Between two worlds : escape from tyranny : growing up in the shadow of Saddam - Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund

Zainab grew up as in the shadow and force of Sadam Hussein. Her father was his private pilot and her family spent a lot of time partying (reluctantly!) in his circles. She provides an insight to Sadam Hussein as a person, a controlling scary person. Eventually, she was married off to an American stranger in order to get her out of Iraq and away from Sadam and his perpetrating son. It was a horrible marrige from which she fled and created her own life as a strong advocate for women in need. Good. It gets a little redundant to her about the extravagancies and outrageousness of Sadam and the people around him, however. But it is still good. 7

The omnivore's dilemma

great

Blue Shoe - Anne Lamott

Mattie lives in Marin!! Mattie is the main character in the book. She is a devout christian who sleeps with her ex even though he is scum and at the same time she wants to kill him. She had a jumbled upbringing and, while dealing with her mother's declining health and mental capacity, is trying to come to grips with her dead father's philandering. The story gets a little annoying at times but it all takes place in lovely Marin. I recognize all the names and places as well as plants and smells and people. I have always been a big fan of Anne Lamott, so how can I not like this one as well? 8

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

This is a fiction hostage drama in an unnamed South American country. The main characters involve a famous opera singer and a successful Japanes businessman who are held hostage after a party to honor the Japanese man's birthday. The story is interesting, the setting is interesting, and the characters are interesting but somehow it still reads a little like a romance novel. Characters spend a long time as hostages having time to develop relationships independent of the real world. In the end it is necessary to have some of them die to solve the dilemma of returning to normal life and family after such an experience. It's entertaining but not believable. 5.

Eating Heaven - Jennie Shortridge

Any book that takes place in Portland, OR, immediately moves one step up the ladder! Eleanor Samuel's life is in crisis. Her uncle--he may even be her dad we find out as family secrets unravel--is dying from cancer and she is the one taking care of him. At the same time her food article writing career is veering off along with her eating habits. Described as in her late thirties and on the heavy side, she is forced to examine her grief, her life and her relationship with food all at the same time. What's not to like? I enjoyed it. 7.

The Red Azalea - Anchee Min

Anchee Min’s story about growing up on Mao’s China is absolutely gripping. The language, her writing, is terse and unadorned and as naked and raw as the life in China she fled. Everything about her childhood is so very foreign, the food, the people, the emotions, the culture, and the brutality of oppression, which makes it so intriguing, exotic if you will. At the same time, it is not difficult to recognize the humanity in it all, the humanity that we all share despite enormous differences. Some books fade into oblivion, but this is one that never could. 9+.

Animal, vegetable, miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver and her family moved to their farm in the Appalachians and decided to spend a year only eating local fooods. A lot of it came from their own farm. Kingsolver writes well as usual and chronicles a year of their efforts be locavores. She shares beautiful stories from their gardening adventures and cooking and canning productions. The stories are intertwined with research and data about the food production industry as well as some lovely recipes. Her response to the question why Americans eat so much bad food is "alimentary alienation" derived from Marx' theories of humans' desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Brilliant. She also writes eloquently about vegetarianism having adhered to a vegetarian diet for periods herself. Sometimes she is even funny. "Strangely enough, it's the animals to which we have assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?" Splendid book. 9

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

This is a book I have been wanting to read for a long time. It's amazing in its detail and use of language. I was transported to dusty hot California instantly. It's a short book that could have been expanded but it's still enjoyable. Two laborers are travelling from job to job as farmhands. George, who smarter, takes care of the dim-witted Lennie. They dream of a place to call their own where they work only for themselves. Their dream is predictably crushed when Lennie gets in trouble again. In the end, George is forced to "send off" Lennie towards that dream... Sad. Good. 8.

Julie & Julia - Julie Powell

365 days. 524 recipes. 1 tiny apartment kitchen. Julie Powell has always adored Julia Child. Around the time she is about to turn 30, Julie is depressed and feels her life is going nowhere. She is a lowly liberal secretary for a government agency populated by Republicans. She decides to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking during one year while blogging about it. Her writing is hilarious. I laughed out loud several times. This is easy and fun reading and by no means any heavy duty literature. I enjoyed it for what it is. I even learned a new word, prolix. Tediously lengthy in speech and writing. Anyway, Julie cooks her way out of depression and mediocrity and into a new career as a writer. "Two years ago I was a twenty-nine-year-old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one-year-old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me--I certainly would." A funny and easy 8.

Clara Callan - Richard B. Wright

This book won prizes in Canada and I am not sure why. This was my choice for one of my bookclubs. And I didn't even like it very much. My bookclub seemed to like it however. The premise was interesting. Two sisters from a small town in Canada part ways in 1934. One heads to New York for a career in radio and the other stays behind working as a school teacher. The book follows them over the next couple of years. It sounded interesting enough, but I didn't like how the author--a man--described Clara's feelings around sex and motherhood. Clara is the sister that stays behind. At one point she gets raped and then she fantasizes about that and goes out of her way to find the guy that did it. It is too weird. I just don't like it when men attempt to imagine what a woman might be going through. It becomes very stereotypical and contrived. The book contains a lot of references to literature, radio, and film at the time, which was interesting. 5.

Ines of my soul - Isabel Allende

My bookclub picked this historical fiction about Ines Suarez, a woman who played a big role in the conquest of Chile by the Spaniards in the 1500s. The historical aspects of the book in regards to the indigenous cultures is interesting because of the role the hierarchy of the indigenous societies played in their downfall. However, some historical facts such as the endless wars and the cruelty of both Spaniards and Indians get tedious. Ines is imagined as a superhuman who doesn't seem to need sleep nor food and can do anything from amazing cooking to astonishing healing and adventurous lovemaking. Hm. Her life and relationships with powerful men seem romantisized and Allende's style with an element of magic realism makes the story of Ines more fictionlike than realistic. I did appreciate some of the man-bashing; at one point Ines states that all men are only interested in three things: fornicating, drinking, and killing. 6?

Skinny Bitch - Freedman & Barnouin

Foul-mouthed and straight up is how the dish is served in this book. Gotta love two women who disguise a vegan lifestyle book behind a clever title. Since I have been a vegan myself for about two years right before my first pregnancy and a vegetarian for many years up until recently, the information is not new to me. However, it is dished out differently. How about, "Soda is liquid satan?" This book is sometimes funny and sometimes crude. Nevertheless, it is helpful reading; it is good to be reminded of these things again. These things = treatment of slaughterhouse animals, antibiotics and hormones in livestock, and the mis-directed interests of incestous government agencies that are supposedly protecting the general public while all along taking money from corporate America. Nothing new, but a good reminder. I will be more mindful of what I eat. Besides, vegan food is good. I love veggies! 9.

High Latitudes : An Arctic Journey - Farley Mowat

Farley Mowat describes his journey in 1969 across Canada's frozen North. It seems like village after village is filled with disillusioned and unemployed Inuit people, or Eskimos as they were called at the time. The Inuit have been more or less forced by the Canadian government to give up their traditional way of life. They don't hunt anymore and they don't live in tents anymore. Their children are sent far away to go to school for a traditional education. Their environment is filling up with garbage--abandoned oil drums and plastic debris. Despite Mowat being an excellent writer, it is a pretty depressing picture. A few positive developments are revealed as well: the encouragement and success of traditional art for sale as well as grocery and goods cooperatives. This was a pick by one of my reading groups and I struggled to get through it. 4.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner - Bich Minh Nguyen

Nguyen's memoir of her family's escape from Saigon in 1975 to the U.S. and their/her subsequent adjustment to American culture. She came to love American food, which seemed more exotic than her grandmother's traditional Vietnamese dishes. Her father married a Mexican woman, Rosa, who introduced even more diverse food into Nguyen's life. The book deals with her longing to be just like the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Americans. In the end, as a young adult, she travels back to Vietnam and realizes that it is not her home anymore; she is American. Also, the book chronicles how she, as an adult, reunites with her mother, who didn't emigrate with them in 1975 but arrived much later. I enjoyed the book from a cultural perspective as well the nostalgic details of food items. Maybe a 6.

The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing

The book begins with the murder of Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner who is a white farmer in colonial Africa (Rhodesia which later became Zimbabwe) in the early 1900s. Then we find out what lead to Mary’s tragic fate by learning about her childhood with an abusive father and an oppressed and depressed mother. Her young adult years give a picture of a fairly confident and independent woman working in an office in a city, supporting herself and enjoying city culture with cinema, romance novels and lots of parties and friends (although shallow). Eventually out of peer pressure and advancing age, she marries Dick, a stranger, and moves out to the country to live a life in poverty and madness on his barely sustainable farm. The most interesting aspect of the story is the relationship between master and slave—all the white farmers use and abuse African workers who are paid little to nothing and who have virtually no rights under the white man’s rule. The Africans, or natives as they are referred to in the book, are viewed and treated more like animals than humans even though without them, the white farmers’ lives and riches would not be possible. Therein lies the complexity; the whites have to continue to treat the natives like slaves in order to justify their ownership and cultivation of acquired African land. Newcomers must learn this. Poor whites, like the Turners, threaten to upset this racial balance and erase the line between white and black. The book leaves several questions unanswered. For example, was Mary intimate with her houseboy Moses? What were his motives? How much did her husband understand? This book is a 9. By the way, Doris Lessing just received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Shanghai Diary - Ursula Bacon

The story, a memoir, of a young Jewish girl fleeing an affluent life in Germany to escape the Nazis during WWII was interesting from a historical perspective for me. I had never known much about the fate of the refugees in Shanghai, China, before. I learned that they were actually bombed by the Americans intending to stamp out Japanese activity, which I never knew, and that for years they lived in squalor and had to wait several years after the war was over to receive their visas to travel to the United States or other countries. Some of the details of her daily life, thrust into such different culture from her own, were interesting as well. Other than that, the book is supposed to read like the diary of a ten-year-old girl during the subsequent seven years of her life, but the voice is not a girl's. The reflections and descriptions seem to mature like an older person's thoughts but the text is interspersed with parts like "Oh, grownups! They can be so strange sometimes. I don't understand how they are thinking." It gets annoying to read. The best parts were the various wise words of a Chinese-British man, her friend, on a spiritual journey, "You will be able to capture your childhood from within, and you will sweeten it with the wisdom of your years. We are everything we have ever been, only more so. We are our own work." or "Dear friend, always remember. We come here to stay. We come here to go." I rate this book a 5.

Teach like your hair's on fire - Rafe Esquith

A teacher, who spends most of his free time and money to coach his poor inner LA fifth-grade students to become better people and students, writes about how some of the magic happens in his classroom. Esquith's daily schedule is rigorous and he never takes vacations; however, his students learn and grow in amazing ways under his tutelage which is payment enough for him. The most amazing thing he does is the annual and complete Shakespeare play the students put on. I would love to see it! Apparently, some of his classes have toured and performed in far away places. There's got to be a video. Hm. I must check. Anyway, his writing and methods are inspiring even though he probably is insane. Or at least his wife must be by now. This man must not have a life outside of his elementary school! His job is his life, which turns out to be quite fullfilling in his case. When did he have time to write this book?

The Magician's Assistant - Ann Patchett

Sabine is a detached unlikeable 40-ish woman living alone in a large home in LA after the death of her husband Parisfal. Well. Husband is debatable. They had been married for a year by the time of his death but never had sex because he was gay. Before his death, he was in a committed relationship with a man, Phan, and the three of them lived together in Phan's house. Phan had died 5 years earlier. Parsifal was a magician and Sabine was his assistant for 20 years or so. Upon his death she discovered that Parsifal had a family she never knew about, his mother and siblings lliving in Nebraska. Anyway this book is a drag pretty much until the end. The ending almost makes up for some of the snail pace and predictable dullness of the story line as well as the numerous insufferable syrupy dream sequences. I will have to muster up some willpower to pick up one of Patchett's other books, e.g., Bel Canto which is supposed to be splendid. A weak 5.

This is not Civilization - Robert Rosenberg

Fun story following a young restless American, Jeff Hartig, as he spends a year in the Peace Corps on an Apache reservation and two years teaching English in an isolated village in Kyrgyzstan. Characters from these years later converge during an earthquake when Jeff has a job in Istanbul, Turkey. Lively descriptions of exotic customs, foods and locales fill the book. Interesting people cross his path. However, Jeff himself is a selfless aimless kind of character who is hard to like. There's no explanation or resolution of his restlessness while the other people seem to find their places. The opening line can't be beat, "The idea to use porn films to encourage the dairy cows to breed was a poor one." It's an 8.

Honeymoon in Purdah - Alison Wearing

A female Canadian travel writer goes to Iran with a male gay friend pretending to be a married couple on their honeymoon. The book came out in 2000. I think the actual trip took place in 97 or so. I particularly liked her descriptions of how she experienced being covered at all times. Her full-length black manteau is outfitted with big shoulderpads in order to fall straight down and not reveal any curves. Her headcover is a slippery scarf with a clip that she and other women struggle to keep in place sometimes with the help of their teeth. She writes about the heat and sweating profusely under all the layers of fabric but also about the freedoom of being invisible under her cloak as she is sitting in the corner of a temple or walking down a busy street. The most lasting impression of the Iranian people, as experienced and conveyed by her, is the overwhelming friendliness of the warmhearted Iranian people. Strangers invite them in, feed them, entertain them, and drive them around everywhere they go. The Iranian people's questions are always about America, "Are people bad in America?" and "Do Americans hate us?" They are always relieved to find out that Wearing and her "husband" are not American but Canadian. Hm.... Very enjoyable. 8.

Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen

Very entertaining! Easy and quick read. Jacob, a veterinary student, loses his parents to an auto accident right before his final exams and ends up penniless and bereft on a circus train during the depression. He becomes the circus veterinarian and cares for an assortment of exotic animals including Rosie the elephant. As much as the details of circus life is interesting and appalling, the story is really about an old man in a home looking back at a wild period in his life during which he meet his wife Marlena, an equestrian circus star. My only complaints are that Jacob seems to be too good and noble, defending and caring for everyone. He would be more interesting were he more flawed i.e. more human. Also, this is a love story where they live happily ever after which is very Hollywood--a movie will most certainly follow. Gotta love the ending though. The guy runs away and joins the circus for the second time in his life! It's a 7.

The Alchemist - Paul Coelho

I had high expectations and was looking forward to reading this book about an Andalusian boy, Santiago, pursuing his dream of finding a treasure in Egypt. Sounds exotic enough. The hype around how inspirational it is supposed to be turned out to be just that, hype. Omens, elixirs, and legends just don’t do it for me especially packaged in a simple tale without much dimension to characters or settings. The language of the book is unadorned and it actually reads more like a fable. The Christian messages are too strong; god will tell you what to do if you only just listen to your heart. OK. Maybe I am crass, but enlisting god in pursuing a dream of finding a treasure seems selfish and materialistic. I wish his dream had been greater and nobler. Maybe I just don’t understand the symbolism… Right. The complexity of the book is not exactly daunting. Trite and preachy. 4.

The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls

Great read. Talk about dysfunctional familiy! The hardship of poverty and the lunacy of the author's parents get worse by the page making it difficult to put down. It is hard to believe that kids can emerge seemingly unscathed out of a childhood such as Jeannette Walls'. Actually, it would be really interesting to know how much therapy she and her siblings have been in as adults, especially Maureen. This memoir depicts a family where the children's unconditional love for their crazy (mother) alcoholic (father) parents survives poverty and immense adversity. Despite the drunken rages and irresponsible and deceptive ways, the father also is bright and loving and teaches his kids to appreciate learning. I wanted to dislike the parents--more the mother than the father--but Walls' love for her parents is unyielding and they remain likeable characters despite their appalling behavior and hideous shortcomings. I did wonder about the richness of details in the book; does she actually remember her childhood accurately or is it ficionalized? I have no memories of being three years old! However, it almost doesn't matter. The book is still enjoyable. It's a 9.

My Life in Orange - Tim Guest

Tim Guest writes about growing up in a commune. When he was 6, his mom joined a cult centered around the teachings of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He spent his childhood wearing orange clothes and missing his mother, who was busy leading therapy groups and spreading the word of Bhagwan. Tim, or Yogesh, was raised by various adults around the commune. His story is painful as he describes being sent around the world according to the whims of his mother or wishes of the commune leaders. He spent time in England, India, Germany and Oregon and felt rootless and lost most of the time. His schooling was spotty as was his diet and care. The kids of the communes seemed to mostly take care of themselves as Baghwan taught their parents not to set limits on their children's unspoiled minds. The information about the life and rumors of Baghwan and the orange-clad "sannyasins" (disciples) in leadership positions in the organization was fascinating. Such corruption! When Baghwan was jailed, on tax evasion and entering the U.S. under false pretenses, he owned 93 (yes...93!) Rollsroyces, a couple of planes, land, gold, and jewelry. All paid for by his followers who slaved away in communes around the world hanging on this man's every word and following his every whim and notion... Yikes. It's a 6.

Stubborn Twig - Lauren Kessler

I don't know why I hesitated to read this book, a historical chronicle of true events. Maybe it was the look of it and the size of the font, the textbook quality about it. It was indeed written by a professor at the University of Oregon. However, once I started I was engrossed in the story of the Yasui family. The book chronicles three generations starting with Masuo, a Japanese immigrant, arriving in the United States in 1908. He setttled in Hood River (right up the road from me!) and built an empire around a grocery store and fruit orchards as well as various and numerous other enterprises. He raised a family and worked incredibly hard to become an accepted member of American society and almost believed he had succeeded when World War II began. Anti-Japanese sentiment had been mounting and Pearl Harbor unleashed a flood of racially based discrimination culminating in interment camps throughout the West. Yasui was imprisoned on false grounds of being a dangerous alien spy. Most of his family were sent to camps. The book describes the difficulty of acculturation as it pertains to the Japanese in the U.S. during an ugly period of time. It describes the duality of living a Japanese life at home while being immersed in American culture elsewhere, the close ties and strict boundaries of Japanese family life as opposed to the rights of the individual of the American culture. Great book. It's an 8 (close to 9) for sure.