Eva's 2008 Selected Book List. Order is not significant.
The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, One Woman's Fight To Save The World's Most Beautiful Bird © 2008 by Bruce Barcott. Non-fiction. Belize's “zoo lady,” Sharon Matola, a maverick, fought to stop the Challilo dam. It's a page-turner so no spoiler alert—read the book to find out the pros and cons and who won. Our 2002 trip to Belize enhanced my appreciation.
A Sand County Almanac © 1949 by Aldo Leopold. Abridged to 2 cassettes. I finally got around to acquainting myself with this conservation classic set in a State dear to my heart, Wisconsin. Poetic and factual.
Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond. 4 cassettes. Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. The author is an evolutionary biologist. This is about how environmental factors shaped 13,000 years of human history. Food production underlies population growth. Food moves in an east west direction much faster because the latitudinal gradiant is a barrier. The Eurasian landmass has an east west axis. The north south axes of Africa and the Americas had the additional barriers of deserts.
Copernicus' Secret. How the Scientific Revolution Began ©2007 by Jack Repcheck. 196pp. Copernicus published 400 copies of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. It was on the Index of Forbidden Books from 1616 to 1834. Martin Luther commented that the claim that the earth moves and not the sky “would be as if someone riding in a cart imagined he was standing still while the trees moved. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem.” Galileo stood up for the idea against the Inquisition (1632). Newton gave it a physical rationale, gravity. Galileo improved on the Dutch telescope. He saw 4 moons orbiting Jupiter, which confirmed once and for all that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. Tycho Brahe was really good at measuring. Copernicus had thought the orbits were circular. Kepler saw that the math matched the data better if they were ellipsoidal. Belief in astrology, and also wanting to get the date of Easter right, were major motives for the interest in astronomy. The daily rotation of the earth was only proved in 1855 when Foucault (1819-1868) set up his famous pendulum.
Countdown, a Race for Beautiful Solutions at the International Mathematical Olympiad © 2004 by Steve Olson. An account of the 2001 Olympiad, including the problems, potted bios of the teenaged American team, a broad overview of the history of the contest, a broad overview of other countries' approaches to math education, and the US approach to math education. A keeper.
Everything and More © 2003 by David Foster Wallace (RIP, 2008). 305pp. I loved the content and I loved the breezy writing, and it was a surprisingly quick read. Most math overview books, like great moments in classical music recordings, hit the same old workhorses. This one, on infinity, went into that little bit more depth that made all the difference. Sometimes the footnotes take up most of the page. A lot are marked “IYI,” DFW's abbreviation for “If you're interested.” I was always interested.
Against the Tide, How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, a political memoir by Lincoln Chafee. Chafee served as a U.S. Senator (R-RI) 1999-2006. I like having history reviewed, with an insider's point of view. The story of how John Bolton didn't get confirmed as UN ambassador was fascinating. Members of Congress are under tremendous pressure to follow the party line! Grover Norquist tried in vain to get right-wing Republicans to lay off Chafee. “A Republican from Rhode Island is a gift from God.” Now Chafee is a visiting fellow at Brown University. I wonder if he will run for Governor of RI in 2010.
Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger. Parts I and II totaling 28 cassettes. An overview of over 200 years of diplomacy analyzed from the perspective of Realpolitik, ending in 1995. Cardinal Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Pitt, Austin Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain, Stalin, Khruschev, Adenauer, US Presidents─they are all here. Kissinger scorns Wilsonian equating of personal morality with the morality of states, but it was the American wave of the 20th century. Roosevelt (both of them) and Adenauer and Churchill were the right men at the right time. By the time he gets to the Cold War Kissinger's still critical of American naivté, but he knows the outcome so there's a grudging admission that containment worked.
Family Romance © 2007 by John Lanchester (b.1962). 368pp. What a great parental memoir! John's mother was b.1920 in County Mayo. She spent 15 years in the convent (much of it as a school principal in India), emerging at age 38 in London. Julia got a teaching job and set about finding a husband. She succeeded, but she had to shave 10 years off her age by stealing her sister Delly's identity. This lie had lifelong repercussions. Her son unravels everything. Photo plates. The paternal portrait is good too.
The Lost, a Search for Six of the Six million © 2007 by Daniel Mendelsohn. 515pp. A geneological search. I like non-fiction where lives are re-constructed thanks to the obsessive interest of the author. This book is like a developing photo. Gradually certain sections of the story clarify. Researcher Daniel shares clues with the reader in the order he gets them. The reader is eager to get corroborating facts to support one or the other of conflicting theories. National Book Circle's Critic Award.
Identical Strangers, a Memoir of Twins Separated & Reunited © 2007 by Elyse Schein & Paula Bernstein. 265pp. In 2003 Elyse, a 35-year old unemployed filmmaker living in Paris (& loving it) on tutoring gigs (not that part), wrote her adoption agency. Long story short, she discovered she had an identical twin! They find each other and research their mother. I liked all the photo plates. But the one I liked best was the Bronx High School of Science yearbook photo of Leda Witt, their mother. In her second year of college Leda fell apart with schitzophrenia. Paula, a Wellesley grad, also has a MA in film. Coincidence?
Up at Oxford © 1992 by Ved Mehta. Everything you ever wanted to know about what it was like to be a student at Oxford 1955-58. I read Mehta's earlier memoir about his blind childhood in India last year and sought this out. I was not dissapointed!
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, read by the author. 8 CDs, 6 hrs. Autobiographical about McCourt's 30-year teaching career. The book rang true to me, with my 5 yrs teaching experience. One of the places McCourt taught was Stuyvesant High, the jewel in NYC's public school crown. I saw Frontrunner (dir Caroline Suh, 2008) this year, a documentary about a Stuyvesant student election. Aquinas's student government and student elections were competitive with those of this high school of super-achievers!
Three Cups of Tea © 2006 by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin. 331pp. Non-fiction, in the same genre as Mountain Beyond Mountains Tracy Kidder's book about Paul Farmer, which I also loved. Tea is about building schools in Pakistan. Like Farmer, Mortenson had an unusual childhood. His was spent in Tanzania. His parents were Lutheran missionaries. Mortenson was a mountain climber. After a failed attempt on K2, he stumbled into Korphe in Pakistan and fell in love with the people there. He rashly vowed to build them a school. In the course of the book Greg marries and has kids and finds his true vocation.
Still Life with Chickens, Starting over in a House by the Sea © 2006 by Catherine Goldman. 176pp. This one's a memoir by a recently divorced woman with a 12 yr old daughter. It's about parenting and moving into a fixer-upper and raising chickens.
The Indian Clerk © 2007 by David Leavitt. 478pp. This historical novel is as much about G.H. Hardy as it is about the mathematical genius Ramanujan this Cambridge don recognized, sponsored, and mentored. I had not known Hardy was an Apostle. Leavitt brings me inside one of this secret Cambridge society's meetings in Spring 1914, when Ramanujan arrived in England. Right after the war he returned to India and died there within a year. Leavitt does not shy from imagining people's love lives, especially Hardy's (sparse), and Littlewood's affair w. Alice Chase. The characters in this novel slightly intersect the Bloomsbury set. I like books about math, Bloomsbury, and how people feel about love. I like Oxbridge and London settings.
Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout. 3 cassettes. Novel about an uptight single mother coping with a teenaged daughter who's in love with her middle-aged male math teacher. My book group liked a Strout that I did not read, so now I've sampled her too.
Oh My Stars by Lorna Landvik. © 2005. 10 audiocassettes. This novel covers the whole lives characters b.circa 1920. The reader gets a satisfying feeling of knowing what happened by the end. Violet Mathers was an unloved homely girl and then at 16 she lost her arm in a factory accident. She became the manager of an interracial band. L.L.'s Your Oasis on Flame Lake also absorbing.
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani. Powerful first novel about a girl of Indian parentage living in Wales whose controlling father, an academic, grooms her to pass the maths A-level at 15 and win a place at Oxford at that precocious age. We learn how Rumi feels about her two trips to India (She loves it, and boy, did she need a vacation!). Crushes, childhood lies, adolescent scenes, and alienation at college are explored. Little brother Nibu is a refreshing presence. Rumi's mother Shreeni is traditional but she works.
The Welsh Girl © 2007 by Peter Ho Davies. 233 pp. Set after D-Day in a Welsh village where a prisoner of war camp is being built. Since my father was stationed at an army prison stockade in Somerset in WW II this was of particular interest to me. Esther and her father Arthur supplement their farm income with Pub work. Karsten, a POW who can get by in English, establishes a rapor with Jim, an evacuee living at Cilgyn, Esther and Arthur's farm. I was satisfied with Esther's development, but I wanted to know more about Karsten and Rotheram. Rotheram was a British army interrogator, a German by birth, fractionally Jewish.
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. ©2007 216pp. A novel set in Provincetown decribing the wonderful first 14 yrs of the Maytrees' marriage. Then Maytree, a guy perpetually checking his love pulse, ran off with their mutual friend Dearie, abandonning Lou and their son, then 10, for the next 20 years! When he came back most in my bookgroup said they would not have taken him back.
Run © 2007 by Ann Patchett. My book group loved this novel. It was apropos the month of Obama's election. Two black boys, Teddy and Tip, are adopted by the mayor of Boston's family. Their birth mother, Tennessee, figures out from newspapers where her sons went and stalks the family for 20 years, vicariously interested in the daily details of Teddy and Tip's development into fine young men. For example she wants to know if their older brother, Sullivan, the heretofore only child of Bernadette and Doyle, is going to be mean out of jealousy (No). In his dreams Doyle hopes one of his sons will be president. All 3 sons are headed in other directions, even as Doyle drags them to Jesse Jackson speeches. Tennessee's daughter Kenya is a major character.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles © 1891 by Thomas Hardy. 12 CDs read by Davina Porter. I see why Marie thought she missed a few pages when Tess suddenly appeared with an illegitimate child (who later dies). This is a classic tragedy about the double standard. After Tess's marriage to Angel Clare, Angel confesses 48 hours of sexual debauchery never repeated. Tess then tells him what she had tried to tell him before the wedding but he always shut her up, about being statutorily raped by her boss, an act never repeated because she left the job immediately. Angel is shocked and abandons his bride, going to Brazil for several years. Re-enter Tess's rapist, Alex D'Urberville, an imposter to the name, whereas Tess Durbyfield is the real scion. But she's a poor milkmaid and he's a rich playboy (with a short detour into fundamentalist preaching). D'Urberville convinces Tess that her husband, who has never written, is not going to return, and he offers to support Tess's widowed mother and starving younger sibs. Angel sees the error of his ways when it's too late. It's actually a good read, and better than the movie.
Howard's End © 1910 by E.M. Forster. Unabridged on 8 cassettes. 12 hrs. Either I saw the movie, or Forster has used the Schlegels in other books, because I felt pre-acquainted with the family. They embody the Bloomsburian values of personal relationships, feelings, and civilized living. They are also concerned with social ethics. They enter into relationships with the business-oriented Wilcoxes. Howards End is the Wilcox's estate in Hertfordshire. An illegitimate baby figures in this novel too.
Island © 2001 by Alistair MacLeod. Short stories, all set in Cape Breton or Newfoundland. The stories often involve an educated young man in the 1970's returning home to his large poor mining or farming or fishing family, or a not yet educated young man leaving such a setting. The writing is terrific, and so is the reader, John Lee.
The Matisse Stories ©1993 by A.S. Byatt. Three stories on three cassettes totalling three hrs. “Art Work” is about an “artistic family” whose cleaning woman, Mrs. Brown, has a knitting machine. Mrs. Brown gets an exhibition of her work at a gallery that rejects her employer's work. “Chinese Lobster” is about Gerda Himmelblau, dean of women, confronting a male professor about a charge of sexual harrassment. He hung himself by his explanation. Maybe it particularly resonated with me because of my recent jury duty on a child molestation case. Though my defendant took the Presumption of Innocence route and did not take the stand.
Last revised: Jan.1, 2009