No need for trash reading this summer! Pick some good books, like these five -- all winners in Ellen's book (the one that lists the titles that are worth your time).
1. “Brooklyn,” by Colm Toibin. This critically acclaimed Irish author deserves to find a wider audience with his latest novel, about a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York City to find a job in the 1950s. Toibin captures both how hard it is to start anew and how such experience permanently changes your way of looking at the world. The heroine of this book is true to life, neither beautiful nor ruthlessly ambitious but with too much ability to stay in a place that offered her no opportunity. A perfect book club book!
2. “The Translator,” by Daoud Hari. The author escaped the genocide in Darfur but couldn’t stay away. He returned to work as a translator and guide in hopes of bringing international attention to the terrible crimes that are taking place there. This is as good a primer as you can get about how innocent people get caught up in the power struggles between groups fighting for the same land – in this case, Sudanese Arabs and African tribes. An eye-opening read for anyone high school on up!
3. “The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders,” by Emmanuel Guibert, Dider Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier. This graphic novel recording a French photographer’s trip through Afghanistan combines his black and white photos, comic strips and words. Together these elements are more than the sum of the parts, showing the primitive and brutal nature of Afghan society and the dedication of those intent on serving as healers there. A bestseller in France, it is newly available in English this year.
4. “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie,” by Alan Bradley. Fans of the British “cozies” – the kind of mysteries that emphasize unraveling the puzzle, not blood and gore – will love this story of an 11-year-old English girl who lives in a rundown mansion and is constantly tormented by her older sisters. The stakes suddenly get higher when she discovers the corpse in the cucumber patch. “Clue” buffs unite, and remember the name Flavia de Luce – with another book about her already on the way, she could become a household name in the mystery genre. Great beach read!
5. “Fragment,” by Warren Fahy. Alas, Michael Crichton is no longer with us. But this first novel by a writer from California promises life after “Jurassic Park.” Think Darwin on steroids, and you end up with a novel about scientists in the field who are grappling with natural selection in a new way. Their locale: a remote island in the South Pacific where life forms evolved on a whole different track. Fahy has cleverly wrapped evolutionary science in a package of suspense and even humor… As one of the characters says, “My God, this planet will be lucky enough to survive one intelligent species – but two? Are you all mad?”
I recently read The Garden of Last Days and was randomly reading reviews of the book when I stumbled upon yours, which I found incredibly sloppy and full or errors. To point out a few:
Book review
"The Garden of Last Days": On the eve of terror, on the edges of society
By Ellen Emry Heltzel
Special to The Seattle Times
"The Garden of Last Days"
by Andre Dubus III
Norton, 537 pp., $24.95
Sometimes what you see in your peripheral vision matters more than the object that's visible straight on. At least, that's the way Andre Dubus III ("House of Sand and Fog") looks at Sept. 11 in his latest novel, "The Garden of Last Days." Using a wide-angle view that's aimed at that catastrophe, he indicts not only the perpetrators but also a consumer society that cheapens peoples' lives.
"The Garden of Last Days" unfolds mainly in a Florida strip club just days before the Twin Towers fell. Here — in the dark corners where lonely men bring their twenties and young women bring their bodies to charm the money out of their hands — a culture clash of colossal proportions is cast in microcosm on the eve of its most searing evocation.
The cast includes one soon-to-be terrorist and three innocents whose lives skid along on the seedy margins of American society: stripper April Connors, the divorced mother of 3 ½-year-old Franny; Lonnie, the Puma Club's bouncer; and A.J. Carey, truck driver and strip-club patron.
A.J. is not a “truck driver”—he drives heavy machinery used for excavation.
All come together on the night April brings her daughter to work because her usual baby-sitting arrangement falls through. Tucking her daughter in the back office, she adopts her work persona, Spring, and joins the succession of women who perform on stage wearing G-strings and a fake "nightsmile." Each vies for applause and, more important, customers who will pay extra for some personal attention.
This is not a euphemism, at least technically: The club sells companionship, not body contact. But it's a free country, isn't it, and deals can be made when strippers meet male patrons in the Champagne Room. For April, this is degrading work, but it's not hard, and the money is so much better than what she earned making sandwiches down the road. "She didn't have to act like she loved them, just smile and curl her finger at them to follow and they did."
She made sandwiches “down the road” from the first strip club she worked in, in New Hampshire, before she moved to Florida.
But on the night when Franny's drowsy presence is foremost on her mind, April sees opportunity knock in the form of a foreigner who slaps down hundred-dollar bills for her time and makes cryptic remarks she doesn't understand. Bassam, a Muslim from Dubai, is both fascinated and repelled as he touches the scar left by the surgery when Franny was born.
Bassam is from Saudi Arabia—this is a fact alluded to repeatedly in the book.
"People like you go to hell, April," he says, staring at her naked body. "You will not see me even once more."
For Bassam, a Muslim hand-picked to plow a plane into a Manhattan landmark, this encounter is the exclamation point to his "time of living so haram," so sinfully.
Stoking a hatred weakened by the Florida heat, he shakes off what his father said, that jihad "is a struggle within yourself, that is all. It is the struggle to live as Allah wishes us to live." No, he tells himself, "she will burn, they will all burn."
As April eyes Bassam's money, the truck driver A.J. runs across little Franny, sleepy and confused and wanting her mother. In an unthinking instant, he makes a decision that will turn this sultry evening upside down, bringing cops and the bright lights of the law to this sleazy outpost — and to Bassam.
True or false, Bassam plays to the stereotype. Dubus deals with this problem by keeping the action moving, switching point of view so that the story is told by various characters, including Jean, April's landlady, and Deena, A.J.'s ex.
Dubus plays on the media-hyped fear of perverts on every corner, but that's not what you see beneath that glossy surface: It's people reaching out for tenderness and love.
That's one irony Dubus exploits, and here's another: the contrast between Bassam, an outsider whose visceral hatred for this country is built on theories and religious zeal, and April, A.J. and Lonnie, who actually live the reverse side of the American dream but assume they're entirely to blame.
Ellen Emry Heltzel is co-author of the
book "Between the Covers: The Book
Babes' Guide to a Woman's Reading Pleasures," due out this fall. She can
be found at www.thebookbabes.com.
Posted by: A reader | July 07, 2009 at 12:18 PM