Several years ago, at the height of my work in the international movement to end the genocide in Darfur, I began writing about books on the Petaluma Argus Courier’s website to occasionally take my mind off the depressing topic of genocide. I thought that reading widely, and writing about what I had read, would be a good way to renew my sense of hope in life that was being challenged by a daily encounter with one of the most hopeless… Read More »
You Look Fine, Really by Christie Mellor (New York: William Morrow, 2010) Should a man read a book that is written for women? When I was nineteen, I accidentally discovered my sister’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I remember feeling guilty about reading it. It wasn’t as bad as reading her diary (which I never did), but the act of reading it was imbued with feelings of transgression and apprehension. Was I, a teenage boy on the verge of manhood,… Read More »
I have to admit that I’m having a torrid love affair with words. (God, I love that word “torrid.”) Each book I read teaches me something new about words – not just new words, but also new ways to think about words. Like any writer or reader, there are certain words that I like better than others. While no one ever gets excited over a pronoun, whose heart doesn’t pound a little faster when they hear “expeditious” or “relentless?” That’s… Read More »
Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott (New York: Riverhead, 2010) In her new book, Imperfect Birds, Anne Lamott wonders if an invisible evil has descended on the small town of Landsdale in Marin County. The first sentence sets the tone for the entire book: “There are so many evils that pull on our children.” The novel ends with a quasi-religious community exorcism in the town square, where local teens gather every night for an impromptu banquet of sex and drugs, as… Read More »
One of my favorite things about the Internet is that it allows us to read local news from small towns across the country. Case in point: public library book sales. (Okay, I have too much time on my hands.) Here are a few of my favorite ones from April’s crop. Norwalk, Connecticut. Stan Siegel, director of public information for the Norwalk Public Library, described the procedure for buying books: “On the first day of the sale, all the hardcovers are… Read More »
Oprah commissioned a designer self-help book from Deepak Chopra. With only one published copy, the price of the book, “Me,” was $400,000. “Me” was number one on Oprah’s book list for nine months in a row, even though only one copy had been printed. Oprah appears to have solved the pesky problem of negative book reviews by not letting anyone borrow her copy. Upcoming sequel: “More Me.” “Ten Steps to Finding the Best Self-Help Book for You” is now available… Read More »
My Life on Hemlock Street: A Brooklyn Memoir by Arlene Mandell There is a quiet, tender mood in the seventeen vignettes of Arlene Mandell’s unfinished memoir that brings to life a vanished world. She gives us a glimpse of Hemlock Street in Brooklyn through the window of her brown brick apartment building. Her humor and abiding love for its diverse and occassionally quirky people radiate through descriptions of the neighborhood. The memoir opens with a gentle touch of irony: “When… Read More »
The Womyn’s Club at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was planning to hold a public burning of pornography on April 15, but fire officials objected due to the danger of air pollution. Undeterred, the Womyn’s Club switched to paper shredders. CENSORSHIP? The event was designed to increase awareness that “pornography has taken over women’s sexualities and destroyed women’s humanity, and that buying pornography supports and promotes the industry and perpetuates men’s violence against women.” Organizers hoped to provoke a… Read More »
Feeding Strays by Stefanie Freele (Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2009) Every reader has guilty pleasures. Mine include the Spenser novels by the late Robert Parker. They’re predictable. Like guilty pleasures should be. Spenser is always cool, always nails the bad guy and always has the love of a good woman. Authors of perennial sequels are careful not to stray too far from the formula their readers have come to expect. They have guilty pleasures too. After reading the first… Read More »
Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain,” has written a sequel called – drum roll, please – “The Male Brain.” She says that the male brain is wired to “search for and seek out fertile females to mate with.” So most men will ogle attractive women even if they’re married, but not all of them will have extramarital affairs. Brizendine claims that men like Tiger Woods, Jesse James and John Edwards are “pathological” exceptions. On the other hand, they might… Read More »