Sometimes I think a book comes along at just the right time — it hits a chord you didn’t know needed to be hit, or speaks on some way that makes the impact of the book more than the sum of it’s part. That doesn’t diminish how good the book is, just amplifies what it’s about.

This week, I had one of those books — Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt.

Making Toast is Rosenblatt’s memoir of the time just after his 38-year-old daughter Amy’s unexpected death from a rare heart condition. The day of Amy’s death, Rosenblatt and his wife Ginny move in with Amy’s husband Harris and their three grandchildren — seven-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old Bubbies (aka James). Over the next year, Rosenblatt and Ginny learn to be part of a new routine, finding a way to cope with Amy’s death by trying to fill in as best they can for a family learning to survive without their mother.

The book’s magic lies in it’s simplicity. The memoir is made up not of a single narrative, but of a series of moments that build to a story about family, grief, and trying to build a new life after the inexplicable happens. And Rosenblatt never overstates these moments, just lets them work for himself. Take, for example, this anecdote where the title of the memoir comes from:

I wake up earlier than the others, usually around 5 a.m., to perform the one household duty I have mastered. After posting the morning’s word, emptying the dishwasher, setting the table for the children’s breakfasts, and pouring the MultiGrain Cheerios or Fruit Loops or Apple Jacks or Special K or Fruity Pebbles, I prepare toast. I take out the butter to allow it to soften, and put three slices of Pepperidge Farm Hearty White in the toaster oven. Bubbies and I like plain buttered toast; Sammy prefers it with cinnamon, with the crusts cut off. When the bell rings, I shift the slices from the toaster to plates, and butter them.

Harris usually spends half the night in Bubbies’s little bed. When I go upstairs around 6 a.m., Bubbies hesitates, but I give him a knowing look and he opens his arms to me. “Toast?” he says. I take him from his father, change him, and carry him downstairs to allow Harris another twenty minutes’ sleep.

I like that section because of how much it says so many things about routines and the love from parents and grandparents and the ways in which life changes in an instant but the simple things, like making breakfast, still have to keep going.

I don’t think I can rate this book because it was exactly what I needed to read this particular week and that timing is linked to why I loved it so much . I’d had a really stressful week where things just never felt like they were working for me and I needed a way to let all of that go so I could get ready to move on to next week. I started reading Making Toast on Thursday and started crying within the first five pages. Not because the book is so terribly sad, but because it was so beautiful and simple and emotional in a way that allowed me to let everything go. It let me channel all of the negative feelings I was having through the story and by the end I just felt better.

I would have loved this book any time I read it — Rosenblatt’s writing is clean and purposeful and he writes with such love for every single one of the people in the story that you can’t help get pulled in. It’s a lovely little book that I sat down and read in an afternoon, and I think lots of other people should read it. But I can’t rate it. I can’t put a number for the book because it impacted me in a much bigger way. That’s one of my favorite experiences of reading, and one that I can only hope every reader understands.

What’s the last book you read that hit the perfect emotional chord making it even greater than the sum of the book’s parts?

The Sunday Salon: Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

Title: Hunger: An Unnatural History
Author: Sharman Apt Russell
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2005
Acquired: Library (upon @BibioEva’s Twitter suggestion)
Rating:

One Sentence Summary: Hunger: An Unnatural History is an overview of the science, sociology, and moral implications of hunger and it’s impact across the globe.

One Sentence Review: This book covers a little too much territory for my tastes, but it still provides a well-written and important overview of the impact of hunger on an individual and society.

Long Review: As someone who grew up never hungry, I don’t know that I’ve ever realized how melodramatic and insulting it is to whine, “I’m starving” at the end of a long day when all I want to do is eat dinner. Starvation is not something to take lightly, as many of the people (but not all) in Hunger: An Unnatural History help illustrate.

The book is divided into two themes. In the first half, Russell explores what happens to the body after a nights sleep, eighteen hours, thirty-six hours, seven days, and thirty days without food. The second half involves more of the sociology and history of hunger, looking at the use of hunger strikes, hunger studies, hunger diseases, and hungry children. She ends with a few chapters looking at what is currently being done to help solve the hunger problems across the globe.

The first half is much more science heavy that the second, but it’s not science-heavy in a bad way because the descriptions are easy to read and easy to understand. Here, Russell describes what it’s like for the body to skip a meal:

We will have varying responses to skipping a meal, based on our metabolism and psychology. In a few ours, as the level of our blood sugar continues to drop, we might also experience a drop in energy. That might make uas anxious or irritable. We might develop a headache. We might have a gnawing sensation below our rib cage. We might rumble embarrassingly. Who knew the body could make such sounds? Borborygmus is the onomatopoeia for the increased activity of the intestines as they squeeze every bit of old material through, all the way to the rectum, causing the collision of water and air pockets, bubbles and gurgles. We might feel some mild cramping. TO be hungry is to be uncomfortable, and most of us experience hunger in the same way we experience pain, as a signal to do something.

What’s striking about the second half — focused on history, sociology, and anthropology — is the very different attitudes people have on hunger. Magician David Blaine, for example, voluntarily starved himself for 44 days while being hung in the air in a clear box as a sort of publicity stunt. On the other hand, Jewish doctors  in the Warsaw ghetto conducted studies on the physical impacts of starvation on people in the ghetto who were actually starving. Many of the participants (and doctors) died because of lack of food or being executed by Nazi’s.

These opposites — from cavalier to contemplative — are a feature of most of the book. Russell does a good job of pointing out these different attitudes and sharing her opinion on them without being too forceful about it. But really, it’s hard to not think that hunger is an awful thing. The question, and one that she raises frequently, is how much are we willing to sacrifice to solve the problem?

Near the end of the book, when talking about a volunteer working to solve education issues in Guatemala, she writes,

I will help — but only so much, only so far. It is not that I believe these children are less than my own. it is not that I believe I do not have a responsibility for them. It is just that in a world of haves and have-nots, I do not want to give up too much of what I have. I do not want to diminish the complexity and diversity of my life. Instead, I will choose to spend another seventy-five dollars on myself rather than send another child to school, and I will choose to do this over and over again. I no longer think of myself as a good person. I have adjusted to that.

That was the most hard to swallow quote of the entire book for me because, at the core, it’s completely true and I am the same way. One of the challenges we all face is the balance of what we can and cannot do, what we will and will not do, and how to accept the selfish (and not selfish) limits we have to put on ourselves.

Hunger and The Great Starvation Experiment

I read this book pretty soon after I read The Great Starvation Experiment by Todd Tucker. TGSE was about the Minnesota Starvation Study conducted by Ancel Keys in the mid-1950s. Russell devotes one chapter in Hunger to talking about the study, and I found the differences in their perspectives on the event quite interesting.

The biggest difference was their idea about Subject Number 20, the young man who lost it for a little while and ended up chopping off three of his fingers in a hunger-crazed attempt to get out of the study. Tucker is sympathetic to #20, and throughout the book portrays him as a leader of the group who was well-liked and well-respected by his fellow participants and the scientists of the study. #20’s breakdown was a shock to everyone, Tucker argues, but didn’t diminish the character of #20 himself.

Russell, on the other hand, is much less sympathetic. Through the researcher’s notes, she says that in the last weeks of the study, #20 became “one of the weakest and most aggravating members of the group” and “his air of suffering irritated everyone.” After chopping off his fingers and received treatment at the hospital, she says “the scientists theorized that the extra care had substituted for the ‘mothering’ his immature personality required.”

What this shows me is that even nonfiction, something we tend to rely on for factual accounts or the “truth” of an experience often involves some interpretation. I’m not sure whether Tucker or Russell is correct in their interpretation of events. I can only look to their research to try and decide who might have a more accurate idea. In her reference and notes section, Russell doesn’t indicate that she did any interviews for this chapter, but instead relied on print and video sources for her quotes. Tucker, on the other hand, interviewed a number of participants in the study (including, I think, #20 himself, although I don’t have the book to check that for sure or get his real name).

Given that information, I’m more inclined to trust Tucker’s interpretation, but that might not be fair either. He might have been too close to his interview subject influences his biases of what happened in this study. In any case, my point is that reading two books that mention the same subject close together provides some good, concrete evidence about the potential fallibility of even well-researched nonfiction to truly get to the truth of an event.

But that’s really a digression from my impressions of Hunger: An Unnatural History. In general, I felt like the book covered a lot of issues related to hunger, but never went into them as much as I might have enjoyed. However, for someone not as interested in food as I am, this book is probably more than enough information to be a satisfying read.

Other Reviews: Rebecca Reads | A Progressive on the Prairie | A Striped Armchair |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Review: Hunger – An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

I didn’t get much reading done this week, which is too bad because I got two books from inter-library loan (The Magicians by Lev Grossman and Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt) that I only have 14 days to read! Gah!

Instead of reading, I’ve been working on a mid-term paper about the ethics of objectivity and transparency for bloggers. It’s a short-ish paper, but it’s leading to a much longer paper that’s going to look at these issues for book bloggers in context of the FTC disclosure guidelines. Don’t worry, I’ll be sharing a lot more about that soon.

During all my reading and research, I came across a number of quotes about the relationship between bloggers and journalists that I thought I could share and see what you all think. This first one is from page 133 of  Cecelia Friend and Jane B. Singer’s 2007 book Online Journalism Ethics:

So are bloggers journalists, and are their ethics interchangeable? No, they are different – but complementary rather than contradictory. Indeed, the relationship can best be described as symbiotic. Interconnected blogs and their readers form a community that discusses, dissects, and extends the stories created y mainstream media, as well as producing its own commentary, fact-checking, and grassroots reporting. The mainstream media in turn feed upon this material, developing it as a pool of tips, sources, and story ideas – not to mention bringing blogs and the issues raised by bloggers to the public’s attention by covering it as newsworthy.

I really like that summary of the relationship between bloggers and mainstream journalism, but that might just be because it’s complimentary to both groups and I consider myself to be part of both groups. What do you think of it?

Another study I read (”Interactivity and Prioritizing the Human: A Code of Blogging Ethics” by Martin Kuhn) surveyed 30 mainstream political bloggers to see how they felt about ethics and issues of transparency and accountability. The study asked who bloggers considered to be the stakeholders in their blogging, and found:

When bloggers considered their own blog, they did not discuss effects outside of their immediate social circles. However, when discussing blogs in the aggregate, bloggers framed blogs as vehicles for social change, a challenge to our mainstream media, and tools that can be leveraged for political and social gain. Thus, the primary stakeholder in a functioning blogosphere, one that fosters authentic human communication, group formation, and community building, is no less than society itself. Viewed from this perspective, bloggers have a duty to be socially responsible, similar to that of communicators in the traditional media, which can be operationalized by honoring a duty to prioritize the human and interactivity in blogging.

Basically, all that’s arguing is that bloggers can’t get away with thinking of their blogs as a singular entity, not tied to any other groups or communities or without consequences. If blogs as a whole are impacting mainstream journalism and society at large, then I think this quote suggests there needs to be some sort of larger ethic or set of ethics at work as bloggers join the conversation.

But there are many, many logistical and philosophical questions that go into the idea of creating a blogging code of ethics. Is it needed? Does a code go against how blogging works and is designed? Who is responsible for creating and/or enforcing a code of ethics? And would a blogging code of ethics look the same or different from the codes of ethics already in place for mainstream journalists?

I’ve really no idea, but since I’m writing a paper (or, at this moment avoiding a paper) on some of those issues I suppose I should come up with something

The Sunday Salon: Some Scholars on Blogging/Journalism Ethics is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

I’m combining three of blog-business posts into one with this, because I don’t like it when my blog gets overrun with posts not actually about books.  This week, Weekly Geeks wanted to look at commenting, a topic I think is really important to think about as a blogger. The task for the Blog Improvement Project is to look into categories and tags — two administrative tools that help keep blogs organized and can help search engines find you blog. And finally, a few bloggers (My Friend Amy, Beth Fish Reads, others?) posted social media policies yesterday, which inspired me to do the same.

Commenting

For pretty much the best post on commenting I’ve read in a long time, you should check out this post by Care at Care’s Online Book Club. She pretty much lays out everything I think about commenting, but in a much more entertaining way than I probably will. In a nutshell, here’s how I think about comments here at Sophisticated Dorkiness:

• I try to respond to all comments here on the blog post. I do that because I like future readers to be able to see the thread of conversation. If a comment needs more than that, or I’m not sure the commenter will check back, I try to respond via e-mail or by leaving a comment on that blog.
• Sometimes I’m slow responding to comments (read, a day or two after the post). I probably won’t change that, I just wanted you to be aware
• I am going to try to be better visiting blogs of people who stop by to leave comments. That’s not something I’ve done in the past, but I want to get better about it.
• I don’t normally delete comments, but reserve the right to do so if they’re rude to me or other readers. I can take criticism, but let’s keep it civil.

That’s about the extent of it. I really, really appreciate every single comment I receive and try to reciprocate the general warm fuzzy feeling of comments to other people.

What are some of your philosophies on commenting? Anything important I’m forgetting?

Categories and Tags

This post is an anomaly in that I put it in three categories. Normally that’s not a great idea, but there are always exceptions. I have a pretty long list of categories which include:

• Authors: For posts specifically about an author or their life.
• Book Review: Self explanatory, right?
• Challenges: This has three sub-categories — 2009 BIP, Blog Improvement Project, and Women Unbound. I don’t join many challenges, so this category is small.
• Communities: This has four sub-categories all for that get used pretty frequently since I’m a big believer in community activities.
  • BBAW: Book Blogger Appreciation Week
  • Read-a-Thon: For the 24-Hour Read-a-Thon
  • Sunday Salon
  • Weekly Geeks
• J-School: For posts specifically related to journalism school notes. I won’t be using this one much in a few months when I graduate (eek!!!)
• Journalism: For thoughts on journalism issues more generally, a category I want to use more soon.
• Metadiscourse: This is my favorite category. It’s just a fancy word for posts about this blog or blogging.
• Musings: Random stuff I’m thinking about.
• Narrative Nonfiction 5: My new feature!
• News and Notes: Info about news happening about books or other events.

So far, these categories have been working pretty well for me. This week I plan to write up some good descriptions of these categories and create a page for them, since some of them might not be self-explanatory.

Tagging is something I’ve never been very good at. I have a small list of tags I usually use, but after reading some of the links from the BIP post this week I think it’s important to use more tags rather than less. I’m going to start making sure to include tags for authors, genres, and other nouns relevant to the posts.

My Social Media Policy

This section is about how I generally use various social media across the web. This policy is evolving and changing and I’m always looking for ways to do it better. Suggestions are always, always welcome.

Blog: As stated above, I try to respond to all comments and visit bloggers that comment. I try to comment on as many blogs as I can, but, like everyone, I read way more blogs than I have time to comment on. That sucks, but it’s the truth.

E-mail: To the best of my ability, I answer all e-mails directly to me that from other bloggers that ask questions or give feedback. I don’t respond to book pitches for books that I’m not interested in because I think it’s a waste of time for both parties. Please don’t take that personally, it’s just easier.

Facebook: My Facebook account is, generally, for my in real life friends and family. I do very little bookish publicity or discussion there. I also don’t go out of my way to friend people, but feel free to find me if you want to read status updates about my cat, The Office, or links to awesome xkcd comics.

Twitter: I don’t follow everyone because, frankly, I get a lot of weird followers. I do try to respond to any @ replies and conversations. Please join in!

Ning/Goodreads: I’m on both Ning and GoodReads, although I’m not very active. Feel free to find me there if you choose.

Thoughts or impressions of any of the above bloggy-business things? Let me know in the comments (to which I will respond, I promise!)

Comments, Categories, and Social Media — Oh My! is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

I’m so excited to share that I get to be a guest on That’s How I Blog, a show hosted by Nicole of Linus’s Blanket. We’ll be chatting about books and blogging and gossip, starting tonight, March 2 at 8 p.m. CST. Then at the end we’ll talk about Susan Jane Gilman’s memoir Undress Me In the Temple of Heaven!

Here’s the specific link for my show — the chat and everything will open tonight, as will the call-in number if you have questions for me.

I’m a little nervous, but excited. I think we’ll have a fun chat. I have to spend some time reviewing the book because it’s been a little bit since I read it.

For more information about That’s How I Blog, check out the That’s How I Blog Website and the That’s How I Blog, Blog. I hope to chat with you tonight!

Let’s Chat Tonight on ‘That’s How I Blog!’ is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

Title: Memoir: A History
Author: Ben Yagoda
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2009
Acquired: Requested from the publisher for review
Rating:

One Sentence Summary: Memoir: A History is exactly what the title implies — an overview of how memoirs have evolved from the early days of spiritual autobiography to the current trends of celebrity memoir and contested truth.

One Sentence Review: This book is a must read for anyone interested in reading memoirs or enjoys talking about truth and writing and how we’ve gotten to the type of memoirs we can read today.

Long Review: I knew I was going to like this book when one of the first section spent time discussing Daniel DeFoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) and the influence of the spiritual autobiography in the 1700s. See, my senior English paper was an in-depth analysis of almost exactly the same topic, and I carry around this secret torch for anything Daniel DeFoe. Yagoda explored many of the themes I tried to address in my paper — the development of truth and the impact of the development of fiction on nonfiction writing — which made my heart do a few nerdy flip flops through the chapter. I knew I was hooked.

And I was definitely pleased with where the book went from there. Yagoda follows the development of the memoir from the earliest confessionals (think The Confessions of Saint Augustine) to the whole slew of memoirs we have today (celebrity memoirs, “misery memoirs,” dad memoirs, and dog memoirs, among others). Throughout, he focuses on some important topics — truth in memoir and memory, treatments of others, and what has made us so narcissistic that everyone thinks they should write a memoir.

Given the topic, this book could have been a pretty dry history. Luckily, it’s not. Yagoda has a calm but bemused tone throughout that makes the history pretty easy to read. Plus, he spends a lot of time making connections between memoirists of the past and writers today, trying to trace current trends back to their earliest origins. I found the connections the most interesting part, and Yagoda writes them with precision and quiet humor. I like this passage about truth and the easy of writing fake:

In any society where a particular currency has high vale and is farily easily fashioned, counterfeiters will quickly and inevitably emerge. And so it has been with memoir. Make no mistake: for anyone with minimal conscience, plus reasonable imagination and literary and research skills, writing an autobiography that’s substantially or even totally fake is elementary. Once the writing is complete, given an only slightly higher level of cunning and guile, the marketing of such a work is easier still.

That section goes on to discuss the process for moving a memoir from writing to press and the many areas where truth is explored — or ignored — before the memoir is published.

Also, Yagoda’s comments on James Frey (the memoir faker of A Million Little Pieces) made me laugh out loud:

After his book had come out to striking success, Frey spoke to Entertainment Weekly. “When I walk into Random House, they treat me like a rock star,” he said. “People are breathless. They can’t believe I’m alive. They’re like ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’”

Is it any surprise that such a self-absorbed poseur should, in his book, have pumped up his life to make it seem more violent, painful, melodramatic, and extreme than it was. Of course not.

Hilarious.

My one problem with the book is the constant name dropping. Yagoda often just lists memoir authors, assuming the reader will know who they are and without listing the name of their book. Being a book blogger, the constant lists of authors and books made me immediately contemplate hosting a challenge to read memoirs through history, but without a list or glossary matching names with the titles my hopes for an easy challenge list were dashed.

Well, not dashed. Put on hold, for the moment anyway. But reading this book did inspire me to think more critically and thoughtfully about the memoirs I read, think about what truthfulness really means, and how memoirs today have changed in response to memoirs of the past. If you have any interest in memoirs, I think this book is a necessity.

Other Reviews:

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Review: Memoir – A History by Ben Yagoda is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

I was reading one of my new library books recently, Hunger: An Unnatural History, and came across a checkout receipt from another patron. That person checkout the book on September 17, 2007 from the Sequoya Branch Library at 3:44 p.m. They also checked out The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. I wonder what kind of person would check out both of those books at the same time?

I’ve always loved finding things left in books — I like the tangible evidence that another person has picked up this book, read it, and experienced the same words and stories that I’m experiencing now. I’ve always loved the way books can connect people across time and place, and finding evidence like a library receipt just makes that feel more real.

I’m a big fan of PostSecret — an online community where people mail secrets on the backs of postcards that are then shared online and in books. It’s become common for people to leave their own secrets in the pages of PostSecret books at bookstores and libraries, sharing real secrets with another person who also decided to pick up that book. I’ve never found a postcard in a book, but I think that would be cool.

I’m almost tempted to start leaving notes or quotes or fortunes in the pages of the library books I read. I wonder if the person finding the note would be as fascinated as me, or if they’d just find it a little weird.

What’s the most interesting or oddest thing you’ve ever found left in a book? What things have you left in books for other people to find?

The Sunday Salon: Connecting Through Notes Left in Books is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

The inaugural edition of Narrative Nonfiction 5 features five books by authors that went in-depth covering “current” events in the United States. I put current in quotes because most of these books are more than 10 years old, which makes current a bit of a stretch. Still, I’m fairly confident many of these issues haven’t changed so much that the lessons of the story aren’t relevant today.

The authors of these books spent an extensive amount of time with the subjects they covered, which resulted in books with rich details and a level of nuance about subjects many people don’t get the chance to understand.

1. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

In Random Family, journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent 10 years living in the Tremont Avenue area of the Bronx. She follows the twisting lives of two couples — Jessica and her heroin dealer boyfriend Boy George, and Jessica’s brother Cesar and his on-again/off-again girlfriend Coco. Over the time LeBlanc spent there, three of the four ended up in jail, while Coco mothers more children than she can afford.

I read this book earlier in the year after it was named on one of Newsweek’s Fifty Books for Our Time. I think it’s earned that reputation — LeBlanc writes about her subjects with sympathy, but also honesty, not sugar-coating their actions or the potential implications. It’s an enlightening book, both for its subject and the effort that LeBlanc went into reporting and writing this story.

2. A Prayer for the City by Buzz Bissinger

Politics can be supremely fascinating, or really dull, it just depends how it’s written. Luckily, Buzz Bissinger’s book A Prayer for the City makes it awesome. In order to write Prayer for the City, Buzz Bissinger was granted 24-7 access to Ed Rendell during his first term as mayor of Philadelphia and his staff. Bissinger spent four years with the administration while they worked to deal with an out-of-control budget, overly powerful unions, and racial tensions that threatened to tear the city apart. He saw negotiations, meetings, and a tremendous number of private moments where Rendell started to fall apart.

What works best about this book is that although Bissinger likes Rendell, he doesn’t let him off the hook. Bissinger profiles a number of Philadelphia residents (who both like and dislike Rendell) to humanize the political topics Rendell is dealing with. The book is a long-term, insider look at a man and what it takes to be in charge of a major U.S. city. It helped me to see politics from this perspective because it gives a sense of why politics can do good or get stalled up and do no good at all.

3. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

I haven’t reviewed Nickel and Dimed on this blog, but I did read it a number of years ago in college. In the book, Ehrenreich goes undercover to explore what impacts welfare reform had on the working poor. Between the spring or 1998 and summer of 2000, Ehrenreich worked minimum wage jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota for a month each to see if she could live off those wages. In most cases, she could not.

This book is on the list because it’s such a well-known book, and a good example of undercover journalism on an important topic. But unlike the previous two books on this list, Ehrenreich doesn’t attempt to be an unbiased observer of the story — this is her lived, editorialized, experience. I don’t think that makes the reporting less valid or accurate, it’s just a different way to get at the issue of the urban and working poor.

4. Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

In Sudhir Venkatesh’s memoir Gang Leader for a Day, Venkatesh writes about his years studying the Robert Taylor Homes in the ghetto of Chicago. Venkatesh was a young sociology student when he first entered the Robert Taylor homes, but with a stroke of luck (and stupid bravery), he became friends with a local gang leader, J.T., which gives him access to study the underground economy of the area.

I enjoyed this book because, again, it provided an intimate look at a place I don’t have any conception about. It changed some of my opinions about gang life and gang influence as well as frustrated me with how little anyone seemed to be able to do. The book is also problematic because of Venkatesh’s methods — he often was oblivious to the serious problems his research might have caused his subjects. However, he was honest about his mistakes which is something to be happy about.

5. There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz

This is the one book on the list I haven’t read, but I’ve heard good thing about it a number of sources. Kotlowitz was a Wall Street Journal reporter who met brothers Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers in 1985 when they were living in the Chicago ghetto. There Are No Children Here follows them boys growing up with their mother, absent father, and siblings, in a housing project controlled by gangs and respond to their challenges in very different ways. The book takes place in a similar time and place to Gang Leader for a Day, but the focus on two children is very different which makes it a book I hope to read and would love to learn more about.

Thanks for reading through my first Narrative Nonfiction 5 post! If you know of other books on this topic, I’d love to add them to the borrow of the list! Also, if you have suggestions for a Narrative Nonfiction 5 post or would like to write a guest post, please send me an e-mail at sophisticated.dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] come.

Narrative Nonfiction 5: Living “Current” Events is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

One goal I set for myself this year is to do more with nonfiction on my blog. One way I’ve decided to do that is through a new semi-weekly feature: Narrative Nonfiction 5. Every few weeks or so, Narrative Nonfiction 5 will feature a list of five nonfiction books on a particular theme.

As the title suggests, I’m focusing specifically on narrative nonfiction. That term can encompass a lot of things, but for me it means nonfiction books that use techniques of fiction — plot, characters, dialogue, symbolism — to tell a good, true, story. Genres that might fall into this category include creative nonfiction, literary journalism, memoirs, personal essays, and more. It does not include things like textbooks, self-help books, how-to books, or other nonfiction that doesn’t even make an attempt at storytelling.

Obviously, these distinctions are fluid and changing and sometimes don’t mean much. The idea with focusing on narrative nonfiction is that I think the genre provides a way for people who don’t like nonfiction or are afraid to read nonfiction to get into the genre easily. Narrative nonfiction can make nonfiction accessible and I hope encourage people to try reading more true stories.

The other thing I’m excited about with Narrative Nonfiction 5 is the chance for reader interaction. If you have a topic you’d like to see a list about, e-mail me your idea and I’ll include for a future list. And if you have a topic you’d like to write a Narrative Nonfiction 5 post about, I would love a guest post on topics I’m not as familiar with.

I’m posting the first Narrative Nonfiction 5 post tomorrow, so stay tuned!

A New Feature: Narrative Nonfiction 5 is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.

Title: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Author: Anne Lamott
Genre: Memoir/Personal Essays
Year: 1999
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One Sentence Summary: In this memoir, Lamott explores moments that test faith and explore her own quirky relationship with God.

One Sentence Review: If you can enjoy Lamott’s neurotic but open personality, Traveling Mercies is a joy to read.

Long Review: Anne Lamott’s reflections on faith and spirituality begin with a story called “Overture: Lily Pads.” In it, Lamott explores the moments in her life when her sense of faith drastically changed. She moves from her childhood and friends and the impact they had on her growing faith to eventually finding her place in a quiet church with her son, Sam. Each of these moments, a time when Lamott felt like she reached a realization, serve as a safe space — a lily pad — between times of uncertainty. The rest of the book explores Lamott’s continuing struggle to understand God and religion and how she fits into the world.

One of the first things to talk about with this book is whether it’s a religious book or not. In topic, probably, but in spirit I think it’s more broad than that. Certainly, Lamott’s religious conversions and experiences make up the bulk of the story, but the faith she has now doesn’t dogmatic or pushy or unwilling to accept other beliefs. The book isn’t about any particular religion, but rather one woman’s journey to find a faith that works for her. If that idea doesn’t work for you — perhaps because you think there is one correct religion or because you don’t believe in having faith — then the book might not be for you.

I’ve admired Lamott ever since I read her memoir on writing, Bird by Bird. Her honesty as a writer is refreshing and something I look forward to reading. But she’s also a writer that knows what she’s doing. For example, whenever she uses a metaphor or unique way to explain something, she follows up on that reference later in the text. For readers paying close attention, these reminders serve as a little joke with Lamott that help bring out her personality and make you feel like you’re just sitting down to chat with her about faith and life.

My favorite chapter of this memoir was “Grace” where Lamott talked about feminism and her admiration of author Grace Paley. Lamott writes,

In 1970 when I was sixteen, the women’s movement had just burst into the general public awareness. I am someone who can say with all sincerity that I owe my life to the movement, but as it first emerged from new York, much of its gospel was defined by grown-up daughters who did not want to risk having anything in common with what has been their mothers’ movement. As a result, some of the language of the early movement contained an ugly rejection of mothers, of motherhood, of softness, of want to be in deep relationships with men. But at the same time, coming out of New York from the tenements and the Village and the antiwar movement was a short-story writer whose work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things — a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer – and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral. You could escape the fate of your mother, become who you were born to be, and succeed in the world without having to participate in traditionally male terms — without hardness, coldness, one-upmanship, without having to compete and come out the winner.

She was beautiful, zaftig, and powerful; she was a mother; she was in love; she was a combative pacifist. That was Grace Paley.

The chapter goes on to tell about a chance when Lamott had the chance to do two readings with Paley. In the first, Lamott performed terribly, but learned that with grace it’s possible to forgive yourself. The idea of grace is the idea of accepting when you’re ineffectual or don’t succeed, but forgiving yourself anyway. There was just something beautiful about the whole chapter. I came back to it about a week later after I had a really horrible and no good day and reading about Grace and grace and Anne made me smile and let some of that go.

In general, I think I enjoyed this book so much because reading it left me with a series of warm and fuzzy feelings. Lamott isn’t afraid to share her neuroses, to put herself out there on the page and let you connect with her through her writing. I felt like the book gave me more faith in my own rocky and hard-to-define sense of faith, which is such a beautiful thing. I can’t say for sure whether the book would be as excellent to someone who feels confident in their faith or has no desire to find it, but for anyone who wonders about it I think the book is one to pick up and savor.

Other Reviews: Word Lily | Bibliofreakblog |

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Review: Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott is a post from: Sophisticated Dorkiness, © 2010.