Eva's 2010 Selected Book List. Order is not significant. I grouped the non-fiction, then the fiction.
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich © 2001 7 CDs 8.25 hrs. The author worked undercover as a waitress, “Merry Maid,” hotel cleaner, Walmart “associate,” and nursing home assistant. Rents are not in line with the pay for those jobs, and Barbara had a car which many in those jobs lack, so she could range further looking for housing. Very well-written. Justly acclaimed.
Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. Autobiographical, written in the early 1990’s, but this edition (6 CDs, 7 .5 hours) contained Senator Obama’s 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in an appendix. Herman enjoyed the parts of this he heard. In Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith speaks highly of this book, and she has lofty literary standards.
Losing Mum & Pup by Christopher Buckley © 2009 Pup, Wm F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) needs no introduction. Mum, Patricia Taylor Buckley (1926-2007) was a hostess par excellence, perennially on the best-dressed list, and a wit. After a dinner party at their rented Château in Switzerland Ted Kennedy said he was driving back to Gstaad. Pat called out “Don’t let him! There are two bridges between here and Gstaad.” When out in his sailboat, Bill would say “How about lobster for dinner?” and steer towards the nearest lobster pot. He always left two bottles of whiskey in the trap. This memoir is centered on the year they died, and it does not spare their infirmities or foibles, but it’s amusing too. The Christian Science Monitor described the book as “A wake in words.”
Borrowed Time: an AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette. © 1988, 342 pp. These eyewitness accounts are important, I was hoping this book would cover the whole 12 year relationship of Roger Horowitz and Paul. Instead it starts in the winter of 1981-’82, gets more detailed in the weeks leading up to Roger’s AIDS diagnosis March 12, 1985, and ends with Roger’s death Oct. 22, 1986. There are flashbacks to 1974-82. Roger and Paul elected not to tell their parents and business associates. I got interested enough in Roger’s closeted brother Sheldon, an LA bigshot lawyer, to Google him. The HIV test became available in ’85. Paul did not take it for insurance reasons, but, though asymptomatic, he knew his own fate because he had his T cells counted. AZT arrived in ’86. Paul had a regretted 6-week affair in the summer of ’81 with Joel (later proven HIV negative) that probably influenced Roger to have a one night stand with a fellow lawyer on a business trip that is the conjectured source of Roger’s infection.
Angles and Reflections by Joan L. Richards © 2000. The author, a tenured professor (History of Math), got a sabbatical academic year research office in Cambridge MA. She commuted from Providence RI where she lived with her husband and sons 9 & 14. Her younger had a grand mal seizure in November that turned out to be a brain tumor. By late spring Ned was out of the woods but Joan had made little progress on her biography of Augustus De Morgan. She was offered and accepted a year’s fellowship at a research institute in Berlin. She could get the book done after all! She could bring her family. Her husband Rick would make 2-week trips to Berlin and spend the summer there. Medical problems happened in Berlin too, so Joan spent another distracted year. She was feeling really bad about “wasting” her two fellowships, but, IMHO, she redeemed it all with this book. It was a counterpoint tale of her life as an academic feeling pressure to publish, and her role as a mother having to pro-actively cope with the American and German medical systems. The medical problems in Germany were Ned’s , but unrelated to his brain tumor.
Roald Dahl by Jeremy Treglown. © 1994. 277pp. Photo plates. Dahl (1916-90) is the author of acclaimed children’s books that came onto the market after my childhood. This biography filled me in on “The B.F.G” (Big, Friendly Giant), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc. Maybe it’s the mix of accomplishment and flaws (he had many) that make Dahl fascinating. His first wife, Patricia Neal, comes across as an admirable person. I want to read her 1988 autobiography “As I Am.” Their 30 year marriage was not ideal (ended in divorce in 1984), but it was interesting. Dahl was an involved father, and close to his sisters, too.
Gellhorn: a 20th Century Life by Caroline Moorehead., © 2003, 424 pp. Photo plates. A biography of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), war reporter. I enjoy reviewing the 20th century through the lens of a life like this. I don’t recommend a lot of what Martha did. For instance, she was not maternal, yet she adopted a boy and then left him for long stretches with caretakers. Later in life Sandy Gellhorn battled weight problems and drug addiction. College bored her, so she dropped out. She knew everyone and had a lot of friends, but she told her friend of many years, Sybille Bedford, who was in her 80’s at the time, that she had come to find her boring, which ended that friendship. Martha was a regular guest at the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to Bryn Mawr with Martha’s mother. Martha settled in London at age 60 despite the weather (she liked nude sun bathing. Previous homes had been in Cuba, Mexico, and Kenya.) She did not have much respect for marriage—all of her many affairs seemed to be with married men, except that with her second husband, who was a widower when she met him. She was Hemmingway’s 3rd wife, 1940-45, and afterwards would not talk to anyone who wanted to interview her about Ernest. She met him in 1937 while reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Everyone who knew Martha thought she looked way above average at every age.
Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany by Willy Schumann (1927- ), © 1991, 198pp. I was riveted by this memoir covering 1930-50. The author ultimately became a German professor at Smith College. I believed him that he did not know about the Holocaust at the time. Immediately after the war, shown a newsreel about the liberation of Bergen Belsen, he and his friends were not upset because they did not believe it. By this time they accepted the fact that the Nazis (always called the NSADP-National Socialist German Workers Party) had faked the news, and now they assumed the British occupying Schleswig-Holstein were doing the same. At age 13, on his only childhood excursion abroad, to Sweden, Willy saw a cartoon ridiculing Hitler. He was shocked. He did not mention the cartoon when he gave his class a report on his weekend abroad. Willy read Erich Maria Remarque’s forbidden book “Im Westen Nichts Neues,” which he found well hidden behind safe volumes at his uncle’s. He did not like it. It was not heroic enough. He thinks Germany was not ready yet for Hitler’s assassination by July ‘44. Germans still expected him to pull victory out of a hat.
Obsessive Genius: the Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith. © 2004, 236pp. A few photos. I knew the outline of the story but this filled in a lot of details. I had not known Marie suffered from bouts of depression. I had not known that besides the Nobels won by Marie and Pierre (1903), Marie alone (1911), and Irene and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1935), Eve’s husband Henri Labouisse got the Nobel Peace Prize (1965, on behalf of UNICEF). Pierre’s retired father ran the domestic side of the household.
Eichmann in my Hands: A Compelling First Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler’s Chief Executioner, by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein. © 1990. 264 pp, Having lived in Israel 1971-72, I was interested in the descriptions of life in Israel, and the Argentinian chapters were gripping too. I read this in 2 days. Peter Z Malkin was born in 1929 in Poland. He emigrated to Palestine in 1934 with his parents and 2 older brothers. A married sister, her husband, and their 3 children stayed behind where they became holocaust victims. The movie The White Ribbon became more meaningful after reading this book. Eichmann was born in 1906. His father was very religious. As an adult Eichmann was so against religion he wouldn’t swear on a bible at his trial.
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America’s Most Important Spy in WW II by Lucas Delattre, © 1990. 8 CDs. Herman got interested in this too. Kolbe was in Hitler’s foreign ministry. He travelled to Switzerland on official errands. In 1943 he decided the most valuable service he could provide his country was to betray it. He never got caught, though he had some close calls. FDR refused to grant US Visas to foreigners who’d helped in the war because he anticipated a lot of rats leaving the sinking ship. Kolbe was blackballed as a traitor in post-war German foreign ministry circles. He became a salesman.
Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings, © 1993. 476pp. In the 1980’s, American author A.O. interviewed German women who had been adults during the Third Reich. We get quite a range of memories. Well worthwhile.
The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo © 2009, 438 pp. Dirac (1902-1984), an Englishman, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 with Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger. In retrospect, he may have been Asperger-spectrum (high functioning of course). Someone raised a hand at a Dirac lecture and said he did not understand a certain equation. Dirac stood there expressionlessly until finally someone said, “Aren’t you going to answer the question?” Dirac said, “There was no question. That was a declarative sentence.” There are many such Dirac stories. But he was capable of appreciating the warmth of Neils Bohr’s hospitality, and he married Eugene Wigner’s sister, who had excellent social skills. He had children and a doting mother (who was his guest at the Nobel ceremony). His brother committed suicide.
Egon Schiele Drawings and Watercolors by Jane Kellir, edited by Ivan Vartanijan. © 2003. 485 pages, mostly color plates, but interspersed we get a biography of Schiele’s short (1890-1918) but productive (over 2500 works survive ) life. I intended to only leaf through this, pursuant to my newfound interest in How To Draw, but I ended up reading all the text and studying each plate.
The Artist’s Wife by Max Phillips, © 2001. 245 pp. Max Phillips was a fellow employee at D.E. Shaw 1996-1998. This is a novel imagining Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964) telling us (about her life). Tom Leherer’s 1964 song sums it up, “Alma tell us/All modern women are jealous/you should have a statue in bronze/ for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.”
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, © 1920. 9 CDs. Debut novel written when the author was 23, ushering in the roaring twenties. Upon the success of this publication Zelda married Scott. The protagonist, Amory Blaine, has a biography a lot like the author’s. H. L. Mencken praised it highly. Wikipedia says the reaction of President Hibben of Princeton University was, "I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.” My own response was closer to Hibben’s than Mencken’s.
A Free Life by Ha Jin © 2007 660pp. A novel about an immigrant’s life that somewhat tracks Ha Jin’s own life. Nan, a grad student, comes to Brandeis University alone at age 29 in the mid 1980’s. His real passion is poetry, but he was assigned to Poly Sci in China. After a year Nan’s wife PingPing arrives. In 1990 China lets their 6 year old, Tao Tao, join them. Work, housing, friendships, and parenting are covered. They move to Atlanta and open a restaurant. Nan was obsessed with a woman back in China who dumped him. PingPing is sad that she cannot inspire that kind of love in Nan. By the end of the novel Nan matures in that regard. The two of them stop working 16x7 and start exercising their creativity. I heard Ha Jin speak at the Boston Public Library this year.
Testimony by Anita Shreve. At a boarding school in New England a shocking amateur video showing four male students in a dorm room engaged in sexual acts with a 14 year old girl comes to the attention of the headmaster. One of the male students is a heretofore model day boy, Silas. How the headmaster handles it, and why Silas was in that situation, takes a 8 CDs to explain.
Solar by Ian McEwan © 2010. 10 CDs, 12 hours. Like On Chesil Beach, which I also read this year, the final CD contained an interview with the author. I was absorbed by the hapless fictional Nobel Laureate in physics Michael Beard. The guy has not done anything creative since winning the prize 25 years earlier. He has a bunch of sinecures and is practiced on the lecture circuit. The man’s personal life is a mess. He constantly makes choices that undermine his health. He goes through his 5th divorce. In the 5 years of that marriage he’d had 11 affairs but he got all bent out of shape when his wife had one affair. Beard appropriates a brilliant artificial photosynthesis idea from a deceased postdoc at his institute. At the end all Beards sins catch up with him.
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. 9 CDs. Winner of the 2002 Booker prize. An imaginative castaway story replete with botanical and animal behavior observations. Pi Patel, 16, survives 7 months by his wits.The novel is bookended by the before and (less so) after.
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, © 2010. This was exceptionally well-written too, and also involves animals, this time through a taxidermist. There’s a description of a pear that is exquisite. I enjoyed this on an iPod while walking to and from work.
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, © 2008. 8 CDs. Several of these short stories pick up the tales of characters already met. Usually short stories whet my interest in a situation, then leave me unsatisfied, wanting more. Lahiri’s stories satisfy, like a novel.
The World According to Bertie by Alexander McCall Smith. © 2007 11 CDs There are several of these books about the folks at 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh—their daily lives hold my interest. Ezra, Herman and I listened to another of them, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, enroute back to Somerville from Rochester the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
Family Album by Penelope Lively, © 2009. A book group selection, but I’ve read four previous Penelope Lively’s so I might eventually have run into it on my own. Family of six children, two parents, and Ingrid, an au pair who stays 40 years, live at Allersmead, a large house somewhere near London. Dad (Charles) writes books in his study, and is as uninvolved as possible in domestic life. Alison is the über-Mum. Family is her core value. Ingrid is the birth mother of Clare, the youngest. Everybody knows it but it’s not mentioned. Clare is treated exactly as if she were a full sibling. The kids fan out into diverse adulthoods.
Last updated Dec. 8, 2010