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Culture Watch. '10
CultureWatch: This Is a Soul is a moving biography of a physician that gives readers a small window through which to view international medicine;The Beauty Bias delves into many sociological, financial and biological issues related to getting older and why this matters;The Hundred-Foot Journey is a wonderful yarn, in part, because of exotic settings and non-academic dissertations on food
An essay, On Looking Forward to Summer and Good Beach Reads, requires that beach reads be of a stop-and-start, interruptible nature, because one never knows when others in the group might want to take a dip, or go to the ice cream store, or pile into cars to hit the local cinema. The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a tale of the dissolution of a long marriage that is a dead-on look at the emotional, financial, irretrievable cost of the husband's words and actions. 'A novel' appears in fairly small print on the cover of this enjoyable narrative reviewed by Joan L. Cannon, Luncheon of the Boating Party, that is a kind of hybrid of fictionalized biography, historical novel, and discourse on painting techniques of the Impressionists.
CultureWatch: Kristin Hannah's The Winter Garden is a slightly flawed but enjoyable tale about people who fit the fiction, but some perhaps not quite to the life; Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a sober, engaging, and thought-provoking volume exploring the decline of Pakistan’s feudal order; In these days of bodice-rippers and cliff-hangers, there are few books best experienced in short dips. Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is a prime example of the latter.
CultureWatch's reviewers Julia Sneden, Jill Norgren and Nichola Gutgold re-read books and those long-denied treats and must-reads: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was a ground-breaker; with great intelligence and truth she used her gift for telling a story to reach into our hearts and minds. In Beverley Nichols' Down the Garden Path, the reviewer chortled at lines such as "I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl"; The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas gives rich detail of Hollywood's heyday and the woman remembered for Nixon's rough treatment.
CultureWatch: P.D. James, in Talking About Detective Fiction, writes "if it is true, as the evidence suggests, that the detective story flourishes best in the most difficult of times, we may well be at the beginning of a new Golden Age." The Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is from the outset a book arranged by artifice. It is the first book I’ve read where the author inserts himself so directly.
Culture Watch, '09
Jill Norgren's Book Review of Read My Pins: With domestic and global problems on all sides Madeline Albright's new book offers a wonderful interlude in which playfully to consider the human face of diplomacy. It complements Madam Secretary, her memoir,which similarly shows herself and politicians in all their humanity.
CultureWatch: Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage is important because it helps to regender early American history which remains overly focused on generals and male political leaders. Lori Hahnel’s collection of short fiction, Nothing Sacred,is spare, subtle, literary but not pretentious in any way, and very pleasing. Now in paperback, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, give the reader a deep sense of the connectedness of the small town and its inhabitants, and of Olive’s place in the scheme of things.
CultureWatch: *A Gate at the Top of the Stairs is about loss, cruelty of others and prejudice, dishonesty, and betrayals that combines humor with heartbreak. The Locust and the Bird will send those who aren’t familiar with Hanan Al-Shaykh's earlier books rushing to the library. Nine Lives, Death and Life in New Orleans may be nonfiction, but the author makes it as affecting as any novelist could. *Chosen one of The New York Times' top ten books of 2009
Nichola Gutgold reviews When Everything Changed; The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. It is these stories that serve not only to entertain but to caution the next generation of women to keep pressing on, and to be appreciative of the hard won progress of women who have gone before.
Jo Freeman reviews Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt: This is a very good book. It blends history and contemporary research into a story that both entertains and educates. Those who study social change and those to want to bring it about will learn much from reading about the revolution in bloody Lowndes County.
CultureWatch: Weary of dinosaur and vampire books for children? The Amelia Bloomer Project selection of books is about girls and women "who have broken barriers and have fought to change their situations and their environment …real and fictional [characters who] follow their dreams and pursue their goals, challenging cultural and familial stereotypes.”
CultureWatch: Duchess of Death relates Agatha Christie's travels with her husband on Middle East digs, to sleep in a tent or on a desert floor, hardly usual in a woman “to the manor born.” Dreaming in French thrives on the gossipy, ex-pat society of Paris. Drawing in the Dust is a lively tale of the purported discovery of Jeremiah’s tomb, as well an an engaging romance. Online exhibit, Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation.
CultureWatch: My Father's Tears and Other Stories: Joan L. Cannon writes: Each one of John Updike's My Father's Tears and Other Stories makes the reader fully aware of the writer's sense of mortality. These stories come from the imagination and the history of an aging artist. My Father's Tears is not to be missed.
We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Jo Freeman's Book Review: Tracy Sugarman's book is a series of sketches, some in pen and ink and some in words. Their purpose is to give a sense of what it was like to be there, or to know that person, at that time. "That time" is not just 1964, but the span of years since.
CultureWatch: Jill Norgren debuts as a SeniorWomenWeb book reviewer and begins with three engaging and beautifully written works of fiction that explore the intersection of emotion, relationship, and culture: The Gift of a Bride and The Indian Bride are murder mysteries, while Unaccustomed Earth, issued in paperback, is a set of short stories. The books are united by a shared concern for the demands, rewards, and complications of marriage and immigration, particularly on the part of individuals who once called India “home.” Joan L. Cannon reviews Somewhere Near the End by Diana Athill: Entertaining and challenging; a literate as well as a literary delight.
Jo Freeman, Book Review, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement: To those of us who were civil rights activists in the 1960s, Bob Zellner and Constance Curry were legends in their own time. Not big legends like Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond, but people you knew about even though you never met them, saw them or heard them speak.
CultureWatch: Lords of Finance, apart from being a wonderful lesson in international monetary economics and finance, is a page turner. No Room for Doubt will appeal especially to our readers as it shows how one remarkable senior woman who overcomes the odds and achieves greatness. Serena, a tale of ambition and intrigue of the rape of thousands of Smoky Mountains' acres. Fat Rose & Squeaky on DVD will resonate with those who are determined to stay in control of their lives, and to protect what they have.
CultureWatch: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry should appeal to all readers of literary fiction; Roseanne McNulty's story becomes an alternative, secret, history of Ireland. Henry Alford is witty and literate, but somehow he has allowed his talents to be diffused, by mixing the intensely personal with the reportorial in How to Live; A Search for Wisdom from Old People. Bailey White's Quite a Year for Plums setting is southern Georgia; the characters are a collection of psychologically peculiar scarred individuals their inventor has endowed with flaws that in spite of being exaggerated don't become burlesque. Online attendance at Shakespeare's Staging is a feast of images and videos.
CultureWatch: The Private Patient by Baroness P.D. James holds our interest by the discovery of not just the who-dun-it, but the complex motives behind the actions. Anyone who loves dogs and brilliant descriptive writing will find Sawtelle rewarding. Wallace Stegner's Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs demonstrates that as a writer of style and elegance, he has few equals. Rancho Weirdo by Laura Chester contains humor that is integral, not incidental, and they are wonderfully irreverent tales.
CultureWatch: The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard keeps one foot planted on the ground and the other tapping away in the world of the early motion picture industry; Where the Lake Becomes the River is a treasure for lovers of psychological fiction and a story to savor; Branch in His Hand moved our reviewer with its power, honesty and beauty; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a classic locked room mystery set on an Swedish island.
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