Notable Books read in 1999 by Eva &/or Herman. Order is not significant

Season’s Readings: Notable Books read in year 2006 by Eva. Order is not significant.

· Born Naked by Farley Mowat (b. 1921, in Ontario) 7 cassettes. Memoir of boyhood. Angus and Helen (His portrait of them is terrific) and their only child Farley moved to Saskatoon around 1930. Farley was a boy naturalist, an enthusiastic birder, and, by 14, a licensed bird-bander. As a 15^th birthday present his uncle took him up to Churchill for the summer (to help him in profitable egg-gathering, I’m afraid.) Mowat is a fantastic writer with material of special interest to me and Herman.Two thumbs way up.

· Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. ©1998 368pp. This memoir of growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia was as good as MaryDan said it was. Having seen the movie October Sky (an anagram of “Rocket Boys”) in no way diminished my pleasure in the book. Inspired by Sputnik (Oct. ’57), Homer (b. 1943) got interested in rocketry. The reader feels his passionate interest.

· Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder ©2003 301pp. The story of Dr. Paul Farmer (Harvard Medical School, 1990) and Partners in Health. Paul works half the year at The Brigham in Boston, half at Zanmi Lasante, the hospital PIH founded in Haiti, and the rest of the year administering a Multi-Drug-Resistant TB program on site in Siberia, visiting PIH projects in Peru and Chiapas Mexico, raising money, meeting with WHO, writing (many publications), and speaking at colleges. Paul’s idea of a vacation is to just be a country doctor in Haiti. This book was selected by the People’s Republic of Cambridge for the whole city to read. I attended the discussion at the Saunders Theater. Tracy Kidder (Soul of a New Machine) & Paul Farmer were there. I learned PIH has lately been invited by governments in Rwanda and Mali to set up health care centers in those countries. PIH has sent Zanmi Lasante-trained Haitians over there to prime the pump. Paul advocates government ownership of health programs these days. Charities can dispense health care but only governments can make it a right. Preference for the Poor is Paul’s mantra. He has a nifty family background.

· Recollections of a Life by Alger Hiss, b. 1904 ©1988 229pp. There was no proof that Hiss perjured himself in 1948 when he denied having given papers to Whittaker Chambers in 1938. It was Hiss’s word against Chambers’. Hiss had two Supreme Court Justices as character witnesses—he’d clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and the statute of limitations had run out. But Chambers had Nixon and J.Edgar Hoover manipulating the McCarthy-era frenzy. A grace moment in his 44 months in prison was hearing a rose-breasted grosbeak singing from the one tree. A prothonotary warbler figured in his trial, but I learned that from The Birdpeople movie. Alger Hiss was debarred and divorced. His wife wanted to change their names and go teach in a remote progressive school. She could not stand it that he wanted to write a book and accept invitations to speak. After stretches of unemployment he settled into selling stationary store goods. He imagined his customers going home and saying, “Guess who sold me paper clips today?”

· Il Dottore, The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor by Ron Felber, unabridged on 7 CDs. True “as told to” story of a Jewish kid from the Bronx who fraternized with Mafiosi even in his childhood, accepted help from them to go to college and med school, and enjoyed drinking, gambling, and womanizing with hoodlums. Before Roe v. Wade Elliot Littner (A pseudonym??) did black market abortions—one of the mob’s rackets. Eventually Elliot was asked to kill one of his cardiac patients. He drew the line there. But once an “Associate,” it’s suicide to “just say No.” This book holds that J.Edgar Hoover never pursued organized crime because La Costa Nostra blackmailed him about his homosexuality. Puppetmaster, a biography of JEH by Richard Hack, said JEH’s sexuality was largely unexpressed, but that book corroborates that the FBI was in denial about the existence of organized crime, and it says Hoover’s power was based in a large part on implicit blackmail (FBI files). Ironic if he was at both ends of that stick. Il Dottore is really down on Rudolph Giuliani for prosecuting the mob “for political gain.” There’s no hesitation here to ascribe unsavory motives for prosecuting or not prosecuting! I thought more of Giuliani after reading this book. It’s heroic and difficult to go after gangsters.

· Seminary Boy, by John Cornwell, b. 1940. ©2006 320pp + photographic plates. Memoir by the author of Hitler’s Pope. At 13 John went to a minor seminary 7 hours from his troubled working class family in Ilford, Essex. The book essentially ends when he leaves the (major) seminary at 20 and heads for Oxford, but there is a wrap-up chapter where we get a peek at what became of everybody.

· The Spiral Staircase, My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong ©2004 306pp. This recapitulates enough of Armstrong’s Through the Narrow Gate, which is about her 6½ years in the convent starting in 1962, that it is not necessary to have read that earlier book (although I did). Karen was 1 year into an English Literature course at Oxford when The Spiral Staircase begins. She was anorexic, but in denial because she was not as anorexic as her friend Rebecca. The shrink she saw about her fits and bouts of unreality didn’t recognize classic symptoms of epilepsy (!) She was upfront with him about her innermost life, as indeed she had been with her spiritual counselors in the convent. She really tried to achieve spiritual fulfillment but came up empty. Karen never got her Ph.D on a technicality, so academic research, which is what she was suited for, was a dead end too. She taught for 6 years at a girls’ school in south London. She got let go. She got a writing job for a TV program which entailed travel to Israel and Greece for background. A follow-on TV job researching the Crusades ended up being cancelled so she was out of work again. She wrote a book on the Crusades. Then she wrote The History of God, and the rest is history. After 9/11 she’s positively in demand as a pundit.

· Secret Daughter by June Cross, b. 1954. ©2006 Memoir, 304pp + photographic plates. June’s parents, a white showgirl and a black comedian with a drinking problem, stayed together for 4 years. They rented a basement apartment from a middle class childless black couple, Peggy and Paul, in Atlantic City, where Norma & James had irregular gigs. After the split Norma got modeling work in New York City. It was hard for her to keep June with her for the usual single mother reasons plus housing prejudice. She placed June with Peggy and Paul. Every weekend June arrived at the Port Authority bus station where her mother was always waiting. But Norma did have some hurtful lapses in acknowledging June. Norma dressed June fashionably, Peggy conservatively. In NYC June called her mother’s friends by their first names, in Atlantic City she always called adults “Aunt,” “Mrs,” etc. June graduated from Harvard and became a producer for PBS’s Frontline and the McNeil-Lehrer Report, and a Journalism Professor at Columbia. The stories of the black elite Gregory family, close friends of Peggy & Paul’s, were fascinating. Yvonne Gregory came to a tragic end related to race.

· Lena by Lena Horne (b. 1917) and Richard Schickel. ©1965 300pp. I usually don’t like show biz biographies, but the race issue gripped me in this one, and Lena is admirable. Mom would’ve appreciated Lena’s account of childhood. Fascinating photo plates.

· Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford. Post-modern biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) on 14 cassettes. If you’re pressed for time, there’s a 1-page summary of Millay’s life by Robert Gale on the web that tracks this biography surprisingly well.

· A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos ©1995 212 pp. Great cover design. “Good citizens need math so as not to be prey to demagogues.” In newspapers, “An enlightening clarity is to be preferred to an obfuscating precision.” I used tidbits for my tutoring last Spring. A lot of the examples are from Probability, the author’s field. I’d like to read Paulos’ other books.

· My Brain is Open The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdös, by Bruce Schechter ©1998 206pp. This was self-repetitious and it also repeated anecdotes I’d read elsewhere. Despite its shortcomings, though, I enjoyed it. Erdös (1913-1996) was essentially a one-note human being. He was mostly interested in math. Well, he did care about his friends, mostly mathematicians, and he was famously devoted to his mother. He did not have a home or hold a permanent job. He just went around the world mooching off people. Occasionally he had a guest professorship for an academic year. He said possessions encumbered one. But the fact is, his voluminous files and publications were crowding first his mother’s Budapest apartment, and later the mathematician Ronald Graham’s house. Lucky both Paul and his mother died suddenly in old age. Who would’ve provided for their long-term care?

· Faithful by Steward O’Nan and Stephen King. A running account of the 2004 Boston Red Sox season written in diary form so at no point did these two famous writer friends know the future like the reader does. The Red Sox blew lots of games & still won it all!

· Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson ©1980 219pp. Eccentric 35-year old Sylvie comes to Fingerbone, Idaho to care for her orphaned nieces, Lucille and Ruthie. Ultimately Lucille wants a conventional life and comes to hate Sylvie with her vestigal drifter characteristics. Now I want to re-see the terrific movie with Christine Lahti. Quotes: “She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.” “…lonliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in a bus station.”

· Gilead by Marilynne Robinson ©2004 247pp. This novel is in the form of a letter written in 1956 from Rev. John Ames, 77, of Gilead, Iowa, to his 7 (sic) yr old son, to be opened when the son is grown up. The most page-turning thread of the book concerns Jack Boughton, a neighbor’s prodigal son. Art lead the book group in singing the spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead.”

· March by Geraldine Brooks ©2005 273pp. This book imagines what the absent father of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was doing during the Civil War. Brooks models March—he’s never given a first name—on Bronson Alcott (G.B. profiled B.A. in the NYer). The subject of this book served the Union as a Universalist-Trancendentalist chaplain. Marmee’s feelings were well drawn when she apprehended the omissions in her husband’s letters. She feels jealous when she learns he has feelings for Grace Clement.

· Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry ©2000. Book group selection. A portrait of a Kentucky community by the town’s bachelor barber, a divinity school dropout, who had a perfect love in his mind. Berry is for sustainable farming & against agribusiness & consumerism.

· All He Ever Wanted, by Anita Shreve. Unabridged on 6 cassettes. 9 hrs. In 1899 a 29 yr old professor at a NH college, Nicholas Van Tassel, falls in love with 25 yr old Etna Bliss. She is preternaturally composed and cultured. He wonders if she’s had a lover. He courts her and proposes. She tells him she doesn’t love him. He thinks in time she’ll come to love him. At the very least he’s sure he can make her content, and he loves enough for two. He can rescue her from having to be a governess to her sister’s children. She accepts. They have two children. The novel is the story of their marriage. The narrator is writing in 1933. There was a lack of communication. He came to realize Etna had had another lover before their marriage, but he did not ask about it when he first realized it, and as time passed it became impossible to bring it up at such a late date. They never fought and he was proud that other men admired his exceptional wife. But he was profoundly unsatisfied psychologically. It all came to a crisis 15 yrs into their marriage. Van Tassel’s academic ambition is also tracked. I was appalled at what he did to get ahead, but his rivals undermined him too.

· Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, on 8 CDs. Worthy of the author of Remains of the Day and better than When We Were Orphans. NLMG is a cautionary futuristic novel set in the past (the 1980’s and 90’s perhaps) in England. The students at Hailsham, a boarding school supervised by “Guardians,” are clones (but that word is politically incorrect at Hailsham) created as a source of spare body parts. In their 20’s they start making (organ) “donations.” By their 4^th donation they’ve usually “completed” (died). Non-clones de-humanize the clones just like slaves were once de-humanized. Hailsham is a liberal place run by do-gooders who force themselves not to shudder. A student’s “possible” is the model from which s/he was cloned. There was great curiosity about possibles.

· Protect & Defend by Richard North Patterson ©2002, unabridged on 12 cassettes. MaryDan could not stick with this one, but I tried it. It was like an amalgam of West Wing, Commander in Chief, and L.A. Law. The new President of the United States faces his first test when the Chief Justice drops dead. He nominates an eminent woman, Caroline Masters. Although she’s 49, she has no record on Roe v. Wade. Robert Bork is quoted as saying, “They’ll never nominate another Justice who has opinions.” The whole confirmation flap threatens to become like Clinton’s first test, gays in the military. The Judicial Committee chairman is a John McCain like figure in that he survived 2 years of solitary as a hostage. I sought out ironing and dishes so I could keep listening.

· Morality for Beautiful Girls, by Alexander McCall Smith. 8.25 hours on 7 CD’s, read with great accents by Lisette Lecat.. After sampling the Ladies #1 Detective agency in Botswana, I’ve checked out another Smith from the library, but one set in Edinburgh.

· State of Fear by Michael Crichton, ©2004, read by George Wilson (His credits include the lead role in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.) I was not very far into this thriller before I realized it articulates the Bush attitude towards the environment and environmentalists. It is right and good for each species to alter the environment to suit himself. Beavers do it. When you take beavers out of the mix the environment changes in a way environmentalists see as “for the worse.” Man is a species. Ergo…The book argues that the DDT (“safe enough to eat.”) ban has killed millions. Later I read in the NYer that the President did read this book and loved it so much he invited Crichton to the White House where they discussed it for an hour, but Bush’s handlers kept it mum. In the book ELF (Environmental Liberation Front), a real fringe organization I’ve met on 60 Minutes, is the terrorist group de jour. The fictional ELFs are willing to manufacture disasters like the mother of all Antarctic glacier “calves,” a tsunami, and flash floods, in order to falsely make it seem like global warming is real. There’s a superman-like genius hero whose front is MIT professor, but really he’s a government agent, who flies from the Antarctic to a cannibal island to Arizona disrupting these foul deeds just in the nick of time.