Under the Covers

Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck

By Amy Alkon

(St. Martin’s Press, $14.99, 304 pages)

Who is this author?

She’s the Advice Goddess, with a popular and prize-winning syndicated column that can be found in more than 100 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. (Wait, what? Aren’t all Canadians born with impeccable manners?). Amy Alkon lives in Venice – the California one, not the Italian one – and also is the author of the memoir, I See Rude People. She’s a frequent flyer on TV shows, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR, CNN, MTV, and Entertainment Tonight and also broadcasts a weekly radio show called, appropriately, Advice Goddess Radio. Alkon also has contributed pieces to Psychology Today, Los Angeles Times and its Magazine, New York Daily News and Pravda.

What is this book about?

LA Weekly once called Amy Alkon “Miss Manners with Fangs,” and now she has written a book meant for nice but imperfect people (that would be many of us) who are a tad confused about being good in a rude world where life is so complex that it sadly is easier than ever to get away with bad behavior. Alkon’s weapons in the fight include a wicked good sense of humor and the smart use of psychological research to back up her intuitive insights. In the book, she poses questions that resonate in our contemporary world, many of them involving the electronic devices that are becoming our masters and others dealing with everyday annoyances, such as dog poop on your lawn. You won’t find much about correct table settings here, but you will find suggestions for getting through the day in a more polite and pleasant way.

Why you’ll like it:

Alkon makes us laugh and makes us think in this useful and entertaining book.  She mines the findings of academics in the fields of anthropology, psychology and evolutionary psychology for information, and transforms these serious discoveries into extremely amusing commentary. Her goal, though, is not simply to glean the giggles. She’s making a case that rudeness is a social crime, and that it can be combatted. Here is some of what she has to say:

“. . . how simple it actually is to treat other people well. Life is hardly one long Princess Cruise for any of us, and there are times when you’ll have to fire or disappoint somebody. But at the root of manners is empathy. When you’re unsure of what to say or do, there’s a really easy guideline, and it’s asking yourself, Hey, self! How would I feel if somebody did that to me?

“If everybody lived by this “Do Unto Others” rule—a beautifully simple rule we were supposed to learn in Kindergarten 101—I could probably publish this book as a twenty-page pamphlet. But so many people these days seem to be patterning their behavior on another simple rule, the “Up Yours” rule—“screw you if you don’t like it.”

“. . . More and more, we’re all victims of these many small muggings every day. Our perp doesn’t wear a ski mask or carry a gun; he wears Dockers and shouts into his iPhone in the line behind us at Starbucks, streaming his dull life into our brains, never considering for a moment whether our attention belongs to him. These little acts of social thuggery are inconsequential in and of themselves, but they add up—wearing away at our patience and good nature and making our daily lives feel like one big wrestling smackdown.

“The good news is, we can dial back the rudeness and change the way we all relate to one another, and we really need to, before rudeness becomes any more of a norm. . . .”

What others are saying:

In a starred review, Library Journal says: “The main problem with etiquette books is that the people who need them don’t read them. Alkon . . . not only tells readers what good manners are but also provides useful suggestions for politely calling offenders’ attention to their rudeness. And she does this in a ferociously funny style—it’s worth a read for the laughs alone. There is nothing here of the proper arrangement of table settings, nor of how to address a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury; rather Alkon deals with modern problems in interpersonal relationships, such as how civilized people should act when standing in lines, on airplanes, online, and elsewhere. In addition, she offers very dependable, sensible, caring advice to those whose friends or family are coping with terminal illness. VERDICT Solid psychology and a wealth of helpful knowledge and rapier wit fill these pages. Highly recommended.”

“She is chatty, at times outrageous, but full of ideas about living politely in a society that she says has become too big for our brains to handle. As for Oscar Wilde, at the end of his life is said to have commented: ‘The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork,’ “ says The Wall Street Journal.

“Alkon turns reporting on findings in evolutionary psychology into an art form. She scans the research horizon for fascinating new results. Though relentless in her skepticism, she is keenly attuned to findings that are both solid and suggestive. (The world lost a great analyst when Alkon turned away from academic research.) In her hands, all this research turns into practical advice for how ordinary people can live better lives. Alkon may be, as the LA Weekly put it, ‘Miss Manners With Fangs,’ but she is perhaps better characterized as the offspring of Charles Darwin and Dorothy Parker. We academics can all take a lesson from her ability to redefine academic turf in terms ‘the ordinary person’ can both understand and enjoy,” says Dr. Barbara Oakley of Oakland University, author of Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend and an expert on anti-social behavior.

When is it available?

If you ask politely, you may borrow this book from the Dwight branch of the Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld

By Jake Halpern

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 256 pages)

Who is this author?

Jake Halpern, who is a fellow of Morse College at Yale University, writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine and is  the author of Fame Junkies and Braving Home, as well as co-author of two novels for young adult readers. He is on the list of This American Life’s seven most popular shows for his hour-long radio story “Switched at Birth.”

What is this book about?

If you have ever been targeted — fairly or unfairly – by a greedy, crooked debt collector, you know how deeply unpleasant the situation can be. So does Jake Halpern, who explores that seamy and unseemly world with vigor in Bad Paper. Halpern hangs his nonfiction tale on the exploits of a former banking executive who teams up with a former armed robber: the perfect pair when it comes to getting blood from a stone, it appears, but even these savvy guys get ripped off by their conscienceless employees. He also shares stories of victims of shady debt-collection entrepreneurs, who often wind up paying debts that actually no longer exist, in this mostly horrifying but frequently hilarious account of this dark side of the American economy.

Why you’ll like it:

Halpern has a serious and alarming story to tell here, but he does it with verve and candor, making what in other hands might be a dry treatise on economics gone rogue into a novel-like tale that grips the reader even as it repels. Forgive the pun, but you owe it to yourself to learn about the downside of the American credit dream and those who enthusiastically take unfair advantage of others who have bitten off more than they can pay for. This is a troubling, but important book.

What others are saying:

The Barnes & Noble Review says: “. . . Thirty million of us have debts old enough — over 180 days in arrears — to attract the debt collector. As Jake Halpern makes achingly clear in Bad Paper, this is not going to be fun, this new relationship, but it will throw into sharp relief a system that compounds the troubles of mostly hardworking, or hard-looking-for-work, Americans while permitting banks to loose the junkyard canines. When big banks can’t pay their obligations, they are given capital infusions (a few, mostly smaller fry, will be publicly executed as examples of bad seed). If you, Joe and Jane Doe, can’t pony up for a modest debt — sometimes even a two- figure debt — then you can expect the phone to start ringing in the middle of the night, and keep right on ringing.

“Now, let’s not let the American consumer off the hook. We know what camp Halpern is in — he’s in the right and decent camp — but he also wants to put in perspective the lay of the debt-insanity landscape, and all the nefarious opportunities it presents to those who game the system in one way or another. “There is a vast market for unpaid consumer debt — not just credit card debts but auto loans, medical loans, gym fees, payday loans, overdue cell phone labs, old utility bills, delinquent book club accounts.” . . . . Read it and weep, you 30 million debtors. Collection agencies are good at making you weep. Someone get the phone. . . “

Says Kirkus Reviews: “An investigation of the bottom-feeding underworld of debt collecting and its disreputable cast of rip-off artists. As journalist and novelist Halpern discovered, the world of debt collection is every bit as scummy (and possibly scummier) as its reputation has always suggested. . . . The author delivers a tale of two kinds of lowlifes and their collaboration in a lowest-common-denominator business that makes Wall Street look meek and ethical. Halpern begins with a focus on former banker Aaron Siegel, who moved back to his financially downtrodden hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., rounded up $14 million from chummy investors and opened his own private equity fund specializing in debt collection. After being ripped off by his own shady employees, who stole a huge portfolio of debt out from under his nose and started their own rogue agency, Siegel decided to employ the help of ex-bank robber Brandon Wilson to help strong-arm the debt collection competition into submission. Halpern tracks not only Siegel and Wilson’s quixotic quest for the stolen debt, but also the ugly, everyday inner workings of the business as a whole, much of which is based in crime-ridden, economically destitute Buffalo. The predominantly unethical practice of buying, selling and collecting debt is carried out by just the sort of societal outcasts you’d expect—usually, ex-cons or other desperate, otherwise unemployable screw-ups fill the business’s ranks. Halpern’s story of the debt collection world is also a dramatic rise-and-fall tale that traces the anything-goes heyday of debt collecting businesses in the unregulated early 2000s and how it has changed with the consequential recent Obama-era crackdowns on the shadier practices in the field. As we see in the book, these new regulations make it much harder for miscreants like Siegel and Wilson to survive. Halpern brings unexpected literary heft to the world of debt collection.”

Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “. . . reports from a “shadowy corner of the economy” — the world of consumer-debt collection, which “remains dysfunctional and largely unsupervised.” . . . Halpern’s narrative follows  . . . the “aboveground economy” (that is, the consumer-debt marketplace) . . . then delves into the inner workings of what he refers to as the “financial underworld.” Here, debt is bought and sold with no questions asked. Halpern also discusses the regulatory climate of the current economy; these details combined with the narrative, a startling picture emerges. By fostering a greater understanding of the workings of debt collection, the book sheds enough light into the shadows to compel readers to push for change.

“[A] wonderful inquiry into the seamy, multilayered world of consumer debt collection . . . both an entertaining sociology of the debt-collecting fraternity and a picaresque romp through the industry’s most unsavory byways,” says The Boston Globe.

Library Journal’s starred review says: “Halpern’s breathtaking exposé takes readers on a deep dive into the debt collection industry. The book proceeds chronologically from 2008 to today, following former Buffalo banker Aaron Siegel and his ex-con partner Brandon Wilson in their quest for money. Three sections relate how Siegel tracked stolen debt-collection files that he bought, how a collection agency operates, and how the industry is largely unregulated and hugely profitable. . . . Halpern succeeds in illustrating how Americans’ appetite for consumer credit and the country’s bank accounting rules have left much “meat on the bone” for collectors. The author also includes interviews with several hapless debtors who thought that they had paid their debts but were tricked by unsavory collectors. He shows that, as with the subprime mortgage crisis, when debt is packaged and resold, there may not be proof of the underlying obligation. Worse yet, the debt may be beyond the legal statute of limitations, and still, naive debtors are cajoled into paying. VERDICT Colorful and chilling, this work is an important peek into the dark corner of consumer finance and recommended for all consumers and true crime aficionados.”

When is it available?

If you borrow this book from the Downtown Hartford Public Library, please return it before overdue fines attract a bill collector.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

The Arsonist

By Sue Miller

(Knopf Doubleday, $24.95, 320 pages)

Who is this author?

Sue Miller, who lives in Cambridge, is a best-selling author who has sold more than 4 million copies of her novels, which some relegate to the “domestic fiction” category but others call great reads. Besides The Arsonist, Miller’s novels are The Lake Shore Limited, The Senator’s Wife, Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother. She also has published Inventing the Abbotts, a collection of stories; and the memoir The Story of My Father. The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbots became feature films; Oprah Winfrey selected While I Was Gone for her popular Book Club.

What is this book about?

It’s 1998, and someone is burning down the fine old homes of Pomeroy, N.H. And Alzheimer’s disease is burning down the mind of Frankie Rowley’s dad and with it, her parents’ marriage. Frankie has returned to the U.S. after 15 years of work fighting poverty in East Africa, and she’s experiencing culture shock, along with dismay at the arsons destroying the elegant second homes of the summer people who vacation in the New Hampshire town, as well as the sad state of her parents’ lives. She’s also attracted to the editor of the local paper. This is a novel about the difficulties and rewards of maintaining a marriage, a love affair, a community – told with Miller’s customary grace and insights.

Why you’ll like it:

Miller once told the New York Times: “For me everyday life in the hands of a fine writer seems … charged with meaning. When I write, I want to bring a sense of that charge, that meaning, to what may fairly be called the domestic.” In The Arsonist, she does just that, exploring the deep emotional chasms that can open up in what has heretofore seemed to be a placid and ordinary life. Miller knows how to tell a good and many-layered story.

Her desire to probe into the inner lives of her characters may come from her family background. She has said: “I come from a long line of clergy. My father was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian church, though as I grew up, he was primarily an academic at several seminaries — the University of Chicago, and then Princeton. Both my grandfathers were also ministers, and their fathers too. It goes back farther than that in a more sporadic way.” But then, she also reveals: “I spent a year working as a cocktail waitress in a seedy bar just outside New Haven, Connecticut. Think high heels, mesh tights, and the concentrated smell of nicotine. Think of the possible connections of this fact to the first fact, above.”

What others are saying:

Says Booklist: “With her trademark elegant prose and masterful command of subtle psychological nuance, Miller explores the tensions between the summer people and the locals in a small New Hampshire town. Frankie Rowley, after years spent doing relief work abroad, has returned to her parents’ summer home, unsure of whether she will ever go back to East Africa, feeling depleted by that region’s seemingly endless suffering. But the reassuring comfort of the small town she has been coming to since she was a girl is shattered by a series of fires set by an arsonist who has targeted the rambling summer homes of the wealthy. Frankie falls into an unexpected and passionate love affair with the local newspaper editor while also becoming privy to her parents’ difficulties, with her mother seeming to resent her husband’s decline into Alzheimer’s, especially since she no longer loves him. The town, awash in fear of the unknown arsonist, splits into factions aligned along class divisions. In this suspenseful and romantic novel, Miller delicately parses the value of commitment and community, the risky nature of relationships, and the yearning for meaningful work.”

Publishers Weekly says:  “A small New Hampshire town provides the backdrop for Miller’s provocative novel about the boundaries of relationships and the tenuous alliance between locals and summer residents when a crisis is at hand. After years of being an aid worker in Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the idyllic Pomeroy, N.H., summer home to which her parents have retired. But all is not well in Pomeroy, where a spate of house fires leaves everyone wary and afraid. Frankie, who may have seen the arsonist her first night home, contemplates her ambiguous future and falls for Bud Jacobs, a transplant who has traded the hustle and bustle of covering politics in D.C. for the security of small town life, buying the local newspaper. Meanwhile, Sylvia, Frankie’s mother, becomes concerned about her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior, fearful that it’s a harbinger of Alzheimer’s. Liz, Frankie’s married sister, has her hands full dealing with their parents while Frankie’s been overseas. Miller, a pro at explicating family relationships as well as the fragile underpinnings of mature romance, brilliantly draws parallels between Frankie’s world in Africa and her life in New Hampshire, and explores how her characters define what “home” means to them and the lengths they will go to protect it.”

Says Kirkus Reviews:  “As a series of fires in a small New Hampshire town exposes tensions between summer and year-round residents, the members of one in-between family confront their own desires, limitations and capacities to love in Miller’s latest. Burned out on her transient life working for an NGO in Africa, Frankie takes a possibly permanent leave and comes to stay with her parents, Sylvia and Alfie, in Pomeroy, N.H., where they have recently retired after years of summering there. The night of Frankie’s arrival coincides with the town’s first house fire, which everyone assumes was an accident. Days later, at the annual Fourth of July tea, Frankie begins a flirtation with Bud, who runs Pomeroy’s newspaper, and accompanies him to the site of the fire so he can take pictures. When a second fire occurs, again at a home belonging to summer residents, Bud begins to wonder if arson is involved. Soon there are more fires—at least six—and Bud is actively covering the story. Frankie becomes more involved than she’d like after realizing she may have seen the arsonist’s car the night of the first fire. Her description helps lead to an arrest. As the investigation meanders—one of the least exciting detective stories ever—Frankie and Bud begin falling in love, though both are in their 40s and on different life paths. But the heart of the story really lies in Sylvia and Alfie’s marriage. For years, seemingly super-competent Sylvia has been secretly dissatisfied with her marriage to self-important but only moderately successful college professor Alfie. Now Alfie’s mind is failing and she’s stuck caring for him. Miller’s portrayal of early Alzheimer’s and the toll it takes on a family is disturbingly accurate and avoids the sentimental uplift prevalent in issue-oriented fiction. Any spouse who has been there will recognize Sylvia’s guilt, anger, protectiveness and helplessness as she watches Alfie deteriorate. While the melodrama fails to ignite, Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis.

“Miller [eschews] easy cliff-hangers or narrative deceits. The momentum grows instead from her compassionate handling of these characters. . . . Not all questions are answered, nor all mysteries solved, but the end of the book is imbued with the same quiet energy that’s been building throughout; it’s not happy, exactly—that would be too easy—but, in true Sue Miller fashion, it’s triumphant,” says Elle.

When is it available?

You can find The Arsonist at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Hello Mr. Bones & Goodbye Mr. Rat

By Patrick McCabe

(Quercus, $24.99, 320 pages)

Who is this author?

Patrick McCabe, a writer of contemporary horror novels and other books that have won a slew of awards in his native Ireland, has a knack for the macabre – and that is not a pun on McCabe, though it could be. His novels The Butcher Boy (which won the Irish Times/Aer lingus Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize) and Breakfast on Pluto (which made the 1998 Booker Prize short list), became films directed by Neil Jordan. Another McCabe book, Winterwood, was named the 2006 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Novel of the Year.

What is this book about?

You get two eerie novellas for the price of one with Hello/Goodbye. Just flip it over when you have finished the first one, and there’s the second. Both are narrated by unreliable voices, because after all, they are dead. In Hello, Balthazar Bowen, a long-gone “eccentric pervert” who had nearly ruined the life of Valentine, an aspiring Christian Brother, comes back from the grave – or at least makes a phone call (imagine the roaming charges!) – to upset the young man’s life anew, during an unusual and unexpected hurricane in England. In Goodbye, Gabriel, a deceased Irish Republican Army bomber observes from on high – or would that be from deep below – as his former girlfriend, a lass from Indiana, travels to the bomber’s rural Irish village with his ashes. All does not go as planned, you surely will not be surprised to hear.

Why you’ll like it:

The New York Times’ review says McCabe “writes like an Irish Lenny Bruce, riffing at warp speed, swerving from one time to another and one place to another and strewing the landscape with allusions — to Coleridge, Milton, Yeats, Marc Bolan, “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Oliver!,” Betty Boop and an annoyingly memorable toothpaste jingle, among others. . .” Being favorably compared to the bitter brilliance of Mr. Bruce is high praise indeed, in my opinion. McCabe mixes comedy with creepiness to create an unusually dark and delicious brew. Sip it with caution; it’s powerful.

What others are saying:

“. . . McCabe, as readers of his 1992 novel “The Butcher Boy” might remember, is expert at making the darkest deeds funny, forcing us to laugh at the worst things in the world. . .  and somehow it all makes sense. . . .By the end, you might feel, as Valentine does, “captive in the dread country of delusion and irrationality,” but if you’re not blinded by McCabe’s verbal pyrotechnics you can make out where he’s been going. This story is about the struggle to break free of a dire past; about the powerful forces arrayed against reason, sanity, happiness itself; about the demons that keep us locked up in old obsessions. . . .  The tone of “Goodbye Mr. Rat” is more muted and mournful than that of “Hello Mr. Bones,” but McCabe’s writing is no less brazenly allusive . . .  and Gabriel is no more to be trusted than Balthazar Bowen was. Different though they are, the novels come together when you’re finished reading, creating a single vision of the horrors that crush people’s souls. The stories McCabe tells have a terrible beauty. Next to them, the problems of a bunch of vampires don’t amount to a hill of beans,” says The New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty .

“McCabe is especially good at conjuring up the menace of psychopaths who perpetrate acts of barbarism under the spurious guise of ideologies,” says The Independent (Dublin).

The Guardian says: “. . . McCabe is a master of both the demented narrative and demented narrator. Beneath the ghosts and ghoulies, however, lies a compassionate exploration of the aftermath of psychological damage.

“The first novella, Hello Mr Bones, concerns a disgraced Christian Brother and an abused child. However – in a radical departure for Irish fiction – the abused child is the Christian Brother. As a boy, Valentine Shannon had been “interfered with” by the local psychopathic Anglo-Irish toff from the manor, “eccentric pervert” Balthazar Bowen, who styles himself as Mr Bones. Valentine goes on to join the Christian Brothers, only to be ejected after striking a student, one Martin Boan. In an effort to escape his past, he relocates to London and works as a lay teacher. His past, however, catches up with him when Valentine receives a phone call from Mr Bones. This call is even more disturbing than a call from one’s abuser might usually be, given that Bowen, or Bohen, or Boan, or Mr Bones, is now dead.

“These days, Valentine is sustained by love. In his partner, Chris Taylor, a 70s feminist and lone parent, McCabe introduces another character who is something of a rare bird in Irish fiction: a good mother. Mr Bones, however, has designs on Chris’s disabled son, Faisal, and repeated references are made to a horrific crime carried out on a boy with Down’s Syndrome in Florida by a certain clown called Bonio who, by all accounts, is limbering up to strike again.

The novella is set in 1987 on the day of the hurricane that assailed Britain. Michael Fish has reassured the populace that there is no need to worry, but in McCabeland, there is every need to worry. As the storm brews, Mr Bones’s demonic plans reach fruition, leading to a chilling denouement.

“. . . the spirit of McCabe’s second novella, Goodbye Mr Rat, is Samuel Beckett all the way: the main character is interred in an urn. Gabriel King has been cremated, though he hasn’t let it stop him. His friend, Beni Banikin, from Indiana, is returning his ashes to his hometown, Iron Valley, in the border counties of Ireland . . . and yet again, McCabe tackles a topic that is rare in Irish fiction – repeated references are made to a sectarian attack carried out by Catholics on Protestants . .  Gabriel expresses disgust and remorse from his urn, but his story changes as his narrative progresses. Can he be trusted? Similarly, his fellow IRA operatives are now respected elected public representatives, poachers-turned-gamekeepers. Their ringleader is mayor. Can they be trusted? Can anyone be trusted? Will the truth about the horrors of the dark decades of the Troubles ever come to light? . . . .These are without doubt strange pieces, and they are strangely effective. How better to articulate the atrocities of the Troubles and the devastation of child abuse than through the horror genre?

“. . . this isn’t Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones, narrated from heaven and suffused with redemption. These are the Bones of Patrick McCabe: stark, fierce, and wonderful.”

When is it available?

This twin terror is now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

By Katha Pollitt

(Picador, $25, 272 pages)

Who is this author?

Katha Pollitt, who describes herself on her blog as  a “polemicist, poet, feminist,”  is a prize-winning author, whose awards include a National Book Critics Award for her first collection of poems, Antarctic Traveler, and two National Magazine Awards for Essays and Criticism. She is a poet, an essayist and a longtime columnist for The Nation magazine. You may also have read her work in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Mother Jones, and the London Review of Books or heard or seen her on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC and the BBC. She is known as a feminist with a strong interest in the politics of sexuality.

What is this book about?

Pollitt makes the case that abortion, which has been legal but a polarizing issue in the U.S. for more than 40 years, can be a moral right and a social good. If that shocks you, it proves a central point she makes in Pro. She says even after 42 years, and despite studies that show that one in three American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause, abortion remains controversial, abhorred by the pro-life movement that has been successfully chipping away at its legality and too often  weakly defended by pro-choicers and feminists, who have absorbed the idea that the choice of terminating a pregnancy is always “agonizing” or “a bad thing,” even when there are moral and rational reasons for doing so. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of her book:

“We need to talk about the scarcity of resources for single mothers and even for two-parent families, and the extraordinary, contradictory demands we make upon young girls to be simultaneously sexually alluring and withholding: hot virgins. We need to talk about blood and mess and periods and pregnancy and childbirth and what women go through to bring new life into the world and whether deep in our hearts we believe that those bodies mean women were put on Earth to serve and sacrifice and suffer in a way that men are not. Because when we talk about abortion as a bad thing, and worry that there’s too much of it, sometimes we mean there’s too much unwanted pregnancy and that women and men need more and better sex education and birth control, and sometimes we mean there’s too much poverty, especially for children and their mothers, but a lot of the time we mean a woman should have a good cry, and then do the right thing and have the baby. She can always put it up for adoption, can’t she, like Juno in the movie? And that is close to saying that a woman can have no needs, desires, purpose, or calling so compelling and so important that she should not set it aside in an instant, because of a stray sperm.”

Why you’ll like it:

If you enjoy reading the words of a strong-minded woman who has done her research, synthesized its findings and is unafraid to speak out about a subject that so many avoid, you will find this book fascinating even if you disagree with Pollitt’s conclusions. And if you agree that abortion can be necessary and justified, you will find plenty to like about Pro. This is a powerful and provocative book, written by an author who pulls no punches.

What others are saying:

Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Even though abortion “is found in virtually every society going back at least 4,000 years,” it continues to be a divisive, controversial issue in the United States. Pollitt, a columnist at the Nation, regards abortion as a fact of life and makes an impassioned, persuasive case for understanding it in its proper context—“the lives and bodies of women” and their families. With wit and logic, Pollitt debunks the many myths surrounding abortion, and analyzes what abortion opponents really oppose: namely, women’s growing sexual freedom and power. She similarly addresses the notion of the “personhood” of the zygote/embryo/fetus and shows how, in spite of its small numbers (“only 7 to 20% of Americans tell pollsters they want to ban abortion”), the anti-abortion movement succeeds by focusing the debate on “life.” As Pollitt explains, objections to abortion have only surfaced within the past 140 years, and she illuminates the “anti-feminist, anti-modern view of relations between the sexes” at the core of today’s opposition, showing how its connection to patriarchal religious institutions provides much of its political power and funding. Finally, Pollitt brings readers up to date on the positive changes she sees in the current pro-choice movement—the growth in the number of women sharing their abortion stories, and in the support for reproductive justice for targeted groups—and offers suggestions of her own. With arguments that are both lucid and sensible, Pollitt successfully reframes the abortion debate to show that, “in the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights.”

The New York Times Book Review  says: “ …Pollitt argues that many abortion opponents are less concerned with the plight of any one embryo—and the fate of that embryo if carried to term—than they are with curtailing women’s sexual and economic freedom. This isn’t exactly a novel concept to students of feminist theory. But Pollitt’s exploration of the hypocrisy of abortion opponents…is so witheringly encyclopedic it will be an eye opener for those who have never darkened the door of a women’s studies classroom.

“Katha Pollitt’s brilliant new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, arrives like an urgent letter as rights are fast eroding….With Pollitt’s characteristic wit and logic, Pro marshals science, history, medicine, religion, statistics and stories of real women’s lives—with all the ‘tangled secret misfortunes’ of families—to make a myth-busting argument that abortion is a social good. It’s good for women. It’s good for children. It’s good for men. It’s a normal fact of life and has been since ancient times. All of which might sound shocking, so rarely do we hear about abortion’s benefits,” says Kate Manning in Time.

Says Ms. Magazine: “[This] shouldn’t be a radical message, but in an era when some feminists feel the need to defend the birth control pill by highlighting its use for reasons other than contraception, the very idea that we should insist that abortion is a good thing because it’s good for women feels incredibly bold…. ‘No one is pro-abortion’ is a common refrain among liberals defending the right to choose. In the abstract, no, but if you need an abortion to live your life as you see fit, then pro-abortion is exactly what you are. Katha Pollitt has your back on this, and more pro-choicers should embrace her unapologetic approach.”

“A dramatic, persuasive argument for abortion…Bolstered by dramatic statistics (‘excluding miscarriages, 21 percent of pregnancies end in abortion’), personal interviews, and historical references reaching as far back as ancient Greece and Egypt, Pollitt impressively makes her case while admitting that abortion clinics have become increasingly inaccessible and certain ‘pronatalist pundits’ are holding women’s intimately private pregnancy decisions up for public scrutiny…Pollitt’s cogent opinion presents potent testimony on a woman’s right to choose,” says Kirkus Reviews.

When is it available?

Pro can be borrowed from the Downtown Hartford Public Library or its Mark Twain branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Sweetland

By  Michael Crummey

(Liveright, $24.95, 336 pages)

Who is this author?

Michael Crummey, an acclaimed Canadian writer who lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, is both a poet and a novelist. His third novel, Galore, won the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and his earlier novels also won or were listed for several literary awards. Crummey often draws inspiration from the history and wild landscapes of Newfoundland and Labrador, where he also has lived, and his fictional towns evoke the harsh realities of life in  the Canadian Maritimes.

What is this book about?                

Sweetland is a tiny, nearly depopulated village on an island off Newfoundland. The mainland government has deemed it as being in inexorable decline, and offers its remaining citizens a very generous payment to abandon the place –providing everyone agrees to leave. But  at nearly 70 years old, lighthouse keeper Moses Sweetland, whose family founded the town, digs in his heels: Hell no, he won’t go. Neither will his niece’s son, who has autism (and whom the town has written off as its “village idiot.”) There are other quirky characters in Sweetland as well, and Moses tells us about them and town’s history. His eventual fate seems inevitable, but Crummey makes the very most of his story, reminding us what a powerful pull a place and the recollections it engenders can have on those who love it.

Why you’ll like it:

Crummey writes prose with a poet’s touch, and is a shrewd and sensitive creator of characters. This is a book in which plot is overshadowed by memories, personal oddities and the power of a strong-willed man to ride out his destiny as he sees fit. Not merely a historical novel, although there is plenty of history of this fictional but believable town, Sweetland nods to the Internet and TV dramas in the current era, but slams us with nostalgia and regret for the passing of a more innocent and challenging way of life.

What others are saying:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month review for January 2015 says: There’s a quietness to Michael Crummey’s novel that adds to its power. Sweetland is about a man, Moses Sweetland, who lives on an island off of Newfoundland. The island itself is called Sweetland, named by Moses Sweetland’s ancestors, and it’s a dying place. In fact, the entire population has been offered a lump payment by the government to remove themselves from the island. There are only two holdouts to the deal: the village idiot and the sixty-nine year old Moses Sweetland. What’s most appealing about this subtle, entertaining, and quietly moving novel is the humanity of its characters and the genuine feel of Sweetland itself. Each character is real and truly imagined; it’s the kind of book and the kind of place where many readers will just want to linger. Communities like Sweetland, with their specific ways of talking and being, are growing less common. Crummey’s book is a testament to those places and the people who live there.

Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Sweetland is both a place—a small island off Newfoundland—and a person—Moses Sweetland—and both have seen better times. The provincial government is offering resettlement money to Sweetland residents, but only if everyone agrees to leave. Moses Sweetland is 69 years old and has been disfigured by an industrial accident. When the story opens, he is the only person—aside from the man considered the island idiot—who opposes the government’s proposition. He’s under plenty of pressure to accept, but the island named for his ancestors, where he takes his great-nephew rabbit hunting and hands down family legends, is the only place Moses can imagine living. Crummey, whose last book, Galore, won the Commonwealth Prize, does both man and place justice: Moses is a memorably strong-willed character, whose manner of thinking and speaking are dying out. The novel also conveys the way that a sense of place is the product of relationships—among the living, with the dead, and, in Moses’s case, arising from intimate connections to land and sea. At the end of the story, Moses remains alone on the island, his supplies dwindling, beset by injury, cold, and memories—the question isn’t what will happen, but how. Having nearly trapped himself in a narrative corner, Crummey writes himself out of it, concluding the book in a way that recalls Aristotle’s maxim from the Poetics: the best endings find a way to be both surprising and inevitable.

Macleans magazine says: “Impetuous and imperious, Moses Sweetland is an extraordinary, beautifully realized character, and the supporting cast—including Queenie Coffin, a chain-smoking romance-novel addict who hasn’t left her house in four decades; and the feral Priddle brothers, “Irish twins” born 10 months apart—are scarcely less so. But Sweetland, Crummey’s finest novel yet, reaches its mythic and mesmerizing heights only after the others depart, leaving Moses—a Newfoundland Robinson Crusoe who even encounters a Friday-like dog—alone on his eponymous island, bracing for a bitter winter both seasonal and personal.”

Says Kirkus in a starred review: “On the small fictional island of Sweetland, just south of Newfoundland, a former lighthouse keeper becomes the last man standing when he refuses to accept a government resettlement package—much to everyone’s exasperation. Never married and with hardly any living kin, Moses Sweetland has spent most of his 69 years on the island to which his ancestors gave their name. Since technology eliminated his lighthouse keeper job, he has done a little bit of everything, like burying bodies and pulling a baby calf from a neighbor’s mistreated cow. He’s a sarcastic cuss, but his attachments—especially to his niece’s autistic son, who is as adamant about staying on Sweetland as Moses—are strong. In resisting the government’s $100,000 cash offer, which needs to be accepted by all the occupants to go through, Moses exposes himself to a series of threats, some of them grisly. But with all the memories the island has for him, and all the secrets there still waiting to be uncovered, he plans on being there until he dies. Canadian author Crummey employs a very different style here than he did with his fanciful, widely admired 2011 novel, Galore. Like Moses, Sweetland moves in fits and starts, capturing the present in patient detail and flashing back to dwell on milestone moments in his life. Unlike most novels steeped in rural nostalgia, it gets a kick out of contemporary life: Moses plays Internet poker; his niece is hooked on Mad Men. But the elimination of an entire community, and what it represents, is deeply felt. Through its crusty protagonist, Crummey’s shrewd, absorbing novel tells us how rich a life can be, even when experienced in the narrowest of physical confines.”

When is it available?

This novel is on the shelf at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

 

The Happiest People In the World

By Brock Clarke

(Algonquin, $24.95, 352 pages)

Who is this author?

Brock Clarke, who lives in Portland (the Maine one, not the Oregon one or the Connecticut one)  is the author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, which was a national bestseller, and the novels Exley and The Ordinary White Boy, as well as two story collections. He’s won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, along with other honors and his stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals and anthologies. He teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.

What is this book about?

Following a trip to Denmark, which Clarke cheerfully admits he had mixed up with The Netherlands, Clarke was inspired by the real life brouhaha that transpired when several Danish cartoonists did caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, thereby thoroughly upsetting the world of Islam and putting their own lives at risk of fatal retaliation. This set Clarke to wondering what would happen if a cartoonist from what has been called the home of “the happiest people in the world” was given a witness-protection-style new identity as a high school guidance counselor, of all things, and shipped off to upper New York state, to a town where, it turns out, the CIA has been stashing various operatives for a long while. What would happen? Dark, delicious, spy novel satire that tweaks American worries about security and conspiracies is the answer.

Of course, given the recent horror of the assassination of the Charlie Hebdo satirical cartoonists in France, this book now takes on (perhaps unwanted) relevance.

Why you’ll like it:

It’s a spy thriller, it’s political, it’s damn funny and it’s cleverly constructed and written. Clarke manages to hit a whole bunch of sweet spots in one novel, potentially making his readers among the happiest in the world.

I recommend that you take the time to go to his website, www.brockclarke.com, and find the essay he wrote about what inspired this book. It will give you a good sense of what the book is about, and more important, his writing style. Here is an excerpt:

“So what is this novel about? It’s about a bunch of things. It’s about free speech and religious intolerance. It’s about what it’s like to live in America right now, with its messed up economy and messed up families and its clashing cultures and its NSA scandals and its wiretapping and its Gitmos and its Snowdens and Plames. It’s about what it’s like to be a high school guidance counselor, not to mention a high school principal, not to mention a high school teacher, not to mention a high school student. It’s about what it’s like to be in a marriage, to be in a family, to love people but not as purely as they deserve. It’s about the way we believe that we can’t be happy unless someone else is unhappy. But mostly, it’s about a person who runs from his past and into a future made up of a new family, a new town, a new country. Meanwhile, all of the people in that new family, town, and country are trying to figure out if and how they can run from their pasts, and if so, in what kind of future they’ll find themselves. They wonder, “Will it be a future we want, or a future we deserve?” I wonder that, too.”

What others are saying:

Says the Wall Street Journal: “In Brock Clark ’s dark and funny satire “The Happiest People in the World”, a Danish cartoonist facing death threats after drawing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad is placed in a witness protection program and sent to live in Broomeville, N.Y. Why Broomeville? His CIA handler is in love with the sleepy town’s high-school principal. Coincidentally, Broomeville is also a CIA recruiting hub—half its residents are armed spies, and the mounted moose head in the local lodge has a hidden video camera.

If all this sounds ludicrous, that is Mr. Clarke’s point. A more peaceable soul than the cartoonist doesn’t exist (he orders his eggs sunny side up rather than poached or scrambled because it seems “the most optimistic and least violent of the three choices”), but his arrival riles up the agents, who find themselves incapable of deciding whom to protect and whom to watch. The ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people. And the paranoia and bloodshed that consume Broomeville in the novel’s grim finale are entirely self-inflicted.”

The Chicago Tribune says: “Clarke’s comedy is complex and packed with big ideas, but also wonderful sentences. The cartoonist, on his way to his new life, having just taken a nap on a bus, feels “that pleasant, superior, invincible feeling one gets when one has just woken up. It’s the way cats must always feel.” Clarke’s characterizations are equally deft, as when the teenage Kurt observes his uncle who is “reading the paper, making those clucking sounds designed only to make the person sitting with you finally ask, What? But Kurt refused to ask it. He was busy feeling melancholy.” Clarke says a great deal about each person in just a few sentences, and the whole book is like that: exuberantly packed.”

“Clarke and his newest protagonist play with fire in the figurative sense in the writer’s fourth, most combustibly funny novel, “The Happiest People in the World,” a transcontinental screwball comedy that mines cathartic (if not consoling) laughs from such front-page flashpoints as global terrorism, government surveillance, and gun ownership,” says the Boston Globe.

Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “The latest from Clarke is a whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption. Impulsive cartoonist Jens Baedrup leaves his wife and home in Denmark with the help of love-lorn CIA spy Locs (aka Lorraine). The reason: an impressionable and lonely immigrant takes offense at Jens’s drawing of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban, hovering above the “happiest people in the world… frowning inexpertly.” And so begins clueless cultural criminal and eternal optimist Jens’s transformation into Henry Larsen, a Broomeville, N.Y., high school guidance counselor. Henry woos Ellen, a heartbroken bar owner. Meanwhile, Locs is futilely and obsessively in love with Ellen’s husband, Matty, a school principal. These mismatches ultimately set off a violent chain reaction of discovery and revenge. As Henry’s world comes undone, the identities of his unlikely protectors are revealed in a hilarious series of bloody blunders. The bizarre moose-eye view opening to this culture-clash horror tale expertly sets the tone for what’s to come. Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.”

An Amazon Best Book of the Month review for November 2014 says: “It’s long been a credo of mine: any story that begins with a stuffed moose head on the wall of an upstate bar, a spy camera embedded in its eye looking down on a sprawl of gunshot victims… well, attention must be paid. And my attention to Brock Clarke’s weird, wise and witty fifth novel, The Happiest People in the World, never wavered. In a nutshell, sort of: a Danish cartoonist named Jens unwisely draws a cartoon of the Prophet, making him an assassin’s target and prompting the CIA to relocate him to America, where he poses as a high school guidance counselor in a small, strange New York town. That’s where the story gets truly bizarre, often hilariously so. I’m no fan of the term “laugh out loud,” but I did audibly chuckle, a lot. (Example: “it’s all good” really is “the most idiotic expression on the planet.”) Without giving too much away: Jens (now known as Henry) works for Matthew (the school principal), both nursing secrets, both victims of lies. But beneath the convoluted entanglements of small town love and small town spies—veering too close to madcap at times—there’s a deceptively touching story of flawed men who aren’t quite sure how to be fathers, husbands, or men. Or happy. “

When is it available?

Happily, this book can be borrowed from the Downtown Hartford Public Library.

 

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Evergreen

By Rebecca Rasmussen

(Knopf Doubleday, $25.95, 352 pages)

Who is this author?

Rebecca Rasmussen first garnered wide attention with her novel The Bird Sisters, and she also has been published in (or has won prizes from) such journals as  TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, Glimmer Train and The Mid-American Review. A Midwesterner by birth, she has lived in eight states and now makes her home in Los Angeles with her family, where she teaches English part-time at UCLA.

What is this book about?

This is a novel about family, and how strong the impulse to share a heritage can be. Opening in the late 1930s, when Eveline, a naive but game young woman, follows her new husband Emil, a taxidermist, to a beautiful and abundant but primitive spot in the forests of  Minnesota, it goes on to chronicle her life and that of her children: Hux, son of Emil, and Naamah, the child of a rapist who strikes when Emil returns for a time to Germany. Eveline makes the heartrending decision to give this child of violence to an orphanage, a place that proves to be cruel beyond measure. Later, as an adult, goodhearted Hux, who knows about his hidden sister, finds her and brings her home, but taming Naamah is far from easy or assured. This is a novel that asks whether the bonds of family can bind up devastating emotional wounds.

Why you’ll like it:

While this book has received somewhat mixed reviews, Evergreen has several intriguing points of entry: a story of survival in the wilderness that takes place in a time less than 100 years ago that might as well be many centuries past; and a story of emotional trauma in which good people make inadvertently bad decisions and bad people strike without conscience or caring. It is also a novel in which the setting deeply affects the characters and the plot. Here is what Rebecca Rasmussen told an Amazon interviewer about the book:

“As a person who has lived in eight different states so far in my life, I’ve had the fortunate experience of witnessing how place changes people. In Massachusetts, I used to snowshoe down my street. I was moodier then. After a long winter, there was nothing more enlivening than seeing the first magnolia blossoms in the spring. In Los Angeles, I’m a hundred feet from the 405. I’m so close I can give a traffic report. But the sun is always shining and the winds are always warm. I’m softer here. Less alone.

In Evergreen, the changes the characters go through are more pronounced than mine, perhaps because there are no modern conveniences to soften the transition when they move from an established town to the wilds of northern Minnesota in 1938. Electricity changes people. Running water. But so do swiftly moving rivers and old growth forests, night skies unmarred by city lights, industry. To my mind, this novel couldn’t take place anywhere else in the world but Evergreen.”

What others are saying:

Publishers Weekly says: “Evergreen is a small pocket of habitable forestland in rural Minnesota, where, in 1938, giddy newlyweds Eveline and Emil start a life together. Their riverside cabin is stubbornly removed from the nearest town of Yellow Falls, with its electricity and grocery stores. Soon a baby is on the way, and their marriage unfolds, almost too sweetly. But Rasmussen has a knack for destabilizing her characters as soon as she’s got them settled. Emil heads home to his native Germany, and his father’s deathbed, with World War II on the horizon. Eveline, nursing an infant, refuses to stay with her parents but, instead, emulates Lulu, her neighbor across the river, who hunts, curses, and stomps around in a dusty coat of animal pelts. Eveline learns empowering survival skills, but they do little to protect her from a stranger who appears one night and rapes her, leaving her pregnant. Mothers, daughters, and granddaughters struggle with abandonment, physical violation, and illness in this story. Rasmussen does not shy away from evil characters—rapists, child abusers—but her most unnerving character is Eveline’s son, Hux. Without an ill-intentioned bone in his body, he makes the women look comparatively unhinged and, at times, selfish. Evergreen is serene, but not safe. If Rasmussen’s characters contained such subtleties and contradictions, the novel would be more realistic. And yet, Rasumssen makes her point about the indelibility of trauma and the impossibility of avoiding heartbreak.”

Booklist says: “Rasmussen has been steadily crafting a unique brand of midwestern literature that combines offbeat characters and timeless rhythms reminiscent of folk tales with touching story lines about the pain and hard-won joys of real life. As with her debut, The Bird Sisters (2011), in her new book, she shows her strong affection for the picturesque rural settings of yesteryear. In 1938, Eveline Sturm joins her German-born husband, Emil, in the northern Minnesota backwoods. Their isolated cabin is beyond rustic, and her only reading material is Emil’s taxidermy manuals, yet she decides to remain alone with their baby son, Hux, when Emil returns to Germany to care for his father. Years later, Eveline’s daughter, Naamah, the product of a traumatic rape, grows up amid cruelty in a Catholic orphanage. After reuniting with his half sister as an adult, Hux tries to help the beautiful, damaged Naamah recapture her lost childhood. In this character-driven saga of friendship and the thorny bonds of family, Rasmussen writes with wisdom and compassion about the people and places that shape us, for better and worse.”

“A fairy tale-like chronicle of how one moment’s pain can echo through generations . . . Rasmussen was born and raised in the Midwest, and her descriptions of the Minnesota wilderness are poetic in their spare beauty. Nature has an almost mystical draw for the characters in Evergreen, most of whom look to it as a refuge rather than something to conquer . . . With its quiet beauty, deep compassion and strong emotional pull, Evergreen cements Rasmussen’s reputation as one of our most talented new writers,” says Bookpage.

“Evergreen is set in the austere landscape of northern Minnesota, where the forests and lakes have a beauty that reveals itself only gradually, and where that beauty is matched by the twin dangers of isolation and cold . . . a stark book, with flashes of human kindness held in balance by moments, or years, of scarring violence . . . Rasmussen doesn’t shy from depicting villainy: Two of her characters are sociopaths, and their impact on the others careens through the years. At the same time, and without sentimentality, she allows for the healing power of time and nature.” Says The Columbus Dispatch.

Says Kirkus Reviews: “A malign stranger’s visit to a remote Minnesota log cabin in the 1930s will cast long shadows over a family in a fatalistic second novel. After her quirky debut, Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters, 2011) returns to the subject of siblings, this time via a fairy tale–flavored three-generation family portrait set in a forest wilderness. Evergreen is the tiny riverside community to which Eveline LeMay travels in 1938 to join her new husband, German immigrant and taxidermist Emil. Arriving dreamily in a rudderless boat, Eveline disembarks into a life of rural simplicity and hard labor, wrapped in the sweetness of a loving marriage. Soon after a son, Hux, is born, however, Emil is called back to Germany, to his father’s deathbed. The year being 1939, his return to Eveline will not be problem-free. Opting to stay on the land instead of returning to her own parents during Emil’s absence, Eveline discovers strength and local friendship but also suffers a traumatic rape which leads to the birth of a daughter, Naamah, whom Eveline reluctantly decides to abandon at the door of Hopewell, a Catholic orphanage. Naamah’s cruel treatment at the hands of Sister Cordelia, the crazed nun in charge at Hopewell, leaves ineradicable scars on the child’s psyche; although she escapes at age 14, her behavior—even after Hux finds and rescues her, years later—is proof of deep-rooted damage. Rasmussen’s devoted storytelling lends grace to the proceedings, but there’s a sense of sketchiness, both in the story and the cast of one-note characters whose problems are largely wiped away in an overwhelmingly sweet conclusion. The delicate inventiveness that marked this author’s first novel is less apparent in her sentimental second.

When is it available?

Evergreen is on the shelves at the Mark Twain branch of the Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

(Penguin, $32.95, 464 pages)

Who is this author?

In 1999, when President Clinton honored Norman Lear with a  National Medal of Arts, saying he  has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.” That’s no exaggeration. The comedy genius behind “All In the Family, “Maude, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times,” “One Day at a Time” and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”  gave us plenty of laughs but also made us more aware of our attitudes about race and women’s rights and income disparity and a whole lot more. Lear was one of the first seven television pioneers inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984 and has won many other arts and  humanitarian honors. He also founded the progressive organization, People For the American Way, which supports Bill of Rights guarantees and calls attention to violations of constitutional freedoms. He also founded other non-profits, such as the Business Enterprise Trust and the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and co-founded the Environmental Media Association.

What is this book about?

Lear, now 92, looks back on his long and storied career, with its many ups and considerable downs, and in relaying his own personal history also gives us a history of entertainment and comedy in America, plus political history as well. All of them are entwined in this man’s career. Lear was born in New Haven to parents who were, to put it mildly, difficult people. He was there as TV became a major shaper of the American conscience and consciousness, was involved in the creation of more than 100 TV shows, and ever the proud liberal thinker.  Lear boasts about being described by evangelical TV  preacher Jerry Falwell as the “No. 1 enemy of the American family” and being on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” Those who might question his politics should remember that he dropped out of college in 1942 to join the U.S. Army Air Forces as a radio operator and gunner during World War II. He flew 52 combat missions in the Mediterranean Theater and earned an Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters. He also purchased one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, which he took on tour to every state. In this book, Lear tells his fascinating life story with frankness and a sense of fun befitting one of the best comedy minds of our generation.

Why you’ll like it:

It’s always a kick to go behind the scenes, and that kind of pleasure is intensely magnified here because the guide is one of the seminal figures in American entertainment. Lear may be in his 90s, but he is still a vigorous commentator and master storyteller. You will learn what it was like to break taboos in what could be shown or discussed on the air in the ‘60s and ‘70s, including profanity, racial slurs, and toilet humor. Of course, what seemed shocking or groundbreaking then is considered pretty mild today. Booklist says of Lear’s reminiscences: “This is, flat out, one of the best Hollywood memoirs ever written. An absolute treasure.” Read it and see for yourself.

What others are saying:

Publishers Weekly says: “The television producer whose controversial sit-com hits—All In The Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day at a Time—virtually defined the culture of the 1970s looks back on his triumphs and vexations in this feisty, thoughtful autobiography. Lear vents sharply conflicted feelings about nearly everyone and everything: his father, a charismatic con-man; his mother, a sour woman who constantly disparaged him (when he made Forbes 400 Wealthiest Americans she noted he was near the bottom of the list); Carroll O’Connor, a sublime Archie Bunker but also a megalomaniac forever threatening to shut down the show over script complaints; the United States, which, as founder of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, Lear celebrated in patriotic extravaganzas while deploring patriotic excesses. Lear pens sharply observed studies of the creative process on his many iconic productions and bares plenty of raucous, sometimes bawdy anecdotes—readers get to experience a nude and lewd Jerry Lewis—before the narrative peters out in a third-act haze of nostalgic testimonial and light spiritual rumination. Still, in keeping with the bigoted, mouthy, complex and loveable characters he created, Lear’s knack for sizing up a flawed humanity makes for an absorbing read.”

Library Journal points out: “Creator of some of the most significant series in television history and a dedicated political activist, Lear presents an amazing life story, from flying 50 bombing missions over Germany during World War II to buying an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, which he shares regularly at schools, libraries, and public institutions nationwide.”

Kirkus Reviews says in a starred review: “A TV titan on his memorable life and storied career. Lear, best known as the creative mind behind such classic comedies as All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons and Good Times, recounts his extraordinarily eventful life with his signature wit and irreverence. The result is not just a vividly observed and evocative portrait of a long life, but also a fascinating backstage look at the evolution of the American entertainment industry. Born to a charismatic and wildly unreliable con man—Lear’s father would miss a chunk of his son’s childhood serving a jail term for fraud—and an unaffectionate, self-obsessed mother, Lear flailed about in various unsuccessful ventures before teaming with friend Ed Simmons to write comedy, eventually penning sketches for the likes of Jack Haley, Martha Raye, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the early heyday of television. After a stint as a film director and producer, Lear returned to TV to create the epochal series All in the Family, which famously brought sensitive political and social issues to the family hour. Lear’s other shows struck a similarly confrontational chord, explicitly discussing race, class, abortion and a host of other controversial topics. Lear’s analysis of network politics is astute and amusingly cynical, and his sketches of such legendary figures as Milton Berle are unsparing in their honesty. It’s not all showbiz; Lear writes movingly of his service in World War II, his difficult upbringing and subsequent troubled marriages, and his commitment to liberal causes, evidenced by his founding of the advocacy organization People for the American Way and his purchase of an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. That he makes these subjects as engrossing and entertaining as his Hollywood reminiscences speaks to Lear’s mastery of storytelling and humor. A big-hearted, richly detailed chronicle of comedy, commitment and a long life lived fully.”

When is it available?

You can get to experience this book at the Downtown Hartford Public Library or its Mark Twain branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

Mannequin Girl: A Novel

by Ellen Litman

(Norton, $25.95, 352 pages)

Who is this author?

Ellen Litman immigrated to Pittsburgh from Moscow in 1992 when she was 19. After spending six years working as a software developer in Baltimore and Boston, she went back to school, earned an MFA from Syracuse University and won a Rona Jaffe Award for her writing. In 2007, she published a novel in stories called The Last Chicken in America, which became a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and for the Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work also has run in Best New American Voices, Best of Tin House, Ploughshares, and other journals. She lives in Mansfield.

What is this book about?

Is there a little girl anywhere who hasn’t admired beautiful models? Even one growing up in Soviet Russia? Even with a rapidly advancing case of scoliosis that is twisting her spine? Kat Knopman is that little girl, and her disease sends her away from the school at which her parents, Jewish (but not all that observant) intellectuals,  teach literature and drama, to a special school for kids with spinal diseases where an ugly and confining body brace awaits and the other students don’t display much sympathy. Kat has a lot to learn: about herself, brains and beauty, being Jewish in an anti-Semitic country and whether her parents are as perfect as she has always thought. This is a fine coming-of-age novel that shows that whatever the particulars, growing up is universally a challenge.

Why you’ll like it:

Littman writes gracefully and often with rueful humor, and though the situations she describes in her novel and stories often are difficult and depressing, her wit and insights make for a very entertaining reading experience. She is particularly good at creating sharp-minded heroines who appreciate life’s ironies, and while she has said that her work is not autobiographical, she herself certainly  is a sharp-witted author with a firm grasp of irony and the absurd.

What others are saying:

Booklist says: “Litman transports readers to her home city, Moscow, during the 1980s in this portrait of a besieged Russian Jewish family. Kat is dizzy with joy at the prospect of beginning first grade at the school in which her glamorously bohemian, slightly dissident, theater-devoted parents teach. Instead, Kat is diagnosed with severe scoliosis and sent to a regimented school-sanatorium where over the years she makes enemies and friends while enduring a painful body cast and the staff’s attempts to straighten out her unconventional mind as well as her curved spine. Her parents—stunning, tempestuous Anechka; kind, dreamy Misha—are overwhelmed by Kat’s predicament, Anechka’s emotionally compounded health problems, and Misha’s mother’s dementia. With surgical humor and supple sensitivity, Litman illuminates the struggles of both the spinally challenged and the straight-backed within a microcosm of the twisted, ailing, malignantly anti-Semitic Soviet state, in which typical coming-of-age angst is amplified. As teen Kat rebels, certain that no one will ever love her, Litman scrupulously traces a web of social and family conundrums in this strikingly lucid and affecting novel.”

Says Publishers Weekly: “Litman chooses a claustrophobic setting for her second novel: a Soviet boarding school for children with scoliosis. As the story begins in 1980s Moscow, seven-year-old Kat is ready to start first grade at a new school—the same one where her parents, Anechka and Misha, are beloved, charismatic teachers who, in their private hours, host risky meetings of dissidents. But after Kat is diagnosed with scoliosis, she must leave her warm, chaotic family for the rigors of the “special school,” where she will be fitted for a brace (which resembles “the carcass of a prehistoric animal”) and faced with increasing prejudice against her Jewish heritage and pressure to conform to Communist ideals. When Kat reaches adolescence, Anechka and Misha come to teach at her school, ostensibly for her own good, but their presence only aggravates Kat’s troubles. Kat, refreshingly, isn’t painted as a blameless victim, but her needs—for her mother’s love, or love of any kind—are so relatable that she never becomes unsympathetic. Readers who can make it through the book’s grim early section will be interested to see how Kat does when the brace finally come off.”

Library Journal says: “Kat Knopman’s earliest years are carefree. Her parents, nominally Jewish, are moderate activist teachers and make life fun in 1970s Moscow. But their lives turn darker when Kat is diagnosed with scoliosis and her mother suffers a series of miscarriages. Kat finds herself an outcast at a special boarding school as her parents slide into quiet despair. But Kat is nothing if not determined. She’ll make a friend out of her worst tormentor and she’ll make peace with her place in the world. Litman deepens the usual coming-of-age tale with a sensitive illumination of disability and the lure and dangers of exceptionalism—whether imposed or adopted. VERDICT Accompanying Kat on her journey is painful at times for the reader, but a trip worth taking.”

“. . . a shrewd, observant coming-of-age tale set in the twilight years of the Soviet Union. Diagnosed with scoliosis at age 7, Kat is crushed to learn that she’ll be sent to a special boarding school on the outskirts of Moscow. She’d always expected to attend the school where her brilliant, bohemian parents, Anechka and Misha, shine as popular teachers so she can show off her own precocious intellect. Instead, she finds herself unpopular with the other boarding school students and disturbed by familial tensions when she visits home on weekends. Mercurial Anechka’s repeated, failed attempts to have another baby reinforce Kat’s sense that she’s disappointed her parents, and the massive body brace she’s forced to wear doesn’t help her self-esteem. Litman traces her bumpy progress from 1980 to 1988 entirely without sentimentality, showing Kat capable of being as mean as the kids who persecute her and revealing her parents (who join Kat’s school in 1984) as too wrapped up in their own problems to be much help to their troubled daughter. Litman is equally sharp on the shifting alliances of childhood: Kat’s mortal first-grade enemy, severely hunchbacked Seryozha, by the end of the book is the devoted friend who prods her to fulfill her longtime acting ambitions. The Soviet Union’s slow collapse is seen in the backdrop, for good and ill. . . . Litman deliberately keeps the dramatic incidents everyday (bullying, tale-bearing, an infidelity); she offers a snapshot of life rather than a grand artistic statement, in keeping with Kat’s final conclusion that “she doesn’t mind pedestrian, [it's] what she needs right now.” Smart, highly readable fiction propelled by a vulnerable and crankily appealing heroine,” says Kirkus Reviews.

When is it available?       

This novel can be borrowed from the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain Branch.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!