A white Zimbabwean couple holding out against Mugabe

My current reads include: Douglas Rogers fascinating The Last Resort about his and his parents' lives in Zimbabwe. Doug lives in Brooklyn  now - has lived in South Africa and the UK before - But his parents still live on the land that they bought decades ago - and they're holding their own against the drive to push all whites out of the country in which they - and their children - were born.

This is one of those books that's really difficult to put down.

Woodstock Writers Festival: Paula Butturini -- Healing through Food

"If you don't stop walking like Frankenstein, I'm going to punch you," Paula Butturini recalled screaming at her husband toward the end of his recuperation from a bullet wound. They were in Rome. Butturini added that nobody noticed, at which the audience laughed, at her slightly veiled comment about the volume at which Italians speak.

Her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was reporting from Romania at the time that the country was in the process of overthrowing its communist regime, when a bullet almost cost him his life. At the time when she made her angry statement, he was still walking with a brace, but his progress in healing had seemed to come to a halt and he had become immersed in depression. "The accident was a defining moment and things start to turn after that," Butturini recalled, adding, "Sometimes anger can be a virtue."

Butturini's new book, Keeping the Feast has just come out. In fact just an hour ago from this time as I sit here composing this posting, the mailman handed me a copy of it. I heard Butturini speak on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival. I was a little tempted to delay writing about her until I read the book. But at 260 pages it looks like a quick dash and interesting -- read. I'll post again after I finished it.

Butturini's book is subtitled, "One couple's story of love food and healing in Italy." She and Tagliabue met in Rome in 1985, married four years later, just a month before he was shot. Subsequently he suffered post traumatic stress and fell into a severe depression. Butturini was no stranger to this latter phenomenon; her mother had suffered from it when the author was a child and she was not going to tolerate her husband putting her through the experienced a second time.

Butturini did more than just demand that her husband not give into depression. As part of his therapy, while living in Rome she established some simple rituals of daily life, shopping for foods in Rome's outdoor market and preparing delicious meals which unlike so many couples and families they sat down and shared. Too many people use food as consolation -- and pay for it on the scales. Butturini used food for healing. It worked.

Healing through Food

"If you don't stop walking like Frankenstein, I'm going to punch you," Paula Butturini recalled screaming at her husband toward the end of his recuperation from a bullet wound. They were in Rome. Butturini added that nobody noticed, at which the audience laughed, at her slightly veiled comment about the volume at which Italians speak.

Her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was reporting from Romania at the time that the country was in the process of overthrowing its communist regime, when a bullet almost cost him his life. At the time when she made her angry statement, he was still walking with a brace, but his progress in healing had seemed to come to a halt and he had become immersed in depression. "The accident was a defining moment and things start to turn after that," Butturini recalled, adding, "Sometimes anger can be a virtue."

Butturini's new book, Keeping the Feast has just come out. In fact just an hour ago from this time as I sit here composing this posting, the mailman handed me a copy of it. I heard Butturini speak on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival. I was a little tempted to delay writing about her until I read the book. But at 260 pages it looks like a quick dash and interesting -- read. I'll post again after I finished it.

Butturini's book is subtitled, "One couple's story of love food and healing in Italy." She and Tagliabue met in Rome in 1985, married four years later, just a month before he was shot. Subsequently he suffered post traumatic stress and fell into a severe depression. Butturini was no stranger to this latter phenomenon; her mother had suffered from it when the author was a child and she was not going to tolerate her husband putting her through the experienced a second time.

Butturini did more than just demand that her husband not give into depression. As part of his therapy, while living in Rome she established some simple rituals of daily life, shopping for foods in Rome's outdoor market and preparing delicious meals which unlike so many couples and families they sat down and shared. Too many people use food as consolation -- and pay for it on the scales. Butturini used food for healing. It worked.

Howard Blue

Nikita Khrushchev -- memoir

Last November I interviewed Sergei Khrushchev  regarding his memoir about his father.  I have yet to post the video from the interview. Alas, a modern-day book reviewer on the net has to master website, twitter, blog, Facebook and YouTube technology. Slowly, gradually, I'll get to it.

At one point I asked Dr. Khrushchev what prompted him to emigrate. "I didn't emigrate," he replied. I came for a job."

"But you have American citizenship, don't you?" I said.

 "Yes I do," he said, "but I still have my Russian citizenship, I have an apartment in Moscow and I go there regularly."

In 1991, 1992 and 1993 when I make several visits to Moscow and I witnessed the coup which resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, I hoped that many more people would have a lifestyle that reflected not only the end of the Cold War, but also the development of a real peace throughout the world. Well you know the rest of the story.

Memoirs on Mormonism (The Church of Latter-day Saints)

Beck, Martha.   Leaving the Saints.  By daughter of Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley.  Crown, 2005.

Jeffs,Brent W. Lost Boy. Broadway 2009. On sexual abuse author experienced as a child & his related lawsuit.

Geer, Thelma.  Mormonism, Mama and Me.  Moody Publishing, 1986.

Jessup, Carolyn.  Escape.  Broadway, 2007.  By a former polygamist.

Laake, Deborah.  Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond.  Morrow, 1993.

McCreary, Pamela. Dancing on the Head of A Pin. Ghost Road Press, 2010.

Morin, Brad L. and Morin, Chris. Suddenly Strangers: Surrendering God's and Heroes. Aventine Press, 2004. Two brothers leave the Mormon church.

Pearson, Carol Lynn.  Goodbye, I Love You.  Cedar Fort, 2006. Mormon woman married to gay man.

Robertson, Judy. Out of Mormonism:A Woman's True Story. Bethany House, 2001.Irene. 

Schmidt, Susan Ray. Favorite Wife:Escape from Polygamy. The Lyons Press. author describes her marriage to a Mormon cult leader at age 15, and her escape from the oppression her married life entailed.

Spencer, Irene Shattered Dreams:  My Life as a Polygamist Wife. Center Street, 2008.

Spencer, James R. Beyond Mormonism: An Elder's Story. A convert to Mormonism leaves it to become a minister in a non-Mormon church.

Wall, Elissa. Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs. William Morrow, 2008.

Worthy, Jack B.  The Mormon Cult: A Former Missionary Reveals the Secrets of Mormon Mind Control.  See Sharp Press, 2008

 

the Woodstock Writers Festival: Dani Shapiro

I heard Dani Shapiro, the author of five novels and two memoirs, Slow Motion and Devotion. when she appeared on a panel with three other memoirists on the second day of the Woodstock Writers Festival, in the Bearsville Theatre, about 2 miles from the center of town. Dani is also a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University.
The first person on her panel to speak, Shalom Auslander (Foreskin's Lament), an intensely funny and acerbic writer initially threatened to steal the show with humorous remarks that left the whole audience and his fellow panelists cracking up. But Auslander's fellow panelists, Shapiro among them, quickly showed that they were going to hold their own.
At first glance, Shapiro, 47,  looks younger than her years, except for a profound seriousness and pensiveness that is at odds with that first impression. She was raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish home, although it was her father who was Orthodox; her mother was an atheist. At age 23 Shapiro found herself a college dropout with a cocaine habit, mistress to her best friend's wealthy stepfather. Then, one day a car accident left both her parents in critical condition and she took on the responsibility of caring for them. One consequence of the experience was that Shapiro wound up rebuilding her life, returning to both college and her Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

The above paragraph outlines the content of Slow Motion which came out in 1998. But at this panel discussion, Shapiro spoke about Devotion, her latest book, which came out less than a month ago. Devotion was inspired by a series of questions about religion and mortality that her son asked. Determined to try to find him -- and herself -- some good answers, Shapiro set out with the help of religious leaders of several different faiths to seek the answers to some of the basic questions that confound us all.

Shapiro had some of the problems that characterize relationships between many of us and our parents. At one point, she commented to the audience, a therapist told her and her mother, "I don't think there's any hope for the two of you," meaning apparently that their relationship was beyond repair. But judging from Shapiro's remarks and several reviews of her book, she has walked much more than the extra mile toward becoming a decent adult, mother and spouse and a profoundly respected writer and writing teacher.

Woodstock Writers Festival: Douglas Rogers

I sat down this afternoon and tried to start a piece about a fantastic weekend I spent at the Woodstock Writers Festival which was devoted to memoir.  At least today, I found it too difficult to try to put together an account of so many disparate parts of the weekend experience. But I will mention that a fascinating and hard-working group of people created the festival which about 400 people attended. One of the organizers was Martha Frankel, the festival's executive director and a very successful author, about whom I will write in another posting as I plan too to write about her festival planning colleagues.

For now I'm going to just tell you about one of the most interesting writers I heard. His name is Douglas Rogers and he was born in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia as it was known then). He's also a good-looking fair-haired, travel writer with a look on his face that says "Nothing surprises me. I've seen a lot of things in my life and I'm not going to get very upset no matter what anyone says or does." Douglas has lived around here and there, some 50 countries according to his count. He now calls Brooklyn his home.

 As Douglas explains, I’m attracted to stories of ordinary people living brave, strange, imaginative, or heroic lives." Well among those people are Douglas's own "European" parents, ("European" being the term used to refer to whites in southern Africa.) You may know that Zimbabwe is ruled by Robert Mugabe, the too long ruling, dictator whose policies have been condemned internationally.

According to Douglas, despite what may appear in the press, the main targets of Mugabe are his African opponents - not Zimbabwe's Europeans - although Mugabe has driven many, perhaps most of them, off their land and out of the country. Despite threats, including some from bands of armed teenagers who have driven up to Douglas's parents door in trucks, his folks, Lyn and Ros are not leaving. They own a chunk of land on which they run a resort.  At one point when things really started to get difficult, Douglas called his parents from abroad. "How are things going Mom?" he asked worriedly. "Terribly Douglas, I'm terribly upset. They lost." "Who are THEY?" he asked even more upset, but also perplexed. "Why the cricket team, of course. Who do you think I meant?" his mother replied. Douglas's parents don't scare easily.

Douglas's book, The Last Resort is in part a coming of age tale as well as a "how to book," as in “how to survive in a corrupt Third World dictatorship.” Included in the story is the fact that there is a brothel on his parents' land, and some marijuana seems to be growing there too. Huh? I'll be reviewing the book at some point in the coming weeks.

disappearance & then resurgence of a cultural legacy

In An Orphan in History, author Paul Cowan describes how his family's Jewish religious and cultural legacy evaporated and how he then set out to reconstitute them.

The author's life after her parents drowned

 My next read, Judith Barrington's Lifesaving: A Memoir, about her three years living in Spain after the drowning deaths of her parents after the cruise ship they were on caught fire.

Ursula Le Guin talks about Barrington's beautiful honesty in her review of the book.

The Longest Trip Home

How religion impacts on our lives has always been a subject of fascination to me. John Grogan, author of The Longest Trip Home (and of an earlier best-selling memoir, Marley and Me), does a fine job of showing how his parents extreme brand of Catholicism impacted on his childhood. For one thing, the family vacations were not to amusement parks or national monuments. Instead, they visited shrines and other holy sites. On one such visit his parents let their children and climbing the 28 steps to a basilica in Canada on their knees!

Some of Grogan's accounts of childhood and adolescent hijinks, and other events, seem a bit too humdrum. But the book's last hundred pages from which its title was drawn, are much more than redeeming. This section recount the author's relationship with his parents, primarily his father, in their declining days including during the last weeks of his father's life. Anyone - and that's most of us - who has seen the physical decline and death of a loved one, will appreciate Grogan's sensitive account of his experience.

The Longest Trip Home

How religion impacts on our lives has always been a subject of fascination to me. John Grogan, author of The Longest Trip Home (and of an earlier best-selling memoir, Marley and Me), does a fine job of showing how his parents extreme brand of Catholicism impacted on his childhood. For one thing, the family vacations were not to amusement parks or national monuments. Instead, they visited shrines and other holy sites. On one such visit his parents let their children and climbing the 28 steps to a basilica in Canada on their knees!

Some of Grogan's accounts of childhood and adolescent hijinks, and other events, seem a bit too humdrum. But the book's last hundred pages from which its title was drawn, are much more than redeeming. This section recount the author's relationship with his parents, primarily his father, in their declining days including during the last weeks of his father's life. Anyone - and that's most of us - who has seen the physical decline and death of a loved one, will appreciate Grogan's sensitive account of his experience.

An American Rebel in Cuba & A Boy Soldier in Sierra Leone

Two books, A Rebel in Cuba by Neill Macaulay and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, both reveal what is best about memoirs, the exposition of personal perspective gained from personal experience.

Both Macaulay and Beah present vivid accounts of their experiences in war. As a young man, Macaulay was an American member of the guerrilla movement that overthrew the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958; Beah as a 12-year-old, was sucked into the haphazard army of Sierra Leone which shared the cruelty of the rebel forces that marauded the West African nation's backcountry.

After Beah witnessed and participated in a number of cruelties, two UNICEF workers found him, and took him and fourteen other boy soldiers to a facility to bring them back to normalcy. But almost as bad as the adults responsible for pulling the young boys into war betrayed their responsibility as adults to protect the young, the UNICEF people foolishly mixed in boys from both groups.  The resulting violence that broke out in the facility brought about the deaths of six boys and injuries to a number of others. In addition, after months of being allowed to act on impulse, the boys even attacked staff members who were trying to help them.

One reviewer has called Beah's book "one of the most important war stories of our generation," I heartily agree. It is a seamlessly written account which reveals how far humans have devolved from the supposedly "more civilized warfare" when European men stood on fields in the 18th century and took aim at each other in a gentlemanly manner. In one scene, older soldiers prompted the author and several other boys to participate in a contest: each was to kill a prisoner. The boy whose prisoner died first was the winner.

A Rebel in Cuba, originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1999, is almost as equally compelling as Beah's book. As a 23-year-old who had just completed a tour of duty in the U.S. Army in South Korea, the author, a graduate of the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, was looking for adventure. He found it by joining the Fidel Castro's guerillas in the mountains of Cuba's Pinar Del Rio Province where he fought for one year.

Macaulay's account of the shooting of prisoners is less shocking than Beah's. But the arbitrary decisions that determined which people would be executed are still extremely unsettling to read about. In Beah's experience, the decisions were totally random ones based sometimes on whether the unit commander or a soldier did or did not like the look on a captive's face

In Macaulay's experience, although informers were dead men walking, the guerrillas decision whether or not to execute known supporters of Batista would have not necessarily informed on the guerrillas, hinged on whether at a given moment someone thought that killing such a person would aid or hurt the rebel cause.

In addition to his vivid portrait of the lives of the guerrillas in the mountains and the mindset of his fellow guerrillas, Macaulay also provides a fascinating account of the divisions among the anti-government groups. Not surprisingly, Batista's urban opponents were seeking less radical change than the guerrillas in the mountains who came from landless and destitute peasant families.

Both books are wonderfully antidotal to the Eurocentric and US centric reporting to which Americans are constantly subject. That some Americans refer to the "country" of Africa illustrates this. The bias of American news media is no better illustrated than Macauley's account of hearing a report from CBS on New Year's Eve 1958 which all but claimed that Batista's forces were on the verge of annihilating their opponents. The next morning Coley woke up to news that Batista had fled Cuba!

McCaulay did not remain in on unqualified supporter of Castro. The world really is made up mostly of shades of gray; he became disillusioned with the infringements on personal liberties in Cuba experienced after Castro came to power. But A Rebel in Cuba is a classic example of the value of firsthand accounts. Reading a book like Macauley's makes one hunger to hear more Iraqi and Afghan perspectives on the wars in their land and more Chinese perspectives on the problems and complexity of their country.

On Becoming A Grandparent

The perfect gift for new grandparents: On Becoming A Grandparent by Alma Bond.

Coming of Age memoirs

The following list of coming of age memoirs supplements the titles you can find on http://www.memoirreviews.com

Please support our website and this blog by purchasing books. Just click on a title to see prices and reviews.

Alter, Stephen. All the Way to Heaven: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas. South Asia Books, 1997.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time: A Memoir  . Penguin, 1977.

DeSalvo, Louise and Giunta, Edvige. Vertigo: A Memoir  . The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. Account of author’s harsh upbringing and her study of Virginia Woolf.

Friedman, Hannah. Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool  . HCI Teens, 2009.

Froncek, Thomas. Home Again, Home Again: A Son's Memoir . Arcade Publishing, 1996. A son recounts his 1950’s childhood and relationship with his father.

McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood  . Harvest Books, 1972.

McCarthy, Mary. How I Grew  . Harvest Books, 2004.

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi  . New York: Dial, 1968.

O'Connor, Sandra Day. Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest  . Random House, 2003.

Rothschild, Matt. Dumbfounded: Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn't for Sissies  . Three Rivers Press, 2008.

Rushfield, Richard. Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the 80s  . Gotham, 2009.

Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames  . Little, Brown and Co., 2008. By the humorist.

Wilson, John V. Jr. Meridian Street: An Illustrated Memoir  . Outskirts Press, 2006. On growing up during the Great Depression and going on to a career in Washington.

Wolff, Geoffrey. The Edge of Maine  . National Geographic, 2005. Novelist/biographer spends many summers in Maine.

growing up in the Soviet Union

A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir . . . could be taught as a master class in memoir writing," says reviewer Elena Lappin in the Feb. 7 NY Times book review section. One can't get a better recommendation.
I listened to a reading from the book by the author, Russian immigrant Elena Gorokhova last week at the University of Vermont. Elena's writing was poetic and her reading of various passages was delightful. The book describes growing up in Leningrad in the 1950s and 60s, dealing with so many aspects of a repressive society and falling in love with the English language which led eventually to Elena's emigrating.