This slender book is subtitled "A Memoir," but "A Meditation" might be more appropriate - it's a reflection very specifically on how one tragic incide...moreThis slender book is subtitled "A Memoir," but "A Meditation" might be more appropriate - it's a reflection very specifically on how one tragic incident in a person's life can shape the rest of their days. Half a Life opens with Darin Strauss's tragedy: At age 18, while he was driving some friends to play miniature golf, a girl on a bicycle swerves in front of Darin and is struck before he has time to react. She is taken to the hospital, but dies soon after. At age 36, Darin writes a memoir that reflects on the ways the second 18 years of his life were impacted by the accident everyone agreed wasn't his fault but that nevertheless crippled him with guilt for years.
The title gets at several things. Most concretely, the book talks only about the half of Darin's life that followed the accident. However, the title also alludes to the demand the dead girl's mother made of Darin, that he promise to do everything twice as well because he was living for two people now - only half his life was his, because the other half was spent remembering Celine and hoping he was experiencing enough to fill two lives. Finally, there's the fact that Darin admits at the end that he's left a lot out of this "memoir" in order to focus on his struggle to come to terms with the accident; the book makes it feel like the accident was the singular event in Darin's life, and while I certainly don't mean to slight the significance of it, I do think that in the end this book only tells about half of Darin's post-accident life, the half that struggled to make sense of the fact that he had unwittingly killed a person before he'd even finished high school.
Half a Life definitely succeeds at being a meditation on the impact of tragedy on our lives, and it's worth a read from this perspective. However, as a memoir, it comes up a bit short - I still feel like I've only had half a glimpse at Darin's life, and honestly, I was relieved to learn at the end that he had plenty of life experiences that weren't completely fixated on the accident. You're really only getting half of Darin's life in this book, if that, but you do walk away with a much stronger understanding of how completely a tragedy can reshape a person's life.(less)
A very mixed bag of food essays. The book is more or less structured to alternate between longer (~6 page) essays by established food writers or chefs...moreA very mixed bag of food essays. The book is more or less structured to alternate between longer (~6 page) essays by established food writers or chefs and shorter (~2 page) "In The Trenches" essays from Regular People. Each writer provides at least one recipe, and the writers of the longer essays also get a page or so to list a few of their favorite cookbooks.
The notable exception to the rule that the longer essays are by people working in the food industry is the inclusion of a piece from Stephen King, who phones in what is unquestionably the worst essay in the book and whose recipe offering is a cake recipe he got off allrecipes.com that features his suggestion that there's no point in making your own icing when frosting in a can tastes so good. I couldn't help feeling that this essay was included simply for the name recognition, though I think having essays from Mario Batali and Mark Bittman already lends more than enough weight to a book of food essays.
The book is subtitled "Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families," though I think that only means that the writers had to have children to be allowed to participate in this project, because while each essay is about food, only some talk about their families - maybe half the essays actually mentioned cooking for or with the writer's children. The writers are all men, most of them are from New York, and some of them enjoy name-dropping at irrelevant times ("I once cooked this for Bruce Springsteen and his mom"). None of the essays particularly struck me as being five-star pieces of writing, and I have to admit most of them were entertaining in the moment but quickly blurred together so that it's hard for me to say in retrospect which ones stood out (I think the Thomas Beller essay, told in storylike vignettes, may have been my favorite). This is the sort of book that I don't regret reading, but I can't imagine myself recommending to anyone.
I did get really excited about cookbooks while reading this, though, and may pick up a few new ones based on hearty endorsements from various writers in this book.(less)
Although Oscar Hijuelos is known for his fiction - his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, made him the first Latino to win the Pulitzer...moreAlthough Oscar Hijuelos is known for his fiction - his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, made him the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction - this memoir was the first book of his that I'd read, and I went into it not knowing anything about him. He has an unusual story; the American-born son of Cuban immigrants, he was hospitalized for a year at age four and, during that time, surrounded by the English language, he lost his ability to speak Spanish and returned home to find he could barely communicate with his mother. He spent the rest of his childhood surrounded by Cuban culture but unable to feel a part of it - his pale skin and hair only contributed to a general sense that he wasn't like the rest of his family and neighbors.
Thoughts Without Cigarettes is something of a rags-to-riches tale; he describes the squalor of his childhood apartment in New York and admits that he barely graduated from high school, though he spent the next several years working his way through various City University of New York institutions and became a first-generation college graduate who found himself fascinated with music and literature. To hear him tell it, he stumbled into success in spite of his efforts to the contrary - his self-doubt and lingering sense of being an outsider or impostor caused him to decline a number of opportunities along the way, ranging from the chance to study at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop to an offer to write movie scripts.
Hijuelos writes with a frank, confessional style that I found very enjoyable, though he has a tendency to let his thoughts run together so that sometimes an entire paragraph turns out to be a single meandering sentence. I couldn't always keep all of the people in his life straight and sometimes couldn't remember which person he was talking about when he'd reintroduce someone's first name several chapters later, but that didn't stop me from wanting to learn more about his life and follow the book through to the end.
I do have to admit that while I assume he quit smoking at some point, he only ever talks about what a heavy smoker he was and never actually addresses why he might have written his memoir without cigarettes, leaving me a little confused about his choice of title. I figured that at some point, him quitting smoking would become a plot point, and it never did.(less)
The publisher wants so badly for you to believe that this is some kind of latter-day Lolita that I actually re-read Lolita before starting this one so...moreThe publisher wants so badly for you to believe that this is some kind of latter-day Lolita that I actually re-read Lolita before starting this one so that I'd have an accurate point of comparison. (We're also reading Lolita in my book club later this summer, so I had multiple motives here.) The beginning does feel very, very much like a modernized Lolita, except that the love interest instead of an underage nymphet is an Asian prostitute. There are also just enough "Prufrock" quotes slipped in to be troubling. However, just when you think this is a lesser rehash of some of the best works in the English language, the book heads off in a different direction and actually becomes really enjoyable in its own right.
The narrator, Alfred Buber, grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and was sent to America as a teenager to avoid military service after the country declared its independence from England. Starting from zero, he becomes a successful lawyer, but he can't stop fixating on his unattractive appearance and believes no woman could desire him. Though he has the occasional romance, he lives a solitary life and eventually cooks up the idea that he could find gratification by visiting the women of some notorious locale in an unspecified southeast Asian country. On his first visit there, he falls in love with a quiet, bookish girl in the Star of Love Bar and begins fixating on what it would be like, how wholly it would ruin his reputation, were he do to what he desires and bring her home with him.
At the beginning I felt like this book was trying too hard to be a modern Lolita and found that off-putting, but it very quickly becomes something different, to the point where I wish the author/editor/publisher hadn't tried so hard to cultivate the Nabokov comparison - it's not accurate and actually takes away from the enjoyment of the book. This would have been a four-star book for me had the final chapters not called into question much of the story the narrator lays out - a few incidents arise that make it clear that not all of his story has been accurate, and after growing somewhat for him, I found it hard to reconcile my feelings at the end. This isn't smooth-talking Humbert Humbert, who gives you ample opportunity to recognize that he's lying to you; this is neurotic Alfred Buber, who seems to be laying out feelings he hasn't been able to tell any of the people in his life, but then tricks you at the end by presenting contradictions that throw his whole story into question. There's a really good story in here that, unfortunately, gets sold short by the ending. (less)
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