Summer 2009 Reading Recommendations from the Library Staff

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

What perfect timing for this optimistic, uplifting debut novel (and maiden publication of Amy Einhorn's new imprint) set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing “about what disturbs you.” The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club sets relies—and mistrusts—enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who's raised 17 children, and Aibileen's best friend Minny, who's found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their stories is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and history, this one has bestseller written all over it.
Recommended by Jennifer Adams

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Essayist and public radio regular Vowell (Assassination Vacation) revisits America's Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country's present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. In a style less colloquial than her previous books, Vowell traces the 1630 journey of several key English colonists and members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Foremost among these men was John Winthrop, who would become governor of Massachusetts. While the Puritans who had earlier sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower were separatists, Winthrop's followers remained loyal to England, spurred on by Puritan Reverend John Cotton's proclamation that they were God's chosen people. Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Sunni/Shia Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11).
Recommended by Julie Bartlett

The Space Between Us: A Novel by Thrity Umrigar

Umrigar's schematic novel (after Bombay Time) illustrates the intimacy, and the irreconcilable class divide, between two women in contemporary Bombay. Bhima, a 65-year-old slum dweller, has worked for Sera Dubash, a younger upper-middle-class Parsi woman, for years: cooking, cleaning and tending Sera after the beatings she endures from her abusive husband, Feroz. Sera, in turn, nurses Bhima back to health from typhoid fever and sends her granddaughter Maya to college. Sera recognizes their affinity: "They were alike in many ways, Bhima and she. Despite the different trajectories of their lives—circumstances... dictated by the accidents of their births—they had both known the pain of watching the bloom fade from their marriages." But Sera's affection for her servant wars with ingrained prejudice against lower castes. The younger generation—Maya; Sera's daughter, Dinaz, and son-in-law, Viraf—are also caged by the same strictures despite efforts to throw them off. In a final plot twist, class allegiance combined with gender inequality challenges personal connection, and Bhima may pay a bitter price for her loyalty to her employers. At times, Umrigar's writing achieves clarity, but a narrative that unfolds in retrospect saps the book's momentum.
Recommended by Camille Close

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

An interest in the human condition is the common thread that ties together Gilbert's diverse body of work, ranging from a collection of short stories (Pilgrim) to a novel discussing the outdoor lifestyle of Eustace Conway (The Last American Man). In her new work, she continues her exploration of the human psyche through a very personal journey of self-discovery in three countries: Italy, India, and Indonesia. In Italy, her first escape, she devours the food and the melodic language with equal gusto. In India, she decamps to an ashram to learn the intense discipline prayer and spiritual pilgrimage require, in the process revealing the depths to be found in reflection, meditation, and historical teachings. In Indonesia, she generates strong friendships and gains insight into homeopathic medicines, healing, and the complexities of different cultures. Throughout, she candidly shares her observations and emotions as she grows from a woman shattered, lost, and confused to one rejuvenated, confident, and in love. A probing, thoughtful title with a free and easy style, this work seamlessly blends history and travel for a very enjoyable read.
Recommended by Eileen Dwyer

Listening Below the Noise : A Meditation On the Practice of Silence by Anne D. LeClaire

Against the cacophony that pervades our lives, novelist LeClaire (The Lavender Hour) offers a persuasive antidote: silence. Sixteen years ago, LeClaire decided to devote a 24-hour period to not speaking, and it became a twice-a-month practice. LeClaire draws deeply on this experience in calling for a wholesale rethinking of noise and a greater appreciation for quietude and nature. Especially revealing are scenes in which the author or her friends, husband and other family struggle with her practice. It is within this conflict that LeClaire finds the lessons that she wishes to pass on to her readers. With Ann Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea as a model, LeClaire, too, focuses especially on women, encouraging them to carve out a silent space in a demanding world. Both book and the practice seem at once self-indulgent and eminently sensible. LeClaire's prose is colloquial, friendly and familiar, and the book is as much memoir as it is inspiration. Nineteen photos by LeClaire's son illustrate each chapter opening.
Recommended by Eileen Dwyer

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

This first-in-a-trilogy is a frilly valentine to Manhattan's picturesque West Village, starring a boisterous and charmingly contentious Italian-American family. Valentine Roncalli, adrift after a failed relationship and an aborted teaching career, becomes an apprentice to her 80-year-old grandmother, Teodora Angelini, at the tiny family shoe business. While Valentine struggles to come up with a financial plan—and shoe design—to bring the Old World operation into the 21st century, her brother, Alfred, is pushing Gram to retire and sell her building for $6 million. It's not all business for Valentine, of course: handsome and sophisticated Roman Falconi, owner and chef at a posh restaurant, is vying for her heart. Bestselling Trigiani channels ambition and girl-power, but is surprisingly reserved—and retro—when it comes to romance: [O]ur relationship has to build slowly and beautifully in order to hold all the joy and misery that lies ahead, thinks Valentine. Still, this genteel and lush tale of soles and souls has loads of charm and will leave readers eager for the sequel.
Recommended by Kelly Kielbania

Hachiko waits by Lesléa Newman; illustrated by Machiyo Kodaira

Hachi, an Akita pup, reveres his master and likes nothing more than accompanying Japanese professor Eizaburo Ueno to his morning train and then meeting him in the afternoon. One day the professor dies while at work, yet the faithful Hachi awaits his return at the station every day until his own death some 10 years later. Newman's fictionalized account of this true story adds a young boy, Yasuo, who befriends the dog and the professor and later cares for Hachi during his steadfast vigil at the Shibuya, Japan, train station. Yasuo brings a childhood focus to the poignant story and keeps it from becoming overly depressing, and Kodaira's soft, black-and-white sketches help to break up the chapters for younger readers and add interest to the story.
Recommended by Theresa Labato

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith

As a mysterious plague falls upon the village of Meryton and zombies start rising from the dead, Elizabeth Bennett is determined to destroy the evil menace, but becomes distracted by the arrival of the dashing and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

Recommended by Erin Loree

Baghdad without a map, and other misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Horwitz, London-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, visited several Muslim countries plus Israel in 1988-89, sometimes accompanied by his equally intrepid wife. In Yemen he sampled qat, a narcotic, and bought a souvenir dagger, becoming "possibly the first armed Jew to parade through the streets of Saada.'' He found Khartoum "the world's most blighted city'' but liked the Sudanese, who "exhibited none of the studied indirection or straight-out lying I'd become accustomed to in the Arab world.'' He made a lightning visit to Beirut under shellfire, covered the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in Tehran, and interviewed Nobel novelist Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo. Of the 14 countries he traveled, Israel seems to have pleased him the least: "The first thing you notice, coming into Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest.'' Horwitz visited Iraq three times in the summer of '88 and returned after the invasion of Kuwait to find things "paranoid and thuggish." His memoir is entertaining, often funny, and occasionally informative.
Recommended by Kathy McDonough

The omnivore's dilemma a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan

Pollan (journalism, Univ. of California, Berkeley; The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World ) defines the Omnivore's Dilemma as the confusing maze of choices facing Americans trying to eat healthfully in a society that he calls "notably unhealthy." He seeks answers to this dilemma by taking readers through the industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer stages of the food chain. Focusing on corn as the keystone plant in the industrial stage, Pollan describes its role in feeding cattle and in food processing as well as its ultimate destination in the products we consume at fast-food restaurants. The organic, or pastoral, stage offers a pure and chemical-free eating environment for animals and humans. In the hunter-gatherer stage, omnivores hunt animals and gather the plant foods that comprise all or part of their diets. Pollan explains how a framework of environmental, biological, and cultural factors determines what and how we eat. Although a bit long and sometimes redundant, this folksy narrative provides a wealth of information about agriculture, the natural world, and human desires.
Recommended by Sue Mulry

The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman

Set in Los Angeles in 1949, Cushman's latest historical novel captures the terrors and confusions of the McCarthy era. Eighth-grader Francine admires her outspoken, precocious friend Sophie, who was kicked out of public school for painting "There is no free speech here" on the gymnasium floor. Francine feels muzzled at home and at her rigid Catholic school, "the land of 'Sit down, Francine' and 'Be quiet, Francine.'" Her worries escalate as Communist scares in Hollywood grow, and Sophie and her playwright father fall under suspicion. Cushman adroitly transforms what could have been a didactic story about intellectual freedom into an integrated, affecting novel about friendship and growing up. Described in Francine's authentic voice, which is filled with period slang, the smoothly inserted historical details, from Montgomery Clift to backyard bomb shelters, personalize Francine's adolescent struggles rather than simply marking a place and a time. Readers will skip over unknown cultural references ("My heart pounded like a Gene Krupa drum solo") and savor the story of friends and family tensions, the sly humor, and the questions about patriotism, activism, and freedom, which bring the novel right into today's most polarizing controversies. Sure to provoke lively class discussion, this will easily absorb independent readers in search of a rich, satisfying story about early adolescence.
Recommended by Robert Stoddard

Don't sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle by Daniel L. Everett

A linguist offers a thought-provoking account of his experiences and discoveries while living with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living in central Brazil and a people possessing a language that defies accepted linguistic theories and reflects a culture that has no counting system, concept of war, or personal property, and lives entirely in the present.

Recommended by Carl Todd

Last lion: the fall and rise of Ted Kennedy by the team at the Boston Globe, Bella English ... [et al.]; edited by Peter S. Canellos

Last Lion is a fine biography, a graceful summing up an extraordinary life that is not yet over. It shows little sign of having been written by a team of seven, and it does not carry the tone of an obituary. With its anecdotes and political tales, it captures the wit, humor, and grace of Ted Kennedy and establishes his place, 'as much a part of the Capitol as the dome or the Rotunda beneath it.'

Recommended by Claire Wheeler

Library Staff Recommendations from 2008

Library Staff Recommendations from 2007

Favorite books of other HCC Staff & Faculty