5 comments about The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family.

1. What may I say that the other reviewers haven't mentioned?
   
   I purchased The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family after reading Mrs. Laskas first installment Fifty Acres and a Poodle, which I would recommend reading first. After the author has established herself at Sweet Valley Farm she decides she wants more in life. Namely, a child. She and her husband Alex try to conceive, but they have no luck. They finally decide to adopt a child from China. I believe that many women will identify with this story & all the emotions Mrs. Laskas experiences.
   
   While this is a charming and enjoyable read, I preferred 50 Acres and a Poodle. This book felt a little forced to me. Obviously, this one wasn't as carefree and funny, as it dealt with more serious issues. It's still a great book and one I'd still recommend.



2. I read this book aloud with my husband. It was like reading a letter from a friend, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and others wipe-a-tear sad. Although it's the story of moving from city to country life, it has relevance for anyone transitioning from one lifestyle to another. The situations are believable and the characters are funny and endearing. It's the kind of story that you know you'll miss when you reach the end. My husband has asked several times that I get the second book in what we hope will be a series by Ms. Laskas, so we can read aloud again.



3. "The Exact Same Moon" is the sequel to "Fifty Acres and a Poodle" (however, you can enjoy it without having read its predecessor). In the first book, Jeanne Marie Laskas recounted her journey from single life in the city to married life on a farm. In this follow-up, she describes her mother's illness and her own realization that she longs for a child.
   
   This book is not as good as "Fifty Acres and a Poodle". It lacks that book's purity of voice and breadth of consideration. It is a quieter, gentler story; it is clearly written by an older and mellower woman, one who questions everything in her life out of curiousity rather than confusion, and that makes this book less poignant than the other.
   
   Still, "The Exact Same Moon" is more than worth the read. It's a lovely tale, well-structured although true, filled with amusing character sketches and interesting little thoughts. It's a pleasant book throughout, intelligent and well-written and occasionally illuminating. Anyone who enjoyed "Fifty Acres and a Poodle" should read it; anyone who hasn't read "Fifty Acres and a Poodle" should read them both.



4. This is the kind of book that makes you feel so good, you want to press it on your friends. The writing is gentle and thoughtfully paced, and she writes about the kinds of everyday experiences and feelings we can all relate to.
   
   The first book is Fifty Acres and a Poodle, which I'd recommend reading first. In this second book, the author is surprised by her unexpected but profound desire for a child to love and to share her world with. Her adoption of a little girl from China is written about with tenderness and deeply felt joy.
   
   I can't wait for the next installment.



5. I always enjoy Ms. Laskas' columns and looked forward to this book. I was not disappointed. Humorous but realistically touching as she deals with issues another mother certainly understands!

2 comments about The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters.

1. "For all the sometimes rowdy comedy attending Amis's depictions of meanness, his understanding of its psychology is complicated and serious. It is, if funny, also immoral, so little and minimal, practiced by wee men only. And it betrays neurosis, implying constant "paranoid" watchfulness lest one be had. It keeps one on a constant stretch of attentive calculation, and this finally becomes a substitute for thought, as well as replacing an objective interest in things outside oneself."

   "I feel STRETCHED", Bilbo Baggins after having the One Ring for a while.




2. I had to have this one - an intersection of two writers I've admired for some time. Fussel is probably the ideal person to write such an appraisal. As mentioned above, the lack of critical theoryspeak is most welcome. The interpretation of Amis as a moral satirist (which isn't a category that you see very much) provides a useful key to most of his work (fiction, poetry, and prose alike.) If you're a fan of the work, you'll enjoy this - it's like having a chance to sit down across from an intelligent, perceptive reader who likes the same things you do.

3 comments about Ink in the Blood.

1. If only everyone under the age of 35 could read Phil Vinson's book, "Ink in the Blood" and take it to heart, recognizing the value of, well, values, what a better world it would be. His descriptions of his family dynamic and his own boyhood are simple, yet complex; funny, yet tragic and always entertaining. This book is a perfect present for people of all ages; retirees will revel in nostalgia, baby boomers will pine for lost innocence and Gen X and Y'ers will marvel at how life "used to be" and recognize, hopefully, what life is really all about.



2. Reading Ink in the Blood will stir old memories for anyone who came of age in the fifties or sixties. For those who have come along since then, the book strikes themes common to all generations, and lends understanding of what it was like to grow up in Texas in the years after World War II.
   
   A candid memoir of Phil Vinson's life from the time he was born in Childress, in the Texas Panhandle, in the early years of World War II, until his involvement in coverage of the Kennedy assassination as a young reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Ink in the Blood shines the spotlight of personal remembrance across all the years back to that time. The war, the postwar boom, the early years of television journalism seen through the career of Phil's father, Doyle Vinson, the development of rock-and-roll through a melding of black rhythm-and-blues and white country music, and the frenetic events of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath all receive due coverage, along with the tentative efforts of a sometimes uncertain young man to discover himself.
   
   Told with honesty and humor through short chapters and vignettes, Vinson's story reads like a novel-a novel that has the reader nodding and smiling at the manifest truth evidenced throughout.



3. Phil Vinson, a journalist, photographer and educator, has written a taut memoir of life in the 1940s and '50s that has the fine learning edge of Huck Finn with traces of the lust of Payton Place thrown in for a little realism.
   Vinson, a native of Childress, Texas, is a smooth, professional writer, who traces his life from his toddler days through his coverage as a reporter of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas.
   In between, he recounts with humor, wit and honesty, the foibles, victories and remembered relatiions of a boy growing into vibrant manhood during the years of James Dean, Elvis, Rock 'n Roll and sneaked peeks, feels and gowing aches and pains.
   The son of pioneering television newsman, Doyle Vinson, he became immersed in the world of journalism as he traipsed along with his father covering wrecks, fires and murders. By high school, Vinson was recruited to the school paper for his inherent talents at both writing and photography.
   His story includes his boyhood friends and their joint explorations of life in all of the Texas traditions, women, beer and ribaldry.
   If you're over 55 and can't identify with many of the situations, predictments and life altering acts, then you didn't have much of a life.
   It's a great read in an easily digested, short-chapter style and told with unabashed honesty, candor, humor and insight. Try it. You'll like it.

2 comments about Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman.

1. This book conincides with the interview I had with Will Fowler in 1999. It outlines his life as a Reporter and how different the reporter is today as it was then. I really loved the book as it detailed the life of him as a reporter in the days when newspapers were the main source of information. He is a credit to his family and his father before him, Gene Fowler.



2. This is an excellent book, highly recommended for writers, journalists or media of any kind. Fowler's style pulls you in as he tells his story in an enjoyable, gripping, humorous and often heartbreaking fashion. Is he still with us ??? ... because I want to tell him personally how much I enjoy this book.

5 comments about Frankie's Place: A Love Story.

1. I live on Mt. Desert Island so I guess I'm not captivated by Mr. Sterba's anthropological examination of his brief stays each year on MDI. I read the book while traveling to capture that 'sense of place' I was missing while away from MDI. That's about the only thing I find captivating about the book.
   
   There is no apparent organization to the rambling narrative which touches on wealthy but non-ostentatious 'summer people' and the 'quaint ways' of the locals. Random observations, lots of words in 'quotes'...kind of irritating. A few factual errors about directions and where things are located (surprising for a reporter) won't bother the average reader.
   
   I found the book disorganized and saccharin, but I'm happy that Mr. Sterba is happy.



2. There are not enough words to say how much I enjoyed this book. For anyone that loves Maine, seafood, politics, humor and history, this is a book you will devour. Having spent time vacationing in Maine while growing up, Jim Sterba's descriptions brought some of my favorite childhood memories back to me. As an avid reader of the New Yorker, I will now always, with a smile, think of the New Yorker as Toi Lit.



3. This is the best kind of travel memoir -- it has recipes, witty anecdotes and characters, natural and social histories, and enchanting descriptions of the land, sea, and sky. Oh yes, and lessons in battling house mice, an overabundance of tomatoes, and the encroachment of crass non-natives. But mostly, it has a narrator whose personal contributions to all of the above make it an even richer experience. Sterba has a journalist's innate curiosity about everything, a journalist's objective stance, and a journalist's heart -- he knows, in other words, wehere the stories lie and he knows how to spin them. He makes you want to know the people as well as the place. Frankie's Place reminds me of Peter Mayle's Provence stories, only less contrived.



4. Jim Sterba's Frankie's Place is an engaging autobiographical sketch with at least a little something for almost everyone: from an Horatio Alger story and the revival of a fractured family, to the history of seacoast Maine (Mount Desert), to favorite recipes, to a too brief recounting of his quite brilliant career as a NYTimes and WSJ reporter. What resonates most is his infectious delight when he at long last relinquishes the vagabond life for matrimony and a home of one's own -- albeit shared with various in-laws and sundry rodents. It's a love story for the final nesting of a man who came in from the cold.
   
   I couldn't help but wish that Frankie, the historian Francis FitzGerald, could have become more than an elusive presence, but I could understand his need to respect her privacy. (That is the way of the Wasps.)



5. Woven through Sterba's account of summers in Maine are bits of travelogue, Maine history, his experiences as a foreign journalist, recipes and his relationship with Frankie. The reader succumbs to that rapport with author and a well-loved place the same way as with Under the Tuscan Sun.
   The character of New Englanders and of those drawn to its scenic shores is faithfully rendered in this book. I envy him his time in that scenic area that he brings alive for us. My mouth waters as I read of the culinary treats and I begin to feel I know the paths through the woods and the friends and locals who inhabit his pages.
   Immerse yourself in this book if you are traveling to Maine anytime soon or use it as a substitute if you can't go.

No comments about So Short a Time; A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant..

No comments about Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant.

1 comments about In Their Shoes.

1. The author has lived a long life. She is very well rounded. I wanted to know more about her experience being a black woman and the other cultures. I guess I will have to get my hands on a copy of Soul Sister.

5 comments about And So It Goes: Adventures in Television.

1. I've probably read this book a dozen times from cover to dog-eared cover; my paperback copy is literally falling apart! I still open it sometimes just to read a couple of pages from the middle, and I'm always entertained by Ellerbee's wit.
   
   Wit: a combination of rational intelligence and humour. Ellerbee displays both in abundance, and her writing style is pitch-perfect. She's worked in network news long enough to have seen all of it's strength and weaknesses, and long enough to have lived through one-too-many comical misadventures. Some of her anectodal experiences are downright hilarious:

   Stealing Reagan's golf cart for a joyride. Spying on a button manufacturer from a rooftop across the street (to learn before the competing networks who'll be chosen vice president for a presidential campaign). Getting unintentionally stuck in the middle of a homecoming parade for the Iran hostages. Using dinner trays to "surf" down the aisle of a flying airplane. A rubber duck on the set. A "thing and a thing." And so it goes...

   There are also some suprising revelations, such as Ellerbee's confession to a back-alley abortion, and her discovery that Ohio didn't become a state until 1954!

   Read this book and be entertained... and simoultaneously enlightened about the field of broadcast journalism.




2. There are some books that should never be resigned to the dustbin and this is one of them. The message is timeless and, despite the humor, frightening. Ms. Ellerbee's wisdom is needed more today than it was back in 1988.



3. Direct, honest, and brilliantly written, Ellerbee's masterwork gives the reader an inside look into the world of broadcast journalism. Her 80's program NBC News Overnight was a unique vehicle for intelligent reporting and videography. It was the last show of its kind on network news TV which, if anything, has gotten worse since the writing of this book. When Ellerbee's Nickelodeon children's programs are more intelligently written than most of the so called "adult" news programs on TV, that's scary. It is unfortunately the case.



4. There can be few things more enriching, entertaining, and inspiring than merrily wending one's way through the fascinating memoirs of this legendary journalist. Ms. Ellerbee can now be seen on her marvelous news program for children on Nickelodeon, which is one of the greatest programs in the history of television. Ms. Ellerbee's thrilling story is sure to deeply touch all who read it, evoking both tears and laughter, often simultaneously. This is one of the greatest books in the history of the world, and should be on every required reading list in every institution of learning in the world.



5. It was a pleasure to read about another journalist's battle in succeeding in one of the most competitive field. If you want to know what a reporter has to go through, you'd want to read this one.

1 comments about Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Judaic Studies Series).

1. If someone had submitted a manuscript based on Ilya Ehrenburg's life to a publisher it would have been tossed away as too unbelievable, even for fiction. Ilya Ehrenburg joined the Bolsheviks as a young man but had broken with the party well before the Russian Revolution. He was a childhood friend of Nikolai Bukharin and spent time with Leon Trotsky in Geneva. While living in Paris before the revolution he was befriended by Lenin but the friendship ended when Ehrenburg mocked him in a satirical piece he had published. He lived abroad for years, both before and after the Revolution, he spoke French and hobnobbed with Europe's literary intelligentsia. He was Jewish. Thousands of people in Stalin's USSR were purged or summarily executed for having just one of these characteristics. Millions were purged for less. Yet Ehrenburg not only survived but prospered. Joshua Rubenstein's "Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg" does an excellent job of setting out the fascinating details of Ehrenburg's life and the many factors that `conspired' to keep Ehrenburg in the public eye and far away from the Gulag.
   
   For those that survived the Holocaust the fact of survival is often an interior matter for the survivor, sometimes marked by remorse and guilt simply because one survived against all odds. For those that survived the purges and executions of the Stalin era in the USSR, the fact of survival is often an exterior matter in which the outside world questions the means by which the survivor escaped unharmed. The historian A.J.P. Taylor, in a review of Ilya Ehrenburg's Memoirs suggest that in "years of danger and crisis, it becomes almost a crime to survive." The fact of Ehrenburg's survival and the means by which he managed to survive is the central theme of Rubenstein's biography.
   
   Rubenstein takes the reader through Ehrenburg's early years as a student revolutionary and his flirtation with the Bolsheviks. The description of Ehrenburg's pre-revolutionary time in Paris and his initial contacts with Lenin and his cadres in exile is particularly interesting. After the revolution, a revolution that Ehrenburg condemned, we see him changing his mind and becoming a staunch supporter of the regime after the Bolsheviks defeated the white army in the Civil War. From there Ehrenburg's years in Paris the 1920s and 1930s where he became well known in artistic and literary circles are outlined very nicely. Ehrenburg became the de facto ambassador of art and literature of the USSR. In fact, it may very well have been Ehrenburg's rather exalted status in the west that protected him all those years. From there we see Ehrenburg's increasing involvement in the anti-fascist movement culminating in his extensive reporting from Spain during the civil war. Ehrenburg survived and prospered despite the fact that Stalin's purges often focused on people who had spent time abroad and who participated in the Civil War. When WWII started Ehrenburg's fame increased as a result of his forceful and intelligent reporting for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. It was during the war that Ehrenburg, along with his colleague Vasily Grossman, began the compilation that became known as the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. The monumental Black Book may very well represent the most important work of Ehrenburg's life.
   
   From the time the war ended and through his death in 1953, Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign and his doctor's plot caused thousands of Jews, including many friends of Ehrenburg to be purged and sent to the Gulag. Through it all, Ehrenburg continued to be published, not without some difficulty in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Ehrenburg became one of the Soviet regime's greatest apologists. As he had done in the 1930's Ehrenburg attacked western left-leaning intellectuals that deviated from the party line. Throughout Stalin's rein and through Khrushchev's leadership Ehrenburg became perhaps the best known and most-intellectually well thought of defender of the Soviet regime. It is for these actions that many find fault with Ehrenburg.
   
   However, at the same time, and within the constraints of an oppressive regime where any untoward step could have severe repercussions, Rubenstein sets out those many instances where Ehrenburg went out of his way to help friends and fellow artists who had been arrested or could not get published. Rubenstein takes pains to point out how many of those who had been imprisoned respected and were grateful for Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.
   
   It is the portrayal of this conflict between Ehrenburg's arguably craven kow-towing to the Soviet regime and his efforts on behalf of his friends or fellow writers that make Rubenstein's work so interesting. Rubenstein, and others, fall squarely on the side of absolving Ehrenburg of most of the responsibility for his acts. Nevertheless he does not bludgeon the reader over the head with that opinion nor does he withhold information that might lead a reader to come to a different conclusion.
   
   I tend to fall a bit onto the non-judgmental side of the ledger although not perhaps as fully as Rubenstein. The deciding factor for me is the thought that Ehrenburg's severest critics seem to be those in the west who did not have to walk the deadly tightrope Ehrenburg walked for years. Those that seem most accepting of Ehrenburg's behavior were those who lived and suffered during those years and appreciated Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.
   
   Rubenstein's Tangled Loyalties is a fascinating look at the life of someone who spent a life making hard choices. I recommend this to anyone interested in Soviet history and leave it up to the reader to determine whether Ehrenburg was guilty of the crime of survival.
   
   L. Fleisig