How Do I
Connie's Picks
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Williams, Tad
Tailchaser’s Song Fiction | |
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In the same vein as Watership Down by Richard Adams, Tailchaser’s Song is an adventure story featuring talking animals. Please don’t write it off as just another childish talking animal fantasy. If Tolkien had written about animals instead of people, this would be it.
This is the story of Fritti Tailchaser, a young feline approaching his adulthood. Part of a culture that values meditative silence as well as rich storytelling, our hero is yet unsure of where he fits into the world. He knows well the creation story of his clan, as well as the grand mythology that makes up his history. When a sudden, mysterious and ancient evil begins to slaughter and steal, Tailchaser becomes a part of his own heroic epic.
Full of poetry and action, this novel easily captivates the imagination. The author went on to write several series of fantasy novels involving human characters, but this early effort begs for a sequel.
Recommended by Connie, August 2008 | |
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Cassidy, Tina Birth: the Surprising History of How We are Born Nonfiction |
| To be clear, this is not your mother’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Tina Cassidy’s gripping and sometimes stomach-turning exploration of the history of birth is honest, unbiased, and very well-documented. She carefully takes into account many of the physical, anthropological, political, and religious issues that have influenced human birth rituals and customs through recorded history. Hideous and miraculous practices that have governed the lives of women are seldom talked about in such frank terms. From the days of women-only birthing huts, to the ousting of midwives in favor of learned male medical practitioners, to the recent trend to have births scheduled around doctors’ business hours, Cassidy’s dry wit and accessible language make this sometimes harsh topic absolutely fascinating. I would recommend this book to anyone, even those of us who don’t foresee ourselves experiencing childbirth firsthand.
Recommended January 2008 | |
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Vaughan, Brian K. Pride of Baghdad Graphic Novel |
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The Iraq War is observed from a unique and unexpected angle. For four lions from the freshly bombed Baghdad Zoo, there is no meaning to the destruction. They are simply freed from their confines, lost and isolated in an environment not suited to large predators, other than human beings. They must find food. They must find clean water. And they also must avoid the hideous barbarism of other creatures also freed during the shelling and fires. The artwork is stunning, both beautiful and brutal, and it elegantly highlights the poignancy of the text. The authors stay true to the nature of the animals; their voices, while using human words, are appropriately spoken from the mouths of lions. It is a heartbreaking story of war and its victims, without useless talk of politics and the typical breast-beating of the media and all those who either support or condemn the war. Art by Niko Henrichon.
Recommended May 2007 | |
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Gregory, Julie Sickened: the Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood Nonfiction |
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Julie Gregory's book is gut-wrenching memoir at its finest. For anyone unfamiliar with Munchausen by Proxy, it is a type of abuse in which a caregiver feigns or induces an illness in a person under their care, in order to attract attention, sympathy, or to fill other emotional needs. This author was a victim put through unspeakable horror from her own mother. Her mother hauled her to every doctor's office in driving distance to have her tested, and medicated, and even operated on for a phantom heart defect. Under the spell of a seemingly devoted and genuinely concerned parent that fooled the medical professionals, Julie believed that she was meant to die. Julie grew up dying. She lived dying. The epitomes of dysfunction, her parents were brutal abusers, chronic liars, and some-time arsonists. The fact that this woman lived to shed light on her past is remarkable. Read it and weep - literally.
Recommended February 2007 | |
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Hofmann, Corinne The White Masai Nonfiction |
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In the late 1980s, Ms. Hofmann goes on holiday to Kenya with her fiancé. In a matter of days, she falls impossibly in love with a native Masai warrior who caught her eye on a public bus. What happens from there is nothing short of ridiculous. She drops her life as a successful, fully independent, educated woman, to become the wife of a man with whom she does not share a word of common language and to immerse herself in a culture in which tradition does not permit females any semblance of equal rights. This memoir of her first few years living in the bush is absolutely fascinating. However, it is difficult to sympathize with Corinne. It is more likely that the reader will be horrified and alarmed with the malarial episodes she experiences or the very avoidable, very high risk situations she allows not only herself, but her infant daughter, to become subject to. Despite all of this, the narrative drives forward, scene by scene, in a way that makes it a satisfying read, something like a train wreck.
Recommended January 2007 | |
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McCarthy, Cormac The Road Fiction |
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Reading The Road made me want to totally curl up into the fetal position. Humankind has descended into an Apocalyptical Hell of global proportions after an unidentified calamity. Our protagonist is never named by the author, and therefore he is never awarded the individual identity taken for granted in a pre-disaster world. Nostalgia and optimism are irrelevant and dangerous in a present that has no use for either past or future tenses. But how to remove the humanity from the man? What can you do with both memories and dreams? All that exists is the now and the road. The man, his son, and the constant fear of death and hunger are the major players. The writing itself is both sparse and elegantly poetic. This is an intense, unrelenting, and beautifully sublime portrait of human emotion and the value of humanity.
Recommended January 2007 | |
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Mason, Bobbie Ann Feather Crowns Fiction | |
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In 1900, Christie Wheeler becomes the first recorded American woman to give birth to quintuplets. In the backwoods of rural Kentucky, a family already on the brink of utter poverty is pushed further toward the edge. As the five tiny infants struggle to stay alive, the word of their miraculous birth spreads rapidly. Christie finds herself in the center of a national spectacle as train loads of people literally stream through her home. The Wheeler family is denied every semblance of normalcy and privacy. Tragedy inevitably strikes, and Christie breaks down, calling into question her identity as a mother and the validity of her relationship with her husband and older children.
Bobbie Ann Mason has a talent for integrating the grotesque with the sublime. She has painted here a portrait of an American woman from an era when women were not expected to do extraordinary things. Yet, the character of Christie Wheeler transcends expectations, and is neither defined by traditional roles, nor by her grief.
Recommended June 2006 | |
