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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'The Lives of Christopher Chant']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76889091
to: The Lives of Christopher Chant (Chrestomanci, #2)byDiana Wynne Jones
I read this series as a 5th grader. In fact, my copy got confiscated by the terrifying 4'9" Mrs. Wasserman because I was reading it under the desk and trying to look innocent.
I was delighted to reread this and realize that these books really ARE captivating, and maybe I did have some literary taste as a kid.
I loved the way the adolescent hero has a terrible shock discovering that he is not adorable, and that he may in fact be an arrogant jerk. What a perfect insight into being 13! And Jones is a master of the dangerous mistrusting gulf between children and the adults around them. How can adults and children understand or trust each other? Who is reliable and who is dangerous? Very -- dare I say it? psychologically realistic-- in a magical alternate universe.
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Blink']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76187715
to: Blink (Paperback)byMalcolm Gladwell
Instinct is king. Our subconscious minds work faster and better than our conscious minds. Tiny splices of information-- first impressions, single glances, can reveal whether marriages will fail, wars will be won, doctors will be sued, or museums will be cheated. Or wait-- no...
Instinct is dangerously unreliable. First impressions are hopelessly biased by unconscious prejudices. ER doctors misdiagnose half of their heart attack patients, cops shoot innocent people, and we can't even tell you if we like Coke or Pepsi better.
This book is sure to be misused and misquoted as being a case for either extreme take on the "value" of instinct. But really Gladwell has collected a mosaic of compelling studies and stories that reflect all aspects of the dangers and beauties of snap judgments.
In the end, the conclusion is that TRAINED instincts are worth trusting-- a firefighter, a general, a surgeon with years of training will have ESP-seeming insights. When the irrelevant information can be filtered out, the elegant and simple "truth" of a situation can be understood.
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<![CDATA[Rebecca
is on page 50 of Blink
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http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/76187715
Rebecca
is on page 50 of 320 of
Blink
Actually, I'm sure I didn't understand it-- at least the 40% of it that was in Spanish, in references to old-school science fiction, and in dense Dominican Republic meta-gangster prose.
But I still couldn't put it down-- even feeling like I had no idea what was going on with the narrator's crazy voice.
The book is successful because even if you're dumb (me) you can still enjoy it on a basic plot level. Then if you're smarter (other people), it gets even better.
Level 1, what you get out of it, even if you are completely and totally lost: fat nerd has a short strange life, dies tragically but maybe just the way he wanted to go.
Level 2: A family in the Dominican Republic has success and catastrophic failures under an oppressive 3rd world regime. They are clobbered with issues of gender and race, and then move to New Jersey, where the next generation defines itself in new American/Dominican ways, with varying degrees of success. Oh yeah and they're cursed.
Does that make Level 3?: They're cursed. Or maybe blessed, too-- there's a sort of guardian spirit that seems to appear at key moments. But horrible-- REALLY shockingly gawdawful things keep happening to them, and when they do, there's a creepy faceless man there, making sure the suffering continues. But maybe he's just a....
Level 4:.... manifestation of the pervasive evil of a psychopathic dictatorship that destroyed (made??) the D.R. and continues to shape the lives of its citizens and emigrants? Or maybe that evil dictator (Trujillo) was just a superhuman manifestation of the evil that lurks in the heart of the D.R., and the potential in all individuals to be demonically cruel. And so maybe the Family Curse is more of a Human Curse-- life means people can be great or they can be evil?
Or Level 5 (and at this point I'm getting all foggy): Maybe... the whole thing is BS, spun by an unreliable narrator out of the shreds (supposedly) of a friend's (allegedly) life. He spatters the text with footnotes and asides about D.R. history, but also with odd metatextual references to his own writing process.... it leaves the whole thing in a funky post-modern fog.
And I couldn't put it down!
There are some great sci-fi and fantasy references (I don't speak DR hoodlum or Spainglish, so I had to get my giggles from the in-speak I DID understand). Sandman, LOTR, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury and hundreds of others that I didn't catch, all get really elegant little one line shout-outs.
Here's one example of the dense stacked references:
256: "It is a wasteland, our own homegrown sertao, resembled the irradiated terrains from those end-of the-world scenarios that Oscar loved so much-- Outer Azua was the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine."
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75950460
to: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (Paperback)byAdele Faber bookshelves: parenting,
teaching
The parenting gems I've gleaned from my favorite parenting books (Playful Parenting, Parenting with Love and Logic, and heck, even The No Cry Discipline Solution) all appeared, 20 years earlier, in this great little book.
The authors present wonderful general principles-- which I appreciate in parenting books, rather than annoying little prescriptions. And they balance the generalities with really good concrete tips for applying their ideas. Give choices. Rephrase. Allow problem solving. Name emotions. Help kids break out of bad roles. Have natural consequences rather than punishments. etc. etc. etc. I want to make copies of their hints and tape them all over the house.
I feel like even just a couple of days after reading this book, I'm a calmer parent, and my kid feels more secure.
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Howl's Moving Castle']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75261289
to: Howl's Moving Castle (Mass Market Paperback)byDiana Wynne Jones
Just perfect YA fantasy. I want to have it for breakfast.
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23347303
to: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Paperback)byAzar Nafisi
The temptation when writing to an American audience about elsewhere is to rely on exoticism and anecdotes of cultural differences. This is especially a temptation when talking about the "inscrutable" Middle East, Persia, The Orient: picture silken balloon pants, martyrs, and veiled child-brides. We may be shocked, we may pity, but we certainly don't empathize.
Nafisi's memoir sticks with me because-- yes-- it's about her life in Tehran through revolution and war-- but more because I feel that she and her characters are Just Like Me.
It's eerie, really. Her tendency to vaguely wave off confounding political details and instead include the whole text of her class lecture on The Great Gatsby, or her obsession with coffee ice cream (with some coffee poured over it, and a sprinkling of walnuts). She thinks in terms of authors and fictions and the dances and boundaries they can make plain in chaotic reality.
This book is an English major's delight. She speaks our language: Revealing the grinding realities of life under a terrifying regime through her experience reading and teaching English literature in Tehran.
About the regime itself... it seemed like science fiction, the way a progressive nation threw itself a thousand years back in time to an imagined religious golden era-- reinstating Islamic laws lowering the legal age of marriage for girls to NINE, and legally changing the value of a woman to one-half of a man. This disenfranchised the non-Muslim population, but also degraded the Muslim religion. What spiritual meaning can the veil have when death squads with rifles enforce it on the streets?
The rational voices were drowned out by the insanity of religious extremism. It made me wonder-- how tenuous is our own hold on a safely secular democracy? Could the scales switch so suddenly and completely in our own country to totalitarian extremism? We imagine-- of course not. But why not? Terrifying.
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/44413825
to: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Hardcover)byLaurel Thatcher Ulrich bookshelves: smart-stuff
This book is not a diatribe, in spite of the veiny-armed woman on the cover. The title, of bumper-sticker fame, is not a clear statement but a touchstone-- a demonstration of slipperiness of interpretation, of history, of ways of defining women.
This book is a thoughtful and close look at women and history. Women looking at history, history looking back at women, women lost to history and where they went... I'm afraid I can't do justice to the delicate and enthralling way she weaves together medieval manuscripts, suffragettes, second-wave feminism, slave narratives, Mormon pioneer sisters, and folk art.
I love Ulrich's attention to detail, and the masterful way she illuminates the connections between seemingly unrelated people, events and texts.
Reading this was like enjoying a graduate seminar with a wise and confident mentor. I want to delve more into these sources. And give Ulrich a big hug.
Some good bits:
227: Confronting these shifting meanings, some people wonder whether history has any value at all. At any given moment it is hard to believe or what to trust. That's why details matter. Details provide the contexts... Details keep us from falling into the twin snares of "victim history" and "hero history." Details let us out of the boxes created by slogans.
169: Some people think of "folk art" ast static and unchanging, but the women and men who create it are often dealing with a heavy load of history. They demonstrate their creativity by adapting traditional forms to changing circumstances.
155: Representations of work are seldom neutral. In any setting, a wise person will ask, "where is this praise of my labor coming from? And whose interests does it serve?"
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<![CDATA[Rebecca added 'The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48576199
to: The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (Paperback)byJames McBride
Just goes to show ya-- people are complicated. I was intrigued by the back-cover-blurb on this book: how does a Jewish woman raise her twelve (half) black children in Harlem in the 50s and 60s, found a baptist storefront church and send every single one of them off to college?
If it sounds like a clear-cut saint's tale, it's not. Mommy, as her kids call her, is secretive, a bit unpredictable, damaged and unyielding.
Her son, the author, recalls his childhood, puzzling out his own ethnicity. He never really lands-- how can he? This is America, there is no landing place with race. And we learn a bit more about Mommy's painful past. She doesn't land either-- she doesn't resolve her past. I sort of like that-- it's like life. Life doesn't neatly tie itself up in a ribbon.
I loved this as an affectionate human portrait of a woman and her family trying to survive, while colliding with enormous and terrifying issues of race, class, and power.
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<![CDATA[new comment from Rebecca]]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72174703
Rebecca's review of
The Case for God byKaren Armstrong
Exactly! She sounds like an inspiring and heretical grandma nun-- as soon as I heard the interview I slapped this on my to-read list.
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