RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: December 2010

Friday, December 31, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE SLAP by Christos Tsiolkas

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Penguin, 2010)

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, this novel presents a riveting premise: A man slaps a young boy who is not his own at a friend’s barbecue. The ensuing eight chapters are written from the points of view of eight characters who witness The Slap. The incident goes largely unresolved and serves instead to reveal the lives of the mean-spirited and self-righteous cast of characters who are motivated by drugs, sex and self-gratification in the Australian melting pot of Melbourne. Ultimately, truth doesn’t matter in this world, and the characters fail to evolve and are never redeemed (7.5/10).

Sunday, December 26, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: CHRONIC CITY by Jonathan Lethem

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethen (Vintage, 2010)

This New York Times “Best Book of the Year” features Chase Insteadman, a former child television star living off royalties and among socialites in Manhattan, who befriends an eccentric stoner named Perkus Tooth with whom he shares a strange and narcissistic gestalt. Even though he is engaged to Janus, an astronaut trapped in orbit, Chase takes a lover, Oonah, an aloof ghost writer, who is instrumental in his struggle to understand what is real and true. Loaded with pop cultural references and charged with an often absurd existential quest steeped in the improbable, the narrative smacks of "The Truman Story" but which has a grim ending (8/10).

Monday, December 13, 2010

COMPLICATIONS by Atul Gawande

Complications by Atul Gawande (Picador, 2002)

This fast-reading collection of nonfiction articles are true, gripping stories that reveal the uncertainty and imperfections of medical science and were written at the end of the Boston-based author’s eight year surgical residency. The Fallibility of Doctors addresses the importance of practice, the reality of human error and burnout and when good doctors go bad and the culture of medicine, especially the unspoken moral burden of practicing on people. The Mysteries of Medicine addresses the nature of pain and nausea, palliative medicine, blushing and hunger & obesity while the Analysis of Certainty Itself addresses autopsies, SIDS and the obligation to share medical knowledge to inform a contemporary patient base. The book is well-paced, and the information is offered in magazine-like bite-sized portions, ideal for the interested layperson (8.5/10).

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).