Debra Baldwin has a new book! Her books are super!

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The PARTY is OVER

Mike Lofgren’s The PARTY is OVER: How Republicans went CRAZY, Democrats Became USELESS, and the Middle Class Got SHAFTED

The title says it all. One depressing book. Truly, corporate America in all its corruption rules the USA today. Lofgren says the solution is to publicly finance elections. As if that would be easy.

Shelter half: A Novel by Carol Bly

Shelter half: A Novel by Carol Bly

An intriguing novel. It is more a collection of short stories detailing quirky individuals living in a small Minnesota town with a typical small-town-gossipy character. It definitely has a Progressive message, but it does make you think. I have a couple of quibbles: the author falls into stereotyping and she leaves a few loose ends.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I liked this book a lot, and I’m not a baseball fan. At 512 pages it’s a long one. While the ending was a little too pat, I loved it for its poetic descriptions and its spot-on depictions of little things that make up our lives today.

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

This book has been over-hyped. Skip it and read River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candace Millard if you want to get a good description of the wilds of remote Amazon tributaries.

The Paris Wife: A Novel, by Paula McLain

The Paris Wife: A Novel, by Paula McLain

In the beginning I was charmed by McLain’s prose, but the novel wore thin for a very long middle. I found the last chapters a little more interesting again. So much has been written about American artists and writers living in Paris in the 1920s. I simply did not find the novel compelling.

War and Peace for our post 9/11 world

Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

I loved this book! It’s long, it’s repetitive, it rambles, but it is so poetic and effective in delivering a sense of what it must have been like for ordinary people living simple lives in a small town in southwestern Turkey in the early 20^th century. This is one talented writer! He has researched and synthesized the essence of many critical factors in the life of the man who would bring Turkey into the modern, western world and he has woven those details into an imaginary tale of a small cast of characters who bring life to the drama of that time and place. I am in awe of his intelligence and talent.

In addition, this tale bears many lessons for Americans today if only we listen as I’m sure the author intends us to do.

This is the most extraordinary book I’ve read in years!

Oops! Wolffe's 2nd book disappoints

Richard Wolffe’s Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House

A terrible book! Wolffe tries to do the impossible and fails. Wish he’d tried a different approach. While his summary, narrative flow of the campaign underlined much of what we all followed in the news, his attempt to go inside the White House using a similar narrative approach is generally chaotic and lacking in helpful analysis. I expect the Obama WH was chaotic during its first year but the journalist who attempts to report on that chaos needs to seek and find themes to organize the chaos for his readers. Yes, there are passages where Wolffe cuts to the chase, but mostly I found the book a disorganized ramble. 

Renegade

Richard Wolffe’s Renegade: The Making of a President

An impressive book. Well written and seemingly even-handed tho I'm sure the right screams it's worshipful. It's organized by thematic chapters that have a rough correspondence to the primary and general campaigns, but there is some back and forth that's a little confusing.

I come away even more in awe of Obama and his intelligence and values. An amazing man.

Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American

Nicely written. The psychiatrist narrator ruminates about his father’s youth while he and his sister go to great lengths to discover the secret he took to his death.

I must agree with the Amazon reviewer who wrote that the book was ”Interesting But Not Totally Satisfying.”  The title is not helpful. This book defies titling. Virtually all the characters seemed normal--experiencing rather mild sorrows that didn’t warrant the trauma designation the publisher gave them. Such is life. And if these Americans had these sorrows, what do we call the routine tragedies of the normal lives of the citizens of so many other countries? Iraq? Burundi? Bangladesh? Perhaps this is the author’s message.

So there. I have been reading...

The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

While I was happy to learn the substance of these two journalists’ reporting, I was horrified by the poor copy editing and dismayed by their over-the-top Time-esque writing style. I find this outrageous in a book listed at $32.50. Shame on Simon & Shuster. Our publishers need to climb off this slippery slope.

Gibbs and Duffy present mostly heart-warming stories of presidents reaching out to and bonding with their predecessors. In this fraternity all but Nixon and Carter instinctively observe the etiquette. The searing burdens of the office forge deep understandings that transcend politics and personalities. Even news junkies are likely to have fresh insights into the characters of our presidents from Hoover to Obama (excepting Roosevelt who, of course, never lived to join the club).

Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains

This short book (272 pp.) is two books in one. In the first Kidder masterfully tells Deo’s mind-bending story of escape from the horrors of genocide only to endure the horrors of NYC. In the second he explains how he was able to learn Deo’s story in such incredible detail. For detail is Kidder’s forte. He digs into his material like no other writer, and he produces masterpieces that pull you in or leave you exhausted from their detail. I loved this book and his House.

I was deeply moved by the amazing kindness of the three New Yorkers who reached out to Deo and enabled him to thrive and return to his homeland on missions of mercy. After reading the book, do not miss the brief online interviews of three who made the difference between Deo’s barely existing and achieving great good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAQFNLacfw

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of my Heart

Flawless writing, lovely story, nice mix of dreamy and tough. A high-quality beach read. More YA than literary. Oh, the horrors of rigid class lines and the resulting oppression; of arranged marriages and nasty mothers-in-law and sons who are under their mothers’ thumbs; and the personal and cultural losses of emigration to the USA.

Oh, how quickly two months can zoom by! The greatest challenge of writing a blog. Impossible to post often enough.

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.