Eva's 2007 Selected Book List. Order is not significant.
What Little I Remember by Otto Fritsch © 1979. 219 pp. Frisch's career tracks 20th century physics which is like a mystery unraveling. He grounds his story in people and places. The book is peppered with photos and delightful sketches by the author of famous colleagues. Even his aunt was famous (Lise Meitner). Frisch's geographic locus is in the chapter titles: Vienna 1904-27, Berlin 1927-30, Hamburg 1930-33, London 1933-34, Denmark 1934-39, Birmingham 1939-40, Liverpool 1940-43, Los Alamos 1943-45. Frisch then settled into family life and a professorship in Cambridge, England. Frisch's daughter encouraged him to write this book.
Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1916-1990) © 1986 Unabridged on 4 CDs. Covers 1938-43. Dahl's stories are Gillcrist-esque. The young Britisher of Norwegian parentage sailed to East Africa to work for Shell Oil. He describes the eccentric British empire-builders onboard. When WWII started Dahl volunteered for the RAF. He got his pilot's training on a Tiger Moth in Kenya. Then he served in the Western Desert and Greece, in Hurricanes and Gladiators, becoming an Ace. He walked away from a crash landing in the desert.
Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicholson. © 1973. 233pp. A mark of a good book is that it's a pleasure to re-read. An Englishman who saw me reading this the first time in 1975 remarked "They got away with everything.". By "they" he meant the upper classes. The author honors his extraordinary parents Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West by writing well about them. I returned again and again to the photo plates.
Waiting by Ha Jin © 1999. 308pp. National Book Award. Many authors fall way short when they touch upon the material Ha Jin focuses on masterfully here–feelings, marriage, and sexual mores. The setting is China, 1965-85. I have read a handful of Chinese memoirs from that period. This novel covered new ground. Ha Jin's works are banned in China. I would liken that to seeing Pulitzer-prize winning Irish-American Frank McCourt as shaming the Irish. My picture of China is improved. Hey, China produced Ha Jin! They have some wildlife.
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. © 2006 345pp My book group's discussion of this, which happened when I was only 40 pages into it, didn't spoil this novel for me at all. We all loved it. Widower Oliver & his 3 sons, 2nd grader Toby, 6th grader Damon, and 7th grader Paul, are homesteaders in Marias Coulee Montana in the 1909-1910 school year. Sight unseen, by mail order, they hire widow Rose Llewellyn as housekeeper. Rose's brother Morris Morgan, a University of Chicago grad, escorts her out West and takes over as teacher extraordinaire in the one room school. What makes Rose and Morrie tick? That question's a page-turner.
The Ledge Between Two Streams © 1991 by Ved Mehta. Unabridged on 12 cassettes. Autobiography set in India spanning 1940-49. The author was b. 1934 & blinded by menningitis in 1938. This is a warm account of Indian middle-class family life. There were 7 Mehta children. I loved the father, Daddy-ji. There's a sobering account of partition. As Hindus, the Mehtas were displaced when Lahore went to Muslim Pakistan. I learned a lot about "facial vision" and other eye-openers about blindness. I heard rumors of a follow-up. I want to read it!
The Oath, The Remarkable Story of a Surgeon Under Fire in Chechnya by Khassan Baiev (b. 1963). © 2003. 12 CDs. The author has lived several lives. He was a Judo champ, a plastic surgeon, an ER doctor, a father of 6, a devoted brother and son, a human rights activist, and, now, in Newton MA, an author working a low level hospital job. The Oath of the title is the Hyppocratic oath. Khassan treated both Russian and Chechyn soldiers and as a result had contracts on his life issued by both sides. Chechans are Moslems from the North Caucuses.
Better, A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande © 2007 273pp A great follow-up to The Oath. The chapter on Gawande's two-month observational trip to his ancestral India's hospitals was reminiscent of the jack-of-all-trades surgery in Chechnya. QA runs through the whole book. How can we do better? How can we improve the process? Measuring helps. For instance, Apgar scores changed infant mortality outcomes.
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett. © 1993. 254 pp. National Book Award winner. 8 short stories all touching on the biological sciences. The title story tells of a fictional Dr. Lachlan Grant at a historically documented Canadian quarantine station receiving Irish famine immigrants in 1847; "The Littoral Zone" is about two academics, both with young families, who fall in love during a 3-week workshop. The story takes the long view of the affair, double divorce, and re-marriage–how they tell themselves the story of their lives 15 years later; Carl Linnaeus believed swallows hibernate; Another story is about a woman whose Czech grandfather knew Gregor Mendel.
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. 15 audiocassettes. Four women, all born during WWII, meet at the University of Toronto. Tony becomes an academic (military history), Roz a financially successful businesswoman, and Charis a single-parent flower child. Zenia, a reporter who supposedly died covering Lebanon, is the one the other three love to hate, though at one time each of them regarded her as a friend and confidante. Piecing together the truth about Zenia's affairs with their lovers becomes an obsession of the others.
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris © 1987 372pp. A novel about mother-daughter relationships over three generations. Aunt Ida was born about 1929, Christine about 1945, and Rayona about 1971. Ida and Christine are full-blooded Native Americans from a reservation in Montana. Rayona's father, Christine's sometime husband, is Elgin Taylor, a black veteran. The priests were well-drawn. Ida also had a beloved son.
Four Colors Suffice. How the map problem was solved by Robin Wilson © 2002 228pp. How many colors are sufficient to color any map in the plane? The problem was first posed in 1852. In 1976 Appel & Haken at the U. of Illinois proved that 4 suffice, albeit with a long computer-aided proof. The older generation tends to prefer proofs verified by humans at every step. Younger mathematicians don't trust pages of close reasoning unless computer-validated I enjoyed the short proof that 6 colors suffice. An 1878 "proof" of the 4-color theorem stood for 11 years until an error was pointed out in a paper by Heawood. In that same paper Heawood proved that 5 colors suffice. That proof's also given; In the 19th century a Cambridge professor had to subscribe to the 39 tenets of the Church of England. Sylvester was Jewish so he taught at Woolwich Arsenal until brand new Johns Hopkins hired him in 1870. Ezra borrowed this book when he passed through Boston this summer.
Godel, A Life of Logic by John L. Casti & Werner De Pauli © 2000 195pp I hated all the stuff about the chocolate cake machine, but there were enough good new-to-me thoughts to make this book well worth the time I spent on it. Surprisingly, it was a quick read.
Incompleteness, the Proof & Paradox of Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) by Rebecca Goldstein © 2000 261pp. Complemented #13. I will seek out another Goldstein. She was a philosophy grad student in Princeton in 1973, and tells of the thrill she felt upon find "K.Gödel " in the local phone book. "It was as if one were to find 'I. Newton' or 'B. Spinoza' in the phone book." She rode her bike over to look at his house.
The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician by André Weil (b. 1906, a very good year) © 1991 as Sourvenirs d'Apprentissage. Translated by Jennifer Gage. 192 pp. The biography of Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray alerted me to the existence of this book. I looked it up on amazon .com where the cheapest copy was $64! Must be out of print. I got it through interlibrary loan. André covers until 1947 when he, his wife Eveline, and their two daughters, Sylvie & Nicolette (b. 1942 & 1946), moved to the University of Chicago. The epilogue says he finished his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ. André was a founder of the Bourbaki group. I filled two and a half pages of my handwritten booklist with interesting tidbits from this book.
The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson, read by the author . This 4 cassette abridgement was enough for me. This is to books as Errol Morris' The Fog of War is to film, the Robert McNamara story. McNamara was dubbed "the find with the mind" when the Ford CEO joined the Kennedy Administration.
Truth & Beauty, A Friendship. © 2004. Ann Patchett's memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy. Lucy and Ann were contemporaries at Sarah Lawrence and roommates at the Iowa Writer's workshop.
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. ©1994. Straightforward account of an unusually challenging childhood and young adulthood, yet it resonates universally. Lucy (1964-2002) survived cancer but was left with a face that required innumerable plastic surgeries. It left her with insecurities. But she loved to dance.
Having Our Say, The Delaney Sisters First 100 Years. Co-authored by Amy Hill Hearth. 6 cassettes. Reminisces. These black siblings are contemporaries of Aunt Eva. They were raised on the campus of St. Augs in Raleigh N.C. Their father was an Episcopal bishop. At the end there was an interview with the real voices of Sadie (Dentist) and Bessie (High School Teacher). One of their brothers was the lawyer who took Marian Anderson's case when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing in Independence Hall. He later became a judge. Another brother was a doctor. Another was an undertaker. Their parents were special.
Kept in the Dark by Anthony Trollope. © 1882. Read by Jill Masters. My first Trollope. This repetitious novel could be condensed into a short story, but I liked it. It's about the effect of a secret on a marriage.
Hard Times by Charles Dickens Unabridged on 9 cassettes. © 1854. Josiah Boundarby of Coketown was a blustering industrialist bachelor of 50. His friend Thomas Gradgrind was educating his 5 children in a school devoted to the facts and nothing but the facts. Imagination and emotion were suppressed. When Gradgrind's oldest daughter Louisa is 20 Boundarby marries her. Louisa, knowing nothing of emotion, but suspecting there's something she's missing here, sought her father's advice on whether to accept the proposal. Her brother Tom turns into a selfish dishonest "whelp" but he is the only person for whom Louisa feels affection. I never heard of Boundarby before reading this, then within a month I ran into an allusion in a short story by Martin Amis and another in The English Assassin, a thriller by Daniel Silva about Nazi art thefts moldering in Swiss bank vaults. To express the fact that Zurich is low key about its wealth, Silva says "No Boundarby here."
Short Fiction by Edith Wharton, unabridged on 2 cassettes. Two of the stories in this collection, The Mission of Jane, and The Reckoning, explore, respectively, the effect of an adoption on an unsatisfactory marriage, and an open marriage that ended in divorce. And the writing! There's not a pedestrian sentence here.
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus. Abridged to 3 cassettes, which was enough for me. Read by Julia Roberts. College student works as a nanny in NYC. Herman enjoyed the parts he heard.
Frank Lloyd Wright, the Mike Wallace Interviews. 1 cassette, 1 interview per side, 53 minutes total. In 1957 when FLW was about 90, Mike Wallace did these two interviews, a few months apart. Mike Wallace tries to egg FLW on and FLW handles it. I'm reminded that accents change with time as well as geography. It's not only 50's recording technology. There's a bit of Father Dan's careful enunciation and certitude in FLW.
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