Non-Fiction

Factory Girls

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From Village to City in a Changing China
by Leslie T. Chang
ages: adult
First sentence: “When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure.”
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 After living in China for a decade, Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie T. Change (who is Chinese; her father emigrated to Taiwan in 1948, when the revolution happened, and then from there came to the United States) decided that the whole idea of women (mostly) migrating from the villages in the country to work in factories in the cities was one worth pursuing. And writing a book about.

I’m so glad she did.

It’s a fascinating, rambling book, weaving in and out of time (I never really got a sense of how many years she spent hanging out with and shadowing the women she chose to focus on), including her family’s history as well as the current socio-economic state of China. She tries to generalize the lives of the women in the factories, and to a great extent it works because she focuses in on several women telling their individual stories, and how their lives have changed — for the worse and for the better — because of their choice to migrate and work at a factory. It made the book more personable, focusing on the few, and less just dry history, making the book more interesting and easier to read.

(As I side note, I’ve always wondered what the Chinese think about making all the chintzy holiday stuff we buy here in the U.S.)

On top of all that, it’s accessible book, and a quick read (even at 400 pages). Good for all those interested in the plight of women around the world.

Audiobook: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

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How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks
by Kathleen Flinn
Read by Marguerite Gavin
ages: adult
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(Also a post for Weekend Cooking.)

I adored Flinn’s first book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, and was quite excited to tackle her next book.

Home from Paris and Le Cordon Bleu, author Flinn is wondering what to do with her life. She really has no interest in owning a restaurant, and is getting tired of people asking her when she’s going to open one (and on a similar line, when are she and her husband going to have a baby…). Then, in a grocery store, inspiration hits: she sees a woman whose grocery cart is full of processed foods, and the reason? Because she doesn’t feel she can cook. It’s intimidating. She doesn’t know how. It’s too hard. Thus, the Project is born: Flinn finds nine volunteers all who are generally insecure about cooking, and persuades them to come in for a series of lessons on cooking basics. Flinn’s goal: to give them the skills and confidence to cook and turn away from fast food and processed food.

I’ll tell you straight up: I learned a lot from this book. A lot. And that was listening to the audio version. I need to go out and purchase the book, so I can have it as a reference in my kitchen. She really does go over all the basics: knife skills, chicken, meat, vegetables, braising, roasting, soup, salad, vinaigrette… it’s all in there. And Flinn is a good teacher. I’m sure her nine volunteers learned a lot from the classes, but she was able to convey what was taught — with a few side trips, to Rome and some fancy dinner parties to raise money — through her words in a way that engaged and interested me. I ended up thinking about this as a practical Michael Pollan: while he spouts ideals (and good ones at that), Flinn actually gives people the tools to use in putting those ideals — eating real food, cooking with real ingredients — to use.

The woman who read the book grated on me at first; she has weird pauses in the middle of sentences that bothered me. Also: listening to recipes being read aloud isn’t that great, so I ended up skipping those. Even with those shortcomings (and they’re not even Flinn’s fault), it’s the best kind of food book: useful, interesting, yummy-sounding with dozens of good recipes that are easy to use. Hopefully, it’ll do for you what it did for me: inspire you to cook.

Amelia Lost

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The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart
by Candace Fleming
ages: 9+
First sentence: “On the morning of July 2, 1937, the coast guard cutter Itasca drifted on the Pacific Ocean, waiting… listening…”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Like many people, I think, what I knew about Amelia Earhart was limited to her legend: she was the first woman pilot, and her plane was lost on her attempt to fly around the world.

What I didn’t realize was how much more there was to the story.

Fleming is a brilliant non-fiction writer for kids; she keeps the information simple without being simplistic, and manages to capture the nuances of her subject without ever wandering into territory that a 9-year-old couldn’t comprehend.

Which means that this book was absolutely fascinating. The chapters alternated between Amelia’s past and that fateful day when her plane was lost. Fleming really did her research, pushing past the legend and the fame to come up with a different portrait of Amelia Earhart. One of the things that most fascinated me was how, well, unqualified she was. She flew not really because of skill — often she didn’t take the time to learn things thoroughly — but because of determination. She was a feminist: she believed that just because she was a woman didn’t mean she shouldn’t do whatever she wanted to do. Including flying. She resisted the boxes that the time period wanted to put her in, and literally soared. No, she wasn’t the most talented, or even the most skilled, but she was determined, and that made up for a lot.

The other thing that fascinated me was how much she was famous for just being famous. She and her eventual husband, George Putnam, worked really hard at keeping her name in the papers, keeping her on the lecture circuit. Being famous was a full time job for them. I also didn’t realize how much of her image was done on purpose to create her image. She hid many things, and re-imagined others. I guess it goes to show that nothing is ever quite what it seems.

An excellent introduction to the life and legend of Amelia Earhart.

Sunday Salon: The State of the TBR Pile 5

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We’re doing inventory at the store this weekend, and because of that I don’t have much time to read. (Not to mention the Oscars tonight! We finally have TV, so I’ll be watching.)

As it is, I’m in a bit of a reading slump. I have a huge pile…. and I don’t know what to read. I threw it out on Facebook and Twitter on Friday, but didn’t get much response, so I’m throwing it out again. What should I read next?

Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver (because I ought to read something else by her)
Goliath, by Scott Westerfeld (because it’s about time)
Clementine and the Family Meeting, by Sarah Pennypacker (because I love Clementine)
Drop Dead Healthy, by A. J. Jacobs (ARC I begged for from work)
The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore(I wanted a mystery)
Kill You Last, by Tod Strasser (ditto)
The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, by Umi Krishnaswami (a MG book with an India connection)
A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness (because it’s in the brackets for SLJ’s Battle of the Books)
The Floating Islands, by Rachel Neumeier (because I’ve heard good things about it, and it finally came in at the library)
Huntress, by Malinda Lo (because it sounded good)
Stupid Fast, by Geoff Herbach (because it won the Cybils YA Fiction this year)
Blood Red Road, by Moira Young (because it won the Cybils YA SFF this year)

What’s on your TBR pile?

Outcasts United

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by Warren St. John
ages: adult
First sentence: “On a cool spring afternoon at a soccer field in northern Georgia, two teams of teenage boys were going through their pregame warm-ups when the heavens began to shake.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

The thing I like best about St. John’s writing is that, no matter the subject, he really makes you care about it. Seriously. Granted, this one has a subject — a woman who creates soccer teams, and an outlet, for refugees in Clarkston, Georgia — that is easy to care about. But, St. John doesn’t do the predictable thing and make the bok Inspirational and Heart-Warming. No, he does the good thing, and makes the book interesting.

The focus is on Luma Mufleh, who grew up in Jordan loving soccer. St. John touches on, but doesn’t delve into Luma’s trouble with growing up in such a restrictive environment for girls. She comes to the U.S. for college, and much to her father’s disappointment, decides to stay. She tries a few things, coaching soccer on the side, before literally falling into creating teams for the boys of Clarkston.

Clarkston, Georgia was once a sleepy little southern town. However, over the last decade or so, it has become a place for refugees — from all over the world, but mostly Africa — to begin their lives in the U. S. You can imagine (and, unfortunately, the town lives up to that stereotype) how that goes over in the all-white, good-boy South. The problem is that because there isn’t much infrastructure for them, the kids were getting lost in the cracks, turning to gangs, drugs and violence.

Enter Luma’s soccer program. She’s not an easy coach — to his credit, St. John never glorifies her: she is harsh, she is unforgiving, she is tough, she is demanding. But above all, she is dedicated and she cares. Amazingly, this combination of toughness and caring works, especially for the younger kids. Not only does Luma give them a purpose, family and a place, she teaches them to win games.

As I mentioned before, it’s not an Inspirational book, and yet there is a message: one person can make a difference. It’s just not one that St. John beats you over the head with, thankfully. Instead, he found a good story, spent a while researching it, and told it in a compelling way. Which makes this one excellent book.

Audiobook: Bossypants

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by Tina Fey
Read by the author
ages: adult
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I really don’t know why Tina Fey felt that she needed to write a memoir. Perhaps it’s because this is the last season of 30 Rock (I hope; I really can’t imagine the show without Alec Baldwin), and she wanted to try her hand at writing… something not television/movie related. That said, it’s a good book. She goes pretty much chronologically through her life: from a childhood in West Philadelphia, to college at the University of Virginia, to her time in Chicago with Second City, to her years at Saturday Night Life, to 30 Rock. In there, she fits her marriage and birth of her first child as well.

Like most comedy, it’s uneven. Some parts are horribly hilarious (like her Doomed Honeymoon), some parts she just lectures (about sexism in politics, for example) and the jokes fall flat (but perhaps they were meant to). That said, it was entertaining enough — Fey’s self-deprecating style is really pretty funny — to keep me sitting in the car listening long after I had gotten to where I was going. My favorite sections were about the development and production of 30 Rock, perhaps because I’ve been a fan of the show since it started. But, I found that’s where the biggest laughs were for me.

A note on the audiobook: on the one hand, I really enjoyed hearing Fey read her book. She did voices (her Alec Baldwin is really quite good), and we got the audio clip of her first Sarah Palin Saturday Night Live. She did mumble on occasion which bugged me until I checked the print version and realized that she was mumbling the asides. But she kept saying “check the pdf for this picture. Really. You won’t regret it.” I never did. I listen to the books in the car, and I’m not going to take the CDs out just so I can look at a picture. I did, however, check them out in the print edition. And they were, as she promised, quite hilarious.

So would I recommend the audio book for this one? Well, yes… if you’re like me and willing to check out the print edition for the extra laughs.

Maman’s Homesick Pie

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by Donia Bijan
ages: adult
First sentence: “My mother had been dead eight days when I showed up in her kitchen.”
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This book is very much like a gumbo: it needs a little bit of everything to make it work. It’s one part cookbook — every chapter has a couple recipes from the kitchen of world-class chef Donia Bijan; one part memoir — it’s nominally Bijan’s story from Iran to France to the kitchen of her own restaurant; but also one part love story to her mother.

Bijan grew up in Iran, the third — and last — daughter of a doctor and a nurse. She was privileged there, going to a private international school, enjoying holidays on the Caspian Sea. Her family was on vacation in Spain when the revolution happened in 1978, effectively cutting them off from their country. For Bijan, her sisters, and her mother, this was a hardship, but also an opportunity: they emigrated to America, and took to their new lives. For her father, however, this became an obstacle that he never surmounted.

He also had issues when Bijan decided to major in French in college with the express goal of going to France to learn to be a chef. Her mother, on the other hand, supported her wholeheartedly. This was where the book fell apart for me. Her memories of childhood were sweet, and even her life in transition was interesting. However, by the time she got to France to learn cooking, I began to wish that there was more to this book. It felt like she was brushing over everything lightly, not wanting to deal with the negatives, or even with the hardships, not thinking about anything too much. All this is well enough, but I wanted more: more feeling, more depth, more descriptions of food, more of her life.

While I found it a pleasant homage to her mother and the way she supported Bijan in her endeavors, there wasn’t quite enough in it to make this book anything more than “nice.”

Seriously… I’m Kidding

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by Ellen DeGeneres
ages: adult(ish)
First sentence: “Dearest Reader, Hello.”
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The point of this book, as Ellen so cheerfully tells us at the end, is for the reader to be happy. Well, considering that it’s Ellen DeGeneres, and that the book is really just a collection of amusing, if meandering and sometimes odd, thoughts and observations, I think I can safely say that, for me, the goal has been achieved.

This book made me, for a couple hours at least, happy. Or amused, at the very least.

It read very much like Ellen’s stand-up comedy: not laugh-out loud funny, but rather companionable, amusing, enough to get a smile or a even an occasional giggle. The book is really formatted as one very long dinner party conversation: there’s a bit about Ellen’s life and her experiences as a talk show host (she does get serious, but only briefly in small doses, and then backs off with a joke or two fairly quickly; the most serious she got was when writing about her experience as an American Idol judge), but mostly it’s just observations on everything from littering to manners to yoga to gardening. There’s no real coherent theme, there’s no overlying lesson, there’s no deep thoughts (even if there is a chapter on deep thinking).

But, for what it is — a congenial conversation between Ellen and her “readers”/fans — it’s a fun little book. Some of the chapters are quite funny (like the “Meditiation” chapter — about four blank pages followed by ” Ahhhhh. Doesn’t that feel better?”), others not so much (the one about writing Pro/Con lists kinda fell flat for me). In the end, though: it was an amusing way to spend an hour or so, and I’m not sad I picked up the book.

Which means, I guess, that Ellen did the job she set out to do.

Audiobook: At Home

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by Bill Bryson
read by the author
ages: adult
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When Bill Bryson and his wife moved back to England, they purchased a rectory built in 1851. I’m not sure if he thought much of it when he first moved in, but after living there a while, he started thinking about how little he knew about his house, and the history that surrounded it. Thank heavens for his curiosity, because out of it was born this book:  a fascinating history of the world without leaving the home.

Initially, that sounds a bit dry as well as overly ambitious: how can one tell the history of the world through the house? The short answer: you can’t. What you can tell is a general history of how homes came to be what we find them today in Great Britain and the U. S. Bryson ends up focusing on those two countries, as well as mainly on the 19th-century, giving the book a much less ambitious perspective. And because Bryson is a thorough researcher and a masterful writer, this book — which is stuffed full of facts and people you can’t hope to begin to keep straight — is downright fascinating. From the history of how tea came to be England’s national drink, to the Eiffel Tower, to indoor plumbing and the telephone, to the rise of the middle class, to sexual repression in Victorian England: this book seriously has it all.

I listened to this one on audio, which possibly wasn’t the best way to interact with this book. (That, and Bill Bryson sounds nothing like I thought he would.) I kept wanting to flip back chapters, to reread earlier passages, to find earlier references to the people and circumstances that he refers back to. He does do a well enough job reminding the reader about who or what things were, but I still wanted to go back and see it for myself. That said, the information itself was fascinating. (I also wish I could have marked things, because for the life of me, I can’t remember half of what I heard.)

It’s fascinating not just because history is fascinating, but because Bryson makes it so. It’s  his snide asides (said in a dead-pan voice, so we know that he’s poking fun), and his brilliant observations, and the sheer amount of research that he did to write this book that really makes this book worth reading.

Then again, I’m not sure Bryson can write a book that isn’t worth reading.

The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie

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by Tanya Lee Stone
ages: 11+
First sentence: “When I was six, I wanted a Barbie more than I can remember ever wanting anything in my life.”
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First a confession: my mom wouldn’t let me have Barbies, and even though I played with them at friends’ houses, I never really wanted one (or at least I don’t have a lingering memory of that). Then I went to college, and became my own brand of feminist, and swore my girls would never have Barbies.

Then M turned three. And she desperately wanted one. After several rounds of fighting and discussion and saying no, we gave in on her birthday, and gave her one. Which was much loved. Then, Barbie multiplied. For, it seems, that one cannot have just one Barbie. They multiplied until I was sick of them and they stopped playing with them, so I tossed the whole lot when we moved to Kansas 5 years ago. Since then, they’ve multiplied again (it seems that you can’t give a young girl a birthday present that isn’t a Barbie), and while they don’t get played with often, I have made my peace with them and keep them around for the times when they are needed.

It seems my story isn’t unique.

I enjoyed this book for the history of Barbie, and Mattel, and how they came to be. There was a part of me that wished for more detail (the fact that Barbie’s inspiration was a German sex toy was glossed over here), but the book was geared toward the younger crowd. However, Stone did to an admirable job balancing the two sides of Barbie: those who love her and those who loathe her. I think I understand better now her appeal, not just to girls, but to women as they grow older. And while I still think there’s downsides to Barbie and her appearance, I admit that they’re more societal and less the fault of the toy. It was interesting, and well-written, full of lots of vintage (and otherwise) pictures.

Recommended.