Homegirl by Judith Matloff

I enjoy memoirs that I can easily picture myself living. Although I do not live in Manhattan nor have I ever bought and rehabbed a Victorian crack den in the middle of a crack infested neighborhood, I could do that. I could buy an old beat up house and live in less than favorable circumstances while I fixed it up like Judith Matloff in her lovely personal story Homegirl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block.

Ms Matloff has moved to New York City after a whole other lifetime living abroad and reporting on wars and natural disasters for various newspapers. She and her husband want to settle down and start a family which involves buying a house in their now chosen home of New York. Judith rationalizes that she has been in war zones and faced down militias, why should she worry about living on a block with drug dealers?

As I predicted from the start, after a few years of sweat and toil she and her husband come to have a beautiful home and family and come to have a real love for their strange neighborhood of misfits and crack addicts. They make friends, watch as stores come into the neighborhood, become activists for drug free neighborhoods, walk the dog and weather 9-11 together.

I loved the narrator’s insecurities about living there after she made the decision to buy, and I love watching her life take root. The whole story is delightful and page turning. About the only confusion I have is her ambivalence about the drug dealers who inhabit her street. On the one hand she befriends some of them and learns to use them to help her keep the addicts off her front steps and keep the crime away from the hood. She laments over one of them named Miguel who disappears suddenly. She even searches for him in the Dominican Republic when she goes there on business. On the other hand she openly hates them and works to rid her neighborhood of them. She rejoices when the undercover narcotics cops announce there is no more work to do in her neighborhood. Perhaps it is this very tension in the story that makes the story so compelling. Isn’t this basic truth for all of us? The very things we hate are somehow secretly so much a part of us that we really have a hard time not loving them. Or something like that. Read this one. It is enjoyable.

Time Bandit

I love books that chronicle what people do for a living. I have read books on waiting tables, housecleaning, cooking at a five star restaurant and stripping. I enjoy reading about people who can describe what they do in a compelling manner.

Johnathan and Andy Hillstrand have done this for the world of commercial fishing on the Bering Sea. (Read: very dangerous and very cold.) I enjoyed the book and all the stories involved more than I thought I would, but I still struggled to finish the book. The novel is arranged around the framing device of one of the two brothers stranded at sea on a fishing boat awaiting rescue. The bulk of the chapters are from this lost fisherman’s point of view. A few others look at fishing from the rescuers viewpoint or from the view point of the other brother who is living in Indiana on his horse ranch. The beginning of most chapters is the brother talking about drifting alone on the sea and then moves into his stream of conscious thoughts and memories about fishing.

The stories are narrated as sort of fishing tall tales. Big men who do a big scary job make big money and get big drunk and get into big fights and go through wives and women like underwear. At first they were funny and interesting. I loved reading about the rules and regulations of commercial fishing, the way the crew worked for 96 hours in all kinds of horrid conditions to bring the catch in, how the boat and crew worked together, how the industry is regulated, the grocery expedition to stock the boat for the voyage, the mindset of a fisherman and how they built their boat with their dad. Many many of the tales were true and touching and fascinating.

After awhile though, I got tired of reading about the fistfights and the bars and the men they saved from freezing in the Bering sea. I think this points to the biggest problem with the narrative and that is the framing device. I think a better way to organize this account of fishing on the Bering Sea would be just to give me 12 chapters each organized around a part of the fisherman’s life. The slow meandering build-up to the fisherman’s rescue really took away from the rest of the story. I did not think for a minute that he would not be rescued. Better save that tale for one independent chapter.

All in all, I am glad to have met these two brothers and learned something more of the price they pay to bring fish to our tables. I realized at the end that these two men are featured in a Discovery Channel show called “The Deadliest Catch.” Check it out!

The Zookeepers Wife by Diane Ackerman

Anyone who has read The Natural History of the Senses knows that Diane Ackerman has a magical way of describing senses and the natural world. I first read this work more than 10 years ago and it has stuck with me for a long time.

I was drawn to The Zookeeper's Wife when I saw that it was Ackerman telling the story. She does not dissappoint. She writes a non-fiction account of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a Polish couple who run the Warsaw Zoo. When the Third Reich invades Warsaw and begins dismantling life for Poles and Jews, Jan and Antonina use their once beautiful zoo to help hundreds of Jews escape Warsaw and thier inevitable fate during the Holocaust.

Ackerman bases this beautiful book on Antonina's diaries and fills in the blanks with meticulous research about Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto and the world of Zoo's at the middle of the 20th century.

What arises is a beautiful tale of one couple's heroic acts in the middle of a strange otherwordly paradise which they created in the middle of a surreal kind of hell.

Ackerman not only tells thier tale but helps us understand what exactly they were up against during the war. She paints a vivid picture of Warsaw and the Poles resistance to Hitler and the Gestapo.

Jan Zabinski after the war was commemorated Righteous Among the Nations.

Speaking of the Shoe Muse

here is a poem I wrote in my Wednesday writing class. Susan read it aloud during class and I kind of liked it. Here it is:

You don’t know what came over you
when you saw those sparkling red pumps--
Candy-apple red, three inch spiked heels,
shinier than the ruby slippers,
narrower than a ballet shoe.

A deep longing sprang up from somewhere
you could not remember.
Your size 11 feet always gave you
lessons in humility, never grace.

The desire ran so deep and so thick
that now your dreams are filled with red shoes,
And the muse whispers “shoes”
on her weekend nights off.

Imagine, as I know you will,
picking up prescriptions and
dropping off dry cleaning, and you suddenly
see something shine in a store window
and remember what you cannot have:

The taut muscular stomach of a pretty boy you once knew
The feel of a baby sucking at your breast
The ability to dance high on tip-toe,
a slender hipbone jutting out
above the waistband of your jeans

All your longing seems focused on lightness
On being no denser than a piece of fine silk
On floating somehow, impossibly, on a cloud
or being dangled by fine wires as you pretend to
fly across a stage on extended calf muscles.
All your longing points you at smallness,
Points you at bright high heeled sparkly shoes
That all size sevens wear.

Birthday books

I celebrated my birthday this week.(They say 43 is the new 23!) I received some very beautiful and thoughtful gifts from my friends and husband. Steph gave a donation to Heifer International in my name. Kim (aka sweetcakes) made me a lovely chicken tea cozy. My husband gave me a DVD I had been wanting to watch. Also flowers, a picture and frame of some friends, a button box and some lovely cards. It was a very nice day.




I usually treat myself to books since those are some of my favorite things to shop for. I picked out a current memoir called: Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. A book of short stories by Elizabeth Berg. Another memoir by autistic animal behaviorist Temple Grandin called Animals in Translation and finally another memoir by surgeon Atul Gawande called Better. I hope to be recommending another book of the week very soon.



I do love memoirs and so far Beautiful Boy is promising to be very compelling. I did end up taking back a book. It looked funny, but after I read a chapter I decided it was vapid and lacking all meaning and the funny could not make up for the sick feeling I felt when I read it. So, I won't even tell you what it was called lest you waste your money on it. Lets not give this writer her due.

Off the Deep End by W. Hodding Carter

Lately memoirs take on this form: find something outrageous and nearly impossible (but not totally impossible) to do. Do it. Write about how hard it was to do it. I have read memoirs of families who gave up buying everything except basic necessities for one year, gave up using electricity for a year, gave up buying anything made in China for a year, read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, walked across the country, and cooked all the recipes from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking over the course of one year.

Hodding Carter has the latest entry into the memoir-turns-daring-do saga, he is going to train for and compete in swimming at the 2008 summer Olympics at age 45. The advanced copy I read does not include the final chapter which will relate his encounter at the Olympic swimming trials. I can’t really say if the final chapter would have made a difference in how I feel about his story.

For much of the book I really did not like Mr. Carter. He struck me as a 43 year old frat boy who was having a hard time accepting middle age. The fact that he kept admitting his frat boy tendencies did nothing to endear me to him. The technical aspects of swimming were not interesting for me—they may be for seasoned swimmers—and a lot of the book seemed bogged down by details of stroke and times and races. It was hard to get through. There were a few interesting adventures most notably his swimming from island to island in the Caribbean in a sort of swimming trek adventure and also his relay swim around Manhattan Island. Even during these adventures he seemed like a puffed up school boy. The kind I mostly try to avoid.

Just the same, being about 45 myself, I hope he is able to make the Olympics. I will watch for him, and I will pick up the book when it is out to see if I can find out his fate at the trials. I will also send this book to an old friend who is an avid swimmer. Perhaps she will understand some of the swimming-speak and relate to him a bit more. ( )

What the Frak is Going on?

This is a cool video of my new favorite TV show. Battlestar Galactica Rules. Who knew I was a Sci-Fi Geek?