A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese
age: adult
First sentence: “This particular story begins in the dusky hollows of 1991, remembered a rotten year through and through by almost everybody living, dead, or unborn.”
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This tale — and it is, in many, many ways a “Tale” — begins in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a University of Michigan masters writing student. He needed a job, so he picks up one as a copyeditor for the Zingerman’s Deli newsletter. There he is introduced to Ambrosio Molinos and the Páramo de Guzmán.

And he — the author — is enthralled. Ambrosio is larger than life. Guzmán is charming. So much so that Paterniti moves his family there for a year. And the cheese… well… by the time Paterniti gets to Spain, the cheese doesn’t exist anymore. See: Ambrosio had a good thing going. He dreamt of, and made by all accounts, a brilliant sheep cheese. It won awards. It got the attention of the king, of international buyers. But. Things went south. Ambrosio said it was his best friend, the lawyer Julián who betrayed him. He sold the business out from under Ambrosio, leaving him destitute.

Except, while that makes a good Story, the truth is so much more complicated than that.

One of the things that made this story so fascinating for me was that Paterniti was so caught up in it all. This book took 10 years for him to write, mostly because he didn’t want to believe Ambrosio’s story could be wrong. He wanted to believe that Ambrosio was a Real Thing, that his ideal of Rural and Simple could work. And it took a long time for him to be able to step away from it and see the big picture. But, as he writes about Abrosio, Guzmán, and his own personal journey, you can’t help but get caught up in it all as well. It’s a layered story, with many diversions (my only real complaint is that the footnotes would sometimes get in the way of the story), side roads, and interesting people along the way. It’s a great story.

And a great book.

by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman
ages: adult
First sentence:
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The thing I like most about this book — and what drew me to it in the first place — is the title. I liked that they’re playing off of The Big Lebowski and Jeff Bridge’s role in it. I like the thought that the Dude is a Zen master. I also like the idea of Jeff Bridges as the Dude and the Bernie Glassman is a Zen master.

I don’t know what I really expected from this book. It is exactly what it claims to be: a conversation between Jeff and Bernie. Nothing more.

And that’s where the problems lie. Although we get a bit of history about Bridges’ life — his childhood, his marriage, his acting — it’s mostly just a long, winding conversation about whatever strikes the fancy of these two men. Which is interesting, for the most part. They riff (best word, that) on Zen, The Dude, Buddhism, acting, activism, love, music, politics.

What it’s not is linear. And (for me at least), that mattered a great deal. I think they tried to have everything tie into something Meaningful, but it just didn’t work as a whole. So, I took to reading it in small chunks. Which made it work better. I’d read until I got tired of their circular discussion (and honestly, of Bridges: he talks a lot — either that or Bernie is just a great listener — and he doesn’t always make sense) and then put the book down for a few days.

In the end, it wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t terrific either. I’m going to be Zen about it though, and just accept it and move on.

It’s what they would have wanted.

by Bailey White

by Rod Dreher
ages: adult
First sentence: “
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Review copy was sent by the publisher to my husband, who then passed it on to me.

I’ve been hearing for years from my husband about Rod Dreher, with whom he’s had a passing internet “relationship” for quite some time. I’ll be up front: Hubby loved this book. And when he (Hubby, not Rod) passed me this book he said, “You need to read this so you can understand why I want a cow.”

The book, simply, is Rod’s memoir about his growing up in a small Louisiana town, and his relationship with his younger sister as she battled cancer.

Writing that sentence made this book seem really trite, when it actually wasn’t. There are a lot of layers to this — I can see why Hubby enjoyed it — about the the good and bad in individual people, about tension within families, about the tragedy of an early death. Rod has a good story here, and is (thankfully) honest about the good and the bad in all situations. But, mostly what comes through is the love that he has for his sister, Ruthie, and the love that the town had for her.

I was grateful that he showed the tension between the positive and the negative; Ruthie was never deified (even though he considers her a Saint, in the traditional religious sense), and came off as a very good, very human person. I appreciated that he acknowledged the importance of place in a person’s life, and how good it is to belong somewhere. I appreciated, too, that he recognized that living in a small town (especially a small Southern town) is a double-edged sword: there are equal measures of generosity and backbiting involved.

The only drawback was the kind-of clunky writing style. Rod’s a columnist, and many times this read like a really, really long newspaper column or blog post. But, once I got used to that, I could sit back and enjoy the story he had to tell. I don’t know if it was a great one — and I’m still not sure about the whole cow thing — but it was a good one. And I appreciate my husband wanting to share that with me.

How Musicals Changed My Life
by Emma Brockes
ages: adult
First sentence: “To give you an idea of the scale of what we are dealing with here, I’d like to begin with an act of superstition.”
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Emma adores musicals. And that’s not exactly a cool thing for a 20-something English gal. So, she adores them in quiet. (Well, only some of them. The Good ones.) As she’s grown up, she’s discovered that there are two types of people: those who like musicals, and those who don’t Get It.

This little book is basically a memoir framed around musicals. Which wasn’t a bad thing. Brockes has Definite Opinions about musicals (some of which I agreed with; others which I didn’t), and isn’t afraid to own the fact that she adores the whole genre. She’s not an “expert”, but she is an enthusiast, which qualifies her to give her opinion about such things. Right?

Well… actually, that’s kind of what annoyed me about this one. The subtitle gave me the impression that either 1) she really had something new and original to say about musicals, or 2) she had a really crappy life, and somehow musicals pulled her out of it. But, truth be told: it was neither of those things. It was a story about a middle class suburban girl who grew up with a mother who loved musicals and thought they were dorky until she was able to accept the dorkiness and own it. (Oh, and there was actually very little about Barbara Streisand to boot.) And she needed 264 pages to get through that.

In the end, I’m not sure if I disliked this one because of my expectations about it. Or if it was Brockes came off as a pompous twit. And even though I finished it (admittedly skimming the last bits), I don’t think it was worth my time.

Is there any other book about musicals out there that would be a better read than this one?

Nelly Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World
by Matthew Goodman
ages: adult
First sentence: “She was a young woman in a plaid coat and cap, neither tall nor short, dark nor fair, not quite pretty enough to turn a head: the sort of woman, who could, if necessary, lose herself in a crowd.”
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Review copy received from my place of employment.

I think I’d heard of Nelly Bly before reading Matt Phelan’s Around the World, but I’m not sure where or why I knew of her. I do remember that I was interested in her story after finishing that graphic novel, so when I chanced upon this ARC at work, I picked it up, curious to know more about Bly and her trip around the world.

It turns out that Bly wasn’t the only one traveling around the world. A competitor of her sponsoring newspaper sent their own reporter — Elizabeth Bislund, who in many ways was the opposite of Bly: elegant, refined, pretty, literary — on a trip in the opposite direction, making it a race not only against time, but against each other.

The thing I liked most about this book, I think, was that Goodman not only thoroughly examined these two women, and their histories and how they became to be newspaper women, but the history of the time. He gave me, as a reader, a sense of this time of anticipation, sitting on the cusp of the modern world. And the fact that both Bly and Bisland could do something like travel around the world in less than 80 days, by themselves.

I found myself rooting for one or the other (I honestly didn’t know, though I could guess, which one won), finding myself liking one or the other at any given time during the book. Bly was more plucky, for lack of a better world, going around the world with one suitcase, and whole lot more drive than Bisland. She was, on the other hand, extremely patriotic — she viewed the world through a U.S.-colored lens, and found everything else lacking, something which grated on me. Bisland was the more open-minded traveler, less determined to “win” and more willing to look at the world on its own terms (which were, admittedly, decidedly British in the 1880s). For that, I think she was the better off.

Perhaps, most revealing, was the epilogue, where Goodman sketched out the rest of these women’s lives. There is a price for fame, fleeting as it is, and Bly paid it.

It’s an interesting work of history, engaging and well-written, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending time learning about both this remarkable time and these fascinating women.

How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World
by Sy Montgomery
ages: 9+
First sentence: “Throughout my career, I have worked to improve the treatment of farm animals because we owe it to domestic animals to give them a decent life.”
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I didn’t really know what to expect heading into this one. I knew it was a biography for middle readers, and I knew autism had something to do with it. But, I must have been living under a rock for a while, because I had no idea who Temple Grandin is.

Wow. What an amazing woman. For those of you under the rock with me, she was born in 1947, with autism. She wasn’t like “normal” kids, and her father (per the times) wanted to put her in a mental institution. However, Temple had an AMAZING mother, who advocated for her daughter. She found a school that would accept her and work with her quirkiness, and even though Temple encountered bullying and hardships along the way, her life was so much better than if her father had gotten his way.

And, it’s incredible what she’s done with her life. How she’s channeled her condition (I don’t want to call it a disability, because it’s not. It’s just a different normal) into something amazing, helping change the domestic animal industry little by little. And every little bit counts, especially when the healthy, happy lifestyle of animals we eat are on the line.

My only complaint was one that is inherent in the book: I wanted more detail, more information. I found it too simplistic, but the book was aimed at 9-12 year olds, so it’s appropriate for that age. As for me, Temple Grandin has written her own biography, so I can read that one as well.

The Race to Build — and Steal — the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
by Steve Sheinkin
ages: 10+
First sentence: “He had a few more minutes to destroy seventeen years of evidence.”
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I picked this one up in an effort to catch up on the books that are getting Newbery buzz. And because “everyone” has been raving about it. And because it was a National Book Award finalist. And because I sold it the other day to a mom looking for a non-fiction book for her 4th grade son by saying “it’s brilliant” and figured I really ought to read it before I say things like that. (Truth in advertising and all that, you know.)

The short review: it really is all that. In fact, I think I need to pick up Sheinkin’s other book, “The Notorious Benedict Arnold,” because I thoroughly admire the way he tells a story.

This one is about the development of the nuclear bomb in the early 1940s. Which, to a non-scientist like myself, is admittedly a pretty dry subject. Yet, in Shienkin’s hands he turns it into a tale of science and spies, of duty and responsibility, of anxiety and choice.

There are three threads running through this story. The first is the American’s race to develop the atomic bomb. I’m going to get into details here (which would probably be wrong, and my phsyics-professor brother will get on my case for), but essentially, Germans figured out how to split atoms, and then everyone (well, Einstein and a couple others brought it to the attention of Roosevelt) panicked because a nuclear weapon in the hands of Hitler would have been a bad thing. Robert Oppenheimer plays a big role in this thread (he’s a fascinating character), but also some other scientists as well.

Thread number two is the effort by the OSS to stop the Germans from developing the bomb. The Germans were using heavy water (argh, more science-y stuff!) from a plant in Norway to keep the uranium from reacting (I think that’s how you put it), and the British sent a team of Norwegians in to destroy the plant. It was all pretty exciting.

The third thread involved Stalin and the Soviets, and was the most fascinating to me. (Well, not entirely true: I did like learning about how the bomb was developed. I had no idea it was a huge round thing. Or that it went off over the city of Hiroshima. I think I always thought it hit the ground before exploding.) Anyway, the Soviets got wind of the American’s development of the bomb, and realized they couldn’t be left out. But because they were fighting the Nazis, they didn’t have the resources to do the research on their own. So, they set out to steal the American’s design. Which they succeeded in doing with the help of Harry Gold (a courier, who got caught in the end), Klaus Fuchs (a scientist who was the first to confess), and Ted Hall (a prodigy who got off; no one knew of his involvement until 1995.) I found it fascinating mostly because of those men’s reasons for getting involved with the Soviets. Especially Hall’s, who said that something this destructive shouldn’t be in one country’s hands.

That said, I did like how Sheinkin pressed upon us the enormity of the whole thing. Oppenheimer’s refusal to build something bigger and “better”. The scientists throwing up once they realized what they’d unleashed upon the world. And the final sentences: “The making of the atomic bomb is one of history’s most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it’s also teh story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It’s a story with no end in sight. And like it or not, you’re in it.”

Brilliant.