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Crazy for the Storm

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:41:00 +0000

Crazy for the Storm
A Memoir of Survival
Normal Ollestad
Ecco Books, an Imprint of Harper Collings Books
ISBN: 978-0-06-176672-5
272 pages
Rating: Mighty Toasty

This is a true story of Norman Ollestad's being the sole survivor of a plane crash which took his father's life atop a snow covered mountain range. His prose is engaging, and his haunting begining in his dedication prepares the reader for a story well-told and memorable, "An insatiable spirit, he (my father) was crazy for the storm. And it saved my life. This book is for my father and for my son."

Initially I was drawn to the story by the very idea of an 11 year old boy surmonting difficult odds, and had thought, after reading, I would pass it on to my own 10 year old son. However, the story, for my taste, has too many distracting foul words and instances of sex or sex-related dialogue for a child, so I didn't.

The author uses flashbacks to reveal his tender, agonizing love-hate for his father, who forces his son to learn incredible sports like surfing, skiing and drags him to Mexico on exciting trips across the border with encounters with suspicious characters and beautiful young women. On the surface, some may say, "Awesome! What a lucky guy!". But like all of us, we don't appreciate the gifts of our parents until we are older, and like any pre-teen, he pouts and is petulant about missing birthday parties and doing "normal' things with other teenagers.

There is a substory that is difficult for me to retell but I sense it among the words. The ancient passing on of wisdom from parent to child, the soulfully gratifying passage knowledge of father to son. We share our heritage with our children in the hopes of leaving a part of ourselves behind. We teach our children in the hope they will remember.

Norman, astride his surfboard near the end of the story, remembers his father, feels his emptiness for losing his father, finds the bridging peace which had eluded him for a long time.

A Long Way Gone

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:17:00 +0000

A Long Way Gone
Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2007
ISBN 13:978-0-374-10523-5
229 pages
Rating: Blue Hot

This is an elegant, eloquent true journey of a youth-soldier in war torn Sierra Leone, Africa. Beah's evocative prose captures the confused, hesitant yet inevitable passage of innocence into hard-won early adulthood, but an adulthood based on thin realities and imbalanced truth. The story is almost other-worldly as you travel with Beah from his pre-teen love of rap music to his ghostly experiences of systematic murder where he robotically participates in a war against man, as he mutually rages within himself. I couldn't help but think: Does Naughty By Nature (rap music group) know how their music saved him, literally and figuratively, from war's insanity? The conclusion will leave you breathless as Beah emerges from the maelstrom, to live a life crystalline with truth and blood, hope and death. He is haunted by his own ghost of the future-past. Larger questions of the origination of war, children of war, loss of innocence, and our own universal connections with each other will provoke you long after you close the book.

Red Scarf Girl

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:37:00 +0000

Red Scarf Girl
A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution
Ji Li Jiang
Scholastic Edition, 1997
285 pages

Do you remember when you still believed in...everything? Did you believe in fairies? Wishes? Happy endings? Parents were always right? Justice existed? The world was a place of balance and opportunity? When did that all end? For Ji Li Jiang, it ended at 12, in sixth grade. Red Scarf Girl is a deftly written work, clear cut in its story, with little elaboration on the gradual, tidal changes within "revolutionary" China under Chairman Mao Ze Dong (also spelled Mao Tse-tung), Chinese Communist Party leader who came into power in 1949 until his death in 1976.

It hardly needs excessive detail; the events themselves paint a picture of a hopeful China in Ji Li's eyes, who sees the future as path of success, under the waving red scarves of the teen revolutionary guards who make up the bulk of the law enforcement. Her breathy innocence spills through her honest words of amazement and admiration for these revolutionaries and Chairman Mao Tse Tung. Over a period of few months, as Ji Li witnesses how her neighbors, her friends begin to suffer under the idealist demands of a self-righteous de facto government her youthful exhuberance falters and then deadens. When Ji Li's own family is brought into question due to dubious, unsavory political connections, Ji Li's mind turns from faithful school girl to a questioning, stunned, tearful adolescent. This true story of a young lady's fall from innocence is memorable.

This edition has an interesting foreward with an introduction to Chinese pronounciation of names. It also includes a useful glossary of terms with words like "revolutionary" and "ideaology". This story would be an excellent tool in a middle school social studies class.

Overall, on the heat scale, Mighty Toasty

The Shack

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:19:00 +0000

The Shack

William P. Young

2007, Windblown Media, $14.00 USA, Soft Cover, 248 pages

This is an absorbing piece of writing about faith, personal accountability, and humanity's relationship with God. It was a bit melodramatic for me, but when I ignored some of the temptingly obvious tearjerking moments, when I allowed myself to imagine all of this was real and possible, it truly permeated my heart, my soul and gave me a new perspective on my personal relationship with God, heaven and the afterlife. Releasing cynicism was a small price to pay for a deeply beautiful, cathartic suggestion of how we work in tandem with the universe. The various personifications of God reminded me of the Piers Anthony series of books, Incarnations of Immortals, where Death takes on a human form and tells his story. Because I have already read books where Ideas and Beliefs talk as people, think like people and respond to the reader as people, it took me a bit to accept this story as "interesting". For some, the interesting begins when the writer describes God as a black female. For me, it began when the writer laid out a plausible line of logic about why death and horrible things happen to us, despite our faith in a loving Creator. This book is a welcome reprieve from the deluge of mysteries, romances, horror stories out there for reading. On the heat scale, Mighty Toasty.

Blu’s Hanging

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:06:00 +0000

Blu's Hanging

Lois-Ann Yamanaka
1997, Avon Books, $12.00 USA, Soft Cover, 260 pages

I've been so lucky to encounter a good book on the tale-end of another. Recommended by a friend, this book introduces me to Lois-Ann Yamanaka, an incredible writer whose frank, unflinching description of growing up in Hawaii is validated by my own experiences.

This novel is a breath taking rendering of Hawaiian life which completely captivates the reader from beginning to end. I've been disappointed in Hawaiian books before, but this story is compellingly truthful about Japanese Hawaiian life in the lower socio-economic areas of Molokai. Yamanaka is a poet, utilizing Hawaiian pidgin in a lyrical, legible story of a young girl who must make a choice between her past and her future, and whether or not to sever the family ties that bind and may possibly strangle her.

After their mother's death, Ivah and her younger brother, Blu, and their youngest sister, Maisie, do their best to survive the emptiness which was left in their mother's place. Their father becomes increasingly distant, hostile, oftentimes sorrowing for their loss as well as resenting the choices he had made in his life. Ivah, as children often are, frequently is the victim of his misplaced bitter mourning, experiencing a range of emotions, including confusion, anger, dismay, guilt, surprise. Being the eldest, Ivah is the new maternal figure, and she quickly is the protector of her siblings. I particularly enjoyed the comic interplays of younger brother to older sister, which deepened the reader's connection to the characters, serving to ultimately heighten the tension at the book's conclusion. Helping with homework, employed at various odd jobs to bring in additional income, defending her family against pedophiles, Ivah's thirteen year old voice depicts a raw, gritty story of a child entering into adulthood on a razor's edge. The title refers to either an actual hanging of the brother Blu's spirit or may possibly refer to the colloquial term "hanging", meaning to "survive, or exist".

There are many forms of symbolism throughout the book, beginning with a dreamed-remembered banquet of mother's cooking and ending with a brother's desperate but generous purchase of similar food to regain the loss of comfort and heart; also the deaths of three kittens by hanging which may be the souls of the three children. I wondered about the picture of raw eggs stirred into rice, by the loss of its potential life had nourished the opportunity for another to live. The practiced reader will enjoy the myriad connections between image and story employed by Yamanaka. Like all great novels, there are "under-stories", like an undertow, which sweeps the reader out to deeper, richer, ambient waters.

The details about Hawaiian food, incorporation of Japanese cultural mythology, depictions of racial prejudices, the eye-rolling umbrage of relatives with slightly more money, and a long running battle with malevolent neighbors creates a magnetic mixture, compelling the reader to head pell-mell to its cathartic end. On the heat scale, White Hot.

The End of the World as We Know It

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:52:00 +0000

The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

Robert Goolrick

2007, Alonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95 USA, Hardcover, 213 pages

A haunting, beautifully written tale of love in all of its facets: cherished, memorable, ethereal, painful, mysterious, cruel, redeeming. I read the book jacket over and over. Was this tale real? Was his story fiction or not? Because I could not believe it. I was both aghast and hypnotized. I was intrigued by the beginning, and awake, in painful awe, at the end. This is not a story for the weak. But it's a story that needs to be heard, and needs to be told by Goolrick. The calm, nearly medical tone underscores the sense of surreal maturity that has overtaken our hero. He is both touched, and untouched. As we delve deeper into his memories, there is a repeating theme of addiction: alcoholic, physical and emotional. A child whose life is changed, and his destiny altered by one ghastly event, who, becomes immediately protected and hated by the family he dreadfully wants to love and be loved by. I was hypnotized by his seamless interweaving of memories and reason. For some other writer, this would be a trite and boring effect, but Goolrick manages to utilize the skills of reflection in a masterful way, enthralling me as we spiral together, both reader and writer, descending into his bordering madness, and near its end, striving for air. This novel supersedes notions of sexuality and focuses on our universal human need to be loved, wanted and needed. The writer pays homage to the tenderness of children, his coming-of-age story embracing the hedonism of an alcohol infused family to rise from its eventual ashes, a thing of beauty, to be held and, we hope, loved forever and tenderly, as we all deserve. And especially you, dear, dear Robert. Overall, on the heat scale, "white hot".

The Lost Mother

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:52:00 +0000

The Lost Mother

Mary McGarry Morris

2005, Penguin Books, $14.00 USA, Softcover, 274 pages

This novel of a family abandoned by their mother during the 1940s speaks to everyone about suffering, betrayal, forgiveness and atonement. Told from the viewpoint of the son, the author does not spread out his feelings on a buffet table for emotional vultures. She turns him this way and that, like a prism in a strain of sunlight, where the right angle will suddenly sparkle out its singular beauty. Her prose is hypnotic: "the leaf rustling of prowling creatures, a canvas thinness away". She keeps our hero, the twelve year old son, true to the spirit and nature of a boy. He is both extremely sensitive, imagining the return of his mother, and unaware of the interplays of adults which occur around him. You learn about the intricate relationships among the characters in many ways: by the son's abrupt, roughhouse, reactions, revealing a growing anger; the daughter's spicy sweet outbursts, which cover her fears; the mother's shaking confusion; the neighbor's protective glances; the father's grim, cool silence. A soft, hard word at a dinner table reveals the father's loyalty to his childhood friend and now spinster sweetheart. The specially prepared meal which, carefully laid, is familiar to those who would avoid Hades, but after having eaten of the pomegranate, find themselves trapped at a potential for eternity. The argument over green apples, between father and son, underscores the bitter sweetness of their lives at that moment. There is a very tiny house for a woman who has little room for anything else, much less her children. This is a pageturner, which will teach you as much about yourself as the intimate details of an impoverished family living during the Great Depression. A great read. Overall, on the heat scale, "white hot".

Time Bandit

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:22:00 +0000

Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs

Andy and Johnathan Hillstrand

With Malcom McPherson

2008, Ballantine Books, $25.00 USA

This is a non-fiction account of the lives of Bering Sea fishermen which both startled and delighted me. Apparently, these two Hillstrand brothers are featured on a Discovery Channel show The Deadliest Catch. The book is a bit hard to breeze through: don't expect to whip through this in a weekend. The storyline, although extremely passionate and interesting, is a bit choppy as the authors wade through a mesh of several sea stories and combine these stories along a background of the biography of the two brothers, told from alternating points of view. Did you get all that? Yeah, I thought so. BUT amazing lines like "we are not afraid of the sea; we are terrified of the water" and "death followed us, like a spy" keep me enthralled. Johnathan Hillstrand is a daring sailor with the heart of a poet. His chapters are chock full of expressions which range from deeply spiritual to plain old expletives. Andy Hillstrand 's chapters are thoughtful and future focused, contemplations of a man sharing life on land while wedded to the ocean. There is a great deal of eye opening material about life on the Bering Sea, the port towns which surround it, and the fishing industry. A good read. Overall, on the heat scale, "mighty toasty".

Ka'a'awa: Hawaii in the 1850s

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:11:00 +0000

University of Hawaii Press
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822
$24.95
eds. 1972, 1973, 1980

I happened upon this book in an airport, returning home from Hawaii. It is a wonderfully rich novel about missionary Hawaii. The humor and cultural values are authentic as far as I can vouch, my family being from Hawaii, but the most enthralling subject of the book was the interweaving of the destinies of native and haoles. The complexities of how an ancient culture merges uncomfortably into a modern world are deftly detailed by O.A. Bushnell, whose characters alternatively provoke sympathy, anger, love and awe. The author captures perfectly the unique balance native hawaiians try to maintain between their respect for their unshakable, cultural beliefs and their adopted Christian religion. Bushnell encapsulates in ths novel a remarkable period in Hawaiian history, without persuading the reader as to a right or a wrong position to have. He begins the novel with a Hawaiian king sworn to the task of surveying the politics of Oahu. He ends the novel with that same king having obligated a sympathetic and sometimes unlikable haole to finish the story that he had started. His request is only that this same man, Saul, include his own story in the retelling. In much the same way, the Hawaiian Islands have become a place of interwoven stories. Each person, native or visitor, kanaka or kamaaina, is a part of the story of Hawaii, and from generation to generation, this story is passed on.

Memory Keeper... YOU keep it!

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:58:00 +0000

The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a soap opera on a stick.

I picked up, having had it recommended to me by so many people, and the deal was sealed when the one of my favorite authors, Sue Monk Kidd, had her quoted on the front cover. I paid money for this book, and I wished I had checked it out at the library first.

It has an interesting premise, a doctor who delivers his own twins, and makes a quick decision about requesting his nurse to take the baby girl with Down's Syndrome to a home for children. He does not tell his wife. Now, that that part is over with, we spend the rest of the book bemoaning about his choice and how his wife is haunted by the 'death' of the missing twin girl.

The nurse, on her own impulse (so much impulsive decision making!), flies off to another city, to raise the baby as her own child. She struggles, she finds a miracle job which does not question her lack of references (she's a runaway nurse, remember?) and pays her well enough to live with her adopted daughter. She flirts with a long running romance with a persistent truck driver who eventually tracks her down and they make a life together.

The doctor, the child's father, escapes into photography as a hobby, enjoys a bit of fame for his work, to the point it could have been a second career, then drops it, perhaps out of his long running depression over his choice, so many years ago. His silence shuts out his wife, who also escapes into love affairs and developing a successful travel business, and eventually it all dissolves into divorce. There's more... at this point, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE.

Now, I finished the book, because I am that way, BUT... seriously, this is not my style of book.

Life of Pi.. Why?

noreply@blogger.com (D Austin) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:58:00 +0000

Boy was I glad this was an amazing book.

As a working mom, it's disappointing to plod through "yet another" hopeful fifteen minutes of bedtime peace without some type of satisfaction, but also because I am dedicated (there is NO way that I am not finding out what this book is about) I will grind through a good portion before I give up. In fact, I hate giving up. As a reader and a fan of good books, I always hope that my effort will be rewarded. In this case, it was!

The beginning of the book is nothing like the end. The writing is fluid, and reads like good prose, and there are interesting universal observances about life, as seen through the eyes of a zookeeper's son. You'd think that this boy's life is, apart from his heritage and occupation, rather ordinary. But the story builds ever so carefully to a near fantastic situation: adrift, at sea, with wild animals as companions.

We meet our hero as a East Indian zookeeper's son, and he is experiencing a crossroads (if you will permit me this) of religion... potentially scattered, I thought, but oh, well, I got my children into bed before 8:30pm, darn it, I need some kind of reward, so keep reading...

My effort (or faith... hee hee ) was rewarded by the slow evolution of this young man's journey toward God. There is an interesting sidebar of characters of a priest, a guru, etc. who meet and argue over the young man's 'actual' faith. I imagine we can spend hours rolling around in the mud of the religious themes that naturally abound in the book, but, to heck with it, this book is fascinating on many different levels.

The book is well written, because although we begin at a rather slow pace about the ins and outs of zookeeping, we then find ourselves transported adroitly into the life of a desperate castaway, whose zookeeper experience possibly saves him from death on the open sea.

I was a little confused when the hero complains of his misguided efforts to save "Richard Parker" until the narrator eventually reveals to me that Richard Parker is the name of a Bengal tiger. I was impatient with this, finding no value to the sloooooowwww tease of the revelation, so I am telling you now who Richard Parker is. An interesting, bordering on weird, story origin: zookeeping, it's this zookeeper background which is excellent prepartion for our hero's eventual conquest of the tiger... or is it of himself?

We are left wondering, even at the very end, exactly who the tiger is. So, after reading it, is it the Lady? or the Tiger?