In no particular order and without much rhyme or reason, following is a list of book reviews I’ve posted over the past couple of years on Amazon.com. I’ve condensed most of them, and made some minor changes; the originals are all on Amazon. Oh, and there’s a couple of CDs in the mix. Enjoy.
Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture
by Moon Unit Zappa
Edition: Paperback
Price: $12.48
As a mother who raised two children partially within hippie culture, I’m always curious to hear how other kids similarly raised turned out. Wild Child didn’t completely satisfy my curiosity, but it whetted my appetite to go out and read more books on the subject (they’re coming fast and furious now).
One of the funny things about “being a hippie” is that many of us feel like we weren’t *real* enough, compared to, say Wavy Gravy or the Deadheads. Sure, my kids went to alternative schools, witnessed more sex than shrinks advise, and loved riding around in our beige VW bus, standing on the seats and waving to passers-by through the open sunroof. But I only lived communally for three years, I held down a respectable office job, and at one point I even cut my hair.
Wild Child quelled my feelings of fraudulence: it turns out there were many ways to be a hippie. One girl’s family traveled back and forth cross-country in a mail truck bought at auction; another spent time working the sugar fields of Belize. About the only thing they all had in common was being embarrassed to show their classmates the contents of their lunchboxes—that, and having a lot of strange people wander around their homes, whether they lived in a house, bus or teepee.
For me the most powerful piece was the editor’s,” Welcome Home,” in which she describes attending a latter-day Rainbow Gathering. Having already lived the real thing, the gathering’s painstaking efforts to replicate hippie life fail to impress or move her.
Only one contributor is angry about her childhood, about the omnipresent sexuality she was exposed to almost from infancy. For the most part, though, the contributors enjoyed their childhoods, and still love and appreciate their parents for what they were trying to do. Interestingly, none have chosen to perpetuate the hippie lifestyle–though many have retained its core values of peace, love, and self-sufficiency.
Wild Child is a fine antidote to hippie bashing, now considered sophisticated even by those who once embraced the lifestyle. The truth is, it was a brilliant and optimistic moment in history. If it didn’t transform the world completely, well, it did affect future generations-as Wild Child eloquently testifies.
The Nanny Diaries: A Novel
by Emma Mclaughlin
Edition: Hardcover
Don’t believe critics who call The Nanny Diaries “hilarious” or “fun.” With a subject like this, one naturally expects satire, and that there is–but eventually the plight of the kids cared for by nannies in New York gets under your skin; in the end your heart breaks for Grayer and all the poor little rich kids like him. If this is the next generation of the Masters of the Universe, we’re all in big trouble.
The Hero’s Walk
by Anita Rau Badami
Edition: Hardcover
Price: $23.95
Heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, a page-turner filled with pathos. I loved it madly.
Back When We Were Grownups: A Novel
by Anne Tyler
Edition: Hardcover
Price: $19.00
Back When We Were Grownups is Anne Tyler’s best book since Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. As in all of Tyler’s work, it’s populated by eccentrics who intermingle in each other’s lives. The overall atmosphere is a genial acceptance of individual quirkiness, a love of humanity rendered with humor and grace.
What the Body Remembers: A Novel
by Shauna Singh Baldwin
Edition: Paperback
Price: $12.00
What the Body Remembers falls into the genre known among my friends as “awful/wonderful.” “Awful/wonderful” books tell painful truths so compellingly that the reader hungrily ingests them, and even aches for more. With its no-holds-barred tale of the treatment of women in India, whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, this book is painful–but impossible to put down. Of all the novels I’ve read by and about Indian women’s lives, What the Body Remembers is the most disturbing– yet I was sorry to close it after reading the last page. Thoroughly engrossing, and as fascinating in its way as Memoirs of a Geisha. Highly recommended.
How To Read/Write a Dirty Story
by Susie Bright
Edition: Paperback
In this long overdue book Susie Bright generously shares her considerable experiences writing and editing erotica, as well as other literary genres. For this editor of erotica it all rang true–the pitfalls, the joys, the rewards. Her section on the publishing industry is particularly right on target. I make it a practice to read and go hear Susie speak whenever I need to get inspired. This book did it for me again.
One Hundred White Women
The Journals of May Dodd: A Novel
by Jim Fergus
Edition: Paperback
Price: $9.42
I found this novel absolutely gripping. For anyone who prefers to learn history via fiction, like I do, it’s one of those….of course, you have to know where history leaves off and fiction begins, and the author covers that in a prologue. This book made me want to learn more history, but from the source–Native American fiction.
Everyman
by Philip Roth
Edition: Hardcover
Price: $16.32
EVERYMAN is aptly titled: Roth’s goal in writing it was, apparently, to probe and express universal truths. That these truths tend to reveal the darker regions of the soul, with precious little to lighten or alleviate their impact, makes for some rough reading. I suspect that many readers won’t make it to the end, despite the book’s brevity.
Everyone, like Roth’s protagonist, faces age and the prospect of death essentially alone. Everyone regrets some life choices, and these become magnified as their consequences are, over time, mercilessly illuminated. These days, almost everyone is bound to face some kind of medical intervention–perhaps, like Roth’s narrator, several. And every one of us will die: it’s the only way out of here. These may sound like a cluster of dour clichés–but in the hands of a genius like Roth, the deeper meaning of it all is brilliantly conveyed. While the message is undeniably depressing, for some readers–I’m one of them–Everyman offers a kind of perverse joy that comes from being in the presence of absolute truth.
A Time to Run: A Novel
by Barbara Boxer
Edition: Hardcover
Price: $18.96
I’m a big fan of Senator Barbara Boxer: whether she’s scolding energy corporations for bilking Californians out of millions of dollars, or confronting Supreme Court candidates, she kicks butt. So I was curious to read her first novel, A TIME TO RUN.
Boxer fictionalizes Washington politics with the same no-holds-barred attitude she employs as a representative of her constituents. She paints a realistic picture of what it’s like to be a senator, particularly for a woman; if some of the writing itself is less than stellar, Boxer compensates for it with her choice of details, the stuff of her story. She lets us in on the kind of back-room deals and media machinations that make up the sleaze of governmental processes.
How much of the novel’s heroine, Ellen Fischer, is Boxer’s alter ego? It’s impossible to know for sure, but Fischer consistently rises above the sleaze, and if just a smidgeon of Ellen Fischer’s character is drawn from Ms. Boxer, we’ve got a friend indeed in Washington.
Forever: A Novel
by Pete Hamill
Edition: Paperback
Price: $10.17
As a New Yorker exiled in California, I can never get enough of New York news, accents, jokes or food. Now add history to the mix: Pete Hamill’s novel Forever tells the history of Manhattan island from pre-Revolutionary times to the post-9/11 world.
“Newspapers give the facts, but novels tell the truth.” We care more about events when we care about the characters, and in Forever we follow Cormac O’Connor, a likeable and sympathetic Irishman, through three centuries in the ever-changing city of New York. Because Pete Hamill’s been grinding out journalism for some forty years, he can be trusted where historical data is concerned. It’s therefore ironic that readers have to suspend disbelief and accept a protagonist who lives forever, in order to go further into the story. The rewards, however, are well worth it.
An interesting aside: Hamill completed and mailed the manuscript to his publisher on September 10, 2001. The next day he knew he had to revise the book. It took Hamill another year to write about the attack on the World Trade Center and its effect on his characters. He did a great job.
Unless: A Novel
by Carol Shields
Edition: Hardcover
I haven’t read a book like Carol Shields’ Unless in something like 30 years. This is a novel that brings home the truth of the old feminist adage “the personal is political.” Through her believable and likable narrator and the women in her life, Shields continually makes connections between the tragedy of one woman’s circumstances and the global powerlessness of all women. The book put me into a weeklong state of the famous Click! (if you don’t know what a Click! moment is–and it’s got nothing to do with computers– I suggest you read this book, and then every feminist novel published from roughly 1965 through 1978.) There’s nothing like a well timed Click! to pull a woman out of the isolated doldrums and into collective rage. Rage, we are repeatedly told these days, isn’t good for our health; but as Marge Piercy noted in a poem, “A just anger’” acted upon is as healthy as apples and carrots.
I have one reservation about Unless– the ending. I found the resolution of the daughter’s situation entirely too pat. If the world really is as oppressive to women as Shields seems to think, then the individual solution, especially of the nuclear family happily-ever-after variety, is an impossible dream.
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Edition: Paperback
Price: $10.05
Somewhere in the middle of A FINE BALANCE Rohanton Mistry reveals the meaning of his title: it refers to the balance, in life, between hope and despair. At the point where this revelation comes, I felt that the story was a long way from achieving this balance–there was far more despair going on, and precious little hope. By the novel’s end, however, a balance of sorts is reached.
The story centers on four main characters: Dina, a widowed seamstress struggling to live independent of her family; Maneck, a college student who rents a room in her house; and Omprakash (Om) and Ishvar, nephew and uncle tailors who work for Dina. The canvas Mistry paints their stories on is vast: like many novels coming out of India in recent years, it begins with independence from Great Britain and subsequent Partition. Along the way numerous characters, from beggars to Brahmins, make appearances, and each has a rich life story to which the reader is privy. The most intense story is Om’s and Ishvar’s; descendants of the untouchable caste, they dare to climb up the rickety caste ladder, and as a result their families become victims of unspeakable horrors.
By focusing on a few individuals with a supporting cast of thousands, Mistry has produced a story as big as the Maharrabata. His writing style is flawless, elegant without being pretentious. He describes huge events, like a funeral procession for a popular legless beggar, with all the grandeur they’re due, and subtler details, like Dina’s inner conflicts, with unerring precision.
Mistry’s proscription for achieving balance between hope and despair is, without question, human connection. Salvation, he seems to be saying, lies in human loyalty, commitment and a willingness to care for one another.
This was a book that altered my perspective on life and broadened my worldview. I’ll carry its vision with me forever.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards. I recently read this but hadn’t yet had a chance to review it; I just found a review that I recommend: Click here.
Carly Simon
Have You Seen Me Lately
Price: $11.98
I love Carly Simon, but I really only bought this CD for one song: “Life is Eternal,” a truth-telling spiritual piece guaranteed to produce goosebumps. I ended up liking the whole CD. Any Carly fan will love this collection—she’s as sexy here as she’s ever been.
Bob Dylan
Love and Theft
Price: $8.97
At 60 Bob Dylan has produced one of the best collections of his long and prolific career. These songs rock—some so much that ya just gotta get up and dance. A few of the tracks are poignant; all are haunting in one way or another. This CD showcases the variety of musical forms Dylan’s mastered, from rock to blues to sweet old-fashioned crooning. Superb.
1 Comment
March 14, 2007 at 9:09 pm
forever was a pretty grabbing read. nice list.