No comments about Coincidences.

2 comments about One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country.

1. Yesyesyes. I have lived through post war America and Grunwald has recalled and revisited the troubling events since 1945. If I hadn't lived through it, it would be even more important to have read this book. I have been gripped by it for days and I am richer and wiser for having read it.



2. Insightful, impeccably written autobiography that reveals the man -- the major events, and the people who shaped those events, as chronicled in Time Magazine ... of which Grunwald was editor-in-chief.

No comments about The Great Reporters: An Anthology of News Writing at Its Best.

No comments about Thomas Johnston (Lives of the Left).

No comments about George Orwell: A Literary Life (Literary Lives).

No comments about Henry Grady's New South: Atlanta, a Brave and Beautiful City.

2 comments about LETTERS TO MILENA (Kafka, Franz, Works.).

1. These are Kafka's best letters . He pours forth his broken soul to the woman who can and does understand him. His language is painful and beautiful. Milena the Czech woman married to another Jewish man is too trapped by her life. Their love is impossible also because Kafka within himself is impossible. The letters are powerful and bring a sense of compassion and loss for these two remarkable people who each in his own way ( Kafka through his tuberculosis) Milena ( in a concentration camp) lose their lives when young.



2. These letters written by Franz Kafka to Milena comprise my most loved Kafka letters. Writing to Felice, his former fiancée, he was less mature - could he be said to have been less himself? In 'Letters to Milena' he asks at one point (I paraphrase) 'Is it you I really love or the existence that you give to me?' Couldn't any of us ask this question of the person we really love and of ourselves when we really love? I think Milena, whom his biographers considered a far more fitting companion for Kafka than Felice; Milena who in Berlin, years younger than the ageless Franz, living desperately and often pennilessly with her loved hurtful husband (who frequently withheld money from her, so that at one point she worked as a railway porter) - this woman who 'lived her life down to the depths' and who was a writer in her own right - really did give Kafka existence in the years they wrote and too infrequently met. She did not let the nervous, procrastinating and intensely self referential Kafka hide from her - which may be part of why he loved her - and when he is finally prevailed upon to visit her, deliciously drolly reassuring her that if he does get onto a train he will likely as not get off it at the right stop, she does not wait until they each arrive at the much discussed meeting point to actually meet him, but goes unflinchingly to his hotel, cutting off Kafka's apprehensions, making everything in their meeting easy, amicable and precious to him.

   'If only it were possible to go to Berlin, to become independent, to live from one day to the next, even to go hungry, but to let all one's strength pour forth instead of husbanding it here, or rather - instead of one's turning aside into nothingness!' Kafka wrote in his diaries in 1914 whilst still engaged to Felice. Milena, for a little while, allowed him to feel he was living, the tragedy was that concurrently Kafka's terrible illness was progressing, depriving him of time and physical energy. He was a man who needed so much time, and who had so painfully little, but, notwithstanding his not infrequent sensation of 'turning aside into nothingness', Kafka lived, he lived his whole life as few, very few, ever do, these letters are a testimony to his intense aliveness and to his genius as a writer. I envy Milena, even though she knew eventually she could not leave her husband for Kafka, she was still the woman who received the treasure of these letters. And yet - a reader has to, bewildered, witness and realize the inevitability and sadness of the eventual cessation of Kafka and Milena's communication, witness Kafka poignantly losing his plans for their future and the idea that Milena can live with him, witness both withdrawing and both mourning.

   'M was here', Kafka wrote (again in his diaries, 8th May 1922, when he was more or less housebound with his illness) 'won't come again; probably wise and right in this, yet there is perhaps still a possibility whose locked door we both are guarding lest we open it, for it will not open of itself.'
   
   I treasure this book. I've read and reread it so that the pages are all dog-eared, falling out and closely annotated all over. To anyone who finds themselves drawn to Kafka I'd say get your hands on a copy or two.

No comments about Life in the Shadow.

No comments about Nobody asked me,.

5 comments about Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada.

1. It helps to appreciate this memoir if you have an idea of who Bruce McCall is. The best way of doing that at one stroke is to read his cartoon collection, _Zany Afternoons_, which is out of print. _Thin Ice_ is a tale of a joyless family ruled by a loveless, inconsiderate father, seen from the viewpoint of the artistic child. By all rights, I should dislike this book, as I think giving one's parents the "Mommy Dearest" treatment is ungrateful, unless they were downright abusive. As the psychiatrist said to the centaur, "Stop blaming your parents." Yet he recreates his childhood homes and family climate so winningly that the story overcomes such resistance, and we are transported back with him. All those witty zingers about how dull Canada was are entertaining, too. The book ends just as he is on his way to revive his career in the States. Since that is where, by his own definition, the "good part" of the story lies, let's hope he produces the next installment soon.



2. Wanting to know more about Canadian perspectives on the United States, and attracted by quotes indicating that P. J. O'Rourke and Peter Jennings found it very humorous, I bought this book. Unfortunately, I was once again reminded not to attribute too much credit to quotes from reviews printed on a book's cover. This is a far from humorous work; rather, it is a painful read.

   McCall's memoir is a bitter reflection on his childhood in Canada. His depiction of the Canada in which he was raised seems to arise from inductive reasoning: since his was a poor, emotionally uncommunicative, and disfunctional family he attributes those same attributes to the entire nation. Since McCall's personal life only took an upturn upon his immigration to the United States in retrospect everything American in his youth was bright, colorful, luxurious and exciting; things from Canada on the other hand were grey, utilitarian, and boring. Americans were fun and vigorous; Canadians dour and laconic.

   McCall's memoir constitutes an unrelenting denunciation of his parents' rearing of their children. His mother is depicted as a tragic, downtrodden, alcoholic who withdrew into alcohol as an escape from the burden of six children and a domineering, unsupportive husband. His description of his father is severe: mean, tyrannical, selfish, belittling. The denunciations are so excessive that about two thirds through the book the one wonders whether McCall doesn't regret missing the opportunity to drive a stake through his father's heart. He describes a stark childhood entirely devoid of love, happiness, or material comforts and attributes all his failures and personality quirks and those of his siblings to their upbringing.

   This was a hard book to plow through, much less finish. It is a sad, depressing memoir which would have been better kept within the McCall family; the writer makes an apt observation in the beginning of the book when he expresses concern about how his siblings will receive this recollection of their childhood.

   I really regret buying this book and the time I invested in reading it. Under no circumstances would I recommend it to others.




3. Thin Ice is one of the best books I have ever read. I also grew up in a large, dysfunctional family in southern Ontario in the fifties and sixties with a tyrannical, alcoholic father in a tense, cold emotion-starved environment. It wasn't until I was in therapy many years later for an anxiety disorder that I even realized that my childhood was far from normal, and all the feelings of inadequacy and inferiority I had carried all my life stemmed from my childhood.

   Thin Ice was a very painful book for me to read, because it is a tearful, emotional trip back in time, but a journey that was necessary for me to understand what happened to me and to finally stop blaming myself. Thin Ice is also uproariously funny, and I am reading it a second time. I, too, yearned to leave Canada behind and move to the United States. I left Canada over a decade ago to raise our children here and have never looked back. After therapy and Bruce's book I can finally leave it emotionally behind, also.

   Canadians get very upset when they are poked fun at, and Bruce does it like a pro. If you are a Pierre Burton nationalist, prepare yourself to be indignant. Bruce "tries to create a time when things were very different indeed - a time when a Canadian, certainly this Canadian, felt himself to be two thirds American, with the other third composed of a grayish ball of chaff: hockey/plaid/butter tarts/earmuffs/CBC/Mounties/toques/wheat/fish/lumber/God Save the King/Queen".

   I bought Thin Ice to be entertained and I not only laughed until I cried, I also really cried and gained a priceless insight into my complex childhood and the key to my personality today.




4. As a Canadian coming of age in Canada, with all the small town yearnings of the U.S. in all it's glory, I could certainly relate to Bruce McCall's book, but I would have loved it anyway. I am buying copies for friends.



5. This book was one of the best i've read in years. Bruce McCall is so great at his craft. he pays attention to every word. Making it impossible to read this book fast. it would not be doing it justice. You need to sit back and savor every single word.