Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison

I read this book because I'm interested in fanfiction as a literary trend. I was hoping for a coherent discussion of why fanfiction is so derided while at the same time it is increasing in popularity. I wanted to read about the gender issues surrounding fanfiction – the fact that it is mostly written by and read by women. And I wanted to read about the porous boundaries between fanfiction and mainstream fiction like Longbourn, which is a new original novel that uses characters and settings from Pride and Prejudice (but which no reviewer described as fanfiction, despite its obvious connections).

But I didn’t get any of that in this book. Instead, I got a scholarly history of fanfiction and a snapshot of the current state of the art, especially the role of fanfiction within the larger world of fandom. An English professor at the University of Utah, author Anne Jamison has read and written fanfiction for years, as have most of the book’s other contributors (of which there are several). Her enthusiasm for her topic, however, in some ways prevents her from delivering me the answers I wanted; Jamison and the other authors are too close to the subject to give it an objective analysis and they consider the appeal (and the legitimacy) of fanfiction to be self-evident. Jamison does not address the gender issues, and swiftly dismisses the idea that writing fanfiction is “playing in someone else’s sandbox.” She says that writing is writing. I tend to agree.

But nevertheless, I enjoyed this book, albeit slowly. I’d love to recommend it to other fanfiction readers but unfortunately I can barely find anyone I know who will admit to reading it. Part of me wants to write a spirited defense of fanfiction here, and address those issues that Jamison didn’t. Another part of me thinks it’s not worth my time. Either you are open-minded about it or you aren’t. I have read fanfiction written by anonymous amateurs that moved me to tears, and award winning literary novels that bored me to tears. Remember, there are no reading police. If you think reading new stories about Harry and Ron sounds like it could be fun, well so do hundreds of thousands of other people. Why not join them?

(Book 12, 2014)

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I am always on the lookout for books by (and about) funny women but they aren’t so easy to find. You’d be amazed at the junk that pops up in a search on Google or Amazon; aside from recent offerings by the heavy hitters like Helen Fielding, Tina Fey, and Ellen DeGeneres (all of which I’ve read), there’s not a lot to choose from. Pretty quickly your search starts turning up titles about how to laugh at your breast cancer. No thanks. But eventually I poked around enough to discover Caitlin Moran. She’s not nearly as widely known in the U.S. as she is in her native Britain, where she’s an award-winning columnist for The Times, but How to be a Woman was reviewed widely in the U.S. and sold well.

This book is scary funny and scary raw. Moran, it seems, will say anything, and in this book she tackles all sorts of issues: body image, pornography, feminism, fashion, childbirth, and especially poverty. She is fearless and relentless as she makes her points, in a way that is both shockingly direct and extremely funny. This book is not light humor. It’s social commentary delivered via shovel, in a voice that is loud, original, irreverent, and hilarious.

Moran grew up the oldest of 8 children in a three-bedroom council house (subsidized public housing) in a down-at-the-heels northern English city in the 1980’s. Despite this bleak beginning, she was winning writing awards by the time she was 13 and by 18 had landed a job as a reporter at a music magazine. Her childhood poverty informs all her commentary, especially when she takes on mainstream academic feminists and really anyone whose privilege gets her goat. Moran has also cultivated a larger-than-life public image in Britain and recently led a 24-hour boycott of Twitter in response to the anonymous threats of violence against outspoken women that are pervasive on that social network.

In case you like the idea of Moran’s work but aren’t very interested in how to be a woman, last year she released another collection called Moranthology which applies the same approach to more gender neutral political and pop culture topics. I just bought that one for my Kindle – sample chapters include I Do a Lot for Charity but I Would Never Mention It, and Downton Abbey Review 2: “SEX WILL BE HAD! SEX WILL BE HAD!" 

(Book 3, 2014)

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss

This book was the 2012 Go Big Read selection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here is a link to the online version of a feature story I did for Isthmus about Go Big Read and about this book.

While I appreciate what is innovative and interesting about this book (the illustration process, the graphic nonfiction format, the author-designed typeface) it didn’t satisfy me as a reader. It wasn’t a true biography, nor was it a comprehensive analysis of Marie Curie’s impact on science, but instead some kind of weird hybrid in a pretty package. And that typeface: Tiny hand-rendered light blue type on a dark blue background. On some pages it could have been Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet for all I could tell. Yes, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and I realize that some allowances must be made for the sake of art, but this was a book, for crying out loud, not an exhibit at an art gallery. What good is a book that you can’t read?

(Book 14, 2013)

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

This sounded like a good adventure: the true story of the hunt for a man-eating tiger in modern day Russia. In 1997 a giant Siberian tiger has a run-in with a poacher who steals the tiger’s kill and shoots him in the leg; a short time later that tiger (now really annoyed) stalks the poacher, lies in wait for him at his cabin, and devours him. Revenge! All the reviews made this story sound so gripping and suspenseful.

And really, it is a good adventure, except to get to it you have to wade through pages and pages of other….stuff. Random stuff. Like the history of Sino-Soviet border conflicts in the Bikin River valley. The depressive effect of perestroika on the economy of the Primorski Kai province, the ecosystem of the Russian Taiga, the subsistence lifestyle of the residents of Sobolonye in which one slang term for “tiger” is “Toyota” because that’s what you can buy with the money you make from poaching one. Some of it’s interesting but most of it is way too detailed for my taste and just took up too many pages that weren’t about the tiger.

Some reviewers have made comparisons to Moby Dick with its asides about sailors’ lives and traditions, and its meditations on good and evil, and you know that Vaillant was happy when they did that. When describing the ultimate death of the tiger Vaillant invokes the great whale, saying that “The tiger had absorbed bullets the way Moby Dick absorbed harpoons.” But I never liked those parts of Moby Dick that much either. This is just another book that would have been better as a magazine article. The description of the hunt for the tiger (without all the accompanying filler) would have been a welcome addition to an issue of National Geographic.

(Book 11, 2013)

The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson

No, we haven’t shut up shop here at A Book a Week. Reading continues apace, as much as I can with teenagers home for the summer (and the youngest going off to college)—and last minute vacations and trips to the supermarket to buy the vast quantities of food required to keep these boys (and their friends) fueled. I know no one really cares but I still feel like it’s only polite to explain my absence….and I suppose it’s fitting that this post should be about a book called The Perfect Summer.

In this book Juliet Nicolson chronicles the summer of 1911 in England, one of the last peaceful summers before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Anyone who knows their history knows that the earliest part of the 20th century was a time of seismic transitions, not just because of the war but because of the social changes: workers’ rights, women’s rights, the rise of the middle class. Nicolson uses the summer of 1911 as a canvas on which she paints small portraits of the lives of different people (politicians, society matrons, butlers, poets) and events (the transport workers’ strike, the coronation of George V and Queen Mary, that summer’s unusually hot weather). It’s an effective method of presenting these stories though it does mean that there’s no particular narrative arc other than that provided by the weather.

I found interesting parallels between society’s mood in 1911 and what is happening this summer in the U.S. and in England. Extreme weather, the gap between rich and poor, and women’s issues are front and center in both years, while the 1911 coronation and in 2012, the London Olympics, provide us with royal entertainment. This book was published in 2007, so that obviously wasn’t Nicolson’s intention but it added to the reading experience.

 So do you have to be an anglophile to enjoy this book? Not especially, but it helps to know some British history. On the other hand you can skip the parts that are boring without losing anything in the rest of the book. I confess to skimming all the stuff about the changes in the House of Lords, for example, but really enjoyed Nicolson’s portrayal of Queen Mary, and her descriptions of the lives of women factory workers.

(Book 26, 2012)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

I liked this more than I implied in my last post. It’s true what I said, that it isn’t a very good book, but it’s an interesting read. It’s just badly organized, meandering, and ultimately unfulfilling. (What is it about? Methamphetamine abuse, the scourge of the rural Midwestern U.S. Why did I read it? Because my fellow blogger Citizen Reader wrote about it a while ago and her blog post stuck with me. She and I share an interest in reading about issues specific to the Midwest; see her recent post here about Detroit.)

Reding pinballs between the personal and the political as he searches for an overarching theme for this book. Some chapters feature interviews with meth addicts, law enforcement officers, and social workers. Other chapters try to link the rise of meth to the disintegration of the Midwest’s rural economy. The loss of union-wage jobs, the rise of factory farms, and the globalization of the food industry are all factors he cites. A third set of chapters detail the rise of the Mexican cartels that supply most of the meth that is now available in the Midwest. All these chapters are interesting, but the parts are greater than the sum. Reding tries to use meth’s effects on the small town of Oelwein , Iowa, as a unifying theme but he never quite makes it work. It’s like he gathered all these interesting stories, which he tells in a compelling way, but in the end he couldn’t seem to turn the material into a coherent book. Nevertheless, if you like this kind of thing, this is a good effort and worth your time.

(Book 25, 2011)

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

How do you make a familiar story fresh? How do you shine a new light on a familiar landscape? Do what Dave Eggers has done – tell a story that most of us know, but tell it from a totally unexpected point of view.

Most U.S. residents know the stories of Hurricane Katrina. If we didn’t live through it ourselves, we watched in horror on TV. We felt awful. We sent money to the Red Cross. We try to remember that even now people are still suffering the after-effects.

But I didn’t know anything at all about the life of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans housepainter, a Syrian immigrant, a man with a wife and four children and strong connections to his New Orleans neighborhood. Eggers embeds Zeitoun’s story within the larger story of Katrina, giving us a more personal and unique way to experience it.

Zeitoun’s family flees New Orleans ahead of the storm, but Zeitoun stays behind to watch over his house, his rental properties, and his warehouse, sure that he is safe in his neighborhood far from the ocean and the levees. Of course we all know what happens – Zeitoun’s house rapidly fills with water and he spends a week paddling around New Orleans in his canoe feeding abandoned dogs with the contents of his freezer and rescuing old people. But here is where the twist comes. As a Muslim man Zeitoun becomes the target of a ragtag band of unsupervised law enforcement agents who decide (without any apparent cause) that he must be an Al Qaeda operative sent to stir up trouble. Zeitoun is arrested and imprisoned without charge for a month before his wife and a lawyer manage to secure his release.

Eggers presents Zeitoun so well, and so sympathetically, that rooting for him is like rooting for the city of New Orleans itself. He’s a good metaphor for a diverse complicated city. Profits from the book go to the Zeitoun Foundation which has contributed over $200,000 toward the rebuilding of New Orleans and towards promoting interfaith dialog.

(Book 16, 2011)

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)

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

Having recently read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I was looking for more “science for laypeople” books. Deborah Blum won a Pulitzer Prize for science journalism and is a professor at the University of Wisconsin. One of her former students recommended this to me, and I’d also heard from several mystery readers that this was a really fun book, if you don’t mind a little chemistry with your drama.

Deborah Blum tells the true story of New York’s first chief medical examiner Charles Norris, and his right-hand man Alexander Gettler and their efforts to reform the way New York city officials investigated suspicious deaths and prosecuted suspected poisoners. Did you know that in the early part of the 20th century it was extremely easy to get your hands on a variety of nasty substances (my favorite is something called Rough on Rats which was 90% arsenic) and also really easy to get away with using said substances to murder someone? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was in its infancy. Autopsies were primitive. Gettler and Norris saw the need for greater regulation and better analysis and they became crusaders for both.

This book is like a smorgasbord of information about poison and poisoners, and how Gettler and Norris went after both. It’s got detailed descriptions of how Gettler minced up flesh from human cadavers and subjected the resulting mush to a battery of tests as he tried to figure out the best way to extract the toxins. Norris focused more on policy – he hated Prohibition, for example, and assiduously tracked the sharp rise in deaths caused by the methyl alcohol in bootleg liquor. I also liked Blum’s vignettes about notorious poisoners such as Fanny Creighton, who managed to knock off several annoying family members with arsenic before she was finally caught and prosecuted. Blum’s prose is lively and she provides just the right mix of science and suspense to make this a great read.

(Book 6, 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)

Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar

Sometimes people ask me how I choose books. I usually answer something like “Oh, I have a lot of writers whose work I like, so just keeping up with their new books can fill my time.” Or, I’ll tell them that I regularly read the newspaper book review pages and make my choices based on that advice. But the sad truth is, sometimes I read a book because it’s been left on the breakfast table by someone else and I pick it up to read while I eat my oatmeal.* That’s how I began Students for a Democratic Society by Harvey Pekar, my first (and probably my only) foray into the graphic format. My son checked this out of the library when he was home from college on winter break and he left it there one morning.**

Did I like it? To my surprise, I liked a lot of it, though after a while I couldn’t stick with it. I discovered something that maybe graphic format readers already know: that when you read these kinds of books, the story’s facts come from the prose, but the emotions come from the illustrations. Because I am so oriented toward print instead of illustration I found myself just reading the prose and skipping the pictures and feeling like the stories were too flat. When I realized what I was doing I went back and looked at the pictures more closely and picked up more of the nuance. Still, it seemed like a lot of work and eventually I gave up.

Students for a Democratic Society is a graphic history of this group from its origins in the labor movement of the late 1950’s up through its disintegration in the early 1970’s. The book mostly consists of a series of reminiscences by and about members of the SDS. It’s certainly not a complete history of the SDS, nor does it claim to be. But it held my interest long enough to provide me with a good introduction to the format, and it inspired me to learn more about Harvey Pekar, who died a few months ago.

*Are you allowed to read during meals at your house? We are. Our kitchen table is usually heaped with books, magazines, and newspapers, and anyone may read during any meal except one that is officially designated as “family dinner,” for which we actually clear the junk off the table. Sometimes during breakfast there is no noise at all except for the crunching of cereal and the flipping of pages.

**College-age boys home on break leave their stuff everywhere. Everywhere.

(Book 1, 2011)

Hellhound on his Trail by Hampton Sides

My blogging friend Linda, of Each Little World, recommended this book. She reads a lot more nonfiction than I do, and she makes it all sound so interesting! And this was! It’s about James Earl Ray and the assassination of Martin Luther King, and it reads like a thriller. The book follows Ray from his escape from prison in 1967, through the assassination and its aftermath, to Ray’s capture in London in 1968.

I was shocked, as I read this, to discover how little I knew about this event. I think it’s because I am caught in an age-related limbo state. I was in elementary school when King was shot; too young to have been reading newspapers and following the unfolding drama on television. In contrast, my children have studied all this school. I think they know more about it than I did.

As you would expect, Ray is not a sympathetic character. Neither are supporting characters such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated King, but was obliged to investigate his death. The author’s portrait of King is nuanced and engrossing, and is well balanced. Sides doesn’t give much credence to the various conspiracy theories surrounding King’s assassination. Likewise, he doesn’t spend a lot of time contemplating Ray’s motives, though he makes clear that Ray was a racist and an admirer of George Wallace and Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. This is a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of storytelling and it works very well.

(Book 50, 2010)

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)

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

This was such a disappointing book. It sounded really good when I read about it. I was envisioning some kind of travel guide like the Lonely Planet series, with photos and little blurbs about food (roasted swan), lodging (in a monastery), and attractions (London Bridge). Doesn't that sounds like a fun idea? Kind of like the fake travel guides published by JetLag, about made-up places like Molvania (A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry), only about the past instead of about an imaginary place. But no, alas, this was just a weird mix of dry scholarly facts and figures presented in the dullest of formats, prose chapters studded with occasional headings. Mortimer does try to sprinkle in some first-hand accounts to liven things up a bit, but he relies so heavily on Chaucer that it starts to feel like a Cliff Notes version of The Canterbury Tales.

The thing that annoyed me most of all about this book, though, was its assumption that the time traveller who was using this book was male. Written mostly in the second person, the book directed all its information to a "you" who was obviously a man. For example, "you" would wear a certain kind of cloak, but a woman would wear a different kind, the book explained. If "you" were traveling by horse, you might expect certain things to happen at an inn, but a woman wouldn't really be traveling by horse, the book points out. What's with that? Yes, I do understand that women's lives were lived more in the background during medieval times, but since the whole book is a fake construct anyway, why adopt this odd voice? No one, male or female, is really going to use the book  because you can't time travel (duh!) so why not just talk to everyone the same way and handle gender-related exceptions as they crop up? Real travel guides have no trouble discussing options that are available to only one gender (such as segregated bath houses, for example), without resorting to treating half the possible readers as afterthoughts.

(Book 42, 2010)

Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science is a nonfiction book about the history of taxonomy. It falls into a category that I call “science lite,” written for a nontechnical audience. I really like these kinds of books but good ones are hard to find. I think they must be hard to write. It’s tricky to achieve just the right tone – accessible but not condescending. I will say that this book could have been shorter. Yoon is so enamored of her topic that she repeats herself sometimes, and she tries a bit too hard to make us appreciate the cosmic interconnectedness of it all.

On the other hand, it is kind of cosmically cool. Did you know that civilizations all over the world and throughout history classify animals and plants in similar ways? For example, native tribes people in remote parts of Asia put the same plants into the same categories that the Oxford botany department does, without either group being familiar with the others’ methods or choices. Yoon hypothesizes that humans evolved the ability (and the desire) to classify things very early on in history as a survival skill. After all, it’s important to know what kinds of things you can eat, vs. what might eat you.

Yoon provides delightful sketches of the fathers of taxonomy, including Carl Linnaeus (a big ego) and Charles Darwin (obsessed with barnacles). She follows up with good explanations of the current state of the field, which focuses on analyzing DNA to decide for certain which things are related to which others. I also enjoyed her digressions about folk taxonomy, which describes categories like pets, and her ideas about why children are obsessed with dinosaurs (again, an innate desire to sort and classify).

(Book 28, 2010)

Finding Iris Chang by Paula Kamen

Iris Chang was the author of The Rape of Nanking, a book that caused a huge stir when it came out back in the late 1990's. The Rape of Nanking detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese during their occupation of the Chinese city of Nanking during the early part of World War II. The incidents at Nanking are partly the cause of the continuing tension between Japan and China. Chang was a dedicated journalist who spent years researching the gruesome events and advocating for the Chinese survivors of Nanking. I considered reading The Rape of Nanking when it came out, but to be honest I was a little fearful that it might be more history than I could stomach.

I did follow Iris Chang's career, though. She continued to write about Asia and about Asians in the U.S. and was greatly respected in journalistic circles and among readers of nonfiction. I was shocked by her death a few years ago, which turned out to be a suicide. Now Paula Kamen, Chang's friend from college, has written a biography of Chang that presents a balanced portrait of Iris's complex personality and relationships, and reveals the mental illness that preceded her suicide.

Here is an excellent post about this book on the blog Each Little World.

(Book 15, 2010)

Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box by Madeleine Albright

Not being a terribly close follower of diplomatic maneuvers, I was unaware of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous use of pins to telegraph her thoughts and intentions to world leaders and the press. But lots of other people were aware of it, and now Albright has written a book about it, to accompany an exhibit of her pins organized by the Museum of Art and Design in New York. It’s a good book to curl up with on an afternoon. It only takes about an hour to read through the text and look at the abundance of photographs of her pins, some quite valuable, but most costume jewelry, the kind we can all find in department stores and at thrift shops and garage sales.

Some examples of Ms. Albright’s pin-based messages include wearing turtle pins to signify that negotiations were progressing too slowly, and a famous incident where she wore a snake pin to confront Saddam Hussein. These events and others are related in breezy prose; Albright knows we are probably not reading this book to find out any deep secrets of international affairs. Instead we are treated to a mostly chronological account of the origins and history of her love affair with pins, including a story about wearing her future husband’s fraternity pin in college. I was charmed by Albright’s (brief) stories from her youth and her days as a young mother. I think I had just assumed that she sprang, like Athena, fully grown and ready for battle, from the forehead of Zeus.

(Book 5, 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)

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)