Recommend a Book
Read it. Loved it? Recommend it!
Have you read something great (or at least really, really good) that you think your neighbors in Palm Beach County would find worth reading?
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READ TOGETHER PALM BEACH COUNTY BOOK REVIEWS
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Reviewed by Elizabeth Neuhoff, Community Volunteer
It would be unfair of me not to warn readers that The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is a heartbreaker. Then, I suppose, it would be more unfair of me not to insist they read it. This is an incredible, imaginative story of nine-year-old Leisel Meminger going to live with her foster family, the Hubermanns, in late 1930's Nazi Germany. Leisel arrives on Himmel Street with no possessions but for the book she has stolen from her dead brother's gravesite. Illiterate at first, Leisel learns to read with the help of her beloved foster father, Hans.
As Hitler's Germany starts to crumble and Leisel's world becomes more chaotic, her need for books becomes insatiable and she becomes a full-fledged book thief. When Hans offers to hide a Jew in the basement, the story really takes off. Snatching books from Nazi book burnings and stealing from the mayor's own library, Leisel becomes increasingly enchanted with literature and eventually starts to write her own story.
This book captivated me from page one. Though history told me this was an unnatural tragedy in the making, Zusak's handling of this difficult subject is surprising and powerful. I couldn't help myself from turning the pages at a furious rate to see how Leisel's story played out. With the macabre twist of using Death as the narrator, Zusak gives us a curious perspective of both the beauty and horror of human nature.
Though this book has won many prizes and accolades as a work for young readers, I think the subject of ordinary people trying to be decent in extraordinary times is appealing to teens and adults alike. Adult readers shouldn't be misled by the categorization as a young reader's title. The complex characters, unique plot devices and Zusak's searing portrayal of the end of innocence will satisfy all naysayers.
I hope as Palm Beach County readers make a selection for "Read Together Palm Beach County" they will seriously consider voting for The Book Thief. It leaves us with much to discuss as a community: the ability to do what is right in the face of evil, the bonds of love and friendship forged through adversity, and the power of words to change not only a child's life but an entire nation.
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Reviewed by Dorothy Jacks, Assistant Property Appraiser for Palm Beach County
We are left with fewer and fewer veterans of the European battles of World War II and, equally, fewer survivors of what day-to-day life living in an occupied country was like. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows provides a wonderful view into that life. A work of fiction, the book is well researched and well written, in an unusual but totally appropriate style. We are presented with a series of letters written by the characters of the story to one another. Letters seem correct for conveying the literal and figurative distances of the time.
The story is based in Guernsey, part of the Channel Islands, an island group off the north coast of France. The islands are part of Great Britain but, as we learn, were occupied during the war by the Germans. Completely cut-off from any communication with the mainland, the residents survived on their own with only each other for entertainment. The story develops a cast of characters through letters written between the residents and a London-based author after the war. It is through the letters that we learn about the real heroism, suffering, tragedy and survival skills of the Guernsey people.
Our main character, Juliet Ashton, has spent the war in London, "Everything is so broken... the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people." Through her name being written in a passed-along book, she comes to correspond with Mr. Dawsey Adams, a resident of Guernsey who tells her about the creation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - their version of a modern-day book club. We learn of life during the occupation and their close calls with the German troops -some funny, some tragic. Juliet eventually moves to Guernsey to write a book about the occupation and our story develops more legs, with relationships and recollections that really get to the core of the book.
The story tells us the tragic tales of food rationing, slave labor and imprisonment, but it also tells us how ordinary people survived the and how communities came together to share and find joy in the smallest things. Access to news was completely cut off on the island for five years. When the war ended and goods started to arrive on the island, the residents wanted the old newspapers that wrapped the goods; they missed the recipes, fashion pages and the obituaries.
The most interesting part of this lovely read is the message of the letters. The first few pages were somewhat disjointed. While you work out how to read through the correspondence, paying attention to the direction of the letters and the author of each, you might wonder where this is going. But the flow is definitely there and you come to feel like somewhat of a voyeur, reading a box of letters you found in the attic on a rainy afternoon. It is a pleasurable pursuit, quite different from the style in which we have become accustomed today. The art of the letter, the ability to tell someone your innermost feelings through pen and paper, can be powerful and permanent.
The Literary Society was more than a way to talk about books, it was the way this group of people stayed together and fought occupation: "The war is now the story of our lives, and there is no subtracting it." The message of this book may be that we are lost without the written word, whether in letters, old newspapers, books or now even email and digital copy. Regardless of the method, these memories are the stories of a generation. Their stories will be paid forward through being written down and read and re-read by generations to come.
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Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Reviewed by Steve Leveen, CEO and co-founder of Levenger
I'm not recommending Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because of its power to convey a feeling for history, though it has that power. In its pages you don't merely learn about the Japanese internment camps of World War Two, you feel them.
You feel the injustice of imprisoning innocent people. You also grasp the tension of the time-the chilling, unprecedented Pearl-Harbor fear that swept the nation and the West Coast in particular (including Seattle, the setting for this novel) after that famously infamous attack.
This is author Jamie Ford's first novel, and yet he displays a seemingly effortless talent for making history as unexpected as it actually was. We see the shock of Japanese Americans as they are suddenly ostracized and then rounded up for relocation. We meet young Henry Lee, a twelve-year-old, first-generation Chinese boy whose parents literally label, in order to save him from being mistaken as Japanese.
Henry is on scholarship to a white school, requiring officially that he work in the kitchen, and unofficially, that he withstand the fists and taunts of his mainstream classmates. There he meets another scholarship kid, also assigned to kitchen duty, a Japanese girl. And we're off to an old, but ever-new, love story set in a world at war.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet examines enduring issues. Must my father's enemy be my enemy? Can immigrants ever really understand their first-generation children, and they their parents? When does loving parental guidance become unhealthy coercion? What is the right path when heart and duty point in opposite directions? Would you ever go to war for a country that imprisoned you? stole your property? damaged the people you love the most?
But I'm not recommending Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because of how powerfully it raises such timeless questions. I'm recommending the book because it is a work of art.
Somewhere amidst the fluttering photographs, the boarded-up buildings, the jazz spilling from segregated nightclubs out onto wet Seattle streets, I realized that this novel is one of those works of fiction that becomes literature. I might reach for words such as magical, moving, transcending and others people use to describe art, but like others, I would fail-fail to convey by other means an experience that must be had.
I recommend Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because experiencing literature feels good in ways we can't well describe, yet makes us want to try.
Postscript: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is available in paperback, hardcover, digital and audio. I listened to Feodor Chin narrate the unabridged audiobook and loved his voices for the young hero and heroine, as well as the many adults of diverse ethnicity. I also bought the beautiful hardcover, which I wrote in, and then photographed, before passing the book to my sons.
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Run by Ann Patchett
Reviewed by Kristin Calder, Public Relations and Annual Giving Director,Bethesda Hospital Foundation
With a shotgun start Run by Ann Patchett races along as a fast-paced, eloquent story with life-changing surprises and unexpected turns that show the common threads that bind family, strangers and community.
Although the majority of the book covers just 24-hours, Patchett's introduction of the characters is so rich and robust that you feel like you would recognize them on the street, knowing their entire life story, their hopes, their secrets and their dreams. You can relate to them and the emotion of the drama of their lives.
Tip and Teddy are African-American brothers who were adopted as babies by a white, Boston politician Bernard Doyle, and his wife, Bernadette. The Doyles had only been able to have one son, Sullivan, and as a strong Irish-Catholic family, Bernadette wished for a large family to love and pass on family traditions. Doyle, as Bernard is called in the book, wanted to make Bernadette happy and ultimately nurture these boys into being well-rounded, socially responsible and the next generation of great politicians. Life, however expected, never goes as planned.
Run opens with a flashback to two weeks after Bernadette's death from cancer when the little boys, as Tip and Teddy were called, were young and Sullivan was a teenager. Chapter two brings us to current day where the little boys are in their twenties and Sullivan is in his thirties and they are finding their way in the world - and most likely not on the path to be politicians to Doyle's dismay. Tip is serious, studious and interested in science, mainly ichthyology, a branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish. Teddy is social, spirited and is interested in the priesthood - and with all the details of the story's setting, family background and his name, I couldn't help but think of the late Kennedy with the same name. Teddy also bonds with the patriarch of the family, their uncle, Father Sullivan. And his namesake Sullivan, the Doyle's oldest son, who is usually missing from the Doyle's daily life has just returned from Africa where he was working on an HIV program there.
When an accident happens, the Doyles are introduced to Tennessee Alice Moser, an African-American single mother and her 11-year-old daughter, Kenya, an especially gifted runner. The vivid images Patchett displays in her description of Kenya running is an example of how her prose flows throughout the book: "She let herself float forward, every step a leap, her legs stretching out like scissors opened wide . . . she was a superhuman force that sat outside the fundamental law of nature. Gravity did not apply to her..."
As the lives of the Mosers and the Doyles become intertwined, the moving story is a tribute to the notion of family - whether by blood, by love or by the greater understanding of good for the community.
Running - to make sense of the truth, to hide from the past, to seek comfort from others or to expend bound-up energy from being indoors during winter in the Northeast - I raced to the finish line to uncover it all.
Run reads like a mystery and just when I thought I'd figured it out, Patchett discloses more and surprised me again - not only with the story, but in the methods she reveals the details, some of which the main characters never even knew.
Every book by Patchett has been an award-winner including one of my favorites, her best-selling novel Bel Canto in 2002. In both of these stories, she successfully weaves together a group of characters, mostly strangers in a compelling story that is hard to put down.
When this story came to an end, a closing that enforces that maybe "everything happens for a reason" philosophy, I studied the blue paperback jacket image that's covered with falling snow. I am left with vivid images in my mind of winter in the Northeast, Kenya gracefully taking long strides with a soft step in the snow and how family by name alone is a powerful force in the human race.
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The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Reviewed by Robert Bertisch, Executive Director, Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County
When I was first asked to read and review The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien I had some serious misgivings. I don't particularly enjoy war stories, having been forced to read The Red Badge of Courage in high school and The Naked and the Dead in college. Additionally I do not have fond memories of the Vietnam War, having been an avid anti-war protester during my college and law school days.
All that being said, Tim O'Brien's collection of interrelated Vietnam stories is a wonderful combination of novel, memoir and short story which contains some of the most brilliant imagery I have ever read. The first person narrator, like the author, is named Tim O'Brien and is a writer and combat veteran of the Vietnam War. In addition to depicting the war itself, the book covers more than 30 years in O'Brien's life and the lives of his fellow soldiers. Being a war story there are many disturbing, graphic and violent images. O'Brien depicts an unforgettable group of soldiers and a variety of haunting characters with whom they become involved during their time in combat.
Vietnam is the author's theme, but the book transcends that particular conflict to describe the pain and force of the need felt by so many soldiers to express their experience of war - something that is truly inexpressible and can only be understood by those who have served. This unremitting need to give form and meaning to the experience is given voice in the chapter entitled "Spin," where the author describes the unremitting power of a story. "Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
At its basic level, the book is about the things that the soldiers of Alpha Company carried with them into war, including physical items, personal burdens and emotional baggage. In the title story, the author vividly details the material objects "humped" by the soldiers, up the hills and through the swamps, as they march for the sake of the march. "They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos and much more." Juxtaposed with the tangible items are the personal burdens borne by each soldier. "For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die."
Finally O'Brien describes how the soldiers collectively shouldered, "the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture."
Each story contained in The Things They Carried speaks of a truth the author learned during his time in Vietnam. It is the line between truth and reality that makes O'Brien's book brutal, beautiful and unforgettable. This book should be required reading on all serious readers' list. It is heartbreaking, gut wrenching and frequently devastating. At its essence it provides the reader with vivid glimpses of what happens when we send men and women to war.
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