Book Reviews

To be cured of any desire to visit the Mediterranean, read Paul Theroux’s account of his lengthy plod around its borders. Following the accounts of authors whose remarks (excepting Joyce) seldom inspire, he boards almost empty ferries and trains or hikes in the offseason and in dismal weather, striking up conversations with strangers who usually warn him to beware of crime and thievery.

Here and there the scent of herbs, a snow-capped mountain, the star-lit surf hint of something worth seeing, but more often cheap overconstruction of vacation accommodations, seedy vendors, and rain, rain, rain predominate.

Actually I could not bear to finish the travelogue.

I am fascinated by Thomas Friedman’s revelations about the worldwide commercial networks and ventures burgeoning daily via internet connections. His title metaphor suggests that time and place differences have been erased or are being used to advantage (Indians working during our night time, etc.)]

Far from alarming us with fears of too much outsourcing, the book is reassuring as it shows the benefits and markets that redound as new enterpreneurs and workers and facilities come online.

What is clear is that the US needs to get the picture out to everyone of how this all works and how to take advantage of it. Then we can take measures to retrain or soften thet transition for workers who must learn new skills….as they always have had to do as the old Industrial Revolution progressed.

The book is an eye opener, a window on how our commercial and cultural world is changing from hour to hour.

I am so grateful to have read Calvin Trillin’s brief but wonderful tribute to his wife Alice. As he says, all his books were written for, evaluated by Alice. No better memoriam could have been written.

She was someone I would have loved to have known, although I would have envied her beauty and writing ability. In reading about her I felt I shared to some extent in a friendship. Her goals as a parent were familiar, though better executed than mine: to help her children become what they wanted to be.
Thank you, Calvin, for sharing Alice with us.

Elaine recommends reading Travels with Alice about trips to Europe with his wife to set the stage for both Calvin and his relationship with Alice.  She says, “I could read Trillin time after time after time.  He is a magician.”

Michael Cunningham skillfully intertwines the interior lives of three women: Virginia Woolf, shortly before her depression-induced suicide, Clarissa, whom her gay erstwhile boyfriend calls “Mrs. Dalloway,” and Laura, depressed enough with her life as a wife and mother to seriously consider suicide.

Clarissa’s friend Richard, crippled with AIDS, in fact slips out of a fifth story window. She recalls the moment of his first youthful kiss as the happiest of her lesbian life. Virginia Woolf, developing the character Mrs. Dalloway, decides she will recognize the first kiss of her lesbian lover as the happiest moment of her life.

All three spend a great deal of time trying to live in the moment, to seize the present and call it happiness, with only momentary success. So the hours slip by.

These characters and their families are brought to life in elegantly simple prose. But the overall mood is not one of joie de vivre.

Elaine says she recalls this as a fine, serious novel verging on the somber that she is glad to have read but doesn’t want to read again.  A good movie, which has been shown at RiverWoods, was made of it.

In this his 13th novel, John Irving has not lost his touch (pun intended).  Once again he pursues a fantastic premise to its improbable conclusion, in this case the transplant of a hand and with it something of the personality of the diseased donor along with the transplanted affection of the donor’s wife.

But is this science fiction or an elaborate metaphor of how we seek to change ourselves by the example of others and how we seek in those we love some aspects of those we have lost.

The fourth hand is not the original two or the transplant, which eventually fails, but the stump, which comes to  serve adequately enough and to be lovable enough by two people who have matured enough.

This Sierra Club book published in 1989 is a hilarious unrelenting sendup of evils perpetrated by the Bureau of Land Management, the LA Department of Water and Power, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service, real estate developers and less organized landscape destroyers such as ATV riders and bumbling urbanite hunters and fishermen.  Embedded in the comic satire are depictions of awesome scenery and a wealth of geological/ecological information.  The author is Page Stegner, son of Wallace Stegner and a teacher of writing at the University of Arizona.

Anyone reading this book will come to understand why some Iranians hate the US and why our military threats only exacerbate the situation.

As Shirin Ebadi, nobel prize-winning defense lawyer for children’s and women’s rights and political prisoners, describes in her memoirs, she was in grade school the year Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA came in with enough money to hire thugs and demonstrators to force the populist and popular prime minister Mossadegh to flee and the repressive Shah Pahlavi to take control of the country.

This coup d’etat was probably the result of Mossadegh’s having nationalized Iran’s oil industry thus upsetting US plans for accessing oil in the Mideast. It was as though the British had sent George Washington into exile and installed a British vice roy as president.
Through the years, Ebadi tells us, her liberal family somehow coped with imprisonment and death threats first from tyrannical shahs and later from implacable Muslim clerics. Meanwhile she became a judge and later, when removed from that office, a lawyer defending human rights, often at the risk of her own life. At one point she found in some political case papers the order for her own assassination.

But Shirin Ebadi refuses to flee her country, determined to assist abused women and children and political prisoners. There is a large element of liberal sympathy in Iran that is only more brutally suppressed when the US and Israel hint at military strikes.

Anne Tyler gets into her characters’ heads. Here she speaks for thirty-year-old, still adolescent, rebellious, warmhearted Barnaby, ironically the only really charitable member of a Rockefeller-like family whose mother will not let him forget the humiliation and costs of his early mischievous juvenile housebreaking career.

Trying to prove he is a man to be trusted, he helps senior citizens with household tasks as an employee of the RentaBack Agency, founded by the motherly Mrs. Dibble. Funny and empathetic, Barnaby shows us what it is like to grow old as he deals with the widely different personalities of his clients.

His own odyssey leads him to understand why his wife left him, get to know his little girl, and find his own personal angel, a highly unlikely candidate.

Grayson is a baby gray whale who gets separated from his mother and joins Lynne Cox, a long distance swimmer who is training in the predawn hours off the coast of California near Seal Beach.  When a friend on the dock alerts her to the whale’s presence, she has to swim with him back out to the oil rigs hoping to find the mother, who does finally join them as they are returning to the pier and takes her baby back on their migration to Alaska.

A small book recounting this rare experience that occurred when Lynne was 17, it also takes the reader into the water to share the sounds, colors, strange sights and unexpected encounters (grunions, rays, dolphins) as well as the tumult of surf and pull of the currents that the swimmer handles with long practiced techniques.  A book to delight all swimmers and snorkelers.

This is Noble Prize winner Pamuk’s memoire about his native city. I read it with the hope of becoming more familiar with Islamic culture. In actuality I learned more about the author’s family life (multiple kinsfolk inhabiting one whole apartment building with whom he spent more time than with his parents, the father being often with another woman and the mother often absent in protest) than with Islam.

The Bosphorus is the leading character in his story. He loved the water and its traffic at all times and seasons. The degenerating old city he imbued with his own melancholy, tramping its streets night and day instead of going to school, memorizing every shop and building, mourning the faded glory of the Ottoman Empire, but absorbing details for the fabric of his novels. The many black and white photos of scenes gone by contribute to this dark tone.