Eva's 2009 Selected Book List. Order is not significant. I grouped the non-fiction, then the fiction.
Head and Heart © 2007 by Garry Wills (b.1934) looks at American history from the 17th century to the early 21st through the lens of religion. I got two more Wills from the library, that's how much I liked this stimulating book. Patrick sent me info on Wills.
My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. © 2006 10 CDs. 11 hrs, 17 min. Julia and Paul married in 1946, ages 34 and 44. Paul was a cultural attaché with the State Dept. 1948-54 he was stationed in France. Julia blossomed. His twin brother Charlie and her sister Dort were two of their correspondents during those years. When Julia was 91, with the help of her nephew, Julia used those old letters to write this memoir. What pleasures she gives us readers! Julia did not get into cooking until she was in her late 30's, and she had no TV experience until she was well into her 50's. I loved the scenes from their marriage.
Von Braun, Dreamer of Space/Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld.. © 2007 477pp. Photo plates. Werhner Von Braun (1912-1977) heard Tom Lehrer's 1965 song (Don't say he's hypocritical/Say rather he's apolitical...). “It tested his sense of humor to the limit.” The man did live with skeletons in his closet, and they did occasionally poke their heads out, but no huge scandal damaging his career or the U.S. Space Program ever occurred.. Only in 1985 did it become public knowledge that von Braun had been an SS officer and that slave labor had built the V2. Yet I liked the guy. He was dashing. He was exuberant. He was good with people. He was a superb manager of large engineering projects. He did right by his thousands of employees (with the elephant-in-the-room exception of the inmates at Dora-Mittelwerk) He loved his family. A not-very-good movie came out about von Braun in 1960 entitled I Reach for the Stars. Mort Sahl said it should have been subtitled, “But sometimes I Hit London.”
At Home in the World memoir by Joyce Maynard. © 1998, 347 pp. As a youth J.D. Salinger was disgusted that his early love, Oona O'Neill, 18, married Charlie Chaplin, 53. Then he repeated the pattern, in the Chaplin role, over and over. Joyce Maynard dropped out of Yale after her freshman year to live with the reclusive food nut in Cornish NH. The thought crossed her mind on her 19th birthday that “maybe I was getting too old for him.” (Salinger was almost 54). After she had developed total emotional dependency on him he cut her off cold. She was a wreck for a couple of years.. Joyce's book is a cautionary tale. Another thread: Joyce's career was amazing. She writes a novel. It's published. She pitches a magazine idea, they give her the assignment. As a young college dropout with eating disorders she got a dream job at the NY Times. She writes a cruise company saying she'd like to lecture on writing. She gets a free cruise for two in exchange for two lectures. She throws together a book, “To Die For.” It gets made into a movie directed by Gus Van Sant starring Nicole Kidman. George Keilbach and I visited the Augustus St. Gaudens sculpture garden in Cornish NH. We drove across a covered bridge to Windsor VT. J.D. Salinger keeps a P.O. Box there.
Dream Catcher, a Memoir by Margaret Salinger, JD's daughter. JD refused to let his wife take Peggy to the doctor for her first few years. He had a different “ism” every few years and insisted his family go along. JD's son, actor Matthew Salinger, however, says his childhood was fine. JD's sister, Doris, says her brother has not published since 1967 because he's afraid of criticism.
Birding on Borrowed Time © 2003 by Phoebe Snetsinger. 277pp. Herman and I enjoyed this memoir by the birder with the largest life list. At 49 Phoebe got a diagnosis of melanoma and a prognosis of 6 months to live. Her kids were in college and she had inherited some money, so she decided to spend her remaining time birding. 20 years later she died in a car accident in Madagascar with her binoculars at the ready. We've been to some of the birding spots Phoebe describes. Ellie has met Phoebe.
Becoming a Man, Half a Life Story © 1992, by Paul Monette. 278 pp. This memoir ends on the day in 1974 when the 29 year old author met Roger, the great love of his life. I want to read Paul's 1988 book Borrowed Time: An AIDS memoir about his years with Roger. This is a fine book because it is honest, but the younger Paul had some appalling lapses in honesty.
Farley, The Life of Farley Mowat © 2002 by James King. Photo plates. Not as idyllic a life as the autobiographical childhood memoir Born Naked implied. Mowat (1921-) was not as content in any one of his many domiciles as I have been in each of mine. Writing superbly takes a lot out of a person, I guess. I had not known Mowat co-authored Woman in the Mist about Dian Fossey.
The Glass Castle © 2005 by Jeannette Walls. 8 cassettes, 11.25 hrs. Memoir by one of the 4 children of a couple with an unusual approach to parenting. Dad (Rex) was smart and a jack of all trades, but never held a job for long. He was capable of making money at poker. He spent time with his kids, but he was an alcoholic who stooped to drinking the family grocery money. Mom was a qualified teacher, but only for 2 or 3 years did she deign to work at that to bring some financial stability to the family. She was devoted to being an artist. Mom also owned inherited property and a diamond ring, but she chose to neglect her kids rather than cash those things in. How did she neglect them? They never went to the dentist or the eye doctor . When the school told her Lori needed glasses Mom refused to get them for Lori, until the school refused to admit Lori unless Lori wore glasses, and the school paid for them. When the youngest, Maureen, was born, they checked out of the hospital “Rex Walls style” by literally running out without paying their bill, Mom and Dad laughing all the while. There was neither heat nor plumbing. Just before the rent collector or the law the family would abandon everything and do a “skedaddle” to another godforsaken place. Welch W.VA, Rex's hometown, was the place where they finally settled. An uncle groped Jeannette when she went over to his house to bathe. Mom's response? “He's so lonely.” The parents left a loaded gun in the house with the kids unsupervised. What the family did right was read together. And the kids knew who their parents and grandparents were and what they believed. I think it was good for the kids that the parents stayed together until death did they part, given that Mom would not have taken the welfare she'd have been entitled to had she left Dad. The 3 oldest kids found their true vocations in NYC. Throughout their childhoods they'd risen to the occasion of caring for each other when their parents dropped the ball. Maureen, being a lot younger, was neglected by her parents and her siblings, and she had not fared so well by the time the book ended.
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. © 1948. 5 cassettes. I'd read this 50 years ago. I enjoyed it all over again. The youngest was b. 1922. Frank Sr. died of a heart attack at 55 in 1924. Unneglectful parenting.
The Woman Behind the New Deal, The Life of Frances Perkins © 2009 by Kirstin Downey. 398pp. Frances started out as a social worker. I'm amazed that Perkins (Secretary of Labor 1933-45) and FDR got Social Security, the 8-hr Day, unemployment insurance, Child Labor laws, and Workplace Safety laws all passed. When I told Marie this she said “Do I feel inadequate!” The budget crunch under which all this was accomplished was even worse than today's. Immigration, another political flash point, was under the Dept. of Labor then. Frances did what she could within the law to admit refugees from Europe. Perkins' husband and daughter suffered from manic depression, so she took care of everyone in her family as well as in the country and beyond.
The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper © 2008. 9 CDs, read by the author. Helene was b. in Monrovia, Liberia, to the ruling elite “Congo” people (descendants of the founding American freed slaves). The natives were the “country people.” In May 1980, Helene and her family fled to the US in the wake of the Samuel Doe coup. She is now diplomatic correspondent at the NY Times. She returned to Liberia in 2003 for the first time since leaving. I learned a lot about Liberia in the context of this memoir.
Life in a Cold Climate by Laura Thompson.. A biography of Nancy Mitford. 399pp. © 2003. Photo plates. Nancy's life was excruciating in part, and this book does not spare the reader the pain. The author cannot help exclaiming a few times, “Oh, Nancy!” when she pines for Gaston Palewski, De Gaulle's right-hand man and the great love of Nancy's life. But Nancy transmuted her feelings into art--she was a writer--which justifies it all. Now I'm interested in the works of all the Mitford sisters.
Harold Nicholson Vol.1, 1886-1929 by James Lees-Milne. (b. 1908). I picked this off the shelf in the library as much for the author as the biography's subject. Lees-Milne was a friend of Nancy Mitford's, an Eton classmate of her brother Tom's. Not a page-turner, but I learned facts, was reminded of others, and was stimulated to insights enough that it was well worthwhile.
Long Life by Nigel Nicholson © 1998 276pp. Photo plates. There were a couple of spots in this autobiography where Harold and Vita's son did not make himself clear to me, but they were dwarfed by the places where he told me just what I wanted to know.
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson © 2006, 294 pp. I thought this was even better than Crow Lake. The town physician's son is 15 when the book opens. It covers 1955-59. There's an epilogue 25 years later. Local farmer Arthur Dunn's prodigal brother Jake Dunn returns. Ian works summers on the Dunn farm. We get flashbacks to the childhoods of the Dunns.
The Hungry Tide © 2005 by Amitav Ghosh. 329pp. This novel took my book group into the world of the Sundarbans, a tangle of rivers and mangroves straddling the border of India & Bangladesh. Piyali Roy, a young American of Bengali heritage, and a cetacean researcher, arrives in Canning to study the Irrawaddy & Gangetic dolphins. Fokir, a fisherman, is her ideal local guide. Multilingual Kanai's Aunt founded a hospital in Lusibari. I loved the depiction of the fieldwork portion of scientific research.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle © 2008 by David Wroblewski. 562pp. This was a 7-day loan and I finished it on time, so you know it was a page-turner. It's set in 1972 in northern Wisconsin on a farm converted for 2 generations to a dog kennel. I personally would have been happier with the story if there had been no Korean potion or Hamlet-like dreams, but I loved the hundreds of pages about the Sawtelles marriage and parenting and work. Tension with uncle Claude, bright son Edgar's muteness, Gar's death, an adolescent's discomfort at a widowed parent's having an affair is all the drama I need.
Out Stealing Horses © 2006 by Per Petterson. (b. 1952) 264pp. Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born. Gift from George Keilbach. A deservedly award-winning novel, set largely in the summer of 1948 when Trond was 15, though there's an epilogue where he's 67 and he meets Lars, who was 10 that summer of '48, a younger brother of Trond's friend Jon. The relationship of Trond and his father is a pleasure to contemplate. That's why it is strange to me that when Trond's parents get divorced –his father marries Jon's mother–he never sees his father again! Flashbacks to resistance activities during the war.
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, a novel by Julia Alvarez. 8 CDs. 9.5 hrs. Carla, Yolanda, Sandy, and Sophia emigrated from the Dominican Republic to NYC about 1958 when they were all in elementary school. Trujillo's men had been after Dr. Garcia (“Papi”), who had to work as a hospital orderly until he passed his US boards. The family went from Dominican upper class to poor, but eventually the girls all went to good colleges. A range of social attitudes are described with precision.
Home by Marilynne Robinson. © 2008 325pp. The “action” takes place across the street from the “action” of Gilead, and in the same 50's time frame, w/ the same characters. The emerging relationship of Glory with her brother Jack is beautifully drawn.
The Brothers Karamazov © 1880 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 28 cassettes. Takes its time gripping the reader. The patricide trial's structure was not unlike the trial I participated in in 2008. Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha's father Fyodor was a neglectful parent.
When Madeline Was Young © 2006, by Jane Hamilton. 274pp. The narrator, Dr. Mac MacIver, grew up in a place I took to be Oak Park. His younger sister, Louisa, played the cello seriously, and eventually went to Oberlin College. There was another person in the household in a sibling role, Madeline, who was their parents age but had a mental age of 6. Mac was unconscious of the fact during his childhood, but Madeline was in fact his father's first wife, who was brain-damaged in an accident. Mac's mother, Julia, was once M's nurse. This novel explores how this unusual situation played out. There are Wisconsin scenes.
So Long, See You Tomorrow by Wm. Maxwell © 1980 135pp. The murder in this story actually took place in the early 1920s. Starting from the bare facts I suppose the novelist imagined the details, the prequel and the sequel to a divorce in an Illinois farming community. Lloyd Wilson had an affair with Fern Smith, wife of his best friend Cletus. A book group selection.
Winter Study by Nevada Barr. Set post 9/11 in Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior among wolf DNA researchers.
The First Eagle ©1998 by Tony Hillerman. 6 cassettes, 7.5 hrs. Jim Chee & ret. Lt. Joe Leaphorn chase the Hanta virus and Bubonic plague bacteria, carried by fleas in rodents. Catherine Pollard, who's in vector control, disappears near Tuba City, AZ.
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