Stepping in the Write Direction

The book When Breath Becomes Air (1/12/16), by Stanford Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, remInds me of The Last Lecture (4/8/2008) by Randy Pausch. These memoirs are lessons on living while powering through the most devastating medical obstacles life offers. They share profound insights on living fully in the face of death, by virtue of their authors’ words and actions, as they and their families embark upon an unexpected medical odyssey manifesting the essence of human endurance and inner strength. I fell in love with author Paul Kalanithi early on in the book because of his passion for literature. He received a Bachelor and Master of Arts in English Literature, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology from Stanford University, later completing a Master of Arts in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Darwin College (University of Cambridge). By the time he’d completed his Masters, the calling to Medicine emerged the stronger passion, and Paul subsequently receiv...

I can honestly say by the time I got to the end of the audiobook Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family, I felt like I was finding freedom. By 1.5 hours into the audiobook, it was apparent the book is a PR puff piece, bordering on obsequious, as though one were writing an autobiography and making oneself appear perfect in every possible way, ie “While in Africa he did a little secret diamond scouting with a close friend who helped him to source the perfect conflict free stone.” Two hours in, the book feels like a PR puff piece that is a complete rehash of every news story of all aspects of their relationship and life, already amply covered and published in every media platform, without any new information or insights. It’s actually kind of boring, but perhaps amping the playback speed to 1.75x would help (nah, sounds too much like narration by a member of the lollipop guild). Annoying words appearing throughout the book: giggling, perfect, cheeky, ado...

As I listened to the audiobook Stay With Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, I tried to imagine what kind of steroidal fueled drama the “Housewives of” franchise could create if polygamy and overbearing extended family in a Nigerian setting were thrown into the mix; I’m guessing it might have been something like this novel. The darkly complex story, punctuated by comical moments is told almost like an instructional fable on the redeeming power of love. The period in which Stay with Me takes place is during a time of great upheaval in Nigeria, when it experienced two military coups, followed by an attempt in the 90s to elect the Social Democratic Party, only to have the election annulled by the general installed during the second coup, prompting the US to suspend aid. During this period Wole Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature (the first African laureate), later fleeing Nigeria in late ‘94. Six months later another playwright and Nobel Prize nominee, Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged with 8 oth...

I came across Miss Aluminum: A Memoir by Susanna Moore when I saw it as a recently read book by someone I follow on Goodreads; the title and book cover were very intriguing to me. I had never heard of Susanna Moore before, but after reading Wikipedia, searching Google images of her, and watching two of her interviews on YouTube, I became very interested in learning more. I was struck with her extraordinary fragile haunting beauty as a young woman in the photo on the book cover, her harrowing life journey, and her dispassionate, almost clinical manner of processing and filtering her experiences in the world, largely through a number of books she has written, many to significant acclaim. The title choice of this memoir is arresting; who has ever heard of a “Miss Aluminum,” and how would that stack up against the gold and silver titles? I have rarely found a book title and cover photo that so strongly compelled me to learn the story between its pages. Moore narrates her audiobook in a pre...

This book should be required reading for every American: Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends by Peter Schweizer (published 2018) is fascinating, astonishing and horrifying. It details, in a bipartisan way (neither party is unscathed), how extended family and friends of elected officials use private equity firms (exempt from certain reporting requirements) and a plethora of shell companies, allowing China and other foreign entities to gain substantial footholds into American real estate and access to industrial and military research information. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.   Many friends close to the highest levels of power, and privy to future plans to regulate certain industries no longer in favor when a change of administration occurs, enrich themselves. A “smash and grab” transpires when a sudden onslaught of numerous new regulations and costly mandates squeeze a sector until the more vulnerable companies bec...

Beach Rental by Grace Greene: what a marvelous story! I loved the concept of the book, the bargain struck by a woman in her twenties, and a man ten years older. Before the book is over there are two tales of awakening love. It’s not a run of the mill storyline. Books with romance in them can be a dime a dozen, but I’ve now read three of Grace Greene’s novels (Wildflower Heart in 2019, and Claire/Beach Brides in 2017), and looking back, I see I’ve rated each one 5 stars.  In Beach Rental, as in her other books, the story unwinds, effortlessly, the emotions are real, nothing is forced, dialogue and conversation run smoothly. There is tension about what is coming next, and enough investment with the characters, readers are compelled to keep the pages turning. With Beach Rental, I listened to the audiobook while reading the kindle; previously I’ve used voiceover on the kindle books. Each time I have found myself repeatedly reading ahead of the narration because the plot is so interesti...

I like the premise of this series; twelve members of the Romantic Hearts Book Club meet at a Caribbean beach resort and decide before departing to send individual messages out to sea in bottles. There is something about a secret message launched into the ocean that speaks to anticipation, the promise of hope, and the possibility for new connections. Each book in the series tells how individual book club member's lives change when the bottles with messages they toss into the sea set off life altering chains of events. In Grace Greene's Clair, three sisters have returned to their childhood home in Emerald Isle, NC where the rose bushes once full of vibrant blooms are now barely recognizable. Mallory, the oldest, on the heels of a divorce, finds solace in work and caring for her youngest sister Darcy, who's been shell shocked by the worst life has to offer. Middle sister Clair's life turned upside down following her book club's resort weekend; she grapples with the sud...

Reading The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd is like entering a vast foreign land, at once both strange and familiar. It’s a story of women, their strength, intelligence, love, and endurance, living often as a subjugated class, finding freedom by forming alliances with kindred souls. It is about the beauty and joy of seeking knowledge, and the liberty to contribute to that body as a legacy for those who come after. It’s fiction knitted together with facts, this story of Ana, the wife of Jesus.  Woven through the narrative are threads based in historic fact, such as the Therapeutae: a monastic commune near Alexandria and the Nag Hammadi Library: thirteen leather bound manuscripts containing 52 3rd and 4th century works (transcribed from older texts) buried in a sealed jar, the most complete of these “The Gospel According to Thomas,” discovered in 1946 by a farmer, and now housed in the Coptic Museum of Cairo, Egypt. It’s a fascinating exploration of the gnostic religious communiti...

Some will not share her politics, but all can agree that in writing her book Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, Isabel Wilkerson has devoted every fiber of her being and soul, marshaling her formidable intelligence and skills of research, organization, and verbal acumen to a premise that, failing inscription on tablets carried from a mountaintop with care, she supplies incomparably in her text: “We look to the night sky and see the planet and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded how small we are, how insignificant our worry of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust we are. Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in a span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with? The species h...

In The Switch by Beth O’Leary a 79 year old cougar is on the prowl in London, a boyfriend is lying in more ways than one, a husband waltzes out of town with a dance instructor, dogs are busting free from their leads, the sap is rising in the countryside, a family processes a devastating loss, passions are stirring, old acquaintances are forgotten, the flames of love are fanned, hearts grow warm in loving breasts, arguments veer into embraces, and as we learned in When Harry Met Sally, it’s about old friends. Life is for the living, so what are you waiting for? I am verklempt. I‘ll give you a topic: “When you lose someone, you don’t lose everything they gave you. They leave something with you.” Talk amongst yourselves. Oh, and one more thing, karma is the cruelest mistress of all!

Just finished Terry McMillan’s first published novel, Mama (1987). Jail, cocaine, high school dropouts, unwed pregnancies, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, arrests, violence, abuse, single parent households, bad checks; what life-robbers some of those words are. How can anyone get beyond having all of those things in one family? That one family lives in a place where almost everyone around them is in the same boat. In this novel, children are born into families where young parents party, drink, and have knock down drag out bloody fights a room away from their kids, listening and cowering in the dark behind closed bedroom doors. It doesn’t sound like the subject matter for a book anyone could endure, much less enjoy. The book is like an epic prose poem on surviving in spite of yourself, and in spite of a world around you that throws up roadblocks faster than dirt flies beneath a hound searching for a buried bone. Terry McMillan breathes such life into her characters, when they inhal...

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner is a very comforting book. Reading it is like tuning into a show about a close knit group of friends in the English village of Chawton, who share a love of Jane Austen shortly after World War II. Like an Austen book, we follow the lives of these friends through the best and worst times they face over a year. Each finds Austen books a port during storms of upheaval, a place where one returns again and again to a world where qualities such as truth, love, honesty, and kindness prevail over less virtuous attributes. I was drawn into the story line from the beginning, and it was a book I didn’t want to leave. The daily life and entanglements of the characters were interesting, and the reading compulsive to see what would happen next. The finish of the book is satisfying, and while not all outcomes were as expected, they were delightful. This book is a gentle rain, not strained, and those who love such narratives are blessed to read a work where des...