Review of Good Prose, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

Good Prose

The Art of Nonfiction

Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing

by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd

Random House, New York, 2013. 195 pages.
Starred Review

Tracy Kidder writes good nonfiction. On Sonderbooks, I’ve reviewed Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains, and I read Among Schoolchildren long before I started writing Sonderbooks.

Good Prose is a book written by Tracy Kidder and his long-time editor, Richard Todd, about the writing process. It throws in the story of their collaboration and friendship along the way, but mostly it gives lots of insights about writing good prose.

It’s no surprise that the writing in this book is exceptionally good. So to review this book, I’m going to simply offer several example paragraphs.

Even the stories about their friendship are insightful. I like this bit from the Introduction:

A long association had begun. Todd knew only that he had a writer of boundless energy. For Kidder, to be allowed not just to rewrite but to rewrite ad infinitum was a privilege, preferable in every way to rejection slips. And as for Todd, it was possible to imagine that a writer willing to rewrite might turn out to be useful. Todd once remarked to a group of students, never expecting he would be quoted, “Kidder’s great strength is that he’s not afraid of writing badly.” The truth was that Kidder was afraid of writing badly in public, but not in front of Todd. Kidder would give him pieces of unfinished drafts. He would even read Todd passages of unfinished drafts, uninvited, over the phone. Very soon Todd understood when he was being asked for reassurance, not criticism, and would say, “It’s fine. Keep going.” When a draft was done, Todd would point out “some problems,” and another rewrite would begin.

That ritual established itself early on and persisted through many articles and Kidder’s first two books. A time came — midway through the writing of Among Schoolchildren, about a fifth-grade teacher — when Kidder began revising pages before Todd had a chance to read them. This was a means of delaying criticism forever. No doubt that was Kidder’s goal, and he could remain happily unaware of it as long as he kept on rewriting. Things went on that way for a while, until Todd said, in the most serious tone he could muster, “Kidder, if you rewrite this book again before I have time to read it, I’m not working on it anymore.” Kidder restrained himself, and the former routine was reestablished.

Here are some tidbits from a section on Characters:

Some general truths apply. For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details. Characters can emerge in long descriptive passages, as in Tolstoy, but brevity can also work. Graham Greene rarely gives us more than a detail or two — a face “charred with a three days’ beard” or a pair of “bald pink knees” — and Jane Austen often gives us less than that, and yet the people those writers create have come alive for generations of readers.

Whether it is brief or lengthy, mere description won’t vivify a statue. What we want are essences, woven into a story in moments large and small. A character has a wart. You could describe it in detail, but the reader would probably see it more clearly if you described not the wart but how the character covers it when he’s nervous.

Here’s a paragraph from the chapter on essays:

When you write about your own ideas, you put yourself in a place that can feel less legitimate than the ground occupied by reporters or even by memoirists, who are, or ought to be, authorities on their subjects. An all-purpose term describes efforts at sharing your mind: the essay. As an essayist you can sometimes feel like a public speaker who must build his own stage and lectern. Essays are self-authorizing. This is the dilemma but also the pleasure of the form. The chances are that nobody asked for your opinion. But if your idea is fresh, it will surprise even someone, perhaps an assigning editor, who did ask.

And from the chapter on style:

We think of an author’s style as if it were some sort of fixed identity, but it is made up of an accumulation of granular decisions like this one. I remember once in those early days giving Kidder some advice about style. I said in effect, “Look, you are not always the calmest and most reasonable person in the room, and there is no need to be. But you admire such people. Why don’t you just pretend to be a reasonable man in your prose?” I think it was useful advice, actually, but it’s not as if a style is a one-time discovery. It is created and re-created sentence by sentence, choice by choice.

And finally, here’s how they sum up the book, again from the Introduction:

Good Prose is mainly a practical book, the product of years of experiment in three types of prose: writing about the world, writing about ideas, and writing about the self. To put this another way, this book is a product of our attempts to write and to edit narratives, essays, and memoirs. We presume to offer advice, even the occasional rule, remembering that our pronouncements are things we didn’t always know but learned by attempting to solve problems in prose. For us, these things learned are in themselves the story of a collaboration and a friendship.

The result is a book both instructive and entertaining.

tracykidder.com
AtRandom.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol

Fire in the Ashes

Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

by Jonathan Kozol

Crown Publishers, New York, 2012. 354 pages.
Starred Review

This book is made up of stories — stories about some of the poorest children in America, but children whom Jonathan Kozol has known and cared about for twenty-five years. So we get to see them rise into adulthood. Some of them do not go on to productive lives, but most of them do, and the readers rejoice with Jonathan.

He begins the book with a note to the Reader, which begins like this:

Over the course of many years I have been talking with a group of children in one of the poorest urban neighborhoods of the United States and have written several books about them and their families. Readers ask me frequently today if I’ve kept in contact with the children and if I know how many have prevailed against the obstacles they faced and, in those cases, how they managed to survive and how they kept their spirits strong amidst the tough conditions that surrounded them.

It has not been difficult to keep in contact with most of these children because so many of them, as they have grown older, have come to be among my closest friends. They call me on the phone. They send me texts and e-mails. We get together with each other when we can.

The stories that follow are stories of particular children. But these stories put faces to poverty. They make us care. I can’t think of a better way to raise concern for problems in urban America than to get us to care about the children and families growing up there.

Sometimes life is more astonishing than fiction, and more inspiring, too. Even if you don’t want your awareness of issues raised, this book is worth reading for the stories alone. You will care about the wonderful people he features and follows into adulthood.

JonathanKozol.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The Blessing Cup, by Patricia Polacco

The Blessing Cup

by Patricia Polacco

A Paula Wiseman Book (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), New York, 2013. 42 pages.
Starred Review

Patricia Polacco knows how to tell true stories with punch. This is a picture book for school age kids, with lots of text on each page. The story told is powerful, and will mesmerize readers and listeners.

The story begins when Patricia’s great-grandmother, Anna, was a little girl in Russia. Anna’s mother was given a beautiful china tea set for her wedding. The tea set had a blessing with it:

This tea set is magic. Anyone who drinks from it has a blessing from God. They will never know a day of hunger. Their lives will always have flavor. They will know love and joy . . . and they will never be poor.

I like when they explain that the blessings work:

And even though their lives were humble because there was never enough money, Anna’s papa would say to her, “Oh, there is rich and there is rich. We are richer than kings, and do you know why?” Then he and Anna chanted together, “Because we have each other!” Anna felt that in Roynovka everyone was rich. They had one another!

But then the Tsar’s soldiers come to Roynovka and they’re told they must leave Russia, along with all the Jews. On the long, hard journey, they bring the tea set. But Anna’s papa falls ill and almost dies.

However, a kind widowed doctor takes the family in and brought their father back to health. They called him Uncle Genya. But when Uncle Genya is told he cannot keep Jews in his house, he buys them tickets to America.

In gratitude, they leave the tea set with Uncle Genya – all except one cup. And that cup is handed down through the family, all the way to Patricia Polacco, with the blessing always recited along with it.

I can summarize the story, but of course you need to read it, in full, with the repeated blessing, in Patricia Polacco’s words, with Patricia Polacco’s illustrations. Again and again, she writes a story that packs an emotional punch.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of My Bookstore, edited by Ronald Rice

My Bookstore

Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop

Introduction by Richard Russo
Edited by Ronald Rice and Booksellers Across America

Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2012. 378 pages.
Starred Review

My Bookstore is a delight. I read it slowly, one essay per day. It would be a wonderful project to try to visit all the bookstores mentioned in this book, though it might take a lifetime.

The premise is simple. 82 American authors wrote an essay about their personal favorite independent bookstore. The essays are entertaining and delightful. Some talk about the power of reading, some about community, some about great book recommendations, some about wonderful family times.

Here’s what Richard Russo says in the introduction:

Many people love good bookstores, but writers? We completely lose our heads over them. We tell each other stories about them. We form lifelong, irrational attachments to our favorites….

…to me, bookstores, like my first one, remain places of genuine wonder. They fill me with both pride and humility when I come upon my own books in them. Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, best, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who’s saying what. If you ask, they’ll tell you what Richard Russo’s up to in his new one, but more important, they’ll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you’ve never heard of, someone just now entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter.

If you haven’t been in a good bookstore in a while, the book you now hold in your hand will welcome you, lovingly, home.

By reading this book, you can experience for yourself some of those stories that writers tell.

It seems wrong to have a link to Amazon after this review. However, I’m going to keep it there, but ask that my readers merely use Amazon as a “showroom.” Get the information about the book, current price, length, reader reviews. Then go find an independent bookstore and buy yourself a copy. Even though there’s only one of the stores in this book anywhere near me (and not so very near), I think I need to purchase a copy of this book before my next vacation and then start checking off stores.

It does have a list at the end of the stores by geographic location. This book is a celebration of books and people who love them.

blackdogandlevinthal.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Surviving Survival, by Laurence Gonzales

Surviving Survival

The Art and Science of Resilience

by Laurence Gonzales

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2012. 257 pages.

Surviving Survival looks at people who have survived traumatic experiences — and looks at how they live the rest of their lives afterward.

Your experience of life in the aftermath may be even more dramatic, sometimes more painful, than the experience of survival itself. But it can be beautiful and fulfilling, too, and a more lasting achievement than the survival that began it all. What comes after survival is, after all, the rest of your life.

Many of the people whose stories he tells survived horrific experiences. They range from shark attacks and bear attacks to loss of a child or maiming in war. He tells many, many stories, and they don’t all end happily. I found myself getting depressed when he said he needed to balance it out by showing people who did not overcome!

The author doesn’t sugarcoat what these people lived through and now face every day. He explains why the aftermath is so difficult, and looks at many different strategies that work for these people as they live out the rest of their lives.

This book is mostly fascinating. And though I sincerely hope I will never face trauma at the level of the author’s examples, everybody faces smaller traumas throughout their lives. And the author shows techniques that can help you recover from those traumas and live a fruitful life.

One insight that struck me early on involved my vestibular migraines. I had a stroke a year and a half ago. It was in my cerebellum, the center of balance, and was manifested by the room suddenly spinning. After the stroke, I started getting, for the first time in my life, vestibular migraines. They aren’t headaches, but the mechanism is similar to migraine headaches. But instead of head pain, I get a vague dizziness. And it reminds me of nothing so much as my stroke. And that scares me.

This book explained to me why that’s so, why it’s going to take a long time before that’s not a perfectly normal reaction. Here he’s talking about someone who was shipwrecked and witnessed the deaths of her friends.

Much of what the brain does is unconscious. It works behind the scenes to forge memories of what is dangerous and what is beneficial so that in the future we can respond correctly and automatically. During her crisis, Debbie’s brain was working overtime to map out those memories in preparation for the next assault. In the brain, the cardinal rule is: future equals past; what has happened before will happen again. In response to trauma, the brain encodes protective memories that force you to behave in the future the way you behaved in the past. Any sight, sound, or smell, any fragment of the scene in which you were threatened, can set off that automatic behavior. The trouble was that in all likelihood, Debbie would never again face a similar hazard. It is rare to be shipwrecked…. In other words, Debbie’s natural and normally useful systems for forming important memories were working on a job that had no practical value. Indeed, those systems were working to make her miserable.

And that’s not the only effect of trauma. Laurence Gonzales examines many, many cases, and looks at people with varying degrees of coping. At the end of the book, he summarizes what he’s learned about rising above survival and living well after trauma.

This book is fascinating like a train wreck, but it throws in good insights for living along the way.

wwnorton.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Safe Journey, by Julia Cameron

Safe Journey

Prayers and Comfort for Frightened Flyers and Other Anxious Souls

by Julia Cameron

Jeremy P. Tarcher (Penguin), 2013. 151 pages.

This is a lovely little book, in paperback and designed to easily fit in a travel bag for airplane reading. I’ve never really been afraid to fly, but Julia Cameron writes in a way that makes her feelings universal, even if you’re not dealing with that particular fear.

She approaches her fear of flying with story. She tells about a memorable flight, telling us her frightened prayers she sent to God, and then the reaction of the two frightened flyers sitting in her row. She talked with one seatmate about praying to overcome her fear — and then he ended up flying back on the same flight as she did!

Once at her destination, she got strategies from friends, like postponing worrying and acting as if. Those strategies, combined with prayer and helping someone else, healed her fear of flying, as demonstrated when she took a third flight to meet her firstborn grandbaby.

The story’s nice, but Julia Cameron’s prayers are inspiring. She tells God how it is and asks for what she needs, simply and directly. Here’s one example:

Dear God, I am frightened.
Please let us find smooth air again.
Get us out of this turbulence.
Thank you for your help.
Amen.

She also intersperses quotations from others about flying and tips for the reader to try. Even though I’m not plagued by a fear of flying, this book was a lovely reminder to trust God about things I was worried about.

juliacameronlive.com
tarcherbooks.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of First Cameraman, by Arun Chaudhary

First Cameraman

Documenting the Obama Presidency in Real Time

by Arun Chaudhary

Times Books (Henry Holt), New York, 2012. 306 pages.
Starred Review

This book was simply fun reading. A fascinating look at an ordinary guy (or so he seems) who got to look behind the scenes of power, and also had the fun of doing a job that had never been done before.

Arun Chaudhary was the first official White House videographer. He was a film student, and interjects things he knows about filmmaking along the way. He had a different perspective from journalists, and his story of his years with this fascinating job are filled with thoughts about what it all means and how video has changed how we see the world.

Here are some of his thoughts expressed in the Introduction:

I should say that I have more than a passing interest in how political videos work because I spent four years filming Barack Obama pretty much around the clock. As the first Official White House Videographer, I was sort of like President Obama’s wedding videographer if every day was a wedding with the same groom but a constantly rotating set of hysterical guests.

If there’s one thing I learned over those years, it’s that videos don’t lie — on the contrary, they are the most reliable gauge of truth we have. The basic narrative told in a shot is true, despite the ease with which some elements of motion picture can be manipulated. No one can deny the power of editing to influence a viewer….

In our age of media supersaturation, videos have an ever more direct impact on how we judge and elect our politicians. This, at the end of the day, may be a very good thing. Given enough screen time, all candidates reveal who they really are. No matter how carefully scripted and choreographed their media appearances and stump speeches, no matter how skillfully edited their official videos, eventually — for better or worse — the camera will catch them out….

So just to let everyone know, the following pages won’t be about what my lousy childhood was like or what the president eats for breakfast. I’m not going to complain about getting thrown out of Indian Parliament by my belt, or getting trapped in the White House library bathroom while POTUS conducted a forty-minute YouTube town hall with Steve Grove on the other side of the door. (Curse you, noisy automatic toilets!) I’d rather explore the complex interplay of politics and media, and art and government, and audio and video, in the new millennium, and discuss what I’ve learned as the first-ever cameraman to train his lens on a president around the clock.

Arun Chaudhary delivers on his promise. Though he does throw in a lot of fun and quirky anecdotes, this book isn’t so much about him as it is about the ground-breaking job he had and what it means for American politics and government. I sent a copy to my film-major son because it highlighted a cool job that a film student came up with, and I thought he might find it as fascinating as I did.

firstcameraman.com
henryholt.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Out of the Depths, by Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau

Out of the Depths

The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last

by Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau

Sterling, New York, 2011. 380 pages.
Starred Review

Israel Meir Lau was one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald. His older brother was charged by their father to take care of him, and against all odds, he did.

The weight of history and the pride of his heritage rings through these pages. Here he talks about his brother:

Naphtali recalled his last conversation with Father, in which Father had counted thirty-seven generations of rabbis on both his and my mother’s sides of the family. He did this in order to demonstrate the great responsibility of whoever would be saved from the horror to continue the chain of our heritage. Father read verses from Jeremiah: There is hope for your future, the word of God, and your children will return home. He emphasized that if we escaped this inferno safely, we would know how to find our home, which was not this home or any other on this enemy land. “Your home will be in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel], even if you have to acquire it through suffering,” he said, and Naphtali and Father cried on each other’s necks. After embracing each other tightly, Naphtali returned to his job in the ghetto. Father’s words echoed in his ears. Father had believed that I, the youngest son of the Lau family, would escape the inferno safely and pass along the heritage that the Nazis were attempting to destroy.

Israel (“Lulek”) did indeed survive, though his parents did not. He was only eight years old at the end of the war, but his brother managed to keep him safe in the camps. He and his brother made it to the land of Israel, and Lulek went on to become Chief Rabbi of Israel.

This is his story, a story of God’s protection and a story of great service back to God.

The beginning of the book, describing the war years, is the most gripping. After he gets to Israel, he doesn’t organize the material in chronological order, so the book was a little harder to follow. But throughout the book, a powerful story is told of a man who clearly has the hand of God upon his life.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, M.D.

To Heaven and Back

A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again

by Mary C. Neal, M. D.

Waterbrook Press, 2012. 222 pages.

Here’s another Near Death Experience book. I grant you that if you don’t believe in heaven, you can probably find ways to explain these away. But for those of us who believe in heaven, stories like these are magnificently encouraging. At the very least, it’s hard to deny that Dr. Neal should have died in the accident she describes. And once you admit that her very survival was miraculous, it’s hard to ignore her description of talking with angels and her sense of mission in her life afterward.

This book isn’t as focused and polished as some of the similar books I’ve been reading. But an interesting aspect is that she felt she was given a mission to help her family through some hard times. And then her son died. So as if a near death experience weren’t enough, this is also a book about a family dealing with the grief of losing a son, and doing so with grace.

As with every other similar book I’ve read, one of her main descriptions of heaven was a place of love:

My arrival was joyously celebrated and a feeling of absolute love was palpable as these spiritual beings and I hugged, danced, and greeted each other. The intensity, depth, and purity of these feelings and sensations were far greater than I could ever describe with words and far greater than anything I have experienced on earth.

This book tells a dramatic story. It also gives us a glimpse of the hand of God in someone’s life. And I find that encouraging.

waterbrookmultnomah.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Stay: The True Story of Ten Dogs, by Michaela Muntean

Stay

The True Story of Ten Dogs

by Michaela Muntean
photographs by K. C. Bailey and Stephen Kazmierski

Scholastic Press, New York, 2012. 40 pages.
Starred Review

Stay is a picture book biography of a circus performer and the ten dogs that changed his life. The pictures are photographs, and the story is told with economy of language, the flair of a performer, and using bright circus colors as backgrounds, making a complete package just right for its subject.

Luciano Anastasini grew up in the circus and performed in the circus from childhood. But one day in Chicago, he fell fifty feet from a high wire and was told his days as an acrobat and trapeze artist were over.

But the circus was Luciano’s home, and he wanted to stay. He sold tickets. He put up posters. He dreamed of the day he’d once again have an act of his own. Slowly, an idea began to take shape in his mind.

In the act he imagined, he would need partners — furry, four-legged partners.

Of course, he could have found dogs through a breeder. Or at a pet store. But if his idea worked, Luciano would be getting a second chance. Perhaps he could give some dogs a second chance, too. So Luciano went looking for the ones no one wanted.

The book introduces each dog like a star, explains why their owners gave up on them, and then how Luciano saw that their apparent flaws were actually their strengths.

While Bowser’s previous owners had seen a sneak and a thief, Luciano saw a clever dog with a good sense of balance. [The accompanying photo shows Bowser balancing on top of a tube rolling another dog inside.]

Cocoa wouldn’t stop digging. As Luciano filled in the holes she made, he thought about why she did it. He suspected she had so much energy, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Digging was her way of staying busy.

Stick was quick on his feet and enjoyed strutting about on his back legs. “Shall we dance?” Luciano would ask him, and they’d waltz around the circus grounds together.

Then the author explains how he combined all these strengths into an act that kept audiences laughing and entertained, how he built the act before audiences and went on to circuses across the country.

The story’s simple. It’s told at a kid’s level, with plenty of action-filled photographs and bright colors. But ultimately, it’s an inspiring story for both kids and adults.

People frequently say to Luciano, “You saved those dogs.” To that, Luciano shrugs and says maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. What he knows for certain is this: They saved him.

After his accident, they helped him put his life back together, and he is grateful to each and every one of them. Dogs don’t care about yesterday; they don’t worry about tomorrow. They live for now — right now, and Luciano tries to do the same.

“We are lucky, my dogs and me,” he says. “We have a job we love, a job that makes people smile. But most of all, we have each other.”

I read this book because it’s a 2013 Fairfax County Public Library summer reading selection, and now I’m looking forward to booktalking it to kids in the schools to spark their interest in reading this summer. A hard-to-resist choice.

I’m posting this review today in honor of Nonfiction Monday, hosted today at NC Teacher Stuff.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.