However, one of the things that makes this book interesting is that Steve Martin is very open and honest and doesn’t try to be funny.  He is very clear about what is a performance and what is real life; he knows what it’s like when someone doesn’t “get” you.  In my mind, that is one of the things that makes Martin’s career so long lasting.  He’s not afraid of making fun of himself, and understands that simple and uncomplicated goes a long way.  It helps that he is a low key enough celebrity that all the dirt wasn’t ruined beforehand.  And I admit to being a touch ignorant myself as I wasn’t yet born during his early career.

I loved Martin’s narration of the evolution of his career, including details of what worked, what didn’t, and how many frogs he kissed before he found a prince that launched him into fame.  And then he is candid about the negative things that came from his sudden fame and what it did to his creativity for a number of years.

Not overly long or dramatic, this short glimpse into show business is both refreshing and intriguing.

How do you define art?  Pause for a moment and try to come up with something on your own.

It’s more difficult than you think, right?  I am amazed at the process and sheer undertaking involved for defining words from aardvark to sing to zealous.

For most of the first part of the book I didn’t really feel like I was reading a tale of an insane person and kept thinking to myself what a great piece this would be to read in an English class.  History combined with a true life struggle makes an excellent story – The Professor and the Madman is neither overly fluffy nor perfunctory.  And then I got to the pivotal event that separated W.C. Minor’s early life from the end and realized the subject matter was unfit for High Schoolers.  It really caused me to re-examine what I had previously read.  ”Oh yeah – he is crazy.”

The beauty of this story is that it allows you to forget about labels, at least temporarily, and appreciate the contribution and undertaking of such a great piece still in use today.

Stacy Parker Aab’s (now a contributor for The Huffington Post) recount of her years working in the White House, both as an unpaid and later paid intern, were muffled at best and confusing at worst.  Her main message, that I eventually got after about 250 of 300 pages, was honorable – the idea that there is a fine balance between integrity, passion, and power – but most of the other details were lost in non-chronological vignettes of her life.  I’m not sure if her story would have been better served told in order, but the jumping around certainly contributed to my inability to pay attention more than 20 pages at a time.  The book came out in January and I’m just now finishing, which is, I think,  a record for me.

Parker Aab met a lot of famous people, had crushes on a few more, and threw in random stories of boyfriends and missteps with men of power.  The crushes really detracted from my ability to take her seriously and the ‘plight’ she encountered as she tried to move up in the world of politics.

I wanted to hear her account of how she overcame struggles the struggle of being young and female in the White House as the title suggests, but instead felt drug along following empty promises of enlightenment.  Maybe that is the politician in her coming out?  I wanted to connect the dots about what it meant growing up in Detroit, making it out of one trench and into another at Georgetown and then accomplishing everything against all odds.  Perhaps I am just dense, but this book felt like a lot of talk and not much meaning.

I did not understand her job succession.  I did not understand her supposed underprivileged upbringing, and I most certainly did not understand what her being black had anything to do with anything.  The epilogue, a seeming afterthought, touches on the issue of race in DC with the election of Obama, but the message I wanted to hear about her making it against the traditional grain did not come through well.  Instead, I felt like she brought up race just to bring it up.  I wanted to like this book so much more than I did – it had such potential – which is why I entered a drawing for it in the first place.

And yet, as much as I was eager to wrap it up, the last 50 pages felt rushed.  I was left asking myself many questions about her past, present, and future with Washington.  A peek at google fixed me up with what I wanted to know, along with a few interesting pictures.

I think I need a break from memoirs.

We read this for a February book club, and the facilitator brought a few interesting tidbits along, which made my appreciation for the book deepen.  Generally I try to finish and review book club books before our discussions because I don’t want other opinions to taint mine.  However, I’m glad these tidbits found me before writing.  First, the author was pregnant when she wrote, which is interesting considering Sara’s life and the author’s account of the location of the world to come, and second, the described painting actually was a Chagall painting stolen from a Jewish museum and mysteriously returned in the mail.

Chagall’s Over Vitebsk is shown below.

Overall, I enjoyed the transition from the 1930s through the 1980s and back again, though all of the time periods are rife with struggle – the Depression, Russian Communism, and Vietnam.  Horn weaves together the story of the artist, how the painting is passed down to modern-day, and what happens after it goes missing – all conjecture heavily based in fact.

The book was due soon, so I returned it to the library today and realized just after I dropped it in the slot there was a slip of paper in it of the painting’s name.  Hopefully this will inspire the next reader to find out a bit more about the history of this novel.

For me, it has always been about books.  I can tell you what I was reading when the Twin Towers fell (White Teeth), or when Lucy crashed her mother’s Buick and broke her nose when she was seventeen (Prince of Tides), or when Greg called to say Sophie had been born, 6lbs, 7oz. (The Accidental Tourist). When in fourth grade, Eric Schwartz passed me a note saying I like you and then asked me to give it to Lucy for him (Sweet Valley High #3, Playing with Fire), and in eighth when Lucy got elected student-body president and I was picked to be delegate (Pet Sematary and Love Story, alternating between the two).  When my parents told me they were getting divorced (The World According to Garp) and when Phillip asked me to marry him (Play It As It Lays).

_____

I’m lucky enough to coach swimming (my favorite sport) at the sister high school to my alma mater.   We’ve had big meets all of February.  Here are a few crappy cell phone pictures to prove it — bonus if you can guess where I’ve been!

Anyway, the experience has reminded me of when I was a young swimmer myself attempting to pass the time on those extremely long days.  My senior year I was working through Le Petit Prince en francais, one of my favorite books to date.  I love the innocence and unique perspective the Prince has, especially when he gets sad and watches sunset after sunset on his home planet.

Until next time, friends.  Il faut arracher les baobabs.

Three months later, I finally got to know Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny.  At first I will admit, I was not sure the book would live up to all of the hype.  In general, I am not a fan of books told in voices where the first person perspective rotates throughout the novel.   I often feel it allows the writer to cheat on the writing and not be as descriptive or powerful.  However, I try not to let this skew my view of a novel until I’ve given it a fair chance.  One of my favorite books ever, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is told this way and is done beautifully.  Kathryn Stockett nailed the voices in The Help and I could not imagine it told any other way.  I also have a soft spot for books within books – characters reading or writing within a novel.

Fittingly, this novel is about voices.  Voices that speak their mind and are encouraged to, voices that are stifled and punished, and voices that are emerging and finding their pitch and tone.

Growing up in Ohio long after the Civil Rights movement, I read about race relations in books but had no real idea of the personal magnitude.  Stockett’s early experience with the dichotomy between maids and their white employers added even more authenticity to such a difficult subject.  The characters make this novel stand out as a vibrant, poignant, and honest look at 1960s America.  To think that some of the injustices described within occurred within my parents lifetime is sad.

I also love that this book is getting so much press and attention and reigniting discussion on an often glossed over subject.  It may make people uncomfortable, but ignoring our daily transgressions is a slippery slope.  Wherever humans don’t treat humans as humans, we’ll never be “done.”

I’m working on loving my neighbor a bit more this year.  How about you?

At first I was puzzled by the begatting and seeming lack of plot, but the more the story went on the more I was intrigued.  The pace was a bit sluggish, but I suppose so was life in those days.

Reading reminded me of an anthropological discussion in college – most ‘feminists’ argued that the Red Tent where women spent three days monthly was discriminatory and degrading whereas some women at the time relished that time to themselves where nothing was required of them.  It is perhaps a subject for the Freakonomics authors to ponder at their next go-round.

Intrigued by Diamant’s version I re-read the story from Genesis to understand which creative liberties she took.  All were done well to increase the intrigue and character of Dinah.  Some books only outline pieces of someone’s life, and occasionally you find one that discusses birth to death and all of the family mishaps in between.  The ending was definitely the best part of the book and tied more than a few of the plot lines together incredibly well.

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

_____

Today’s teaser comes from page 225 of Stacy Parker Aab’s Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House.

“Bimbo eruptions,” that’s what Betsey Wright, the longtime staff mother to Bill Clinton, called the pattern of hairsprayed women standing before clustered microphones and announcing to the lights and the black glass eyes that yes, the President came on to me.

The Shack was one such book for me.  It has redefined forgiveness, relationships, and communication for me.

The most important thing I took away was that you can’t put God in a box.  All of our religious rituals and rules limit our transcendence and concept of what it means to live a life on this earth.

The middle of the book is really the meat and potatoes and will be what I re-read, likely more than once.  The beginning is necessary for setup and the end is a bit of cheesy idealism, but the middle is an intense look at who and what God is.

This follow-up had much more overt political undertones and I think the original delight of the hidden side of everything faded slightly.  I enjoyed this book but not as much as I thought I would.

If Freakonomics is economics on speed, SuperFreakonomics is economics on speed and crack with a touch of ADD.  The topics were linked together in a winding river kind of roundabout way, in other words – eventually, which was more than a bit frustrating at times.  Instead of the linear nature of the first book – what does x and y have in common, this book meanders among a few topics before drawing a conclusion of sorts.  I would argue this is a more interesting approach when structured well but I was left feeling lost as Levitt and Dubner jumped around.

And yet, true to form, SuperFreakonomics poses more questions than it answers.  That is what it does well.  However engaging and thought provoking the discussion, it involves many politically charged elements such as suicide bombers, prostitutes, healthcare costs, and global warming.  I wholeheartedly support questioning and drawing your own conclusions, and for that this book is wonderful.  As Freakonomics looks into the past and explores hidden connections, SuperFreakonomics predicts and posits regarding our future.  I’m terribly curious to see if any of the newfangled keep-it-simple-stupid (KISS) solutions outlined to improve our world ever come to fruition.