Book of the Month - The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support.

Just days later - the night before New Year's Eve - Joan and her husband were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Joan Didion, author of A Book of Common Prayer and many other fiction and non-fiction titles, and John Gregory Dunne, author of the novels Dutch Shea, Jr., and True Confessions as well as some non-fiction titles, were a well-matched, devoted couple. The year of “magical thinking” refers to her efforts to think away her grief and loss. It is well written and a gripping story of loss and coming to grips with that loss. I highly recommend it. Meg

[Some text taken from BookLetters. Click on titles to check availability.]

Book of the Month... Michelle

Michelle: A Biography, by Liza Munday

Liza Mundy offers this highly readable, thoroughly reported biography of the charming and self-possessed woman who could become the nation's first African-American First Lady.

She can be funny and sharp-tongued, warm and blunt, empathic and demanding. Who is the woman Barack Obama calls "the boss"? In Michelle, Washington Post writer Liza Mundy paints a revealing and intimate portrait, taking us inside the marriage of the most dynamic couple in politics today. She shows how well they complement each other: Michelle, the highly organized, sometimes intimidating, list-making pragmatist; Barack, the introspective political charmer who won't pick up his socks but shoots for the stars.

Michelle's story carries with it all the extraordinary achievements and lingering pain of America in the post-civil rights era. She grew up on the south side of Chicago, the daughter of a city worker and a stay-at-home mom in a neighborhood rocked by white flight. She was admitted to Princeton amid an angry debate about affirmative action and went on to Harvard Law School, where she was more comfortable doing pro-bono work for the poor than gunning for awards with the rest of her peers.

She became a corporate lawyer, then left to train community leaders. She is modern in her tastes but likes to watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Brady Bunch.

Drawing upon interviews with more than one hundred people, including one with Michelle herself, Mundy captures the complexity of this remarkable woman and the remarkable life she has lived. Meg

[Click on title to check availability. Text taken from BookLetters.]

Book of the Month...The Girls

The Girls by Lori Lansens
[Click on title to check availability.]

The Girls is the story of two sisters, Rose and Ruby Darlen: their lives, their loves, their family and their friends. Rose and Ruby are 29-year-old conjoined twins – called craneopagus twins medically – because they are joined at the head. Born during a tornado to a shocked teenaged mother in the hospital at Leaford, Ontario, they are raised by the nurse who helped usher them into the world.

Rose says, if you take your hand, “press the base of your palm to the lobe of your right ear. Cover your ear and fan out your fingers” – that’s where Ruby’s head is. Joined to Ruby at the head, Rose's face is pulled to one side, but she has full use of her limbs. Ruby has a beautiful face, but her body is tiny and she is unable to walk. She rests her legs on her sister's hip, rather like a small child or a doll. In spite of their situation, the girls lead surprisingly separate lives. Rose is bookish and a baseball fan. Ruby is fond of trash TV and has a passion for local history.

Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and as the novel opens, she begins to pen her autobiography. Here is how she begins: "I have never looked into my sister's eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I've never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I've never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or solo walk. I've never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I've never done, but oh, how I've been loved. And, if such things were to be, I'd live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially.

This is a wonderfully written, beautifully told “fictional memoir” that is highly recommended. Meg

[Some of the above review was taken directly from BookLetters.

Book of the Month...September 2008

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson.

Subtitled Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, the Devil in the White City takes place against the backdrop of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and is about two men: Daniel Hudson Burnam, famous architect who designed New York’s Flatiron Building and who was director of “works” for the Fair, and Henry H. Holmes – a doctor and a serial killer who uses the Fair as his stalking ground for victims.

Their stories are told in parallel and both are equally as riveting. The architect who struggled to merge the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim and Louis Sullivan, to turn what was a swamp with the prosiac name of Jackson Park into the White City of the Chicago Fair: the physician who constructed his own “Fair” wherein he lured and tortured women to their deaths.

The Devil in the White City is a fascinating, true story of an intriguing time in our nation’s history and several characters that – for whatever reason – remain unforgettable. Meg

[Click on title to check availability.]

Book of the Month....August 2008

Digging to America by Ann Tyler.
(Click on title to check availability.)

On the surface, this is a novel about two very different families thrown together by chance and their mutual decision to adopt a Korean child. But if you dig further, it is a novel about cultural identity and what happens to an individual’s identity when that connection to culture is lost.

The Donaldsons and the Yazdans meet at BWI (Baltimore/

Washington International Airport); both have adopted a child from Korea and both are meeting that child for the first time. The families are very different: Brad and Bitsy Donaldson are white, upper middle-class; Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian Americans and far from well-to-do. But their new daughters draw them together, and as time goes one, the families become friends – although that friendship is sometimes strained.

Bitsy Donaldson is bound and determined to celebrate and keep her daughter’s oriental heritage alive. She names her Jin-Ho and dresses her in oriental costumes on her anniversary date. The Yazdan’s, who have been assimiliated themselves, are more comfortable letting their daughter, Susan, lose sight of her heritage.

Sami’s mother, Maryam Yazdan is the ambivalent one. She is bound and determined to retain her ties to her Iranian heritage, but this determination has effectively cut her off from friendship, community and love in America. As the two families and their children learn how to manage both heritage and acceptance so, too, Maryam must learn to let her culture not become a barrier to her future happiness. Meg

Book of the Month...July 2008

Fallen Founder by Nancy Isenberg
(Click on title to check availability.)

Villain or patriot? Scheming politician or forward thinker, way ahead of his time? Ms. Isenberg’s book of revisionist history explores all these questions and more while she relates the life and death of one of America’s most controversial figures, Aaron Burr.

In this challenging, but fascinating biography, Isenberg asserts that Burr was, in fact, “the only founder to embrace feminism” and the only one who “adhered to the ideal that reason should transcend party differences.” None of the founding fathers were without faults and human frailties, and Burr was no exception. But his character and contributions should not be ignored.

Fallen Founder is an interesting portrait and one that should lead to much discussion and thoughtful reflection. Meg

Book of the Month....June 2008

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson
(Click on title to check availability.)

One summer in the Rocky Mountains, three men are brought together to construct a ramp to nowhere – a causeway for a daredevil motorcycle rider to jump across a canyon. As the men work together, their wounded lives and backgrounds are gradually revealed: Darwin’s wife died and he is in the grip of grief and fury; Arthur, after betraying someone close to him, has abandoned his career as a Hollywood stunt engineer to build this road to emptiness; Ronnie, the youngest of the three, is a petty thief and runaway looking for a way back to a normal life.

Carlson, writing his first novel after several succesful short story collections, describes how these three men grow into a family of sorts. Redemption, tragedy, and grace come at the end. Meg

Book of the month.....May 2008

The Great Swim, by Gavin Mortimer
(Click on title to check availability.)

Why would anyone want to swim the English Channel?? Well – this book is about 4 women who, during the summer of 1926 –just after World War I – battled each other in a race to be the first woman to swim across that Channel. The 4 American women – Gertrude Ederle, Mille Gade, Lillian Cannon and Clarabelle Barrett – were each backed by various American newspapers from New York to Boston – and these newspapers made the most of the publicity that a woman, in a bathing costume on the front page of a national newspaper would produce.

Mr. Mortimer uses a great variety of sources to reconstruct the excitement and drama that accompanied an event that captured the heart of people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Check the library's catalog for The Great Swim. Meg

Book of the Month....April 2008

Mozart's Ghost, by Julia Cameron
(Click on title to check availability.)

Meet Anna, a thirtysomething Midwesterner living alone in New York City. A schoolteacher by day, she is a medium by night, covertly helping people reunite with their lost loved ones. Anna leads a double life, guarding her secret as much as she guards her heart – until Edward, a gangly yet quietly handsome concert pianist, moves into her building.

Edward’s music fills Anna’s apartment with beautiful sounds that disturb her concentration and her lines of communication with ghosts. She and Edward fall for each other fast, but Anna is conflicted: by exposing her true identity, does she risk losing what may be her true love? And is music really his true love?

Then a ghost begins to interfere – Mozart’s ghost – and while making a pest of himself to Anna, he begins to play matchmaker with unpredictable results….**

Julia Cameron is also the author of several books about writing, including The Artists’ Way.

(**Text from book's fly leaf.)