Entertaining NonFiction - September 2007
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Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the
USA
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Jacket Notes:
The bestselling author of "How the Garcia Girls
Lost Their Accents" explores the phenomenon of the Latina sweet 15 celebration.
An enlightening and entertaining portrait of contemporary Latino culture, this
title also takes a critical look at the social consequences of the quince
parties.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 04/30/2007
Skillfully blending memoir and social science,
Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) explores the quinceañera, the
coming-of-age ceremony for Latinas turning 15. She spent a year researching and
attending -quince- celebrations, finding out what rituals are favored and what
they mean to the girls. She researched what the gowns and photo sessions cost.
She interviewed people working in the -quince- industry, from party planners to
cake bakers. After all, with more than 400,000 American Latinas turning 15 every
year, and with the average quinceañera costing $5,000, the financial, if not the
cultural importance of the -quince- should not be underestimated. Alvarez
structures her book around one particular girl's ceremony, from the dreamy
planning stages through the late hours of the actual, dizzying affair. By
intercutting the party narrative with stories from her own youth, Alvarez
reminds herself-and readers-that at some point we were all confused, histrionic
adolescents. Both sympathetic and critical, she doesn't dismiss the event as a
waste of hard-earned savings or as a mere display of daughters for the marriage
market; nor does she endorse it as the essential cultural tradition connecting
Latinas to their roots. Instead, Alvarez wants readers to focus on creating
positive, meaningful rites of passage for the younger generation. (Aug.)
Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do
Before They Die
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Jacket Notes:
Gorant takes readers along as he searches out the
top ten iconic sporting events, evoking the best (and sometimes worst) sports
has to offer. Part adventure, part pilgrimage, he captures these events in all
their color and commotion and reveals why sports matter so much to so many.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 03/19/2007
All true obsessives, whatever their object of
adoration, love making lists. It's a way of trying to organize (or at least make
sense of) the sprawling, life-controlling nature of their obsession.Sports
Illustrated editor Gorant, being the kind of self-described "idiot" who has
spent far too much of his life watching televised sports (any kind, "the more
obscure, in some ways, the better") took his particular list and made it into a
book. If Gorant's genial account of attending the 10 ultimate sporting events
seems at times like little more than an excuse to get out of the office and make
random alcohol-based friendships with assorted strangers, so much the better. As
an exercise in vicarious frivolous fandom, Gorant's year-plus-long odyssey-he
starts at the Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl in February 2005 and ends with Fenway
Park's Opening Day on April 11, 2006-is serenely satisfying reading in the
manner of a lengthy magazine article. Gorant's selection trends toward the
obvious (a Packers game at Lambeau, the Masters, the Daytona 500) and the
decision to include only one non-American event (Wimbledon) comes off as a
little lazy. All that to the side, Gorant brings a fresh and appreciative eye to
each event, whether it's the days spent lazing around an RV at the Daytona 500
with a self-described "family" of NASCAR fans or discovering how a relaxed
afternoon game at Wrigley "could be all the romance a man needs."(June)
Where War Lives
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Jacket Notes:
A Pulitzer Prize — winning journalist takes us on a
personal and historic journey from Mogadishu through Rwanda to Afghanistan and
Iraq.
With the click of a shutter the world came to know Staff Sgt. William David
Cleveland Jr. as a desecrated corpse. In the split-second that Paul Watson had
to choose between pressing the shutter release or turning away, the world went
quiet and Watson heard Cleveland whisper: “If you do this, I will own you
forever.” And he has.
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy
Years
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Jacket Notes:
Acclaimed journalist Talbot tells in a riveting,
well-researched narrative just how explosively alienated the Kennedy
administration was from its own national security apparatus and that Robert
Kennedy planned to open an investigation into his brother's assassination.
The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke
Barriers
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Jacket Notes:
The enchanting true story of a love affair that
broke down the walls that divided a neighborhood. Bernstein has written a
wonderfully charming and moving tale of working class life, social divide, and
forbidden love on the eve of the First World War.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 12/11/2006
Bernstein writes, "There are few rules or unwritten
laws that are not broken when circumstances demand, and few distances that are
too great to be traveled," about the figurative divide ("geographically... only
a few yards, socially... miles and miles") keeping Jews and Christians apart in
the poor Lancashire mill town in England where he was raised. In his affecting
debut memoir, the nonagenarian gives voice to a childhood version of himself who
witnesses his older sister's love for a Christian boy break down the invisible
wall that kept Jewish families from Christians across the street. With little
self-conscious authorial intervention, young Harry serves as a wide-eyed guide
to a world since dismantled-where "snot rags" are handkerchiefs, children enter
the workforce at 12 and religion bifurcates everything, including industry. True
to a child's experience, it is the details of domestic life that illuminate the
tale-the tenderness of a mother's sacrifice, the nearly Dickensian angst of a
drunken father, the violence of schoolyard anti-Semitism, the "strange odors" of
"forbidden foods" in neighbor's homes. Yet when major world events touch the
poverty-stricken block (the Russian revolution claims the rabbi's son, neighbors
leave for WWI), the individual coming-of-age is intensified without being
trivialized, and the conversational account takes on the heft of a historical
novel with stirring success.(Apr.)
One Red Paperclip: Or How an Ordinary Man
Achieved His Dream with the Help of a Simple Office Supply
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Jacket Notes:
MacDonald posted a red paperclip on Craigslist in
an attempt to barter it for a home. Fourteen trades later, he was the proud
owner of a house in Canada. This irreverent and insightful odyssey shows a
regular guy who sought and found his dreams.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 06/11/2007
MacDonald is just a regular, sharp-witted guy on a
quest for "funtential," his coined word for the maximum potential for fun. In a
casual, playful tone, his account begins as he stares past his computer screen
and at the brick wall of his girlfriend's apartment in Quebec; he lives there,
and she pays the rent. Wanting to contribute financially to the relationship, he
recalls a childhood game, Bigger and Better, and begins looking for something to
trade. He's drawn to the red paperclip holding together his résumé and cover
letter. The rest of the book traces his exchanges from the red paperclip to a
fish pen to a smiley-face door knob and culminates with a house in Kipling,
Saskatchewan-all within a year. From the outset, MacDonald insists on making
each deal in person, and these personal exchanges provide the book with a human
interest that transcends any fascination with quirky material swaps. Trading a
door knob for Shawn's camping stove, for example, becomes an excuse for the once
strangers to chat over steak sandwiches and beer. So, while the trades are the
unifying element of the book, it isn't really about getting a house; it's about
people, relationships and living life to its fullest.(Aug.)
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Jacket Notes:
In 1982, sixteen-year-old Marina Nemat was arrested
on false charges by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and tortured in Tehran’s
notorious Evin prison. At a time when most teenaged girls are choosing their
prom dresses, Nemat was having her feet beaten by men with cables and listening
to gunshots as her friends were being executed. She was condemned to die, but
survived because one of the guards, whose family was well-connected to the
Khomeini regime, pleaded for her life. But the price Ali exacted was high:
Nemat, a fervent Christian, would have to convert to Islam and marry him.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
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Jacket Notes:
In her first full-length nonfiction narrative,
bestselling author Kingsolver opens readers' eyes in a hundred new ways to an
old truth: you are what you eat. The bestselling author returns with a wise and
compelling celebration of family, food, nature, and community.
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 03/26/2007
Reviewed by Nina Planck. Michael Pollan is
the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and
the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist
Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local.
Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern
Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title
goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic
and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business,
selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from
local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus
slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given
up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the
pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field-local food and sustainable
agriculture-is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the
earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the
accidental gardener.Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much
smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced
narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her
tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and
funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited
resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad
manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is
snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I
grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding
modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the
accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's
risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why
bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember
what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical
development, from buds to fruits to roots.Kingsolver is not the first to note
our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks,
yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked
sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial
agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter
Camille), as if to show that local food-in the growing, buying, cooking, eating
and the telling-demands teamwork.(May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food:
What to Eat and Why(Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
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