I read a lot in November—partly because I have had a cold that won’t quit and have been reading while lying around—and enjoyed a surprising number of the books read. I still read some titles I ended up sneering at, but in the spirit of the holidays, I've decided not to deal with them here.
Fiction
Lake Success, by Gary Shteyngart. Hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, plagued by an SEC investigation and unable to cope with his three-year-old's autism diagnosis, takes off on a Greyhound bus in search of his college girlfriend, leaving his much younger wife Seema to cope with their son, her immigrant parents, and the SEC. Barry's experiences as he lurches across he country might teach a better man something important about himself or humanity, but Barry is not the reflective type. Seema, on the other hand, grows in her Barry-free time, finding ways to encourage their son to become a functioning human being. This book was my first by Shteyngart, but it won't be my last.
Searching for Sylvie Lee, by Jean Kwok. Sylvie Lee is the older daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States who spent the first 9 years of her life living in the Netherlands with her grandmother and an aunt. After travelling back to the Netherlands to be with her dying grandmother, she disappears, and her younger (and much less accomplished) sister Amy travels to Europe to try to find her. As Amy searches for her sister, she uncovers family history that has been held secret for decades. The story is told asynchronously from the viewpoints of Sylvie, Amy, and their mother; as the climax approaches, we begin to sense what may have happened, but there is still a bit of a twist at the end. An engrossing family drama.
Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue. Cameroonian immigrant Jende thinks he has landed his dream job driving for Lehman Brothers executive Clark. Jende's wife Neni and their son have joined him in the United States, and she is going to school and expecting their second child. Despite the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States, they believe they are on their way. Then the great recession hits, and Jende loses his job and his somewhat trumped-up asylum request. As his family struggles, so does Clark's family, as dreams at many levels (people might have to start flying coach!) are crushed. What makes this book different from so many other immigrant stories (SPOILER) is that Jende, over Neni's objections, decides the family should return to Cameroon.
The Confession Club, by Elizabeth Berg. This is Berg's third feel-good book set in Mason, Missouri. The center of this story is a group of women who meet regularly to eat and confess to each other their misdeeds and regrets. Several characters from the previous two books reappear with new problems to solve, but all ends happily. It's corny but charming.
Nonfiction
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams. Williams is brilliant, a marvelous writer, and an environmental advocate. While reading Erosion, I occasionally felt I had read the same environmental arguments in her book about the national parks, but her writing about the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments reminded me of the destructiveness of the Trump Administration (so much keeps happening that you forget the outrages of first two years) and the utter lack of understanding of the indigenous people's histories. Her essay on her brother's suicide is terribly raw and moving, beautiful in its grief. The book is not uniformly great, but there's enough that is to make it worthwhile.
Eat Joy: Stories and Comfort Food, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett. This collection brings together writings (and recipes) from a variety of well-known authors, who describe a moment in their lives when food was important. The title is somewhat misleading, as many of the stories have more to do with sadness than joy--dead fathers abound (Edwidge Danticat's essay about sharing rice with her dying father is perhaps my favorite)--but the pieces are nonetheless rewarding. And it's somewhat shocking what horrible food some authors lived on (General Tso's tofu, anyone?).
To Obama, with Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Every day of his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from constituents, sometimes replying with handwritten notes, other times leaving directions for staff to investigate and respond. Selecting these letters was only a small part of the work of the Office of Presidential Correspondence, and Laskas gives us insight into what that work involved, its rewards and its challenges (the office received a lot of what were termed Red Dot letters, those that suggested an emergency in progress, whether self-harm or violence against others, and under protocol had to be responded to with assistance within 24 hours). Laskas talked to a number of people whose letters made it into 10LAD, examining how writing the letter and getting a response affected them. She also talked to President Obama about how the letters affected him. He told her, "If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That's not the job of the president. That's not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It's the job of citizens." Of course, the letters and the President's responses are the soul of the book--it's good to be reminded how angry people were in 2008 (and interesting to see that Obama often argued with accusations made against him). To Obama may not be the deepest book written about his historic administration, but it's an enjoyable one.
Mysteries
Those People by Louise Candlish. Candlish's work reminds me of the novels of Liane Moriarty--both skewer the smug self-satisfaction of the upper middle class and do it in a way that is both creepy and humorous. The fact that Those People includes police interviews with people in the neighborhood where the book is set makes this title even more reminiscent of Moriarty's Big Little Lies. In Those People, a lovely suburban neighborhood near London is disrupted when a lower class gent inherits a house on the block. He and his female partner immediately offend by playing heavy metal at deafness-causing levels, parking a variety of junky vehicles on the street and in their yard, and starting construction projects that promise to be protracted. Then the scaffolding required for one of the projects collapses, killing someone. Was it an accident, negligence, sabotage? Relationships break down as the police investigate. It's entertaining and somewhat mysterious.
Favorite Passages:
Whatever I know as a woman about spirituality, I have learned from my body encountering Earth. Soul and soil are not separate. Neither is wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.
Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams
Election Results
An Abecedarian
A shuffle of slippers awakes me. I arise from my
bed. Mom looks at me through tearstained cheeks. "Honey, she lost.
Clinton lost." I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't even pretend to suppress the
dry sob that
echoes in my throat. Someone
fear-driven will be the head of this
glorious nation, my
home country. How could we have done this?
I convince myself to get up. The days are now numbered until
January 20th, that dreaded day when our true leader is
kicked out, no
longer in the position to
make our country the place we
need it to be. Right now,
only Obama can make me feel better, so I
press the Home button on my iPad to watch his speeches.
Quiet tears leak down my face, a whispered
reminder: my Mexican, Asian, and Muslim friends may
soon be leaving me, all because of
Trump, who can't even begin to
understand the rest of the world's point of
view. I thought I
would be angry. Instead, I'm sad that he's brainwashed America with his
xenophobia-ridden lies. I turn back to Obama,
yearning for everything and nothing at the same time. I tell myself.
"Zoe. We can get through this."
Zoe Ruff, age 13, in a letter to President Obama
Monday, December 2, 2019
Friday, November 1, 2019
Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics, by Susan Herbst
It’s embarrassing to look in your stack of unread books and
find a book you borrowed from a friend years ago and still haven’t read. So
with apologies to my friend Nisan, I have finally read Rude Democracy. One of
the things that was immediately interesting was that the book was written in
2009-10, in the wake of the 2008 election and the health care debates—a time
when we thought incivility was high but did not realize the escalation that
would occur in the Trump era. It would definitely be interesting to see what
the author has to say about the current situation. (Early on in the book she
says “My belief is that truly interesting and important cases of intentional
public lying are somewhat rare,” a statement I think might require some
revision.)
Herbst suggests there are three basic definitions of
civility—one equates civility with virtue, one with good manners, and the third,
the definition Herbst favors is that civility and incivility are strategic
tools. One can certainly see this in the 2008 election, which Herbst looks at (with
particular emphasis on Sarah Palin) and the 2016 election, which of course she
was unable to consider. She is hesitant to say that the level of incivility is
worse than it has previously been, arguing instead that modern communications put
incivility in our faces in a way that would not have been possible in previous
centuries. She also makes a strong argument that civility is not only about how
we talk but about how we listen.
The book is organized into three major sections; the first
looks at Sarah Palin’s use of civility and incivility in the 2008 campaign; the
second examines President Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 2009,
in which he discussed the need for civility, as well as how subsequent events related
to the health care debate tested Obama’s thinking about civility; the third
presents results surveys of Georgia college students regarding freedom of
speech and civility on campus. I did not find any of these analyses particularly
helpful. In the section on Palin’s use of civility and incivility, which she
praises as skillful, she spends more time critiquing the way media covered
Palin and Obama rallies than actually dissecting how Palin used
civility/incivility as strategic tools and why her use was effective.
I did find interesting the fact that American Presidents
rarely have talked about civility. A search of the American Presidency Project’s
archive of 86,000 documents revealed only 129 mentions of civility, only one
before 1961. She does look at strategies Obama used in his speech, but I am not
sure they are strategies of civility but rather strategies used in discussing
civility. The strategies—linking terms by forcing associations among them,
breaking a concept into parts to identify one’s proposal with the most favored
part, creating a symbol that condenses an issue, and frame shifting—are interesting
but I’m not sure what I learn about civility through learning about these
strategies for controlling the discussion of an issue.
The major idea I took from the chapter on the survey of
college students is that, while students have very strong feelings about
political discussion, they have very few skills for engaging in such discussion.
As an educator who has spent years teaching teachers how to develop discussion
skills in their students, this came as disheartening confirmation of the
concerns most of us have about the civic preparation of young people.
Overall, I was disappointed by Rude Democracy. While Herbst presents some interesting ideas, her
analysis could have been more pointed.
Favorite Passages:
“Again, Eulau gets to the bottom of it, proposing that
civility is about emotional maturity: “We have achieved the politics of civility
when we are capable of asking not only ‘What is in it for me?”’ but also ‘What
can I do for you’ It is out of these two simple questions that the maturity of
civility is born.”
Just as incivility is a strategic asset, a real skill when practiced
well, listening and dealing with incivility can also be both skill and asset. Neither
ignoring nor capitulating in the face of incivility will move a conversation.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Bad Weather, Good Reading
October in Colorado is ending on a particularly cold and snowy note, but it is also ending with a couple of really good books (The Grammarians and Olive, Again), so the month redeemed itself!
Fiction
For a writer/editor who as a child thought that being a twin with a secret language would be unbelievably cool, picking up Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians was a no-brainer. After all, it's about identical twins Laurel and Daphne (oh, did I mention my name is Laurel) who are obsessed with language. Their closeness and idiosyncrasies set them somewhat apart from their families and prevent them from forming other close friendships. Yet, after attending college together and sharing an apartment in New York, they both marry, have a daughter, and eventually carve out language-based careers. Daphne becomes an editor and columnist who writes snarky pieces about writers whose language is insufficiently precise while Laurel is a teacher who writes poems and short stories based on the language of historic letters to the Department of War whose English does not live up to the standards of the pedantic Daphne. Other than the sisters, the characters are not particularly well developed and there were some inconsistencies in the narration that bothered even me (this is the kind of thing my son the literary scholar usually has to point out to me). But I enjoyed the sisterly relationship, the word play, and the philosophical discussions of language and its uses enough to let me ignore any problems I saw. And, by the way, I no longer think being a twin would be that great.
I pick up every Elizabeth Strout book as soon as I can, so I certainly wasn't going to miss the new sequel to Olive Kittredge, titled Olive, Again. Like its predecessor, Olive, Again is a a collection of linked short stories. In some, the irascible Olive Kittredge, a retired math teacher who was widowed near the end of the previous book, is the central character; others feature her neighbors in Crosby, Maine, with Olive making a cameo appearance. Together, the stories in this collection add up to something not quite a novel but equally rewarding--an exploration of "coming into age," of loneliness, of friendship. Olive as a character continues to fascinate--she seems here to be gaining some degree of self-reflection, yet she continues to offend with her abruptness and condescension; perhaps that is why she feels so authentic. My favorite story is "The Poet," in which Olive sees a former student sitting in a coffee shop and joins her for breakfast; the student happens to be a former poet laureate but Olive is perplexed by her ratty sweater, bad teeth, and apparent sadness. When the woman later writes a poem that eviscerates Olive, the pain comes not only from the poem but from the fact that someone left the poetry magazine at her door, knowing how it would affect her. While there is much that is sad in Olive, Again, it is balanced with humor and the humanity Strout gives her characters.
I thought I had already posted about Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, but either the post was imaginary or it has disappeared, so . . . The Nickel Boys is based on facts about a horrific school for boys in Florida, The Dozier School, renamed the Nickel School for this novel. The main character, Elwood Curtis, is a good student who is looking forward to better things in the future when he accepts a ride from a man who happens to be driving a stolen car; though an innocent passenger, Elwood is sent to the Nickel School, where he and other African American boys are hideously abused, sometimes killed. Although there is a novel-ish twist near the end, when we are learning about Elwood's post-Nickel School life, most of the time I felt like I was reading a nonfiction account, which was somewhat disappointing given the creativity of Whitehead's earlier works (particularly The Underground Railroad). Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book.
If you are a beer aficionado or are just looking for a "feel good" novel, you might enjoy The Lager Queen of Minnesota, by J. Ryan Stradal. I don't like beer and I thought the story was quite unbelievable, so didn't really care for it but can see that some people would feel differently.
I listened to Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein because the editors on the podcast Audicted recommended it. It's the story of two friends, Julie and Maddie, who are involved in war work; they are assigned to a secret mission behind enemy lines in France. Julie is captured and the first part of the book is structured as her confessions; the second part is a more straightforward narrative from Maddie's perspective. It's an intense story that not only educates about the work women did during World War II but also explores loyalty, friendship, and courage. Although I am somewhat tired of World War II stories, I nonetheless enjoyed Code Name Verity.
My friend Colleen recommended Problems with People, a collection of stories about the difficulty of connection. While I admire author David Guterson's writing style, the stories mostly left me feeling dissatisfied.
Some reviews I'd read of Katherine Center's Things You Save in a Fire had led me to believe it was a more serious book than I found it to be. Essentially, it's a romance with some serious social issues--sexual assault, misogyny in certain professions--thrown in to give it some depth.
Classic
I have struggled with Margaret Atwood in the past (I think Alias Grace is the only of her books I have made it through), but all the attention to The Handmaid's Tale convinced me that I should read it, and I'm glad I did. The dystopian tale of women's subjugation is a terrifying look at what could happen in a religiously-oriented state run by people who hate women (does this now seem more possible than it did a few years ago?). The epilogue, which purports to be the minutes of a presentation at a historical association meeting, is both encouraging (Gilead no longer exists) and very funny, perhaps especially if you're an academic or even a semi-academic (as I might call myself). I am now looking forward to reading The Testaments and might even try some other Atwood.
The Ongoing Binge
In case you think I might have abandoned mysteries, such is not the case. Here are this month's time-stealers:
Favorite Passages
There were no words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify.Words were meant to communicate information and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way. We are alone, Daphne thought, words can't change that.
--Cathleen Schine, The Grammarians (these were Daphne's thoughts following her father's funeral)
"When you get old," Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, "you become invisible. It's just the truth. And yet it's freeing in a way."
--Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again
Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.
--Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
Fiction
For a writer/editor who as a child thought that being a twin with a secret language would be unbelievably cool, picking up Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians was a no-brainer. After all, it's about identical twins Laurel and Daphne (oh, did I mention my name is Laurel) who are obsessed with language. Their closeness and idiosyncrasies set them somewhat apart from their families and prevent them from forming other close friendships. Yet, after attending college together and sharing an apartment in New York, they both marry, have a daughter, and eventually carve out language-based careers. Daphne becomes an editor and columnist who writes snarky pieces about writers whose language is insufficiently precise while Laurel is a teacher who writes poems and short stories based on the language of historic letters to the Department of War whose English does not live up to the standards of the pedantic Daphne. Other than the sisters, the characters are not particularly well developed and there were some inconsistencies in the narration that bothered even me (this is the kind of thing my son the literary scholar usually has to point out to me). But I enjoyed the sisterly relationship, the word play, and the philosophical discussions of language and its uses enough to let me ignore any problems I saw. And, by the way, I no longer think being a twin would be that great.
I pick up every Elizabeth Strout book as soon as I can, so I certainly wasn't going to miss the new sequel to Olive Kittredge, titled Olive, Again. Like its predecessor, Olive, Again is a a collection of linked short stories. In some, the irascible Olive Kittredge, a retired math teacher who was widowed near the end of the previous book, is the central character; others feature her neighbors in Crosby, Maine, with Olive making a cameo appearance. Together, the stories in this collection add up to something not quite a novel but equally rewarding--an exploration of "coming into age," of loneliness, of friendship. Olive as a character continues to fascinate--she seems here to be gaining some degree of self-reflection, yet she continues to offend with her abruptness and condescension; perhaps that is why she feels so authentic. My favorite story is "The Poet," in which Olive sees a former student sitting in a coffee shop and joins her for breakfast; the student happens to be a former poet laureate but Olive is perplexed by her ratty sweater, bad teeth, and apparent sadness. When the woman later writes a poem that eviscerates Olive, the pain comes not only from the poem but from the fact that someone left the poetry magazine at her door, knowing how it would affect her. While there is much that is sad in Olive, Again, it is balanced with humor and the humanity Strout gives her characters.
I thought I had already posted about Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, but either the post was imaginary or it has disappeared, so . . . The Nickel Boys is based on facts about a horrific school for boys in Florida, The Dozier School, renamed the Nickel School for this novel. The main character, Elwood Curtis, is a good student who is looking forward to better things in the future when he accepts a ride from a man who happens to be driving a stolen car; though an innocent passenger, Elwood is sent to the Nickel School, where he and other African American boys are hideously abused, sometimes killed. Although there is a novel-ish twist near the end, when we are learning about Elwood's post-Nickel School life, most of the time I felt like I was reading a nonfiction account, which was somewhat disappointing given the creativity of Whitehead's earlier works (particularly The Underground Railroad). Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book.
If you are a beer aficionado or are just looking for a "feel good" novel, you might enjoy The Lager Queen of Minnesota, by J. Ryan Stradal. I don't like beer and I thought the story was quite unbelievable, so didn't really care for it but can see that some people would feel differently.
I listened to Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein because the editors on the podcast Audicted recommended it. It's the story of two friends, Julie and Maddie, who are involved in war work; they are assigned to a secret mission behind enemy lines in France. Julie is captured and the first part of the book is structured as her confessions; the second part is a more straightforward narrative from Maddie's perspective. It's an intense story that not only educates about the work women did during World War II but also explores loyalty, friendship, and courage. Although I am somewhat tired of World War II stories, I nonetheless enjoyed Code Name Verity.
My friend Colleen recommended Problems with People, a collection of stories about the difficulty of connection. While I admire author David Guterson's writing style, the stories mostly left me feeling dissatisfied.
Some reviews I'd read of Katherine Center's Things You Save in a Fire had led me to believe it was a more serious book than I found it to be. Essentially, it's a romance with some serious social issues--sexual assault, misogyny in certain professions--thrown in to give it some depth.
Classic
I have struggled with Margaret Atwood in the past (I think Alias Grace is the only of her books I have made it through), but all the attention to The Handmaid's Tale convinced me that I should read it, and I'm glad I did. The dystopian tale of women's subjugation is a terrifying look at what could happen in a religiously-oriented state run by people who hate women (does this now seem more possible than it did a few years ago?). The epilogue, which purports to be the minutes of a presentation at a historical association meeting, is both encouraging (Gilead no longer exists) and very funny, perhaps especially if you're an academic or even a semi-academic (as I might call myself). I am now looking forward to reading The Testaments and might even try some other Atwood.
The Ongoing Binge
In case you think I might have abandoned mysteries, such is not the case. Here are this month's time-stealers:
- The Liar's Girl, by Catherine Ryan Howard. This book about a young woman who returns to Ireland when the police ask her to talk with her former boyfriend, a convicted serial killer, has been nominated for some big prizes in the genre and I thought it was okay but not great.
- All The Wrong Places, by Joy Fielding. At the end of this book, I felt the author was asking us to be happy about the protagonist's nasty cousin being the victim of a serial killer--don't think I'll read any more of Fielding's work.
- Here to Stay, by Mark Edwards. In-laws from hell come to stay with young married couple and bad stuff happens. Ugh.
- Leave No Trace, by Mindy Mejia. A counselor at a psychiatric facility becomes involved with a patient's efforts to escape and help his father in ways that strain credulity. Totally unbelievable.
- Bloody Genius, by John Sandford. I liked this latest title in the Virgil Flowers series better than its recent predecessors, perhaps because there was less womanizing (after all, Virgil's girlfriend is pregnant with twins).
- 17th Suspect, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. What you'd expect from this series.
- Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke. I like that Locke brings issues of race into the mystery genre, but this particular book had a kitchen-sink feeling to it--Locke threw in so many plot elements (a cover-up of a previous crime, problems in the marriage, exploitation of Native Americans, protection of squatters who have set up on property owned by African Americans) that I wished for a bit more simplicity. Still, I will continue to follow her work.
- Still Midnight, by Denise Mina. This is book 1 in Mina's Alex Morrow series; I'm not sure I'll try another.
Will I staunch the mystery binge in November? Stay tuned.
Favorite Passages
There were no words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify.Words were meant to communicate information and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way. We are alone, Daphne thought, words can't change that.
--Cathleen Schine, The Grammarians (these were Daphne's thoughts following her father's funeral)
"When you get old," Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, "you become invisible. It's just the truth. And yet it's freeing in a way."
--Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again
Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.
--Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
Friday, October 11, 2019
Talking to Strangers, The Dutch House, and Feelings of Inadequacy
This week I definitely felt my inadequacy as a reader. First, the finalists for the National Book Award came out--and I haven't read any of them, in any of the categories! And I read a lot!
Then I read a couple of very good books that I struggled with for various reasons.
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell has such a genius for synthesizing cases and research that I always feel somewhat dense when I read his work. His new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, started with concern about the Sandra Bland case. In case you don't remember, Bland was the African American woman who was stopped for a minor traffic offense, was arrested after her interaction with an overzealous police officer escalated, and committed suicide in her jail cell a few days later. Something I had not known about her was that she had a history of depression and had recently suffered a grievous loss.
Gladwell's interest in the case led him to ask: Why do we so often go wrong in our interactions with people we don't know? This is not the question I would have asked if I were looking into the case--mine would have been more focused on how we can improve policing. But it's an interesting question, and Gladwell brings a large variety of cases to bear on the question, from a Cuban spy who goes undetected in the Defense Intelligence Agency for years, to Bernie Madoff, Friends, Amanda Knox, the creators of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Sylvia Plath, judges who grant bail, convicted sex abusers Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser, stop and frisk (or pretextual police stops), and more. From his examination of these cases and related research, he teases out three explanations for why we are so bad at understanding strangers:
--In general, we default to truth--that is, we tend to believe people are telling the truth.
--People are not transparent--their exterior does not always match their thoughts. Even so-called experts in reading facial expressions are often wrong. This problem can be exacerbated by cultural differences.
--People's actions are often closely coupled with place/context (e.g., suicides in Britain went way down when the way in which gas was delivered to homes changed, indicating that people's suicidality was tied to the availability of a particular method).
His analysis clearly indicates that people continue to cling to their misconceptions even in the face of evidence (this is in line with brain/learning research that we have known about in education for some time). He also points out that much of police training is based on misconceptions.
It's when Gladwell brings everything together to apply it to the Sandra Bland case that I don't follow, as it seems in this case many of the above general rules don't really have a lot of explanatory power. And he doesn't deal at all with the question that plagues society with respect to the many tragic police-citizen interactions in the past few years: racism. In the end, he sums up the police officer's mistake in dealing with Ms. Bland as "blaming the other person." Sorry, that seems to me to abandon all that has come before--but I respect Gladwell enough to wonder if I've somehow missed the point.
The Dutch House
I like Ann Patchett's work, and I particularly appreciated her prior novel Commonwealth, which was an autobiographical work based on Patchett's own complicated family. The Dutch House continues some of the themes from that work--children abandoned by their mothers, the cobbling together of family, memory and how it shapes people. The Dutch House is less complicated, however--two children are at the core: Danny, the narrator, and his older sister/surrogate mother Maeve. The title refers to the huge house that their father Cyril, a real estate developer and landlord, bought for their mother, a woman who was planning to be a nun before she met and married Cyril. Unsurprisingly, she hates the house and eventually abandons it and her family to serve the poor in India.
The children (3 and 10 at the time) are devastated, particularly Maeve, who has no one to be a substitute mother. She longs for her mother while Danny, over the years, becomes increasingly angry at her abandonment. When their father marries a younger woman with two daughters, the ultimate result is the children's banishment from the house, which haunts them as they become adults. Over the years, they spend a lot of their time together parked in a car outside the house reminiscing. In the end, redemption, forgiveness, and (so the ending is not entirely happy and fluffy) grief.
The characters in this book are not as deeply drawn as in some other Patchett works and I think that relates to my feelings of inadequacy. I heard Patchett being interviewed on NPR (can't remember who was interviewing her), and she said The Dutch House was Maeve's story as told by Danny. But as a reader, I didn't see that at all--to me, it was Danny's story, often Danny's story of being manipulated by Maeve. Now I know this doesn't really matter, especially in reader response theory, but when you hear the author say the book is one thing and you can't figure out what she was thinking, you don't feel really insightful.
I liked The Dutch House, even though I don't think it was Maeve's story, but I have liked other Patchett works more.
Favorite passage:
But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
Then I read a couple of very good books that I struggled with for various reasons.
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell has such a genius for synthesizing cases and research that I always feel somewhat dense when I read his work. His new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, started with concern about the Sandra Bland case. In case you don't remember, Bland was the African American woman who was stopped for a minor traffic offense, was arrested after her interaction with an overzealous police officer escalated, and committed suicide in her jail cell a few days later. Something I had not known about her was that she had a history of depression and had recently suffered a grievous loss.
Gladwell's interest in the case led him to ask: Why do we so often go wrong in our interactions with people we don't know? This is not the question I would have asked if I were looking into the case--mine would have been more focused on how we can improve policing. But it's an interesting question, and Gladwell brings a large variety of cases to bear on the question, from a Cuban spy who goes undetected in the Defense Intelligence Agency for years, to Bernie Madoff, Friends, Amanda Knox, the creators of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Sylvia Plath, judges who grant bail, convicted sex abusers Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser, stop and frisk (or pretextual police stops), and more. From his examination of these cases and related research, he teases out three explanations for why we are so bad at understanding strangers:
--In general, we default to truth--that is, we tend to believe people are telling the truth.
--People are not transparent--their exterior does not always match their thoughts. Even so-called experts in reading facial expressions are often wrong. This problem can be exacerbated by cultural differences.
--People's actions are often closely coupled with place/context (e.g., suicides in Britain went way down when the way in which gas was delivered to homes changed, indicating that people's suicidality was tied to the availability of a particular method).
His analysis clearly indicates that people continue to cling to their misconceptions even in the face of evidence (this is in line with brain/learning research that we have known about in education for some time). He also points out that much of police training is based on misconceptions.
It's when Gladwell brings everything together to apply it to the Sandra Bland case that I don't follow, as it seems in this case many of the above general rules don't really have a lot of explanatory power. And he doesn't deal at all with the question that plagues society with respect to the many tragic police-citizen interactions in the past few years: racism. In the end, he sums up the police officer's mistake in dealing with Ms. Bland as "blaming the other person." Sorry, that seems to me to abandon all that has come before--but I respect Gladwell enough to wonder if I've somehow missed the point.
The Dutch House
I like Ann Patchett's work, and I particularly appreciated her prior novel Commonwealth, which was an autobiographical work based on Patchett's own complicated family. The Dutch House continues some of the themes from that work--children abandoned by their mothers, the cobbling together of family, memory and how it shapes people. The Dutch House is less complicated, however--two children are at the core: Danny, the narrator, and his older sister/surrogate mother Maeve. The title refers to the huge house that their father Cyril, a real estate developer and landlord, bought for their mother, a woman who was planning to be a nun before she met and married Cyril. Unsurprisingly, she hates the house and eventually abandons it and her family to serve the poor in India.
The children (3 and 10 at the time) are devastated, particularly Maeve, who has no one to be a substitute mother. She longs for her mother while Danny, over the years, becomes increasingly angry at her abandonment. When their father marries a younger woman with two daughters, the ultimate result is the children's banishment from the house, which haunts them as they become adults. Over the years, they spend a lot of their time together parked in a car outside the house reminiscing. In the end, redemption, forgiveness, and (so the ending is not entirely happy and fluffy) grief.
The characters in this book are not as deeply drawn as in some other Patchett works and I think that relates to my feelings of inadequacy. I heard Patchett being interviewed on NPR (can't remember who was interviewing her), and she said The Dutch House was Maeve's story as told by Danny. But as a reader, I didn't see that at all--to me, it was Danny's story, often Danny's story of being manipulated by Maeve. Now I know this doesn't really matter, especially in reader response theory, but when you hear the author say the book is one thing and you can't figure out what she was thinking, you don't feel really insightful.
I liked The Dutch House, even though I don't think it was Maeve's story, but I have liked other Patchett works more.
Favorite passage:
But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Reading around the Edges of a Mystery Binge
I've been on a bit of a mystery binge (a sadly disappointing mystery binge), but have read a few other books worth mentioning in September (and how can it be nearly October already?). After drafting this post, I realized that my reading in the latter half of September was pretty depressing!
Nonfiction
My book club started up again for the fall, and Educated by Tara Westover was our first book for the year. I thought I was the only person left in the Western United States who hadn't read this memoir of a young woman's upbringing in an "off-the-grid" (but not really family) in Idaho, but it turns out that wasn't true. The story is amazing, in that Ms. Westover managed to get away from her crazy family and gain an education, including a Ph.D. from Cambridge. However, it's also infuriating in that the Westover children were horribly mistreated by their father (Tara was also mentally and physically abused by one of her brothers), not defended by their mother or anyone in the community, and completely uneducated (the parents claimed to be home-schooling them but in truth they were unschooled). There is much that a person who grew up in a "normal" situation simply cannot comprehend, but when I finished the book I wasn't sure that Tara herself has even now completely processed her experience, but maybe that's not possible either. The book did cause me to consider the line between mental illness and evil and to what extent someone's mental illness should excuse their abusive behavior; that question remains unresolved but I appreciate being prompted to think about it.
Grace Will Lead Us Home, by Jennifer Berry Hawes, was another thought-provoking read that leaves one with more questions than answers. Hawes documents the horrific 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, SC, and the aftermath for the survivors and the families of the victims. It was upsetting to learn that the survivors were badly let down by the church and their pastors in the aftermath--very little spiritual assistance was provided and funds sent to the church but intended for the survivors and victims' families were taken by the church. The depth of the indifference shown these good people is literally shocking. Many of the survivors and members of victims' families were admirable in the strength and forgiveness they showed following the tragedy; as one might expect, other families experienced conflict and ultimately estrangement, compounding their losses. The story of the perpetrator is difficult to take in. Though his childhood and young adulthood seem to have been rather chaotic, he was not explicitly raised to be a racist; his radicalization seems to have occurred largely online, which is a frightening reinforcement of other stories we've all read. And, while some progress in race relations in Charleston are documented, much remains to be accomplished there and elsewhere. The book offers moments of uplift, but it's mostly terribly sad.
Fiction
Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich, might almost fit into my mystery binge, but the author definitely had more complex motivations than simply to entertain. The book has multiple narrators and jumps back and forth in time. In the present, Ann and Wade are married, and Wade is suffering from early onset dementia. One of Wade's daughters, May, is dead, and his first wife Jenny was convicted of killing her; his other daughter, June, disappeared on the day May died. Without being able to discuss the events with Wade, Ann tries to find her way to the truth of what happened and why it happened. Meanwhile, Jenny is in prison, where she has one friend, a woman who killed two people but is eager to learn. The book is beautifully written and the characters come alive in Ruskovich's prose. I definitely recommend it--but only if you don't need everything neatly wrapped up.
The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin, got a lot of positive reviews and landed on a several "Best of" lists, but I actively hated the story of four siblings who at very tender ages go to see a psychic who tells them when they will die. This, not surprisingly, screws them up rather thoroughly. Who would predict children's deaths? How did no responsible adult in their life never find out and help them deal with the predictions? I found the entire scenario so disgusting I could not enjoy any of the deep points other reviewers thought Benjamin was making. Not recommended.
Classic
Unlike House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome is not set among the upper class denizens of New York. Rather, Edith Wharton sets this "tale" (as she called it) in rural Massachusetts among struggling farmers, of which the title character is one. Ethan had gone off to college but been forced to return home to care for his ailing mother; he was so grateful to his lively cousin Zenobia for helping in his mother's illness that he married her. Shortly thereafter, Zeena transformed into a dour invalid. Then her cousin Mattie came to stay with them, and the situation between Ethan and the two women became complicated and ultimately sad (I won't say more to avoid ruining the twist at the end of the book). Wharton frames Ethan's story as being told by a visitor to the area 20 years after the end of the story took place; I didn't find this framing added anything (but in general I dislike such frames), but I found the tale interesting. Of course, Wharton's prose is admirable.
The Binge
Nonfiction
My book club started up again for the fall, and Educated by Tara Westover was our first book for the year. I thought I was the only person left in the Western United States who hadn't read this memoir of a young woman's upbringing in an "off-the-grid" (but not really family) in Idaho, but it turns out that wasn't true. The story is amazing, in that Ms. Westover managed to get away from her crazy family and gain an education, including a Ph.D. from Cambridge. However, it's also infuriating in that the Westover children were horribly mistreated by their father (Tara was also mentally and physically abused by one of her brothers), not defended by their mother or anyone in the community, and completely uneducated (the parents claimed to be home-schooling them but in truth they were unschooled). There is much that a person who grew up in a "normal" situation simply cannot comprehend, but when I finished the book I wasn't sure that Tara herself has even now completely processed her experience, but maybe that's not possible either. The book did cause me to consider the line between mental illness and evil and to what extent someone's mental illness should excuse their abusive behavior; that question remains unresolved but I appreciate being prompted to think about it.
Grace Will Lead Us Home, by Jennifer Berry Hawes, was another thought-provoking read that leaves one with more questions than answers. Hawes documents the horrific 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, SC, and the aftermath for the survivors and the families of the victims. It was upsetting to learn that the survivors were badly let down by the church and their pastors in the aftermath--very little spiritual assistance was provided and funds sent to the church but intended for the survivors and victims' families were taken by the church. The depth of the indifference shown these good people is literally shocking. Many of the survivors and members of victims' families were admirable in the strength and forgiveness they showed following the tragedy; as one might expect, other families experienced conflict and ultimately estrangement, compounding their losses. The story of the perpetrator is difficult to take in. Though his childhood and young adulthood seem to have been rather chaotic, he was not explicitly raised to be a racist; his radicalization seems to have occurred largely online, which is a frightening reinforcement of other stories we've all read. And, while some progress in race relations in Charleston are documented, much remains to be accomplished there and elsewhere. The book offers moments of uplift, but it's mostly terribly sad.
Fiction
Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich, might almost fit into my mystery binge, but the author definitely had more complex motivations than simply to entertain. The book has multiple narrators and jumps back and forth in time. In the present, Ann and Wade are married, and Wade is suffering from early onset dementia. One of Wade's daughters, May, is dead, and his first wife Jenny was convicted of killing her; his other daughter, June, disappeared on the day May died. Without being able to discuss the events with Wade, Ann tries to find her way to the truth of what happened and why it happened. Meanwhile, Jenny is in prison, where she has one friend, a woman who killed two people but is eager to learn. The book is beautifully written and the characters come alive in Ruskovich's prose. I definitely recommend it--but only if you don't need everything neatly wrapped up.
The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin, got a lot of positive reviews and landed on a several "Best of" lists, but I actively hated the story of four siblings who at very tender ages go to see a psychic who tells them when they will die. This, not surprisingly, screws them up rather thoroughly. Who would predict children's deaths? How did no responsible adult in their life never find out and help them deal with the predictions? I found the entire scenario so disgusting I could not enjoy any of the deep points other reviewers thought Benjamin was making. Not recommended.
Classic
Unlike House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome is not set among the upper class denizens of New York. Rather, Edith Wharton sets this "tale" (as she called it) in rural Massachusetts among struggling farmers, of which the title character is one. Ethan had gone off to college but been forced to return home to care for his ailing mother; he was so grateful to his lively cousin Zenobia for helping in his mother's illness that he married her. Shortly thereafter, Zeena transformed into a dour invalid. Then her cousin Mattie came to stay with them, and the situation between Ethan and the two women became complicated and ultimately sad (I won't say more to avoid ruining the twist at the end of the book). Wharton frames Ethan's story as being told by a visitor to the area 20 years after the end of the story took place; I didn't find this framing added anything (but in general I dislike such frames), but I found the tale interesting. Of course, Wharton's prose is admirable.
The Binge
- Blood Oath, by Linda Fairstein -- possibly her last book, since she has lost her publisher due to her role in the Central Park Five case (as portrayed in Ava Duvernay's Netflix series). Surprisingly, I thought this book was better than a lot of the previous Alex Cooper series.
- A Better Man, by Louise Penny -- Inspector Gamache, Jean-Guy, Three Pines, blah, blah, blah.
- In Her Bones, by Kate Moretti -- Daughter of a female serial killer becomes obsessed with survivors of her mother's crimes and then is suspected of killing one. Interesting premise, not that great in execution.
- Whistle in the Dark, by Emma Healey -- What do you do when your daughter returns from four days being missing and won't tell what happened to her? Again, better premise than book.
- The Wife Between Us, Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen -- A controlling husband and the women who fall for him and then must escape -- ugh.
- The Last House Guest, by Megan Miranda -- rich friend, poor friend, mysterious death -- again ugh.
- Sins of the Fathers, by J.A. Jance -- I have always liked Jance's character J.P. Beaumont, but this isn't really much of a mystery. More of a dip into Beau's drunken past -- definitely not the strongest entry in the series.
Favorite Passages:
Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness.
Tara Westover, Educated
How quickly someone else's life can enter through the cracks we don't know are there until this foreign thing is inside of us. We are more porous than we know.
Theirs is a devotion that is possible only because of their equal disappointments in each other and the knowledge they share that at one time, to the one who mattered, they were each separately enough.
Emily Ruskovich, Idaho
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Reading OBOB Authors: Recursion and The River
One Book One Broomfield has introduced me to some authors I might never have encountered otherwise; two of these are Blake Crouch and Peter Heller, both of whom have new books out. The two books are both engaging, although in totally different ways.
Recursion
Crouch's Recursion is a time travel tale but different than other such books I have read (and I have to admit, I haven't read that many) because people in this story travel only backward, have different lives when they travel, and, at some point in the future, can remember all of the lives. Aside from those who have created the time travel apparatus, people do not understand what has happened to create the conflicting memories--indeed, they think they have something called False Memory Syndrome (FMS)--and a suicide epidemic results.
The narrative is told from the viewpoints of two characters. New York police officer Barry Sutton starts investigating FMS when he fails to prevent the suicide of a woman who is tormented by her memories of another life. Barry has also experienced tragedy--his teenage daughter was killed in a car accident and his marriage subsequently fell apart--and is open to return to the day of her death to prevent the accident. When he is afforded that opportunity, he enjoys his altered life until the day his wife and daughter remember the other life. At that point, his thinking about time travel changes.
The second protagonist is scientist Dr. Helena Smith, who is working on a device that will help people with Alzheimer's (including her mother) recover some of their memories. When a wealthy investor offers to underwrite her work, she is delighted until . . . no spoilers here.
Recursion bears some similarities to our 2017 OBOB selection by Crouch, Dark Matter. People have alternative lives--clearly a fascination for Crouch--but the focus is somewhat different, in that Recursion explores the functions of memory while Dark Matter looked at how the smallest decisions can change a person's life. Each book contains a device whose function is somewhat magical to this reader and which some more scientifically picky readers will likely find infeasible. And each book contains some violent scenes that I could have done without; I can't help wondering if Crouch was thinking about the TV/movie adaptation when he wrote those scenes.
In the midst of Recursion, I sometimes struggled to figure out what life someone was in (and why) but then remembered what my friend Suzy advised me when I was reading The Time-Traveler's Wife: "Don't worry about the details; just let it flow." Hardline sci-fi people might have difficulty with that approach, but it allowed me to enjoy this book.
The River
Peter Heller wrote two books between our OBOB selection The Dog Stars and his latest release The River. I was not overly fond of either The Painter or Celine, but The River lives up to that earlier work. Although The River is not set in a post-apocalyptic world as The Dog Stars was, it features men surviving in the outdoors as they battle nature and their fellow humans--and Heller writes about these themes exceedingly well.
Dartmouth roommates Jack and Wynn decide to take a canoe trip on the Maskwa River in northern Canada before they return to school in the fall. The two young men are different--tough guy Jack grew up on a ranch near Granby, Colorado, where his mother was killed in a fall when he was a boy; Vermonter Wynn, while bigger, is more tender, perhaps because he grew up in an intact family that included a sister with cerebral palsy--but they share a love for the outdoors, fishing, and literature. The trip starts out as the idyllic trip they had imagined, but then it goes all Deliverance on them (that book/film is referenced more than once) as they encounter wildfire, a pair of drunk Texans, and a badly injured woman.
I can't say much more without veering into spoiler territory, so let me conclude by saying that The River is riveting.
Favorite Passages
Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human--the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
Blake Crouch, Recursion
He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that
seemed so lost and lonely so . . . what? Essential and lovely.
There's always relief in committing to a decision, even when there's no choice.
The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. I twas like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.
Peter Heller, The River
Recursion
Crouch's Recursion is a time travel tale but different than other such books I have read (and I have to admit, I haven't read that many) because people in this story travel only backward, have different lives when they travel, and, at some point in the future, can remember all of the lives. Aside from those who have created the time travel apparatus, people do not understand what has happened to create the conflicting memories--indeed, they think they have something called False Memory Syndrome (FMS)--and a suicide epidemic results.
The narrative is told from the viewpoints of two characters. New York police officer Barry Sutton starts investigating FMS when he fails to prevent the suicide of a woman who is tormented by her memories of another life. Barry has also experienced tragedy--his teenage daughter was killed in a car accident and his marriage subsequently fell apart--and is open to return to the day of her death to prevent the accident. When he is afforded that opportunity, he enjoys his altered life until the day his wife and daughter remember the other life. At that point, his thinking about time travel changes.
The second protagonist is scientist Dr. Helena Smith, who is working on a device that will help people with Alzheimer's (including her mother) recover some of their memories. When a wealthy investor offers to underwrite her work, she is delighted until . . . no spoilers here.
Recursion bears some similarities to our 2017 OBOB selection by Crouch, Dark Matter. People have alternative lives--clearly a fascination for Crouch--but the focus is somewhat different, in that Recursion explores the functions of memory while Dark Matter looked at how the smallest decisions can change a person's life. Each book contains a device whose function is somewhat magical to this reader and which some more scientifically picky readers will likely find infeasible. And each book contains some violent scenes that I could have done without; I can't help wondering if Crouch was thinking about the TV/movie adaptation when he wrote those scenes.
In the midst of Recursion, I sometimes struggled to figure out what life someone was in (and why) but then remembered what my friend Suzy advised me when I was reading The Time-Traveler's Wife: "Don't worry about the details; just let it flow." Hardline sci-fi people might have difficulty with that approach, but it allowed me to enjoy this book.
The River
Peter Heller wrote two books between our OBOB selection The Dog Stars and his latest release The River. I was not overly fond of either The Painter or Celine, but The River lives up to that earlier work. Although The River is not set in a post-apocalyptic world as The Dog Stars was, it features men surviving in the outdoors as they battle nature and their fellow humans--and Heller writes about these themes exceedingly well.
Dartmouth roommates Jack and Wynn decide to take a canoe trip on the Maskwa River in northern Canada before they return to school in the fall. The two young men are different--tough guy Jack grew up on a ranch near Granby, Colorado, where his mother was killed in a fall when he was a boy; Vermonter Wynn, while bigger, is more tender, perhaps because he grew up in an intact family that included a sister with cerebral palsy--but they share a love for the outdoors, fishing, and literature. The trip starts out as the idyllic trip they had imagined, but then it goes all Deliverance on them (that book/film is referenced more than once) as they encounter wildfire, a pair of drunk Texans, and a badly injured woman.
I can't say much more without veering into spoiler territory, so let me conclude by saying that The River is riveting.
Favorite Passages
Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human--the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.
Blake Crouch, Recursion
He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that
seemed so lost and lonely so . . . what? Essential and lovely.
There's always relief in committing to a decision, even when there's no choice.
The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. I twas like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.
Peter Heller, The River
Monday, September 9, 2019
One Book One Broomfield 2019: Beautiful Boy
This year's One Book One Broomfield pick is Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff. The memoir of the author's journey through his son Nic's meth addiction has a new Afterword added in 2018, ten years after the book was initially published. His descriptions of the pain Nic's addiction--and his behavior while using--caused are raw and heart-rending: the worry about the child; the feelings of guilt and powerlessness; the difficulty of figuring out what, if anything, can be done to help the child, particularly given the varying advice given by different professionals, not to mention friends, family, and others with addiction experience; the sometimes delusional hope; the concern about how the addiction is affecting younger siblings and the parents' marriage. It's overwhelming--especially (for me at least) when I think about Sheff's wife (Nic's stepmom) and two younger children, whose pain and steadfastness bring tears to my eyes as I write this.
Sheff, who is journalist, also did voluminous research on addiction, particularly meth addiction, and shares that information in an understandable form. This information is one reason that the book feels like more than a memoir to me. The other is Sheff's obvious intent to help others by telling his family's story. I don't always perceive that same intent when I read other memoirs.
It is interesting that the meth epidemic has faded from the public consciousness as concern about the opioid epidemic has grown. But meth is still a problem, and a quick Google search reveals that it is growing. If you're interested, here's an informative piece from Kaiser Health News, written in May of this year: https://khn.org/news/meth-vs-opioids-america-has-two-drug-epidemics-but-focuses-on-one/.
Back to Beautiful Boy, note that the film of the same title is based not only on this book but also on Nic's book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines. I'm thinking I should read this book too before the author's appearance in Broomfield on November 8.
Favorite passages:
When we talk, in fact, I realize that Nic has discovered the bitterest irony of early sobriety. Your reward for your hard work in recovery is that you come headlong into the pain that you were trying to get away from with drugs.
. . . in mortal combat with addiction, a parent wishes for a catastrophe to befall his son. I wish for a catastrophe, but one that is contained. It must be harsh enough to bring him to his knees, to humble him, but mild enough so that he can, with heroic effort and the good that I know is inside him, recover, because anything short of that will not be enough for him to save himself.
How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.
Sheff, who is journalist, also did voluminous research on addiction, particularly meth addiction, and shares that information in an understandable form. This information is one reason that the book feels like more than a memoir to me. The other is Sheff's obvious intent to help others by telling his family's story. I don't always perceive that same intent when I read other memoirs.
It is interesting that the meth epidemic has faded from the public consciousness as concern about the opioid epidemic has grown. But meth is still a problem, and a quick Google search reveals that it is growing. If you're interested, here's an informative piece from Kaiser Health News, written in May of this year: https://khn.org/news/meth-vs-opioids-america-has-two-drug-epidemics-but-focuses-on-one/.
Back to Beautiful Boy, note that the film of the same title is based not only on this book but also on Nic's book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines. I'm thinking I should read this book too before the author's appearance in Broomfield on November 8.
Favorite passages:
When we talk, in fact, I realize that Nic has discovered the bitterest irony of early sobriety. Your reward for your hard work in recovery is that you come headlong into the pain that you were trying to get away from with drugs.
. . . in mortal combat with addiction, a parent wishes for a catastrophe to befall his son. I wish for a catastrophe, but one that is contained. It must be harsh enough to bring him to his knees, to humble him, but mild enough so that he can, with heroic effort and the good that I know is inside him, recover, because anything short of that will not be enough for him to save himself.
How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)