__blackink___whitepages__ rt Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Questions 36-65 are archived at blackink_whitepages_ Questions 66-88 are archived at _blackink_whitepages_ Questions 89-112 are archived at __blackink_whitepages_ Questions 113-134 are archived at __blackink_whitepages__ Questions 135-154 are archived at __blackink__whitepages__ Current standings; 1. jane=190 2. lostgirl=188 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 100819 ... rt This book from 2007's Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry is a very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina. The poet spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, she found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, she traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, she illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration. Renowned for writing about the idea of home, her attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For this book, she has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home. (Adapted from a review in Indiebound) For three points, name the poet, her book, and give a personal response... 100820 ... rt beyond katrina by natasha tretheway Question 156 “When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” So begins this book, the daring, arresting first novel by an author of prodigious talent, which takes as its theme “the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.” David and Alice Pepin have been married 13 years and are far past the blushing romance of their university days. “The middle,” Pepin tells his wife, “is long and hard,” an observation this book repeatedly makes about dieting, novel-­writing and marriage itself. Alice, who teaches troubled children, is clinically depressed and has grown desperately obese. Her shape pleases her husband, but her obsessive diets do not, and their consistent failures belabor the Pepins’ life together. Partly in consequence, David, a successful computer game designer, is often engrossed in fantasies of Alice’s death, sometimes by his own hand. When Alice dies with David’s fingers in her mouth, as well as a handful of peanuts, to which she is deathly allergic, he claims it was suicide, while the police think murder. At that point, the novel grows more deliberately odd. Pepin’s case is investigated by two detectives who are well acquainted with marital difficulties. One of them, Ward Hastroll, has a wife, Hannah, who has not gotten out of bed for five months, driving him, too, to vivid fantasies of murder. Hastroll’s name is an anagram for “Lars Thorwald,” the wife-killing villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (a movie the Pepins studied in the class where they met), and his actions sometimes mimic those of Hitchcock’s character. The other detective is Sam Sheppard, the real-life Ohio osteopath whose legal case became a landmark when he was convicted and later exonerated of the murder of his wife, Marilyn. In another long-ago class, the Pepins also learned about Sheppard’s case, commonly thought to be the basis for the “Fugitive” television series and movie. The detectives’ investigation leads them to Mobius, a pint-size professional wife-killer whom they suspect Pepin hired. Mobius’s very name, of course, invokes the inescapable repetitiveness of marriage, which can kill off relationships by inhibiting any opportunity for change. As this brief summary suggests, the book requires considerable decoding. This can be annoying, a little like going to a dinner party where all the guests seem bright and amiable but insist on speaking another language. Yet over all, the novel is an enormous success — forceful and involving, often deeply stirring and always impressively original. Nearly 40 years ago I was a fellow at the Creative Writing Center at Stanford. The director, Richard P. Scowcroft, who had helped his revered friend Wallace Stegner establish the program, told those of us in the advanced fiction seminar that the one subject he had always feared writing a novel about was marriage, because it still seemed to him the most complex and frequently unfathomable of human relationships, notwithstanding his own long and successful marriage. Scowcroft’s remark is a testimonial to this author's bravery. In many ways it would have taken less courage to present a sympathetic portrait of Osama bin Laden than it did to write this novel, which flouts the treasured conceptions of love and marriage many of us depend on to make it through the day. The novel is most harrowing in its bleakly convincing portrayal of the eternal contest that often passes for a marriage, with each partner holding the other responsible for his or her deepest unhappiness. The point of view in this novel is overwhelmingly male. Except for about 20 pages from Marilyn Sheppard’s perspective, we see only through the husbands’ eyes, which may account for why marital dissatisfaction is so often associated here with dangerous rage. The wives, in fact, all tend to be withholding. Each couple’s problems are peculiar, naturally, but in their own way familiar. Sam Sheppard philanders. Hannah Hastroll feels invisible to her husband. David and Alice Pepin have lost their connection in their heartbreaking failure to have a child. But in each relationship too much or too little has been said or done for so long that the partners blunder along in an oblivion of mute and tortured dissatisfaction, each marriage a game of blindman’s buff in which the partners occasionally long for each other but grope about, arms outstretched, eyes unseeing. It is only because of the book’s unflinching honesty about the perils of marriage that we can celebrate and credit the hope it eventually offers. All three husbands ultimately recognize a pathway to marital happiness. “If he could feel her want,” one reasons, “if he could prove to her that he’d always be there to feel it, then they’d be complete.” It is no small thing that he has dedicated this novel to his wife. The book takes risks not only with its subject but also with its form. The novel is shape-shifting, inhabiting several planes of reality. In this it draws its inspiration from M. C. Escher, whose optical illusion “Encounter” is reproduced on the novel’s title page. In Escher’s print, the positive and negative spaces of a room’s wallpaper merge indecipherably into a circle of black and white figures dancing toward confrontation. These tricks of perspective mirror life, the author seems to say. “The person in your mind isn’t the person in the world,” David Pepin remarks, nor, for that matter, is your partner, whom you inevitably view through the lens of your own projections, idealizations and fantasies. Escher also inspires some of David’s video games and, more important, a novel he is writing on the sly. When lines from the book are eventually disclosed, they prove to be the same as those we have already encountered in the book including its opening. The question of whether his book and Pepin’s are one and the same lingers, unanswered, but the device serves to potent effect when the book concludes with three (or is it four?) alternate endings, each entirely plausible and together suggesting the way any marriage wavers between potential outcomes. Yet his sliding-scale approach to reality doesn’t always work. The book is often comically grotesque — David’s first hit computer game, “Bang You’re Dead!,” envisions school shootings — and frequently magical, as when Mobius appears. Elsewhere, an implausible expert in “transportational psychology” turns up to offer Yoda-like counsel to Pepin in the midst of a disaster-marred vacation with Alice. But the novel is grounded in its realistic moments, especially by its intense vision of the characters’ inner worlds, which affectingly resemble our own. The high point, perhaps, is his sensuous reimagining of the Sheppards’ marriage and Marilyn’s murder, which occupies more than a third of the book. Going back to my days in Scowcroft’s seminar, I have taken it as an article of faith that a novel fully transports us only when it presents a coherent imagined world. Pigs may fly or authors may interrupt their own stories, but the ground rules must be consistent so that readers may step confidently outside of themselves for a while and, as the book goes on, draw a line between the author’s created universe and their own. This may not be a precept he shares, but for me the spell of the book fractures occasionally — for example, when it veers from Dr. Sheppard’s house in Ohio, rendered with mesmerizing verisimilitude, to Mobius’s jail cell in New York, where the same Sheppard, inexplicably transformed into a detective, endures a Karamazov-style inquisition from a murderer who can kill himself by holding his breath. Each piece is a tour de force, but they’re hard to reconcile in the same novel. Yet this one qualm is far outweighed by the trove of rewards to be found in the book especially its audacious and moving honesty about one of society’s fundamental institutions, and its hard-won hopefulness. This is a brilliant, powerful, memorable book. (Adapted from a review by Scott Turow. His novel “Innocent,” a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” was published last month.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100821 ... rt mr. peanut by adam ross Question 157 While I was reading this novel, a book populated with deeply flawed, unusual characters, one question kept popping into my mind: “Who are these people?” As you can probably tell from the title, Marie behaves badly: she’s impulsive, selfish, and has a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds. After serving time in prison for helping her ex-boyfriend flee the police after a bank robbery and murder, Marie is hired by her childhood friend, Ellen, to work as a nanny to two-year-old Caitlin. She mostly eats Ellen’s food, steals her stuff, and lusts after her husband, Benoit, although she does seem to care about Caitlin. That arrangement doesn’t last too long though, as Ellen and Benoit return home one night to find Marie passed out drunk in the bathtub with Caitlin. Ellen’s angry, but Benoit, well, he’s transfixed by the sight of naked Marie’s voluptuous body. She and Benoit are soon hooking up, and Marie, convinced that Ellen doesn’t deserve her husband and daughter, runs off to Paris with Benoit and Caitlin. Kidnapping, husband stealing—the question is what will Marie do next on her foreign adventure? At the end of the novel, the author explains that the book is her attempt at writing a French film, and I can’t think of a better way to describe the book. Marie is an outrageous character and her unbelievable experiences seem straight out of movie. The thing is, much like after watching an artsy, subtitled foreign film, I felt vaguely unsatisfied and like I’m just too unsophisticated to “get” the story. Was I supposed to root for Marie after she steals her friend’s baby? Or admire the balls it takes to just do whatever the hell you want and not care about the consequences? Mostly I just wanted to see Marie tossed back behind bars where she belongs and Benoit get some sense smacked into him. Still, as frustrating and unrelatable as I found these characters, it was fun to read about people who aren’t vanilla and ordinary. It’s nearly impossible not to get sucked into their story and want to find out what will happen next. The book is unpredictable and unusual, and I recommend it to anyone looking to add some edginess to his/her summer reading list. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100822 ... lostgirl Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky this one piqued my interest, simply because it hit so close to home. we had to fire a nanny about ten years ago who threatened our family in so many ways, that the whole bizarre situation was still frightening long after she was out of the house...it was a lesson to all of us that clearly, people can be tricky, and are so often much different than the picture they outwardly present. this criminal psycho-thriller has a strange but controversial family dynamic, and should make for some entertaining reading. 100822 ... rt +3=191 lostgirl! back into first place... 100822 ... rt Question 158 This wonderful new novel is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance — a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings. The author spent his earliest childhood in Leningrad, then moved with his family to the United States, and this novel reflects his dual heritage, combining the dark soulfulness of Russian literature with the antic inventiveness of postmodern American writing; the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie. This novel avoids the pretensions and grandiosity of his last book, “Absurdistan,” even as it demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers. The book takes as its Romeo and Juliet, its Tristan and Iseult, a middle-aged sad sack named Lenny Abramov and a much younger beauty named Eunice Park. He is the son of Russian immigrants, she the daughter of Korean immigrants, and for all their differences, both are afflicted by a lack of self-esteem — insecurities manifested in Lenny’s self-deprecating humor, his compulsive need to try to make others like him, and in Eunice’s bouts of anger and self-loathing, her fear that nothing she cares about can really last. Both are burdened with their striving parents’ unbearable expectations, and both are plagued by unlucky experiences in love. Slowly, haltingly, nervously, they begin to forge a partnership they hope will keep them safe in an unsafe world. The book takes place in the near future, and Mr. Shteyngart has extrapolated every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extremes. The United States is at war in Venezuela, and its national debt has soared to the point where the Chinese are threatening to pull the plug. There are National Guard checkpoints around New York, and riots in the city’s parks. Books are regarded as a distasteful, papery-smelling anachronism by young people who know only how to text-scan for data, and privacy has become a relic of the past. Everyone carries around a device called an äppärät, which can live-stream its owner’s thoughts and conversations, and broadcast their “hotness” quotient to others. People are obsessed with their health — Lenny works as a Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) for a firm that specializes in life extension — and shopping is the favorite pastime of anyone with money. It’s “zero hour for our economy,” says one of Lenny’s friends, “zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves.” But while his descriptions of America have a darkly satiric edge, his descriptions of New York are infused with a deep affection for the city that is partly nostalgia for a vanished metropolis (in other words, Gotham as we know it today) and partly an immigrant’s awestruck love for a place mythologized by books and songs and movies, by everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra. He writes, for instance, of the “melancholy 20th-century light” of a summer’s day that can make “even the most prosaic, unloved buildings” appear “bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision.” In another chapter he conjures the green paradise of Central Park as seen through lovers’ eyes: an Edenic expanse of trees and grass amid the city’s glass and stone. “We headed south,” Lenny says of a walk with Eunice, “and when the trees ran out, the park handed us over to the city. We surrendered to a skyscraper with a green mansard roof and two stark chimneys. New York exploded all around us, people hawking, buying, demanding, streaming. The city’s density caught me unprepared, and I reeled from its imposition, its alcoholic fumes, its hubris, its loud, dying wealth.” As recounted in Lenny and Eunice’s own slangy diaries and their e-mail and text messages, their relationship is like a country song — a ballad of longing turning into love turning into loss. For him, it’s a case of love at first sight. For her, it takes a little longer: She has to persuade herself that Lenny’s schlubby looks don’t matter, that his devotion to her is real. Eunice worries that Lenny’s belief that “niceness and smartness always win” in the end is hopelessly naïve, while he worries that her oppressive childhood has made her brittle and mistrustful. Slowly, however, she falls in love with her “sweet emperor penguin,” and step by step, they begin to negotiate the emotional and familial minefields that threaten their budding romance. But even as they do, the world around them is crumbling. There are riots involving LNWI’s (Lower Net Worth Individuals) and rogue elements of the National Guard. New York, Los Angeles and Washington are put on red alert, and when everyone’s äppärät stops working, there are rumors that Venezuela or China has detonated “a Nonnuclear Electromagnetic Pulse” in the atmosphere. Eunice is unable to reach her family in New Jersey or her best friend, Jenny, in California, and Lenny fears for his parents on Long Island. “Things were going to get better,” Lenny writes. “Someday. For me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks.” In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his antic, supercaffeinated prose, he gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet — a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story. (Adapted from a review for the NY Times by Michko Kakutani) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100823 ... rt super sad true love story by gary shteyngart 100824 ... jane just missed it! here was my personal response from before though: i love that it's set in the near future - it opens up so many opportunities to the imagination. and i like that technological aspects are incorporated but not overly described, like so many science fiction books i've read in the past. sounds very interesting. 100824 ... rt Question 159 It was 7:00 am on December 10, 1996. I sluggishly awoke to a sharp pain piercing my brain directly behind my left eye. Squinting into the early morning light, I clicked off the impending alarm with my right hand and instinctively pressed the palm of my left hand firmly against the side of my face. Rarely ill, I thought how queer it was for me to awaken to such a striking pain. As my left eye pulsed with a slow and deliberate rhythm, I felt bewildered and irritated. As I rolled out of my warm waterbed, I stumbled into the world with the ambivalence of a wounded soldier. I closed the bedroom window blind to block the incoming stream of light from stinging my eyes. I decided that exercise might get my blood flowing and perhaps help dissipate the pain. Within moments, I hopped on to my "cardio-glider" (a full body exercise machine) and began jamming away to Shania Twain singing the lyrics, "Whose bed have your boots been under?". Immediately, I felt a powerful and unusual sense of dissociation roll over me. Even though my thoughts seemed lucid, my body felt irregular. As I watched my hands and arms rocking forward and back, forward and back, in opposing synchrony with my torso, I felt strangely detached from my normal cognitive functions. It was as if the integrity of my mind/body connection had somehow become compromised. Feeling detached from normal reality, I felt as though I was observing myself in motion, as in the playback of a memory, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space. I was sure I was awake, yet, I felt as if I was trapped inside the perception of a meditation that I could neither stop nor escape. Dazed, I felt the frequency of shooting pangs escalate inside my brain, and I realized that this exercise regime was probably not a good idea. Feeling a little nervous about my physical condition, I climbed off the machine and bumbled through my living room on the way to the bath. As I walked, I noticed that my movements were no longer fluid. Instead they felt deliberate and almost jerky. There was no grace to my pace and my balance was so impaired that my mind seemed completely preoccupied with just keeping me upright. As I lifted my leg to step into the tub, I held on to the wall for support. It seemed odd that I could sense the inner activities of my brain as it adjusted and readjusted all of the opposing muscle groups in my lower extremities to prevent me from falling over. I was momentarily privy to a precise and experiential understanding of how hard the fifty trillion cells in my brain and body were working in perfect unison to maintain the flexibility and integrity of my physical form. Ignorant to the degree of danger my body was in, I balanced my weight against the shower wall. As I leaned forward to turn on the faucet, I was startled by an abrupt and exaggerated clamor as water surged into the tub. This unexpected amplification of sound was both enlightening and disturbing. It brought me to the realization that, in addition to having problems with coordination and equilibrium, my ability to process incoming sound (auditory information) was erratic. For the first time, I considered the possibility that I was perhaps having a major neurological malfunction that was life threatening. In that instant, I suddenly felt vulnerable, and I noticed that the constant brain chatter that routinely familiarized me with my surroundings was no longer a predictable and constant flow of conversation. Instead, my verbal thoughts were now inconsistent, fragmented, and interrupted by an intermittent silence. As my brain chatter began to disintegrate, I felt an odd sense of isolation. My blood pressure must have been dropping as a result of the bleeding in my brain because I felt as if all of my systems, including my mind's ability to instigate movement, were moving into a slow mode of operation. Yet, even though my thoughts were no longer a constant stream of chatter about the external world and my relationship to it, I was conscious and constantly present within my mind. What is going on? I wondered. Have I ever experienced anything like this before? Have I ever felt like this before? This feels like a migraine. What is happening in my brain? The harder I tried to concentrate, the more fleeting my ideas seemed to be. Instead of finding answers and information, I met a growing sense of peace. As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent, my consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a "being at one" with the universe, if you will. In a compelling sort of way, it felt like the good road home and I liked it. By this point I had lost touch with much of the physical three-dimensional reality that surrounded me. My body was propped up against the shower wall and I found it odd that I was aware that I could no longer clearly discern the physical boundaries of where I began and where I ended. Instead, I now blended in with the space and flow around me. When the shower droplets beat into my chest like little bullets, I was harshly startled back into this reality. As I held my hands up in front of my face and wiggled my fingers, I was simultaneously perplexed and intrigued. Wow, what a strange and amazing thing I am. What a bizarre living being I am. Life! I am life! I am trillions of cells sharing a common mind. I am here, now, thriving as life. Wow! What an unfathomable concept! An excerpt from her book, reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The author is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996. On the afternoon of this rare form of stroke (AVM), she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. It took eight years for her to completely recover all of her functions and thinking ability. In 2008, she gave a presentation at the TED Conference in Monterey, which has become the most viewed TED Talk to date. This now famous 18-minute presentation catapulted her story into the world. As a result, she was chosen as one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2008. In addition, she was the premiere guest on Oprah's Soul Series webcast and was interviewed by Oprah and Dr. Oz on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She is the National Spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Harvard Brain Bank) and travels the country as the Singin' Scientist (listen to the Brain Bank Jingle). Since 1993, she has been an active member of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) and is currently the president of the NAMI Greater Bloomington Area affiliate in Bloomington, Indiana. For three points,,name the the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100824 ... jane My Stroke of Insight Jill Bolte Taylor finally, a book i actually OWN! i have not yet read it, but after i watched her speak on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html), i knew i wanted to check it out. fascinating stuff. 100825 ... rt +3=193 jane! Question 160 In 2003, a game reserve in Swaziland sent 11 African elephants to a zoo in Florida that had, only decades earlier, been declared one of the five worst zoos in America by the National Humane Society. The elephants came a long way, via Boeing 747 and with judicious doses of tranquilizers and vigilant bedpan monitoring -- a necessity since elephant urine can eat through metal, one of the many interesting facts to be found in this book. Lowry Park, in Tampa, had already come a long way itself by 2003, thanks in large part to the leadership of Lex Salisbury, the zoo's CEO and the mastermind behind the importation of the elephants. The book unfolds over the course of six years, and while it lures you in with the elephants (and tigers and chimps), it's Salisbury who really sets the hook. Despite a tempest of animal-rights protests surrounding the elephants' sale to Lowry Park, the wild creatures seemed to settle in pretty well. Salisbury, however, enjoys an apotheosis and suffers a downfall, a story entailing mutinous zookeepers, the tragic death of one of the zoo's residents by Salisbury's own hand, a wife's thoughtless mistake, shady business dealings, and the most irresistible news hook of all time: runaway monkeys. French makes a conscientious attempt to address the ethical snarls of zookeeping -- a practice that many animal-rights activists would prefer to see entirely eliminated but also the only means of survival for some endangered species. Zoos are, he writes, the ironic manifestation of our "wish to love and protect other species even as we scorched their forests and poisoned their rivers and shoved them toward oblivion." He never presents zoos as an unqualified good, but given that the book's impressively intensive reporting required him to spend countless hours hanging out with the zoo's staff and describing events from their point of view, that's where the sympathies of the book gravitate. French quotes from statements issued by anti-zoo factions, but did not, apparently, interview them, so they come across as distant hecklers, jeering from far beyond the margins of the main events. The book originated as a series of feature articles for the St. Petersburg Times, and it must be said that the author's style here never rises above the workmanly, meat-and-potatoes standard of the daily newspaper. On the other hand, it's also blessedly free of the padding so often found in more "writerly" and less journalistic nonfiction books; there's no potted history of zoos and no labored effort to incorporate the author's "personal story" into the narrative -- even though the acknowledgments reveal that, when he started reporting on the zoo, he was afraid of animals. All the artistry in the book comes in the form of scene-setting and storytelling, at which he most certainly excels. He sketches the difficult history of the zoo's longest resident, a chimpanzee named Herman who was rescued from animal dealers in Liberia and raised as the doted-upon third "child" in the family of an American mining executive. Chimps are fantastically strong for their size and unpredictably aggressive, so the family finally had to send him out of the house. Lowry Park was the closest zoo, and Herman's human "father" visited him there regularly, but the love lavished on the ape was an ambiguous gift. It left this miniature King Kong sexually fixated on human females (he liked blondes with bare shoulders, and raged at any man who touched the woman keepers he regarded as "his") and uninterested in breeding with his own kind. Nevertheless, Herman appears in the book as the good alpha male, a sensitive diplomat adept at calming the histrionics that regularly flared among Lowry Park's chimps. (One primatologist characterizes the animals as "drama queens.") He stayed by the side of a baby who got his head stuck in some netting and took the group's most vulnerable and picked-upon member under his wing. So when, in the course of the book Herman falls prey to the Borgia-like scheming of the alpha female, it comes as a palpable shock. In counterpoint to Herman, there's Lex Salisbury, basted with seemingly every cliché known to business journalism. He's a "hard-driving" visionary who can be "hell on the minions who toil beneath," who likes to "make his own rules" and flaunts a "larger than life" image involving a safari hat and a cheesy nickname -- El Diablo Blanco. The author ponders the conundrum of Salisbury, who unquestionably pushed Lowry Park into the upper echelon of American zoos, but who eventually managed to alienate almost everyone who worked for him. His relentless ambition and self-confidence accomplished much, but it also led him to think he could get away with setting up a for-profit animal park on the side and with allowing that project to become hopelessly entangled with the not-for-profit Lowry Park zoo. Salisbury's rise and fall would be a rich saga even if it didn't involve him taking up a shotgun to deal with the results of an inexperienced keeper's mistake. (The experienced keepers had mostly quit, protesting poor working conditions, an emphasis on commercialism over conservation and Salisbury's unrelenting demands for greater productivity.) Fate handed the author (and Salisbury's critics) a precious gift, however, when in 2008, the CEO made a major error of his own by placing 15 patas monkeys on a moat-enclosed island in his pet project, Safari Wild. Salisbury hadn't taken into account two key facts: 1) Patas monkeys can swim and 2) they're "officially the fastest monkeys on Earth." The monkeys staged a jail break and for eight months roamed the greater Tampa area at will, stealing food, killing the batteries in tractors by playing with their switches all night and generally making Salisbury look foolish. Likening the behavior of human alpha males to their animal counterparts is a bit of a gimme at this stage, but comparing and contrasting the nurturing leadership of Herman to the dictatorship of Salisbury -- something the author does with admirable lightness -- is inspired. It's also sobering to watch young zookeepers, filled with winning enthusiasm and camaraderie, being ground down by the human world's equivalent of evolutionary pressure. "At the zoo," he writes, "every day was another lesson on living in a world where there were no more pure choices." And you don't even need to look in the cages to see that. (Adapted from a review by Laura Miller, a senior writer for Salon.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100825 ... jane ‎"Zoo Story: Life and Death in the Garden of Captives" by Thomas French. i have always loved animals, and thus always felt torn by zoos. it sounds like French does a lovely job of telling *their* stories, despite his initial fears of them. 100826 ... rt +3=196 jane! Question 161 The author and her best friend were both born in 1946, at a time when “the iceman” and “the last of the horse-drawn wagons” could still be seen on city streets. She points this out at the start of her tenderly evocative memoir, but there is even stronger evidence that this book dates back a long time. The book captures a moment when they were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown, to the point in which a touristy couple in Washington Square Park spied them in the early autumn of 1967 and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively, “They’re just kids.” How hard is it for her to turn back the clock to this innocent time? Hard. Exactly as hard as it was for Bob Dylan to describe himself as a wide-eyed young newcomer to Greenwich Village in “Chronicles, Volume I,” a memoir that this book deliberately resembles. In describing the day that her photographer friend created his exquisitely androgynous image of her in white shirt, black pants and black jacket for the cover of her “Horses” album, she describes deliberately giving the jacket a rakish “Frank Sinatra style” fling over her shoulder. “I was full of references,” she says, invoking them explicitly throughout the book. A calendar of her would include Joan of Arc’s birthday, the day of the Guernica bombing and the day she, as a young bookstore clerk, sat among Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick in a bar feeling “an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people.” Of all the artists who shaped her persona, Mr. Dylan is arguably the one she worshiped most. She describes the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, another of her heroes, as looking like the 20th-century Mr. Dylan, rather than seeing things the other way around. So it makes perfect sense for her to use a memoirist’s sleight of hand, as Mr. Dylan did, to recapture an eager, fervent and wondrously malleable young spirit. It also makes sense for her to cast off all verbal affectation and write in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry. This portrait of her, like the one in Steven Sebring’s haunting 2008 documentary, is a newly mesmerizing figure, not quite the one her die-hard fans used to know. In this book, she writes of becoming pregnant at 19 (“I was humbled by nature”) in New Jersey, giving up her baby and heading to New York for a fresh start. Describing herself as “I, the country mouse,” she writes of heading to Brooklyn to visit friends and discovering that those friends had moved away. In a back bedroom of their former apartment she encountered her best friend for the first time: “a sleeping youth cloaked in light,” a beautiful young man who resembled a hippie shepherd at a time when she had been contemptuously described as looking like “Dracula’s daughter.” Thus fate introduced them, and they would become roommates, soul mates, friends, lovers and muses. Strictly speaking they were never starving artists in a garret, but the romanticism and mythmaking of the book and their tenancy in the tiniest room at the Chelsea Hotel, brings them pretty close to that ideal. They went to museums able to afford only one ticket. (The one who saw the exhibition would describe it to the one who waited outside.) They went to Coney Island, able to afford only one hot dog. (she got the sauerkraut.) They loved the same totems and ornaments and flourishes; they valued the same things, though in different ways. “We were both praying for his soul,” she writes of his frank ambition — especially when he fell under the influence of Warhol, someone she deeply mistrusted — “he to sell it and I to save it.” She goes on to suggest caustically that it was his prayers that were answered. But much of the book unfolds before he did the taboo-busting, shock-laden photographic work for which he is best remembered. (“I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality,” she writes of his sadomasochistic imagery.) And it occurs before his illness. (He died of AIDS in 1989.) Of the two of them it was her who made her mark first. Like “Chronicles,” this book carries its author to the verge of fame but stops right there on the brink, so that its innocence is never compromised by circumstances too surreal or hagiographic for the reader. This book achieves its aura of the sacrosanct by insisting that the later, more doomy and fraught part of her life story belongs elsewhere. It’s possible to come away from this memoir with an intact image of the title’s childlike kindred spirits who listened to Tim Hardin’s delicate love songs, wondered if they could afford the extra 10 cents for chocolate milk and treasured each geode, tambourine or silver skull they shared, never wanting what they couldn’t have or unduly caring what the future might bring. If it sometimes sounds like a fairy tale, it also conveys a heartbreakingly clear idea of why she is entitled to tell one. So she enshrines her early days with her best friend this way: “We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.” They sound like Hansel and Gretel, living in a state of shared delight, blissfully unaware of what awaited on the path ahead. (Adapted from a review by Janet Maslin for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100827 ... lostgirl Just Kids By Patti Smith wow....a true blue memoir of an incredible friendship between two stars in the making. their unique relationship carried them through their years of struggling to survive as nobodies in a very different nyc, through better times that eventually surfaced. judging from several reviews, she tells their story emotion by emotion, by adorning the pages with beautiful prose, all perfectly punctuated with his elegant photography....friendship is powerful, and in this case, they helped to define each other as they grew together and individually. looks like an absolute must for my to-read list. 100828 ... rt +3=194 lostgirl! Question 162 Ten years on from The Beach, this author has collaborated with his father on a story reflecting his fascination with dreams and the self It's ten years since he started to write his first novel, The Beach. In some ways he has spent the decade confounding the expectations that the extraordinary success of that book placed upon him. He said he saw a pile of copies of it in a shop the other day 'and it was like seeing someone you used to know ages ago and are now trying to avoid'. He felt like turning away as if pretending they hadn't seen each other. 'I've got nothing particularly against the book,' he says, 'which has given me lots of opportunities, but I do feel very detached from it. It's ancient history for me. I started it when I was 24. It would be desperate to still be clinging on to it now.' Publishers, predictably, have been more reluctant to let the bestseller go. He recalls how, after he wrote his second novel, The Tesseract, a far more complex and demanding narrative set in Manila, he was sat down by an editor in America who said: 'Look, Alex, your strength is young people, backpackers in search of Utopia. Get back to that. And this time, can you make the young people Americans?' The great blessing of the success of The Beach, however, was that it enabled him to walk away from conversations like that one, to follow his own sense of what he wanted to be writing - or even decide if he wanted to be writing at all. He had become a novelist a bit by accident, The Beach had grown quickly out of a comic book he had been drawing, and suddenly it felt too much like a career choice. 'Because I'd never really wanted to be a writer I'd never felt fortunate about The Beach in any way other than like someone who won the lottery,' he says, when I talk to him about the supposed writer's block that has been ascribed to him in recent years. 'If you are asking were there times when I thought, "Fuck this, I've had enough of writing, I don't like the book world. I don't like most books, even. I don't like sitting on my own in a room for hours on end," then yes, there were loads of times like that. 'I often find writing a kind of irritating way to spend my one shot at life. I never felt short of things to write about. It was more to do with the will to write. I'd read stuff I'd written and think, "Who cares? I don't. Why should anyone else?"' This process of harsh self-editing has resulted in an urgent and unsettling third book, The Coma, more of a novella than a novel, which is illustrated with woodcuts by his father, Nicholas, the Telegraph cartoonist. The book describes the dream-like interior life of a man left permanently semi-conscious after being beaten up on a train. Its brevity, he says, is born out of need to make all of it count, not to try the patience of the reader; or indeed that of the author. 'It's a short read. It was always designed to be. I suspect it would not have worked had it been much longer. Those jumps in mental landscape get frustrating after a while. You need something to grip on to.' The atmosphere of the book reminded me of reading Kafka, that sense of shifting alienation. He agrees that it was exactly that mood that he was trying to generate. 'Tonally, you'd have definitely read it before. If you've read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled that has an element of it, too. I spent a lot of time wondering why dreams are so tricky in a narrative. There is something rather naff about talking about dreams. That in itself is something that pushed a button in me because it felt like a taboo or something.' He is very good at recreating the virtual worlds of the half-awake and then subtly dissolving them. As his protagonist realises that he is only dreaming about recovery from his assault, he questions where his thinking self is located. The result is compelling and chilling. 'There is something about this area that is scary and central to how we think about ourselves,' He says. 'Children can understand and cope with the idea of dead and alive, but not this half-state. Most people in comas appear to smile and appear to react to things. They are not in this complete sleep state necessarily. But nobody knows what it is like. And I wanted to write something that could inhabit that space.' His father's illustrations heighten the oddness. He was very keen to make the novel a collaborative effort, in part because he had enjoyed that experience when working on the screenplay for the film 28 Days later with Andrew Macdonald and Danny Boyle, who also directed the film of The Beach. 'I hung on to that idea of teamwork,' he says. 'And I knew if I was going to do a book that involved images then my dad would be the one I would work with. I've grown up watching him do these things every morning before he goes to the office, and I think the way he does woodcuts and linocuts very much influenced the way I write prose. I mean the heavy emphasis on craft with the aim of making things simple, hopefully deceptively so. I wrote about 30 pages of the thing and asked him if he was interested. And he liked the idea of the story.' Even so, he says he had huge reservations about working so closely with his father. 'I said, "I will be completely unreasonable about things at times, in a very annoying way, and that may come as a shock." And he looked at me as if to say actually he knew that side of me rather well.' A lot of that side of he seems to express itself on the page. If there is a theme running through his books it has to do with an obsessive kind of detachment from life, an anxiety about connection. He does not believe, though, that it is something he consciously seeks. 'I'm never anxious to explore anything in myself as such. A story just pushes a button. It's quite easy for me to see the connections though: a neutral male protagonist with no interest in telling a back story; well-meaning, flawed, trying to make sense of things.' He has recently become a father, I wonder if this growing sense of domestication makes it harder for him to summon the disconnectedness that his books describe. He smiles. 'No. One thing it does not seem hard for me to get in touch with is the strangeness of life. It's rather the opposite: I spend my time trying to reinforce the domestic, trying to prop it up. 'I don't seek oddness,' he says. 'But certainly I don't find oddness hard to locate.' (Adapted from a review in The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his book, and report whether or not you read The Beach or saw the film. 100829 ... jane The Coma by Alex Garland i did see The Beach, the film, one night at 3am when i couldn't sleep. the idea of a novel about a coma simultaneously reminds me of The Fountain and also Johnny Got His Gun - which haunts me to this day. 100830 ... rt +3=199 Question 163 What is a woman in her early 40s to do when her brilliant, gorgeous, manic-depressive, verbally abusive, charming control freak of a husband of 15 years leaves her for a man named Bob, just before a drunken driver gives her so many broken bones that she has to inch down stairs on her backside? The author of a poetry collection called “Babel’s Stair,” teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. Those aren’t promising details, I know — readers may suspect that an academic poet’s memoir about failed marriage, debilitating pain and a strict religious upbringing would be dry, self-­pitying and overly earnest. But this little known book is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if she had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea. Nothing much happens here, plotwise. While she is healing both physically and emotionally, she returns to California to stay with her parents — a handsome, preachy father who’s “the Mennonite equivalent of the pope,” and a resolutely cheery, unapologetically flatulent mother who, as a nurse, is as open about bodily functions as her daughter is about emotions. They celebrate Christmas with her beautiful younger sister, Hannah, weed out the closets, play Scrabble and cook. (Apparently, all Mennonite women can cook: “Dinner for 10 an hour from now? No problem.”) Also in California, she dates a couple of mildly inappropriate men: a Christian rocker who wears a nail around his neck and a Mennonite cutie 17 years her junior. She talks to her closest friends and appreciates them deeply. She visits senior citizens with her mother, bearing jam and Zwieback. And she thinks, a lot — about her marriage, what it means to be Mennonite, who the members of her eccentric, varied family really are. She remembers the horrors of childhood camping trips, a terrible teacher, the Mennonite boy she briefly dated who’s haunted her dreams evermore. In the end, she realizes both that you really can go home again and that her Mennonite upbringing has provided her with everything she needs to weather this crisis: a sense of humor; a strong predilection for stoicism, honesty, hard work and good cheer; an appreciation for community; and an unwillingness to blame other people for anything — even cruel ex-husbands and teenagers who drink and drive. “I had plenty of time to wonder if I had somehow been complicit in my own accident,” she writes. “Had I had time to swerve and failed? Had my misery pulled Curtis’s Jeep Cherokee down on me? Was I a magnet of self-pity?” She also dissects her marriage with admirable and courageous self-knowledge. She takes full responsibility for staying with a man who didn’t love her, for tolerating and kowtowing to his impossible standards. Through the entire book, I never once doubted that a woman with this degree of fortitude and self-­reliance would be all right. This book is loose and gossipy, organic and unhurried without losing control. It has “a real nice shape,” to use a compliment one matchmaker applies to the author herself. The book’s star is undoubtedly her mother, Mary — a woman with near total resistance to depression, fatigue and negativity, who rejects puritanical attitudes toward matters of the body. (Most of them, anyway: Mennonites do not seem to discuss sex much, although the existence of so many children suggests they’re not unfamiliar with the subject.) Mary welcomes her divorced, broken-boned, nonreligious, academic daughter back with open arms, without judgment, castigation or undue coddling. She sings endless songs, each odder and funnier than the last, fills a freezer with mini-jars of strawberry jam to take to the elderly and suggests calmly, in line one day at Circuit City, that she should marry her cousin Waldemar, who it happens is also a professor. (“Wally is my first cousin,” she reminds her. “That’s both incestuous and illegal.” The women then engage in a conversation about the relative merits of marrying a pothead versus a man with a tractor.) She has clearly inherited her mother’s gift for emotional generosity and tolerance. She launches lovingly at the oddities of her conservative upbringing, the horrible “shame-based” lunches she and her siblings were forced to take to school in diaper bags, the strict ethical and behavioral standards she was held to until she was old enough to flee. She takes us on a hilarious tour of Mennonite cuisine: borscht “looks and smells like milk gone bad,” with a “lingering afterwhiff” of soldiers’ socks, while a typical sandwich is made from ketchup, homemade bread and salty little meatballs called cotletten, each “pungent saltball” of which “assumes a jellied viscosity, heavy as a puck.” She is as sharp about the cognoscenti and academics she now lives among as she is about Mennonites and her family’s eccentricities. Her tone reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s deadpan, affectionate, slightly hyperbolic stories about urbanites and Minnesota Lutherans, and also of the many Jewish writers who’ve brought mournful humor to the topics of gefilte fish and their own mothers, as well as to the secular, often urban, often intellectual world they call home now. It’s the narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation. If she is a bit too persistent in mentioning that her husband ditched her for “a guy named Bob from Gay.com,” well, she’s understandably shell-shocked. My bigger quibble is that she learns during the course of her visit home that her mother almost left her father, not once but a couple of times — yet this fascinating, telling, surprising piece of information is passed over without comment or elaboration. I wanted to know exactly when and why this happened. Mennonites don’t typically divorce: a culture that frowns on dancing in high school isn’t going to look kindly on the breakup of a marriage. And her parents are so conservative, so traditional and religious, it’s hard to imagine Mary even contemplating such a thing, let alone telling her daughter about it. Maybe she wanted to protect her parents’ privacy, but more details here would not only have shed greater light on her own upbringing and life, but also rounded out her loving, appreciative, unsentimental portrait of her mother. But these are tiny things. I loved this book, and the author. She is a terrific, pithy, beautiful writer, a reliable, sympathetic narrator and a fantastically good sport. I hope she becomes rich and successful and falls madly in love with her first cousin Waldemar. Madam, your tractor is waiting. (Adapted from a review by Kate Christensen, who is the author, most recently, of the novel “Trouble.”) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100830 ... lostgirl Mennonite in a Little Black Dress By Rhoda Janzen it sounds initially like it will read as an introspective memoir of a life gone crazy with a subsequent foray back to childhood roots for healing, all wrapped up with a glimpse into Mennonite culture for garnish. but i'm convinced that this work steps beyond the religious and the cultural and ventures boldly forward as an honestly humorous look at the simply human side of seeking help from those who unconditionally, love....and that would be mom and dad. 100830 ... rt +3=197 lostgirl! Question 164 This novel is the sixth novel by the author, best known for The Remains of the Day — a book of quiet desperation in a British household, brought to life on the screen by actor Anthony Hopkins. The author, born to Japanese parents in Great Britain, wrote his latest work, praised by critics as a deceptively simple tale set in a private school in the English countryside, where nothing is as it seems and the horrible truth is slowly revealed. An excerpt from the novel... My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they've been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as "agitated," even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying "calm." I've developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it. Anyway, I'm not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don't get half the credit. If you're one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful — about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I'm a Hailsham student — which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I've heard it said enough, so I'm sure you've heard it plenty more, and maybe there's something in it. But I'm not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I'll be the last. And anyway, I've done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I'll have done twelve years of this, and it's only for the last six they've let me choose. And why shouldn't they? Carers aren't machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don't have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That's natural. There's no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I'd stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I'd never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years? But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven't been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don't have that deeper link with the donor, and though I'll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year. Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences — while they didn't exactly vanish — seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we'd grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It's ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham. There have been times over the years when I've tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I've told myself I shouldn't look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He'd just come through his third donation, it hadn't gone well, and he must have known he wasn't going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: "Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place." Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he'd grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn't want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham. So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he'd lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He'd ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he'd make me say things over and over; things I'd told him only the day before, he'd ask about like I'd never told him. "Did you have a sports pavilion?" "Which guardian was your special favourite?" At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky we'd been — Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us. © 2005 Random House For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100831 ... jane Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro childhood memories can be so painful sometimes - in fact, i have blocked so many of mine out. in this period of my life i have been excavating my subconscious for them. i often wonder about people who fabricate memories for themselves. 100831 ... rt +3=202 jane! Question 165 Amid the old-timers and stale knishes of Shalom Chai deli, this author makes an aloof, if amused, onlooker. We’ve come to Grand Street in honor of Leo Gursky, the lonely octogenarian who anchors her intricate second novel. In flared jeans and Saucony sneakers, she is not just too young and modern for this crowd but too soft-spoken as well. Her voice is barely audible as a hoary man in a yarmulke shouts, “Come on, when was the last time you saw a drunken Lubavitcher?” She got glowing reviews for her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, followed quickly by a six-figure, two-book deal. So I ask her how she feels about writers’ succeeding wildly the minute they’re out of the gate. “In general?” she asks. “I don’t know what it’s like for other writers.” What about her husband, great-young-thing Jonathan Safran Foer? “That subject I’m not talking about,” she says firmly. “Not much to say on that front.” She will, in fact, not utter his name within sight of a tape recorder. Can you blame her? She’s living beside a lightning rod, whose alternately hyped-and-reviled second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, has attracted much Schadenfreude. Put together, the power couple is easy to resent. She’s 30, he’s 28. Their debuts were nestled side-by-side on year-end best-of lists in 2002; this year they could well be again. Then there is the multi-million-dollar brownstone on three lots that they just bought near Prospect Park (its ornate bathroom is featured on the snark blog Gawker). And there are the striking similarities between their two second novels, which few reviewers have failed to note. Mediabistro declared them “obviously collaborative.” (“Is it a cute postmodern joke?” the piece went on. “God knows Foer is fond of those.”) Add to that her own privileges: the isolated splendor of her Bauhaus childhood home on a Long Island hilltop; a precocious and suspended career as a poet; degrees from Stanford and Oxford; a stint corralling literati for a hip reading series at the Russian Samovar that must have yielded lots of writerly connections. But what of it? Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected. More to the point, this book is a significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best. Old Leo (a new entry in the Jewish-lit canon) nurses the loss of his true love, as well as his only son—a famous writer—and his own great manuscript. Her novel is emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense. It draws a career arc that may very soon surpass her husband’s, in book clubs (it was a Today show pick) as well as Hollywood. (Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated was made into a film, and Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón—of Y Tu Mamá También—is already laboring on this novel) The literary couple is a familiar phenomenon, and one notoriously unfair to the female member. Who is more famous, Paul Auster or his talented wife, Siri Hustvedt? Marianne Wiggins could be a great novelist, but will she ever field an interview that doesn’t probe her time in hiding with Salman Rushdie? Those who open up about it seem only to suffer more. When Ayelet Waldman recently confessed her undying lust for husband Michael Chabon, she became no less vulnerable than Kathryn Chetkovich—who wrote an essay, “Envy,” on her burning jealousy of her boyfriend, Jonathan Franzen. Aiming at liberation, both inevitably became so-and-so’s partner. That’s a dilemma she is looking to avoid, and on the strength of her work she stands a better chance than most. She does address the smaller elephant in the room, the writer’s biography in general. She calls it irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. “A year ago I started reading a biography of [fabulist Jorge Luis] Borges. And I just closed it on page ten, because I realized I was not going to like the man. And if I didn’t like the man, the book was going to be tainted for me.” Still, she offers a selective biography. “I felt like I really did have the last real American childhood,” she says of an upbringing that actually seems a touch surreal. Her house-on-high in Old Westbury was built by architect Ulrich Franzen, and the family garden was laid out by an Olmsted. Her grandfather owned a factory that made precision gears; her father left the family business to become an orthopedic surgeon. As a child, she—just as detail-oriented as her forebears—lived in a world of her own. For five years, she pretended to be a travel agent in a game called “Office,” organizing trips for fictional tourists. “One time my brother tried to be in the game,” she says. “The partnership collapsed in a month. It didn’t do to have more than one person involved.” Well into her twenties, she wrote poetry, which “felt like the great goal of the language,” she says. She wrote a poem about her uncomfortable bed, declaring, “Architects should try to live in their own houses.” She was a lot like the novel's 14-year-old narrator, Alma Singer, who wants to be a survivalist, compiles obsessive lists, and is an avid collector. At Oxford, she did her thesis on compulsive collector-artist Joseph Cornell. (Before she and Foer met, Foer put together a poetry anthology inspired by Cornell’s work.) Then she abruptly quit poetry. She wouldn’t show me any of her poems, having set aside what she describes as an impossible quest for poetic precision. Still, her first novel had the feeling of being too perfect. It also left her distracted. “Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad,” she says. “I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.” What she needed was to take more chances. In writing the new book, “there was a real loosening of control. There was no end in sight, no synthesis at all until finally there it was.” It’s tempting to attribute her new risk-taking to her husband’s influence—even more so if you’ve read their new novels. “Did she learn to be cute from her husband,” asked Entertainment Weekly, “both of whose books seem somewhat desperate to amuse?” Both books revolve around fathers, exiled from Europe, who have outlived sons they’ve never met. Both juxtapose precocious young narrators with eccentric old ones. Writing for the The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller called these correspondences an “engraved invitation to compare and contrast.” The Village Voice noted with forensic suspicion a blue glass vase that appears in both books. “These comparisons are laughable,” she says, insisting the couple didn’t read each other’s proofs until the very end. “People find what they’re looking for.” In fact, it’s clear that the writers’ passions (Joseph Cornell) and family histories (the Holocaust) ran parallel long before they met. As do their sensitivities: Like Foer, she still seems a touch uncomfortable with the pigeonhole of “Jewish fiction.” Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, she “wanted to have nothing to do with anything Jewish at all.” Even as we walk through the forsaken shtetl of the Lower East Side and she points out a bialy shop Leo name-drops and housing projects he might inhabit, she insists that “Leo might as well have lived in Baltimore.” But she’s clearly begun returning to that history: A few years ago, she began recording conversations with her grandparents. And she’s been honing a semi-fictional piece—a chapter on each grandparent—that she might publish someday. Critics make much of her book’s unremarkable dedication, “For Jonathan, my life,” but have yet to mention the accompanying one: “For my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.” She says that she shunned her heritage when she was younger because she was keen on “casting the line to a more foreign landscape” so as to distance her work from straight biography. She also notes that the hidden meanings of the most tantalizing material can sometimes be found in obvious places. Take that blue glass vase. “It was mine—a gift from my mom—and now it’s ours. It’s nice. I’ll show it to you one day.” (Adapted from a review in New York Magazine) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100831 ... jane Nicole Krauss The History of Love i'm having difficulty with a personal response at the moment 100831 ... jane i would like to know more about the 14 year old protagonist girl - (obsessive listing compels me; i do it too). i think it's interesting she did her thesis on Joseph Cornell. for a while i was very into Jon Sarkin who is an artist borne of brain damage. 100831 ... rt +3=205 jane! Question 166 This novel, which President Obama read during his vacation at Martha's Vineyard is a masterpiece of American fiction. Once again this author has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. He knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are “almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.” These are not gratuitous observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate the book, beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power.” That twinning is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his “personal liberties” — a phrase he uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly collide with others in equal pursuit of their sacred freedoms, which, more often than not, seem to threaten our own. It is no surprise, then, that “the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage,” as he remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it. The dream-power ratio is lived out most acutely — most oppressively, but also most variously and dynamically — within the family, since its members orbit one another at the closest possible range. The family romance is as old as the English-language novel itself — indeed is ontologically inseparable from it. But the family as microcosm or micro-history has become his particular subject, as it is no one else’s today. “The Corrections,” saturated in the ­socio-cultural atmosphere of the 1990s, described the hopeful “corrections” improvised by the three lost Lambert siblings, adults manqués lured to the voluptuary capitals of the Eastern Seaboard, escaping the Depression ethic of their Midwestern parents, who continue to loom over their lives, disapproving gods, though themselves weakened by senescence and its attendant ills. Locked together in obligation and duty, assailed by guilt and love, the Lamberts thrash against the cycle of needs — to forgive, to explain, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory. In lesser hands, this might have devolved into cliché. Also the timing looked ominous. Published a week before 9/11, his novel, set against a panorama of ’90s excesses (promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, trendy East Coast restaurants, high-tech gadgetry), all outgrowths of “the rambunctious American economy,” might have seemed fatally out of step with the somber new mood. Instead, “The Corrections” towered out of the rubble, at once a monument to a world destroyed and a beacon lighting the way for a new kind of novel that might break the suffocating grip of postmodernism, whose most adept practitioners were busily creating, as James Wood objected at the time, “curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being.” “The Corrections” did not so much repudiate all this as surgically “correct” it. He cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism. His fictional canvas teemed with information — about equity finance, railroad engineering, currency manipulation in Eastern Europe, the neurochemistry of clinical depression. But the data flowed through the arteries of narrative, just as it had done in the novels of Dickens and Tolstoy, Bellow and Mann. Like those giants, he attended to the quiet drama of the interior life and also recorded its fraught transactions with the public world. Even as his contemporaries had diminished the place of the “single human being,” he, miraculously, had enlarged it. This book is a still richer and deeper work — less glittering on its surface but more confident in its method. This time the social history has been pushed forward, from the Clinton to the Bush years — and the generational clock has been wound forward, too. There is, again, a nuclear family, though the hopeful aspirants are not children but parents. They are the Berglunds, “young pioneers” who renovate a Victorian in Ramsey Hill, a neighborhood of decayed mansions in St. Paul (he assuredly knows that F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up there, on Summit Avenue; the street is mentioned in the opening paragraph) and then float upward on drafts of unassailable virtue. Patty is a “sunny carrier of sociological pollen, an affable bee” buzzing at the back door “with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valleys in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning”; her husband, Walter, is a lawyer of such adamant decency that his employer, 3M, has parked him in “outreach and philanthropy, a corporate cul-de-sac where niceness was an asset” and where, commuting by bicycle each day, he nurtures his commitment to the environmentalist causes he will eventually pursue with messianic, and mis­begotten, fervor. To their envious neighbors, a step behind the golden couple, there “had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.” They are “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive every­body so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.” These heckling strophes drip with spite, but spite is often the vehicle of premonitory truth. The Berglunds really are headed for disaster, though not because there’s something wrong with them. They are, after all, “fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street” — and much of America, too. They resemble any number of well-meaning couples for whom “the home” has become a citadel of aspirational self-regard and family life a sequence of ennobling rites, each act of overparenting wreathed in civic import — the “issues” involving cloth versus disposable diapers, or the political rectitude of the Boy Scouts, or the imperative to recycle batteries — and the long siege of the day heroically capped by “Goodnight Moon” and a self-­congratulatory glass of zinfandel. He grasps that the central paradox of modern American liberalism inheres not in its doctrines but in the unstated presumptions that govern its daily habits. Liberals, no less than conservatives — and for that matter revolutionaries and reactionaries; in other words, all of us — believe some modes of existence are superior to others. But only the liberal, committed to a vision of harmonious communal pluralism, is unsettled by this truth. This is why a Ramsey Hill pioneer like Patty Berglund will suffer torments of indecision when thinking how best to “respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood.” But, in an inspired touch, Patty is a former All-American basketball player; and her competitive drive overcomes her inhibitions when the adversary is plainly her inferior, for instance the loutish next-door neighbor “in a Vikings jersey with his work boots unlaced and a beer can in his fist” who noisily molests his backyard trees with a chainsaw, clearing space for a vinyl-sided boat shed that disfigures the collective efforts of urban renovation. In retaliation, Patty slashes the snow tires on the villain’s pickup truck and then goes door to door like a petitioner to justify the vandalism she will not own up to. The reckoning begins at home. Just as the complacent upright parents in Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” see their world capsized by their own children, who become militant leftists, so the Berglunds inadvertently have bred a native rebel, their son, Joey. Bright, handsome, personable, preternaturally adept at getting his way, all thanks to his doting mother, he defies her by moving next door to live with the enemy, the disheveled right-wing household where the chainsaw tree-­murderer cohabits with a blowzy single mother and her blameless teenage daughter, who worships Joey and showers love on Patty — or would if only Patty didn’t coldly rebuff her. This idyll, related with brilliant economy, establishes the themes explored over the course of a narrative that moves at once backward, forward, inward and outward — with hypnotic force ­and with none of the literary flourishes that faintly marred “The Corrections.” The Berglunds, introduced as caricatures, gradually assume the gravity of fully formed people, not “rounded characters,” in the awful phrase, but misshapen and lopsided, like actual humans. And, as it happens, they are willfully self-invented in the classic American vein. Walter, from rural Minnesota, “the small-town son of an angry drunk,” has made himself into a model of self-sacrifice and self-discipline, but remains captive to the “bludgeoning daily misery and grievance that depressive male Berglunds evidently needed to lend meaning and substance to their lives.” Patty, by means of the novel’s most ingenious device — a third-person autobiography, secretly written “at her therapist’s suggestion” — describes herself as the self-exiled daughter of Westchester County do-gooders, her mother a “professional Democrat” immersed in state politics, her father a lawyer with family money who is a hero to his many pro bono clients, “most of them black or Hispanic or otherwise ethnic.” Patty’s robust athleticism violates the family creed. “I don’t see the fun in defeating a person just for the sake of defeating them,” her mother complains after watching Patty chase down a timid runner on the softball basepath. “Wouldn’t it be much more fun to all work together to cooperatively build something?” And yet when Patty is date-raped, her parents’ solicitude extends to the culprit, the son of wealthy political activists, while they are merely embarrassed by their daughter’s physical and psychic distress. Assaultive sex reverberates through the book and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the “personal liberties,” and for him the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with ­— that is, so genuinely curious about — the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants. There are three intersecting love triangles in the book The pivotal one involves Walter’s college roommate, Richard Katz, an outsize rock musician with an ominous resemblance to Muammar el-Qaddafi, to whom Patty, like any number of other women, is attracted even as Katz, saturnine and sarcastic, is tightly bonded, for some “deep-chemical” reason, to the almost virginally earnest Walter. The many vivid scenes in the book include one in the Berglunds’ lakeside cottage in northern Minnesota, where Patty, now married, and Richard, resolutely single, circle each other like matched predators. It is Patty who exults more fully in the pure exhilaration of appetite, though she has been reading “War and Peace” ­— a touchstone for the book ­— and has just finished the pages “in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming,” she records in her secret memoir. “Pierre’s loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion.” Yet she will heedlessly plunge into the same error. This is his self-mocking acknowledgment that not even the greatest literature can save us from ourselves, because nothing finally can override the imperative to be free. “This seemed to her, in any case, the first time she’d properly had sex.” Yet soon after, she startles her lover by asking, “Do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?” The reasoning is axiomatic: “I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m 45, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.” Sexual freedom, for women no less than men, “the default gender,” to borrow a term from his second novel, “Strong Motion,” is yet another form of entrapment. Thus does the author wring multiple meanings from his theme, particularly once the Berglunds’ story ­merges with the encompassing history he tells, much of it set in Washington, where the Berglunds move after Walter gets a lucrative job with a nature conservancy. It comes with spacious living quarters in a Georgetown mansion, with daffodils and jonquils in the backyard, a fresh opportunity for the Berglunds, after the disappointments in St. Paul, to indulge their “excellent ­urban-gentry taste.” It is now 2004, the peak moment of the Bush phantasmagoria, when it was possible to think of America as “still a rich and relatively young country” and of the Iraq adventure as “an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side.” There is no mistaking his own view of these matters, even without the evidence of his journalism from this period — including “Inauguration Day, 2001,” a report he wrote for The New Yorker on the bus trip he took to Washington with a group of protesting young socialists. The book abounds in journalistic touches, some of them slapdash, most obviously when he revisits quarrels over “the Bush-Cheney venture in Iraq” and the sinister role of Halliburton, “whose former C.E.O. was now running the nation.” Yet he, equipped with the novelist’s investigatory gene, knows that every man has his reasons. If his wicked portrait of a neoconservative sage, steeped in dime-store Leo Strauss, who dazzles Joey at a dinner party with gnomic mentions of “the philosopher, ” flirts with burlesque, he has nonetheless caught the tone of those Bush administration auxiliaries who fluently made the case for the Iraq “cakewalk” and, as he writes, “referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how ‘we’ had been ‘leaning on’ the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom.” He is best, always, when he returns to the Berglunds. Their uneasy peace, roiled by strife dating back to Joey’s rebellion, feels increasingly warlike, as they too breathe the fanatical air that has toxically invaded the land. Walter, “greener than Greenpeace,” strangely colludes with a superrich Texan to despoil a West Virginia mountaintop, though it means uprooting 200 local families, “most of them very poor” — all to create a sanctuary for a species of warbler not even on the federal endangered list. The scenes set in West Virginia, and Walter’s clashes with hard-edged locals, the proud, embittered descendants of “Jefferson’s yeoman farmers,” clinging tenaciously to their wasteland ­— “the scabby rock-littered pastures, the spindly canopies of young second growth, the gouged hillsides and mining-damaged streams, the spavined barns and paintless houses, the trailer homes hip-deep in plastic and metallic trash, the torn-up dirt tracks leading nowhere”­ — bristle with conviction. Meanwhile, Patty is reduced to a parody of the Beltway wife and finds solace at the gym where, when not toning, she holds down a desk job, mainly to escape the presence of Walter’s assistant, an adoring and nubile Bengali-American. And Joey, now a Young Republican paid $8,000 a month to concoct fraudulent reports for something called “Restore Iraqi Secular Enterprise Now,” will soon get involved in a boondoggle involving the transshipment of corroded tank parts from Paraguay to Iraq. His motives aren’t purely mercenary: he also yearns to impress the Straussian’s luscious daughter, a materialistic tease captured by Franzen in all her narcissism: “She gave Joey a once-over head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and­ — a little reluctantly, it seemed — pulled the iPod wires from her ears.” The magic is in “a little reluctantly”: one sees the fleeting look of displeasure, the slow tug on the wires; rather, remembers it, from similar images stored in one’s mind and awaiting release. There are numberless such moments in the book crystalline instances of precise notation shaped by imaginative sympathy. His world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front — the seething national peace that counter­poises the foreign war. Himself a confirmed and well-informed environmentalist, he gives full voice to Walter’s increasingly extreme preachments on the subjects of overpopulation and endangered species. “WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!” he declares at one point, in a rant that goes viral on the Internet as his dream sours into a nightmare vision of a land in which “the winners,” who own the future, trample over “the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of the world, the nonadaptive.” The apocalpyse, when it comes, clears the way for a postlude, set in Minnesota, that is as haunting as anything in recent American fiction. In these pages, Walter, “a fanatic gray stubble on his cheeks,” seizes hold of the novel, and he makes us see, as the best writers always have, that the only pathway to freedom runs through the maze of the interior life. Walter, groping toward deliverance, mourns “a fatal defect in his own makeup, the defect of pitying even the beings he most hated.” But of course it is no defect at all. It is the highest, most humanizing grace. And it cares nothing about power. Like all great novels, this book does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew. (Adapted from a review by Sam Tannenhaus, editor of the NewYork Times Review) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100902 ... lostgirl Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen i love good contemporary fiction, and this looks like it will encompass all my favorite aspects of a well written novel. a page turner filled with fiction on, well, on truth....on "what really is"....about family, kids, marriage, work, government, religion, morals and money to name a few. after reading the reviews, i'm compelled to move it higher on the to-read list, actually. we are all too happy to tout our free society, however there are always limitations to any liberty...especially taking into account the collective human condition. to paraphrase something a reviewer stated that struck a nerve....when you look behind the curtains of the perfect home that holds the outwardly perfect people in the outwardly perfect family what do you see? hmmmmmmm.... 100902 ... rt +3=200 lostgirl! 100903 ... rt Question 167 I used to tell my daughter stories about a family of mer-cats--kitties with fish tails--who lived in the East River and how they were persecuted by a mean purple octopus. I spent considerable time and effort coming up with nonviolent ways for the mer-cats to defeat the octopus at the end of each story. Finally one night I asked my daughter Lily, who was 4 at the time, how she thought the mer-cats should handle the problem. She chirpily replied that the mer-cats should find a sharp rock and then stab the octopus till it died. Ha, ha, ha! Kids. If the time ever comes, Lily might do pretty well in the events surrounding this book. As described by the author, this book describes an annual spectacle in which a group of children are forced by the government to fight one another to the death on TV. This novel is a chilling, bloody and thoroughly horrifying book, a killer cocktail of Logan's Run, Lord of the Flies, The Running Man, reality TV and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But it inspires in readers a kind of zeal I haven't seen since the early days of Twilight. Stephen King is a major fan. So is Stephenie Meyer. The book is set in an unspecified future time when things have gone pretty spectacularly badly for humanity. The world, or the bit of it we can see, is dominated by a ruling caste who live in luxury in a city called the Capitol. The rest of us live like peasants in 12 districts that are strictly cordoned off from the Capitol and one another. Life in the districts sucks: it's mostly hard labor--mining coal and farming and working in factories--in dismal conditions. To make things even dismaler, once a year each district is required to give up two of its children, chosen by lottery, and enter them in the games. The kids are dropped into an enormous arena strewn with traps and hazards, with a heap of weapons and supplies in the middle. The last child alive wins a lifetime of luxury and celebrity. The action is filmed and broadcast to the entire world. We experience this ordeal through the eyes of Katniss, a resident of District 12, a harsh, cold region mostly given over to coal-mining. She is a passionate 16-year-old who hates the Capitol and is devoted to her family; she volunteers for the Games to take the place of her sister, whose name came up in the lottery. Katniss is a skilled hunter and sheer death with a bow and arrow. She doesn't like to kill. But she doesn't want to die either. Whereas Katniss kills with finesse, the author writes with raw power. After a life spent in freezing poverty, Katniss experiences pleasure--warmth, food, pretty clothes--with almost unbearable intensity, and that's where her writing comes alive. (Not sex, though. The book is oddly non-erotic.) Likewise, she brings a cold, furious clarity to her accounts of physical violence. You might not think it would be possible, or desirable, for a young-adult writer to describe, slowly and in full focus, a teenage girl getting stung to death by a swarm of mutant hornets. It wasn't, until she did it. But rather than being repellent, the violence is strangely hypnotic. It's fairy-tale violence, Brothers Grimm violence--not a cheap thrill but a symbol of something deeper. (One of the paradoxes of the book is that it condemns the action in the arena while also inviting us to enjoy it, sting by sting. Despite ourselves, we do.) Katniss survives the first novel, and the second finds her back in the arena, where she will try, in her words, to "show them that I'm more than just a piece in their Games." These books expose children to exactly the kind of violence we usually shield them from. But that just goes to show how much adults forget about what it's like to be a child. Kids are physical creatures, and they're not stupid. They know all about violence and power and raw emotions. What's really scary is when adults pretend that such things don't exist. (Adapted from a review in Time Magazine) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100904 ... lostgirl The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins i love that this book has teenagers as it's main characters...but even though it seems to be geared to a young adult reader, i don't expect the plot to revolve singularly around sappy teenage romance. it's more a gladiator story set in the post apocalyptic future starring kids as protagonists. one reviewer stated that he was transported to another world in 2.3 seconds....sounds like a winner so far....and the vividly depicted violence contained within this work was described along the lines of this: "one doesn't actually need to see a shark in order to be terrified by it." okay, i'm always up for something different...but my kids might actually read this one.... and i will probably already have it completed before they do! 100905 ... rt +3=203 lostgirl! Question 168 A novel in which the main characters are called Lok, Ha, Fa, Nil and Mal may well send some readers running for cover. Their identity has been signalled before the first chapter, in a quote from HG Wells's A History of the World: "...We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man..." Actually, this inclusion now seems a touch heavy-handed: more intriguing to work it out for yourself. But that is neither here nor there; addicts of this powerful and provocative book are hooked from the opening episode, in which the family party is trying to negotiate the crossing of a river, their habitual log bridge having disconcertingly gone missing. They don't like water; they are not good at communal endeavour; but they cherish their children and bury their dead. This was the author's second novel, published in 1954. My copy is a battered first edition, the dustjacket falling to pieces, the price snipped from the flap, suggesting that it was a present. There are stiff little extracts from reviews of Lord of the Flies at the back: "A very exciting first novel..." The dustjacket has that leaping stag figure from the walls of the Lascaux cave - half human, half animal - which places it fair and square within the context of its inspiration. It is hard to realise now the effect that the discovery of the Lascaux paintings had in the post-war period: those images haunted the imagination of a generation. For some, like the author, it was the implications of the images and their setting; for others, it was the extraordinary sophistication and perception of the paintings themselves. My aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt, got into her pre-war Standard 8 and bombed south through France within months of the first press reports; she was with one of those privileged groups to be taken round by torchlight before the caves were closed to the public for ever. In the novel, the Neanderthals are one family, relationships vaguely indicated; the old woman is the mother of Lok, through whom he tells the story. He is maybe the father of Liku, a child - perhaps Fa is the mother, or Nil, who has a baby, the new one. Mal, the old man, dies in the mountain cave to which they have come from their winter habitat somewhere by the sea. They nurse him through his illness; one of the women visits a great hidden cave to offer up what seem to be prayers to Oa, their concept of an earth mother. When Mal dies, the rest mourn and bury him by the hearth in the cave. But all of this is an expected cycle; the people know about birth and death. What is about to happen is the entirely unexpected, when the certainties of their perilous, precarious world are eroded by the arrival of others. A different people, barely recognisable as such - people who make incomprehensible noises, travel on the water in hollow logs, shoot at the Neanderthals with barbed sticks, steal their children, hunt them down. Homo sapiens, of course. He chose to tell the story through the eyes of Lok, who is himself not the brightest of the group. Leadership seems to be vested in Ha, and it is he who is the first to be picked off by a Homo sapiens directed arrow; it is often the women who are quickest to make deductions and arrive at decisions. Making Lok the puzzled interpreter of what is going on was a master-stroke; the reader recognises with dismay the human characteristics and behaviour of the newcomers, while empathising entirely with Lok's bewilderment. In fact, innocence is the word that springs to mind. And the terrible ending, when Lok is alone, the last of his kind, and dies of grief, is the death of innocence. The people have no language, but they seem to have memory - "pictures" of other places, earlier events. And they seem also to have some telepathic communication - the sharing of "pictures". They are protective of one another, and they respect the old, in whom crucial knowledge and experience reside. They have tools; they have brought with them to the summer caves the vital embers of fire; they can deal with marauding hyenas, but not with cats or bears. They eat meat, but prefer not to, and feel guilty when they do. The people are astonished and awed by the newcomers. These, in turn, look at the "devils" with a mixture of fascination and repulsion; they abduct their young as playthings, but their objective is extermination. Perhaps this is a suggestion of the origins of racism, and indeed the whole novel is ripe for allegorical deconstruction. An essay by the author in his collection A Moving Target opens with the description of a single footprint in what was once the soft mud of a cave in the Auvergne, with a mark alongside made by the stick on which the maker leaned, saving himself from falling. He talks of kinaesthesia, the capacity for sympathetic identification with someone else's bodily movements; there is a sense in which this book seems like an exercise in fictional kinaesthesia, with its author trying to slip not just into a Neanderthal skin, but also into one of those unimaginable minds. It was a hazardous endeavour, and in lesser hands could have fallen flat on its face; indeed, plenty of imitators have done precisely that. He carried it off through the energy and conviction of his narrative, and a way of telling that mixes immediacy with detachment, so that at one moment you experience what is going on as Lok does, and at another you are snatched back into the wisdoms of authorial knowledge, and the Neanderthal becomes a red creature, running on all fours. Each time I revisit this book I find something new. It is a short novel, but intense and intricate, and has that quality of revealing itself little by little. The story rushes you ahead; only later do you home in on some potent detail. And, having read it, you will always look differently on a palaeolithic hand-axe, or those Lascaux images. (Adapted by a re-read by Penelope Lively) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100906 ... rt The Inheritors by William Golding Question 169 THIS AUTHOR IS THE O. HENRY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM Simply the best storyteller around, he describes the world as you think it is before revealing how it actually is—in narratives that are by turns hilarious, heartwarming, and provocative, but always memorable. Millions of people know the title piece about violinist Joshua Bell, which originally began as a stunt: What would happen if you put a world-class musician outside a Washington, D.C., subway station to play for spare change? Would anyone even notice? The answer was no. His story went viral, becoming a widely referenced lesson about life lived too quickly. Other classic stories—the one about “The Great Zucchini,” a wildly popular but personally flawed children’s entertainer; the search for the official “Armpit of America”; a profile of the typical American nonvoter—all of them reveal as much about their readers as they do their subjects. (Adapted from a review by Indiebound) Twenty Questions for the author: 1. The latest book or movie that made you cry? "The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages: 1851-2008." I read it every night in bed as I drop off to sleep. It weighs 11 pounds. A few days ago it hit me in the eye. True story. 2. The fictional character most like you? Thing Two, from "The Cat In The Hat." 3. The greatest album, ever? Don't make me choose. There are so many fabulous polka bands. 4. "Star Trek" or "Star Wars"? "Star Trek," the TV pilot episode, where Spock shows momentary panic. It's so wonderfully... wrong. It's disorienting, like the feeling you get when you walk onto a broken escalator and have to take those mincing stutter-steps. 5. Your ideal brain food? I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew. 6. You're proud of this accomplishment, but why? When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong rabid Yankees fan. 7. You want to be remembered for ...? The only man to have won two Pulitzer prizes and had sex with Natalie Portman. 8. Of those who've come before, the most inspirational are? There is something profoundly wrong with the syntax of the question. I refuse to answer it. 9. The creative masterpiece you wish bore your signature? The incorporation papers for Google. 10. Your hidden talent? I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known. 11. The best piece of advice you actually followed? When you mix heroin and cocaine into a "speedball," make sure to inject it slowly. (Note to editors: This is true, but if it is considered excessively unwholesome, you can replace the answer with: "Duck!" Or, if you wish, you can keep the original answer, as well as this parenthetical.) 12. The best thing you ever bought, stole, or borrowed? For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a massage parlor that advertised in "The Washington Post." I was determined to prove, for the record, for a column, that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it wasn't a whorehouse. So I got a giggly half-hour back rub from a very pleasant but extremely puzzled young woman in a slinky cocktail dress and no underwear. 13. You feel best in Armani or Levis or ...? Natalie Portman, I bet. 14. Your dinner guest at the Ritz would be? Natalie Portman. 15. Time travel: where, when and why? I would go back to September 10, 2001 and order a slice of cheesecake at Junior's on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Junior's used to have the best cheesecake in the world but has changed the recipe a little. 16. Stress management: hit man, spa vacation or Prozac? It's a tossup between a morphine pump and Natalie Portman. 17. Essential to life: coffee, vodka, cigarettes, chocolate, or ...? Hot sake and cold unagi. Is there anything more sublime? 18. Environ of choice: city or country, and where on the map? I would take the map, affix it with pushpins to the wall of my study, then stand 20 feet away with a dart. I would throw the dart and see where it lands. Then my wife would yell at me for making holes in the wall. I would regain the upper hand by pointing out that I don't even have a study. We'd go back and forth on this for a while, the way spouses often do. We'd probably wind up making out. 19. What do you want to say to the leader of your country? It would be a question: "Who has been the most influential political theorist in your life, Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky?" 20. Last but certainly not least, what are you working on, now? This is a trick question. Anyone who doesn't say "this questionnaire" is a liar -- worse, a self-promoting liar trying to get publicity for some pet project. So, my answer shall be the truth: "This questionnaire." Only after I'm done with this will my son and I get back to writing the next episode of our new comic strip, "Barney & Clyde," which is available to the finest newspapers at surprisingly affordable prices. For three points, name the author, his book, and what would you do if you heard Joshua Bell playing in the subway? 100907 ... lostgirl The Fiddler in the Subway By Gene Weingarten i would drop my briefcase, take out my headphones, and completely immerse myself in that hypnotic scene with my eyes wide open, allowing myself to be transported to another world. and when it was over, i would offer a hug in gratitude. 100907 ... rt +3=206 lostgirl! 100908 ... rt Question 170 The women in this author's first story collection are looking for salvation, though not the kind that involves Jesus. You’d be forgiven for making that assumption, considering that so many of these antiheroines are the products of Catholic schooling. But in fact, most of her ruthlessly frank and lonely characters have left religion, and the saving they seek in this modest, engaging and disquieting collection is from the plague of isolation — or it is, anyway, when they’re not themselves trying to be the rescuers, saving others from any number of ­scourges. The title story presents Emma, a tartly funny Brandeis-bound senior at Sacred Heart in Muskegon, Mich. (the state most of these characters call home). Emma, an artsy outsider, is contemptuous of the Catholic values around her, obsessed with vaginal excretion and prone to unpredictable crying jags. She is sufficiently self-aware to assert, in a way that recalls Holden Caulfield by way of John Hughes, that she doesn’t break down “in a bittersweet, coming-of-age, I’m-at-a-crossroads way.” Instead, all-encompassing feelings of doom elicit sobs. She wants to deliver herself from this and live as her peers do, less cynical and “buffered against emotional impoverishment.” Part of Emma’s angst is adolescent, protestations notwithstanding, but the loneliness that suffocates her chokes others here too. An unnamed social-work student in “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling” cannot stick to the script at a help line where she interns. After mishandling a call from a 700-pound man who likens his heart to “an animal trying to pull a combine. It’s too small for what it has to do,” she goes to therapy but can’t or won’t identify her own feelings to her counselor, who is blind. Instead, she demands that he show her what his eyes look like behind his dark glasses, a request both hostile and intimate. His blindness — what the student understands as vulnerability — touches her, but only enough to underscore her lack of empathy. Indifferent to work, adrift generally, she is either uncomfortable or bored by conventions of emotional sharing. Her refusal to reveal anything to her therapist, or to a one-night stand who asks how she feels, is her repudiation of the notion that talking is good. She’s not alone in that rejection. In the story “Very Special Victims,” Kath describes her childhood sexual abuse to a succession of boyfriends, one of whom presses her to reveal the offending uncle’s name and seek vengeance. She resists, and wonders if she had a “weak love for the role she played” with her uncle, “the novelty persona of cosseted scamp.” The men Kath tells of her past have protective instincts. But she senses they expect her to behave “damaged,” whatever that means to them, when all she wants is to remain silent. Victimhood is burdensome, talking about it more so, and Kath insists on her normalcy. The abuse, she says, “did not define her.” But the story leaves room for ambiguity. Does Kath’s belief that she’s O.K. indicate that she’s recovered from her trauma, or that she’s unable to be truthful with herself? Do Kath’s men — proxies for the reader — really know better than she how to navigate her life? To be sure, honesty can cost you. In “Look, Ma, I’m Breathing,” Isabel has written a memoir confessing that, as a girl, she lied about seeing an apparition of the Virgin. Now she’s being stalked by a would-be landlord. What’s riveting here is Isabel’s examination of the toll faith took. She condemns the community for having believed her, for so needing “a sign, a perfect symbol, an infusion of hot, surging blood into their tepid and watered-down rituals” that their credulity gave her undue power and caused her harm. Yet at least the Catholics paid attention to her; in the secularized world, she realizes with something like grief, nobody is even “committed enough to victimize her.” Belief and skepticism are central to “None of the Above” as well. A child, Peter, tells his teacher, Alma, that the cuts on his body come from cuddling with a tiger cub. Alma is certain that he’s lying, a victim of abuse. When she finally intercedes as rescuer, she finds he was telling the truth all along and she is the villain. Peter doesn’t want rescuing or think he needs it. His feeling of betrayal is so profound, it calls into question whether Alma’s interference was worth it; though it may ultimately save Peter’s life, it has in the meantime shattered the child’s trust in Alma and her own faith in herself. “Consummation” offers the clearest examination here of what it means — and what it costs — to be saved. The unnamed narrator, a mother and court advocate for foster children, addresses a doctor who treated her father when she was a child. What the doctor gave her then was “a life sentence of uneasy love for a man I used to fear,” a man who verbally abused her. Her initial wish that her father had died, or vanished, evolves vividly into the heartbreaking recognition and acceptance of the conflicted nature of her feelings. She is not simply bitter but is struggling, like so many people in this gripping collection and in life, to accept the coexistence, in varying measure, of pity and sympathy, of hatred and love. (Adapted from a review for the NY Times by Sara Ivry, a senior editor at Tablet Magazine, where she is the host of Vox Tablet, a weekly podcast on Jewish culture and life.) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100908 ... jane DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION By Suzanne Rivecca it goes without saying that i can relate to an overly sensitive adolescent girl attemtping to assimilate herself into catholic school :) 100909 ... rt +3=208 jane! Question 171 The rock singer Sting may be a man of furtive cool, mystical tantric talents and exotic, globe-spanning tastes, but it was his affable drummer who could always boast the more intriguing back story. Sting, one Gordon Sumner, was the son of an English milkman and a hairdresser. The author of this book and supplier of the fussy yet propulsive rhythm that was a hallmark of the Police -- was born in Alexandria, Va., in 1952, a Middle Eastern operative for the CIA, and archaeologist Lorraine Adie, who worked for British intelligence during World War II. The drummer-to-be grew up in Cairo and Beirut. His father was instrumental in the 1953 overthrow of reformist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh -- to leftists, a cardinal sin of 20th century American foreign policy. He was also a champion of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Palestinian cause, journalist, adventurer and World War II-era trumpeter and arranger with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. So when the son injected himself into the British punk scene of the late 1970s, did it constitute a fiery rejection of his father's Cold War machinations? Was his attraction to the music of the Third World a way to work out inner guilt? It's hard to say, after reading this book, a breezy memoir of life in and out of the limelight; the drummer is apparently not an inner-demons kind of guy. The original punks were always suspicious of the Police, accusing them of fake edginess. It's a charge he cheerily does little to refute. In one droll chapter, he relishes the sight of Rage Against the Machine, the Che Guevara-worshiping stadium rock band of the 1990s, chilling at the Palazzo Versace Hotel in Brisbane, Australia. "Ha-ha!," he writes. "I remember when I used to be professionally angry." These days, he is professionally happy. He lives in Los Angeles, composes orchestral works and plays a lot of polo. His recent reunion tour with Sting and Police guitarist Andy Summers grossed more than $247 million. If he suffered any kind of crisis, it was in the late 1980s when he realized his clothes -- "an exotic collection of leather pants, hostile shirts and pointy shoes" -- don't really match the man. He is a "mellow" father of four now, and "the thrill has gone from frightening the natives." He spends much of his book dwelling on this post-Police life. At best, he offers a glimpse of a creative soul that is charmed and untroubled -- a rocker's analogue to Brendan Gill's lighthearted memoir of life at the New Yorker. But while he is self-deprecating enough to recount his good fortune without smugness, he grievously overestimates the irony inherent in his story. The English manor house (or, better yet, tax exile) is as much a rock cliche as shouting "Freebird" -- and when he turns up among the polo set, he is, tellingly, surprised that his fellow millionaires don't bat an eye. Another aggravation is the fashionably non-chronological blueprint of this memoir. The strategy worked well for Bob Dylan's "Chronicles, Vol. 1," but here it seems like an excuse to sidestep most of the history of the Police. He prefers to dwell on his work with lesser musical lights, his film scores and yet more polo. A chapter on his time in Africa for the 1985 film "The Rhythmatist" falls surprisingly flat. Perhaps because it is so fresh in his memory, he does delve deep into the Police toward the end of the book, with a detailed recounting of their recent reunion tour that reveals a hint of the true troubled relationship that has most defined and driven him. He knows that he embodies a sort of micro-targeted mega-fame common to Southern California. Behind the drum risers, he's a Golden God, but otherwise, he's just another guy holding up the line at the Coffee Bean. Sting, however, is in Golden God mode 24/7, and the trappings of that life seem to amuse him to no end. The constant hubbub and pretension around the singer is "Sting world"; the meditating man at the center of it "doesn't do farewells, he just vaporizes." He holds Sting's musicianship and vision in high esteem, but he also deflates the mystique by constantly referring to him as "Stingo." Some of the best writing in the book describes what it's like to be locked in a band with a fellow headstrong musician, arguing over the intangible details that make good music great. That was the rocky Bromance at the heart of the Police. After the success of the reunion, he muses about a full re-formation, but thinks better of it. "If you love somebody, set them free," he writes. "That's what Sting said the minute he was free from the Police the first time around, years ago. I think it's pretty good advice for right now, too." (Adapted from a review in the L.A. Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and list your favorite song by The Police 100909 ... lostgirl Strange Things Happen: a Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies By Stewart Copeland oh, and spirits in the material world is such a great song.... 100910 ... rt +3=209 lostgirl! Question 172 It’s quite  a difficult concept to get my head around, reading as I am, a 17 year old’s autobiography. After all, how many teenagers have accomplished much beyond making it through high school, conquering little more than acne along the way? I do remember how I was at 16 and my ambitions then were little more than making it to next weekend’s party without a breakout. No doubt she had the odd acne trouble on her recent voyage, but it’s hard to imagine it gave her much angst, considering the other challenges at hand. Having met her as a 15 year old in her home town Mooloolaba, it comes as no surprise to see her achieve yet another milestone in her very youthful life. In launching her book, the story of her recent solo non-stop, unassisted circumnavigation, she is rapidly ticking off her accomplished dreams much as some of us tick off a shopping list. Create a major sponsorship campaign? Tick Source and prepare a tough little yacht for the rigours of the Southern Ocean? Tick Deal confidently with intense media scrutiny while being derided for daring to achieve such an ambitious challenge? Tick Sail around the world solo? Tick Meet the Prime Minister of Australia? Tick Write a biography and undertake a national book tour? Tick Get a drivers licence upon turning 17? Tick And there’s been countless other achievements to get this far. While her adventure attracted a lot of initial critisism once her venture became public, she has maintained her own strong self belief  and confidence all along. She has been single-mindedly focused on achieving her dream for so long that failure to get to the starting line was never considered an option. She is, of course, a very competent sailor who has the skills and knowledge to cope with long distance voyaging. But, more importantly, she has courage, confidence and the character to overcome most challenges. All essential elements to cope with the unfathomable challenges of blue water voyaging. Her book offers readers an insight into her toughness of character. Though she says that the name of her book refers more to the aspirations of the voyage rather than her own character, she appears true to her dream. After meeting her, sailing with her and Bruce on Big Wave Rider, and seeing first hand how she transformed into a confident sailor, it was evident that she deserved support and encouragement in her quest. She’s a naturally instinctive sailor, and has proved herself to be one tough cookie. I was thrilled,  a little emotional and just a little relieved, to see her sail triumphantly into Sydney Harbour in May 2010. She is inspirational, not because she sailed alone, non-stop, unassisted around the world, no meager undertaking, don’t get me wrong. No, she is inspirational because she dared to challenge herself to do it, then actually did it. To put her dream under the public scrutiny that comes with such a venture only added one more challenge amongst the hundreds that she had to overcome. We will all be hearing a lot more about this remarkable young woman over the coming years. I, for one, can’t wait to hear what she tackles next. (Adapted from a review by Fiona Harper for Travel Boating Lifestyle) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100911 ... lostgirl True Spirit by Jessica Watson to be not only that brave, but also to be that committed at sixteen is astonishing to me. as a mom of teenagers, i can only imagine what her parents must have gone through in her absence while she completed such a dangerous journey.... then to write her story? impressive.... 100912 ... rt +3=212 lostgirl! there is a fascinating interview with her on wnyc's leonard lopate's show. 100912 ... rt Question 173 The author of this book, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs. There is a legion of experts denigrating manual trades like plumber, carpenter and electrician, warning that the United States labor force needs to be “upskilled” and retrained to face the challenges of a high-tech, global economy. Under this new ideology, everyone must attend college and prepare for life as a “symbolic analyst” or “knowledge worker,” ready to add value through mental rather than physical labor. There are two things wrong with this notion, according to him. The first is that it radically undervalues blue-collar work that involves the manipulation of things rather than ideas. Expertise with things permits human beings to have agency over their lives — that is, their ability to exert some control over the myriad faucets, outlets and engines that they depend on from day to day. Instead of being able to top up your engine oil when it is low, you wait until an “idiot light” goes on on the dashboard, and you turn your car over to a bureaucratized dealership that hooks it up to a computer and returns it to you without your having the faintest idea of what might have been wrong. The second problem with this vision is that the postindustrial world is not in fact populated — as gurus like Richard Florida, who has popularized the idea of the “creative class,” would have it — by “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe.” The truth about most white-collar office work, he argues, is captured better by “Dilbert” and “The Office”: dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker’s personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a “hard discipline” like gardening or structural engineering or learning Russian, people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice, expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harley-­Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes. This glorification of manual labor would seem patronizing but for the author’s personal biography. He grew up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, and worked his way through high school and college as an electrician. Along the way he picked up the ability to rebuild the engines of old Volkswagens, something that stayed with him even as he went on to get a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he was a fellow at the Committee on Social Thought. He also worked on a white-collar assembly line, writing abstracts of articles in scientific journals that he could not understand. Straight out of graduate school he got a job as the executive director of an unnamed Washington “think tank,” which he soon realized was being financed by oil companies to issue scientific studies questioning global warming. “I landed a job at the think tank because I had a prestigious education in the liberal arts, yet the job itself felt illiberal: coming up with the best arguments money could buy. This wasn’t work befitting a free man, and the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of a slave.” Rather than his fellow academics, he found himself drawn to people like Fred Cousins, owner of a Chicago area parts shop, who “gave me a succinct dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of Honda starter motor bushings” when his motor wouldn’t start. He argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure. In this world, self-­esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you. Highly educated people with high-­status jobs — investment bankers, professors, lawyers — often believe that they could do anything their less-educated brethren can, if only they put their minds to it, because cognitive ability is the only ability that counts. The truth is that some would not have the physical and cognitive ability to do skilled blue-collar work, and that others could do it only if they invested 20 years of their life in learning a trade. His book makes this quite vivid by explaining in detail what is actually involved in rebuilding a Volkswagen engine: grinding down the gasket joining the intake ports to the cylinder heads, with a file, tracing the custom-fit gasket with an X-Acto knife, removing metal on the manifolds with a pneumatic die grinder so the passageways will mate perfectly. Small signs of galling and discoloration mean excessive heat buildup, caused by a previous owner’s failure to lubricate; the slight bulging of a valve stem points to a root cause of wear that a novice mechanic would completely fail to perceive. He asserts that he is not writing a book about public policy. But he has a clear preference for a “progressive republican” order in which the moral ties binding workers to their work or entrepreneurs to their customers are not so readily sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and growth. He argues that there is something wrong with a global economy in which a Chinese worker sews together an Amish quilt with no direct connection with its final user, or understanding of its cultural meaning. Economic ties, like those between a borrower and a lender, were once underpinned by face-to-face contact and moral community; today’s mortgage broker, by contrast, is a depersonalized cog in a financial machine that actively discourages prudence and judgment. In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to like this book. While I make my living as a “symbolic knowledge worker,” I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture — my family’s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals I could never afford to buy. Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it appears, is already a distant historical memory. (Adapted from a review in NY Times Magazine) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100912 ... rt Shop class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford Question 174 “We pray for the lady visitor and the book she’s trying to put together,” said the spiritual leader of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles at a meeting that the author attended in 1996. She was there as part of her monumental research job for her book, a work that seems to have lasted the better part of 20 years and taken a piece of the author's heart in the process. Her hard work, keen insight and passionate personal In a book that, quite amazingly, is her first, the author, (a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times who is now professor of journalism and director of narrative nonfiction at Boston University) has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country. She has challenged the dismissive assumptions that are sometimes made about that migration, treating it as a briefer and more easily explained event. She makes a case that people who left the South only to create hometown-based communities in new places are more like refugees than migrants: more closely tied to their old friends and families, more apt to form tight expatriate groups, more enduringly attached to the areas they left behind. She argues that these people, among them her Georgia-born mother and Virginia-born father who raised her in Washington, D.C., were better educated and more closely tied to their families than other scholars have assumed. She works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns. She winds up with a mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to “The Promised Land,” Nicholas Lemann’s study of the Great Migration’s early phase, and “Common Ground,” J. Anthony Lukas’s great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston. (But it should not go unnoticed that her book also tells the kinds of stories that have made such a tenacious best seller out of “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s wide-eyed, indignant novel of racial injustice.) With a glimmer of the big, unwieldy story she wanted to tell but no set method of how to frame it, she interviewed more than 1,200 people whose lives had followed the same basic pattern: early years in the South followed by relocation in either the North or the West. She winnowed this group down to three, each of whom had left home during a different decade. The oldest, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, was a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife who moved to Chicago in 1937. Next was George Swanson Starling, who relocated to New York in 1945 from the Florida citrus groves after his efforts to organize fellow workers earned his employer’s ire. Finally, and unforgettably, there was Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a 1953 transplant to Los Angeles from Monroe, La. Called Pershing in his early years and then morphing into Bob the West Coast bon vivant, this doctor warrants a book of his own. Dr. Foster’s most famous patient, Ray Charles, would write a song about Dr. Foster’s way of running off with Mr. Charles’s women. These three left their homes for very different reasons. But what they had in common was an inability to accept the illogic of the Jim Crow world in which they were raised. The single greatest strength of this book lies in its anecdotal examples of how the rules of segregation, whether spoken or unspoken, actually worked on a day-to-day basis. It’s one thing to know that Southern blacks faced bias in all aspects of their lives. It’s another to know that when an esteemed black doctor from Louisiana needed to perform surgery on a black patient, he couldn’t do it in a white hospital. Driving around with his own portable operating table was easier. Although the book contains its share of much rougher stories, it is these seemingly workaday ones that hit hardest. One interviewee’s remark that leaving the South “was like getting unstuck from a magnet” best sets her tone in a book sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience. The book whose title was taken from a Richard Wright quotation, does a superb job of capturing the way whole lives can be changed by small outrages, and the way those changes are neither irrevocable nor simple. For Ida Gladney, George Starling and Robert Foster, the act of leaving home meant the end of one set of troubles. It just as surely meant the beginning of another. Dr. Foster’s epochal journey is the most devastating, partly because of his storytelling style. Years after the fact, he would remember in vivid detail the exhaustion of driving west across Texas without knowing where segregation actually ended, where he could find a place to sleep, where he could even safely stop his car. (He kept an eye out for Confederate flag bumper stickers. He also wound up traveling desperately across three states without rest.) It says a lot about her that she retraced Dr. Foster’s steps by driving west herself, with her parents in the car to provide commentary. Because they are her parents and three black people can now stop wherever they want to, her mother and father cut short this experiment before their daughter’s exhaustion could even begin to match what Dr. Foster went through. “I’m looking for a room,” he told her he had said after being turned down wherever he stopped along the way. “Now, if it’s your policy not to rent to colored people, let me know now so I don’t keep getting insulted.” In a book that spans a century, she describes both youthful dreams and late-life losses. There may be things about her three principals that she will not say (Dr. Foster’s obsession with appearances, particularly with his wife’s, goes well beyond anything that racial inequity can explain), but there does not appear to be anything she didn’t know. Her closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. It creates a wide swath of human drama. And it shapes a new understanding of why Southerners’ new lives in strife-torn cities far from home may not have been easier than the lives they left behind. (Adapted from a review by Janet Maslin for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100913 ... jane THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson it's interesting, because "the color purple" has been showing up in my life in various ways. i've never seen the movie or read the book, but i am taking this question showing up as a sign that maybe i should do one or the other :) 100913 ... rt +3=211 jane! the author was interviewed on fresh air today 100913 ... rt Question 175 This author earned accolades and envy with the publication of her first essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, two years ago. Her follow-up finds her hiding in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant and arguing with cabdrivers, but her bemusement survives these pedestrian moments for another biting outing. Her reserved style, a portrait of the artist on the fringes of the joke, doesn’t permit her to let down her guard fully, but here, she skews more personal than in Cake. “An Abbreviated Catalog Of Tongues” runs down a litany of deceased childhood pets, which mostly perished in bizarre accidents, like the stingray she accidentally fed her sister’s gold necklace. “Off The Back Of A Truck” juxtaposes the flameout of a relationship, in which she discovers her boyfriend is still dating his ex, with the acquaintance of a furniture-store employee who arranges deals on “floor models” for her. “Lost In Space” offers insight into how a budding wit earns her stripes, as a spatial disorder forces her to stall through tasks like reading analog clocks. If this book has a theme besides the bafflement of the outside observer, it’s the female friendship, and her eye for its currents and miniature adjustments over time is particularly fine in this collection: While she tries to bolt from her anorexic, kleptomaniac roommate in “Take A Stab At It,” there’s a tenderness to the way she describes adapting by hiding heirloom earrings in a jar of peanut butter. “Light Pollution”’s articulation of how work friends are made almost overshadows the story it sets up, about a wedding-party outing in Alaska culminating in the bear sighting she and the other out-of-towners had joked about without expectation. An intimate anthropologist, she combs patiently through events, looking for finds. And even when some fail to yield results, her seams never show, as demonstrated by the discrepancy between the collection’s two travelogues. Her union of a musing on age and an impulsive trip to Portugal in the malformed opener “Show Me On The Doll” creates a too-predictable chunk of disappointment that never lodges in a satisfying register, but in “Le Paris!”, she shifts evenly between an earlier ejection from the Notre Dame cathedral and her not exactly triumphant return to the City Of Light. Able at last to settle into polite distaste for the city where her oft-compared influence David Sedaris once tried to talk pretty one day, she returns wiser and without losing her sharpness. (Adapted from a review by Ellen Wernecke for A.V. Club) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100914 ... jane How Did You Get This Number Sloane Crosley what a quirky sounding little collection of stories here. i'm not sure about the writing style but for some reason reminds me of david sedaris (as most quirky storytelling does). i would love to take a gander into this one - fiction or nonfiction. 100914 ... rt +3=214 jane! Question 176 Early in this author's first novel, “Chang and Eng,” a historical tale about conjoined twins born in Siam in 1811, Eng awakes to find that Chang has died in the night. “Then I too am done,” Eng thinks. The two men’s lives have been entwined almost beyond imagining, and one cannot survive without the other. Eng clings to his dead twin, then dies himself. It is impossible not to think of this moment, which appears once at the beginning and again near the end of the novel, when reading Strauss’s new memoir... At 18, the author was behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile with some high school friends in tow, on their way to play miniature golf near his suburban Long Island home. It was a month before the end of his senior year in high school — a time of optimism, as he writes: “Your future rarely feels so present as it does in this June of your prime.” He was set to go to Tufts in the fall. The day was clear, visibility excellent. He drove the legal speed limit. He wasn’t drunk or high. He saw a group of girls riding bicycles on the side of the road, and in the next moment, inexplicably, one swerved across two lanes and in front of his car. Her name was Celine ­Zilke, and she was 16 years old, a junior at his high school. “So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable,” he writes. But on that spring day, the irrevocable slammed into the worlds of the 18-year-old boy and the 16-year-old girl. Life changed in a flash so fast that he would never be able to summon the moment fully. She was dead, and he had killed her. What life delivers to us forms us all, but as surely as random and sometimes monstrous events shape our lives, so too does our response to those events. Something happens, something tragic, immutable and unfair (whatever that means). So what are we going to do? Cave in? Become controlling, rageful? Shut down? Live lives of quiet desperation? At the center of this elegant, painful, stunningly honest memoir thrums a question fundamental to what it means to be human: What do we do with what we’ve been given? He went to Celine’s funeral, where he received a hug — “a clenching of her body, a steeling herself for something personally odious” — from Celine’s mother. “ ‘I know it was not your fault, Darin. They all tell me it was not your fault. . . . But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now.’ Her voice went dim. ‘Because you are living it for two people.’ Her face was a picture of the misery that had worn out the voice. ‘Can you promise me? Promise.’ ” He nodded. Though he didn’t know it at the time — there was much he didn’t know, much that he pushed away, ducked and avoided in an attempt to outrun his identity as that kid, the one who killed a girl — he would spend his life doing exactly what Celine’s mother had commanded. A lazy, underachieving and under-read student in high school, he began to develop academic interests in college. He saw Tufts as a witness protection program of sorts, and told none of his new friends what had happened. “My accident was the deepest part of my life, and the second-­deepest was hiding it.” Besides, Celine never got to go to college. He thought about Celine constantly, as he would for many years. These thoughts ranged from the mundane (removing a soda from its case at the Mini Mart, “while my fingers closed around the damp, solid aluminum, I would think: Celine Zilke will never feel a can in her grip again”) to the profound (“I’d later think of Celine at my wedding and when my wife told me that she was pregnant. Name an experience: it’s a good bet I’ve thought of Celine while experiencing it”). The accident slowly carved him from the inside out, remaking whoever he might have become had he taken a different route on that spring day, or sped up at a yellow light, or been in a different lane. It is a testament to his strength of character that the adult he grew up to be, one can’t help thinking, is wiser, more thoughtful, kinder, though undoubtedly also more tortured, than the one he might otherwise have been. But reviews of memoirs often assess the writer rather than the book, as if it is the moral character and not the telling of the story that matters. His strength of character isn’t what makes this a good book. What is truly exceptional here is watching a writer of fine fiction (“Chang and Eng” was followed by the novels “The Real McCoy” and “More Than It Hurts You”) probe, directly, carefully and with great humility, the source from which his fiction springs. “I’d written three novels without laying a hand on the subject,” he writes: “historical and contemporary, first-person and third-, different fictional stories chiseled from the same real story.” He tells us that he didn’t want to write an accident memoir, didn’t want to become “one more person creating an entertainment out of misfortune.” There’s no getting around the fact that this is a memoir about an accident and its aftermath. There’s plenty of drama in this book. The Zilke family, despite reassurances that they didn’t blame him for their daughter’s death, ended up suing him for millions of dollars, a development that a showier, more manipulative writer might have mined for suspense. He endured a severe stomach ailment that seemed to be a direct result of his continuing guilt and stress. An episode with a Judd Hirsch-like shrink would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic and painful. His dating life — until meeting his wife — was rife with doubts about whether and when to share his secret. But he is not a showy writer, and his book is not trivial entertainment of any kind. I was struck by a tiny word at the beginning of a passage midway through: “We’d had the accident at the age when your identity is pretty much up for grabs. Before it, I hadn’t been so introspective; I’d had nothing to introspect about.” Rarely has the word we been so huge and so heartbreaking. It was their accident. A girl died, and the boy who killed her also died that day. In his place grew a man who heeded the words of that girl’s grieving mother, and in so doing, became a writer who returns to that moment again and again, attempting to reshape the irrevocable, searching for truth and meaning, if not solace, in the spot where the wound will never heal. (Adapted from a review by Dani Shapiro, who is the author of five novels and the memoirs “Slow Motion” and “Devotion.”) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100915 ... jane Half a Life Darin Strauss 100915 ... jane i wrote to mr. strauss about a year ago after hearing a story of his on this_american_life. here was my email: Mr. Strauss, I just heard your story on This American Life (a little late, yes, but I enjoy digging in the archives). As a former creative writing student at NYU, my heart pangs a bit when I wonder what a class with you may have entailed. A minor tragedy, perhaps, that I left New York in 2005. The other interesting thing I encountered in researching your name was that your book is entitled "Cheng and Eng." Recently, I have been doing some dabbling research into conjoined twins, namely reading the book "Mutants" by Armand Marie Leroi and watching documentaries on Brittany and Abigail Hensel and Lori and Reba Schappell. For whatever reason, though, I felt compelled to write you a message. Namely one from my old NYU address, so you wouldn't think I was a lunatic. P.S. Do you have a typed version of the story you read on T.A.L.? I would be interested in reading it and possibly sharing it with a friend of mine. Thanks~ ---- he wrote back to me, a couple of times, and then we lost contact. i believe he and his wife had just had twins, so i understand ;) 100915 ... rt jane...THIS IS ONE OF THE COOLEST things i have ever read. i admire your empathy for him and your ability to strike up correspondence with a writer of such talent. i heard an interview with him recently on the ny times book review podcast. they were featuring his book, half a life. thanks for sharing the email you sent him. it's a huge gift to this game. i think it is worthy of 3 bonus points... +6=220 jane! 100915 ... rt jane...THIS IS ONE OF THE COOLEST things i have ever read. i admire your empathy for him and your ability to strike up correspondence with a writer of such talent. i heard an interview with him recently on the ny times book review podcast. they were featuring his book, half a life. thanks for sharing the email you sent him. it's a huge gift to this game. i think it is worthy of 3 bonus points... +6=220 jane! 100915 ... rt Question 177 When Michael Kimbell said that "nobody is writing sentences" like this author's sentences, he was not exaggerating. Her lines, her stories, are spiky things that don't sit easily in the hand. I felt a peculiar sort of stress as I read her fresh collection, newly published by Dzanc Books; I was confronted with how the stories resist simple narrative and scene and dialogue, while at the same time luring me in with their intoxicating mood, the emotive power behind miscommunication, and the uncertain standing her characters--like us readers--have in the world. There is something precise and potent in her brief tales of family, lovers, and attempts to connect (twenty-one stories are collected in this 100-page book); each tale is a portal to the tender points that serve as a harmonic to our everyday talk and she focuses especially on speech; there are a lot of verbal exchanges here that are often manifested in one-word banter. In her conversation with Kimball, she said that this minimalist approach to dialogue is intended to convey how most of us only hear a word or two of what others say. What is on the page, then, is what sticks for these characters. For readers navigating the exchanges, we experience both a rawness and mutedness to this filtered kind of conversation: what is heard and, sometimes, meant, is set in high relief, while the lack of contextual words and verbal filler that we are accustomed to in speech gives these exchanges a dream-like, underwater feel. At the same time, even outside of the speech in her stories, her writing is patently sonic; it is evident that she hears every syllable of her stories. To read them is to defamiliarize these syllables, to meet them again, anew. "Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." That's the epigraph for her book, a translated quote from Max Born's The Restless Universe--which her father used to read to her when she was young, and of which she understood nearly nothing. Like Born, her book is interested in alternative octaves; as a reader, the temptation to stick with what is visible, what we are familiar with in traditional storytelling, exacerbates the awe we feel when confronted with ... let us call it the invisible light. What we see there, what rhymes and dissents from what we know in the visible light, feels essential. This is a collection that operates on its own pitch, its own time, its own light. It is "minimal" storytelling only in it that is says nothing extra; little galaxies are contained in these spare stories. (Adapted from a review @Isak) check out the animation/promotion for this book on youtube. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100916 ... lostgirl Further Adventures in the Restless Universe By Dawn Raffel i would probably enjoy this....especially since i so often find solace in writing about the metaphorical reality we all live within (and without.)  one reviewer sums it up perfectly....    “Dawn Raffel’s stories are like prismatic drops of rain, hanging from the edge of a roof or sliding down a windshield, reflecting an entire world within. The language of motherhood, of adulthood, of childhood—the language of family and individual—has never been like this.” (i loved the animated promo....though I was waiting for those planets to collide.) 100916 ... rt +3=215 lostgirl! Question 178 Thirty years ago, this author's Endless Love pulled off that rarest of parlays in modern-day fiction: a "literary" novel that crossed over and became a pop success -- a best-seller that spawned a terrible Brooke Shields movie and a saccharine Diana Ross/Lionel Richie theme-song. Since then, he has written six novels of extraordinary scope and range -- books as diverse as a Hitchcockian study of a lover's death and re-appearance (Waking the Dead), and a vision of the world as seen through the eyes of the son of a Dylan-esque rock-and-roll genius (The Rich Man's Table). Now, with his new book, I think he is about to cross over again, because he has written nothing less than An American Tragedy for the 21st century. Like Dreiser's masterpiece, this book illuminates American life by focusing on a single act of murder. In this case, it's an accidental one, uniting five characters, each wildly different and each drawn with astonishing clarity. Paul Phillips, the protagonist, is a high-level carpenter and cabinet-maker -- and one of the book's deepest pleasures is the way it portrays the inner life of an artisan, one who feels the grain and swirl of the wood beneath his hands the way a poet senses consonants and vowels. One gray afternoon, in a forest off the Saw Mill Parkway, Paul crosses path with a fugitive lowlife named Will Claff, who has hideously funkified his own life by placing (and losing) a $5,000 bet on a meaningless game between the Portland TrailBlazers and the Seattle Supersonics (the mundane nature of that game is a stroke of genius). When the gentle-souled Phillips objects to the way Claff is beating his dog -- and Claff, paranoid to the point of hallucination, imagines that Paul is a collector sent by the mob -- their argument turns physical, and the physical turns fatal. Without ever meaning to, Paul kills Claff -- and, taking pity on the beaten mutt, adopts it as he flees the scene. The proverbial tree -- in this case, a human life -- has fallen in the forest, but no-one has heard it ... except the man who felled it. So the driving tension of the story becomes: what happens when a live-and-let-live man is forced to take a life? And how can you survive, day to day, when you've become the homicide cop hot on your own trail, when your own conscience becomes a relentless detective? Do you keep your crime a secret? Or do you dare to share it with a soul-mate? Paul's soul-mate is Kate Ellis, a hugely successful author of bohemian-Christian, recovery-based books, who shares a house with him in "Leyden," New York -- clearly modeled on the author's own home-town of Rhinebeck. Their household is also peopled by Ruby, Kate's grade-school-aged daughter, and now by their adopted dog, whom he has the audacity to name "Shep." W.C. Fields famously warned against sharing the stage with children and dogs, but Ruby and Shep are drawn with such haunting insight they'd even make that old drunk re-consider. It's an intimidating challenge to portray the inner life of a mongrel without being cute, and it's one of the book's many pleasures that he brings it off. Another joy of the book is the way it toys with genre. Clearly, there are elements of noir and crime fiction at work here, but the story provides genre kicks without genre formula, so you never sense exactly where it's going. An actual detective picks up the trail, and his tracking of Paul is an exciting subplot, but the truly compelling suspense -- and mystery -- evolves from the killing's effect on Paul, Kate and Ruby. Counterpointed with this suspense is another tension, provided by the timing of the story--the days leading up to the end of the last century, and the fears -- hilarious in retrospect -- about Y2K. Here is the author on that curious phenomenon: "In an instant of ice-clear certainty Kate knows that when midnight strikes and all the computers that are responsible to keeping everyone sane and alive fail or don't fail, the end result will be basically nothing. We are not being kept alive by algorithms of 1s and 0s, we are not creatures of some cosmic mainframe. Y2K is going to be a bust, a big letdown posing as a huge relief, a sore disappointment that we will agree to be pleased about. All the precautions, the hard drives copied, the larders filled, the flights postponed, the water stored, the personal information photocopied, the bank accounts emptied into floor safes, wall safes, mattresses, the candles and the kerosene, and the firewood, all those apocalyptic speeches from our leaders -- it was all a desperate attempt to find some meaning, a predictable narrative. The hour will come and it will pass, and the only horror of it will be just that -- another hour will have passed, and after that another one will, and then another. Y2K will be soon forgotten. The things for which we feverishly prepare aren't generally the things that actually happening. Our undoing comes waltzing in through another door altogether..." I've rarely read a passage with such ferocious insight into our national psyche, so telling about our predilection to seek out a pseudo-apocalypse for comfort at the very moment that a genuine one is lurking just beyond our field of vision -- an insight that's amplified by the unspoken awareness of what would happen in lower Manhattan just nine months later. So the book turns into a mystery encompassing not only Paul and Claff, but the character of America at the turn of the century. Filled with superb nature writing -- the branches of a forest are like "ten thousand cracks in a mirror" -- as well as utterly original characters and a plot as compelling as a Lee Child tale, this is a book poised to take its place as an American classic. Don't wait for the Brook Shields movie. (Adapted from a review in the Huffington Post) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100917 ... lostgirl Man in the Woods By Scott Spencer interesting how a single decision, event, or encounter can change lives forever, isn't it.... (that's not much of a personal response, but the basic premise of this novel is one that i live by, so the chances are pretty good i will read it and like it.) no paths in this crazy maze we call 'life' are crossed by accident. 100917 ... rt +3=218 lostgirl! his first novel, "endless love" is a haunting coming-of-age tale that will leave an indelible imprint. 100918 ... rt Question 179 How Mom and I outran the tornado On a tumultuous cross-country road trip to a new life, I saw how powerful my mother was -- and how vulnerable The following is an excerpt from a memoir of the author presented... The beer, I thought, must be in the compartment under the trunk with the tire jack, or in the cooler with the baloney sandwiches and cartons of milk packed in ice, but otherwise I was puzzled. "Where are the Hershey bars and peanuts?" I asked. "Huh?" my mom replied, distracted, her arms stretched over the roof of the station wagon, adjusting bungee cords. It was the morning we were leaving Sonoma, and all the neighbor kids and their mothers were crowded around our fully loaded car, which my mom had strategically packed inside and on top with everything we'd need for the week it would take us to drive across the country. For days on end as Billy and John and I had raced our bikes in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids or gone swimming with Mary Anne or to movie matinees chaperoned by one of the other moms, my mother had been packing up in preparation for the moving van and driving us across the country by herself. When we reached Ohio, she would leave us for a couple of weeks with relatives we knew only by name, my father's younger brother Don and his family, while she and our dad found us a new place to live in Pennsylvania. My father had already taken an airplane to Philadelphia, where he had a new job working for the government in the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs. He'd sent us presents made by the tribes he was working for: I got a beaded doll without a face, which was hard to love though I tried. I'd asked my mother why he didn't want his little adobe office on the Plaza anymore, with its crackly leather chair and the enticing hot cinnamon from the bakery wafting through the open windows. She'd answered in terms that she must have thought were appropriately concrete but free of confusing details: His job in Sonoma made him sad. Years later I learned that most of his private practice work had been filing divorces. ----- My mom had been promoting our trip across America as a great adventure. Since she was about to drive 3,000 miles by herself with three children, two dogs, and three cats, one of whom was going to give birth again any day, her only hope for survival was to whip us into an enthusiastic frenzy and pray the spirit of fun would carry us through. I couldn't wait. Seven solid days of McDonald's, A&W, Kentucky Fried, Shakey's Pizza, International House of Pancakes, Arby's, Foster's Freeze -- nothing could be better. And every night in a new motel: My mother, I knew, had left room in her suitcase for all the hotel towels we would be collecting for our new house in Pennsylvania. Holiday Inn's bath linens had a better color scheme, but by dint of some carefully timed wheedling I'd extracted the promise that we'd stay at a Howard Johnson's whenever we had the chance. If there was anything that could beat McDonald's Filet-o-Fish it was HoJo's crispy fried clams, and I saw the entire cross-country trip as an opportunity for reunion with Howard Johnson's coconut cake. In those innocent days before car seats and seat belt laws, kids could roll all over a car unrestricted, so my mother put the back seat down in the station wagon and made our car into a big playroom. She padded the floor with a chenille bedspread, and she lined the edges with board games and coloring books and pillows and the camping cooler. Jean-Tom and Robespierre yowled in one mesh-sided cat carrier and pregnant Musette had a second to her preoccupied self, but the dogs were free to wander the interior, on the lookout for unattended sandwiches, ready to press their damp noses against my mom's neck as she drove. Our suitcases and an enormous bag of dog food were strapped onto the luggage rack under a canvas dropcloth. "Your tail is riding kind of low," one of the teenage Verboten boys snickered from the curb when we'd gotten into the car. My mom sat in front by herself in her red bandanna, the Triple A Triptiks sharing the passenger seat with her purse and files of important papers and boxes of breakables she hadn't trusted to the movers. She checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror and beamed at us over her shoulder. "This is going to be fun!" she cried, and we all hooted and waved as she laid on the horn and pulled away, the younger neighborhood kids racing after us on their bikes, handlebar tassels flying, to the end of the street. That first day out, somewhere near the high-desert town of Winnemucca, Nevada, a freak flash flood washed out the highway. We turned back to the only motel we could reach; the proprietor put us in an upstairs room, as the creek we were on was expected to keep rising. We sat on the lumpy beds and ate the rest of the baloney for dinner, listening to the endless surge of water pouring down the creek, the bar's neon sign throbbing red all night through the curtains. "A flash flood -- now, that's exciting!" my mom said, peering out the motel's window at the churning creek. "This'll be something you can write on a postcard to your friends. I bet they've never been in a flash flood before!" On the second day, a salt storm kicked up while we were crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert. We waited it out for hours, pulled to the shoulder of the highway like every other vehicle on the road, visibility nil as the storm continued to hiss at the windows, sandblasting the paint off our car. The wind blew so hard it knocked a livestock truck on its side, and giant hogs came bursting out of the opacity, lifting their pink snouts and squealing in panic as they trotted past us on either side of the station wagon, men chasing after them wearing their shirts tied over their faces. "A salt storm!" my mother marveled, gazing out the blind white windshield as Billy and John and I played checkers in the back. "What are the chances we'd be lucky enough to see something like this?" On the third day, after arriving in Denver long after dark, too late and too tired to look for a Howard Johnson's or any other cheap motel, my mother awoke in the middle of the night in our expensive downtown hotel room to discover that Musette was having her kittens inside my mom's open suitcase -- on top of all of her clothes, except for the grubby outfit she'd dropped on the carpet after wearing it for two days straight. Two kittens, three kittens, a fourth; then the fifth kitten started to be born breech. My mother went into veterinary midwife action. She tried to help Musette ease that kitten out, but it was stuck. "What's going to happen, Mommy?" we asked, creeping out from under the covers to lean across the end of the bed, where our mother was hunched in front of her suitcase, muttering "geez louise, geez louise" over and over, telling us to stay back, the hotel's towels bloody all around her. "I don't know -- " she said, her response unusually curt, then softening, as if she suddenly remembered us. "But it's going to be okay, don't you worry ..." Throwing on her dirty clothes, a smear of blood across her cheek from pushing her hair off her face, my mother loaded us back into the car with Musette and the kittens. She drove up and down Denver's deserted streets in a futile search for a veterinarian's office, enlisting us all in a joint prayer to Saint Jude. Finally she was able to flag down a policeman, who escorted us to the only emergency vet in the city. We got back to our hotel and the other animals as the sun was rising behind the bright sharp edges of the downtown buildings. Musette survived, and the first four kittens. My mom's hands trembled as she packed us all into the station wagon to head for Kansas. "That was the worst of it," she said, shooting us a weak smile in the rearview mirror and starting the engine. After we'd passed through Topeka, the midday sky closed up and went black. As the local radio station we were listening to announced the tornado warning, the cars in the opposite lane of the highway pulled squealing onto the shoulder, the entire lane of traffic turning around and merging into ours, all of us heading east at increasing speed. Behind us, we could see the tornado's funnel sucking all the blackness toward itself. "Put the leashes on the dogs now, Billy," my mom said, her voice brittle with false calm as she outlined detailed instructions for each of us in case she decided to pull into a ditch. The speedometer was showing 90 miles per hour, both lanes of the highway bumper-to-bumper with vehicles racing eastward, some cars and trucks passing us neatly by along the shoulders. "Not until I tell you to, okay? But here 's the plan -- Billy, you take the dogs. Cissy, you take the boy cats in their carrier. John -- John, you sit right by the door, Mommy will hold your hand and bring Musette. If I stop, we'll all crawl under the car, got it? Billy, tell me what it looks like now." "It's closer, Mommy. It looks bigger." The radio had stopped working, broadcasting only a deafening spray of static. My mom gunned the engine and drove. One hundred miles an hour, 110. "That's fast, isn't it, Mommy?" John piped up. "Yeah, that's fast," Billy and I confirmed, nodding our heads up and down. When we rattled to a halt in Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of hours later, our engine was blowing billows of smoke almost as black as the tornado, which my mother had outrun at a sustained 115 miles an hour. We spent the next day splashing in the pool of a motel in Lawrence while the station wagon was being serviced, my mother lying prone on a lounge chair in the shade, a wet washcloth draped over her face. "Don't talk to me," she said when we came over and poked her shoulder to see if she was still breathing, "I just outran a tornado. Wait until Sally Verboten hears about this." On the last day of our trip, we were finally closing in on our cousins in Dayton, my brothers and I campaigned heavily for McDonald's. Again. There'd been exactly one HoJo's on our entire route, and pancakes with blueberry syrup at IHOP had launched us every morning; otherwise we 'd stayed in whatever motels we could find and eaten every meal courtesy of McDonald's. Not again, my mother said, but finally we wore her down. It didn't hurt that she realized we would reach Dayton well after dinnertime and a McDonald's sign appeared up the highway, beckoning in the distance like a mirage oasis in the desert, as we'd all begun to whine. "Okay," she said wearily, flicking on her turn signal for the exit ramp, "but we 're not sitting inside. We'll go to the drive-through." If you had a strawberry milkshake and a packet of fresh french fries, the best way to eat them, to my eight-year-old mind, was to munch a few fries, drink a bit of the milkshake, and dip the rest of the fries into the milkshake to taste the thick icy sweetness of the shake against the hot salt of the fries. The straw and the plastic lid on the shake, therefore, were impediments to complete satisfaction. I was enjoying my first handful of fries and just prying the lid off my strawberry shake, humming noisily and perched cross-legged right behind the driver's seat, when my mother swung around to face me, her unwashed hair flying out from under her sweaty bandanna, which she'd worn every day since my dad left for his new job. "DON'T --" she started to threaten through clenched teeth, her face contorted with menace, too exhausted and ground down to pretend anymore, this close to the finish line. "Don'tyoudare," she warned me, pointing a long, skinny finger at me, "takethetopoffthatmilkshakeit'llspillallover." Chastened, I snapped the milkshake lid back onto the waxed cup. I sucked demurely on the straw. But after a while I just sort of forgot. As I started to pry the lid off my milkshake a second time, the cup somehow exploded in my hand, sending a pink tsunami of milkshake toward the back of my mother's head. In the rearview mirror I watched her eyes grow wide and black when the cold sting of milkshake splashed over her neck and started dripping down her dirty, five-days-worn collar, down her back between her shoulder blades. For an hour she raved. "I hate this goddamned family -- nobody helps me -- I have to do everything myself -- I wish I could run away --" She wept and swore, her hands shaking with rage on the steering wheel. We were blown back by the force of her fury and frustration, huddled together at the tailgate of the station wagon, hugging the dogs. We escaped the car as if it were on fire as soon as we pulled to a stop in front of Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia's house, and I peeped through a window curtain in their living room and watched my mother continue to stammer and weep as she stood on the driveway rinsing herself off with the garden hose, holding the gushing end down the back of her filthy shirt. "C'mon, kids," my aunt Virginia said cheerfully, luring me away from the window, rounding my brothers up from the couch where they sat next to each other, mute and paralyzed and white-faced. Her own two toddlers were already asleep in their bedrooms. She'd started running a bath for our mom; we could hear the water pounding into the tub. "Let's go in the kitchen," she said. "We can make popcorn balls." ----- Ohio rained. The only thing for us to do in the inclement weather was to sit in the living room while our little cousins took their endless naps, eating popcorn and watching soap operas with Aunt Virginia as she ironed her clean laundry. Some days we made popcorn balls with corn syrup that seeped at its own slow pace out of the bottle, and I paid attention as Aunt Virginia buttered the inside of the saucepan so the boiling sugar concoction wouldn't stick. Sometimes we colored them red or green or blue. Sometimes we made caramel corn with brown sugar and salted nuts and it was better than Cracker Jack. Other times we made popcorn à la Rice Krispie Treats, glued together with marshmallows and margarine melted into a stretchy goo. We buttered our hands, too, when we helped shape the popcorn into balls big enough to last through an entire episode of "General Hospital" or "Guiding Light." "Maybe tomorrow we'll go outside," Aunt Virginia would say hopefully, gazing out the kitchen window at the perpetually unpromising sky, even-tempered and patient though she undoubtedly had not anticipated being stuck inside with five bored children for two weeks when she agreed to watch us while my mom and dad house-hunted. At last we were escorted to our new house in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a rural township of gently sloping fields and Amish dairy farms that was the last stop on the Main Line. What had my mother done without us? Though my father had disappeared every day for as long as I could remember, doing his job or going to the dump with carloads of grass clippings, my mother had always been close by. This was the first time my brothers and I had ever been truly away from her. She'd found us a place to live, Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia had told us, but how long could that take? I pictured her with my dad driving up to unknown but comfortingly familiar motel rooms with HoJos towels on the bathroom rack, eating fried clams in the restaurant with no one to share them with, packing the HoJos towels into her suitcase all by herself, with no one to help her squeeze them down while she zipped the suitcase shut. Beyond that I had no idea how she might have spent her time. Now I wonder if she might have taken a walk alone, or an uninterrupted bath. Maybe she read a book. Maybe she finished the thoughts in her head, or lost track of where she was altogether. Maybe she spent every minute going from bank to phone booth to hardware store, unpacking, organizing, cleaning a kitchen and bathrooms that weren't left quite clean enough by the people who'd lived there before. Maybe she found herself sitting in the middle of a wide green lawn in Pennsylvania, watching shadows bend the fading light under a vast old black walnut tree, and in the distance her three children were shambling out of a car and approaching her, shyly, and she didn't look back to how beleaguered she felt the last time she saw them but, instead, without thinking, she swung her arms out to hold her sweet bumbling kids, her skinny blond boys and her newly tubby, graceless little girl -- who made her feel lucky to wake up every morning, who were running toward her across a vast space, relying on her to show them what it felt like to be home. (Excerpt courtesy from Random House) For three points, name the author, her memoir, and give a personal response... 100918 ... lostgirl Cakewalk By Kate Moses this looks a little sappy in the memoir department, however i must admit i am intrigued by the story...we used to take those (partial) cross country trips when i was a kid, and i recall with vivid clarity the adventure, though my own memoir would contain much more fun than heartache.  i will admit, however that i have an extraordinarily superior memory when it comes to food. so i can definitely relate to that part of this book.... if one were to ask me what i ate at a given restaurant on a given visit with enough context, i would be able to relive and recite the entire culinary experience. i'm weird like that...what can i say?  100919 ... rt +3=221 lostgirl! 100920 ... rt Question 180 The following is an excerpt of the book and author presented... SLIPPING THE TRAP OF APPETITE The whitebait Opens its black eyes In the net of the Law. --Basho THE BAIT THIEF The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art. Aristotle wrote that Homer first "taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way." Homer makes lies seem so real that they enter the world and walk among us. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to be Homer's own self-portrait, for Odysseus, too, is a master of the art of lying, an art he got from his grandfather, Autolycus, who got it in turn from his father, Hermes. And Hermes, in an old story we shall soon consider, invented lying when he was a hungry child with a hankering for meat. But I'm making a straight line out of a narrative that twists and turns, and I'm getting ahead of myself. We must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to keep his stomach full. Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides so he can watch the four horizons. To amuse himself by day, he changes into a salmon, swimming the mountain streams, leaping the waterfalls. Sitting by the fire one morning, trying to imagine how the others might possibly capture him, he takes linen string and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made ever since. Just at that moment, the others approach. Loki throws the net into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. But the gods find the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. In this way, Loki is finally captured. It makes a nice emblem of trickster's ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and then getting caught in it. Moreover, the device in question is a central trickster invention. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir out of logs and branches. On the North Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhook; he taught the spider how to make her web and human beings how to make nets. The history of trickery in Greece goes back to similar origins. "Trick" is dolos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish. East and west, north and south, this is the oldest trick in the book. No trickster has ever been credited with inventing a potato peeler, a gas meter, a catechism, or a tuning fork, but trickster invents the fish trap. Coyote was going along by a big river when he got very hungry. He built a trap of poplar poles and willow branches and set it in the water. "Salmon!" he called out. "Come into this trap." Soon a big salmon came along and swam into the chute of the trap and then flopped himself out on the bank where Coyote clubbed him to death. "I will find a nice place in the shade and broil this up," thought Coyote. Trickster commonly relies on his prey to help him spring the traps he makes. In this fragment of a Nez Perce story from northeastern Idaho, Coyote's salmon weir takes advantage of forces the salmon themselves provide. Salmon in a river are swimming upstream to spawn; sexual appetite or instinct gives them a particular trajectory and Coyote works with it. Even with a baited hook, the victim's hunger is the moving part. The worm just sits there; the fish catches himself. Likewise, in a Crow story from the Western Plains, Coyote traps two buffalo by stampeding them into the sun so they cannot see where they are going, then leading them over a cliff. The fleetness of large herbivores is part of their natural defense against predators; Coyote (or the Native Americans who slaughtered buffalo in this way) takes advantage of that instinctual defense by directing the beasts into the sun and toward a cliff, so that fleetness itself backfires. In the invention of traps, trickster is a technician of appetite and a technician of instinct. And yet, as the Loki story indicates, trickster can also get snared in his own devices. Trickster is at once culture hero and fool, clever predator and stupid prey. Hungry, trickster sometimes devises stratagems to catch his meal; hungry, he sometimes loses his wits altogether. An Apache story from Texas, in which Rabbit has played a series of tricks on Coyote, ends as follows: Rabbit came to a field of watermelons. In the middle of the field there was a stick figure made of gum. Rabbit hit it with his foot and got stuck. He got his other foot stuck, then one hand and then his other hand and finally his head. This is how Coyote found him. "What are you doing like this?" asked Coyote. "The farmer who owns this melon patch was mad because I would not eat melons with him. He stuck me on here and said that in a while he would make me eat chicken with him. I told him I wouldn't do it." "You are foolish. I will take your place." Coyote pulled Rabbit free and stuck himself up in the gum trap. When the farmer who owned the melons came out and saw Coyote he shot him full of holes. Coyote doesn't just get stuck in gum traps, either; in other stories, a range of animals--usually sly cousins such as Fox or Rabbit or Spider--make a fool of him and steal his meat. So trickster is cunning about traps but not so cunning as to avoid them himself. To my mind, then, the myth contains a story about the incremental creation of an intelligence about hunting. Coyote can imagine the fish trap precisely because he's been a fish himself, as it were. Nothing counters cunning but more cunning. Coyote's wits are sharp precisely because he has met other wits, just as the country bumpkin may eventually become a cosmopolitan if enough confidence men appear to school him. Some recent ideas in evolutionary theory echo these assertions. In Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence, Harry Jerison presents a striking chart showing the relative intelligence of meat-eaters and the herbivores they prey on. Taking the ratio of brain to body size as a crude index, Jerison finds that if we compare herbivores and carnivores at any particular moment in history the predators are always slightly brainier than the prey. But the relationship is never stable; there is a slow step-by-step increase in intelligence on both sides. If we chart the brain-body ratio on a scale of 1 to 10, in the archaic age herbivores get a 2 and carnivores a 4; thirty million years later the herbivores are up to 4 but the carnivores have gone up to 6; another thirty million years and the herbivores are up to 6 but the carnivores are up to 8; finally, when the herbivores get up to 9, the carnivores are up to 10. The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other. If this myth contains a story about incrementally increasing intelligence, where does it lead? What happens after the carnivore gets up to 10? There is a great deal of folklore about coyotes in the American West. One story has it that in the old days sheep farmers tried to get rid of wolves and coyotes by putting out animal carcasses laced with strychnine. The wolves, they say, were killed in great numbers, but the coyotes wised up and avoided these traps. Another story has it that when trappers set metal leg traps they will catch muskrat and mink and fox and skunk, but coyote only rarely. Coyotes develop their own relationship to the trap; as one naturalist has written, "it is difficult to escape the conclusion that coyotes ... have a sense of humor. How else to explain, for instance, the well-known propensity of experienced coyotes to dig up traps, turn them over, and urinate or defecate on them?" With this image we move into a third relationship between tricksters and traps. When a coyote defecates on a trap he is neither predator nor prey but some third thing. A fragment of a native Tlingit story from Alaska will help us name that thing: [Raven] came to a place where many people were encamped fishing.... He entered a house and asked what they used for bait. They said, "Fat." Then he said, "Let me see you put enough on your hooks for bait," and he noticed carefully how they baited and handled their hooks. The next time they went out, he walked off behind a point and went underwater to get this bait. Now they got bites and pulled up quickly, but there was nothing on their hooks. Raven eventually gets in trouble for this little trick (the fishermen steal his beak and he has to pull an elaborate return-ruse to get it back), but for now the point is simply that in the relationship between fish and fishermen this trickster stands to the side and takes on a third role. A similar motif appears in Africa with the Zulu trickster known as Thlokunyana. Thlokunyana is imagined to be a small man, "the size of a weasel," and in fact one of his other names also refers to a red weasel with a black-tipped tail. A Zulu storyteller describes this animal as cleverer than all others, for its cunning is great. If a trap is set for a wild cat, [the weasel] comes immediately to the trap, and takes away the mouse which is placed there for the cat: it takes it out first; and when the cat comes the mouse has been already eaten by the weasel. If a hunter does manage to trap this tricky weasel, he will have bad luck. A kind of jinx or magical influence remains in the trap that has caught a weasel and that influence forever after "stands in the way" of the trap's power; it will no longer catch game. Coyote in fact and folklore, Raven and Thlokunyana in mythology--in each of these cases, trickster gets wise to the bait and is therefore all the harder to catch. The coyote who avoids a strychnined carcass is perhaps the simplest case; he does not get poisoned but he also gets nothing to eat. Raven and Thlokunyana are more cunning in this regard; they are bait-thief tricksters who separate the trap from the meat and eat the meat. Each of these tales has a predator-prey relationship in it--the fish and the fishermen, for example--but the bait thief doesn't enter directly into that oppositional eating game. A parasite or epizoon, he feeds his belly while standing just outside the conflict between hunter and hunted. From that position the bait thief becomes a kind of critic of the usual rules of the eating game and as such subverts them, so that traps he has visited lose their influence. What trapper's pride could remain unshaken once he's read Coyote's commentary? In all these stories, trickster must do more than feed his belly; he must do so without himself getting eaten. Trickster's intelligence springs from appetite in two ways; it simultaneously seeks to satiate hunger and to subvert all hunger not its own. This last is an important theme. In the Okanagon creation story, the Great Spirit, having told Coyote that he must show the New People how to catch salmon, goes on to say: "I have important work for you to do ... There are many bad creatures on earth. You will have to kill them, otherwise they will eat the New People. When you do this, the New People will honor you ... They will honor you for killing the People-devouring monsters and for teaching ... all the ways of living." In North America, trickster stepped in to defeat the monsters who used to feed on humans. The myth says, then, that there are large, devouring forces in this world, and that trickster's intelligence arose not just to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters. Typically, this meeting is oppositional--the prey outwitting the predator. The bait thief suggests a different, nonoppositional strategy. Here trickster feeds himself where predator and prey meet, but rather than entering the game on their terms he plays with its rules. Perhaps, then, another force behind trickster's cunning is the desire to remove himself from the eating game altogether, or at least see how far out he can get and still feed his belly (for if he were to stop eating entirely he would no longer be trickster). For three points, name the author, his book, and for an additional five points, name your favorite trickster... 100920 ... lostgirl Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde aaaaah the trickster. the master of exploiting duality, the upsetter of balance, the catalyst for change, and oh, yes the creator of games.... my favorite? Hermes? no. the coyote? no.... perhaps it's the Tiger_King....   100921 ... rt +3=124 hey_lostgirl! Question 181 This author wrote her first memoir, "Looking Back," when she was 19; now, at 44, she has written her second. In the 25 intervening years, she bought a house, nearly had a nervous breakdown, lost her virginity to the soundtrack of "Pippin," met Mary Tyler Moore and Muhammad Ali, was raped, got married, appeared on TV, had three children, emptied her breast milk into the Atlantic, planted a garden, went broke, had an abortion, clawed through a heap of garbage looking for a lost retainer, wrote three novels, watched her parents get divorced and die, got divorced herself, bought another house, got breast implants and took them out again, took tennis lessons, sold most of her possessions and moved from New Hampshire to California. Over the years, she has related many of these events in her syndicated newspaper column (now defunct) and in articles for women's magazines. Oddly, she has been chastized severely, and often for imagining that any of them could possibly be interesting. The one thing she has done that everyone agrees is interesting is have a nine-month affair with J.D. Salinger. The story, as she tells it in her new book, goes like this. Twenty-six years ago, when she was a freshman at Yale, she published an essay in these pages, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life," that made her famous. Among the hundreds of letters she received in response to the article, and to the winsome photograph of her that appeared on the cover, was one from Salinger, then 53. She corresponded with him for several weeks, met him, fell in love with him and quit school to move into his house in New Hampshire. He told her that she was very talented, and that he loved her. They talked about having children. They lived together through the winter of 1972 and into the following spring. But she began to irritate him: she was sloppy, she read TV Guide and little else, she wrote what she thought people would like to read because she wanted fame and glamour. She was too clenched up to have intercourse -- she got terrible headaches when they tried. Finally, disappointed, Salinger sent her away. For years, she refused to discuss this affair. In doing so now, she is violating the privacy of a figure who is revered in a very personal way by a great many people, both for his writing and for his decision to retreat into the silence that she is breaking. She will be -- indeed she already has been -- called shameless and mercenary. She knows this, of course. In the months preceding the book's publication, she was to be found at home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, editing her manuscript and driving her 14-year-old, Willy, to his tennis tournaments. She has spent much of her life engaged in mother activity of this sort -- perhaps she'd be a better writer if she hadn't. We met at a match one afternoon and lay on the grass in the shade with her unsightly dog and her exquisite son. She laughed frequently -- a loud laugh with a hysterical edge to it, involving knee-slapping. Writing this book had been, for her, the exorcism of a past that has been festering for years. "When I first embarked on it, it felt like such a forbidden thing, like my grandfather eating pork," she said. "But now I've come to feel there's nothing so terrible about the truth, and it's such a relief." She could now joke about her notoriety. She told me about a guy she met at a party in San Francisco. "He came over to me and said: You're the one who lived with. . . ."' she snapped her fingers, imitating the man trying to remember the name. "'Thomas Pynchon?' I said, and he says: 'Yeah! That's the one!"' The day she went to meet Salinger for the first time, she wore an extraordinary dress. She and her mother designed it together for the occasion. It was, she says, almost an exact replica of the dress she wore to her first day of first grade -- very short and made out of stiff white material covered with alphabet letters in primary colors. Her mother, Fredelle, used to refer to clothes as "costumes," and this dress was to be her costume for her meeting with Salinger, for playing the part of helpless little girl to his much older man. There is still something unsettlingly childlike about her. She is tiny and cute; her dark brown eyes are so big they are just short of buggy. She wears red hooded sweatshirts and little sheepskin booties. But there is also something almost tangibly maternal about her, as though her skin retained impressions from her children's bodies. The thing people say about her is that she takes up a lot of space. She is not one for keeping quiet about things. She is dramatic and demands attention. She experiences wild ups and precipitous downs. She is always getting into car accidents. Once, in a pizza restaurant with her family, she dumped a glass of beer over her head by way of communicating her frustration with the evening. "It's easy to wonder whether it's love she's looking for, or fame, or attention," says the novelist Joseph McElroy, an old friend. "God knows, she wants attention and intends to get it." The pairing of her and Salinger -- the writer whose metier is autobiography and the writer who's so private he won't even publish -- was an unlikely one, and the story of their affair makes for uncomfortable reading. The Salinger that emerges from her side of the story is a rather attenuated figure. We don't see him writing or talking about writing -- he didn't let her into that part of his life. We see him only in his relationship with her: the waxing and waning of his love for her and the eccentric domestic rituals with which the waning was entwined (his peculiar diet, his meditation, his practice of homeopathy). At the time she was living with Salinger, she was at the height of her fame: she had become the unofficial spokesperson for the Youth of America, and people were continually calling her up, asking her to appear on the radio, to write articles, to have her photograph taken. Under Salinger's influence, she turned many offers down. Still, Salinger could tell she was tempted, and was disgusted by her worldliness. Of course, Salinger's own obsessive privacy was also a form of caring about the world's opinion, a poisonous sensitivity. In one of her few references in her memoir to Salinger's writing, she observes that his voice in person is Holden Caulfield's voice, only not so kind. In her account, the contempt for everything and everyone "phony" that in the teen-age Holden betokened a kind of hopeful idealism seems in the older Salinger rigid to the point of cruelty. She bought her house in Marin County two years ago. It sits on the steep side of a woody hill; from her deck you can see Mount Tamalpais. One wall of her living room -- the wall she faces when she is sitting at her computer, working -- is hung with 24 brightly colored masks. She has always felt these masks to be a benevolent presence while she writes, and she recently realized that they represent her readers to her. Her relationship with her readers is extremely close. One flew her family around in his private plane. Another recently asked her to officiate at her marriage. Several have lent her their homes to write in. When she left New Hampshire for California two years ago, she invited her readers to a tag sale, and some traveled from distant parts of the country to attend. Many keep in almost daily contact with her through her Web site (www.joycemaynard.com), on which she posts bulletins about her life and exchanges messages with readers. Occasionally, she posts a note to explain why she cannot have coffee with absolutely everyone who wants to meet her: "A man wrote me from prison, to say my stories about my kids and my family were the one lifeline he had to the outside world. I wrote back with a picture of my children. He wrote back to say he'd come to visit us -- maybe fix the wiring in my house and paint it, maybe marry me -- as soon as he got out on parole. For the brutal murder of his parents, I learned." Still, those who check in regularly can learn, at a virtual remove, what Joyce's children are doing, what she's been cooking lately and where she's going on vacation. One longtime watcher, a television producer in New York, explained to me by E-mail: "She's the literary equivalent of 'The Truman Show' or Princess Diana -- we've watched her grow up with us. It's my favorite soap opera." Writers who write (or seem to be writing) about themselves tend to provoke very personal responses from their readers. To some, such responses are irritating, intrusive mistakes. After the publication of "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman received a letter from a woman who, heeding his expressions of lavish desire for his readers, offered herself up to the poet as the fleshy, sexual partner he appeared to be seeking. Whitman wrote back to her in chagrin and some disgust, explaining that he had not meant his poem to be taken literally. She might have responded differently. It's not that she wants sex from her readers, exactly -- but she does look to them, and has come to depend upon them, for love and reassurance. This is, of course, precisely the relationship to her public that Salinger warned her to avoid, because praise can tempt a reader to repeat himself. But for her, writing per se has never been the point. She doesn't see herself as a "literary" author. She calls herself a "journeyman writer," and an "entrepreneur." She has produced three novels, the most successful of which -- "To Die For" -- was made into a movie, but most of her time has been spent turning out articles for money. She wrote about getting breast implants for Self and then, four years later, about having them taken out again. When she had an abortion, she paid for it by writing about it for Redbook. She is not embarrassed by this. "I've assessed sports bras," she shrugs. "I've written about what the best ride is at Disney World. Last year, Willy wanted to go to tennis camp, so I got a job -- this was really a new level -- as the spokesperson for Diaper Genie. There was a time when my husband, Steve, and I were $10,000 in debt from uninsured medical expenses -- my daughter had broken her arm, we had two babies in diapers and I just didn't know what I was going to do -- and that was the moment I thought, I have a trade, a trade that I can ply as much as if I were a carpenter. "It troubles me that people speak about writing for money as ugly and distasteful. During that first flurry of criticism of this book, all kinds of people said, 'Oh, she's doing it for the money.' And I thought, Well of course I get paid! Imagine someone suggesting that a doctor shouldn't get paid!" (She received a low-six-figure advance for the book from Picador U.S.A.) "But I have to say," she continues, "there was no amount of money that could have persuaded me to write this story at any other stage of my life. I've had some very desperate money times over the years, but it was just never an option. And it wouldn't be something I'd get into now if I didn't feel that it was the right thing to do." In 1986, she published a collection of her syndicated newspaper columns in a book, cutely titled "Domestic Affairs: Enduring the Pleasures of Motherhood and Family Life." On the cover is a photograph of her and her three children standing in front of their old home in New Hampshire. Her eyes are red, and her mouth is drawn together in a tight half-smile. She looks awful. The cartoonish sweetness of her face is somehow exaggerated and made grotesque by her miserable, hopeless expression. She has just been crying, because her husband refused to be in the picture. The children look restless, glancing off in different directions. The camera is down near her knees as though it is another child at whom she is gazing in mute apology. This cover was appropriate. In her column, She tended to portray her life as a homey sitcom, each installment representing a lovable mistake made and a lesson humbly learned. But all the while, her marriage to Steve Bethel, an artist, was disintegrating. "A good home must be made, not bought," she wrote in one typically precious column. "In the end, it's not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen." It's easy to make fun of essays like this. And yet there is something movingly quixotic about her failed attempt to make her painful, messy, unflattering life, through her columns, into happy television. She wasn't wrong, either, about what was required of her: after her separation announcement, 20-odd newspapers discontinued her column on the grounds that, as far as family matters were concerned, she was no longer fit to comment. She was taught to write by her mother, a frustrated intellectual who in her middle years took to writing on family topics for women's magazines. In her articles, Fredelle, too, tended to render her life "the way it should have happened," as she used to put it. "To get the rhythm of a sentence, she would sacrifice authenticity every time," She recalls fondly. Her husband, Max, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, was an alcoholic, but his drinking was never discussed. It is to the emotional consequences of concealing this shame that she attributes her subsequent need for self-exposure. Her current book is a departure from her habitual college-application-essay style. She set out to write it very plainly, and she certainly did. There's barely an adjective in the entire thing. There's none of the murky texture of memory; her story is presented as immediate, undigested experience in the present tense. "I didn't want to tell a reader what to think of any of this," She explains. "I wanted people to live through it." This is, of course, just another variety of self-deception. But, oddly enough, it works. She has, as she intended, let herself rip, and while she is diluted, it can be cloying, and when she is at full strength -- in her very shamelessness; in the unrelenting thoroughness of her self-exposure; in her determination not only to tell the truth but to tear it open and eviscerate it and squeeze it until it is bled dry -- is surprisingly powerful. It is unlikely, however, that this change of style will be appreciated. She is no longer as famous as she once was, but ask anyone of roughly her age who grew up in this country, and he will not only know who she is -- but chances are he will react to her name with startling venom. Perhaps to them it still seems like only yesterday that, as teen-agers, they picked up that issue of The New York Times Magazine with her on the cover and wondered, Why isn't that me? The degree of derision she inspires is astonishing. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post complains that, reading her work, "you may . . . find yourself struggling to comprehend self-infatuation so vast and reckless that the victim cannot imagine a detail of her life so minute or trivial as to be of no interest to everyone else on this planet." Writes a former Yale classmate of hers, Alex Beam, in Slate, "She has hacked her way through three decades wrapped in a delusion torn from the Oliver Sacks casebook: The Woman Who Mistook Herself for Someone Interesting." An odd confusion runs through much of this criticism: in their hurry to condemn her for imagining that the trivial details of her life are interesting, her critics tend to veer into claiming that trivial details of life in general are not interesting. In the world of criticism, it can seem as though the novel never existed. She has been attacked like this her entire career, but she still gets infuriated. "If people choose to live their life in a way that does not confront the more troubling aspects of their experience," she says, "that's fine, if it works for them. But it will probably make them uncomfortable if they come up against somebody like me. So they just shouldn't! They shouldn't read my work!" A few years ago in New York, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray gave a talk about her forthcoming biography of Louise Colet -- a poet and a lover of Flaubert's. Flaubert did not come off well in Gray's account, and among the caddish acts of which she held him guilty was his hurtful caricaturing of Colet in the character of Emma Bovary. Upon hearing this theory, the Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch stood up in the back of the room. Writers write about people they know, he protested, and they do so in ways that are humiliating, nasty, inaccurate and unfair. That's what writers do. Is the case of her and Salinger any different? Yes -- but not because of Salinger's love of privacy. Many people value their privacy, and there's no reason to privilege Salinger's simply because, since he is famous, he is obliged to resort to baroque means to protect it. Nor is this case different because she is writing autobiography rather than fiction: a fictional portrait can be every bit as transparent and damaging as a nonfictional one. No, the reason this case seems different from Flaubert's is simply that here, Salinger is the better writer. Imagine the positions reversed. she is the recluse, Salinger the memoirist. Offered a memoir by one of America's great writers, who would shed a tear for the violated privacy of the purveyor of minor novels and contributor to women's magazines? (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her new book, and give a personal response... 100922 ... jane At Home in the World Joyce Maynard 100922 ... jane i remember reading about her when Salinger died. for someone who seems to have so much life in them, she really kind of seems to exploit herself in a very exhibitionist manner. 100922 ... rt +3=223 jane! Question 182 I miss the haymaking by a day. In the fields around this author's home, 60 rolling, forested kilometres east of Oslo towards the Swedish border, the cut bales stand as neat witness to his and his farming neighbours' joint annual push to make the most of a fitful Norwegian summer. "I love physical work," the writer says, unreproachfully, to the late-arriving interviewer who has dodged the hard bit. "I always did. My father liked it, and I take after him I think." The new roof on the main house stood firm against the winter's heavy snow – "It was so cold for so long". A rooster struts around the barn. In addition to a dozen chickens, he and his wife, Pia, have a few lambs. The slaughterman comes out to kill them in the yard; they never face a journey to the abbatoir. "The day I can't do that, I won't keep them any more." In season, hunters deliver to the door bloody packs of elk meat shot in the woods on his land. In the grounds, a cabin for work holds richly-stocked bookshelves, neat as sheaves. Back in the newly-built conservatory, we eat herb omelette from home-laid eggs and syllabub fruited with last season's berries. Dog and cat pad companionably around. Even late in June, local firewood soon crackles in the grate. Perhaps nothing in this idyll would really surprise lovers of the novel with which this author lassooed the admiration of the world. In 2006, I and my fellow-judges met for a final session to choose the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It quickly emerged that we had a unanimous, clean-sweep victor: a Norwegian writer until then hardly known here. This author's sixth book, cantered round the planet stealing hearts. Set in the summer forests of 1948, with an old man's memories of youthful bliss and loneliness opening onto a landscape of wartime betrayal and family division, it struck readers with the beauty, clarity and sheer inevitability that marks out a classic of the future. After its Independent victory, it took the International IMPAC Award. US critics hugged it close. It dominated "best of the year" picks from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly. A story carved so deeply with the grain of its place, time and people had – in an irresistible translation – stepped past every obstacle in its path. Especially in the US, his work settled into that rustic corner of the literary landscape where backwoods lyricism meets homespun wisdom. For many American critics, he had also acquired the holy nimbus that comes with great tragedy. They knew that he had lost four family members – mother, father, brother, nephew – in the fire of 7 April 1990 that killed 158 people aboard the Scandinavian Star ferry between Oslo and Denmark. In an author so scarred by fate, so illuminated by nature, transcendentally-minded Americans understandably sought a Nordic sage. But, for all the weight and grace of prose, that really isn't him at all. He's a sociable city boy and, although he enjoys the farm work, "It's not Tolstoyan. I don't have a deeper meaning in living here." His wife's passion for country life first brought him to this lovely spot (both have children from first marriages). And its isolated glory has a downside. "What I really miss the most out here is to have a beer with the boys and then go home by bus." Once he took a cab back from central Oslo. It cost 2000 kroner (£210). A lifelong fan of Valerenga football club in Oslo – more West Ham than Chelsea – he is now fretting about whether to flout his principles and sign up for pay TV to watch the rest of the World Cup, rather than depend on patchy reception from the Swedish public channel over the border. The stocky, chatty 57-year-old I meet comes from proud working-class Oslo stock: his father a shoe-factory and print worker; a Danish mother who toiled in a chocolate plant, then cleaned ships and schools. "Everyone I grew up with worked in factories or drove lorries". His father respected good books: in the writing cabin sits a handsome set of shelves he owned. Yet the volumes within went unread: "He was afraid to approach these books for fear of not understanding them." His mother, in contrast, was always "a big reader, but she went to the library": weekly, on Wednesdays. "She read heaps of books, and really high quality... She realised she would never get an education, but she couldn't stop reading. Literature was nothing like a career opportunity for her". Given this background, it's not that hard to grasp the deep youthful commitment to the Maoist fringe of Communism in Norway that kept him on the factory floor for years. Indeed, he worked with his father in a large print works. "Some of best times I had with colleagues was in that place – we had so much fun... You'd come home in morning having worked a double shift – it was almost like being on dope; a light-headed, strange feeeling". Even then more of an avid reader than a wannabe Red Guard, he dreamed of authorship as he clocked on to help raise his workmates' consciousness. On the shop floor, he saw the gulf between himself and his father, who "wasn't a revolutionary. But he liked being in a collective: he liked working in a factory; he liked singing in a choir. And I was a Communist – and I didn't like that at all! I liked the people, yes – but when I went home, I was alone. I went to my books." In 1973, the young bibliophile went to train as a librarian, a routine he liked for its regularity and discipline. Then the revolution called. "I was the one who loved the school the most – but I was the one who dropped out to become a factory worker." Now he reflects that "It was commitment, yes, but at the same time I sort of knew that it was doomed." But he looks back in kindness at the idealism of that ardent kid. His Arvid "loves the world, he loves people. I feel very tender towards the boy, almost, that I was myself." In 1981, he took a fateful step towards a career in literature when he began to work as a buyer for the Tronsmo bookstore in Oslo; he stayed a dozen years, and only left to write full- time. "It was my university. They said, 'You can import any book you like – but you have to sell it'." And he did. He read, hungrily, and was inspired: by new-wave Americans such as Jayne Anne Phillips and Raymond Carver, or radical British voices such as James Kelman. "In Norway I'm considered very American-influenced, and yet I feel much more at home with the British writers". He had already published two books and was working on a third when the ferry disaster stole so much of his family in 1990. In the immediate aftermath, "What had happened didn't change anything". He finished It's Fine With Me – a "working-class Catcher in the Rye" – in the same vein as he had started it. But, over time, he could hardly escape. "What happened was so big! It was huge... It was so awesome – that's what they say in America." His voice mimics a US talk-show gravitas: "Awe...some." Eventually, "I think I became a little braver about writing about death. You learn something about death. And that is: anybody can die at any time. Just through going on vacation to Denmark." Indirectly, his In the Wake explored the bereavement itself. To Siberia, meanwhile, imagined his mother's venturesome early life. "I couldn't have written it when my mother was alive," he says. "And so it is written not in the light, but in the dark, of her death." Still, he and his surviving brother refused to become the slaves of their loss. "I didn't dare to be 'the Titanic writer'. I didn't want to be defined by what had happened." They did join a survivors' support group, but only for a while. "When two years had passed, the rest is private, we said." This book, his international breakthough, may have moved away from Arvid and his kin, but it dwelled equally on the sheer precariousness of family love. The immanence of loss – such an aching motif for him – floods every scene with a sunset radiance. But its success, and the performance of a public self that brought, hit like a summer storm. "I got really sick for a time. I wasn't prepared for this. I am this Arvid Jansen kind of guy, from a place where nobody's famous for anything. So suddenly it crept up on me and...". He mimes an explosion. "I had really to take it easy for a bit." These days, he reports, "It's very nice to go down Karl Johans Gate [Oslo's main shopping street] and people smile at you and say 'Thank you'." Still, "I'm not very good at being disturbed. I get very agitated." He has cut down severely on the time he spends playing the part of "best-selling author". "I try not to go alone anywhere. I try not to go too often. I don't do very much in Norway, because I meet people and they say, 'Hey – this book of yours. I've been there, and it's not quite like that, you know'." If not, that's because he has so deftly cropped the raw stuff of life, and seasoned it into the nourishment of art. The city boy brings his own kind of harvest home. (Adapted from a review in The Independent) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100923 ... jane Out Stealing Horses Per Petterson i may be reaching here, but i just finished reading "middlesex" by jeffrey_eugenides and my mind is drawing ties between the time periods of both books and also the theme of foreign families and america in each. 100923 ... rt +3=226 go ahead jane. lostgirl has no power due to a microburst in her pittsburgh village... middlesex is a edgy read, proving you to be a red literary giant, just as i knew you were. 100923 ... rt When this author accepted a job running an English-language newspaper and teaching journalism in Yemen for a year, she must have known that her experiences would yield a droll story or two. An unattached 37-year-old from Manhattan, she liked drinking beer (“I love bars, everything about them,” she writes) and flirting with strangers on subways. The ancient city of Sana would be her new home, in a harsh and poor Islamic land that required her to cover up in public and never meet the gaze of a man. What she couldn’t have imagined is that her actions there would spark a diplomatic crisis, uproot several lives (her own included) and result in this completely winning account of her adventures as a feminist mentor and boss. Yemen is an unlikely country in which to preach the gospel of a free press. Mocked by the Arab world as so backward that Noah would still recognize the place, it has no radio stations and a largely illiterate populace. The owner of the newspaper that she is hired to oversee was educated in the United States but works as a media adviser to the president and keeps the paper afloat with advertorials. Her students have been taught to value neither objectivity nor accuracy. The paper is a joke at the United States Embassy for its misprints: a headline about Yemen’s “Ministry of Tourism” came out as its “Ministry of Terrorism.” The professor has less success whipping her staff into shape than in lifting the curtain on a society hidden from Western eyes or caricatured as an outpost for Al Qaeda. Without ignoring the terrible restrictions on intimacy faced by her students in their daily lives — in a country where, she notes, homosexuality and adultery are punishable by death — she manages to form a series of touching, often hilarious friendships with young men and women who do not let their wariness of her thwart their curiosity. More personal than historical, her book doesn’t claim to plumb the depths of Yemeni culture. Her contacts were mainly among the English-speaking elite. And some sections seem too brazenly aimed at disabusing American readers of stereotypes of Muslim women. (The opening scene is a wedding in which a Yemeni bride searches in a panic for her birth control pills.) Only in the last chapters does the author briefly discuss her romance with the married British ambassador to Yemen; and nowhere is there mention that she had a baby with him, or that the London tabloids pilloried her as a temptress. These episodes in no way detract from — and in some ways only enhance — her riveting tale of a life’s journey that reads as if it will need a sequel.  (Adapted from a review in the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100924 ... jane The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen Jennifer Steil it's a shame she didn't expand on that last chapter; it sounds like that would have made the book quite a bit more dynamic. 100924 ... rt +3=229 go jane! i thought i saw you yesterday. perhaps your doppelganger. 100926 what's it to you? who go blather from