RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: August 2009

Monday, August 31, 2009

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE FOREVER WAR

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (Vintage, June, 2009).

Dexter Filkins, a singular and brave foreign correspondent for The New York Times, offers an informed, insider’s glimpse to the chaotic war fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A fascinating study of contemporary war, Filkins achieves raw and riveting witness in his written portrayal of people, images, events and interviews. In Afghanistan he covers the strife and brutality of Talibani executions, wandering orphans in Kabul, landmines, competing war lords, hellish checkpoints overrun with rape and plunder. And in Iraq – which is the centerpiece of the book – he reports from the battlefront, embedded with American soldiers who are themselves children, waging war in a chaotic tribal culture where Sunnis and Shiites and hundreds of insurgent groups are entangled in a brutal battle of revenge. By becoming “part of the place, part of the despair, part of the death,” Filkins offers a plainly intelligent, non-political, non-preachy, horrifying portrait of war (9.5/10).

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

RollnSmoke Reviews: LOVING FRANK

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan (Ballantine Books, 2008).

Mamah Bothwick Cheney is an educated but unfulfilled mother and housewife living in early-20th century Oak Park, Illinois, when she meets and begins a romantic affair with the brilliant and legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. At the expense of their marriages and families, they run off to Europe together and return to The States to commence a bucolic life, co-habitating “in sin” among the isolated fields of Wisconsin where Frank designs an idyllic farming homestead just for them called Taliesin. While this historical novel provides insights into the eccentric characters of both protagonists – they are “alive. Together” -- it is difficult for the reader to summon sympathy for their much-maligned and exposed romance because they’re unbearably narcissistic and comfortably privileged as each constantly indulges his and her artistic and intellectual whims, so that there is no preparation for the final, climaxing tragedy of the story (7/10).

RollnSmokeRecords Recommends: BEST NEW BOOKS

...NONFICTION...

BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER (Amy Chua, Penguin, 2011). An ambitious Professor of Law at Yale University, Amy Chua builds a defense for results and skills-oriented Chinese parenting – ruthless, where parents have “higher dreams and higher regard” for their children -- over Western parenting – which she presents as indulgent, choice-offering and overly-nurturing of self-esteem (8/10).

JUST KIDS (Patti Smith, Harper Collins, 2010). In spare, thoughtfully collected diction Patti Smith celebrates in memoir her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that began one summer in New York City in 1968, two artists, in love (9/10).

LIFE (Keith Richards with James Fox, Little Brown, 2010).
The infamous guitar player for The Rolling Stones offers up an account of his own, spirited and adventurous life, very much in his own words – unliterary and British raw -- this is indeed, quite a Life (8.5/10).

UNBROKEN (Laura Hillenbrand, Random House, 2010).
A fascinating, non-fiction story that reads just like flowing fiction, featuring track Olympian, Louie Zamperini, who survives a wrenching Pacific bomber crash to float for weeks on a rubber raft until he is captured by the Japanese and held as a POW for years (9.5/10).

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS (Rebecca Skloot, Crown, 2010) This debut book by a young, accomplished science writer tells the story of the infamous HeLa cell, which came from the ovarian cancer mass of a poor, young black woman who accessed John Hopkins University Hospital for medical care in the early 1950’s (9/10).

...FICTION...

FREEDOM: A NOVEL (Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). A love story between two people who meet and marry young, grow up together and slowly learn the thresholds of wanting to be together vs. not wanting to lose each other (8.5/10).

STATE OF WONDER (Ann Patchett, HarperCollins, 2011)
Patchett’s sixth novel is a fast and fun summer read situated in the steamy Amazonian tropics of Brazil where a doctor named Marina is sent by her employer, the head of a drug company that is funding research for an emerging fertility drug, to uncover the circumstances of a dear colleague who recently disappeared there (8.5/10)

PRIVATE LIFE (Jane Smiley, Knopf, 2010). Smiley writes with a smart, keen eye, stringing her narrative like holiday lights among historical American icons – The St. Louis World’s Fair, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, two World Wars and the U.S. encampment of Japanese – while at the same time slowly revealing the sad and intimate details of an unraveling marriage (9/10).

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS (Tom Rachman, Random House, 2010). This engaging, fast-reading, debut novel centers on an English-speaking newspaper opened in Rome by American Cyrus Ott in 1954 and reveals the characters – primarily the editors and writers – who work there (9/10)

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (Colum McCann, Random House, 2010). Winner of the National Book Award, this novel is Colum McCann’s emotional response to the devastation of the 9/11 attacks. He achieves resolve, hope and rebuilding by harkening back to New York City as it was in 1974 when Viet Nam was raging, art was flourishing, liberation theology was emerging and technology was quickly developing (9.5/10).

...Recently Read Old School …

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Hachette Book Group, 1960)
Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, this debut novel is filled with sustained mystery & suspense and compelling misdeeds & murder. Told from the endearing and feisty point of view of 8-year-old Scout Finch and set in 1935 rural Alabama, this classic novel is loaded with timeless lessons about racism; good, honest parenting; the meaning of honor and conscience; and the importance of empathy: “… you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them” (10/10).

A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway (1964)
Ernest Hemingway’s only memoir, published posthumously several years after his suicide, covers the years 1921-1926 when he was young and married to his first wife, Hadley. What rises in retrospect as most poignant and wise is Hemingway’s lasting love for her. “I wished I had died,” he writes in the end, “before I ever loved anyone but her.”

THE END OF THE AFFAIR by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004)Greene’s provocative story about an affair that fails to disintegrate is considered one of his greatest “catholic novels” in its wide consideration of faith. What emerges in the wake of passionate and illicit relationship is a shared struggle with hatred, love, jealousy and ultimately, belief, which Sarah catches “like a disease” (9/10).