Review of The Boy Who Met Jesus, by Immaculée Ilibagiza

Biography, Christian, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 1

The Boy Who Met Jesus

Segatashya of Kibeho

by Immaculée Ilibagiza
with Steve Erwin

Hay House, Carlsbad, California, 2011. 219 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

Immaculée Ilibagiza’s books fascinate me. Her deep love for Jesus was refined and purified in the fire of the Rwandan genocide. She tells that story in Left to Tell and her message of forgiveness in Led by Faith.

Then, in Our Lady of Kibeho she got even a Protestant like me excited about visions of the Virgin Mary that had come to three schoolgirls in Africa.

The Boy Who Met Jesus tells of another visionary from that time in Kibeho. Segatashya was a pagan shepherd boy who heard the voice of Jesus and then experienced repeated visions of Jesus talking with him, and his life was profoundly changed.

Segatashya’s visions have not yet been officially declared genuine by the Catholic church, but Immaculée interviewed people who talked with Segatashya and examined him, and none of those people have any doubt that he was genuine and his message was directly from Jesus.

The words he says Jesus told him may not appeal to those who believe you must exactly follow a certain doctrinal pattern, but I find the words full of love and beauty.

I will find the hearts of everyone who believes in me and follows my commandments — no matter which Bible they read or which religion they belong to.

When I come looking for my children, I will not only look in the Catholic Church for good Christians who do good deeds and acts of love and devotion. I will look across the entire world for those who honor my commandments and love me with an open and sincere heart . . . it is their love, not their religion, that makes them true children of God. Tell this one truth to all those to whom you speak in my name: Believe in me, and in whatever you do in life, do it with faith and love.

Those who do know of God, who have been taught of God’s ways, will be held to a higher standard . . . for to those who have been given, much will be expected. No one is forced to believe in God, but still, God lives in every person’s heart . . . just follow your heart to God’s love. Those who live in love will hear God’s voice, because God’s voice is a voice of love.

Though his message was not all sweetness and light. He foresaw the genocide of Rwanda, not knowing what it meant, but begging people to repent. He talked about the End of Days, but offered encouragement to those who follow Jesus.

After Segatashya’s apparitions, he was told by Jesus to go to other African countries and spread the message. Those stories are fascinating, too.

Immaculée tells about her visits with people who knew Segatashya and a member of the Commission of Enquiry who examined him. But I think my favorite part is where she met Segatashya herself as a college student before his death in the genocide. She asked him what Jesus was like.

“What you need to know is this: Jesus knows us all to the very depths of our souls, all our dreams and worries, all hopes and fears, all our goodness and all our weakness,” he explained. “He can see our sins and faults and wants nothing more than for us to heal our hearts and cleanse our souls so that we can love him as immeasurably as he loves us. When he sends us suffering, he does it only to strengthen our spirits so we’ll be strong enough to fight off Satan, who wants to destroy us, so that one day we can bask in the glory of his presence forever.”

Whatever your beliefs about God, it’s hard for me to imagine someone reading this book and not being touched.

hayhouse.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Austenalia, Musings, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

A Jane Austen Education

How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

by William Deresiewicz

The Penguin Press, New York, 2011. 255 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. I wrote a paper on her my Sophomore year of college. I had lots of time in which to write the paper — so I read ALL her novels, and then wrote the paper staying up all night the night before it was due.

A Jane Austen Education is perhaps my favorite so far of nonfiction Jane Austen take-offs. William Deresiewicz was a graduate student of literature, and he writes about how things he learned from Jane Austen mirrored and informed his life as he became an adult. He’s not afraid to pull out lessons that he needed to learn, and there’s a lovely combination of personal observations and stories with ideas and examples from the novels.

Here’s how he begins:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

He goes through all the novels, matching them up to different periods of his life. There’s lots and lots of good stuff here. He has studied all the novels and studied Jane Austen’s life, so he has plenty of information to convey, and along the way, he comes up with some profound insights and self-deprecating humor. I’ll include at least one paragraph from the chapter on each novel, but there’s a lot more where this comes from.

From Emma:

There was one more thing about my life that had to change, now that I’d read Emma: my relationships with the people around me. Once I started to see myself for the first time, I started seeing them for the first time, too. I began to notice and care about what they might be experiencing, and they began to develop the depth and richness of literary characters. I could almost feel along with their feelings now, as we talked, feel the contours of them as they tried to express them to me. Instead of a boring blur, the life around me now was sharp and important. Everything was interesting, everything was meaningful, every conversation held potential revelations. It was like having my ears turned on for the first time. Suddenly the world seemed fuller and more spacious than I had ever imagined it could be, a house with a thousand rooms that now lay open to explore.

From Pride and Prejudice:

But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.

From Northanger Abbey:

Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilites, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

From Mansfield Park:

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories — entering into their feelings, validating their experiences — is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

From Persuasion:

Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship — which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.

From Sense and Sensibility:

If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate — not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen — and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth — is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.

Now, undoubtedly, my knowledge of all the Austen novels contributed to my enjoyment of this book, but I have little doubt that it would also encourage people to read the novels who haven’t before. All in all, it’s a wonderful contribution to Austenalia, a delightful, thoughtful, even scholarly contribution, and from a male perspective, as a nice contrast to so many others. I highly recommend that Jane Austen fans read this book.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, which I got at an ALA conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Journal of Best Practices, by David Finch

Biography, Nonfiction Review, Relationships, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Journal of Best Practices

A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband

by David Finch

Scribner, New York, 2012. 224 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

This book is sweet. As an adult, David Finch was diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome. It actually opened his eyes to why his marriage was falling apart. He began working on learning how to be a good husband, and kept a Journal of Best Practices.

He writes with plenty of humor. Some of the practices, wives might assume a husband would know without being told. I’m thinking of things like “Laundry: Better to fold and put away than to take only what you need from the dryer.” David Finch used his diagnosis to tackle things like that without blame and simply strive to be nicer for his wife to live with.

Here’s where he explains how the diagnosis helped:

Once I learned that I have Asperger syndrome, the fact that we’d had these serious marital problems seemed less surprising. Asperger syndrome can manifest itself in behaviors that are inherently relationship defeating. It’s tricky being married to me, though neither Kristen nor I could have predicted that. To the casual neurotypical observer (neurotypical refers to people with typically functioning brains, i.e., people without autism), I may seem relatively normal. Cognitive resources and language skills often develop normally in people with Asperger syndrome, which means that in many situations I could probably pass myself off as neurotypical, were it not for four distinguishing characteristics of my disorder: persistent, intense preoccupations; unusual rituals and behaviors; impaired social-reasoning abilities; and clinical-strength egocentricity. All of which I have to an almost comically high degree. But I also have the ability to mask these effects under the right circumstances, like when I want someone to hire me or fall in love with me.

Looking back, I suppose a diagnosis was inevitable. A casual girlfriend might have dismissed my compulsion to arrange balls of shredded napkin into symmetrical shapes as being idiosyncratic or even artistic. But Kristen had been living with me — observing me for years in my natural habitat — and had become increasingly skilled in assessing autism spectrum conditions in her job as a speech therapist….

Most people intuitively know how to function and interact with people — they don’t need to learn it by rote. I do. I was certain that with enough discipline and hard work I could learn to improve my behaviors and become more adaptable. While my brain is not wired for social intuition, I was factory-programmed to observe, analyze, and mimic the world around me. I had managed to go through school, get a good job, make friends, and marry — years of observation, processing, and trial and error had gotten me this far. And my obsessive tendencies mean that when I want to accomplish something I attack it with zeal. With my marriage in dire straits, I decided that even if I needed to make flash cards about certain behaviors and staple them to my face to make them become second nature, I was willing to do it.

Kristen didn’t know it, but that was what her life was about to become — her husband, with the best of intentions, stapling flash cards to his face. Okay, not to his face. And there were no staples involved. But flash cards? Definitely. Many people leave reminder notes for themselves: Pick up milk and shampoo, or Dinner with the Hargroves at 6:00. My notes read: Respect the needs of others, and Do not laugh during visitation tonight, and Do not EVER suggest that Kristen doesn’t seem to enjoy spending time with our kids.

I found two things particularly endearing about this book:

1) That he was willing to make so many changes to make life easier for his wife.
2) That his wife loved him despite the hugely egocentric life he was living before the diagnosis and that she never asked him to be perfect. (Some of his descriptions of what he was doing before are pretty outrageous. But she clearly loves him.)

This is a lovely and humorous story about two imperfect people, one exceedingly quirky, learning to live together with love and grace.

SimonandSchuster.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Titanic: Voices from the Disaster, by Deborah Hopkinson

Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Titanic

Voices from the Disaster

by Deborah Hopkinson

Scholastic Press, New York, 2012. 289 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Children’s Nonfiction

Normally, I never ever read disaster stories. It’s too easy to imagine it happening. I didn’t even ever go see the Titanic movie. I mean, come on, I know how it ends! The only reason I read this book was because it is under consideration by Capitol Choices.

That said, the book tells a compelling story. Though the author does stress the horrible loss of life, some of the impact of the disaster is softened because she focuses on the stories of survivors. Throughout the book, she uses quotations from the survivors, earning the book its subtitle Voices from the Disaster.

The book is also filled with photographs and written in an episodic way that makes you want to keep on reading and browsing. You’ll find out you don’t actually know what happened next, and you want to find out. In the back matter, Deborah Hopkinson even points to websites and still unresolved questions for those who want to explore further. This book is also an excellent look at how historians think.

In her Foreword, Deborah Hopkinson says it well:

Maybe the Titanic makes us all historians. We can’t help being curious: What happened? Why? Who said what and when? What did it mean? And, of course, what if?

deborahhopkinson.com
scholastic.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Graphic Memoir, Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Feynman

written by Jim Ottaviani
art by Leland Myrick
coloring by Hilary Sycamore

First Second, New York, 2011. 266 pages.
Starred Review

How to make the life and work of a brilliant, if quirky, physicist accessible to the general reader? Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick have done an amazing job by putting the biography in graphic novel form.

Not only do they present the scope of Richard Feynman’s accomplishments, including such a wide variety from work on the atomic bomb to work on the committee investigating the space shuttle’s explosion, they also present the basic idea of some of his pioneering concepts in physics. And they talk about his personal life, including his first wife who died not too long after their marriage, and his defense of a man who was running a strip club, and his decision to give up drinking.

The one thing I didn’t like? It was hard to tell apart all the physicists in their shirts and ties. I finally got to where I could spot Feynman by his crazy hair, but that was about as far as I got.

However, this book inspired me to want to read more about Feynman, and it was a fascinating and interesting story in its own right. It didn’t inspire me the way Feynman’s Rainbow did, but it was another side to a man who made a big difference on our planet.

This is Teen Nonfiction, and I decided to post it on the regular nonfiction page rather than the Children’s Nonfiction page, because even in the graphic memoir format, it’s going to go way over the heads of most children, but most adults won’t mind reading a comic book about a great scientist.

firstsecondbooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Some Assembly Required, by Anne Lamott, with Sam Lamott

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Parenting, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Some Assembly Required

A Journal of My Son’s First Son

by Anne Lamott
with Sam Lamott

Riverhead Books, New York, 2012. 272 pages.
Starred Review

I so love Anne Lamott’s writing! She is honest and writes with humor about the failings and foibles we all have. Along the way, a deep faith shines through and a desire to be compassionate to everyone — though she is not afraid to tell us where she is not compassionate at all.

In many ways, Anne Lamott paves the way for me. She’s a little older than me, and her first son was born a year after mine. However, she has become a grandmother before me. In this book, she looks at the beautiful experience of being a grandmother and all the difficulties of letting her son be a father without undue interference from her.

There are some beautiful passages about Jax, the miraculous and wonderful grandbaby:

After I was sure he was sleeping soundly, I touched the flush of his cheeks in that light brown skin and traced those bold eyebrows. Of course, like all babies, he wakes up with a startle, slightly groping and low-level graspy, but with no sense of a time bomb about to go off. The beauty of the curve of his head — how it rests in the crook of his elbow — almost makes me want to flog myself, out of a desperate, unbearable love. All grandparents I’ve mentioned this to have felt this. He’s a Fibonacci spiral, like a nautilus shell — one of those patterns in mathematical expression with a twisting eternal perfection.

Or when she tells Jax the Secret of Life:

Dear Jax: Yesterday was your first Thanksgiving, and it is time for me to impart to you the secret of life. You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained everything important to the other kids. They said: “Look, you’re human, you’re going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.” And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don’t know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.

But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map. This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free. Otherwise, you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others, so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.

I know exactly one other thing that I hope will be useful: that when electrical things stop working properly, ninety percent of the time you can fix them by unplugging the cord for two or three minutes. I’m sure there is a useful metaphor here.

I love the way Sam talks about his son:

It used to be kind of an accident that he could get his feet to his mouth, but now it’s a tool in his movements. He grabs his feet to shift his weight forward, and to sit or roll. Now it’s a lever, to use. He’ll use his feet as a lever, as handles. He’s discovered, “Wow, they’re attached to me. They have weight to them.” It’s evolutionary, and it caught me by surprise because the foot phone seemed like a phase, but it was evolution — him starting the movement process, of rolling over, and rocking forward inch by inch, like someone with no arms. Now you can’t take your eyes off him for a second. He’ll go from being on his back to being on his stomach, with an arm trapped beneath him, and hurt himself. Now if you look away, he can get hurt.

But my favorite is where Anne Lamott reflects about Jesus:

I would say that my deepest spiritual understanding is that God also sees and forgives my smallest detail, even my flickery, prickly, damaged, jealous, vain self, and sees how I get self-righteous and feel either like trash, often, or superior, and like such a scaredy-cat, and God still understands exactly what that feels like. Because God had the experience of being people, through Jesus.

Jesus had his good days and bad days and stomach viruses. Not to mention that on top of it all, he had a mom who had bad days and good days of her own. She’s like me and Amy, like all of us; she would have been as hormonal, too. And she must have been jealous sometimes of the people Jesus chose to spend time with instead of her. Jealousy is such a toxic virus. “Who are these people? And what do they have that I don’t have?” It’s pretty easy to be deeply selfish when it comes to sharing your child. Even Mary must have been like: “Back off! He’s mine.“

Anne Lamott makes the particular experience of being a grandmother a universal experience that we can all share with her.

riverheadbooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Girl’s Guide to Homelessness, by Brianna Karp

Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness

A Memoir

by Brianna Karp

Harlequin, 2011. 344 pages.
Starred Review

Wow. This book will grab you and keep you turning pages. And I hope it will adjust your opinion of homeless people.

If you’ve ever thought that the homeless are lazy or somehow deserve their fate, consider the words of Brianna Karp:

“I had never thought about how those homeless people ended up there. I had never once thought to ask, ‘Why would a lazy person choose that life?’ It seems like a really hard, scary, uncertain life. It seems like the last kind of life a lazy jackass would choose.”

This book tells how one person ended up there. Yes, she had a difficult upbringing. She did have a job, much of the time, and even a trailer to live in. But she definitely doesn’t fit the stereotypical picture of a homeless person. Reading her story definitely made me think.

I was hoping the book would end with Brianna happily married and living in a house, never to be homeless again. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t. But the story of her journey is compelling and moving. She knows how to tell her story so that you feel for her, but don’t pity her. She does show how to be homeless with dignity and self-respect. I truly hope that this book will have incredible sales. Did I mention the story is a page-turner?

As a public librarian, I deal with homeless people every day. I’m sure there are many I don’t know are homeless, but I know that the library is a great place for homeless people, since our services are open to all and everyone is equal there. This book increases my respect for them, and that’s a good thing. And did I mention it’s a great story?

Most of the book is Brianna’s story, but I like this section where she talks to the reader about attitudes toward homeless people:

“The most irritating thing, I found, is when people question ‘luxury’ items like phones, laptops or vehicles. ‘I just saw a homeless person with a cell phone! Guess he’s not really homeless.’ ‘Wait a second, how do you blog if you’re homeless?’ ‘Why don’t you sell your phone and laptop and car and buy food or rent an apartment?’. . .

“I can understand potentially taking issue with government money being misspent — if a homeless individual is receiving housing funds for a very specific, designated purpose from an assistance program, and spending them elsewhere. But personal income? It’s yours, you’ve earned it, and if you want to use it to buy a cell phone or a laptop or a book or a necklace or even a goddamn pack of cigarettes because you feel that any of the above will improve the quality of your life or just plain make you feel a little happier or more humanized for a short while, then good for you. I will never be the one to demand to know how much it cost you or look at you askance and mutter about how you wouldn’t be homeless if only you didn’t buy A, B or C. It’s basic respect, and I don’t think that basic respect and the right to privacy end when you lose your home. . . .

“Sustainability is the key to any lifestyle. Sure, I could sell my phone and my laptop for the price of a few hamburgers. But, then, the hamburgers would soon be gone, and so would my phone and laptop. I would have absolutely no phone, so an employer could contact me. And without a laptop, I would only be able to search and apply for work online during the hours that the public library was open.”

This book will entertain you, but it will also make you examine your own attitudes.

girlsguidetohomelessness.com
harlequin.com
@tGGtH

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Art of Miss Chew, by Patricia Polacco

Art, Biography, History, Picture Book Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Art of Miss Chew

by Patricia Polacco

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012. 42 pages.
Starred Review

Patricia Polacco tells a personal story here about the art teacher who got her started as an artist.

It begins with another teacher, Mr. Donovan, who noticed that if he gave Patricia extra time, she could pass her tests with no trouble. He also sees that she’s a natural artist, and helps her get in with the high school art teacher, Miss Chew.

Miss Chew taught Patricia how to paint and how to see. She noticed that Patricia was seeing patterns instead of letters and got her in with a reading specialist. But especially, she valued Patricia’s art and gave her a featured place in the art show, the only non-high school student in the show.

This book is best read to be appreciated. I’ve long loved Patricia Polacco’s art, but the paintings in this book feel more warm and loving than ever. In the paintings themselves, you can clearly see how deeply grateful she still feels toward those two remarkable teachers. There’s also a sparkle in the pictures of young Trisha as she discovers true joy in making art.

A remarkable and memorable book.

patriciapolacco.com
penguin.com/youngreaders

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely 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 Mind’s Eye, by Oliver Sacks

Audiobooks, Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review, True Stories 0

The Mind’s Eye

by Oliver Sacks
read by Oliver Sacks and Richard Davidson

Random House Audio, 2010. 8 hours, 30 minutes on 7 discs.
Starred Review

This was perhaps not the best thing to listen to after having had a stroke, since it told me things that could have happened to me and made me hyperaware of new symptoms. However, this book was completely fascinating, and I found myself talking about it to people the whole time I was listening to it.

Richard Davidson read most of the audiobook, but Oliver Sacks gave introductions to each chapter, and completely read the chapter about his own experience with vision problems and the tumor he had growing on one eye. Both narrators were excellent, though I was a little jarred when Oliver Sacks’ section ended. I would have preferred that to be the final section, though he did follow a logical progression from vision difficulties on to complete blindness.

The book talks about vision and the brain. He begins describing cases where people suddenly lost their ability to read, because of a brain injury. They can still recognize letters of the alphabet, but not put them together as words unless they spell them out or write them out. Many of these people can still write, but they cannot read. Oliver Sacks delves into several different cases and how the people found ways to cope.

He progresses to people with face blindness, who can’t recognize people or places. I was very surprised to learn that Oliver Sacks himself has a certain amount of face blindness. He has, on occasion, failed to recognize himself when passing a mirror. I thought it was even more striking that one time he looked through a window, saw a tall man with a beard, and started trying to groom his beard, thinking it was a mirror. He talked about people with much worse disability in this area, who had to figure out how to cope without being able to recognize commonplace objects by looking at them.

And there’s more. He talks about several different variations of problems in the visual cortex. When he had cancer and lost vision in one eye, he said it wasn’t just as if half his visual field were cut off; it was as if people who went into his large blindspot actually disappeared.

The final section on blindness was also fascinating. Some people get extra good at visualizing, including an engineer who could now visualize going inside an engine to repair it. Another person lost the ability to visualize at all, but gained an enhanced ability to sense things in other ways.

This entire book is fascinating. The mind is amazing, and we can learn much about how it works by seeing how people cope when a small part is damaged. This is a fascinating look at vision and perception and the way we relate to the world around us.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/minds_eye.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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

Review of Bossypants, by Tina Fey

Audiobooks, Humorous, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Bossypants

by Tina Fey
read by the author

Hachette Audio, 2011. 5.5 hours on 5 CDs.

I’d heard good things about this book, and then a co-worker told me she was listening to it. When she said that Tina Fey herself read it, I knew this was one book I’d want to enjoy in the audio form.

This was a perfect audiobook to get me laughing on my commute. The humor doesn’t get political very often, so I suspect some of my conservative friends may also enjoy it. Tina Fey tells about her life in performance, and what it’s like to be in charge.

I think my favorite part was when she explained what she learned from sketch comedy and how it’s like life. I wish I could quote sections to you, but that’s the disadvantage with the audio form — not easy to go back to get quotes. In sketch comedy, it’s absolutely vital to cooperate with your partner, and she gave hilarious examples.

The audiobook also included a recording of her sketch on Saturday Night Live where Tina Fey, as Sarah Palin, gave a public service announcement with “Hilary Clinton.” The pictures in the text were included in a PDF file on the final CD, and so was a complete recording of that show. Having the pictures was nice — I didn’t have to check out the print book to see them, though I admit I looked at them after the fact, not in the middle of the text, like they would have been in the original book. Tina Fey talks about her strange six weeks performing as Sarah Palin. Like so many people, I hadn’t realized that she wasn’t even working for Saturday Night Live at the time — until public demand suggested that she be the one to play Sarah Palin.

So, Tina Fey talks about performing, about parenting, about being a boss, and so much more. And she does it all with a lot of humor. This is a wonderful commuting book, because what’s better than a good laugh on the way to work?

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/bossypants.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

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