A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
What It’s About: Journalist Brooke Hauser relates the stories of several students at International High School in Prospect Heights, a high school designed to teach English and other skills to recently-immigrated high school students and help them integrate into the U.S. Over the course of a year, Hauser follows the students as the face the competing pressures of learning to survive in America, learning to thrive in high school, and balancing the expectations from their families.
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One Sentence Summary: In 1933, the first year of Hitler’s reign in Germany, a mild-mannered professor was appointed the American ambassador to Berlin and became one of the first witnesses to the atrocities soon to come in Europe.
Two Sentence Review: I’m drawing a blank right now… In the Garden of Beasts is a good book and I enjoyed reading it. Enough said?
Why I Read It: Erik Larson is one of those big narrative nonfiction writers, so when I saw he was speaking at BEA about his new book, I knew I had to read it.
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5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet by John C. Abell in WIRED
I love a lot great discussion points about e-books in this article, but my favorite paragraph has to be this one:
It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.
I want to just pull out this quote every time anyone in my family makes a comment about the growing size of my bookshelves!
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One Sentence Summary: After a pleasure flight of enlisted American men and women crashes in an uncharted part of New Guinea, a dramatic rescue is organized to save the survivors who are living amid a prehistoric tribe that calls the valley home.
One Sentence Review: Lost in Shangri-La exemplifies the best qualities of strong narrative nonfiction and was truly unputdownable.
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Do you ever have weeks where it feels like everything that could possibly happen all happens at the same time and it seems like you can’t even find time to think? That was the last couple of weeks for me.
This general sense of life busyness started 11 days ago. In that time I’ve worked full time, plus… played two soccer games, gone to one birthday party, driven to and from Minnesota twice (for a total of about 18 hours in the car), gone to dinner, took a sick day, volunteered, went to an author event, went to my book club, visited all of my grandparents, visited a friend’s family in the hospital, and attended a funeral. I also wrote two freelance stories and a guest post and read two books.
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While I haven’t read either of Mortenson’s books, I’ve been following the discussions about this scandal because issues of truth in nonfiction are interesting to me. One particular article by Laura Miller in Salon — Why “Three Cups of Tea’s” lies don’t really matter — rubbed me the wrong way. While I agree with her central argument about the importance of the financial side of this story, Miller is too quick to dismiss the serious issues of Mortenson potentially fabricating parts of her story and discredits other hard-working and honest nonfiction writers in the process.
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Earlier this week, my review of Blood Work by Holly Tucker was posted online. This was my second “professional” review (the first being Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress), and I have to say, this one was a lot easier to write. I think that’s because Blood Work is nonfiction, which is much more up my alley.
Blood Work is a history of blood transfusion, which was first attempted in France between 1665 and 1668. At that time, French and English scientists were in a race to see who could perform a successful transfusion the soonest, first focusing on animals and then people.
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I’m in the middle of reading The Long Goodbye by Meaghan O’Rourke, the story of O’Rourke’s experiences after her mother’s death from at age 55. While I don’t actively seek out memoirs about grief, it seems like they have been a big part of my reading lately.
About a month ago, I read an article in the New York Times where O’Rourke and Joyce Carol Oates discuss why they chose to write about their own losses, and why books about loss can resonate with readers.
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Two Sentence Summary: From the book jacket — “On June 8, 1966, an EF-5 tornado cut a 22-mile swath across eastern Kansas and straight through Topeka, Kansas’s capital city. When it was over, 16 people were dead, more than 500 were injured, and property damage had reached $100 million.”
One Sentence Review: The level of detail and strong use of visuals make this book an impressive and engrossing read.
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One Sentence Summary: Between 1915 and 1970 almost six million African American migrated from the South to escape Jim Crow laws, which changed the entire face of the United States.
One Sentence Review: Wilkerson’s book manages to be both epic and deeply personal at the same time, and is the kind of nonfiction that changed the way I think about the world.
Why I Read It: This book was shortlisted for the Indie Lit Awards in nonfiction, and I am a judge for that panel. Opinions expressed in this review are my own, and don’t reflect the thoughts of the panel or reflect our ratings of the book.
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