Last week, through the goodness that is LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program I got a copy of My Korean Deli: Risking in All for Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe in the mail. As soon as I picked it up, I didn’t want to put it down. The book is a memoir centering on the author’s purchase of a Brooklyn neighborhood market with his wife’s family (immigrants from Korea, which is where the subtitle comes from). As a city dweller, I love a neighborhood market and have often wondered about the family commitment necessary to keep one running, and this book confirms that it’s intense and stressful – but does so in an entertaining and thoughtful way. (The book also made me miss NY markets that really are deli – with a meat counter and some “real food”. I wish DC markets would do that as well). If you enjoy memoirs (or just love a deli, bodega, or local market), this book is for you.
Early Reviewer: Little Princes December 18, 2010
I think this may be my favorite Early Reviewer books of the year. Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan is a book very much in the vein of Three Cups of Tea. Grennan first went to Nepal in 2004 for what was supposed to be a relatively brief (few month) stay at the start of a one year trip around the world. Volunteering at the orphanage outside Kathmandu was supposed to be his “good deed” before his big, fun, responsibility-free adventure. Grennan did leave Nepal after his stint was up, but couldn’t forget the children he had met and cared for there. He returned to Nepal again and again, eventually founding a non-profit, Next Generation Nepal, opening a second children’s home, and beginning a quest to find the families of the children within the two homes. (Most of the children were not truly orphans, having instead been trafficked by men who promised to take the children to safety in Kathmandu for large sums of money from the parents).
This was a captivating and engaging read. I finished it in two days and never wanted to put it down. It’s not being published until February, but I highly recommended it once it is available.
Early Reviewer: Fannie’s Last Supper December 17, 2010
Fannie’s Last Supper by Chris Kimball was a fun book. The premise is as follows: Kimball, founder and editor of the magazine, Cook’s Illustrated, and host of the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen decides to create and served 12-course, Victorian dinner from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook. As you can imagine recreating recipes from 1896 is a challenge, and sometimes fairly gross (Mock-Turtle Soup, made with a calf’s head. Ugh.). It was interesting to see how much cooking had changed in just over 100 years, and while it was really fun to read about this different food and to get a little history into how this country ate, it made me glad that I live when I do now when cooking doesn’t take all day and I never have to make gelatin from calves’ feet.
While the planning and preparation for this dinner took two years, and the books covers this, there was also a documentary made of the dinner itself, which is supposed to be showing on PBS “during the holidays”. So far I haven’t seen it listed on my local PBS station, but I am hoping to catch it when it airs. It would be interesting to actually see the food described in the book.
Early Reviewer: How to Read the Air December 4, 2010
I felt really lucky to get this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program. How to Read the Air is the second novel by Dinaw Mengestu. His first, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was set in Washington, DC, which is why I picked it up. It was also beautifully written, which is why I enjoyed it. This book has no DC connection. It follows the protagonist, Jonas Woldemariam, as he retraces the steps of his parent’s road trip from Peoria to Nashville, trying to make sense of his and his parents lives. It’s not really an uplifting book, Jonas’s parents had an unhappy and abusive marriage and his mother left once he was in college, Jonas’s marriage is falling apart, but as the story unfolds I found myself caring just as much as Jonas about what had happened and how the characters found themselves where they are. Mengestu is a great writer and if you haven’t read him before, I really recommend it.
Early Reviewer: Two Cents Plain November 5, 2010
I have a backlog of Early Reviewer books from LibraryThing at my house (3 more to review after this one), which I suppose is not a bad problem to have. Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood is a graphic memoir by Martin Lemelman about (as you could probably guess from the subtitle) growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s. His parents were Holocaust survivors (his mother spent World War II hiding in the woods in Poland and his father was a soldier in the Soviet army). They met in a displaced persons camp in Germany and married. They settled eventually in the Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, where they owned a candy store and raised their two boys (Martin is the younger). While Martin’s childhood wasn’t idyllic, the store does have that glow of nostalgia that makes the hardships (the angry father, the poverty, the roaches) not seem that harsh. The book is illustrated by Lemelman’s drawings and by snapshots and memorabilia (ticket stubs, letters, etc) that give the book a scrapbook-y feel. A good book.
Early Reviewer: Girl in Translation May 24, 2010
I got my copy of Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, which has been treating me quite well recently. I started it on the honeymoon, but read it leisurely, finishing quite a few books in between. It was good, well written and engaging. It reads somewhat like a memoir, and tells the story of a girl who immigrants to the US from Hong Kong with her mother, and their struggles working in the clothing factory, and living in a condemned apartment, as well as Kim’s triumphs as a student. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it. The blurbs on the back compare it to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which happens to be the book for book club next month, so I’m interested to compare.
Diet for a Hot Planet March 20, 2010
Diet for a Hot Planet is subtitled “The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It” which should give you a good idea of what this book covers. Anna Lappe (the daughter of Frances Moore Lappe who wrote Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1970s) does a good job of explaining how the food we eat contributes to the climate crisis. There’s a lot to think about and I haven’t processed it all yet, but I know at the very least I will be figuring out how to limit my purchase of items containing palm oil. To establish palm oil plantations (which is apparently in everything from cookies to soap), developers cut down rainforests and drain peatlands (massive amounts of dead and decaying plant matter which are covered by water). When the peatlands are drained this plant matter is exposed to air and begins to oxidize, releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Lappe states that ” [t]hough peatlands cover just 0.2 percent of the earth’s surface their destructions is associated with 8 percent of total global emissions” (p. 30). There’s lots more about this in the book – and about other ways that agriculture and food production impact our planet, so if you are interested (or want it explained better) I recommend that you read it.
(I got Diet for a Hot Planet through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program for free. Lucky me! I will happily loan it out if other folks would like to read it.)
Etta December 22, 2008
Etta, the first novel by Gerald Kolpan (and another Early Reviewer book) is a winner. In it, Kolpan imagines the life of Etta Place, a “real-life” figure about whom little is known beyond her status as girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. The life Kolpan creates for Etta is perfect – adventurous and complex with a great sprinkling of real historical figures. It’s not the truth, but it’s better than. It’s life at its storytelling best.
Kolpan has done his research. Having just finished a non-fiction book with a chapter on the Harvey Girls, it was interesting to see them pop up again in fictional form. And to see how close to the historical truth the depiction was. One thing that I really like about historical fiction is that it offers you a glimpse of another world. Etta did this for me – and made for a quick and entertaining end of the year read. I would recommend it, if you like historical fiction.
The Oxford Project October 29, 2008
This book was amazing. Amazing. I picked it up after dinner on Monday night and I didn’t put it down until I was done.
Basically the Oxford Project is this: Photographer Peter Feldstein moves to the small town of Oxford, IA (he’s an art professor at the University of Iowa) and in 1984 decides to photograph all of the town’s 676 residents. After an exhibit in town, he puts the photographs away and doesn’t think about them for 20 years – at which point he decides to do it again.
The book contains portraits of 150 or so of those residents – along with biographical stories from interviews Stephen Bloom did with the residents. The photos are wonderful and really make you want to read about the people pictured and their lives.
Several things stuck out at me about the book:
Many things about people are immutable – often residents would stand the same way for their portraits 20 years apart without noticing it. So much of who we are as people is shaped by how others see us, but clearly at our core we are all our own person.
Family resemblance is interesting to consider. Both in terms of appearance and in terms of how we live our lives. I think we all think at least a little about the ways in which we are like our families (even if we don’t want to be) and also the ways in which we are profoundly different. When families work, they are a wonderful thing. So many of the people in this book spoke about the joy and strength they get from having so much of their family living nearby.
Bad things shape you. Especially the loss of a child. It was remarkable to me how many people spoke in their interviews about a child who had died – even if that death had occured a long time ago. Having a child die before you never becomes normal or unremarkable.
A small, close-knit community is wonderful. Unless you don’t feel a part of it – and then the closeness of that community makes it even harder to not belong.
This was another Early Reviewer book. I was so excited when I found out that I was getting it and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.
Tears of the Desert September 30, 2008
Tears of the Desert by Halima Bashir is subtitled “A Memoir of Survival in Darfur” which gives you a pretty good idea of what you are in for. This was another Early Reviewer title, and it took me a few weeks to pick it up after receiving because I wasn’t sure I was up for the subject matter. I’m glad I did though. The book is very accessible and does a good job of personalizing the conflict.
Like many people I’m sure, I knew that “bad things” were happening in Darfur, but I didn’t have a good idea of the specifics of the conflict. Bashir explains it well through the lens of her own life story. She is a black African from the Zaghawa tribe, and she explains that the conflict exists between the Arab minority that rules the country and the black African tribes that make up the majority of Sudan’s population. Bashir is also quite an exceptional woman. Thanks to a supportive father, she leaves her village to attend private schools and is accepted into the university in Khartoum, where she earns her medical degree. Writing about her childhood is especially powerful, because it makes clear just how much has been lost by the conflict – not just lives, homes and bodily integrity, but an entire way of life, her village community and many others just like it.
It is worth noting that Bashir’s memoir was written with a professional writer, Damien Lewis. I think that this is part of why the book is so readable and think it was a good decision to make. I would recommend the book.
