Books I Have Read But Missed Reviewing

When I got my first Kindle I bought up bargain books, many of which were wonderful discoveries. I did not review them at that time.  I thought it's time to share books that have stuck with me.

I was looking around Netflix and happened upon the film Harry and Snowman. It rang a bell. It only took a minute before I realized I knew Snowman from The Eighty-Dollar Champion, which I had read quite a few years ago.

This book by Elizabeth Letts is one that has stayed with me. The story of an immigrant who buys a horse on its way to become dog food and how the horse becomes a champion is an inspirational story.

"Harry knew what it felt like to be powerless. Beat up or not, this horse seemed brave." from The Eighty-Dollar Champion

Harry de Leyer grew up on a farm in Holland during WWII, hiding Jews and working in the resistance. He helped to save horses abandoned by the retreating Nazis. After the war he was sponsored to come to America to work on a tobacco farm. Harry was 22 years old. But his passion for training horses was noted. He worked his way up to teaching riding at an elite girl's school.

Harry needed an easy riding horse. He was late to the auction and the only horses left were on the trailer going to the slaughter horse to become dog food. He noted a horse who seemed to have something special. The horse looked him in the eye and nuzzled his hand. He bought the horse for $80. When he got home it was snowing and one of Harry's children thought it made the horse look like a snow man. And he got his name.

Harry ended up selling Snowman but the horse kept jumping fences and returning to Harry. So Harry bought him back and began to work with Snowman. The horse had a love of jumping.

"There was more to horses than columns of numbers, the profits and losses in his farm ledger. There is one thing no horseman can ever put a price on, and that is heart."from The Eighty-Dollar Champion

Snowman was not pretty. He did not have a pedigree. Harry was not a college-educated, East Coast elite like the competition. What Harry and Snowman had was chemistry, heart, and the desire to be winners.

Their achievements brought international fame.

Who can resist a tale of the underdog stealing the win?

I can't. And that is why I remember this story and this book.

In 2014 I read An Unfinished Season by Ward Just. I enjoyed it immensely and later read The Eastern Shore and liked it even more. I have his novel American Romantic on my TBR shelf. An Unfinished Season is the story of a young many who falls for a girl from the upper crust. The young man discovers that all that glitters is not gold. Through the story of one young man, Just considers the American psyche and the choices we make.

I bought the book for 50 cents at Big Lots. It sat on my shelf for at least a year. I picked it up and fell in love. I did not want to read it too fast, yet did not want to put it down. In his blurb, Pat Conroy confesses, "I love this book." Well, Pat, I do too.

Corey, the son of a blue-collar, working-class man, shares his father's high standards of careful workmanship. While helping his father replace a drain, and saving the roots of an aged oak tree, he is noticed by Liam Metery, who has inherited the wealth accumulated by his Gilded Age grandfather. Corey is asked to help around the Metarey estate, and as Liam Metary and his family come to respect Corey, he is invited into their lives. Liam himself is a man who loves workmanship, and the simple pleasure of hands-on industry. He is also a progressive liberal who decides to back the great Liberal senator from New York State, Henry Bonwiller, in his run for the presidency in 1972.

As Corey becomes involved with the behind-the-scenes machinations of politics, his world widens. Corey is especially taken by a journalist, who becomes his role model, leading him to his life's work in journalism. Corey is also affected by Liam's dreams of a better country, the end of the war in Viet Nam, and a government that aligns itself with the common man's good. Liam recognizes the boy's potential and assists him with a scholarship to a private school, and later leaves him money for a Harvard education.

The fairy tale unravels, dragging Liam and Corey into the ambiguous black hole created by Bonwiller, and their loss of innocence reflects the national loss of idealism in the 1970s.

What would you do to protect your most sacred dream? How reliable are the human vessels in whom you place your dreams? Can you live with the knowledge that you have compromised yourself?

One reviewer wrote that the title "America, America" should be heard like a sigh for what might have been, knowledge of what has been lost.

I later read Canin's novels Carry Me Across the Water, which I reviewed here, and  The Doubter's Almanac which I reviewed here.

I remember Song of the Orange Moons by Lori Ann Stephens as a lovely book. I wish I could tell more about the plot but it's been a long time since I read it in 2012. The blurb reads,

A mosaic of stories that follow the intertwined lives of three girls coming of age. Two young girls from Jewish and Christian families and their elderly widow next door try to find happiness in a seemingly cruel world. In spite of their different cultural and economic backgrounds, Rebecka, Helen, and Adelle all share the delicate and self-conscious journey to womanhood. In their search for they find lasting strength in the power of their friendships. 

 My highlights from the book include:

Those church-ordained picnics and prayer lines and ladies groups are the finest excuse for conjuring up rumors I ever heard, and just more evidence that God is a woman. 

For the first time since I moved, I felt the immense emptiness caused by grief. I cried for the loss of my friend, and for my inability to find her again. 

Skin is not like love or morality. Love is just a tradition that people follow. A word that means “you must.” Morality is a death sentence to the imagination, a noose for passion—I’d seen the hand of morality in torn pages of the library books. 

Being cynical is better than walking onto cattle cars on a direct route to the incinerator and still hoping that humans are basically good at heart. 

...feel his sadness like a blanket covering us both. 

They feel a terminal loneliness. They feel like a misplaced foot or a forgotten ear. 

Of course she was lonely. Everyone is swimming alone. But we are swimming alone together, sometimes bumping into each other, sometimes rubbing our fins together awkwardly against the current, and sometimes floating at the top with our bellies exposed to the dry air.

...telling me the facts of life that I knew couldn’t possibly be true, but telling them with such conviction that the truth seemed to bend like a spectrum, into so many beautiful colors.

Well, now I want to read it again!

A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin

In the Woods of Michigan 
It was serendipity; I was Up North in Michigan, a stone's throw from a spring fed pond, two hours away from Cheboygan--reading a book whose character's life took him from Cheboygan to a cabin on a small inland lake in Michigan. The character also lived in Lansing, where I lived for many years, in a small Ohio college town similar to where we lived when my husband was in seminary, a half hour's drive from OSU, and in Princeton, a half hour's drive from where we first lived in Pennsylvania. The landscape was all so familiar.

The book was A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin  who also wrote America, America which I read several years ago, an impressive book which has stayed with me. When Canin's new book appear on NetGalley I immediately requested it and was pleased to get an ARC.

The book revolves around an unforgettable character and the son who struggles to understand him. It is about the search for one's father, a quest to understand life and how to live, an exploration of existence.

A Savant from the Woods
In the 1950s Milo Andret grew up fifteen miles inland from the resort town of Cheboygan. His parents were insular and joyless. Milo spent his free hours in the woods surrounding his home, preferring to be alone than with people.

On the Straits near Cheyboygan, MI

When Milo was thirteen he found a beech tree felled in a storm. Inside the tree he envisioned an interlocked, continual chain and he spent the summer carving it out. Over 25 feet long, each link twisted upon itself like a Mobius strip, he secreted it away in a hollow tree behind a cover with reversed screw threads. It would be his life's great work.

He eventually showed the chain to his shop instructor who warned that no one would believe he made it. The year the freighter SS Carl D. Bradley sank along with the fathers of many of his classmates Milo was targeted and beaten by bullies who had heard of his remarkable achievement. His father's response was, "Welcome to the world."

A teacher identifies Milo's special ability and pushes him into a mathematics competition; his winning would bring fame to the school. He won.

Milo attended university in East Lansing and after years of pumping gas in Lansing is accepted into U.C. Berkley. It is the 1970s and Milo discovers love and ambition, addiction and competition.

Pressed into topology by his advisor Milo solves a mathematical problem and finds fame and a position at Princeton. Milo is expected to conquer another mathematical question. His days are spent deep in thought, imagining and testing and failing to find another big idea. His life becomes a slow dance of unraveling into darkness, alcoholism, and decline. He loses his position at Princeton and slides down the scale until he is at a small Ohio private school. Milo has won the Field Medal in Mathematics but his theory is challenged. As Milo tells his son, mathematicians are destined to lose, never able to find what they are looking for.

The Son, Fellow Mathematician, Addict, Lonely Yet Ever-hopeful Soul
The first part of the novel is Milo's early story; in the second part we learn his son Hans has related the story as his father told it to him. We now view Milo through the eyes of the son who desperately wants to understand his father and we learn about Han's own struggles with genius and addiction.

When Hans was thirteen his father takes the family to a wreck of a cabin on a muddy Michigan lake. It was in the Michigan woods that he completed his first great work, the continual chain of wood. He thinks that here he will find his way again. Nature surrounds them. The children watch a pair of red ants drag their prey across the sand and realize the truth about life.

Milo is incommunicative and prey to his demons while his wife plays Pollyanna, looking for the bright side, trying to make choices right. But she is wearing out, ruing the loss of the glamor of being married to an important man, living in Princeton. Her bitterness is expressed in wise insights. When Hans remarks that the Mayflies seem to be committing suicide in pairs she responds that he is right: they are mating. And later when daughter Paulie asks why clean a rented house her mother replies because that's what life is--cleaning a rented house.

The story ends with Hans returning to the lake cottage to be with his father who is in his last days, Everyone who ever believed in Milo, for however short a time, and everyone who ever doubted him, for however long a time also come. It is a time of reckoning.

On a lake Up North in Michigan

*****

Milo Andret is not an easy man to live with, and I mean both within the novel and for the reader. While I was reading The Doubter's Almanac I would wake, at night, and in the morning, puzzling over Milo and wondering if he would solve the questions tormenting him.

It is a dark novel, a hard story. Milo is a failure. He dies over a long time, beginning with the first drink he takes at grad school. Unable to meet his own high expectations and the expectations of his mentors he lashes out indiscriminately. It isn't easy being a genius; people hold them to unreasonably high standards. He holds on to his alcoholism more ardently than he does his lovers.

Days have passed since I finished the novel but the somber and sorrowful feeling lingers. I think of the alcoholics of my family. I think of my father's slow death from cancer, and how my mother asked for morphine knowing she'd never wake again, but unwilling to suffer any longer. After such things sorrow remains, and the questions of life's meaning or lack thereof. I wonder if having a special ability necessitates extraordinary achievement. Had Milo chosen his own path would he have been dissatisfied and driven? I want to read the book again. It is deep and rich and revealing.

The novel offers hope: one can learn, we can become wise, we can choose a good enough life, we can decide that fun and happiness are more enduring than awards and prizes.

Never give up, Milo has instructed Hans. What is it we should hold to, to not give up? Our decision will form our life.

I received a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Doubter's Almanac
Ethan Canin
Penguin Random House
Publication Date: February 16, 2015
$28.00 hard cover
ISBN-13: 978-1400068265

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Read excerpt from America, America from NPR at http://www.npr.org/2008/08/26/93722689/writer-ethan-canin-tackles-the-american-dream

"I've been reading Ethan Canin's books since he first burst on the literary scene...I thought he could never equal the power of...America, America, but...With A Doubter's Almanac, Canin has soared to a new standard of achievement. What a story, and what a cast of characters. The protagonist, Milo Andret, is a mathematical genius and one of the most maddening, compelling, appalling, and unforgetable characters I've encountered in American fiction..." Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

Mini Reviews, From Mad to Mature

Three more mini-reviews!

"Dine like Draper and Drink like Sterling," reads the back cover of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook, Inside the Kitchen, Bars and Restaurants of Mad Men, by Gelman and Zheutlin and published by SmartPop. The 70 recipes are inspired by specific Mad Men episodes and offer a culinary trip to the 1960s. Recipes were culled from vintage cookbooks and magazines and were kitchen tested. Recipes include cocktails, appetizers, salads, main courses, desert and sweets.

My childhood family gatherings always featured Whiskey Sours. One year I had a cold and was given a sip; it was supposed to help. It was the last Whiskey Sour I ever drank, but here is the recipe from the book (Season 4. Episode 10):

Whiskey Sour from Playboy Host & Bar Book by Thomas Mario
2 ounces blended whiskey
3/4 ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 lemon slice
1 maraschino cheery (optional)
1. Add whiskey, lemon juice, and sugar to ice in a cocktail shaker and shake well.
1. Strain into prechilled glass. Garnish with lemon slice and cherry, if desired.

Mom made a Wedge Salad. (As a kid I never ate her salads; I didn't like her dressing made with half catsup and half Miracle Whip, or the Iceberg lettuce.) The Palm's Wedge Salad (Season 3, Episode 2) is almost like Mom's:

Wedge Salad
2 Iceberg lettuce hearts, quartered and cored
1 large ripe Beefsteak tomato, sliced
Crumbled bacon to taste (added to original recipe per Roger's preference)
3/4-1 cup Blue Cheese Dressing
1. Place w iceberg wedges on each of 4 chilled salad plates
1. Top with bacon, place slices of tomato alongside. Serve with dressing on the side.

*****

Menswear Dog: The New Classics by David Fung & Yena Kim and published by Artisan, NY, was gifted me because the model is a Shiba Inu.

The amazing photographs are such fun, especially for Shiba lovers. The elements of a four season wardrobe are presented. But the book also imparts useful fashion advice, including fit, step-by-step pictures on the four-in-hand tie knot, decoding clothing care labels, stain removal, packing clothing, and shoe care.

Our best-shod Shiba Inu Kamikaze

*****

I had time to read a book on my real, not virtual, book shelf and picked up Ethan Canin's Carry me Across the Water, a 2001 book from Random House.

August Kleinman has based his life on his mother's advise to "take no one's advice." Together August and his mother escaped Nazi Germany, leaving behind his in-denial father, and forged a new life in Brooklyn. August falls in love, serves in the Pacific theater during WWII, and takes the risk to start his own brewery and makes millions. Now in old age August takes stock of his choices, plans to give away the burden of wealth, and hopes to amend for his action the war, involving a return to Japan.

Memory, violence, father and son relations, expiation, art, and faith are all touched on in this slender volume about one man's life that illuminates the human experience.

Read the first chapter at the New York Times here.

He was in the doorway between boyhood and manhood, and any piece of evidence that indicated his fearlessness came upon him like a sudden break in the mist that enveloped his trajectory. He caught a glimpse of himself as a man. Not the halting, indolent creature he was now but a person of action: unflinching, dauntless, a breaker of the rules that otherwise would not have afforded much to a ruby-faced, ill-proportioned boy like himself.

If Pat Conroy Likes It, I Should Read It

The last two books I have read had one thing in common: a blurb on the back cover by Pat Conroy. And since I liked these books, and have always enjoyed Pat Conroy's books, I suppose that in the future when considering a book, I should first check and see if Pat has a quote on the back cover.

First I read Rick Bragg's memoir, "All Over but the Shoutin'."  In the blurb, Conroy calls it one of the best books he's read, a work of art. If "art" is that which reflects to us our lives but in a way which makes sense our of the chaos, I would agree that it is a work of art.

Rick is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist. His writing style is beautiful, and his stories moving. In the second paragraph he claims, "This is not an important book. It is only the story of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons..."  later he states that he had "put off" telling this story for ten years, because "dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades."

And so Bragg begins to delineate the story of his family, about a beautiful woman who loved a man damaged in the Korean conflict and went down the the self-destructive path of alcoholism. How the man abandoned his family, and the woman picked cotton to clothe and fed her three sons.

Rick Bragg is not a Depression-era child. We are used to hearing these stories from that time period. But to read about someone my younger brother's age growing up in poverty rearranges my view of the world.

Bragg calls himself lucky, just a guy in the right place at the right time. His climb up the ranks, from writing sports stories for the local paper to feature writing at the New York Times is presented without bravado, not a jot of egoism sneaking through the words.

Bragg's descriptions of life in Haiti are chilling. While on the staff of the United Methodist Committee on Relief, my husband had visited Haiti several times between 1985 and 1989. Bragg's first trip was in 1991. Bragg writes, " I had come to believe that I was good at one thing, writing about people in trouble. As it turned out, I was a rank amateur  I didn't know what misery was, but I would learn." Bragg was over-whelmed by the poverty and garbage, death and despair around him. Three years latter he returned to find "not much had changed." Political upheaval and deadly repercussions still ruled the lives of  the citizens. The poor were still maimed-- or killed, their bodies stolen and held for ransom.

Real Life rarely has happy endings tied up nice and neat. So it was sweet to read about how Bragg repaid his mother's sacrifice by purchasing her a home of her own. "And I am grateful I could give her this much, before more time tumbled by lost. There ain't no way to make it perfect. You do the best you can for the people left..."

Bragg's father, on his death bed,  asked his sons to see him, and he tries to make amends for years of abandonment. He tells his son, "It's all over but the shoutin'."

The second book I read last month was "America, America" by Ethan Canin.  I bought the book for 50 cents at Big Lots. It sat on my shelf for at least a year. I picked it up and fell in love. I did not want to read it too fast, yet did not want to put it down.  In his blurb, Pat Conroy confesses  "I love this book." Well, Pat, I do too. I finished it over a week ago, and the characters and images live in my mind's eye as if I had lived the story myself.

Corey, the son of a blue-collar, working class man,  shares his father's high standards of careful workmanship. While helping his father replace a drain, and saving the roots of an aged oak tree, he is noticed by Liam Metery, who has inherited the wealth accumulated by his Gilded Age grandfather. Corey is asked to help around the Metarey estate, and as Liam Metary and his family come to respect Corey, he is invited into their lives.  Liam himself is a man who loves workmanship, and the simple pleasure of hands-on industry. He is also a progressive liberal who decides to back the great Liberal senator from New York State, Henry Bonwiller, in his run for the presidency in 1972.

As Corey becomes involved with the behind-the-scene machinations of politics, his world widens. Corey is especially taken by a journalist, who becomes his role model, leading him to his life's work in journalist. Corey is also affected by Liam's dreams of a better country, the end of the war in Viet Nam, and a government that aligns itself with the common man's good. Liam recognizes the boy's potential, and assists him with a scholarship to a private school, and later leaves him money for a Harvard education.

The fairy tale unravels, dragging Liam and Corey into the ambiguous black hole created by Bonwiller, and their loss of innocence reflects the national loss of idealism in the 1970s.

What would you do to protect your most sacred dream? How reliable are the human vessels in whom you place your dreams? Can you live with the knowledge that you have compromised yourself?

One reviewer I read thought that the title "America, America" should be heard like a sigh for what might have been, knowledge of what has been lost.