Helping Me Help Myself - Beth Lisick

Knowing that I love memoirs so much, Raz recommended this one to me. This is one woman's quest to become a better person through self-help guides and personal coaching gurus. Married in Berkeley with a 4-year old son, Lisick is a writer who moonlights as a banana and does various other odd jobs to barely pay the minimum on her bills every month. So, for one year she decides that each month she is going to pick one area of her life to focus on imporving - she will read the self-help books, but she will also, when possible, seek out the masters themselves by attending workshops. She flies to Chicago to attend a seminar for the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; focusing on her physical well-being, she takes a week-long cruise with Richard Simmons; she learns new parenting techniques; she draws financial advice fom Suze Ormon; and in my favorite month, she takes a photograph of every room in her house and consults a specialist in organization. Each month Lisick's self-help vocabulary grows, and while she abandons each project when her 30 days are up, she appears to carry small lessons from one month to the next. Lisick has a very good sense of humor, and while she is resistant to change, she is very aware of her personal problems. At times, she can be a bit crass, but this book actually provided me with a little motivation to organize my own closets and to be a little better about trying to make the changes I know I need to make in my own life.

The Kindness of Strangers - Katrina Kittle

A couple months ago, I agreed to review books for an award given out by Stanford called the Saroyan Prize. It is given out every two years to a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction. My deadline to submit my reviews is tomorrow, and The Kindness of Strangers was the last of my four books to read. So, I went out on my back deck to enjoy the nice weekend weather and hope that this was a good one...the writing grabbed me right away. Nothing spectacular, just straight-forward and immediately engaging. The book is told in the third-person, but the chapters rotate from the perspective of a widow of two (Sarah), her oldest high-school aged son (Nate), and the 11-year old son of a friend (Jordan). As Sarah struggles to keep her own two sons in order, a devastating secret is revealed about Jordan's family. While the "secret" is not discussed in the book-flap summary, it comes to light fairly quickly - so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything by saying that the horrible truth is that Jordan has been sexually abused for years by his parents. His father flees from the police, and his mother, Sarah's best friend, is arrested but denies any knowledge of the abuse. The subject matter is clearly disturbing, but I thought Kittle dealt with the varying perspectives of the abuse in a masterful way. She deals with the betrayal Sarah feels, Nate's anger, and Sarah's youngest son's inability to understand why his friend would "let" such a thing happen. And, of course, there is Jordan himself and his conflicting loyalties to his parents, his struggle to survive, and his painful journey to understanding what a "normal" world and parental love should look and feel like. Kittle addresses the cycle of abuse, the manipulation by predators, the mob mentality of a community whose children have been threatened - and in general, I felt, really managed to incorporate all sides of this very complex and devastating subject. The Kindness of Strangers is not easy reading, but for better or worse, I think it paints a very real picture of abuse - and is hopefully a step in the direction of better understanding and protecting all children.

The Appeal - John Grisham

After a dismal detour into non-legal writing with Playing for Pizza, Grisham is back to what he does best. The Appeal is a bit of A Civil Action meets Grisham's prior novel King of Torts. After dumping toxic waste into the drinking water of a small town for years, suddenly its residents find that the their cancer rate is 15 times the national average. The book opens with a large punitive damages verdict against the company. The company immediately appeals, and behind the scenes, the conservative machine begins working to ensure that a right-minded individual finds his way onto the state Supreme Court. Grisham comes out swinging with this book, which I found much better written than most of his others. While the main focus of the book condemns the buying of publically-elected judges, Grisham also manages to denounce big business, defense lawyers, and plaintiff's lawyers who handle class actions. He also questions religious organizations who campaign in the name of values, and anyone who campaigns on hot-button issues but utterly fails to ever walk a step in the shoes of the people whose votes they hope to win. I could see many readers thinking Grisham has finally gone off the deep end with this one - and promoting his own liberal-agenda, but I thought it was finely done and one of his best works to date.

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

Jake and I originally bought this book for his grandmother who is a speed-demon reader. She told me it took her about three tries to get into, but then she really loved it. As she handed it over to me, she "gave away" that the narrator of the book is Death, and hoped that she wasn't ruining anything by telling me. As I started to read, I was thinking, "I don't get what's going on here," and then recalled what she told me and it all made sense. Smarter folks than I will figure this all out on their own right away, I'm sure, but I felt knowing ahead of time allowed me to get into this fabulous novel much more quickly, so I pass that spoiler along. This is the story of young Liesel, growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII. In traveling with her single mother to meet her new foster parents, Liesel's younger brother dies of starvation and cold, and after she is dropped off with her new family, Liesel determines that it is because of Hitler that her mother found herself on such desperate times. Liesel, unable to read, then finds herself fascinated by books and language. Her new father teachers her how to read, and Liesel finds a whole new world opened up to her. She befriends a neighborhood boy, assists her stern foster mother with a laundry business, and helps her family hide a very dangerous secret. Admist Liesel's growth is the constant presence of Death, and the need for all those around her to prove their loyalty to the Nazi Party, as well as the fear that they will be mistaken for or otherwise taken as a sympathizer of the Jews. Zusak's language is haunting, and his use of foreshadowing helps maintain the excitement and page-turning quality of this book. I am a sucker for books with young girls as protagonists, and this one did not disappoint.

The Art of Salvage - Leona Briers

Many aspects of this novel are ones that I typically find interesting. Teenage unwed girl gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up for adoption. As the time of the birth nears, however, she finds the decision a difficult one to make. So, she has the baby girl, who is raised by the mother's parents - and the real mother poses as the girl's sister until quite late in the life. The mother exhibits many signs of mental illness and is either incapable or unwilling to show much affection for her daughter. As the daughter grows up, she is obsessed with finding her father, despite learning that her father died before she was born. She too suffers from bouts of depression, and resorts to cutting to relieve her stress. The story is told in four parts, alternating in focus on the mother and the daughter. Despite liking the basic formula of the story, I found the writing distracting. Briers would tell a straight-forward and interesting story for 30-40 pages, and then it would flashback to something that happened years before or something that never happened at all, and I would find myself daydreaming and having to go back and reread everything all over again. Something about the writing just could not maintain my attention. I've read some glowing reviews of this book on the web, but I just think these subject matters have been dealt with in so many better ways by other authors

Three Weeks with My Brother - Nicholas Sparks & Micah Sparks

I've actually never read any of Nicholas Sparks's fiction - though I have a few of his novels sitting on my shelves, and keep meaning to rent the movie based on his book "The Notebook." But, I came across this one while indulging my latest obsession with travel literature. Leaving his wife and five children back in North Carolina to embark on an adventure with his only brother, this is billed as an account of Sparks' three week trip around the world - visiting locations such as Easter Island, Macchu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, and Ankgor Wat. It is also, however, a memoir of Sparks's entire live to date, a look at his interesting family dynamic - the lasting impact of his mother's words, and his incredible bond with his siblings. The travel aspect takes a back seat - especially since the Sparks's choose to take their trip as part of a travel group of over 80 people that focuses on churches and museums, rather than taking in the everyday life and culture of the incredible cities they visit. Often times, Sparks's observations of a given country are glib and bordering on insensitive, albeit admittedly humorous - and as someone who tires of museums and churches very quickly, I could definitely relate. But, ultimately, this is not a book about travel around the world. Sparks's stories about growing up are endearing - and the pain he suffers in losing people he loves and coping with his own developmentally delayed child - brought tears to my eyes. Sparks is also painfully honest about possible mental illness in his family, and his own struggles with excessive stress and guilt. While I enjoyed the travel aspect, it was simply a vehicle for Sparks to tell the real story - one about survival, love, and the importance of family.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - Peter Godwin

I haven't finished many books lately - mostly because I'm on another string of bad books - and I spent a reading-free 4-days with the mock trial team that I coach - definitely a strange experience for me. I checked this book out based on a recommendation from my friend Hillary who does a lot of healthcare work in Africa. It is the memoir of a white man who grew up in Zimbabwe, but currently lives in Manhattan. His parents, deeply rooted in their African community, refuse to leave even after the father has a heart-attack and it becomes obvious that the country does not have the resources or the desire to provide him with adequate medical care. Godwin returns to Zimbabwe to assist his family and to confront his ever-changing and unstable homeland. I thought Godwin did a good job balancing his telling of the political history of Zimbabwe, along with the more personal telling of his family's story. About a third of the way through the book, Godwin discovers that his father is Jewish. This revelation appears to cause somewhat of an identity crisis for Godwin, though I found his reaction overly-dramatic and inexplicable, particularly from a white person growing up in Africa who has probably confronted issues of identity continually throughout his life. I found Godwin's accounts of his interactions, growing up and in the present, with non-white Africans insightful - and at times painful. But, for some reason, I did not find him to be a particularly likeable narrator, and unfortunately, this interfered with my ability to completely absorb his telling of Zimbabwe's powerful history and shocking decline.