Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas

Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas

Kantor is fascinated by ambition, power, gender and by the interplay of public and private lives, and these themes suffuse this brutal, unflinching summary of the Obamas’ first 2 ½ years in the White House. As an avid Obama supporter since I finished his memoir, Dreams from My Father, I come away even more admiring of this man and his amazing wife. They have worked so hard all their lives—like Condi Rice and others—to succeed in our white world, and they have remained idealistic to the core in spite of their challenges in the Presidency. It is astonishing that they have done as well as they have in today’s sleazy politics.

I hope Kantor wins significant recognition for this remarkable book—in spite of her gender. It seems to me that the media has dismissed it and that it is not on the best seller list has more to do with her gender than with the quality of this fine book.

I hope Obama’s enemies read it literally as I did and don’t pounce on it for ammunition in their never-ending efforts to discredit him. He is not perfect but he and his wife deserve our support for the work they are doing on our behalf.

The Brother Gardeners

Andrea Wulf's The Brother Gardeners: 
Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession

In the 18th century a number of wealthy men raced to collect plants new to England. Andrea Wulf has chosen to focus on one Peter Collinson and his Pennsylvania collector John Bartram and on Joseph Banks and his botanist Daniel Solander who was a protege of Carl Linnaeus in Sweden. These men and their many colleagues created a nation of gardeners and a style of landscaping that remains with us today. Wulf does their stories justice. A great book.

Now, to see the movie...

Kaui Hart Hemmings' The Descendants

The movie got a lot of play so I bought the book. It's an okay "beach read." It's hard to empathize with an absent father who tries to connect with his two bratty daughters as their mother lies dying. There's not much character development and the arc of the story is predictable.The movie probably has some lovely scenes of Hawaii not to mention George Clooney. What's not to like?

Living in Iran

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

You don't have to have read Lolita to enjoy this book but it would help to have more than a nodding acquaintance with the novels of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen.This is a challenging book for those of us who weren't lit majors. Nafisi loosely structures her memoir around her private seminars with seven young Iranian women who love English-language novels.She teaches the reader her approach to literature, but far more importantly, she helps the reader get a sense of the great losses she and her students felt after the Iranian revolution. Iran's intellectuals were shocked and helpless as they watched the country become a radical theocracy with Sharia law. Nafisi was a thoroughly westernized upper-class Iranian woman who returned to Iran to teach only to be forced to wear the veil and endure the extreme politics flowing from the worst form of Islam.

No thinking woman can read this book without being deeply moved.

Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table

Ondaatje is one of our most gifted writers working today. I enjoyed this novel for its exquisite prose. He writes so beautifully without going over the top. At first I'd understood it was semi-autobiographical and that was what most interested me, but then I saw an interview in which he stated flatly that it was not at all that. So I stepped away for several days, but when I took it up again I was pulled into his reverie with new insights. Without relating to the characters one is still brought to see relevances to the arc of one's life.

from Tim T

John Steinbeck's The Dubious Battle
Wow! a great book. I have never gotten into Steinbeck until this one. A great read about apple farmers and the workers who pick.