Eva's 2015 Selected Book List, in the order she read them

1. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, ©2009 9 CDs. Non-fiction about American-born Kathy and her husband, Syrian born Abdul Zeitoun who together ran Rainbow Construction in New Orleans. Kathy had converted to Islam before she met Zeitoun. When Hurricane Katrina hit Kathy and their four kids were evacuated, but Zeitoun stayed behind to guard their home and rescue people in his canoe. He was picked up in his own home as a looter! He was not allowed a phone call. After a few weeks Kathy presumed him dead. It’s disconcerting to see our own country imprison people without due process. There’s a LOT more to this book that just that…

2. Alex & Me, How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene Pepperberg, ©2008. 5 CDs. Same non-fiction genre as Wesley and Me, the owl book I liked last year. Alex (an acronym for Animal Learning Experiment) is an African Gray Dr. Pepperberg worked with for 30 years. Alex died prematurely at age 31 in 2007. I like reading about the ups and downs of a person’s career. I see how a bird can have personality.

3. The Boys in the Boat, 9 Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown. ©2013, 12 CDs. The team was from the U. of Washington. in Seattle. Joe Rance worked summers building FDR’s Grand Coulee Dam.

4. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout ©2008, 270 pp. I finally got around to reading this acclaimed book. Then at Thanksgiving I watched with the Coopers the 2nd DVD of the mini-series of the same title starring one of my favorite actresses, Frances McDormand. I could watch part because I’d read it. Also glad I read it before I met Marie and Larry’s cat Olive, named after O.K.

5. Dreams of Joy by Lisa See, ©2011. 13 CDs. Joy, born 1938 in L.A.’s Chinatown, in 1957 joined a Chinese student association that idealized Red China. She impulsively went off to China to seek her birth father. She got stuck there, married., and experienced a famine. She was blocked from divorce. There are a few implausible coincidences, but I was wrapped up in this eventful novel.

6. The Dinner by Herman Koch, ©2008. 8 CDs, translated from the Dutch . A harrowing story centered on two couples, in-laws, dining together in a restaurant. Two teenage boys, cousins, their sons, have committed a heinous crime caught on video. The perps are not recognizable except to their parents, and even the parents are not sure how much any of the other three know.

7. Paper Love, Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman, ©2014. 377pp. Same genre as Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. This is the kind of sleuthing I like. It is amazing how much of Valy Schiftel’s life the author was able to reconstruct. There were thrilling contacts made. There are scenes in Vienna, Berlin, Moravia, London, Israel, and Pittsfield MA, all places I’ve been. The book is repetitious, communicating the 99% perspiration of research.

8. Against Medical Advice by James Patterson & Hal Friedman, ©2008 5 CDs. Non-fiction. Cory Friedman’s Tourette’s Syndrome manifested when he was almost 5 yrs old. He was subsequently also diagnosed with OCD. He and his family tried everything. He suffered terribly for 13 years, then the symptoms abated. They are still present in a small way. It’s a medical mystery.

9. Wendy and the Lost Boys, the Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon, ©2011. 427 pp. While reading this I enjoyed watching on YouTube old clips of Wendy (1950-2006, Mt Holyoke ’71) on talk shows. She knew everyone in the NY theater scene and won a Pulitzer for the Heidi Chronicles. Her relatives and personal situations were fascinating too. Photo plates.

10. Handmade Wilderness, How an Unlikely Pair Saved the Least Worst Land in Mississippi by Don Schueler, ©1996, 283 pp. An inter-racial gay couple bought 80 acres of land in 1968 as a weekend getaway and project for the rest of their lives. It grew to today’s 1067 acre Willie Farrell Brown Preserve which Don donated to the Nature Conservancy. A book about people and ecology.

11. The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys, ©2015. A book group selection. James Hunter is in a German prison camp in WW II. As an officer he does not have to work, so he passes his time meticulously documenting a family of nesting redstarts. Meanwhile back in rural England, his wife is having an affair, complicated by the fact that James’ London sister is bombed out and moves in.

The author is a neighbor and contemporary of MaryDan’s. Maxine and both her parents had been extraordinarily well-loved babies and I attribute that to their finding love and good lives despite disabilities, poverty, and racism. I loved the photo plates.

14. Human Capital by Steven Amidon, ©2004. 375 pp. My book group selected this page turner, set in a suburb of Boston. At one point every character was in such deep trouble I saw no way out. With considerable inventiveness, the author found a way to end each person’s problems except one, who committed suicide. A movie has been made of this. I’d be interested in seeing it.

15. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, ©2013.340 pp. Two brothers b. in the 1940’s, grew up in a lowland on the outskirts of Calcutta. They were good students of STEM subjects. The younger one, Udayan, got caught up in the Naxalite movement of 1967-72. He married Gauri, a philosophy student. Subhash, the apolitical brother, went to Rhode Island where he got a Ph.D. Udayan got involved in bomb-building and was executed. When I was reading this Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had just been sentenced. Two brothers. bombs… Subhash came home to comfort his parents, saw that Gauri was pregnant, married her, and returned to RI. The marriage was not a happy one, but Subhash was a good father to Bela. Gauri got her Ph.D and left alone for California when Bela was 12.

16. A Kim Jong-Il Production, The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power by Paul Fischer, ©2015. 10 CDs In 1978 N. Korea kidnapped two luminaries of the S. Korean film industry in order to jump start its own industry. Kim Jong Il (1941-2011; destined to inherit the dictatorship in 1994) was a film buff—he had a library of Western films that no one else in the country was allowed to see, so he was aware his country’s films were lacking. Shi and Choi actually made pictures in N. Korea (carrots, sticks, and the chance to make movies again). In 1986 they escaped.

17. On the Move by Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), ©2015. 384 pp. Memoir. Like David Hockney, a Brit who worked in the U.S. and loved road trips across America. Both of Sacks’s parents were physicians. I like stories of careers including the personal. Photos.

18. Euphoria by Lily King, ©2014. A book group selection. This novel imagines the details of Margaret Mead’s early field work when she dropped her first husband and took on another. Euphoria gave me a feel for Anthropology.

19. Margaret Mead by Jane Howard, ©1984, 441 pp. Margaret Mead (1901-1978) had her share of flubbing speeches, being rude, and being criticized. Luther Cressman, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson were her husbands, all academics. Margaret was a student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. There was a circle of accomplished women around Margaret. Photos (not glossy, though).

20. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, ©2014. 13 CDs Werner, an orphan in Germany in the 1930’s, is identified as a radio prodigy and sent to an elite military school. Marie Laure, blind daughter of a Parisian museum employee, has been taught to get around via her father’s scale models of the neighborhood. She is evacuated to Saint-Malo during the war. Her great uncle there has secret radio equipment in the attic Marie Laure’s path crosses Werner’s. It’s a Pulitzer prize winning novel that engrossed me.

21. The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese, ©1998, 345 pp. Non-fiction. Dr.Verghese, a tennis amateur, became friends with an ex tennis pro now fighting cocaine addiction. Verghese had problems too: He had separated from his wife and was co-parenting his two young sons. I loved the accounts of their admirable hobby and friendship, with medical detective stories interspersed.

22. Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, ©1991, 304 pp. Gift from Buffy. We visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge together when I was in Utah in August. The author weaves accounts of her deep love of this refuge with her Mormon heritage and with her mother’s dying concurrently with her writing the book. I learned about the extreme fluctuations in the Great Salt Lake levels.

23. David Hockney, Vol 1, 1937-1975 by Christopher Simon Sykes, ©2011 328 pp; and Vol 2 1975-2012, ©2014, 390 pp. David Hockney grew up in Bradford, U.K., studied Art in London, and was successful early. He fell in love with America and spent years living in California. He did not just paint swimming pools, though! He tackled many mediums. Sykes conveys David’s enthusiasm for each new one. He did sets for Operas. He maintained good relationships with his family. In the days when homosexuality was illegal he refused to deny his. I was impressed by how many friendships Hockney maintained . Color plates.

24. Doctored, the Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar, ©2014 The author was born in 1968. His family moved to the US in the mid 1970’s. This book points out the abuses of fee-for-service and also the hassles of managed care. Can’t some economist write a Ph.D thesis on how to compensate doctors so they can concentrate on what they were trained for and work normal hours? I hope Obamacare (A work-in-progress. Much of it is about running experiments to see what works) eventually improves the status quo. I appreciate the author’s honesty about what his life feels like and what’s going on in his profession. The anecdotes about patients and the author’s own family held my interest. “A manifesto for reform,” blurbs Abraham Verghese.

25. Some Luck by Jane Smiley, ©2014. 12 CDs First novel of a 3-volume saga of an Iowa farm family. Rosanna and Walter Langdon married in 1920. Their offspring: Frank (smart, serves in WW II), Joey (a born farmer), Mary Catherine (dies), Lillian, Henry (an academic) and Clare. They have a cousin who marries a Trotskyite. All these threads are followed unto the next generation. The farm moves from horse to tractor. I also read Early Warning, the second volume covering 1953-1986, which touched on historic events I remember: Vietnam; Rev Jones in Guyana. Lillian marries Arthur who’s in the CIA. An adoptee finds his birth family.

26. Virus Hunter by C.J. Peters & Mark Olshaker, ©1997, 323 pp. I like these non-fiction Medical/Scientific quest stories & career accounts. I had loved The Hot Zone which covers some of this same ground. Hoof and mouth disease was eradicated in the ’20’s by killing all the infected beasts. That worked because the disease was passed from horse to horse, but was not the right strategy for Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis because VEE is passed by mosquitoes. Kill all the horses. Wait. Bring in uninfected horses and the mosquitoes will infect the fresh horses, There are wild animal reservoirs of the virus. Furthermore, some of those horses killed would’ve lived and become immune. The best VEE strategy is vaccination. But you have to convince the locals.

27. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, ©2013. 7 CDs. This is a novel. I wondered. Very well written. Jane Hamilton praised it. The Cooke family of Bloomington IN: Mother & Dad (/A psychology prof ), brother Lowell, sister Fern, and narrator Rosemary. Fern disappeared when Rosemary was 6, leaving everyone bereft. Lowell became an animal rights activist.

28. Trapeze by Simon Mawer, ©2012. 9 CDs. Thriller by an author who has previously been long and short-listed for the Booker Prize. Marian Sutro is a young English woman totally bilingual in French and English. It is 1943. She trains to be parachuted into France as a resistance agent. She does it. She’s good at it. There are close calls after she’s betrayed. She arranges to get a physicist out.

29. Citizens of London, Three Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynn Olson, ©2010 397 pp. Recommended by Natalie. It “won” over the several other books I was reading in parallel. I didn’t like Averill Harriman when he was the Lend Lease Administrator—he horned in on Gil Winant’s ambassadorial bailiwick. The other American was Edward R. Murrow whom everyone liked. Another person everyone was attracted to was Pamela Churchill. I would have liked to discuss this book with George Keilbach (1938-2015). The mixture of the personal and political would have appealed to him as much as it did to me. We two are “citizens of London” too. I brought to my reading my impressions of my father’s wartime England and my own six years in London. While reading, I, along w/ Murrow and Churchill, could not wait for America to give Britain a bigger assist.

30. A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop by Rembert Weakland, ©2009, 426pp. I now know in more detail why people who took Vatican II to heart were so disappointed in the long papacy of John Paul II. IMHO the Catholic Church was lucky to have an able man like Weakland (1927- ) in a leadership role, first as Archabbot of the Benedictines, then as Archbishop of Milwaukee for 25 years, and now as a writer. The conservatives at the top pretty much disregarded his input, though, as he was a liberal. But, as I see it, he always acted within canon law. It was his attitude of advocating collegiality instead of top down rule that was a thorn in the Curia’s side. IMHO the more ideas for dealing with the challenges the Catholic Church faces the better. May the wisest ideas win!. Weakland helped my friend Jane in the search for her birth family, hence my interest.

31. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, ©2010 10 CDs. Combines science writing for the general reader with legal issues, medical ethics, racial attitudes, and Lacks family history, linking it all together with the author’s chronological account on her reporting research, how it all unfolded to her. Henrietta Lacks, mother of 5, died at Johns Hopkins in 1951. The cells culled from her cervical cancer, dubbed HELA (due to privacy concerns, cell lines are no longer named with the initials of the donor), were the first cells that thrived in culture. They were a godsend to labs around the world. Mass testing polio vaccine was one of the immediate big applications, but still today HELA cells are invaluable. The author became close with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, whose personality is beautifully evoked. Poverty is described. Lacks’s have endured homelessness, prisons and an insane asylum.