Category: NonFiction

Roar of the Sea

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Vanasse, Deb. Roar of the Sea: Treachery, Obsession, and Alaska’s Most Valuable Wildlife. Alaska Northwest Books, 2022.

It is if Alexander MacLean’s whole life was leading up to the day he would become a pirate. At twenty-one he was jailed for fighting. He was such a bad ass Jack London used him as inspiration for a novel. Less than 200 pages long, Roar of the Sea may be short, but it packs a lot of information between its pages. As didactic and dense as it was, I found myself interested in what happened next. Pitted against Alex in the fur seal war was Henry Wood Elliott. Henry had himself a losing battle for as fascinating a subject of biological study the fur seals were, it was no match for the monetary worth of one luxurious seal pelt.

This has nothing to do with the writing of Roar of the Sea, and I am only going on assumption by first name, however I had to bring this to attention: author of the book, female. Publishing director, female. Marketing manager, female. Project specialist, female. Editor, female. Design and production, female. The only review on the book is by a woman. Last one. Roar was edited and indexed by a woman.

Reason read: As part of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing, I occasionally review new and republished works.

Author fact: While Vanasse is all things Alaskan, she lives in Oregon.

Book trivia: Maybe the finished publication will have photography, but I was missing it in the early proof. I would have liked to see what Alex and Henry looked like.

Picasso’s War

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Martin Russell. Picasso’s War: the Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece that Changed the World. Dutton, 2002.

Reason read: the bombing of Guernica happened on April 26th, 1937. Read in honor and memory of the lives lost that day.

On May 11th, 1937, only two weeks after the insurgent Nazi Condor Legion bombed Guernica, Spain, Pablo Picasso commenced painting his famous masterpiece. While Picasso’s War celebrates Picasso’s work of art, “Guernica,” it also paints a biography of Picasso, the passionately flawed man. Picasso who couldn’t stay faithful to one woman; Picasso who saved everything ever given to him. As an aside, these two details make me believe I would have never gotten along with him. As a painter, his art was as polarizing as cilantro. In 1981 the famous painting still had to be protected from terrorists with armed guards.
Coincidentally, Martin was standing in from of “Guernica” on September 11th, 2001.
As an aside, I love books that make me want to explore more. I looked up Picasso’s cartoons “Dream and Lie of Franco” because of Russell’s book.
The biggest surprise for me was learning of Herbert Southworth, an unsung hero of the Guernica saga. He had a clerical job at the Library of Congress and he was convinced he could get to the bottom of who actually bombed Guernica. Despite denials, he needed to convince the American public of Franco’s threat to Democracy.

Author fact: Martin also wrote Beethoven’s Hair which was a bestseller. I am only reading Picasso’s War for the reading Challenge.

Book trivia: I wanted photography in Martin’s book. If nothing else, just a picture of Picasso’s famous Guernica for reference.

Playlist: Beatles and Joan Baez.

Nancy said: Pearl said Picasso’s War was “wonderfully readable” (Book Lust To Go p 90).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the simple chapter called “Guernica” (p 89).

Travels in a Thin Country

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Wheeler, Sara. Travels in a Thin Country: Journey Through Chile. Modern Library, 1994.

Reason read: Chile’s independence was gained in April 1818. Although the official date of celebration is September 18th every year. Note: I could have started this earlier because Wheeler’s birthday is in March.

I think our desire for travel can be summed up by one of Wheeler’s first sentences in Travels in a Thin Country, “Our collective ignorance appealed to my curiosity” (p 3). It’s the reason most of us want to travel, to abolish an innate ignorance of the world around us. I admired Wheeler’s bravery for jumping into a journey down Chile’s entire length, all the way to the Antarctica end, without a solid plan in place. Her travel is motivated mostly by the seat of her pants and held up by the kindness of strangers. Interwoven in the adventure is a strong sense of political and cultural history of the region. I wanted photography to back up Wheeler’s gorgeous descriptions of the people and landscapes she traveled through. On a personal note, I found it vaguely romantic that Wheeler tried to travel in a jeep for nearly her entire journey. Her trusted loyalty to Jeep could have been a commercial.

As an aside, I had to look up where in New York Southampton is located even though I had a grandmother who lived on Long Island. Because Wheeler said upstate New York she had me doubting my geography. How sad is that?

Favorite lines, “we rubbed our favorite arguments threadbare” (p 189) and “there were two men in the bar, drunk beyond all sense of time and place” (p 261).

Author fact: I’m sorry that I looked up Wheeler on the web. I found several sites that made mention of the abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her husband all because she admitted she had an affair. For me, that painted an unfair picture of Ms. Wheeler. Unfair, because the entire time I was reading Travels in a Thin Country, as she was describing the travels to different places with different men, sharing jeep rides and tents, I had to wonder if she was sleeping with them along the way. As the pages went on, I couldn’t help but notice that most of her traveling companions were men even if women were in the picture.

Book trivia: Travels in the Thin Country is Wheeler’s second nonfiction. I am also reading Terra Incognito, Too Close to the Sun, and An Island Apart for the Challenge.

Playlist: Ry Cooder, Edith Piaf, Fine Young Cannibals, Pink Floyd, Violetta Parra, Beethoven, Claudio Arrau, Talking Head’s “We’re on the Road to Nowhere,” “Jingle Bells,” “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music,” “Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “Take Heart, Joe, My Love,”

Nancy said: Pearl called Travels in a Thin Country a treat and the best travel account she could find of Chile.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “It’s Chile Today” (p 144).

Everything but the Squeal

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Barlow, John. Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Reason read: March is food month.

The challenge for John Barlow in Everything But the Squeal is to consume every single part of the pig from tail to snout and everything in between; a veritable “porco-graphic tour” as John states. He faces every consumption with humor and more than a little snarky defensiveness, “when they’re starving , pigs will occasionally eat eat other, but so do we when our airplanes crash in inhospitable places” (p 21). This is also a travelogue as John has promised to eat the pig geographically as well, “in situ” as he put it.
More than a travelogue about eating pork, Everything But the Squeal is a memoir about marriage and family. What more tolerant vegetarian wife would tote their newborn son around northern Spain while her husband goes on a quest to devour an entire pig? But wait, there is more. Everything but the Squeal is historical, describing the past cultures of the Galacian people. It’s an abbreviate biography of Manuel Fraga (Minister of Tourism in 1962 and founder of the Popular Party in the 1980s). It’s even a love letter to his son. The direct comments he makes to Nico are endearing.
Here is how a documentary can ruin your eating habits. After watching “My Octopus Teacher” I no longer can stomach seeing any cephalopod on a menu. Here’s how words can ruin your eating habits. I won’t eat Slim Jims because I do not understand what “mechanically separate chicken parts” means. Thanks to Everything But the Squeal I now have to be on the lookout for MRM – mechanically recovered meat… um…whatever that means…and I won’t even describe the pig slaughter scene.
A byproduct of reading Everything But the Squeal was a slow picking up of tidbits of the language. I learned that morrina means a profound longing for the native land; something that is more powerful than a teenager at boarding school suffering from homesickness.
As another aside, I think I want to try my hand at making Galacian Red Sauce. I am sure there is more to it than evoo, paprika, garlic, onion, bay leaves and lemon, but you had me a paprika and sold me on lemon. As another aside, I don’t think I have ever been confronted with the description of offal as often as I have this month.

Quotes to quote, “The delights of home are never stronger than when you’re not there” (p 93). Obvo.

Author fact: Barlow has written other books. Everything but the Squeal is the only one on my Challenge lust.

Book trivia: Barlow talks about taking pictures but doesn’t include them in the book.

Playlist: “Y.M.C.A.,” “Brazil,” Grateful Dead, Barbra Streisand, Julio Iglesias, and Jerry Garcia.

Nancy said: Pearl called Everything but the Squeal “mouthwatering” (Book Lust To Go p 219).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Spain” (p 218). Can’t get any simpler than that.

With Bold Knife and Fork

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Fisher, M.F.K. With Bold Knife and Fork. G.P. Putnam and sons, 1968.

Reason read: March is Food Month.

Fisher is one of the best known and well loved food writers of the last century. When I told someone I was reading With Bold Knife and Fork her immediate reaction was a one word exclamation, “love!” And speaking of love, I loved, loved, loved some of the snarky phrases Fisher used. Here are a few, “…floating dunghill of lassitude, corruption, dirt, and whatever evil I have ever recognized as such” (p 171), “Stuffed with prejudices” (p 287) and “culinary monkey” (p 291). But, back to the “plot” of With Bold Knife and Fork. Fisher will walk you down a myriad of memory lanes with food and how it related to her childhood or the social norms of the day. It was amusing to think of a very young M.F.K. Fisher as a child hearing the siren’s song and feeling the pull towards decadent food. There is a definite humor to her storytelling. I had to laugh when she talked about a pressure cooker and how “it should never be used by a person taking tranquilizers or alcohol for his own reasons, or one with a fever or the deep blues” (p 164). There is also a didactic nature to Fisher. I appreciated learning the difference between preserves, conserves, jellies, jams, honeys, and marmalades.
As an aside, what is so special about offal? Everything But The Squeal and With Bold Knife and Fork both offer pretty descriptive passages on the “delicacy.” Can is ask? The phrase, “tuck into.” Is that the act of starting to eat or the actual consumption of food?
Last off-topic observation: the quote reminded me of an episode of This Is Us, “We are so conditioned to this threat of the Secret Ingredient, and this acceptance of trickery, that even honesty has become suspect when we are brash enough to ask for recipes” (p 292).

Author fact: Fisher is a self-professed soy addict.

Book trivia: More memoir than cookbook, With Bold Knife and Fork offers 140 interesting recipes.

Favorite quotes, “Rice can be cooked in two basic ways, right and wrong” (p 79). Not helpful. Not helpful at all. Another quote, “There is a mistaken idea, ancient but still with us, that an overdose of anything from fornication to hot chocolate will teach restraint by the very results of its abuse” (p 99). One last one, “I like tomatoes but can skip them when I know I should for other people’s dietary or emotional reasons” (p 157), and last one “It is hot as the hinges of hell’s front door…” (p 302). the devil in me wanted to ask what about hell’s back door?

Playlist: “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear” and “W.S. gilbert’s “Patience.”

Nancy said: Pearl said writing about food is how Fisher expressed her love.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Food for Thought” (p 91).

Eat Pray Love

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Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Viking, 2006.

Reason read: March is Women’s History Month. Celebrating Gilbert this time.

Does everyone picture Julia Roberts when they hear the words eat, love and pray in that order? I know I do. I haven’t even seen the movie and yet that is exactly what goes through my head. Admittedly, before I even started reading the book I had a preconceived notion of what the storyline would be: a woman of means takes a year off from her crash-and-burn American life to find herself in the beyond beautiful countries of Italy, India and Indonesia. She spends four months in Italy eating her way through the wine-soaked landscape. She spends another four months in India meditating and losing the weight she gained in pasta. After paying a bribe, she spends the last four months of her year away on the Indonesian island of Bali being courted by the culture and in the end, a man. A year of seemingly easy leisure produced Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. But. But! But, my cynicism ends there. Gilbert is a skilled storyteller. Even if my synopsis is pretty accurate, Eat, Pray, Love is a highly entertaining read. I enjoyed every second of it.

Author fact: I have two other Gilbert books on my challenge list: Stern Men and The Last American Man.

Book trivia: Confessional – I have been calling this book Eat, Love, Pray for months now. I can’t even get the title right.

Best line ever, “…showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, brining you confidence and protection” (p 148).

Playlist: Count Basie, Eagles, Neil Young, Ray Charles, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, and Kenny Roger’s “Coward of the Country,”

Nancy said: Pearl said Gilbert became famous for writing Eat Pray Love.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter “The Maine Chance” (p 136). As an aside, Eat, Pray Love shouldn’t in this chapter. It has nothing to do with the state of Maine.

Namaste the Hard Way

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Brown-Warsham, Sasha. Namaste the Hard Way: a Daughter’s Journey to Find Her Mother on the Yoga Mat. Health Communications, 2018.

Reason read: I was supposed to receive Namaste the Hard Way back in 2018 as part of the Early Review program for LibraryThing. The book never arrived, but the entry stayed on my spreadsheet. I had this urge to clean up unfinished entries.

In a nutshell, Namaste the Hard Way is a very candid look at what it means to lose your parent at a young age and never fully recover from the trauma. Brown-Warsham admits that she finds herself closest to her mother’s spirit when she is practicing yoga. But. But, it is more than that. When Brown-Warsham becomes a mother she finds a different connection to her mother. Her marriage is a means to connect with her mother. Any familiar path Brown-Warsham takes is one that leads her to memories of her mother. Her vulnerability and honesty was touching. Confessional: the entire time I was reading Namaste the Hard Way I was filled with a sense of envy. Brown-Warsham lost her mother to cancer at a young age and yet she has something tangible to bring her mother’s memory into sharp focus: yoga. I lost my father halfway through my twenty-third year. The smell of motor oil and scorched metal from arc welding can bring back memories my father, but unless I hang out all day in a repair shop, I can’t evoke the nostalgia as easily as Brown-Warsham can. All she has to do is practice yoga.

It was surreal to read about Kripalu, it being just down the road from me and, and! And. I know people who used to work there.

Lines I liked, “Running is not for sissies” (p 149). When Sasha started talking about running I practically stood up and cheered. I am not a practicing yogi (aside from what is recommended after a super hard run), but when she talked abut shedding blood at the chaffing points of her sports bra I said a silent “yes!” in agreement. I concur! Best line about running, “I’ve given up the running I so loved because I’d never forgive myself if the baby were jostled and had shaken baby syndrome or if he or she fell out of the warm, safe sac into my underpants because I attempted to run seven miles” (p 198).

Playlist: “Eye of the Tiger,” “Kiss,” “Thriller,” “You Light Up My Life” by Debbie Boone, “Like a Virgin” by Madonna, James Taylor, and the “Wiffenpoof” Yale Song.

Jam Today

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Davies, Tod. Jam Today: a Diary of Cooking with What You’ve Got. Exterminating Angel Press, 2009.

Reason read: A bunch of years ago (in 2009) I was supposed to receive this book in exchange for an honest review. It never arrived. I decided to take matters into my own hands to clean up “unfinished” business.

Part cookbook, part memoir Jam Today is, dare I say, whimsical. Davies will tell you her favorite meals and she’ll walk you through how to make them. She is not precise in measurements, nor in direction. She doesn’t have to have precision in either because this isn’t your standard Julia Childs how-to in haute cuisine. While the subtitle of Jam Today is misleading it should be taken as a lighthearted romp through the joys of planning, cooking, and eating a flavorful meal. Instead of A Diary of Cooking with What You’ve Got her subtitle should have read “a diary of cooking with what I’ve got.” How many of us have salt cod, champagne, or cremini mushrooms lounging around in the refrigerator? Smoked salmon hiding in the pantry? I’m enough of a culinary snob to expect people who cook to have some kind of mortar and pestle on their counters, but a suribachi mortar and pestle? On the whole, Jam Today is fun. Seriously, how can you go wrong when the final instruction of a recipe is to not forget to light the candles?

Lines I liked, “It’ll stay tame if you show it who’s boss ion a cheerful way” (p 154).

Author fact: Davies most always includes a salad and wine with her recipes.

Book trivia: The title of Davies’s book comes from The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland when the Mock Turtle sings for Alice about “jam today.”

On Death and Dying

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Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. Scribner Classics, 1969.

Reason read: February is Psychology month. Also, I needed a book for the Portland Public Library Reading Challenge in the category of a book published in the year I was born. There you go.

How do you look someone in the eye and tell them they are dying? Sure, every single one of us is dying by increments every single day. Some of us will die tomorrow, without warning. No fanfare. But, how do you tell someone they will die in a month? In a week? Days? On Death and Dying is exactly that, a chance to talk to terminally ill patients; to have a candid talk about what it means to moving towards death sooner rather than later. Kubler-Ross and her students interviewed over 200 patients towards this end. I think it is safe to safe we know what emerged from this seminal work:
Stage One: Denial and Isolation
Stage Two: Anger – the “Why Me?” stage.
Stage Three: Bargaining – not a lot to say about this stage except to say it is very childlike in believing you can strike a deal with a higher power to avoid death.
Stage Four: Depression (the stage I think I would live within the longest).
Stage Five: Acceptance. This is the most difficult of all the stages to reach. Even after achieving acceptance, it is easy for the patient to revert back to an earlier stage such as anger or denial. Stage five is also difficult for the patient’s loved ones. How many families see a patient’s acceptance as resignation or a loss of will to live? One must remember there are defense mechanisms as well as coping mechanisms at play.
My biggest takeaway from reading On Death and Dying is how the more training and experience a physician had, the less ready he or she was to become involved in Kubler-Ross’s interviews. It is as if they lost the ability to see the patient as a human with a right to know their terminal future. We need to bring compassion back at every level of care.

As an aside, my husband could rattle off the five stages of grief as if he had sat in a Psychology class yesterday. He explained the anacronym I had never heard before, DABDA.

Quote to quote, “If a patient is allowed to terminate his life in the familiar and beloved environment, it requires less adjustment for him” (p 48).
Favorite quote, “Those who have the strength and the love to sit with the dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body” (p 276).

Author fact: Kubler-Ross died in 2004. As an aside, I cannot help but wonder what Dr. Kubler-Ross would have thought about Covid.

Book trivia: On Death and Dying has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about On Death and Dying except to explain how the book was constructed.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 100s” (p 63).

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

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Cokinos, Christopher. Hope is the Thing with Feathers: a Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. Jeremy A. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Reason read: February is Feed the Birds Month. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s the coldest part of winter?

Cokinos spent ten years researching the life and subsequent extinction of six birds: Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Labrador Duck, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Heath Hen, and the Great Auk.
I find it terribly sad that no one knows the exact date of the demise of the Carolina Parakeet, but then again that’s probably true of many extinct species. Right? How do we really know when we have seen the very last whatever? Here are details from Hope is the Thing with Feathers that will stick with me for a very long time: the Heath Hen has been compared to the Greater Prairie Chicken for their myriad of similarities. Their mating sounds are practical identical. Is that why no one took the extinction of the Heath Hen seriously? Were they so abundant they fell victim to overhunting; were they that easy to massacre? Is that what happened to the Passenger Pigeon? The cruelty inflicted on these birds was difficult to read. Cokinos gets into the question of cloning. Can you clone a species which has gone completely extinct? Can we have a Jurassic Park moment on a less dangerous scale?
Besides hunting, another factor wreaking havoc on bird populations was deforestation. Singer Sewing Machine purchased the nesting grounds of Lord God birds. Then they sold the rights to logging companies who cleared the land, destroying everything in its path. This happened over and over again.

Quotes to quote: “He also played sad songs on his flute” (p 62), “…thus the titanic vanishing of the Passenger Pigeon concluded, finally, on the bottom of a cage in the middle of a city busy with commerce and worry about war” (p 267), and “We ought not underestimate the elegance of individual decisions coupled with communal actions – a bird seen, a refuge protected, a vote changed – especially as they accumulate one by one, the way barbs and barbules of a feather hold together” (p 334).

Author fact: Cokinos is an excellent researcher. The amount of time and effort that went into verifying the shooting of the past Passenger Pigeon was astounding.

Book trivia: the title of the book comes from the title of my favorite Emily Dickinson poem.

Playlist: Steve Lawrence, “Maple Leaf Rag,” and the sound of birds singing.

Nancy said: Pearl explains the plot of Hope is the Thing with Feathers.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Bird Brains” (p 40).

Dickey Chappelle

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Garofolo, John. Dickey Chappelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action. Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015.

Reason read: I was supposed to review this book as part of the Early Review Program with LibraryThing way back in 2015. The book never arrived, but the entry lingered still on my spreadsheet in an irritating way. In an effort to clean up loose ends, I decided to read and review it. I’m glad I did.

This book will haunt you. Made up primarily of Georgette Louise Meyer, aka Dickey Lou Chappelle’s amazing wartime photography, her eye on humanity will move you to tears. As she journeyed around the world, from the Pacific theater of World War II to the rice paddy fields of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, her images captured a raw humanity more seasoned photographers failed to notice. By her own standards, her photography skills weren’t perfect, but nor did she care. Her fighting spirit shimmered in the images. I had never heard of Dickey Chappelle before reading this book. In truth, it was someone else’s final photograph of Dickey that will make Ms. Chappelle, the woman and not the photographer, unforgettable to me.

Author fact: John Garofolo used to be in the entertainment industry.

Book trivia: Dickey Chappelle was slated for a stage production. Not sure what happened to the idea.

Monsters

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Croggon, Alison. Monsters: a Reckoning. Melbourne: Scribe, 2021.

Reason read: as a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing I occasionally review books (mostly nonfiction).

Part memoir, part commentary on the world at large, Croggon centers Monsters squarely on one of the most difficult topics of them all: family. We all have had something of a family whether we like it admit it or not. Using an irreparable relationship with her two sisters as the threat through Monsters creates the tease to keep readers engaged. We all want to know what really happened with her family. Who is the real monster? More often than not, Croggon places the blame squarely on herself with statements like I’m the bad one, I am a monster, I am a blasphemy. The woe is me attitude was tiresome. Her research into her genealogy makes one question: how responsible are we for the sins of our fathers? What about our grandfathers? Great grandfather’s grandfather? Are we, in the 21st century, beholding to catastrophes committed in the 13th? While Croggon’s essays are thought provoking, I don’t think they tell a cohesive story relevant to the mystery of her dysfunctional family dynamics.
One other observation: Croggon spends a great deal of Monsters quoting other people:
Herman Melville, Frans de Waal, A.L. Rowse, Peter Ustinov, Rachel Dolezal, Ruby Hamad, Clara Thompson, Helene Cixous, Ursula K. Le Guin, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Carl Linnaeus, Angela Saini, Friedrich Nietsche, Gillian Rose, Olwen Hufton, Alex Wright, August Strindberg, Robin Bernstien, Mircea Eliade, Ijoema Oluo, Elaine Scarry, John Berger, Wallace Stevens, Graham Robb, Edward Said, Guilane Kinouani, Alice Walker, Camile Paglia, Margaret Atwood, Heather Rupp, Kim Wallen, Sylvia Plath, Sandor Ferenezi, Naomi Wolf, Colin Burrow, St. John of Patmos, Bibi Bakare-Yusat, Mircea Eliade, Dr. Spock, A.L. Rowse, among others. Was this to demonstrate how well read Croggon is or a subliminal effort to back her arguments? She does say she wouldn’t know where she would be without books.
Final thought. I this would have been a more enjoyable read, at least for me, if Croggon didn’t beat herself up so much. I grew weary of her self-accusing herself of crimes committed, calling herself a monster repeatedly, of having no hope, often announcing her traitor status, always being in the way, or being too late.

Author fact: Croggon has won awards for her writing.

Book trivia: Monsters is categorized as a memoir.

Playlist: Antony and the Johnsons, “You are My Sister.”

In My Father’s Court

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Singer, Isaac Bashevis. In My Father’s Court. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966.

Reason read: January is the month most people embark on keeping a journal. Read In My Father’s Court in honor of memoirs.

In his “Author’s Note” Singer explains his thoughts behind In My Father’s Court. He wanted readers to know he thought of it as memoir; “belles-lettres about a life that no longer exists” (p xi). I would say In My Father’s Court is a sentimental collection of essays about memory. It is the first of his many autobiographical writings. Looking back at one’s childhood is sometimes painful, sometimes awe inspiring, but always full of nostalgia. Singer is sweet remembering his family’s history.

Line I liked, “There are in this world some very strange individuals whose thoughts are even stranger than they are” (p 3). Amen to that.

Author fact: Singer is a Nobel prize winner.

Book trivia: In My Father’s Court was first published as a series of connected stories.

Playlist: “The Sons of the Mansion,” and “Welcome, O Bride.”

Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about In My Father’s Court.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Polish Up Your Polish” (p 181).

Origins of a Song

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Grogan, Jake. Origins of a Song: 202 True Inspirations Behind the World’s Greatest Lyrics. Kennebunkport, Maine: Appleseed Press, 2021.

Reason read: this was a gift from a friend who knows me all too well.

What makes a great lyric? Opinions vary. My take? A song will grab me if the artist can drop into my mind, steal my heart, and take the words right out of my mouth. Be about me. Better yet, be me. The lyrics have to say what I mean and say it better than I ever could. I want to feel as if someone has been reading my journal or listening under the bed when I talk in my sleep. Lyrics don’t have to be complicated. They just have to mean something. But Origins of a Song‘s subtitle is misleading. This book is not about the true inspirations behind great lyrics. More accurately, it’s the inspiration behind the great song itself. My current obsession (Dermot Kennedy), my longtime hero (Natalie Merchant), and one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time (Josh Ritter) are not included in this book. Everyone has an opinion and mine is this: I think some songs were included not for their brilliant lyrics, but because some songs were smash hits and very difficult to ignore. “My Girl” by Smokey Robinson, for example. What is so special about the lyrics? The tone of Ruffin’s voice, melody, and instrumentation (piano) made the song a hit, not the words.
Bonus points for Grogan: he gives credit where credit is due. If Elvis didn’t write the song (did he ever?), Grogan makes sure to tell you who did.

Author fact: According to Origins of a Song , Grogan’s favorite song “Dancing Queen” inspired him to write the book.

Book trivia: Confessional: I couldn’t find a rhyme or reason for how Origins of a Song is organized. Songs are not in alphabetical order, nor are the artists. It’s not in chronological order according to the release of the song, either.

As an aside, I was going to catalog all of the songs and musicians Grogan mentions, but since the whole point of the book is just that, I refrained.

Shtetl

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Hoffman, Eva. Shtetl: the Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

Reason read: in honor of Hannukah.

Inspired by a documentary Hoffman saw on Frontline, this is the biography of Bransk, a Polish town that no longer exists thanks to the thoroughness of the Nazis under Russian rule. One of the most difficult segments to read was the recounting of young Bransk boys conscripted into the Russian army. They were religiously converted away from their birthright and upon returning home, shunned by their own people.
As an aside, I am afraid of cult figures and the power they can wield over seemingly intelligent people. I was surprised to learn of a man in the 1750s by the name of Jakub Frank who claimed he was the Messiah. He wanted to rule all of Poland and had a strong sexual appetite for young girls and orgies.

Quotes to quote, “I believe that if we are to understand what happened in Poland during the war, we must begin by acknowledging, from within each memory, the terrible complexity of everyone’s circumstances and behavior” (p 6).

Author fact: Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland.

Book trivia: Shtetl was written after Hoffman saw a documentary by the same name of Frontline in 1996.

Nancy said: Pearl admires Hoffman’s writing and reads everything she publishes, but for the Challenge I am only reading Shtetl. Pearl would have bought Shtetl for someone exploring Jewish roots.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Polish Up Your Polish” (p 181) and from More Book Lust in the chapter called “A Holiday Shopping List” (p 114).