Collected Miscellany

–>Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistanby Ali Eteraz

Publishers Weekly

Eteraz, known for his blog Islamophere, opens his memoir with a vivid description of his father promising Allah that if God bestowed him with a son, that boy “will become a great leader and servant of Islam.” The rest of the book finds Eteraz, whose given name is Abir ul Islam (which translates as “Perfume of Islam”) trying to come to terms with his father’s mannat, or covenant, and understand the role that Islam will play in his life as well as the role he will play for Islam. Born in Pakistan but raised in the U.S. from age 10, Eteraz moves easily between describing the holy history and tenets of his faith while exploring and explaining the differences between the Islamic world and Western society. As Eteraz’s feelings for Islam change to fit his evolving personal, political and religious views, readers get a glimpse of all aspects of this hot-topic religion, from fundamentalism to reformism, salafism and secularism. A gifted writer and scholar, Eteraz is able to create a true-life Islamic bildungsroman as he effortlessly conveys his coming-of-age tale while educating the reader. When his religious awakening finally occurs, his catharsis transcends the page.

–> The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China by Hannah Pakula

Publishers Weekly

Pakula, an experienced biographer of royal women (An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick), looks at the imperious (if not imperial) wife of the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, presenting a richly complex account of 20th-century China that, despite its length, remains thoroughly engrossing to the end. Born May-ling Soong (1897–2003) and educated in America, Madame Chiang and her five Soong siblings were wealthy, Christian, fluent in English and major players in Chinese politics. Marrying Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, the strong-minded and hot-tempered, shrewd and ruthless May-ling quickly became a partner in his efforts as Chinese leader until the Japanese invaded, and then in 1945 when Mao’s Communists drove him to Formosa (modern-day Taiwan), which he ruled until his death in 1975. From the 1930s to 1950s, Americans idolized Madame Chiang as a symbol of Chinese resistance to the brutal Japanese and as an anticommunist stalwart. But critics of her and Chiang’s ineffective, authoritarian, corrupt leadership soon became the majority. Pakula draws a vivid if often unflattering portrait of a charismatic Chinese patriot, her husband and family, in tumultuous and tragic times.

Cover via Amazon

I hope to actually start to digging my way out of my read-but-not-reviewed hole this week.  In the meantime, checkout these well reviewed works coming out in paperback (or will soon).

–> The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant

Publishers Weekly

What could be more intriguing than the young writer Roald Dahl—destined to create such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—assigned by His Majesty’s Government to Washington, D.C., as a diplomat in the spring of 1942, charged with a secret mission? Dahl’s brief was to gather intelligence about America’s isolationist circles (indeed, he infiltrated the infatuated Claire Boothe Luce in more ways than one) and propagandize for prompt American entry into the European war. The United States had technically been at war with Germany since December 1941. However, the U.S.’s attention was focused mainly on the Pacific theater—and such pro-German political figures as Luce and Charles Lindbergh meant to keep it that way. Dahl’s most important job was to influence public opinion generally and the opinions of Washington’s powerful specifically. As bestselling author Conant (Tuxedo Park) shows in her eloquent narrative, Dahl’s intriguing coconspirators included future advertising legend David Ogilvy and future spy novelist Ian Fleming. Most fascinating, though, is Dahl’s relationship with the great British spymaster William Stephenson, otherwise known as Intrepid. This all boils down to a thoroughly engrossing story, one Conant tells exceptionally well.

–> Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

Publishers Weekly

Columnist and author Greenberg’s heartbreaking and inspiring memoir details his daughter’s downfall into insanity one hot summer in New York City. Greenberg writes with a raw passion and intensity, capturing the essence of every detail and event as if they were occurring in real time as he types. His reading is a heartfelt and honest attempt to relate the experiences with as much restrained emotion as possible, offering it as part headline news story, part editorial. With perfect pitch, tone and pacing, Greenberg is a talented narrator, who will surely capture and hold listeners’ attention.

–> The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah

Publishers Weekly

Sally Thorning, part-time environment rescuer and full-time mother, struggles to maintain her sanity and juggle the overwhelming demands of work and home in this superior psychological mystery from British author Hannah (Little Face). During a week away from her husband and children, Sally has a brief affair. A year later a local headline tragedy—Sally’s lover’s wife appears to have murdered her six-year-old daughter then committed suicide—reveals that Sally’s lover was not who he claimed to be and she needs to find out why. After surviving a shove in front of a bus, Sally re-examines that unwise affair as she plays amateur detective and nearly loses all she values in the process. The story alternates between Sally’s confessional and a tight police procedural interspersed with evidence—pages torn from the diary of the alleged daughter-killer. Paced like a ticking time bomb with flawlessly distinct characterization, this is a fiercely fresh and un-put-downable read.

As the players struggle to get their rounds in at rain soaked Bethpage Black what better time to take a look back at last years amazing US Open golf tournament.  Are You Kidding Me?: The Story of Rocco Mediate’s Extraordinary Battle with Tiger Woods at the US Open by Rocco Mediate and John Feinstein does just that and in entertaining and enlightening fashion.

For those of you not golf fans, or who inexplicably didn’t follow the amazing events of last year, here is recap.  Tiger Woods was coming of April knee surgery and hadn’t played a 18-hole round of golf before the US Open started.  Many wondered if Tiger would finish the tournament.  But if Tiger is in the field then he is the favorite; and he had won at Torry Pines, the US Open site, many times including earlier that year at the Buick Open.

Rocco Mediate was a successful PGA journeyman whose bad back had kept him from achieving the kind of success his talent might have brought him.  He was more famous for his talkative demeanor than for competing in majors. If you had to pick a player that would challenge Tiger Woods for a major championship, and in spectacular fashion, you would not have picked Mediate.

But last year these two very different golfers produced one of the most memorable US Opens in golf history.  Tiger mixed in some very ugly golf with the kind of shots only Tiger can make to storm to the lead after 54 holes.  Thirteen times before Tiger has taken the lead after three rounds and thirteen times he has won.  And yet Mediate pushed Tiger to the brink; twice forcing him to make birdie on the final hole to stay alive.

Mediate in turn frequently seemed about to fade away and let Tiger grab another spectacular win.  But on numerous occasions he pulled himself together and played remarkable golf in the most pressure cooker of situations (three successive birdies on the Monday playoff to take it too sudden death).  In the end it took Tiger 92 holes to beat Rocco.  Tiger may have had a bad knee, but Rocco still forced arguably the greatest golfer of all time, and one of sports most dominant competitors, to use everything he had to win.  And Tiger labeled it his greatest win ever.

You don’t have to be a golf or sports fan to appreciate the drama and appeal of this story.  But what Mediate and Feinstein offer in Are You Kidding Me? is not just a shot by shot recap of the tournament – although the coverage of the event is well done – but rather a better understanding of the person and golfer behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

–> The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell

Publishers Weekly

Veteran espionage novelist Littell (Vicious Circle; The Company; etc.) trades cold war spies for interwar Russian poets in his wonderful new novel. In 1934, real-life poet Osip Mandelstam struggles to get published in the totalitarian state. A battered idealist who has witnessed his share of Stalin-orchestrated horrors, Mandelstam feels writers have an abiding responsibility to be truth tellers in this wasteland of lies. Much to the despair of his fellow poets, Osip writes an epigram likening Stalin to a ruthless killer, leading to Osip’s arrest, brutal interrogation and exile. The robust narrative employs an array of narrators, including Osip’s devoted wife, Nadezhda; his disloyal lover, actress Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova; and Stalin’s personal bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik. The most intriguing voice heard is that of Fikrit Shotman, a weightlifter turned circus strongman who shares a cell with Osip and whose journey from Moscow prison to Siberian gold mine perfectly captures the absurdity of life under tyranny. Littell is unflinching in his portrayal of Osip’s tragic arc, bringing a troubled era of Russian history to rich, magnificent life.

–> Step By Step by Lawrence Block

Kirkus Reviews

The prolific crime novelist (Hit and Run, 2008, etc.) writes about his adventures as a racewalker. The author’s focus at first seems puzzling. Block chooses not to tell the story of his writing life-a project he began but abandoned after weeks of feverish writing-or his personal life (“if you wanted to know something about me, well, too bad”). Instead, the memoir focuses almost entirely on his distance walking. Generally these walks are competitive-marathons and 24-hour walks in which the globetrotting Block consistently ignores both the scenery (he leaves his glasses at home) and the other runners and concentrates on beating his shortest time and longest distance. When he’s not entering formal events-from which he took a hiatus for more than 20 years-he and his wife are driving across America in search of all the towns named Buffalo or traversing Spain on foot. Block occasionally goes off on amusing tangents. He writes briefly on the question of why even nonobservant Jews like himself don’t eat pork, the nature of his interfaith (make that interagnostic) marriage and his preference for trees over Porta-Potties. On the whole, though, this is an account of the author’s entering event after event, wondering why he keeps walking despite blisters and backaches. It’s telling that the only two books whose gestation he describes in any detail are his novel Random Walk (1988) and the present volume. Fans of Block’s fiction may be interested, but they should be prepared to skim the particulars of times and distances that the author assiduously records. A peripatetic but never pedestrian memoir.

–> The Night of The Gun by David Carr

Amazon.com Review

In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” David Carr’s riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can’t write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader’s trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it’s hard to love David Carr–sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it–will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls–makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey.

I first heard about Joe Mackall at an event at Ohio State this past summer with Dinty Moore.  I like what I heard and so picked up both Last Street Before Cleveland and Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish.  I had some interest in the Amish as I had once worked for a State Senator who represented the area in which the book was set and had has some interaction with Amish issues.

It turned out to be a fascinating book and much more than just a story about how the Amish live.  Sure, Mackall offers real insights into the way the Swartzentruber Amish that are his neighbors live; what they are like as people, friends, neighbors, etc.

But it is more than that.

For those unfamiliar with the subject here is some useful background from the book’s website:

Joe Mackall has lived surrounded by the Swartzentruber Amish community of Ashland County, Ohio, for over sixteen years. They are the most traditional and insular of all the Amish sects: the Swartzentrubers live without gas, electricity, or indoor plumbing; without lights on their buggies or cushioned chairs in their homes; and without rumspringa, the recently popularized “running-around time” that some Amish sects allow their sixteen-year-olds.

Over the years, Mackall has developed a steady relationship with the Shetler family (Samuel and Mary, their nine children, and their extended family). Plain Secrets tells the Shetlers’ story over these years, using their lives to paint a portrait of Swartzentruber Amish life and mores. During this time, Samuel’s nephew Jonas finally rejects the strictures of the Amish way of life for good, after two failed attempts to leave, and his bright young daughter reaches the end of school for Amish children: the eighth grade. But Plain Secrets is also the story of the unusual friendship between Samuel and Joe. Samuel is quietly bemused—and, one suspects, secretly delighted—at Joe’s ignorance of crops and planting, carpentry and cattle. He knows Joe is planning to write a book about the family, and yet he allows him a glimpse of the tensions inside this intensely private community.

If I had to pick a word to descirbe Mackall’s writing it would be “honest.”

In our day and age the concept of “real” has become a cliche; part of a hokey phrase like “keeping it real.” But there is something very real about the way Mackall writes and the stories he tells.  The relationships he explores and the way he communicates them reflects both an honest curiostiy but also a deep respect for the people involved.

Mackall gives the reader a basic overview of the this particular Amish community and helpfully provides context for the larger Amish culture.  He does this with care by intentionally avoiding sensationalism.  But at the same he xplores his own feelings about this unique community and what this says about our culture and theirs – and how the two interact. This deep respect for his subject matter and a continuing sense of introspection makes for a much deeper story.

Those with an interest in the Amish are probably already well aware of Plain Secrets.  But if you have ever wondered about Amish life this would be a great introduction – not because of the technical details but because of the real sense of how they live.  But really, anyone who enjoys well written narrative non-fiction would enjoy this engaging book.

For some reason if a book doesn’t get reviewed relatively quickly I struggle mightily to get around to it at all.  This habit vexes me to no end and this year I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to be better about not allowing books to get lost.

Joe Mackall’s The Last Street Before Cleveland was one book that got lost in the shuffle somehow and sat in the “To Be Reviewed” pile for months.  So this week I resolved to write about it and check that off the list.

So what exactly is the book about?  Despite the books brevity (150 pages) it is not easy to summarize.  It is about trying to go home again; about overcoming depression and finding faith; about memory and nostalgia; about the dying blue collar world; etc.

The publisher describes it this way:

The old neighborhood was the place Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone’s parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church and school operated like a religious city hall, and where a boy like Joe grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion. When the mysterious death of a childhood friend draws him back to the last street before Cleveland, however, he discovers that there is more to “old haunts” than mere words—and more to severing one’s roots than just getting away.

The titular “last street before” Cleveland is the street Mackall lived on in Parma, Ohio just outside of Cleveland; one street up and you were in Cleveland proper.  Which is not all that far away from where the author lives now in Ashland, Ohio where he teaches English and journalism at Ashland University.  But culturally and metaphorically it is a different world.

So when he returns to the geography of his youth it is a disorientating experience and it takes him in directions he never anticipated.  This memoir takes the reader along for the ride.

For my belated thoughts click below.

Read the rest of this entry »

–> Matala by Craig Holden

Publishers Weekly

A couple of smalltime grifters are taken for a ride by the enticing young woman they choose as an easy mark in this nifty little page-turner from Holden (The Narcissist’s Daughter). Young, beautiful and bored Darcy Arlen is in Rome on a group tour of Europe, a gift for her high school graduation. When she comes across young, good-looking Will staring pensively into the Tiber River, she’s more than ready for an adventure. Will and his partner/lover Justine, 39, have been on the road for several years, living off small cons and thievery, into which she has initiated him. The duo sees Darcy as a lamb to be shorn, and soon enough the two separate her from her tour, and they all head to Venice and then on to the Greek island of Matala. It slowly becomes clear that Darcy is not the innocent everyone supposes her to be, and the plot morphs into con-man-conned territory. Holden cops out on a few promised revelations, but in the end everything falls nicely into place, adding up to a slick, sexy read.

–> Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

Publishers Weekly

At age 70, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with a virulent form of blood cancer, her third bout with cancer over the course of 30 years and one she would not win. Her son, journalist Rieff (At the Point of a Gun), accompanied her through her final illness and death, and offers an extraordinarily open, moving account of the trial and journey. Sontag’s avidity for life had prompted her to beat the advanced breast cancer that devastated her in 1975; she now resolved to fight the statistical odds of dying from myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), despite the pessimistic prognosis from doctors. Rieff, who admits he was not close to his mother over the preceding decade, is silenced by Sontag’s refusal to reconcile herself to dying and unable to console her. Both mother and son are by turns angered by doctors’ infantilizing treatment of terminally ill patients and by their squelching of hope. Anxious, chronically unhappy and obsessed with gathering information about her disease, Sontag was unable to be alone, and Rieff becomes one in a circle of devotees who rotate staying with her at her New York City apartment. A doctor is found who does not believe her case is hopeless, and in Seattle she undergoes a bone-marrow transplant. In this sea of death, Sontag took her son with her—conflicted, wracked, but wrenchingly candid, Rieff attempts to swim out.