Hissing Cousins by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer

Hissing Cousins: The Untold Rivalry of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth

By Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer

I was introduced to Hissing Cousins when the authors visited my library a year or two ago. I bought a copy of the book and looked forward to reading it because they had brought the history to life in a chatty way. Of course, as I have difficulty finding time to read printed books, I eventually had to buy a Kindle copy and found the writing style to be just as accessible and vivid as the author’s presentation was.

Eleanor and Alice were a part of prominent families so they weren’t complete strangers to fame but they definitely carved their own mark in the world during their lifetimes.

Alice was the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, a larger than life figure who she adored. She did not have an easy early life; her mother died when she was just two days old. Her father was so distraught that he didn’t have much to do with her for some time after that. The raising of Alice was left to an Aunt until Teddy remarried and his second wife insisted on bringing Alice to live with them. When Teddy became president, Alice became a media darling.

Alice and Eleanor had often spent time together in their formative years as Teddy and Eleanor’s father, Elliot, were brothers. But more than that, they were both partially raised by Auntie Bye. Both of Eleanor’s parents had died when she was around 8 years old.

Though she had helped with the campaign to elect him, Eleanor hoped her life would be busy but out of the limelight when her husband, Franklin Roosevelt, took office as president some years later. However she soon found herself pulled into many issues and taking a very active and vocal role.

The two women maintained an odd tug and pull of affection and rivalry throughout their years. Alice was a staunch Republican and Eleanor an avowed Democrat. They were both outspoken on their causes though Alice in a more sarcastic tone, enjoying being the center of attention and influence, while Eleanor was more earnest and worked very hard to champion the causes of the disenfranchised and downtrodden.

There is so much vivid detail and little scenes are brought distinctively to life. I was absorbed by this book and read it slowly, fascinated. I highly recommend it.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

What did I expect going into this book? I knew it had something to do with book banning and burning but I didn’t know much else.

Overall, it’s a really good story, well told in terms of plot and use of language. It’s a bit strange because it feels dated to the time it was written, 1953, due to some of the terminology or ideas – the wives who stay home and just watch T.V., medicating themselves with sleeping pills, and how almost everyone is smoking.

At the same time, it feels terribly relevant today with the imagery of people watching reality television and sports instead of engaging with each other or giving themselves time to think about and research ideas.

I started listening to the book on audio and I think that may have been a mistake. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is read by Ray Bradbury himself. In a way, it’s nice to have the author, and such an iconic one at that, reading his own work. But it’s really terrible listening to him. His speech is not clear a lot of the time and it’s just unpleasantly taxing trying to follow what he is saying while I’m driving in the car. I don’t recommend the audio. I got the ebook on Kindle but his voice was kind of stuck in my head by that point.

It was a shorter book than I expected. Only 46,118 words, I found out later. Even the audio was only five discs. There was a sixth disc in the container but the book ended on the fifth disc.

The main character, Montag, is a fireman. But fireman don’t put out fires in this place and time. They are called only when a stash of books is suspected. They go to search out and burn the books, houses having been made fire proof. The people who live there are either sent to an insane asylum or jail.

The premise is that the ideas contained in books just make people depressed and confused. But getting rid of the books doesn’t seem to have helped as the suicide rate continues to rise.

Montag has his world shaken up by his own wife’s possible attempted suicide. Did she mean to take all the pills or not? Also, the appearance and then disappearance of a young woman who asks a lot of questions, Clarisse. But we keep seeing Montag look at a vent grill in his house, and something is hidden there. Apparently Montag has had questions for a while.

As I said, it’s a fast read, strong on action and some interesting imagery, and a whole lot of questions. I definitely would recommend it and am glad I read it.

"Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents."
"So that's what I am."
"There's some of it in all of us."

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour

Education of a Wandering Man

Louis L’Amour

I chose this book on the very strong recommendation of a library patron and because our book club theme this month was “something to do with education or school.” I’ve always enjoyed memoirs by writers so I was hopeful, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it quite as much as I have.

Like most writer’s writing their memoirs or a collection of reminiscences, the anecdotes are fascinating – illuminating and funny, often self-deprecating. I laughed frequently or nodded my head in agreement many times. I also didn’t expect to share a world view quite so much with someone who wrote westerns, as they are not something I’ve ever particularly read, but I found his thoughtful ruminations very familiar.

 “One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend. And there have been many such.”

L’Amour left school when he was only fifteen and traveled extensively around the U.S. doing whatever jobs he could put his hand to and to other countries in the American Merchant Marine. Later he would see some of the world as part of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. He asked questions and the world opened to him, further igniting his inquisitive nature. He didn’t ask much of people monetarily, making his own way but two anecdotes stuck with me.

He has a lot to say about migrant workers of the early 1900’s for he was one –

“Over the years the terms applied to wanderers have been confused until all meaning has been lost. To begin with, a bum was a local man who did not want to work. A tramp was a wanderer of the same kind, but a hobo was a wandering worker and essential to the nation’s economy.”

And having lived through the depression, he creates a wonderful picture of that difficult era –

“The Depression brought a different kind of drifter to the railroads and highways, and only one who bridged that period can grasp the depth of the change. The Depression hoboes had little of that carefree, cheerful attitude of the earlier hobo. They were serious, often frightened men.”

His humble inquisitiveness, that led him to question people everywhere he went and for people to open up to him, fueling his questions further, is summed up here –

“Questions must be formulated from knowledge and I knew too little for that. I was a young man in a hurry, wanting to know all that had been thought, pondered, speculated upon.

“The world was out there, a big wonderful, and exciting place of which I knew too little. In my reading I was constantly coming upon the names of scholars, historians, or political leaders of whom I knew nothing at all, though often enough there were names that I remembered from Dinner-table talk at home. Reading Don Quixote was marvelous stuff, but I needed to know more about Cervantes himself and the world in which he lived.”

“What had men thought? What had men believed? How did they come by those thoughts and beliefs? How had men learned to govern themselves? Were the processes the same everywhere?”

I had an advisor who once told me, take what classes you want, to give you a rounded view. What you need to know for your job, you’ll learn on the job. I’ve found that to be true, and heard it echoed here.

“As can be guessed from the title, this book is about education, but not education in the accepted sense. No man or woman has a greater appreciation for schools than I, although few have spent less time in them. No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.”

 “No one can ‘get’ an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process. If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.”

“Personally, I believe children should be taught to see, to observe, and to subject what they have seen to analysis, and this in the earliest grades.”

I couldn’t agree more! He also speaks a great deal about being a writer and learning to write well.

“’Where do you get your ideas?’ If a person does not have ideas, he had better not even think of becoming a writer. But ideas are everywhere. There are ideas enough in any daily newspaper to keep a man writing for years.”

I found myself bookmarking page after page as I read. I’ve still 30% of the book to go but I’m enjoying it far too much to rush it. I highly recommend it.

 “This book began as an account of how I educated myself, but it has often wandered far afield. Yet I have ever been a wanderer, drifting through fields of books and finding blossoms wherever they might bloom. Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.”

Year of Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes

Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

by Shonda Rhimes

I started watching Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, back when it first went on the air and was immediately in love with the writing. I adored the characters of Meredith Grey and Christina Yang. I loved George. I watched it every Thursday for years, until life intervened. Six months ago, I started going back and watching it from the beginning, as time permits. (Which means I’m only through episode five or so.) But the writing still inspires me.

A friend recommended this book to me a year or more ago but it took me this long to pick it up; I'm sorry I waited. It was wonderful! As a woman, writer, and mother, there was so much that resonated for me. I found it truly inspirational and just plain fun.

Now, Rhimes starts out by saying that she loves to lie, but I find more truth in her fiction than a lot of other places in life.

Her tone is completely conversational, as if you were right there with her. About having to choose between toilet paper and red wine and the toilet paper not always winning, she says,  “Did I just see you give me a look? Was that . . . did you just judge me? No, you are not about to come up into this book and judge me. That is not how we are going to start off this journey.”

Gotta love it. I’m not sure I know how to write a review of this book that could possibly be better than the woman’s own words, so forgive me if this is mostly quotes. I’ll editorialize where I can.

“There’s a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. Everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.”

I call it the writer’s high. It’s incredible and I totally agree.

The book, the year, started with her sister telling her, “You never say yes to anything.”

Shonda is an introvert, an extreme introvert, highly gifted with words and, it seems to me, highly intelligent. Saying yes to things is terrifying, but she begins doing it anyway, even if it finds her “licking the dust at the bottom of the Xanax bottle because oh yeah, I don’t take Xanax anymore, it’s been twelve years since Xanax was my friend.”

She says yes to giving the commencement speech at Dartmouth, hyperventilates and forgets about it for five and a half months, leaving her two weeks to write the speech.

“When I first got a publicist, I told him and his team that my main reason for having a publicist was so that I never ever had to do any publicity. Everyone thought this was a joke. I was not joking.”

“It’s one thing for people to know you are nervous and have stage fright. They are sympathetic to that. But how do you admit to people that you don’t remember the biggest interview of your career? That is weird.”

But this is who she is. Nature or nurture? I think largely nature and her parents let her be her own person.

“I was just an unusual kid. Lucky for me, my parents held unusual in high regard. And so when I wanted to play with the cans in the pantry for hours on end, my mother didn’t tell me to stop messing around with the food and go somewhere else to play. Instead, she declared it a sign of creativity, closed the pantry door and let me be.”

Lucky for all of us.

“As Watergate played out on the tiny black and white set my mother had dragged into the kitchen and balanced on a chair just outside the pantry doors, my three-year-old imagination made a world of its own. The big cans of yams ruled over the peas and green beans while the tiny citizens of Tomato Paste Land planned a revolution designed to overthrow the government. There were hearings and failed assassination attempts and resignations . . . Man, that pantry was fun.”

Being asked to be on Jimmy Kimmel? Not so much.

“My left eye starts to twitch. I tell myself that it’s okay, because it is twitching only in what I am sure is the tiniest, most unnoticeable way. Nobody can tell it is twitching but me.

‘Wow, your eye is really twitching,’ Joan Rater, head writer at Grey’s anatomy, informs me with great authority. The whole writing staff crows around to peer at my eyeball jumping around in my head.

‘Honey,’ my toddler, Emerson, takes my face in her hands and gravely informs me, ‘your eye is broken. It’s busted, honey.’”

The Mommy Scorecard, kids, dreams and doing. This book is a memoir based around the idea of saying yes, so it’s a series of vignettes that are interrelated but not necessarily following one right into another. It’s a window on her world -  vivid, honest, engaging, funny and wonderful. I’m so glad she decided to share it. Take advantage of that.

Ramblings of a Lonely Stranger by G.H. Monroe

The Ramblings of a Lonely Stranger

By G.H. Monroe

I should probably say that I may be somewhat biased about this author’s poetry as he is a member of the writer’s group I run through our library.  However, I feel that pulls out imagery and concepts that are eminently relatable.

“Poetry is like a special cable that allows me to share the aches, joys and longings of my soul with the souls of others.” Those are aches, joys and longings that many of us have felt and described in a beautiful way.

“I believe that a poem is born in a moment of feeling or inspired thought.”

“Someone says something that stirs a feeling in me, something that makes profound sense to me, deep within my soul, and I think, “That’s a poem!”

This is a short volume, a collection of some of those poems. Capturing people, feelings, moments in time. Inspiration.

I’ll share my take on ten of my favorite poems from this collection.

Big Wes – the loss of a father and how it comes back upon the son time and time again. “In that moment it hits me like a steel-toed kick to the midsection and all of the wind leaves my soul.”

That’s an incredibly vivid sensory image of being punched but taken into the metaphysical by the wind leaving the soul instead of the lungs or diaphragm. The simple change up bothers, irritates. I’m not sure I like it but it gets under the skin.

Losing Mother – Not just in the physical sense but as she loses her faculties, losing the mother that he knew. “I see you hoping, no, longing, that one might drift down to the dry ground and spark the raging fires of your recollection.” A mournful and painful image, aching for the way things used to be.

Fine Art – I like this one for not just the appreciation of beauty but of the manners that make one FEEL the beauty. “Your focus, like your manner, is soft.” And “The gentle smile, the downy shoulders and indulgent eyes.” The indulgent eyes speak of the subjects manner rather than their physical characteristics, but both are what make her beautiful to the observer.

Deliverance – A poetic turn of phrase helps the reader experience the oppressiveness of the summer air before a storm. “The stifling shroud that hangs in the summer air brings burden to even the simplest of acts.” “Breaths come with difficulty, as if drawn through plastic wrap.” Then the cool relief of a thunderstorm sweeps through. “This breeze, pregnant with the scent of distant lakes, holds the promise of cool, wet relief.” Who hasn’t smelled that water in the air? It is one of my favorite scents, wish they could capture THAT in an air freshener!

Summer in a Jar – A collection of simple couplets, like glasses being poured. Twilight hours, dinner, lawn chairs, lemonade in a glass with ice, sun setting, children chasing fireflies. It’s an unusual sort of poetry for Monroe, but well-chosen for this poem. “They play and laugh, both near and far, catching summer . . . in a jar.”

Forever Road – Begins with a musing on the frailty of humans, how our memories are flawed and we lose the most precious experiences all too readily. A moment caught in time, driving down the road with a beautiful woman, wishing the road could go on forever. But if memory goes on, then can these moments persist? “Perhaps . . . if I can keep just this one memory . . . it might.”

A Million Prayers – “Miss me please, as I miss you, wonder if I’m well.” “ . . . foolishly, I hold out hope to write a kinder end.” Cuts to the quick.

Life in Two Days – “Our lives are lived in two days.” The author speaks of the impatience of youth using well-chosen almost universal longings – Christmas, license, graduation. Then he uses the snooze button image to move us suddenly forward in time. “…find ourselves smack in the middle of life’s second day, whose hours pass like the blurred faces on a training racing past.” So true, waiting, waiting, waiting and now the days rush past. “We begin to hear each grain of sand crash to the bottom of our mortal hourglasses.” (I wish that had been hourglass instead of hourglasses.)

Slow Violence – A poem on how media loves the flashy violence but has no interest in in the slow violence of the things that hurt us in the long term. I agree but I also think it’s part of our nature, how we lose track of the long term problems when we feel helpless to change them.

“Thousands homeless and hungry? Humans too poor for medical care? Reel in the news trucks, go back to your regularly scheduled lives. There’s nothing more to see here.”

But is it because we don’t care or because we have to cope with our own lives and don’t see what we can do? Perhaps a little of both. As the author once said to me, “I care, just perhaps not as much as you do about the things that directly affect you.”

I Hate You for That – “My walls are sturdy, they are tall. Tirelessly, I add more stones each day, yet every day you peek over the top . . . and I hate you for that.” Love it! The introvert and the extrovert tearing down his wall.

A great collection of poetry to help you feel connected to the rest of the world.

The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel by Magdalena Zyzak (Guest review by Tarren Young)

The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel 
by Magdalena Zyzak
Guest review by Tarren Young

I have been pondering on how to give this book a proper review for several days now.

I received this book as a gift  at Christmas. I’m thrilled that “Santa” knows my tastes fairly well. I also know where Santa found the book. Santa stopped off at the Dollar Tree late one night after a long day in his workshop, to pick up a few odds and ends, and decided to meander through the books. Now, one does not typically associate high “literary” works of writing with Dollar Stores. But, if you are willing to browse through them with a little bit of patience and diligence, there are often some rare gems to be found.

I did not read the reviews of this book until after I had already started this book. (I rarely do, because I do not want the reviews to sway me one way or another...despite the fact that that is the sole purpose of the reviews.) At first, I was rather disappointed to see that it received terrible reviews, right down to “how does this crap get published?” because I was thoroughly enjoying the story!

This is her first published novel (if I am understanding right, she has moved into film directing) and the inside flap clearly states, “Magdalena Zyzak’s rolicking debut is a literary mash-up: equal parts bawdy farce, picaresque adventure and comic love story.” It makes me wonder if the people who have reviewed the book completely forgot the part about it being a farce and comical love story?

Granted, the time frame is 1939, and the characters are about to experience an event in a dark time in history. The characters are so secluded in the country that, really, that they can’t help but be their under-educated selves and, for them to be any other way, would be a disservice. I am also fine with there being some bawdy humor touching up against a dark time in history, because we all have found light and laughter even during some dark times.

The story revolves around Barnabas Pierkiel, although the other characters like to attempt to overthrow the stage occasionally which makes for a laugh out loud read for me. I often read passages aloud to my husband or would have him read the passages if there were little ears around (yes, sorry, this is not a PG rated book.) The narrator relates the story of Barnabas and the disastrous family he comes from . . . a long line of men who have somehow, seemingly become cursed to lose their limbs and shortly thereafter their lives, due to random, unpredictable, unfortunate kinds of events. How Barnabas tells his story, when he actually gets the chance to tell his own story, often left me laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face. You both feel sorry for him as he seems so uneducated, yet at the same time, one of the most educated in his very rural (very made up) country, Scalvusia.

Going back to the aforementioned stage-stealing characters and the quirky narrator, the story does change from first to third person perspective, often in the same chapter, but for me it was never abruptly. It was similar to the narrator in Lemony Snickett’s, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Who knows? Maybe that series is what inspired her to write the story in the way that she did. Sadly, even though I did not find an issue with this, many reviewers did.

Trying to stay on topic for our book club theme of crime for January, I really wanted this to be my book choice. I am a very slow reader and I read this book in two weeks, which is fast for me. I am not going to say there were not any crimes in this book, as there most certainly were! At first, I thought, how boring would that be if it was all just petty crimes? But the petty crimes add up eventually, interlocking like puzzle pieces and fitting together in the end...mostly. You may have to slam that last piece in with a sledgehammer because it’s a bit warped, but, it’ll fit.

Two gypsy sisters (supposedly) are renting a house as they decided to stay behind when their caravan went through the town a while back. Barnabas is madly in love with the oldest of the two sister’s Roosha. Sadly, every time Barnabas tries to make an impression on her, it doesn’t go well. He is usually tripping over something or being slammed into by someone. She turns her nose up at every attempt, and for good reason - she is supposedly a mistress to one of only handful of prominent men in the town. Or, at least the man she is mistress to thinks he is a prominent man. Personally, I think he’s a pompous jerk, but that’s just me. Alright, every once in a blue moon he’ll have a redeeming quality, but still a pretty arrogant windbag.

It is these gypsies that eventually fall prey to the hideous “crime” from the community. Other people fall prey as well to minor crimes such as being beaten up and having things stolen from them. But the biggest crime is blaming the gypsies for an event that the people of the town want to see as murder when it is actually a suicide.

Perhaps the people want to have a scapegoat because it is the pastor of the town who commits suicide. It is often hard for people of religious backgrounds to understand why a religious figure would do that, and therefore, they think, it must have been murder. The mayor’s wife heads up a committee to root out the gypsies and have them pay for their crime.

Despite the anger I felt at the characters trying to blame innocent people for crimes they did not commit, I did really enjoy this book. That is, right up until the last two chapters. The last two chapters really, to me, did not connect to the story in any coherent way. Abstractly, I’m sure that they do connect, but it drove me a bit insane that the ending of the story felt completely disconnected from the rest.

Overall, I would rate this story probably about a 3.75 stars. If the last two chapters and epilogue had been more coherent and less disparate, I would have probably rated the story as four stars. If this author published another book, I would probably read it to see how her style has or has not changed.

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Dust Tracks on a Road

By Zora Neale Hurston

I first fell in love with the writing of Zora Neale Hurston when Their Eyes Were Watching God was chosen for a community read. I put off reading it for a while but when I did, I was deeply engrossed by her story-telling, her beautifully descriptive settings, and her philosophical musings. It was one of the best books I had ever read.

Then our book club decided to read books with “beautiful covers” for the month of March. I was sitting on my bed, doing my Morning Pages journaling and saw this book peeking out at me from my bookshelf. What a beautiful cover, I thought. It’s a shame I never gotten around to reading it. Then I knew my book for the month had found me - Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston.

The only problem was that it was a hard copy. I don’t have much time for reading that isn’t on my Kindle while I’m putting my child to bed. But, I looked at the length of the book and the number of chapters. I had three weeks and there were only 16 chapters. Surely I could do this if I just read one chapter a night, right?

Yes, it’s okay to laugh now. No, I haven’t finished the book. In fact, I’m only a few chapters in but it is every bit of the incredible characterization, thoughtful musings, and amazing story-telling that I saw in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have long had a weakness for autobiographies by writers and this one does not disappoint.

In the first chapter of the book, Hurston talks about Eatonville, Florida, and describes it “at the time of my birth.” However, she was born in Alabama and didn’t move to Eatonville until she was three. That confused me a little. However, since most of us remember little of our lives before the age of 3, I can understand it.

As simple a description as how and why a road was improved between towns is beautifully laid out, the courtship of her parents is a tale indeed, and how she started walking because a sow was after her cornbread is delightful.

Her tales are filled with vivid characters, clearly realized settings, and the philosophical observations shine through.

“Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”

I am going to finish the book, I just bought it for my Kindle for all of $2.15. I’ll update this review when I finish it.