1 Title idea: MaryDan

• *The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. Gift from Mirka And Janusz. 216 pages. C 1997. Our houseguest Ara read it in one day and was eager to discuss it over breakfast. The novel starts out with an unusual love story. A colleague at work, who rates this one of the best books she read in the last few years, told me the author said in an interview the book is about the relationship of the generation of Germans born in the 1940’s to the previous generation. I agree with that. "What did you do during the war." was a question shied away from in Germany during the ‘50’s.
• *Singing My Him Song, by Malachy McCourt. I liked this better than A Monk Swimming. Malachy tells more about his gigs as an actor and the 95% rejection that is an actor’s lot, and he considers himself a successful actor. Malachy’s second marriage has lasted 25 years and counting. 17 years ago he had the backbone to join AA by way of OA (Overeaters Annonymous). He gives us a sketchy suggestion of how his kids turned out. He had a VERY rough time with Malachy Jr. during the lad’s adolescence. He had been an absent, neglectful alcoholic father during the boy’s formative years. He got the boy during adolescence because Jr. was expelled from his boarding school and his mother washed her hands of him. Malachy Sr. did not exactly make up for it all by coping beautifully with a son who had bad companions, some of whom ended up in prison or dead of overdoses, and was "stupid" enough to get caught by police "countless" times and never read or took advantage of NYC’s cultural opportunities. Malachy Jr. now runs a successful Scuba business in Bali. That’s a microsm of how other parts of Malachy’s life went.
• A Long Way from Tipperary, What a Former Irish Monk Discovered in his Search for the Truth, by John Dominic Crossan. C 2000. 204 pp. Crossan was b. in Ireland 1933. He moved to Chicago as a Servite Seminarian circa 1950. He taught for 26 years at De Paul University. I picked this memoir up in the library, remembering how MaryDan and Bob had been so impressed with Crossan’s 1994 interview w/ Terry Gross. Crossan loved the monastic life for most of the 19 years he lived it. Left for academic freedom and to get married.
• *Tis by Frank McCourt. Thumbs up with some reservations. I liked his honesty when describing teaching and his relationship with Angela and his brothers. He’s less succressful writing about courtship and fatherhood. He told me all I wanted to know about the decline of his marriage. He’s better describing the down side of life than the up side.
• It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong. w/ Sally Jenkins. Abridged to 4 cassettes, but I still loved it.
• *Coming into the Country, by John McPhee. Unabridged narration by Nelson Runges. 11 cassettes. C 1976. Non-fiction about Alaska. I particularly liked the WWII survival tale of Leon Crane, who the author tracked down alive and well in Philadelphia and interviewed. I liked the Eagle, Alaska windmill whose output is measured in "revolutions per month." Lots of stories about rugged individualists. Herman read this a long time ago as a Book on paper
• *Reporting Live by Lesley Stahl, read by the author. Abridged to 4 cassettes. Herman and I listened to this driving to and from Barrington RI July 7, then Katy & I finished it commuting to Netegrity. An interesting counterpoint to the great Daniel Schorr- interviewed-by-Scott Simon forum I attended at the Kennedy Library. Schorr was not a good mentor for Leslie.
• *Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. Book-group selection discussed July 20 at our house. Another good book-group selection this year was Plainsong by Kent Haruf, also about a father with two children and a wife short on mothering skills.
• To See You Again, A True Story of Love in a Time of War by Betty Markowitz Schimmel w/ Joyce Gabriel. 7 cassettes. I was not crazy about the reader. Candidate for abridgement. But thumbs up anyway. Happy family w/ Czech Jewish father, Hungarian Hassidic mother flee Czechoslovakia for Hungary when Nazis invade. Details of how mother and children survive the war. Teenaged daughter experiences greatest love of her life in Budapest ghetto. This autobiography covers Betty’s (Her family nickname is Baby, which I hated) adult life, emigration to U.S.A., and problematic marriage. Circa 1975 she makes her first trip back to Hungary with her daughter, a college graduation trip. She encounteres her old love! I think she handled it just right.
• TheTerrible Hours by Peter Maas. Non-fiction. Unabridged on 6 cassettes. About the rescue in 1939 of an American Submarine that sank in 200 feet of ocean off NH. For 20 years 44 year old career navy man Charles "Swede" Momsen had been inventing underwater rescue devices. The centerpiece of this book is about the heroic rescue of 33 submariners and subsequent raising of the Squalus so it could be debugged, the dramatic vindication of Momsen’s life work. I like rescue tales.
• Einstein’s Wife by Andrea Gabor. Work and marriage in the lives of five 20th Century Women. Each chapter is about 60 pages. Profiles of Mileva Maric Einstein, Lee Krasner (Jackson Pollock’s wife), Maria Goeppert Mayer (Nobel prize winner), Architect & urban planner Denise Scott Brown, and Sandra Day O’Connor.
• An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. Read by Alan Bates. A good book to be in the midst of when I saw Innocence. Both works are about a resumed old love affair w/ the woman currently married and the man, a musician by profession, not. The strength of this book is the description of the life of a member of a string quartet. The romance(?) was grotesquely overwrought (on his part).
• Dubliners by James Joyce. 8 1-hr cassetttes. Beautifully read by David Case. 15 stories. Glad I finally caught up with this.
• The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Green. 8 cassettes read by Joseph Porter. Set in Africa during WWII. Major Scobie is a policeman unambitious for the commissionership, though his getting it would be the only circumstance that would reconcile his wife Louise to more Africa. Scobie seems incorruptible at the start of the novel but he starts down the slippery slope. This was so much more interesting than Greene’s travelogue about his trek through Liberia in 1932. I could not even finish that one. There’s a lot of suspense over conscience and moral choices.
• Hitler’s Niece by Ron Hansen. Read by Janet McTeer. Abridged to 4 cassettes, but still good. Fits in strangely with The Heart of the Matter, in that the main character, to whom we are sympathetic, takes a few steps onto the slippery slope and is lost. This novel imagines Adolph as his intimates must have seen him. It researches and imagines Hitlers relationship with his niece Geli who died (the record is fuzzy about whether it was a suicide) in 1932.
• Shrub, by Molly Ivins. 2 cassettes. Read by Molly Ivins. C 2000. The Record, the record and the record (Dubya’s, in Texas).
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 3 cassettes. Narrated by Frank Muller. Unabridged. Told from the point of view of Nick Carroway, we learn of Jay Gatsby’s romantic obsession with Daisy Buchannan, wife of philandering Tom, Yale classmate of Nick’s. There’s a lot more to this than the roaring 20’s Jazz Age parties at Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg, which is all I remember from the movie.
• The Professor and the Madman, A tale of Murder, Insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Read by the author. 6 cassettes. Candidate for abridgement. It would’ve been perfect as a long Nyer piece. Having said all that, the language was beautiful. I learned things. I gained an appreciation for dictionary-making. I liked The Map That Changed the World, also read by author Winchester perhaps more. It’s about Wm. Smith b. around 1769, who founded the science of Geology. He started as a surveyor but noticed, drew conclusions about, and mapped rock strata. The author relates all this to economic development (Coal;canal mania; later RRs) and the prevailing religious world-view.
• Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland. A book-group selection. A novel imagining the provenance of a Vermeer painting. Several of the chapters had been published as stand alone short stories.
• In My Hands, Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke. Read by Hope Davis. Introduction and afterward by the author. 4 cassettes. Unabridged. Irene was a 17 yr old student nurse when war broke out. For a year at the beginning of the war, and a year at the end, she lived in the forest with the partisans. In the middle she had a relatively safe job with access to the Nazi Warenhaus. She began by leaving food under the Ghetto fence (a capital crime). She eventually hid 12 Jews in the basement of a Nazi major while regularly bringing supplies to others hidden in the forest. She tells her story, suitable for anyone, but her ghost writer specializes in young adults, to counteract holocaust deniers. Her story is already part of the public record as the Israelis have named her as one of the Righteous Among Nations, and the rescues recounted here are recounted in the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (Irene emigrated to the U.S. after the war.)
• Jim the Boy by Tony Earley. Another book suitable to young adults or full adults. A book club selection. Set during the depression in Aliceville N. Carolina. The mountains that Songcatcher is set in are so close the "mountain boys" go to Jim Glass’s newly consolodated school. Both works mention "panthers" that were still in those mountains in Jim’s father’s boyhood. Jim is raised by his widowed mother and 3 uncles. A refreshing, sensitive, short book.
• Across the Limpopo by Michael Nicholson. Unabridged on 6 cassetttes. In 1982 the author, his wife, and their two sons aged 7 & 9 drive in their Range Rover from South Africa to Southhampton, in 5 months. This book takes us through the African part of the journey, ending as their car is hoisted on to the ferry at Alexandria in a net. The English family had been living in S. Africa for a few years because of Michael’s work (He’s a reporter). The trip presented, as you might imagine, many close calls and problems to solve. At one stretch they did 1300 miles without pavement. The worst was being lost in the dessert without any track or landmark. They encountered washed out bridges, ruined spare tires in the middle of nowhere, soldiers, animals,…
• Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell 12 cassettes. Read by David Case. The author rebuts the case for Beatification. On that level I am convinced. But on a personal level the author is down on Eugenio Pacelli, and he doesn’t like his politics either. I think readers sees this and discount for the chip on the author’s shoulder. In fact I assume that on a personal level Pius the XII was saintly, if the worst this author who is trying as hard as he can to convince us the man is not a saint can come up with is that he loved walking around in his soutaine with silk cummerbund, and that he wasn’t as fluent in some of those dozen languages as he made out to be. Politically, Pacelli’s whole life, starting from re-writing Canon law in the years following his ordination in 1899, to the "creeping infallibility" of Pius XII’s papacy 1939-58, was about strengthening the central power of the papacy. Cornwell liked it better when dioceses could choose their own bishops. He prefers a Vatican II-like spirit of collegiality and ecumenism. Cornwell points out that the Catholic Church has a history of being suspicious of democracy, though the official line is they are OK with any form of government, so long as human dignity and natural law are respected. Cornwell snidely opines that Franco was Pacelli’s kind of guy. No relativism about what’s right, and friendly to the Church; Cutting to the central thesis, for 17 years Pacelli was papal nuncio to Germany, then Cardinal Secretery-of-State. Pacelli negotiated a Concordat with the Reich that marked the end of the Catholic Center Party which had about 17% of the vote, enough to give Hitler pause. The deal was Hitler and the Church would not bother each other. This turned out to be a good deal for Hitler. But to Pacelli, for whom religion was supremely important and politics just worldly, it seemed like a good idea at the time. IMHO, he narrowly interpreted his job as protecting the spiritual life of Catholics, and a secondary long-range goal was to spread Catholicism. He kind of weakly protested on behalf of baptized Catholics of Jewish descent, but he did not even push that pathetic protest too hard because (Cornwall supports this assertion with witnesses) he feared a backlash against Catholics. Generally speaking, Pacelli thought Nazis bad, but Communists worse, because the churches were still open under the Nazis. He did reach a point, belatedly, when he accepted that the Nazi threat was the more urgent ("Urgent before big" is a Go proverb), but the general thrust of his papacy was to neutrality, speaking out against the evils of war and refraining from taking sides amongst the combatants. This is arguably a tenable position for the leader of an international religion who may have hoped to play a role in negotiating the peace, but (IMHO) ordinary, not a saintly, behavior. Cornwell contends that had the Pope spoken out courageously he would have had an ameliorating effect on Hitler. He points to the 23 million Catholics in Germany (after the Anschluss, Catholicism was the largest religion) who would have taken a Papal directive seriously. In Pius XII’s defense, Cornwell thinks he underestimated his power. The famous Christmas message in 1942 that after the war the Church pointed to as evidence of the Pope speaking out had only one sentence about the evil of persecuting people, and mentioned neither Nazis nor Jews. Lots of other interesting threads: e.g. Cornwell documents Vatican knowledge of atrocities in the Balkans during the 40’s, and the continuing good relations between Catholic Croatia (a perpetrator) and the Holy See. Again, the world is messy, but do we want to canonize this record?
• A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle. Read by David Case. Top drawer travel writing. English couple buys a two centuries old house and take us through their first year of living there. Local culture, a lot of food writing, and some This Old House.

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