RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: December 2009

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

RollnSmoke Reviews: LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by 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. The novel reads like a thick braid of short stories that each describes different lives of average New Yorkers – hookers in The Bronx, a soul-searching man at odds with his vows to The Order, drug-addicted artists from The Village, a therapy group of grieving war mothers, an 18-year old computer hack prodigy, a grandmother in jail, a judge, a lover. This intricate maze of people – whose ordinary days are charged with life by the hand of an awesomely skilled writer -- are joined together the day Phillipe Petit walks a tightrope wire between the iconic World Trade Center Towers on August 7, 1974. A stunning, broad portrait of New York City, McCann’s seventh novel, rooted in belief and grief, love and healing, is a smashing, impossible-to-put-down read (9.5/10).

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE LAZARUS PROJECT

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead Books, 2008)

Author Aleksandar Hemon, born in Sarajevo and now living in Chicago, creates a strangely intertwined narrative that centers on a struggling writer named Brik (also a Bosnian native who lives in Chicago post-9/11) who is inspired by the story of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who was shot to death in Chicago in 1908 amidst an ugly American obsession with anarchism. In his quest to write this immigrant story, Brik secures a grant, and with a thuggish childhood friend, travels to Ukraine, Moldova and ultimately to Sarejevo to realize the full story. During this strange, bleak journey, much is revealed about Brik, particularly about the nature of his strained marriage to an accomplished American neurosurgeon. But also, there are flashbacks to the surviving sister of the said unjustly murdered immigrant who is left alone to cope with abusive, crooked Chicago cops. Hemon is a skilled writer and manages to inject odd humor into weird predicaments, but ultimately details about pogroms and massacres, whore-houses and hateful murders, death and despair dominate this cinematic and complex narrative whose central mysteries are never fully resolved (7.5/10).

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).