5 comments about The Summer of Ordinary Ways: A Memoir.

1. This is a nicely written book, a beautiful memior of chilhood on a farm. It starts slowly but by the end I loved her writing...



2. I didnt pick this book randomly off the shelf, I work in Sleepy Eye MN, closely with the people. I did not grow up in Sleepy Eye, but in another small farming community. I know some of the people who she is talking about, although I do not know her or any of her immedate famliy. There was a huge uproar here about this book when it came out and I had to see what it was all about, of course!
   
   What I found was someone I knew, a girl raised with the same type of envirnment I think most of us were raised with in small midwestern farm towns. The local stories, small town attitude, where everyone knows everyones business and you are judged by your last name, relatives and great-grandfathers history 'all those Haalas are crazy'. I found myself and my friends in her stories, my sister, my parents. Its a story about life, the memories of a girl and a kid becoming a woman the fast way, by becoming a mother. She made me feel I was with her @ the nuns retreat, when her dad shot the puppies, on her uncles bike. I was rereading a story I already know. It was creepy, but comforting. I think thats talent.
   
   I really enjoyed this book, the style is different, jumping around, even mid story, to different, semi-related stories, different then what I'm used to, I guess. Her discriptions make me see the tree, the barn, her uniform, blue and white on the steps of St. Marys Catholic School. Beautifully discripted. Definately not the brutal, horrible book some people 'couldnt even finish'.
   
   If you grew up in a small town, or in a large close-nit family, you will relate to Nicole. A glimps of snipits of small town life, real or imagined by her, is truely what this novel is.



3. In my long reading life I have rarely come across a book written in such compelling and poetic language. I have just read Nicole Lea Helget's memoir in one sitting and can scarcely catch my breath. And to those who might question the authenticity of the book, please remember that a child's interpretation of happenings may not always agree with that of an adult who was there, too, but that does not make the child's recollection any less true. Just think about the mysteries and taboos in your own childhood!



4. This collection of beautifully written short pieces work together to give a view into a difficult Minnesota childhood. It's a stark story, and slim in several ways. Pages aside, it lacks context, and the landscape is almost missing, which is odd for a farm story. The writer's gift with words is considerable, and the final chapter left me gasping (what a tour de force). Did I like it? yes, I did. Still, I have to ask, as a child, was there no laughter? Was her entire childhood taut and poetic, all smashed grasshoppers and bleeding animals? It seems in a family like this, there might have been at least some laughter. I guess that is another area where the book is slim--I didn't sense the fullness of a life when reading it. Perhaps she will write a longer exploration of her life, or a novel. If she does, I'll definitely read it, as she is quite a writer.



5. I agree with the earlier reviewer, as far as mean people and animal cruelty go. I could hardly finish the book myself, not only because of the animal cruelty and abuse but also the author's total indifference to it. I don't particularly care to read about people abusing and killing animals (killing a mother cow because she wants to keep her calf, and shooting 13 puppies because "they are ugly"), and basically that is what a lot of this book is about. Not a very good or interesting read, author is whiney and self-absorbed - don't waste your time with this garbage.

5 comments about The Next Better Place: A Father and Son on the Road.

1. This is a wonderful book. "A road trip with an alcoholic father and a child? Must be a downer," you'd think. Not so. Never sliding into self-pity, the author just lays out a personal cross-country saga in mesmerizing detail. At times heartbreaking, this book is ultimately an inspirational story of survival by a child who deserved better. I've read a lot of travel narratives, and this is as good as they come.



2. This wonderful hitchhiking odyssey is all thumps up (or outstretched as the young boy would tell us). What a romp across 1960 America. It's the kind of book I'd love to see as a movie. Sure lends itself to the big screen because I have read few more visual stories. This is fun all the way to California and back! What a roll of the camera . . . and sentence.



3. I would normally give this book 5 stars, except I have a strong sense that this book is a fictional fraud.
   
   It's the story of an 11 year old boy who hitchikes the country with his alcoholic, dead-beat father in search of a better life in California. Of course, California is no better than any other place they've been and they take buses back to Albany where his mother lives with his two sisters, only to ***spoiler*** go back out on the road again with his father at the end of the book.
   
   The book is well written and engaging, but only if the book is true, which I doubt. The book often states what a good storyteller the father is and how good said father is at making up things to get what he wants out of people. The author continually expresses his desire to be on the radio or in movies, not to mention how often he embellishes stories, so I wouldn't be surprised if the book was just one big lie.
   
   From the outset, the author states how he went 2 entire months without a bowel movement, which I don't even know is medically possible, much less didn't land him in the hospital. Plus he recounts in great detail names, places, and events that happened 40 years ago. And somehow, all these events involve sexual predators, thieves, and other ne'er-do-well's. Never any average people. Nah, I don't think the book is true.
   
   But if it is true, it's really well done.



4. Smiling ghosts of Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac hover over many pages of Michael Keith's "The Next Better Place." This captivating book places Keith squarely in the same row with America's finest writers of the road adventure story. Which is to say that "The Next Better Place" is so much more than a memoir-cum-novel of a precocious son traversing America's great expanses with an ageing picaro of a father. Keith knows when to embroider his book's perfectly intoned dialogue, tremulous details, and charming teenage bravado with both lyrical pathos and hints at the perverse. The greatest American road novel, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," also came to mind as I devoured Keith's book, and I can only hope that Keith will soon reward his readers with another one.



5. I ENJOYED THIS BOOK VERY MUCH,HOWEVER I'M A LITTLE CONFUSED ABOUT MR. KEITH'S DATES. HE SAYS THESE EVENTS TOOK PLACE IN 1959, WHEN HE WAS 11 YEARS OLD. HOWEVER ON THE "AUTHORS NOTE" PAGE IT GIVES HIS YEAR OF BIRTH AS 1945, WHICH WOULD HAVE MADE HIM 14 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME OF THESE EVENTS. ALSO HE MENTIONS SEVERAL TIMES THE SONG FROM THE MOVIE "THE MAGNIFICANT 7". HOWEVER THAT MOVIE WASNT RELEASED TILL THE EARLY 1960'S. NO BIG DEAL. JUST BAD PROOF READING BY THE PUBLISHERS.

5 comments about Pig Boy's Wicked Bird: A Memoir.

1. I grew up in neighboring Illinois not far from `Pig Boy'. So, in reading this lovely memoir I found myself transported back into my own childhood memories of growing up. I was tired of reading at the time and therefore hesitant to give this memoir a chance. When I finished, I found that the author had reignited my passion for reading. This memoir will make you want to read again...to write again. The author truly captured the very humorous and.... yes poignant business of growing up, families and the unique value that every person brings to this world. Get this book, you will be glad you did.



2. First of all, I really enjoyed this book. I was skeptical going in, thinking it was just another outbreak in the rash of memoirs that has erupted on the best seller lists. This one is different. On the surface, it's a coming of age story, a story about self worth, self awareness, and the impact of family (the family in question being "the seven D's" - all of Doug Crandell's brothers, sisters, and even his parents have names that start with D.) But it turns out that what the story is really about is the three D's: disability, disfigurement, and just being different.
   
   Two of the author's fingers are essentially severed in a childhood farming accident, leaving the boy disabled, disfigured and different. This leads to an awareness and an appreciation of those three D's -- that turn out to be everywhere in young Crandell's world: his mother who is "no longer a woman" due to a hysterectomy, a man with cerebral palsy who connects with the author, the runt pigs destined to be destroyed but saved by Crandell, a grandmother with a humped back, a sister with scoliosis, even the oldest brother is left changed by a never fully explained abduction reminiscent of Mystic River. (Most everyone in the book is marked in some critical, defining, and not always obvious way. Some, like the landlord's son, are, to quote John Lennon, crippled inside.)
   
   Sherwood Anderson and his collection of grotesqueries, Winesburg, Ohio is the influence pointed out by Doug Crandell for helping him sort out his confused world of being marked different as well as leading him on the path to becoming a writer. What I noticed were the influences of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and in particular Carson McCullers. For a story of the Midwest, Pig Boy's Wicked Bird has a distinct Southern Gothic feel. (One person's physical characteristics are described as "crooked," "twisted," and "warped" in the space of a single paragraph). Like The Member of the Wedding, or even Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, these disabled, disfigured, and different people will live with you forever.



3. There is a distinct nostalgia in Pig Boy's Wicked Bird. The peculiar power in this depiction of an American family is relevant to anytime, place, or condition. The author uses beautiful language and rhythmical sentences to creat a compact telling of this humorous and poignant memoir. The business of living can be lonely. The reader can make profitable use of the insights illuminated throughout this story.



4. Doug Crandall, former little Pig Boy of the Heartland, brings us a heart-rendering, oftentimes snorting food-out-the-nose-from-laughing memoir of friendship with farm animals and dealing with life's tragedys. Poetically written by the now grown up Mr. Crandall, even city girls like me can appreciate his love of family, roots and Jimmy Carter. If you love crusty old men, goofy dogs and little piglets, you'll love this story as I did.



5. There is a wealth of people out there who have grown up in a family that doesn't seem just right. Television for a lack of decent material exploits the dysfunctional family as it exaggerates the flaws of family life in America. "Pig Boy's Wicked Bird" by Doug Crandell tells a different side of the story. Yes, life is full of absurdity and tragedy but what comes out of this book is a recollection of our own past growing up and as weird as it seemed...it was wonderful too. Intelligently written and a delight to read I give it 2 thumbs up and a nub for good measure! This is a great life story!

1 comments about The Silent Stars Go By: A True Christmas Story.

1. "The Silent Stars Go By" is a Christmas story we all wish we could tell, but don't have a childhood like Williams' to reflect on. Throughout the work, Williams is able to recall the era of the late 1950s and how the fall and early winter of 1959 in particular impacted he and his family. Madison, Georgia at that time was a northeast Georgia village in love with its football team (the local high school won 3-of-4 state championship and many regional titles in and around the late 50s and early 60s)and Williams masterfully gives readers a clear depiction of what the town was like. In a style similar to his "Heart of the Distant Forest," Williams also creates a sense of his love for all things natural and devotion to family. The fact that the story is true, and based on his family's own struggle, is something many should treasure. An additional pleasant aspect of the story is that there is no "angry child syndrome." This is a joyous tale, I love the book and have read it twice.

2 comments about Journey to a New Land: An Oral History.

1. What a wonderful family history to share with our children and grandchildren! My husband came to America from Italy in the 1950's and I have heard similar stories of his family's voyage to this "New Land" for many years. As we read the book, he talked about his own experiences after leaving his home in Vallecuppa, Italy and arriving in New York as an eleven year old. He, like Elda, lost his father after being here for only one year. His family also struggled to survive. This book covers feelings of coming to a strange land, not knowing the language or customs and how the family adjusted. Please read this book with your children and grandchildren...don't let this important message of survival, struggle, adjustment, hard work and success stop...the story belongs to all of us...it's our heritage.



2. It helped me learn more about Imegation. I would recamend this book to even 4th graders.

1 comments about My Brother's Voice.

1. What a great read! Mr. Nasser's incredible and heart-wrenching experiences during the Holocaust are presented to us as a testimony to the powers of love, faith, and the will to survive. It is refreshing to read an autobiography that not only describes the cruel and unjustified treatment from the SS but also the kindness of some Wehrmacht soldiers, not merely the every-man-for-himself stories prevalent in many Holocaust books but how helping other prisoners lifts the human spirit. In other words, Mr. Nasser's book gives us not only the dark aspects of the Holocaust (and they're very dark), but reminds us intelligence, attitude, and hope can lighten the heaviest of loads.

1 comments about The Assault of Laughter.

1. Melissa Hart takes us along for the ride as she and her siblings cope with having her mother come out as a lesbian and the resultant divorce and hate war between the angry father and the resolute mother. We see the father's rejection of the son, who has mental difficulties but is full of fun, and father's inner violence under minimal control at times. Melissa grows up, dealing with these issues along with dating, teen peer pressure, racism, and coming to know herself. The most amazing thing about this book is the laugh-out-loud funny passages that are interspersed with heartbreaks. I couldn't put it down.

No comments about Childhood to Womanhood: A Memoir--Seattle and Juneau, with Stops along the Way.

5 comments about Dining at the Lineman's Shack.

1. The cookbook as memoir probably began in 1959, when Alice B. Toklas' collection of recipes included one where she suggested serving, at a DAR Meeting, hashish fudge as a snack. John Weston's memoir, Dining at the Lineman's Shack doesn't serve up such confections, but it's a lovely book, and there are some fascinating recipes as well.

   The book is essentially, a loving tribute to his mother, Eloine, who raised Weston and his siblings in a remote shack desert during the Great Depression. Like Steinbeck's Joad family, Weston brilliantly captures life in Skull Valley, AZ. Eloine had the remarkable knack of transforming whatever foodstuffs were available into culinary delights. Among the most surprising menu items Weston delights in describing are Calves' Brains and Scrambled Eggs, Rabbit Jerky. Eloine could disguise the more questionable fare as creatively as possible, making it exceedingly edible. Weston serves up the actual recipes for Mountain lion Barbacoa. Margarita's Yam Soufflé. Pastel de Choclo (Rodeo Pie) and Miss Ruby's Cupcakes. One hopes that Eloine's cooking pleased her diners in the manner that Toklas' delighted the robust Picasso and intimidated Hemingway.

   Reared in the South and trained in the preparation of Southern cooking, following the death of her husband, a miner referred to, simply as "the dad," Eloine moved her family to Prescott, AZ and embraced Southwestern cuisine, including a love for chile peppers. Weston even includes authentic recipes for salsa and chile sauce. The loss of his father deeply affected him, and for a time, Weston fantasized his father's return, hoping their relationship would grow and change. Of course, this was never to be.

   From chapter to chapter, Weston makes constant connections and strongly focuses on the presentation of his memories, much as a fine restaurant will focus on the presentation of a featured dish, as it's served to a leading customer. A fan of Opera, Weston would escape his Arizona childhood, rearing a family, teaching and writing. (His novel, Hail, Hero! was filmed in 1969, serving as Michael Douglas' film debut.)

   Toklas lived in Paris with her "longtime companion," Gertrude Stein for 29 years, and her recipes are heavy with cream and butter. I've had little success with her recipes. Eloine's recipes are more accessible. Weston has settled with his longtime companion, Jim, in Palm Desert, CA. A genuine taste treat, Dining at the Lineman's Shack should be a prime addition to your summer reading list.

   Reviewed by Steven LaVigne in White Crane Journal




2. Dining At The Lineman's Shack by academician and novelist John Weston is a memoir of 1930's Arizona, about growing up in a lineman's shack, coping with the difficulties of rural family life, enduring tough times with the comfort of a mother who can cook miraculously well with next to nothing for ingredients. A compellingly personal story, and one which is vividly descriptive to such an extent that it virtually transports the reader through time and space, Dining At The Lineman's Shack is exceptionally well written and very highly recommended reading.



3. I have just finished a week of savouring "Dining..." bit by bit, bite by bite, many unexpected meals of great enjoyment. The work is compelling from the cover to the end, which of course begs a sequel. It is so like a novel, yet better than a novel with its many surprising branchings and final lingerings, the true stuff of life. And so erudite. And so generous with its scattered recipes for life. I feel richer having the book hand, both for its range of insights and its range of yummies. I know of no other memoir that yields this particular mix of pleasure.



4. I've just finished a week of savouring "Dining..." bit by bit, bite by bite, many unexpected meals of great enjoyment. The work is compelling from the cover to the end, which of course begs a sequel. It is so like a novel, yet better than a novel with its many surprising branchings and final lingerings - the true stuff of life. And so erudite. And so generous withi its scattered recipes for life. I feel richer having the book handy, both for its range of insights and its range of yummies. I know of no other memoir that yields this particular mix of pleasure.



5. Blending memoir, recipes, and fiction, John Weston revisits his childhood in Arizona during the Great Depression, where his mother worked hard to create splendid meals for her children. There are a lot of brilliantly written passages where Weston reminisces, letting his mind drift from memory to recipe, and these moments are captivating. The fictional stories interspersed throughout, however, abruptly confuse the reader. The ingredients seem to all want to mix together properly, and at moments they almost achieve their purpose, but ultimately, by the final pages, they flop. Weston flips through his life's memories and doesn't share enough with the readers for us to understand the course of his life. He mentions having children, and briefly references Jim, his companion of over thirty years, but the threads connecting his life after childhood are meagerly explored. I wanted to like the book more, but I was left bewildered and wishing for more from "Dining at the Lineman's Shack".

2 comments about Displaced Person: A Girl's Life in Russia, Germany, And America.

1. Ella writes what she remembers about her childhood and gives us a chance to understand what life was like for a girl dealing with World War II and the aftermath. The details of everyday life help you understand what it took to survive. She writes with honesty and gratitude for those who helped her. It is an inspiring story. God is good - all the time!



2. I think this was a great book. It answers alot of unasked and unanswered questions. It also talks about the effects of war. We met the author at a time share and she gave a talk about the book. She was very interesting to listen to. My Dad read this book too. He agrees with me that she didn't leave anything out. I did wonder why I couldn't get a straight answer from distant relatives where our relatives were from. When a country or state boundary line has moved other places people write on there family tree death or birth record that when the people were born they live in X which is call Y in 2006. I never thought they were not telling the truth because they were afraid the communists would find them.
   
   If you want to read an interesting book about Russia and Germany about WWII this is the book for you. The section about life in America was vivid about living with her parents but when she was more integrated into American life and not living with her parents the information was slimmer. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to live on a cotton plantation in the South.