Let The Great World Spin

I've written about some of my favorite and least favorite post-9/11 books and I'll admit it's hard to imagine writing a book about New York City that doesn't reference that defining generational moment.  But Colum McCann has done just that.  In Let The Great World Spin, McCann depicts the Twin Towers as the sturdy backdrop for 1974 New York City that was itself spinning out of control.

New York is a city of immigrants, so it is fitting that the opening chapters refer to the Corrigan brothers from Ireland.  The younger brother, known simply as Corrigan, is a heavy drinker but lives his life in service to others.  He prefers living with the down and out so his older brother is less than surprised to find him in America surrounded by a family of hookers in the Bronx. Claire and Lara are mid-west transplants, both living in New York, but very different universes; Claire mourns the death of her son, killed in Vietnam, while Lara mourns her own life, lost to drugs and alcohol.  Gloria meets Claire through a small group of mother's who have lost their sons and Claire's husband, Solomon, is the judge who sentences Tilly, one of the prostitutes befriended by Corrigan.

Each of these people could carry the book on their own and for awhile it's unclear if or how they are all connected.  And then McCann introduces Philippe Petit, a high wire artist who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in August of 1974.  Petit momentarily takes our minds off the every day.  As he performs, Gloria imagines he's her son, come back one more time, and Solomon gives thanks for being able to sentence the frivolous and Lara is relieved not to see the details of an auto accident in the paper.  Yet his walk unites all the characters.

From that moment and for a generation, the Twin Towers were powerful: Petit and millions of other's balanced, survived and even thrived.

Netflix stars: 5/5

Also recommended, Man on Wire, the documentary about Petit's famous walk.

Land of Marvels

I've been wanting to be more involved in my immediate community, so I joined a JP Book Group. I thought it would be nice to get to know some more people in my neighborhood and read some different books.  The focus of my long-running friend book group has always been less on reading and more on getting together to catch up, so I also felt obligated to read this book.

Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth was quite the challenge.  It seemed promising-- a group of archaelogists in the early 1920s in what is now Iraq searching for treasure-- both ancient and modern (oil).  But I found myself scanning over paragraphs and easily falling asleep.  The evening of the meeting I raced home to finish reading it (close, but no cigar!) and felt the dread of having to go to class without my homework done.  As it turned out, they were a nice enough group and nearly all agreed that it wasn't the best read.  There were also two guys, which was interesting.  We sat in the Jame's Gate and had food and beer.

I finished the book that night and would say that if you can make it through the first 2/3rds of the book, the last 1/3rd is worth it.  But if historical fiction isn't your thing, I'd skip this in favor of something else.

Netflix stars 2/5

Olive Kitteridge

Most people know I grew up in Kansas, and although Wichita is not a particularly small town, it sometimes felt that way. Family trips up to Ipswich, MA to see my cousins, or summer vacations to Santa Fe, Colorado or Italy confirmed to me that the world was bigger and I needed to see it.  I couldn't imagine why everyone didn't want to leave.  I moved to Boston after graduation and hardly looked back.   I thought reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout reminded me of the insularity I sometimes felt growing up.

Olive is the main character connecting a dozen or so stories set in small town Maine.  She's a curmudgeon, large and unattractive, overbearing and overall mean.  In short, not a sympathetic character.  The people in her town are gossips and un-motivated.  Her son manages to escape first to California, and then to New York.  The other men in the book seem broken and the women seem to get by mostly by being crazy and/or drunk.

It's been more (ahem) than 10 years I've lived in Boston and I can recall Wichita fondly.  I'm happy to still have close friends I grew up with; some moved away, and some stayed there.  But they're happy and successful.  I'm better able to connect with fellow midwestern ex-pats and appreciate that friendliness.  And I've come to realize that New Englanders are just as insular, if not more, than midwesterners.  The discomfort I felt reading Olive Kitteridge came from my own feeling of being sucked in to Boston.

Ms. Strout is a wonderful writer. Her scenes and characters are evocative to a fault.  So it's not the writing, but the subject matter.  Last spring I met a woman in my neighborhood and upon telling her that we like to recruit a geographically diverse housestaff to my hospital, her response, "But why would that matter?" seemed to summarize my overall frustration with Olive Kitteridge.

Netflix stars: 3/5.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Recommended to me, and with a very long wait at the library, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery seemed like a sure fire hit for me.  It's also French!  But it just never really took off.  The main protagonists, a French concierge in a fancy apartment complex and the 12 year old daughter of a pair of inhabitants, are both philosophical and literary snobs. The concierge, Madame Michel, pretends to hold up the stereotype of the concierge-- lazy, uneducated and with little interest beyond her tv.  Paloma is a smart girl, but hides from her family, who she thinks are ridiculous.  It was hard for me to figure out why both these characters were playing so miserable and it wasn't until late in the book the reader is clued in.

Part of my issues with this might have been the poor translation.  The basic sentence structure was at times awkward, and there names and places that just didn't translate at all to the American audience.  I'm a patient reader and it takes a lot for me to not give a book a full chance, but if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't finish it.  But I did and it partly redeemed itself, so I'm giving it 2 stars.  Read at your own risk.

A Short History of Women

Everyone loves hearing stories about their grandparents.  They lived difficult lives (World Wars, the Depression), astonishing lives (world travel when Europe was quaint and affordable), had love lives (meeting by post, starting farms in desolate lands).  Our grandmas came of age when women didn't have a lot of rights.  My own grandma was born just one year after women gained the right to vote.  During WWII she worked as a riveter and later joined my grandfather running a furniture store.  A few decades earlier women were making huge strides.  My sister read a book about Trudy Ederle, the first women to swim the English Channel.  Coco Before Chanel is the story of Coco Chanel and how she became stylish and famous by pure grit and determination.
But not all women created worldwide impacts.  Kate Walbert's novel A Short History of Women tells of four generations of women who try to make a difference, but just as easily are forgotten.  Dorothy Townsend is a 19th century suffragette who dies during a hunger strike.  Her children are sent away and their children barely know the sacrifice she made.  Her daughter Evelyn is an accomplished chemist, but is taught during a time when women are told to keep their work private, lest men find out and get jealous.  Her niece Dorothy resists authority late in life by taking photos at an off-limits military base-- only to have her own daughter apologize in shame. 
Ms. Townsend's novel reminded me of the loneliness of The Hours.  These were stories about women trying to Do Something, even if it came at a cost. We know our grandmas, and we know Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Indira Gandhi, Virginia Woolf and Hillary.  But this book reminded me of all the unrecognized women who made/make sacrifices.  When there is an election and I vote, I know it's because of them that I can.
5/5 netflix stars

A Walk In The Woods

My mom liked to say that from Kansas, you could get to somewhere fun in a mere 12 hour drive.  The beaches on the Gulf were 12 hours to the south, the mountains 12 hours to the west, and deserts and cacti 12 hours to the southwest.  We spent many summers in Colorado or Santa Fe, and most vacations involved some rustic cabin living and lots of hiking.  We had our favorite trails-- the Alpine Trail near where we stayed in Buena Vista, CO and the ski basin in Santa Fe.  But these trails would represent just a centimeter of the 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia up to Maine.  In the mid-90s Bill Bryson and his friend Steven Katz decided to hike the AT over the course of several months, and A Walk In The Woods is Bryson's record of that adventure.
I started this book as part of the Emergency Holiday Challenge and remembered Steph loving it and was even told by someone in my yoga class how funny it was.  And while it was funny, it was also wistful and kind of sad.  Bryson would intersperse details of the hike (lots of walking, lots of trees) with facts about the AT and the environmental changes.  We've all heard about the demise of the passenger pigeon, and the relatively quick fell of the American Chestnut trees...Bryson lectures us just to the point of depression and then says, "back to the trail!"
Even though this book is just about 10 years old, at times it felt dated.  Bryson writes with disdain about people to bring modems hiking so they can share stories from the trail (um, that would be blogging) and writes with amazement that some people have brought satellite tracking devices (what we now know as GPS!).  Every few days they arrive at a small town where they check in with their families from payphones.  Cell phones were not rampant yet.
2,200 miles is a lot of hiking and without giving anything away, a six-mile day hike on a trail of woods, streams and mountains maybe gives you the same idea as 6 months of the same.  Day hikes let you get back to the relative warmth of a cabin (and maybe access to some soothing hot springs) by 6 pm.  Nevertheless, I feel lucky that we have the luxury of wilderness to hike in, that despite the extinction of species, we generally value unspoiled nature.
4/5 netflix stars

The Help and Strength in What Remains

The Revolutions of 1989 were by and large bloodless; the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions of other Eastern Bloc countries resulted in the end of Communism and peaceful transfer of power. Twenty years before that Dr. Martin Luther King epitomized the non-violent struggle for civil rights.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett describes the stories of three women: one privileged white woman who along with two African American maids work together to tell the stories of behind the scenes lives, and in the process create a non-violent revolution in Jackson, Mississippi.  Each woman makes personal sacrifices for the greater good-- even though at the time they have no idea what that good will be.  Ms. Stockett tells the story of The Help in three viewpoints-- Skeeter's, Aibileen's and Minny's.  Each woman has a personal impetus to enact change, but what's amazing is how the three of them come to work together.
The revolutions of 1989 were not all peaceful. Tianamen Square took place that summer.  Likewise, 1994 brought about revolutions too. The very violent kind.  Extreme poverty for the majority and extreme wealth for the minority set the catalyst for the ethic genocides in Burundi and Rwanda.  Tracy Kidder relays Deo's story in Strength in What Remains.  Similar to What is the What, Deo miraculously flees Burundi and lands in New York with $200, no place to live and barely understanding a word of English.  Within five years he's enrolled at Columbia and soon after that, Dartmouth Medical School.  Mr. Kidder relays Deo's story in a series of viewpoints also.  He writes as a journalist, telling Deo's history as Deo remembers it.  Then he tells the history of the country, so the reader can better understand how events took a turn from the worse, and finally, he tells his story: how he met Deo and his impressions of him and his relationship to him and their return together to Burundi.  Mr. Kidder's document seemed a more complete story than What is the What.
In The Help, Skeeter is amazed that Aibileen is such a voracious reader, and that other maids who work for her friends have gone to college and aspire to send their children to college.  Many of white women Skeeter is friends with cannot see past the color and occupation of their maids.  But what surprised me was that Deo's story in New York was similar.  He'd come from being an intern at a hospital in Burundi to being a grocery delivery boy who made $15 a week in New York.  Just as the family Aibileen works for dehumanizes her by not even allowing her to use a bathroom in the house, Deo's employer literally pokes him with a stick to make him work.
Both books are good reminders that revolutions are, and should be, dynamic and constant.  I give both 5/5 netflix stars.