Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan


Susannah Cahalan is a successful reporter for the New York Post.  She begins experiencing paranoia and is unable to control her emotions. Her coworkers become concerned and send her to the doctor.  This starts a month of doctor visits, hospital stays, and many different diagnoses and treatments.  She finally tests positive for a rare autoimmune disease where her body is basically attacking her brain.  This extremely rare disease has only been known since 2007.  She documents her experiences, piecing together her month of madness by interviewing doctors, family, and friends, watching videos, and reading her own journal entries.  Hopefully Brain on Fire will help others who have this scary disease and get them the help they need.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

New York City in the 1840’s was a crowded and lawless place. Refugees from the Great Famine in Ireland were flooding in, crowding the already crowded slums. Nativist New Yorkers resented the immigrants, feared their poverty, hated their religion and expressed these feelings through physical violence. Responding to this violence, city leaders created a police force, an organization which was hated by nearly all. Under these circumstances, Timothy Wilde, a young man in need of employment, reluctantly accepts a position on the force offered to him by his brother. Unwillingly, he becomes a skilled and dedicated officer, particularly after he discovers a young girl wandering the streets, covered in blood, muttering about another child being ripped apart.  Eventually, he discovers a mass grave containing nineteen mutilated skeletons in varying degrees of decomposition. Spurred on by a sense of duty and outrage, Timothy’s investigation takes him to all parts of old New York City and he meets all manner of its citizens, men and women, rich and poor, immigrant and nativist. Pre-Civil War New York is vividly described in this book and the combination of fictional and historical figures makes the gruesome plot of Gods of Gotham plausible.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot

At first glance, this title, Dotter of HerFather’s Eyes, seems to imply a loving father doting on a favorite daughter, as in “apple of her father’s eye.” But the book tells two intertwined stories of father-daughter relationships in which the daughters do not live up to the fathers’ expectations; they are not the “dotters of their fathers’ eyes.” Those would be other “dotters,” more conformist and compliant. These daughters, Lucia Joyce and Mary Talbot, are connected by their fathers’ professions. Lucia was the daughter of renowned author James Joyce. Mary was the daughter of renowned Joycean scholar, James Atherton. Although born several generations apart, both young women struggled against the expectations of parents and society. Lucia’s story is the more tragic of the two. Born in 1907, she grew up on the European continent, poor but surrounded by famous intellectuals and scholars. She loved modern dance and planned to pursue a career.  But her passion was not taken seriously and her ambitions were thwarted. Her father, considered the most influential of modernist writers, did not allow his daughter to become a modern woman.  Mary’s story has the better outcome. She was eventually able to escape her father’s abusive control and create her own life, family and career in academia. She, a successful writer, and her husband, a well-known graphic artist, have partnered to create this elegantly told story of two lives. It is the first graphic work (not graphic novel, since the book is part memoir and part biography) to win the Costa biography award.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Avana Mathis

When Hattie, along with her mother and sisters, fled the racial violence of 1920’s Georgia for Philadelphia, she was a hopeful fourteen year old, entranced with the promise of a better life in the North. She was so confident of a bright future she named her first two children Philadelphia and Jubilee. But the North did not provide a better life for Hattie or her family. Her husband, an incorrigible womanizer and carouser, was an unreliable provider. Consequently, Hattie and her nine surviving children lived in poverty as Hattie eked out a sparse existence by sheer force of will. As adults, her children had their own unhappy stories, due to bad choices and physical as well mental illness. Hattie’s children regarded her as a cold, unloving mother. But for Hattie, little more than a child herself when her problems began, providing for her family’s physical needs had left her no time or energy for the emotional side of motherhood. Nevertheless, when problems arose, she did her best to support her children. And in her old age, she took on the responsibility of raising and protecting a granddaughter, hoping that this girl, the twelfth tribe, would be able to break the cycle of tragedy that had dogged her family. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is the second book chosen for Oprah’s 2.0 Book Club. Like many of Oprah’s other choices, this book involves someone striving to overcome difficult life circumstances. But in this book, many problems are insurmountable. Poverty, racism and disease can overwhelm the strong as well as the weak. Sometimes survival is the only victory that can be claimed.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Handsome, wealthy, and extremely athletic, Will Traynor had it all - a promising career, gorgeous girlfriends, and all the time in the world to pursue his love of international travel and thrill-seeking adventures.  Until the motorbike accident that left him a C5-6 quadriplegic.   Now requiring 24-hour care, the once-powerful Will lives in his parents' home in a small tourist village in England and has only limited use of one of  his hands.  Bitter, acerbic and deeply depressed, with no hope of recovery, Will is quite certain he cannot live this confined life instead of his old, larger-than-life one.

Louisa Clark has no idea what she wants to do with her life.  At age 26, her boss has just told her he's closing the cafe she's been working in for six years.  She lives at home with her parents, her grandfather, and older sister Katrina and small nephew Thomas, and her long-term boyfriend, Patrick, is so obsessed with marathons and triathlons his idea of a date is Louisa watching him run.  After a horrifying stint at the Job Center, the best of which was a shift at the chicken factory, Louisa is so desperate she takes a job as caregiver to a wealthy quadriplegic, although she has no background or knowledge of how to care for a man confined to a wheelchair.  When she is offered the job, and reassured by Will's mother that her role is only that of a companion and guardian, Louisa has no idea what is in store for her.

Although she initially dreads the long, mind-numbingly boring days spent with a man who she is quite sure hates her, Louisa soon finds that there is more to Will than his prickly exterior.  In fact, the more time she spends with Will, the more she begins to uncover a deep well of fearlessness inside herself - and the possibility for more happiness than she ever thought possible.  An unconventional love story, Me Before You will have you reading, laughing, crying, and holding your breath late into the night.

Friday, January 4, 2013

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman


Why are there so many self-help books published every year? The author argues that they do not work. He believes that the stress of positive thinking is actually making us unhappy, and coincidentally making some people rich. Wealth, relationships, material possessions, and financial success are not the way to happiness. The author looks to other paths which include embracing insecurity and uncertainty as a way to ultimately find, maybe not happiness, but perhaps a little peace.  The Antidote questions our society’s values of selfishness and greed and would like us to reflect on what truly is important. 

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Pavel and I by Dan Vyleta


Berlin was a grim place to live in 1946. A bitterly cold winter made the post-war shortages of food, shelter, clothing and coal nearly unendurable. Despite these conditions, Pavel Richter, a demobilized American soldier, has inexplicably chosen to remain in Berlin. The Cold War had already begun and Pavel finds himself caught between British and Russian spies as they struggle for power and information. When Pavel agrees to help a fellow American hide the body of a Russian spy, he puts his own life at risk as well as those of his two German friends: Anders, an orphan living with other street urchins, and Sonia, a woman who has turned to prostitution in order to survive. Particularly dangerous to them is the sadistic Colonel Fosko, a British officer who has gone rogue and will stop at nothing to obtain what the Russian spy may have had when he died. As the tension and violence mount, and Pavel becomes trapped in the Colonel’s ever-tightening ring of intrigue, the mysterious “I” of Pavel and I eventually reveals his identity and motive. But Pavel remains a cypher to the end.