RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: February 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE

HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE by Michael Greenberg (Vintage, 2008)

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad …” so opens the quick-reading, honest and compelling memoir written by the helpless father of a precocious fifteen-year-old girl who suffers her first manic episode one hot summer day in Greenwich Village. Her “crack-up” eats Sally alive and sends her to the emergency room and on to a psychiatric hospital where she is assigned the diagnosis of Bipolar 1. In the course of trying to understand his daughter’s madness, Greenberg cites James Joyce’s struggles with his own mentally ill daughter and moves through various stages of self-blame. In the midst of managing this crisis, Greenberg must also address his brother’s long-affliction with mental illness – “he’s 48 and chronically rattled” -- and can only wonder if his daughter’s condition is genetic. In the end, through counseling and a rainbow of strong medications, the family circles the wagons, and Greenberg, his wife, his ex-wife and their son, must all confront the uneasy issue of how to help Sally defeat this terrible mental disease without defeating herself. They must bravely forge towards hope that Sally can somehow be restored so that she can trust her mind again and resume a meaningful life (8.5/10).

Sunday, February 21, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE HELP

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam, 2009)

What a debut novel! Set in the early-1960’s against a busy historical backdrop that includes an emerging conflict in Vietnam, the assassination of President Kennedy and MLK’s March on Washington, this novel takes place in a still racially-divided Jackson, Mississippi. A brave, independent and privileged white woman, Skeeter, dreams of becoming a writer and manages to win the support of various local black maids whom she persuades to tell about their “experiences waiting on white families” in The Deep South. The process of stealthily telling, collecting, writing and submitting these stories is told from three alternating points of view – from Skeeter’s, as well as from two of the domestics themselves, sweet and patient Aibileen and feisty, mouthy Minny. There is much at stake in sharing these truths but the reward of blurring the lines among what defines family vs. help vs. race is worth the risk, and these three heroes know that they “done something brave and good here.” This will be a hard act for Stockett to follow (9/10).

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).