The Last Girls (Hardcover) Review

Can events experienced early in women's lives really have an effect, either constructive or noxious, on the rest of their lives?This is the primary question address by author Lee Smith in her novel The Last Girls.

In 1966, five Southern college "girls" take a rafting trip down the Mississippi River.Now, 30 years later, they have come together once again to re-enact that fateful trip.The primary difference is that on this trip their mode of transportation is a luxurious steamboat and their primary reason for coming together is to journey to New Orleans and scatter the ashes of one of their fellow rafters, "Baby".As the steamboat trip progresses each "girl" (Harriet, Courtney, Catherine and Anna) reminisces about their days at college, the choices they have made over the ensuing years, and the influence Baby has had on each of their lives right down to the dreams they have either pursued or abandoned.

The raft trip appears to be a metaphor for the trip of discovery that each of us experiences as we "sail" through life, complete with the detours taken in an attempt to avoid crashing on the rocks, the effects of a rough trip on our perceptions, and the enjoyment experienced during those periods of smooth sailing.

Lee Smith has managed to capture the essence of what many women experience as they grow older. At some point each one of us explores thememories that have been tempered by time, revisits all of our youthful desires as well as acknowledging the compromises we've made, have accepted the reality of life while continuing to enjoy the fantasy world of romance novels, and ultimately we have searched for an answer to the question of the relevance of our lives.


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Morning by Morning (Hendrickson Christian Classics) [Hardcover] Review

I chanced upon this daily devotional in a local bookshop. I didn't know it was that good. I just bought it because I needed something extra for the morning before going off to work. As I began going through it, I realised how inspiring, motivating and crystal clear Spurgeon was able to explain some of the things about God. Along the way, it gave me many fresh revelations; things that I accepted previously as a Christian but never really understood why. As mentioned, many of the devotionals were inspiring and motivating. I really felt that God was speaking to me so lovingly through Spurgeon's devotionals. I'm not the only one who felt this way. Many of my friends and colleagues whom I shared the devotionals with felt the same way. Spurgeon's devotionals brought them so much closer to God and made some of them so much more passionate about God. This is definitely the first-choice daily devotional to go through first thing after we wake up every morning.

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Product Description:
For tens of thousands of Christians over the last century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon's Morning By Morning has been a daily devotional guide through life's ups and downs. New generations can once again enjoy Spurgeon's beautiful prose and elegant command of the English language in this addition to the Hendrickson Christian Classics series.Morning By Morning offers readers the best of Spurgeon's insight and wise counsel on themes that are as relevant to our day as they were in his day. In this updated version, Spurgeon's work is returned to its former brilliance while retaining the beautiful language of the original King James Version.

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The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Paperback) Review

Once you get past the communist/revolutionary rhetoric of the 60's-70's,a portrait of a bright, intelligent human being is exposed.
The case of Angela Davis is important for many reasons - but most importantly the right to free speech and to believe as you wish. That is what makes this country great.

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On August 7, 1970, a revolt by Black prisoners in a Marin County courthouse stunned the nation. In its aftermath, Angela Davis, an African American activist-scholar who had campaigned vigorously for prisoners' rights, was placed on the FBI's "ten most wanted list." Captured in New York City two months later, she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Her trial, chronicled in this "compelling tale" (Publishers Weekly), brought strong public indictment. The Morning Breaks is a riveting firsthand account of Davis's ordeal and her ultimate triumph, written by an activist in the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements who was intimately involved in the struggle for her release.
First published in 1975, and praised by The Nation for its "graphic narrative of [Davis's] legal and public fight," The Morning Breaks remains relevant today as the nation contends with the political fallout of the Sixties and the grim consequences of institutional racism. For this edition, Bettina Aptheker has provided an introduction that revisits crucial events of the late 1960s and early 1970s and puts Davis's case into the context of that time and our own--from the killings at Kent State and Jackson State to the politics of the prison system today. This book gives a first-hand account of the worldwide movement for Angela Davis's freedom and of her trial. It offers a unique historical perspective on the case and its continuing significance in the contemporary political landscape.

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One Sunday Morning: A Novel [Paperback] Review

If Edith Wharton were alive and writing now, who would she be? Dominick Dunne is the first novelist who comes to mind, especially his first few novels. But Dunne's books are, more often than not, jump-started by a crime; for Wharton, a social gaffe was sufficient to fuel a plot. And Wharton's books were rich in subplots and subtext.

You could, I think, make the case that Amy Ephron is our Wharton. This seems, on the surface, improbable. Ephron lives in Los Angeles, where roots do not run deep and Society goes back only a handful of generations. She has worked --- gasp --- in the movie business, where people with a provenance rarely venture. And she writes novels that are painfully short: ONE SUNDAY MORNING runs to 214 pages only because the book is small and the margins are vast.

What Ephron shares with Wharton: Her books are not so much written as carved. Every word counts. And, like Wharton, every word is about the story --- there are no digressions, no riding of an authorial hobbyhorse. And, like Wharton, Ephron is concerned how a small event can be inflated into a large one.

In ONE SUNDAY MORNING, the event is a view from the window of a Gramercy Park townhouse: young Lizzie Carswell leaving a hotel in broad daylight with Billy Holmes, a man engaged to one of her friends. Lizzie's mother had to go abroad because of a scandal; have mom's degenerate genes been passed on? And what will Clara Hart, Billy's intended, do when she hears the news (as she most assuredly will)?

Wharton material, to be sure. But there's a tension here you wouldn't find in a Wharton novel --- the story is set in 1927, and so, very much bubbling under the Society plot, is the reckless mood of that era. Alcohol. Drugs. Homosexuality. These add a Fitzgeraldian spice to the strict moral tale that is Ephron's legacy from Wharton. And, just in case you're nostalgic for Somerset Maugham, there's a man just back from very interesting travels in Asia. Maybe he's a lost soul. Maybe he's a potential suitor.

This isn't to say that Amy Ephron has cherrypicked her influences (though if she did, she couldn't have done better). You read this book for itself, and for the precise portraits she draws. Sample: "Clara was nursing a gin and tonic. She had a Piaget watch on her right wrist that Billy had picked up for her at an antique store. It had a simple black band and a plain gold rim around its face so the numbers themselves were the set-piece, distinctly Piaget. Billy's linen suit was appropriately wrinkled. It occurred to Mary that they fit into Paris in a way that she never would."

Mary will, of course, get a big surprise. So will the other characters. It turns out that quite a lot can happen in 214 pages --- that is, when the writer is a master storyteller like Amy Ephron.

--- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth

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Morning in the Burned House [Paperback] Review

This book is very aptly titled.The poems feel like waking up in a pile of cinders that used to be a house.Not sad really.Just sort of empty.As if everything has been reduced to stark facts with a few flowerssprouting here and there out of the ashes.There is something profoundlytouching about these poems.They do an amazing job of conveying the spentfeeling after the huge emotional turmoil of losing a parent.One line fromthe book that runs through my head sometimes:"After a pause, shesays--he hears her say--'I love you like salt.'"

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Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (Paperback) Review

Art and life.Life and art.The lines pf demarcation aren't' visible in this richly imagined story of the relationship between Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1847 - 1926) and her older sister, Lydia, who sometimes served as Cassatt's model.Using five of the artist's paintings as springboards the author offers a moving story of courage and creativity, while she renders a fascinating study of the times in which the women lived.
Although suffering painfully, from a terminal illness, Bright's disease, Lydia continues to model for her sister, relentlessly scanning each finished portrait as if it foretold her future.Chessman conceives of Lydia as a study in patience and resignation, imagining thatpainter Edgar Degas, who often visited the sittings, said to Lydia, "You show me how to live, if only I could do it as you do."
In addition to exploring a unique sibling bond "Lydia Cassatt Reading The Morning Paper" suggests aspects of Cassatt's daring life, hints at a liaison with the dynamic Edgar Degas, and presents thumbnail sketches of her interaction with such artists as Renoir and Caillebotte.
Lydia, we learn, died in 1882 while Cassatt lived to create for over thirty more years.
Rather than a sad reflection on a too short life, Chessman, with pitch-perfect prose, has penned a celebration of family, love, and art.
- Gail Cooke

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Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam (Paperback) Review

After reading a number of unnecessarily harsh and, from my point of view, patently untrue "reviews" that disparage this book and its author, I feel obliged to weigh in. I am a Viet Nam nurse vet; when I first read this book several years ago, I was amazed by its honesty and heartened that a sister-in-arms had been brave enough to tell it like it was. I cannot speak to the precise details in Van Devanter's fine and harrowing account of her life before, during and after Viet Nam, but I can say that her experiences during her service ring entirely true to me. I have heard her reputation slandered before, and have wondered why the denegration was so vehement and so personal. Do those who defend their greatly-amended version of our reputation as Viet Nam nurses by tearing down this excellent book feel that we must, for some reason, be portrayed as angels to the world at large? Such a picture would be as false as denouncing us as [prostitute]. We were human beings, with all the fine and base characteristics that entailed. We were young women--most of us still in that amorphous hormonal classification of "late adolescence." We lived on adrenalin and bad food, experienced heartbreak daily, dealt with entirely too manymales, and did a mind-boggling body of work to the best of our abilities in spite of the pain, frustration, sexism and distraction. "Home Before Morning" is the grandmother of female Viet Nam accounts, an important piece of literature, a first-of-its-kind window on the Viet Nam war. It is well-written and evocative, and its author--who certainly must now have earned the peace she found so elusive in this life--deserves our profound respect for publishing it at a time when she must have realized it would draw criticism from those who find such raw truths threatening.
As a writer of fiction that draws on my experiences in Viet Nam, I owe Lynda Van Devanter a great debt. The first among us, she whacked through the jungle of criticism, took the heat, and secured the road for the acceptance of a woman's unique view of what is, by nature, a testosterone-charged world. She deserves a medal, posthumous though it would now be, for grace under fire.
Susan O'Neill, Army nurse-vet and author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam.

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"This incredible story, which plunges us immediately into the bloodiest aspects of the war, is also a suspenseful autobiography that will keep you chewing your fingernails to see if Van Devanter survives any of it at all. She proves herself a natural storyteller. . . . The most extraordinary part in this book is Van Devanter's plight after the war-her attempt to retrieve the love of her family, only to realize they don't want to see her slides, hear her stories; her assignment to menial duties at Walter Reed Army Hospital. . . . How Van Devanter survives all of this to become, incredibly, a stronger person for it is what makes her book so riveting."-San Francisco Chronicle
"An awesome, painfully honest look at war through a woman's eyes. Her letters home and startling images of life in a combat zone-surgeons fighting to save a Vietnamese baby wounded in utero, the ever-present stench of napalm-charred flesh, a beloved priest's gentle humor and appalling death, the casual heroism of her colleagues, a Vietnamese 'Papa-san' trying to talk his dead child back to life, a haunting snapshot dropped by a dying soldier with no face-tell the story of a young American's rude initiation to the best and the worst of humanity."-Washington Post
"Moving, powerful . . . a healing book."-Ms. Magazine
"This book reads like a diary: unguarded, heartfelt. . . . [It] is both moving and valu-able, for reminding us so vividly that war is indeed hell . . . and that its most tested heroes are the doctors and nurses who doggedly labor not just to save life, but also to keep their respect for it, even as their surviving patients are sent out, once more, unto the breach."-Harper's Magazine
"In Vietnam, reality hit fast: Van Devanter's plane was fired on when it landed in Saigon; and after three days of adjustment, she was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital, a 'MASH-type facility' near the Cambodian border. There, the casualties, . . . the personal danger, the fatigue, the heat, rain, and mud, the harassment of officers enforcing petty regulations, and above all the meaninglessness of American involvement rapidly put an end to Van Devanter's blind patriotism, her innocence, and her youth. . . . Van Devanter brings us face to face with the toll that undeclared war took on its combatants."-Kirkus Reviews
"If you read only one work about Vietnam, make this the one. . . . This is the way it was, as seen through the eyes of an army second lieutenant when she was twenty-two. I believe her completely, because this reviewer remembers Vietnam the same way, when he was a nineteen-year-old Marine PFC."-Deseret Sentinel

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First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood (P.S.) [Paperback] Review

First Darling of the Morning is a series of glimpses into author Thrity Umrigar's childhood, growing up in Bombay at a time when the country of India was still new and unstable. The stories start at a very young age with some of Umrigar's earliest memories and continue until she is twenty years old and leaving India for the great uncertainty of the United States.

This isn't a solid memoir, though; there are gaps in between each story, sometimes of a few days, sometimes of a few years. It allows the author to pick and choose which of her memories she wants to share with the reader. Sometimes they are humorous and sometimes they are incredibly painful. Each is a part of a larger story: the tale of Umrigar's coming of age in an uncertain time.

Though First Darling of the Morning is a memoir, it reads like literary fiction. This is the perfect book for those people who want to read more nonfiction but have trouble with writing styles or pacing. The book itself is relatively short and the words flow like a smoothly moving water; Umrigar's writing is simply beautiful. She writes with such longing, in some ways desperate to once again be the child she left behind, to correct all those mistakes she made. However, there is also wisdom behind her words, the realization that she can never return.

Her words also hold great passion. Umrigar portrays what it was to be a conflicted youth in Bombay at a time of unrest. There is no preaching here about what India was or what it has become; it is simply memories, thoughts and observations from someone who lived at a turbulent time. In some ways, India was coming of age at the same time that Umrigar was. And that's what this is at its core: a coming-of-age story. It has all the pain of what it is to grow up, to be a teenager. Anyone of any culture will recognize Umrigar's self-doubt and inner turbulence. You don't need to be Indian to sympathize with her and understand her plight; it is a story that has been told again and again since the beginning of time in a thousand different ways.

However, it is those Indian elements that make First Darling of the Morning special, in many ways Umrigar's tribute to her heritage, to where she came from. It is her signal that she will never forget and never push it aside in shame. She writes proudly with her head held high.

Between the poignancy of the stories and the gravitas and beauty of Umrigar's writing, First Darling of the Morning is a gem that is absolutely not to be missed. I can't recommend it highly enough; I only wish there was more to read. For now, though, readers must settle for this small but satisfying look at one girl's journey to adulthood.

[...]

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