Eva's 2014 Selected Book List.  Order is not significant.

 

1.       Body and Soul  ©1993, 447 pp. In this novel long-time head of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop Frank Conroy imagines what it would be like for a gifted poor kid with musical talent to luck into some great mentors. As a pre-schooler Claude, b. circa 1939 to a single mother, was often left alone in their basement apartment with an old piano. His mother had been in Vaudeville.  His first mentor is the proprietor of a music store. I loved the way Anson Roeg intuited Claude’s first affair.  I enjoyed the musical triumphs. Claude finds his father eventually.  Unrelated to  Body & Soul with Kristen Scott Thomas which is on my movie list this year.   

2.       Stop-Time by Frank Conroy  ©1965 read by Frank Mueller. I never heard of this classic coming of age memoir until I started reading about Frank Conroy on the web after I liked Body and Soul so much. I can see autobiographical elements in the novel. Frank is smart but plays hooky a lot, so fails French 4X at Stuyvesant H.S. But then at age 17 he spent a semester at one of those Danish Folk High schools—his widowed cab-driver  mother is Danish—where he hangs out with the French contingent and becomes fluent in French.  Also he read voraciously thoughout his childhood. At the end he has just gotten into Haverford College

3.       Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser © 2010. Photo plates.   Lady Antonia (1932-  ) and  Harold (1930-2008) talked for the first time at a party in 1975. When she made to leave he said “Must you go?” At the time he was married to actress Vivien Merchant, she to MP Hugh Fraser.  The Frasers had six children, the Pinters one son, age 16 (who later became estranged and changed his surname). The Fraser divorce was amicable, the other not.  H and A married in 1980. Later, after Vivien and Hugh were dead, H and A remarried in the Catholic Church (Her religion. Pinter was a non-observant Jew).   They knew or at least met everyone who was anyone. I spent a lot of time on the internet afterwards reading about the interesting marriages of Antonia’s children, and I watched some films with screenplays by Harold Pinter.  Haven’t read any of her historical novels, though.

4.       As I Am, the autobiography of Patricia Neal.  ©1987,  Pat Neal had one eventful life!  She tells us how unfaithfulness feels from both sides of the fence. Neal had a 25 year marriage to Roald Dahl who is a large personality. They were closest in adversity, of which they had plenty. Their firstborn, Olivia, died at age 7 of measles. Their only son’s stroller was hit by a car when he was 4 months old and he was brain-damaged. Then there was her stroke while pregnant with their 5^th child (who turned out fine).  Neal describes how left-out she felt during the years recovering from her stroke as Roald took over the family. She was not part of the decision-making and the children ignored her. Daughter Ophelia Dahl is exec. director of Partners in Health, my favorite charity.   

5.       Up Home Again by Ellie O’Leary. Memoir in progress, read in manuscript. Ellie is my friend ever since we were roommates on an Ulpan in 1971. She now hosts a bi-weekly radio program out of Bangor Maine where she interviews Maine writers, published or unpublished. She got the gig, which she’s very good at  (I have downloaded podcasts), after being a guest on the show.  I knew the outline of Helen’s life (she changed her first name since 1971) –Her childhood in Somerville then Maine, orphaned by the time she got to Bates College,  her marriage, her trifecta (Matt, Luke and Brigid), her career challenges, but the details  engrossed me.

6.       My Losing Season  Memoir by novelist Pat Conroy, b. 1945  ©2003  12 CDs. Pat was the oldest of seven. His father, Marine Colonel and fighter pilot Don Conroy was physically and psychologically abusive. Pat went to a military college, The Citadel, where he played on the basketball team under Coach Mel Thompson. Pat liked him, though he was psychologically abusive too IMHO. The book focuses on his senior year when the team went 8 and  17. He looked up all his teammates 30 years later for this..

7.       The Death of Santini, the Story of a Father and his Son by Pat Conroy © 2013, 336 pp.  I liked this better than My Losing Season. I was interested to learn that Don Conroy grew up in St. Brendan’s parish in Chicago, on Bishop Street, a block west of Loomis where my mother grew up.   The youngest of Don Conroy’s 7 kids committed suicide at age 36.  It was the honesty of the book that I liked, because the subject matter was not pretty.  We watched the movie The Great Santini after I read this.

8.       The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer ©2013, 328 pp.  Kinzer is a journalist who spoke and fielded questions at Google--because of Google Books we sometimes have authors come in during the lunch hour--about this account of John Foster Dulles (1888-1959) and Allen Dulles (1893-1969) who ran the State Department and the CIA for most of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy finally fired Allen after the Bay of Pigs, saying if this was a parliamentary democracy I’d have to resign, but in our system you have to go. When not in government, both had served corporate clients at a law firm. Not only were Intelligence and Covert Action not separated in the CIA as they are in most democracies, but the CIA and State Department did not push back on each other either. Even though Foster was a religious prig and Allen was gregarious, urbane, and a ladies’ man, the brothers were of one mind when it came to foreign policy. Corporate profits trumped human rights. They overthrew democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. They did not anticipate repercussions decades later. It suited them that the Belgians murdered Lumumba.  They misunderstood Sukarno in Indonesia. Their attitude towards the non-aligned was “if you are not with us you are against us.” 

9.       Escape from Camp 14, One Man’s Remarkable Journey from North Korea to Freedom in the West ©2012, 5 CDs, 5.5 hours.  Blaine Harden chronicles Shin Dong-hyuk’s life. This is the book my cousin Robert Casey (RIP) recommended to me in response to my 2013 book list. This book confirmed what I had read of North Korea in Nothing To Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Remick. Only Shin Dong-hyuk’s life was extraordinary—he had been born in a political prison camp and escaped at age 23.  The place was a hellhole.  The regime is depraved.  He got through the electric fence that his friend Park had just died on thanks to Park’s wet burning body grounding the current.  Dong has enough to eat since leaving N. Korea, but now he has nightmares and is wracked by guilt for things he did to avoid torture, like snitching on his mother.  He got tortured anyway. 

10.    Dear Leader, Poet, Spy, Escapee, A Look Inside North Korea  by Jang Jin-sung. ©2014. 10 CDs  A high-ranking intelligence agent describes his life in North Korea, what he observed of the lives of ordinary North Koreans, and his harrowing escape, which lasted 10 months. It took survival skills to live as a fugitive  in China.  There’s an epilogue of his life now in South Korea.

11.    American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (a woman) ©2008, 19 CDs, 18.5 hrs. This novel imagines how a librarian from a middle class family married Dubya.  Kennebunkport is transferred to Door County, Texas oil interests to a Wisconsin sausage empire. Charlie Blackwell, in the W role, is sympathetically portrayed as a husband and father, unsympathetically as presidential material. 

12.    A Spy among Friends, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben MacIntyre. ©2014. 306 pp. Photo plates. Everybody loved Kim Philby. Imagine heading a department and needing its operations to be successful enough to keep your job, when at the same time most of your ops failed because you were telling the Soviets about them beforehand.  He remained undiscovered 11 years beyond Burgess and MacLean’s defections.  Amazing. It was fun discussing this in our kitchen with Brian and Tomiko Morley.

13.    Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger © 2013. More of a page-turner than most of our book group picks. The narrator’s father is a Methodist minister, which does fit in with many of our book group’s choices.  There’s a mysterious death but this is a not a genre book (other Kruegers are). I guessed whodunit by page 200, but the last 107 pages still held me.  Set in Minnesota in 1961.    

14.    A Painted House by John Grisham © 2000, 388 pp. MaryDan loved this so I sought it out at the library. It’s set in September and October 1952 on a cotton farm in Arkansas. The story is narrated by 7 year old Luke Chandler who, like Frank Drum in Ordinary Grace happens to eavesdrop on every important conversation.  That’s a weakness. A strength  is that it’s a window into a simpler time when folks grew almost all their own food, and really savored the simple pleasures like listening companionably to the Cardinals with others on the porch. Ten Mexicans and the Spruills, hill people from the Ozarks, help harvest the cotton, but a third of it is wiped out by October flooding.  A bully gets shut down for good.  John Grisham spent his early childhood in rural Arkansas. 

15.    Marmee & Louisa by Eve La Plante. ©2012. 12 CDs. Bronson Alcott considered paid work beneath him. His wife had married him at age 30 for love—she’d held out for love. She was an early feminist, but his fecklessness soon dampened her happiness. Nevertheless they stayed together--well he went off on annual 5-month lecture tours that only paid his expenses. She came from an old New England family. They survived by moving from borrowed house to borrowed house while the occupants were away in Europe. She didn’t want to show her face in Concord, they owed so many people money. She did paid work despite having 4 young daughters in the early years and poor health in the later years. Louisa May, who never married, had an unusually close relationship with Marmee and vowed to be an earner and make her parents’ lives cozy. She become the highest paid author of her time.

16.    An Appetite for Wonder, The Making of a Scientist, by Richard Dawkins © 2013 293pp, photo plates. This memoir is an account of the British author’s intellectual awakening from his birth in Africa in 1941 to the 1976 publication of The Selfish Gene. He had a loving family. Oundle and Oxford.  Dawkins coined meme, a unit of cultural evolution. Memes get replicated in people’s brains. 

17.    The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ©1976  (30^th anniversary edition, 2006)   A gene’s eye view of evolution written for the general reader but acclaimed by biologists. Lots of examples from the animal and plant kingdoms. Plausible ideas about how early genes loose in the primordial soup might have, over evolutionary time, organized into temporary survival vehicles—higher organisms. The gene is what survives for eons, more so than any species.  He invokes game theory and evolutionary strategies. 

18.    The Universe Within ©2013 by Neil Shubin. 4 CDs. Ice Ages occur regularly. Big planets periodically get close enough to Earth to affect the tilt and thus the climate. Early single-celled animals injected oxygen into our atmosphere. The author describes field work looking for fossils, and the individuals who first proposed  Continental Drift and Carbon Dating. 

19.    Quantum Man, Richard Feynman’s Life in Science  by Lawrence M. Kraus  © 2011, 320 pp.  Biography with an emphasis on the science.  Feynman loved the way the same phenomenon could be approached from so many perspectives. E.g.  Snell’s Law: when light goes from a less dense medium to more dense medium the light ray is bent closer to the perpendicular to the surface between the media. Forty years later, in 1622, Fermat proposed his principle of least time to explain this: light travels between two points along the path of shortest time. If light travels more quickly in a less dense medium it makes  sense to travel a longer distance in that medium. It matched up with Snell’s angles. In 1690 Christian Huggens pointed out that light behaves here like a wave would.

20.    Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi © 2013 318 pp.  At my book group Jean looked up the author on her tablet. There is a heavy autobiographical element to this first novel. Kweku, a surgeon from Ghana trained at Johns Hopkins, married Fola, a law student from Nigeria. They have four children between 1975 and 1989.  After the threadbare student years they bought a house in Brookline. Then professional disaster  struck.  Long story short, the family split up. Kweku returned to Ghana. The novel explores how the five left behind coped, and what Kweku did with the rest of his life.  All four kids are bright but challenged by their separate emotional traumas. Olu, the oldest, becomes a doctor. He lives for 15 years with his very compatible Asian girlfriend, a fellow physician, whom he loves, before marrying her, and then he suggests keeping their marriage a secret! 

21.    Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel ©2003 (when she was 51), 223 pages. A grim memoir, but honest. Childhood in the North of England. Catholic Schools. Her mother’s lover, Jack, moved in. Her father, Henry, moved out…but not before a couple of years of overlap. A promising law student, Hilary dropped out at age 20 to get married. Hilary endured years of physical misery due to a missed diagnosis of endometriosis. She was treated instead for mental illness. I would have liked to have heard also about the happy parts of life—being a gifted and successful writer, being in love, remarrying after divorce and that second marriage lasting.

22.    Sketches from Life, the Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. The Early Years. ©1982 492 pp.  Opening line: “I was a child of the city.” NYC. L.M.. (1895-1990) was b/ to a single mother who requested and got this epitaph: “Here lies Lewis Mumford’s mother.”  He was a philosopher of City Planning. He wrote for the NYer.  His son Giddes was killed in WW II. Photos plates and sketches by L.M..   

23.    The Purity of Vengence by Jussi Adler-Olsen ©2013 11 CD’s. What’s with all these Scandanavian thriller/mystery writers?  Karl Merck is the chief, Rose and Assad his offbeat but very competent team. In 2010, looking at cold cases, they noticed that in 1987 six missing persons never turned up. They went missing in the same week. That’s the average for a year. Hundreds go missing, but only six never turn up. There’s a twist I never saw coming at the end. In between we get interested in Kurt Wald, 88, leader of the Purity Party. Also we read about Nita Hermanson, who as a young woman gets stuck in a Danish version of a Magdalene Laundry.

24.    Ripper by Isabel Allende, © 2014. 12 CDs. It was a surprise to me that I. A. wrote a mystery about a serial killer. Later I learned she offended many when she bad-mouthed mystery books on NPR and called Ripper a joke. It is a  thriller, set in San Francisco. Nothing satiric about it. Indiana is a holistic therapist. Her daughter Amanda is a computer whiz headed to MIT in the Fall. 

25.    Death Stalks Door County, A Dave Cubiak Mystery ©2014 by Pat Skalka, Aquinas ’65, MaryDan’s friend. Dave, 43,  is an ex-Chicago policeman, who, bereft, has taken a job as a Park Ranger in Door County after his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver. Solving a series of murders draws him into life again. By book’s end he’s running unopposed for Police Chief.