, I was very disappointed, after the many positive reviews the book had gotten. While this is a priceless document for the author’s grandchildren, it was heavy on the cataloguing of how things were in her childhood and it was light on any conflict or revelations that would interest the general reader. You got a good sense of what her grandmother was like, but there was no character development of her mother or her siblings.

Children/Young Adult books

4 CDs. Based on the true story of Juana Maria (died 1853), a Nicoleno Indian left alone for 18 years on San Nicolas Island (one of the Channel Islands, 70 miles off the California coast) in the 19th century. Won the Newbery Medal. The author later (1976) wrote a sequel, Zia.

Charmingly-illustrated story of Jane Goodall’s childhood. She was born in London in 1934. This was a 2012 Caldecott Honor Book.

Books Sampled

I skipped all the technical stuff, but was interested in the recovery process from stroke. In 1996, Jill was at Harvard Medical School performing research and teaching medical students about the brain. One morning in December (she was 37), she had a stroke. Immediately after her stroke, she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. With hard work, she recovered a lot of her brain function in the first 8 months, but full recovery took 8 years. For example: It took 4 years of walking with hand weights, three miles a day, several times a week, before she could walk in a smooth rhythm. She did not begin to be able to add and subtract, or multitask, until her fourth post-stroke year.

This ranks right up there with Behind the Beautiful Forevers as most depressing read of the year. [I’m just now noticing a pattern here, in the year’s books: Civil War, Holocaust, the Depression, lynchings. Maybe next year’s reading will be more upbeat.]

From the Table of Contents you get the picture of doom:

Days of theft : Pine Ridge, South Dakota

Days of siege : Camden, New Jersey

Days of devastation : Welch, West Virginia

Days of slavery : Immokalee, Florida

Days of revolt : Liberty Square, New York City.

The Introduction brings more doom: “The game, however, is up. The clock is ticking toward internal and external collapse.”

One has to take it in small doses, and I read only the Welch, WV section. The authors “take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas of the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.” In each section, the illustrator, Joe Sacco, creates a “graphic memoir” [my words] from one of the oral histories. Since I love oral history and graphic memoir, those were the redeeming features of this book.

Abridged to 6 CDs. Volume I of the author’s trilogy. It took him 24 years to complete all three books. I didn’t realize when I got the CD that it was abridged. But I quickly realized it while listening, as there were clearly places where it skipped ahead, so I don’t recommend the abridgement. I was reading this when the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington was all over the news.

Published posthumously in 1967. Out of a total of 6 or 7 CDs I only completed 5 before it was due back. The book was too much of a fantasy for my tastes, but one redeeming feature was the wonderful performance of it by Jim Norton, with great Irish accents. At Swim-Two-Birds is the book by this author that is considered his masterpiece. But, based on this book, I’m not thinking of seeking it out. Flann O’Brien is, I have learned, the pseudonym of Irish writer Brian O’Nolan.

Book-related quotes, and quotes from books

As most of the readers of this book list will know, I grew up in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, two blocks from 75^th and Colfax, and I left for college in 1965. Thus when Ida Mae and her family, in Warmth of Other Suns, ended their migration at that spot, it brought the Great Migration history very close to home:

“By the end of the year [1967], the 7500 block of Colfax and much of the rest of South Shore went from all white to nearly totally black. The turnover was sudden and complete and so destabilizing that it even extended to the stores on Seventy-fifth Street, to the neighborhood schools, and to the street-sweeping and police patrols that could have kept up the quality of life. It was as if the city lost interest when the white people left. The five-and-dime shut down. The Walgreens on the corner became a liquor store.”

And, the story of Mahalia Jackson also resonated, as she integrated the neighborhood where my cousins, at 8411 Calumet, lived. The Catholic priest mentioned was their parish priest:

“It happened to ordinary people like Ida Mae and to celebrities like Mahalia Jackson, the leading gospel singer of her day. When she began looking for a house in a well-to-do section of the South Side, people held meetings up and down the block. A Catholic priest rallied his parishioners and told them not to sell to her. She got calls in the middle of the night, warning her, “You move into that house, and we’ll blow it up with dynamite. You’re going to need more than your gospel songs and prayers to save you.”

“She bought the house. It was a sprawling red brick ranch and the house of her dreams, coming as she had from the back country of Louisiana. … The police were posted outside her house for close to a year.”

Reading and Writing

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson devoted fifteen years to the research and writing of this book. In her years of research, Wilkerson raced against the clock to reach as many original migrants as she could before it was too late, interviewing more than 1,200 to identify the book’s three main characters. … In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the All-Time Best Books of Nonfiction.

- http://isabelwilkerson.com

Elsewhere

My mother’s reaction to my novels was, as you might expect, complex. She enjoyed seeing the town that shaped both our lives (Gloversville, NY) through the prism of my imagination. Recognizing her husband (my father) in Nobody’s Fool, she remarked that she was far fonder of him on the page than in real life. … Mohawk and The Risk Pool are my most literally autobiographical novels, if by autobiography you mean shared facts and data. Still, while there’s far more invention in Bridge of Sighs, I think of it as the novel that most deeply probes who I am, as a man and as a writer.

- Richard Russo, in an interview

The Cat’s Table

What someone says to the boy, you know, ‘Keep your ears and eyes open, because this is going to be a great education,’ and so the minute I said that, or had someone say that, then it became, in a way, a book about how especially 11-year-olds are easily educated in a bad way or a good way. ... You know, it's very obvious, because, I think you are obviously kind of discovering elements of yourself, even if you are writing fiction, because even the kind of characters you invent are aspects of yourself, are glimmers of aspects of yourself, and then you had to paint them in, in great detail.

- Michael Ondaatje, interviewed on PBS News Hour

Alan’s War

The author had written graphic novels for young and old. He met Alan by chance in 1994 when Alan was 69 and Emmanuel Guibert was 30. “One day, a few days after our meeting, he started telling me stories about his experiences of the war. We were walking back and forth along the ocean. He spoke well; I listened well.” Guibert eventually made him a proposal: “Let’s do some books together. You’ll tell me stories; I’ll draw.” They began recording his account on cassette tapes. “We were happy to have found a good reason to spend time together.”

Are You My Mother?

Bechdel says there's something—a kind of accepting warmth— that she never got from her mother. But in the course of writing the book, she says she realized there were other gifts her mother did give her. "My mother taught me to be a writer," she says.

As a young girl, Bechdel kept a diary, but she says that around the age of 11, "I was in this sort of obsessive-compulsive phase where I had to do all these repetitive motions in my writing," she recalls. Making diary entries became an epic task, so Bechdel's mother stepped in to help. "My mom said, 'Let me just, you tell me what to say and I'll write it down.' And I feel like it was in that moment, that exchange with her ... my words coming out of her pen, I think that's when I became a memoirist."

– from Guy Raz’s NPR interview, May 27, 2012

RIP Doris Lessing (died November 17, 2013)

For many years, Doris Lessing's name hovered near the top of the list of Greatest Living Writers Never to Have Won a Nobel Prize for Literature. That oversight was corrected in October 2007 when the Swedish Academy recognized the author for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power." (Bob says the skepticism is what he likes about her work.)

When Lessing was informed by reporters that she had won the prize, she responded, "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old, and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd better give it to me now before I've popped off."

http://grammar.about.com/od/writersonwriting/a/lessingadvice07.htm

Miscellaneous

I see Emma Bovary running down a grassy hill on her way to the chemist’s shop, her cheeks flushed, her hair loosened by the wind. The grass, the cheeks, the hair, the wind are not in the text. I provided them.

- Siri Hustvedt, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and

Art (No. 49)

(Thanks to Bob for finding this quote!)

Excerpts

The Long Way Home

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Pershing ... was in uniform with his captain's bars and medical caduccus. The storekeeper [in Robert Pershing Foster’s hometown of Monroe, LA] noticed and asked what he was going to do when he got out of the army.

"Well, I'm going to go into practice, private practice," Pershing said. ... "I'm going to California and start my practice there."

"What's wrong with St. Francis [the local hospital]?"

Pershing shook his head. The man had lived there since before Pershing was born, and a central fact of colored people's existence hadn't registered after all these years.

"You know that colored surgeons can't operate at St. Francis, Mr. Massur."

The man looked startled and caught himself. White-only and colored-only signs were all over town, but the storekeeper had not thought about how segregation applied to the hospital. ... One set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn't see the bars.

-----------------------

It was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation "with all deliberate speed."

Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.

The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

-----------------------

Each December, at “settling time,” George would meet with Mr. Edd, the white landowner, to learn how he had done. In a malevolent ritual, played out across the cotton South, Mr. Edd would open his ledger book to prove that the annual debt for supplies bought on credit almost exactly matched the value of George’s annual crop. George Gladney didn’t know much about arithmetic, but he did know the dangers of challenging a white man’s figures. So he’d thank Mr. Edd and return to his shack with a few dollars to show for a year’s worth of backbreaking toil.

Elsewhere

There were times when I seriously considered wringing her neck, but then the cycle would end, and there she'd be again, my mother, lost and frail and afraid, with barely enough energy to draw her next breath, her heart a sledgehammer in her chest—anxious, it seemed, for this terrible struggle to be over. ... At some point I simply flatlined and, without admitting it to myself, conceded defeat and started just going through the motions. This was why my dreams were haunted. Because I'd given up on someone I loved, someone who'd never, ever, given up on me. I couldn't speak [when his family got together to scatter his mother’s ashes] because the only thing left to say was I'm sorry, and the person I needed to say it to was gone.

My Stroke of Insight.

By her sixth post-stroke year she could run up a flight of steps two at a time. "I held the memory of what it felt like to race up the steps with abandon. By replaying this scene over and over in my mind, I kept that circuitry alive until I could get my body and mind coordinated enough to make it reality." In her seventh post-stoke year, her need for sleep at night had cut back from 11 hours to nine and a half.

Little Heathens

On character-building: Grandma ... tore into us, using her favorite term "littleheathen." "A body'd think you had no upbringing," she proclaimed. "They'd think that you'd been peed on a stump and hatched by the sun."

On how they cleaned windows: Windows were so public that we invested considerable energy in keeping them clean. Here is how we did that: coat the glass with a thin paste of Bon Ami (the "hasn't scratched yet" product) and allow it to dry to a powdery coating; then remove the residue with crumpled sheets of the Cedar Valley Daily Times or the Des Moines Register and keep rubbing until the windows shine. Besides making the world go around, those folks who did their assigned chores were identified as "goodhardworkers."

On how they buttered corn at church picnics: Place about three-quarters of a pound of butter in a large-mouthed, two-quart Mason jar, and pour three cups of near-boiling water over the butter; it will melt and float to the top. Dip the hot ear of corn into the jar and quickly remove it. It comes out completely saturated with butter, ready to be salted and eaten. Now step away and make room for the next parishioner.

Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope

What should we call my war story? Pygmies have a tradition I like. They gather around a storyteller and yell out topics. For instance, when someone in the group says “Love!” the storyteller responds: “Love? It’s like this.” Or “Hate!” “Hate? It’s like this.” And then he develops his story.

You could call my story: “War? It’s like this.”

But, you can do as you wish.

[from near the end of the book]

Wild

Cheryl records this incident (abridged by me) that occurred while she was trying to hitchhike into a town:

The man who drove the Chrysler LeBaron made his way toward me on the gravel shoulder of the road.

“Good morning.”

He couldn’t give me a ride because there was no room in his car. He wondered, instead, if he could talk to me. He said he was a reporter for a publication called the Hobo Times. He drove around the country interviewing “folks” who lived the hobo life.

“I’m not a hobo,” I said, amused. “I’m a long-distance hiker. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.”

“So how long have you been out on the road?” he asked, pulling a pen and a long, narrow reporter’s notebook from the back pocket of his thin corduroy pants.

“I told you. I’m not on the road,” I said, and laughed. I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.”

“So, if you’re hiking a wilderness trail, what are you doing here?” he asked.

I told him about bypassing the deep snow in Lassen Volcanic National Park.

“How long have you been out on the road?”

“I’ve been on the trail about a month,” I said. “Being a hobo and being a hiker are two entirely different things.”

“I hardly ever meet hobo women. Hobo women are hard to find,” he persisted.

I told him that this was because women were too oppressed to be hobos. That most likely all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who’d been fathered by hobo men who’d hit the road.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You’re a feminist, then.”

“Yes,” I said. It felt good to agree on something.

“But none of this matters!” I exclaimed. “Because I myself am not a hobo. This is totally legit, you know. What I’m doing. I’m not the only one hiking the PCT. People do this.”

He told me to look for his piece on me in the fall issue of the Hobo Times, as if I were a regular reader.

“Standard-issue hobo care package,” he said, turning to give me a can of cold Budweiser beer and a plastic grocery bag weighed down with a handful of items at its bottom.

“But I’m not a hobo,” I echoed for the last time, with less fervor than I had before, afraid he’d finally believe me and take the standard-issue hobo care package away.

I walked until I found a good spot in the shade. I ate the Slim Jim first, washing it down with the last of my Budweiser, and then the butterscotch candies, all six of them, and then turned my attention to the can of baked beans. I pried it open in tiny increments with the impossible can-opening device on my Swiss army knife, and then, too lazy to rummage through my pack for my spoon, I scooped them out with the knife itself and ate them—hobo-style—from the blade.

Are You My Mother?

She could see my invisible wounds, because they were hers, too.

My Losing Season

In every home I entered as I reconstituted my team, I found instead of memory scar tissue and nerve damage. There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Reviews and Commentary

The Long Way Home

I can say this many years later: I feel honored to have loved somebody enough to have my heart broken. I think it takes a lifetime to be able to figure that out and to bear it."

– Gail Caldwell, in an interview

The Warmth of Other Suns

From a customer review of Warmth:

The older we get, the more we read, the more we realize that the history textbooks given to us in public schools when we were children left gaping holes where the shadow side of this nation's history should have been. It is only as an adult, independent reader, that I have learned most (if not all) of what I know about American history. And while I had a general idea about the Great Migration--the exodus of about 6 million black Southerners moving north from 1915 to 1970--it was only by reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns that I have gotten a more thorough grasp of this massive movement.

Me … Jane

Goodall’s research at Gombe Stream [began 1960] is best known to the scientific community for challenging two long-standing beliefs of the day: that only humans could construct and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. … In response to Goodall's revolutionary findings, Louis Leakey wrote, "We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!"

- Wikipedia

Little Heathens

We kids had been having our character built from the day of our birth. Remember, I tell about my grandma snatching my sister Avis away from my mother's breast and saying, 'You can't start building character too soon.' That was a little harsh. I think a lot of it was. There were times we felt put-upon.

- author Mildred Armstrong Kalish, in an interview

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Half an acre. 335 huts. 3,000 people. And a concrete wall that is supposed to hide them from view: this is Annawadi, the Mumbai slum that comes vibrantly to life in this book's pages. Ms. Boo says that she chose Annawadi because the scale of this 'sumpy plug of slum' bordering a lake of sewage was small, and its location was fraught with possibilities. Annawadi sits beside the road to the Mumbai airport, on 'a stretch where new India and old India collided and made new India late.' In 2008, at the time the events in the book unfolded, scavenging and trash sorting were the children of Annawadi's most promising career choices.

-from The New York Times review

The Third Policeman

If ever a book was brought to life by a reading, it is this presentation of O'Brien's posthumously published classic. … Norton's Irish brogue, accentuated to different degrees with the various characters, ties the ribbon on a perfect presentation of this absurd and chilling masterpiece. – Publishers Weekly

This page has been accessed times since January 15, 2014 Last revised: January 15 28, 2014

This page has been accessed times since January 15, 2014

Last revised: January 15 28, 2014