Gentry
"Perspectives"
July 2005 |
Dive Into a Great Book
Gentry's Christine VanDeVelde takes a look at some great summer reading
options By today's standards, my childhood summers were
positively indolent. One of my favorite authors, Ellen Gilchrist, once
wrote something that best describes life at that time. "It was get up in
the morning and be happy. It was go out in the yard and lie down on the
ground and listen to China." And when I wasn't listening to China, it was
a pretty good bet that I was laying around reading. Perhaps that's why I
think of summer as being a time when there is all the time in the world
for books. In the small town in Illinois where I grew up, there was a
Carnegie library, built in 1905, a two-story red brick building where the
floors of the stacks were paved with milky glass tiles and dust motes
floated in the dim light. There was no better way to spend part of my
summer than sitting cross-legged on the floor of those stacks, searching
the shelves for a good book and finding it.
To help you lay your hands on some good books for this summer, here are
some of the titles I've been lucky enough to find this past year. Some are
books I revisited from my past, some piqued my interest in ways that were
new, and some held me in their thrall as a good book always has.
Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism
by Paul Collins This is a beautifully written, haunting book
about a father coming to grips with his son's diagnosis of autism. As the
prognosis for his son evolved, Collins found himself drawn to the story of
Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child who was found in the woods and later
frolicked with Jonathan Swift at the court of George I -- and who, many
now believe, was autistic. Collins interweaves the compelling story of his
own son's condition with the tales of Peter and other historical figures
believed to be autistic, like outsider artist Henry Darger, as well as the
stories of those who are on a quest to understand and find a cure for this
devastating disorder.
Never A City So Real: A Walk in Chicago
by Alex Kotlowitz Part of the Crown Journeys series, this
"tour" of the city Norman Mailer described as "too impatient for
hypocrisy" is too short, but nevertheless succeeds in perfectly capturing
the city's character through the people and neighborhoods that make
Chicago what it is. I lived in Chicago for twelve years and feel about
this awesome city as Nelson Algren did, who famously wrote, "Like loving a
woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a
lovely so real." With the stories of fabled labor organizer Ed Sadlowski
and the steel mills along the Calumet River, lawyer Andrea Lyon who tries
capital cases in the Criminal Courts building south of Chicago's loop, and
Edna Stewart and the patrons of her soul food restaurant on the city's
West Side, Kotlowitz makes you fall in love all over again.
Rhoda: A Life in Stories
by Ellen Gilchrist I have read every silver-tongued tale Ellen
Gilchrist has ever published and this year when my daughter read one of
her short stories for English class, I went back and started reading her
books again. Of all her stories and novels, those featuring the character
Rhoda Manning are my all-time favorites. Rhoda is kind of a red-headed,
feisty, foul-mouthed version of another favorite of mine, Beverly Cleary's
Ramona. This volume, the winner of the National Book Award, follows
Rhoda's headstrong exploits from age eight to age sixty and if you're not
captivated by her take-no-prisoners approach and southern sensibility you
probably are not much fun. How could you resist the Mannings? "Everything
happened to them but they always recovered," wrote Gilchrist. "They had
too much character to give in to fate." Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell This is a book that looks at instinctive
decision-making, rapid cognition, and the art of "thin-slicing," filtering
the factors that matter from the universe of variables. It's about how
Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, took one
look at a statue and knew it was a fake -- a fact fourteen months of
investigation on the part of the Getty Museum had failed to uncover.
Gladwell covers a lot of ground here -- from the Pentagon's war games to
facial recognition, but manages to do it in a gratifying, lucid way. I was
drawn to the book's premise, because I am a notoriously bad judge of
character based on first impressions and was interested in Gladwell's
conclusion that we can make better decisions in the first two seconds of
cognition by training our minds and senses to focus on the most relevant
facts. I'll let you know…
These three books are very different pieces of fiction, but each roped me
in and held me to the end. Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh is
the quiet but evocative saga of the Novak family, set in a coal mining
town in western Pennsylvania at the time of World War II. Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld, the earnest coming-of-age story of Lee Fiora, an
Indiana teenager who wins a scholarship to a prestigious East Coast
boarding school, takes a look at status, belonging, and the anthropology
of adolescence. The Ivy Chronicles by Karen Quinn is the
slight, but hilarious -- and familiar -- story of a Park Avenue mom who
loses her job and her husband and starts a business advising her former
peers about how to get their children into the most prestigious private
schools.
And, finally, if you're looking for something that's a little more
substantial, but still easy to pick up and put down when you're traveling
this summer, try Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten
Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman -- assembled by his
daughter, these letters provide another look at the Nobel Prize-winning
physicist and another vantage point from which to view his passion for
discovery and his gift for understanding and explaining the world. |
