Dianne Hales, LA BELLA LINGUA: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH ITALIAN, THE WORLD'S MOST ENCHANTING LANGUAGE

I bought the book because my family had just returned from Italy, and I found it was just the right time to read Hales's conversational presentation of Italian history and culture through the lens of the evolving language of Italy--what she calls "the wiliest of Western tongues." The book itself--with chapters on religion, music, art, literature, food, film, love, and curses--reminded me of the stroll I took in Venice one morning, when the streets were still empty ... where I saw a man, cigarette cupped in his hand, walking his tiny dog past one of the old wells in a square; and street sweepers in their sea-green shirts wielding their long-bristled brooms over the stones; and where I smelled the bread for the day coming out of the ovens. It felt like the real city before the day's cruise-ships arrived. Hales's pages are full of anecdotes and curious factoids, the twists and turns to the language, that tickled me, surprised me, made me think. For example, "The manhole covers of Rome are still emblazoned with S.P.Q.R., the Latin abbreviation for the Senatus Populusque Romanus, the senate and people of Rome. Italians joke that it really stands for sono pazzi questi romani--These Romans are crazy." She emphasizes the uneven progress of what came to be "Italian" from Latin, through Greek, through the various waves of Germans and Saracens, and which was consolidated from (and despite) the various local languages: e.g., watermelon is "cocomero in the south, anguria in the north--and an insulting way to say 'blockhead' throughout Italy." She explains how "ancient Romans, such as Gaius Julias Caesar ... bore three names: a basic first name, a clan name, and also a family name that was handed down. By medieval times, the latter two names disappeared ... which became confusing ... Occupations inspired names ... such as Botticelli for 'barrel maker' (the nickname later given to the artist Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filpepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli, whose brother made barrels)." She takes us along on her discovery of new foods and friends, and it was a treat being in her company.

Emma Brockes, SHE LEFT ME THE GUN: MY MOTHER'S LIFE BEFORE ME

A very well written memoir by a woman whose mother left a horrifying family situation in South Africa to recraft a life for herself in London. The mother Paula said nothing to the author Emma for many years about what she endured in Africa, and after her mother's deaht, Emma, who is a journalist by trade, spent months digging up records and interviewing family to find out what had happened there and why her mother bequeathed her a gun. Compassionate, thoughtful, and productively messy, his book raises all sorts of questions about what it means to protect your child--either with silence(because some stories just should not be told to children) or by making conscious choices not to do what your parents did; and about when exploring the past crosses the line from enlightening to exhausting. The preface opens: "My grandmother thought she  was marrying someone vibrant and exciting, a man with wavy hair and tremendous energy. He was a talented carpenter, a talented artist, a convicted murderer, and a very bad poet."

Mary Karr, LIT

Unlike BOSSYPANTS (see previous blog entry), I did NOT read this memoir in two hours on the plane ride home. It is a brilliant, poetic, and at times harrowing account of Karr's early adulthood, post-college, marriage, first five years of motherhood, and years of drinking and getting sober (several times over). "Lit" in the title means both "literature" and "drunk," and the two categories of experience are profoundly intertwined. I'd put this in my top 5 for this year so far. I liked it better than Glass Castle or Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight or Dry--and I loved all those.

Tina Fey, BOSSYPANTS

A very very fun read, and just what you'd expect from Fey. She's willing to show pictures of her terrible shag haircut and tell ridiculous stories about her childhood (the one about getting her period and not knowing what it was--because she thought it was blue like laundry detergent--that's what the ads on TV made it look like--that story made me howl). But she also sketches portraits of people she loves, makes light of how hard she works, fesses up to her worries and mistakes, and pretty well lays waste to those who sustain the sexism in her industry. I read it in two hours on the plane ride home, quick and enjoyable.

Laura Shaine Cunningham, SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS

My dear friend Claudia gave me this memoir, about a girl who grows up first without a father (her mother tells her for years that he is "in the war"; never mind that the US isn't at war) and then, after a few years, without her mother, who dies (high up in a hospital, unclear how). Raised by two bachelor uncles (one of whom wears a pith helmet while cooking) in a junior-four in the Bronx, which she has decorated to her seven-year-old taste, complete with pink bathmats sewn together in the livingroom, she experiences a childhood that is at once wildly unorthodox and deeply loving and kind. Beautifully written, with metaphors that surprise without ever trying too hard. Loved this one.

Thad Carhart, THE PIANO SHOP ON THE LEFT BANK: DISCOVERING A FORGOTTEN PASSION IN A PARIS ATELIER

An interesting memoir, published 2001, about a man who lives in Paris and slowly discovers a piano shop, a piano of his own, and a whole world of pianos--along with a group of Parisians who tune and play and even revere them. It's a well-written, at times poetic story filled with curious and intriguing facts and some great personalities. Sort of a "niche" book but an engaging read.

Alexandra Fuller, COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

By turns heart-rending and hilarious, this is Fuller's memoir of her mother, who, it seems at the outset, has not quite managed to forgive her daughter for writing what she calls the "Awful Book" (the title is never named; I imagine she means DON'T LETS GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT, which laid bare Alexandra's peculiar and at times traumatic childhood).
Prose is lovely and quirky and witty as usual. Opening line: "Our Mum--or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself--has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in *them*) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe."
The cover shows Nicola with her first best friend, a chimpanzee, who is dressed in a blue jumper that matches her own. It's all very curious ... otherworldly ... and at times painfully sad. Nicola loses three of her five children, survives a brutal war, and relocates again and again with her husband, the pair of them seeming at various times happily aimless, uneasily restless, and searching for something unnamable. But by the end, it seems that the Awful Book has become something of a joke that the mother and daughter share, and that Nicola's governing characteristic is her resilience.

Glen Retief, THE JACK BANK: A MEMOIR OF A SOUTH AFRICAN CHILDHOOD

This memoir is very engaging--and by turns harrowing, insightful, other-worldly. Retief's father is a computer programmer for the research department at Kruger National Park in South Africa, so among other things young Retief learns that there are 517 varieties of birds in the park and how it feels to come to school and find four lions on the basketball courts. The plot arc that governs the book, it seems to me, is Retief learning (or mislearning) about the links among sexuality, race, and violence and then unlearning them. So if at age 12 he links sexuality (and homosexuality) with violence because of the white prefect John who sexually and physically abuses him at his boarding school (I was physically wincing through this section), he unlearns the link later and begins to connect sexuality with love. Several times he writes about "that great cycle of apartheid violence--the apparatus whereby white boys are bullied when young so that they later they will know how to beat blacks into continued submission." I don't mean to make this sound like a "teaching" memoir--it's compulsively readable--but it provided a window into a world I don't know.

Christina Haag, COME TO THE EDGE

A well-crafted memoir by the actress Haag who had an on-again, off-again romance with John F. Kennedy, Jr. This is not a prurient memoir, for those who are looking for the ugly "skinny" on the Kennedy family. This is Haag's story, and she begins with her affluent childhood and her schooling with the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on the Upper East Side; then her days at Brown and Juilliard for training in acting; her years spent taking parts in plays and bits in movies until she hit her stride; and her years of being, quite tenderly and deeply, in love. Most interesting to me, so far as insight into John Jr.'s psyche (which I must admit has never really captured my interest), was the episode when CH and JJr are vacationing in Jamaica. She has a broken leg; the two of them are in a kayak, without the rubber apron, without a bailer, quite ill-prepared. John pushes to try to make it to shore, to the beautiful beach, and despite her fear and resistance, they go. They nearly die trying to get in; then they nearly die trying to get back out. Afterwards, Christina is still shaken, angry and upset. "We could have died!" she tells him. "What a way to go," is his response.

Joyce Carol Oates, A WIDOW'S STORY

JCO's memoir of the four months following her husband's sudden death from pneumonia. Heartfelt, sensitive, at times sharp, and beautifully written. It took me a full week to read; it's too intense to be read quickly. Comparisons with Joan Didion's YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING are inevitable, although I found the books quite different in tone. The small bits JCO writes about the doctors and hospitals I found alarming and infuriating ... her husband died of an infection acquired at the hospital; the nurse Jasmine is horridly insensitive and inappropriate; her own doctor (Dr. M--, with the exception of Jasmine, JCO names no names) stupidly misdiagnoses her shingles the first time around. But mostly I was left with a feeling of astonishment--that everything she wrote about--the visits to and from friends, the Fed-Ex and UPS sympathy deliveries, the emails and letters, her life with the cats, her lectures, planting the garden, the "death tasks"--happened in four months. Also very interesting was how she finally read the partial manuscript that her husband left behind, in which he represents her (as the character "Vanessa") and she speaks of the artist's need to be able to write and let go.

Conor Grennan, LITTLE PRINCES

This reminded me of Jamie Zeppa's memoir of her two years in Bhutan. In this, the young American Grennan signs up for 3 months of volunteer work with children in Nepal (he claims it's a great line to use in bars) and gets sucked into loving these orphans, many of whom were trafficked away from their families. At the time when the Maoist rebels and the King's forces are at war, he tries to reunite the children with their parents, begin an orphanage, and start Next Generation Nepal. An engaging read.

Erik Weihenmayer, TOUCH THE TOP OF THE WORLD

OK, I am a wuss. I wince when I bump myself, say, on the corner of the desk. From now on, I will think, at least I am not shivering in 200 mile-an-hour winds, crouched behind a rock wall, eating freeze-dried spaghetti and suffering from oxygen deprivation. A friend (with whom I hiked the Grand Canyon) passed me this book, partly because the author used to teach at my daughter's school; it turns out he went to my husband's high school, too. The author is blind, and he has climbed some of the world's toughest mountains, including Everest. It's a great story, a good read; he tells his story with plenty of humor, and also some pointed and wry insights about how the world treats, and what the world believes about, blind people.