Friday, February 19, 2010

Book-Reviews - Bing News

Book-Reviews - Bing News

New and Notable book reviews - AZCentral.com

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 11:33 PM PST

Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.

'Making Toast'

Roger Rosenblatt

(Ecco, $21.99)

This lovely memoir is not about grief, but about living with it and finding purpose in performing small, necessary tasks in the shadow of tragedy. Late in 2007, the author's 38-year-old daughter, Amy, collapsed and died of an undiagnosed heart disorder. She left behind a husband, three kids (ages 6, 4 and 1), her heartbroken parents and brothers, and more friends than she knew she had. Rosenblatt - playwright, author and prize-winning essayist - and his wife quickly left their New York home and drove to Amy's in Maryland, where, at the suggestion of their son-in-law, they moved in and began helping with the care of their grandchildren. Yes, this is sad. How could it not be? But it is never maudlin or depressing. Rosenblatt mentions his own anger, the quiet sorrow of Amy's husband, the gaping hole that had opened in their lives. But mostly he writes about his pleasure in his children and in theirs, as they all shoulder the loss together but in different ways. Restrained and oddly delicate, his book finds, in the smallest moments, grace beyond measure.

'Staying True'

Jenny Sanford

(Ballantine, $25)

She didn't see the signs. Before they were engaged, he sent her a prenuptial agreement full of chauvinistic preening (it was a hoax, but later, after his hike on the Appalachian Trail, it rang eerily true). Before their wedding, he said he did not want to say a vow that included a promise to be faithful. And later, as they began a trial separation, he swore he wouldn't see his Argentine lover, but hours later he bought a ticket to Buenos Aires. The author, who has filed for divorce from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, paid for her gullibility, but her friends, family and faith saw her through his public humiliation. She shows herself to be a strong woman with deep morals and a sturdy sense of responsibility, which is admirable, but not always interesting. Still, readers will feel her pain. It fell to her to tell her four sons what their father had done. "This is going to be worse than Eliot Spitzer!" said one of them. Another, who remembered the letters their father had written to them during the separation, had darker thoughts. "That's it," he said. "His notes were good-bye."

'The Art of Eating In'

Cathy Erway

(Gotham, $24)

It's true, what they say: Enthusiasm is contagious, although yours might falter when you read Erway's chapter on "trash diving" (searching for food in the trash bags of bakeries and groceries). For two years, she forsook restaurants and takeout places and made all of her food at home, and she did it in a city so packed with eateries that some of its residents do without kitchens. She shared her experiences in a blog called "Not Eating Out in New York." Now she has written this memoir of what she learned, the people she met and the adventures she had in her kitchen and among people who celebrate food and frugality in innovative ways. She saved money (a week of eating at home cost $25; a week of paying her own way in restaurants cost more than $200), she learned a lot about cooking (when she first made dinner rolls, she didn't know where to buy yeast) and she created and collected recipes, some of which are in this book. Indeed, her enthusiasm is catching, even when she's describing someone else's trash.

'An Exact Replica

of a Figment of

My Imagination'

Elizabeth McCracken

(Back Bay, $12.99)

This memoir, which will be released in paperback next week, is proof of the fierce, humbling tenacity of a mother's love. In 2006, McCracken's baby boy died in the womb during the ninth month of pregnancy. She and her husband lived in France then, and as they staggered through the ensuing weeks, she was acutely aware of what she felt, what was said, what was done, what wasn't said and done. Her book is not overwrought, nor does it spurn laughter, and surely it will comfort readers who've lost children themselves. Like Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," it is a powerful and defiant study of grief by a woman who knows it too well. It's also an act of devotion. Life goes on, McCracken says, but "death goes on, too," and "a person who is dead is a long, long story." She promises that those who are left behind to tell the story will survive. "The frivolous parts of your personality, stubborner than you'd imagined, will grow up through the cracks in your soul."

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)