My Korean Deli by Ben Ryder Howe

Ben Ryder Howe is the sweetest man on earth. Or at least he comes across that way in his memoir My Korean Deli: Risking it all for a Convenience Store, the story of his family’s attempt to purchase and operate a deli/convenience store in Brooklyn. He must be sweet – he goes along with this plan to please his mother-in-law! What a nice boy.

Ben, son of New England gentry, is married to Gab, daughter of Korean immigrants. Gab is a corporate lawyer in Manhattan; Ben is an editor at the exalted literary magazine The Paris Review. Gab’s mother, Kay, has worked for years in other people’s convenience stores, but longs for one of her own. Despite having what seems like enviable careers, Ben and Gab agree to purchase and work in said deli for as long as it takes Kay to get up and running, while still (most of the time) working at their original jobs to keep income flowing in. To save even more money, Ben and Gab move into Kay’s basement in Staten Island. Does this sound like a recipe for peace and family harmony? No, but it’s abundant fodder for a book like this.

Ben is terrible as a deli owner. He makes dozens of mistakes at the cash register, and doesn’t have a clue how to handle the suppliers or the staff. To say that the store’s success is erratic is an understatement; pretty much whatever can go wrong, does. The store gets robbed, is fined for code violations by the city of New York, and becomes a nighttime hangout for neighborhood drunks and drug addicts. Kay nearly drops dead from the stress of overwork. Nevertheless Ben maintains a sense of equanimity and soldiers on. I won’t give away the ending, but be assured that management skills and profits eventually come their way.

Ben also writes affectionately of working at The Paris Review under its founder and editor George Plimpton. Observant readers will remember that Plimpton was famous for taking jobs for which he was supremely unqualified (Detroit Lions backup quarterback) and then writing books about the experience. Is this book a kind of sideways homage to Plimpton? You decide. Ben Ryder Howe is much too modest to make any such claims.

(Book 13, 2011)

Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding Myself by Frances Kuffel

This is a memoir by a formerly obese woman who lost 180 lbs in her early 40’s. It’s not a how-to-diet book (there are no recipes) or an inspirational tract (like the popular Women, Food, and God; click to see the Citizen Reader’s take on that book). Rather, it’s about the experiences of (a) completely changing your appearance to the point where you become unrecognizable to friends and family, and (b) carving out new a life in what was formerly uncharted territory – the Planet of Thin, Kuffel calls it. On the Planet of Thin you can buy your underwear in Rite Aid rather than ordering it out of a catalog, you fit in an airplane seat, and most profoundly for Kuffel, you can run through the streets of lower Manhattan to escape the collapsing towers on September 11, 2001. “My weight loss had saved my life,” she says, bluntly and without fuss.

In addition to the Planet of Thin, Kuffel explores the Planet of Girls, another formerly forbidden zone where you can shop for interesting clothes and meet men who flirt with you. This might sound trite but it’s not. Kuffel has her first date and her first sexual experience. Her reactions are decidedly complicated, her descriptions moving. She is shockingly honest and this makes for an interesting read, though sometimes you want to say “It’s okay, Frances, we don’t have to keep talking about this.” This book offers good writing about a transformative life experience. I liked it.

(Book 5, 2011)

Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown

This is a memoir of Brown’s experience helping her daughter Kitty recover from anorexia, using an approach called family-based treatment (FBT). It’s also an indictment of traditional attitudes towards anorexia (blame the victim, blame the family) and a call to action to make FBT more widely available to doctors, therapists, and struggling families. A recent randomized controlled trial of FBT shows that FBT offers a success rate greater than 50%, vs. 23% for traditional treatment methods.

Anorexia is a nightmare for children and their parents. Brown chronicles her family’s dawning horror as they realize how sick Kitty has gotten, and the medical maelstrom they encounter as they try to learn about the disease, find the best treatment, and fight for coverage from their insurer. In family-based treatment, parents take responsibility for their child’s weight restoration; this is a huge difference from traditional approaches that isolate the child from her parents and place the responsibility for weight restoration directly on the patient. But FBT is a hard path to take. Brown and her husband had to sit with Kitty during every meal and every snack for the many months it took her to gain weight. It was an emotional rollercoaster as meals would take hours, and be accompanied by rivers of tears as Kitty fought the demons that were preventing her from eating.

Brown takes deeply entrenched theories (both scientific and popular) about anorexia and turns them on their heads. Here is the fundamental question: Is extreme weight loss caused by deviant thinking, or is the deviant thinking caused by the weight loss? According to Brown, (and FBT advocates) it’s the nutritional deficits that result from too much weight loss that lead to the deviant thinking among anorexics, not the other way around. On this issue Brown has become a crusader, and she backs up her conclusions with results of studies performed on starvation victims. Without exactly saying it, she clearly blames the medical establishment for long-held “blame the victim” attitudes and she seeks to rebut that approach in this book.

Okay, but why did I read this book, you are wondering? It’s not my usual fare. It’s because I know Harriet Brown, and I know Kitty (not her real name). For several years their family lived in our neighborhood, and my oldest son was friends with Kitty in the sibling-ish manner of boys and girls who have gone to school together their whole lives. I saw Harriet fairly frequently at school events and other neighborhood activities. Lots of my friends have been skeptical about Harriet’s decision to write this book: is she taking advantage of Kitty’s illness for her own personal gain as a writer? Let me answer a resounding NO to this question; I think she is doing adolescent girls a huge favor by telling their family’s story and by calling attention to FBT. If you know both of these women (Kitty is 19 now), you know they are no shrinking violets. Kitty was always fearless on the playground, and for as long as I’ve known her, Harriet has been pissed off about something or other. It’s like she’s finally found her cause and she brings to it a wealth of wisdom, the energy of a true zealot, and the communication skills of an experienced journalist; quite a formidable combination.

(Book 47, 2010)

Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl’s first memoir, Comfort Me With Apples, introduced us to Mim, her mother. Clearly suffering from some form of mental illness, Mim is a terrifying figure, at once funny and dangerous, who wreaks all kinds of havoc on Ruth’s life. Now Mim is back in Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way, a short memoir by Reichl devoted entirely to Mim.

Apparently Mim took to heart the Catherine Aird maxim “If you can’t be a good example you’ll have to serve as a horrible warning.” Her disappointments (career, looks, marriage) are legion and she has left for Ruth, after her death, a box of letters and mementos that help Ruth process all of them. Ruth is grateful to Mim for giving her permission and incentive to have a career, and more importantly, to choose her own road through life rather than living the life dictated by her parents, as Mim had to do. Reichl writes movingly both of Mim’s troubles and of her own successes.

What I can’t figure out is why this is a book. It’s very short, only 112 pages of largish type on small pages; it’s kind of a miniature book, a guest room book, or maybe a gift book? But who would buy this for their mother? “Here mom, you were as nutty as Mim, so thanks a lot.” It would have made a perfectly good article in the Atlantic or the New Yorker where you could read it for $5.00 and get lots of other good articles at the same time. I liked it, but I’m glad I didn’t pay the publisher’s list price of $19.95 (or $25.00 in Canada!).

(Book 8, 2010)

Mother on Fire by Sandra Tsing Loh

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer, performance artist, and public radio commentator. I don’t hear her much on radio but I do read her pieces in the Atlantic. I’ve also never seen any of her one-woman shows but would sure like to. In 2008 she published Mother on Fire, a memoir about her life in Los Angeles, specifically framed around her search for an appropriate school for her kindergarten-age daughter.

This is a very funny book, filled with raw emotion and angst. Loh takes on issues of class and status, money worries, stalled careers, the mommy wars, and the frantic pace of life in LA. She expertly captures the desperate panic of educated, affluent, urban parents in search of the perfect environment for their precious offspring. Loh herself vacillates between being one of these super-obsessed types, and being a slacker mom, and freely admits her own contradictory impulses. That’s partly what makes the book so entertaining. One day Loh is touring the $22,000-a-year private (pseudonymous) Wonder Canyon School, where “children honor diversity, learn peaceful conflict resolution and are taught music using the Orff-Schulwerk method.” Of course there is no diversity at Wonder Canyon; as Loh points out, the children must honor it because they don’t actually experience it. The next day Loh is letting her daughters watch Disney princess videos for the 82nd time and feeding them Kraft macaroni and cheese. She is consumed with guilt for failing to provide Baby Mozart and organic broccoli all the while railing against the forces that make her feel guilty. But despite how much Loh wants the Wonder Canyon, there is no way that she and her husband can afford it on the combined income of a journalist and a musician.

Thus Loh’s daughter ends up at an LA public magnet school. It’s a better choice than the local elementary school (which Loh dubs Guavatorina for its 89% English Language Learner status) though she is still the only blonde in a sea of Central American and Armenian children. But why is this a bad thing, Loh asks? Her daughter’s school is a warm and loving place where the children thrive. As a result of this revelation Loh becomes a public school activist and runs a Web site for parents of children in LA public schools.

Loh’s writing style takes a little getting used to. Her articles in the Atlantic are straightforward magazine-style journalism but Mother on Fire is filled with exclamation marks! –And interjections! Also lots of $%^#@!!!!! Before writing this book, Loh performed a stage version of Mother on Fire for 7 months in Los Angeles. I imagine the book reflects the style of the show. Was there a lot of ranting and desperate proclaiming? I bet there was.

You can find Sandra Tsing Loh everywhere on the Web. Here are some links to an interview in Salon, her articles in the Atlantic, her NPR pieces, a New York Times review of Mother on Fire, and her personal Web site.

(Book 35, 2009)

Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies

I thought this book was a novel about a crumbling marriage. It turns out that it’s a true story about a crumbling marriage which makes it a little weirder to read. If it were a novel it would fit squarely into the “domestic fiction” category that I love so much. Is there such a thing as “domestic nonfiction?”

Isabel Gillies had the perfect life: two perfect children, a handsome husband, a beautiful house. Then along came the perfect other woman and poof went the husband, the house, and all the trappings. Isabel had to move back in with her parents, but she’s gotten the perfect revenge by writing this book. Husband Josiah comes across as a cold-hearted jerk who abandons his family, and the French mistress Sylvia is portrayed as predatory and conniving.

Josiah and Sylvia are pseudonyms, but most of the rest of the story’s details are true. I found it by turns sad, funny, fresh, and maddening. Most of the drama takes place in Ohio, where Josiah was (and still is) a professor at Oberlin. Gillies possesses a certain kind of naïveté sometimes found among native Manhattanites and she spends much of the first part of the book exclaiming over the shocking novelty of life in the Midwest where no one has nannies. I found these parts really annoying (as you might guess) and had a little trouble warming up to her because of this. I was embarrassed for her when she admitted being surprised that Ohio had cable TV. Nevertheless, her honesty is endearing and you can’t help but take her side. Which I guess is the point.

(Book 30, 2009)

Escape by Carolyn Jessop with Laura Palmer

I don't usually read books about the issue du jour if you know what I mean. For some reason, however, I was attracted to this book by Carolyn Jessop, who escaped from the FLDS, the fundamentalist polygamous cult that was recently raided by the Texas authorities for alleged child abuse.

Carolyn Jessop was raised in the FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, and forced at age 18 to marry a man 30 years her senior, a man who already had three wives and numerous children. She endured more than 15 years of marriage to him and gave birth to 8 children. Her book tells the story of how she went from being a true believer in the tenets of her religion to understanding the real nature of the FLDS: that it brainwashes its followers through isolation, violence, and intimidation into total subservience to the leadership, which consists of corrupt old men.

The first part of this book, which details Jessop’s childhood and married life, is painful to read. Life in the FLDS compound was (for women, anyway) “worse than [under] the Taliban” (according to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who, with Carolyn Jessop’s help, targeted the FLDS for its crimes). It was especially interesting to read about the dynamics among the women in the household. For them, plural marriage seems to be essentially a zero-sum game, where every favor granted to one wife or her children means that a different wife or child will lose out. Competition among the women is cut throat and Carolyn’s children were routinely brutalized by their “other mothers.”

Before Carolyn Jessop, few women managed to escape from the cult, as local police were FLDS members who returned runaway wives to their husbands. But Jessop’s bravery and intelligence saved her and her children. The story of how she managed to escape and to retain custody of all of her children makes for great thriller-type reading.

Written in 2007, before the raid on the Texas compound, this book provides great background for understanding the legal battles that are still going on with the FLDS. Before reading this book I didn’t know much about the FLDS other than that they seemed like some creepy fringe group that was operating far off my radar. I did not realize how many women and children were (and still are) being held against their will, forced into sexual slavery, denied education, adequate medical care, and freedom to come and go--their basic human rights.

(Book 26, 2009)

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

This slim little book is about loss, specifically the loss of a baby. Too depressing, you might say? Maybe for some, but it’s also about hope and about recovery. And it’s quite funny and upbeat in places, if you can believe that. McCracken’s first child (a boy) was born dead in 2006 while she was living in France. Her second child (also a boy) was born healthy barely a year later, and is doing fine. The two events are so closely linked that it’s difficult to separate them; they are like two sides of the same coin. McCracken’s book doesn’t take a chronological path through these events but still manages to be a coherent and moving portrait of what happened and how she and her husband dealt with it. And her writing is beautiful: witty, matter-of-fact, and searing, all at once.

I went through a phase where I couldn’t read stories about dead children. I think there still might be some books like this that I won’t ever read (A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton, for one). But something about McCracken’s approach drew me in, and I had read such good reviews! Interestingly, even though I thought it wasn’t getting to me, I ended up having a weird dream where I kept mixing up McCracken’s dead baby with my own firstborn son. My son, who is very much alive, left last week to take a summer job far from home and then is going away to college. So I am facing my own loss, which is nothing like McCracken’s but which nevertheless is obviously bothering me on some subconscious level. And I thought I was fine. Hmmmm. It’s obvious that writing this book was therapeutic for McCracken, but it’s also therapeutic to read it; in my case it’s bringing up issues I didn’t know I had.

(Book 24, 2009)

Dumbfounded by Matt Rothschild

You know how sometimes a movie trailer can make a movie look funny and unique, but then you go see it at the theater and you realize that all the best bits were in the trailer and the rest of the movie is a big disappointment? This book is like that. I read several reviews (like this one) that made the book sound great, but it turns out that in between the funny events described in the review are just long boring parts where nothing happens.

Dumbfounded is Matt Rothschild’s memoir of his offbeat adolescence in Manhatten in the 1980’s. It’s a fish out of water story: a Jewish kid in a WASP enclave, a gay kid surrounded by macho private school jocks, a young lonely boy raised by elderly eccentric grandparents. But Rothschild can’t sustain the momentum necessary to make it all work as a book, and he has to resort to filler. He also includes episodes of pathos (an unpleasant reunion with his flighty socialite mother) that try too hard to evoke a certain response from the reader. “Oh, now we are supposed to feel sorry for him.” I felt a little manipulated.

Some of his stuff isn’t bad, though; I think Rothschild’s story would have made a funny article for the New Yorker (or a good movie trailer).

(Book 23, 2009)

In Love With Jerzy Kosinski by Agate Nesaule

In the book In Love With Jerzy Kosinski we go inside Agate Nesaule’s head because that is where all the action is. Or rather, we go inside the head of Anna, Nesaule’s fictional alter ego, a woman who has a lot in common with her creator. Both are English professors, both endured World War II as young children in Latvia, became refugees, and immigrated to the United States in their teens. And both (according to the author’s note) are obsessed with the late Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski.

Hardly anything happens in this book. Anna learns to drive and leaves her husband with little fanfare. She gets a job and a boyfriend, and she thinks about Jerzy Kosinski. She reads, she gardens, she cooks. But Anna’s past is never more than a millimeter below the surface, and her memories are triggered by the smallest event. The sight of a traffic cop paralyzes her because he reminds her of the Russian soldiers who took away her father. A warehouse fire convinces her that a war has begun in the city where she's living. Anna’s horrific childhood in Latvia colors nearly every moment of her life but on the surface she is calm, measured. One secret of survival, it seems, is to never let anyone know how much you are struggling.

It is the contrast between Anna’s serene exterior and her roiling interior that makes this book so interesting. Nesaule plays up this contrast by juxtaposing Anna’s controlled existence in the present with the chaos of her memories. No drama in Anna’s adult life can begin to match the drama she has already lived through. No man is as needy as her father was after the Russians were through with him. Is this why Anna is so drawn to Jerzy Kosinski, a man who made his professional reputation recounting the drama of his own life in the clutches of the Nazis in Poland? Anna must remain in control, but Jerzy Kosinski can reveal everything at the top of his lungs; indeed can embellish and even falsify the real story to achieve the greatest possible effect.

Agate Nesaule is also the author of A Woman in Amber, a memoir of her life in Latvia. Might someone ask whether In Love With Jerzy Kosoinski is just a fictionalized retelling of that same story? I don’t think it’s that simple. Just as Anna’s everyday reality is colored by the events from her past, so is Nesaule’s. I don’t believe that Nesaule could write anything that wasn’t influenced by her earlier life. No, let me rephrase that. Nesaule is an extremely talented writer who could write anything she wanted; I just can’t imagine anything that would be as powerful and heartbreaking as the truth.

(Book 21, 2009)

Who Do You Think You Are? by Alyse Myers

Who Do You Think You Are? by Alyse Myers is a sad and depressing book. Alyse Myers tells the story of her unhappy childhood in Queens in the 1960’s, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and her struggle to be a better mother to her own daughter. Myers doesn’t cover a lot of new ground in this book and I found her writing to be claustrophobic and at times annoying as she repeatedly revisits her pain and her anxieties. However, I think the portrait of Myers’ mother was really interesting, and I think some readers (especially women of a certain generation) will recognize aspects of their own mothers and grandmothers in this character.

Myers’ ne’er-do-well father died when she was 11, leaving her mother (who remains nameless throughout the story) to raise Alyse and her two younger sisters alone on very little money. Her mother’s limited skills and education meant that her options were few—she got by on low wage office work. Never loving or affectionate with her children, she turned abusive after her husband’s death, focusing most of her rage on Alyse. Alyse used education as her ticket out and escaped from her mother at the earliest opportunity. Only after Alyse was happily married and a mother herself did she fully reconcile with her mother.

Why was Alyse’s mother so abusive? Why did she direct her anger at Alyse and not at her younger sisters? And why were they finally able to reconnect, toward the end of the mother’s life? Myers never explicitly spells out her interpretation but I have a theory. Her mother’s life was difficult and disappointing. She was an extreme example of the consequences of limited options and poor choices. Alyse, on the other hand, was a smart girl who was aiming high. This was threatening to her mother, but even more, her mother saw it as dangerous. What if Alyse ended up as disappointed in life as her mother was? Better to rein Alyse in, push her back down, than to see her dreams crushed like her mother’s were. Alyse’s younger sisters were not as challenging to their mother, not as obviously destined for success. It wasn’t necessary to send the same message. The two women could only reconcile when it was clear that Alyse’s life was happy and complete; the abuse was no longer necessary.

I think it was common for girls raised in the 1960’s and earlier to hear the question “Who do you think you are?” The subtext of that question is “don’t get above yourself, don’t think you are anyone special.” It’s a way of diminishing expectations, of protecting against future disappointments. No one will treat you like a princess when you are grown, so don’t expect it now. Of course Alyse’s mother carried this to extremes, but I don’t think her motivations were so unusual, or even necessarily evil.

(Book 18, 2009)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Yesterday I finished listening to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson on a device called a Playaway. Have you heard of these? They are little digital audio devices (smaller and lighter than a deck of cards) that come preloaded with an audiobook. The Madison Public library has recently begun lending them. They come complete with a battery and headphones (along with polite instructions about cleaning the earbuds with alcohol before using). The Playaway takes all the bother out of listening to audiobooks; no more bulky cassette players, no more ripping CDs to your iPod. The Playaway Web site says that the universal headphone jack allows use with different kinds of output devices including FM transmitters, so perhaps you could use one of these in your car. It even comes with a handy lanyard for hanging around your neck. I felt a tiny bit dorky wearing it this way but not enough to make me not do it.

Bryson reads this book himself; it’s his memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950’s and it’s totally entertaining. In truth, it’s more than a memoir, it’s a history of the 1950’s from the point of view of a child. Thus for example, atomic air raid drills are remembered not for the horror of possible nuclear annihilation but for the sight of the teacher (Mrs. Enormous-Bosom) taking shelter under her desk, her large behind not quite fitting underneath. Bryson avoids maudlin self-indulgence by anchoring his personal story in the larger world. He includes longer sections about U.S. society in the 1950’s: race relations, foreign policy, and an endearing portrait of his mother who worked full time as a reporter for the Des Moines Register back in the days when few women worked outside the home.

Bryson’s childhood sounds idyllic. He describes with delight the days spent on his bicycle, the hoards of children in his neighborhood, the endless road trips in the back of a station wagon, and the sights and sounds of downtown Des Moines before it was leveled for redevelopment. Bryson enjoyed the kind of freedom that was so common in the 1950’s and so uncommon now. While I am younger than Bryson, I too remember being kicked out of the house early on a summer morning with a peanut butter sandwich in my pocket, instructed not to return until dark. This book evokes great memories for baby boomers, but I think anyone of any age would enjoy it.

The book is (like all Bryson books) extremely funny. If you happened to see a woman walking around Madison wearing a weird square thing around her neck and giggling hysterically, that would be me.

(Book 17, 2009)

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls grew up in extreme poverty with an alcoholic father and a co-dependent mother. Why is her story unique? Because Walls escaped from her toxic environment and against all odds got a Barnard education and a good job as a journalist in New York City. Her memoir recounts her childhood as her family moved like gypsies across the U.S., living in their car, finally settling down in a crumbling shack in Appalachia with no heat or indoor plumbing. Walls remembers having nothing to eat in the house for weeks at a time, stealing food from the garbage can in the school lunchroom, wearing threadbare clothing, and washing her face in snow for lack of a better alternative.

I put off reading this book for a while because I was afraid it would be too depressing, and it is a sad story. Yet Walls never resorts to self-pity or demonizes her parents; this is not a revenge book. In fact she writes about her parents with humor and affection, recalling the good times as well as the bad. Despite their obvious defects as parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls treated their children with love and respect, and encouraged their intelligence and creativity at every turn. Many affluent suburban children grow up in environments that are far less emotionally rich, and Jeannette Walls knows this. Walls’s parents eventually joined her and her siblings in New York City but ended up homeless and remained so for many years, despite their children’s efforts to help them find jobs and housing.

Toward the end of the book Walls talks about her fears of revealing her past to her New York crowd – she worries that she will be fired from her job and rejected by her friends and colleagues when they learn of her origins. Why this particular anxiety? She never directly addresses the underlying issue here, the twin stigmas of poverty and alcoholism in the U.S. I kept thinking that if someone with a similar background from a poor nation moved to the U.S. and achieved success through hard work (the same way Walls achieved success) would that person be as ashamed of her past? I don’t think so. What does this issue say about poverty in the U.S. and about that most American of myths: the rags-to-riches story?

(Book 14, 2009)

Shanghai Diary by Ursula Bacon

This was a random find on the non-fiction shelves in the library. The subtitle is "A Young Girl's Journey from Hitler's Hate to War-Torn China." I had read bits before about the Jews of Shanghai, a group of refugees who sought haven there because no where else would admit them. They were confined to a ghetto, but it wasn't a ghetto like those of Europe; they lived along side impoverished Chinese and enjoyed relative freedom of movement. They were extremely poor, lived in awful conditions, with rampant disease and hunger, but most of them lived through the war and they were safe from outright murder. Ursula Bacon's family traveled to Shanghai in the late 1930's and spent more than 10 years there before finally gaining entrance to the United States.

I couldn't exactly figure out her family. Originally from Breslau, they must have been highly assimilated and were also quite affluent before the war. The book is sprinkled with references to silver trays, stately homes, and governesses. Most of the holocaust era stories I have read have been from the point of view of poorer folks. I wish Bacon had written more about their earlier life but perhaps that would have shifted the focus too far away from the Shanghai story.

Bacon's writing is a bit young with a certain amount of adolescent philosophizing and "Oh, dear God, what to do!" kinds of interjections. She is overly fond of adjectives. But these are minor complaints. I was never bored reading this and my curiosity about this topic is renewed. While reading the Wikipedia entry on the Shanghai Ghetto I came across a reference to a documentary film with the same name. I see that Netflix has that so I am going to request it.

(Book 6, 2009)