Life on the Stage

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I am sometimes attracted to biographies about people I find intriguing. That was the case with Julie Salamon's Wendy and the Lost Boys:The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein. I admire Wasserstein's plays, especially her Pulitzer and Tony winning “The Heidi Chronicles”, but what really piqued my interest was an essay she wrote for The New Yorker describing how, at the age of forty-eight, she underwent in vitro fertilization and gave birth (three months prematurely) to her daughter Lucy Jane. It was written in such an honest and open way that I felt as if I knew her. And I was shocked when just seven years later she died of lymphoma.

Salaman traces Wasserstein's life from her comfortable childhood in Brooklyn and Manhattan, through her years at Mount Holyoke and Yale Drama School, to her successes and failures in the theater and in her personal life. She was a larger than life character, a mainstay of the New York theater community, a woman with a huge network of devoted friends. And yet it is clear from Salamon's account that although many friends thought they knew her well, each knew only a piece of Wendy.

The characters in her plays were often conflicted and insecure, trying to please their families, find their soul mates, achieve their ambitions – all with a bracing sense of humor. Clearly they reflected Wasserstein's own psyche. Salamon's biography captures the many facets of this complex women.

Unbroken but maybe bent a bit

What are the limits of human endurance? And what gives people the strength to persevere? "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption" opens with a riveting glimpse of men adrift for weeks on a bathtub-sized raft in the Pacific, stalked by sharks hurling themselves onto the raft, then strafed by a Japanese plane. I was hooked immediately. Author Laura Hillenbrand (Sea Biscuit) next takes us back to the beginning, tracing the life of Louis Zamporini, troublemaker kid, thief, Olympic miler and WW II airman missing in the Pacific. As his ordeal unfolds, one cannot imagine what will come next. Readers learn about competitive running, the war in the Pacific, human endurance, frailty and redemption. We see yet again what men in war are subjected to, how they rise to the occasion, and the price they pay. Tough, headstrong Louie Zamporini in particular was well equipped to persevere. This biography is a great read.

Friends For Life

The cover of “The Girls from Ames: A story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship” shows a group a smiling attractive teen aged girls. Jeffrey Zaslow (who is the coauthor of “The Last Lecture”) is the author telling the story of eleven girls from the town of Ames, Iowa who were born in 1963 and have maintained a unique friendship that has spanned forty years. The girls met at different times in the small city that is home to Iowa State University. Some were friends from infancy because their parents were friends, some met in grammar school but by middle school almost all of the eleven were friends. By the time they reached Ames High School they were an established group (clique) of eleven girls.

The book begins as they are meeting for one of their many reunions over the years. Using pictures taken over the years, and memories, their stories take shape. In the beginning of the book it was difficult to keep track of who was who. But in the front of the book there are pictures taken of the girls, one was a grade school photo in the second or third grade and one which appears to be a high school yearbook portrait. I would flip back and forth from the story to the pictures to figure out exactly who was speaking. By the end of the book I had become very familiar with these women.

The book is a part sociology, with many cultural references during that time frame and part biography, as each girl tells her story. It is a microcosm of American culture, “white, middle class females from the mid West during the years 1963 to the present”.

Their stories, especially in the early years, are funny and charming; keggers in the cornfields of Iowa, husking corn in the summer, proms and sleepovers. Over the forty years of friendship the girls have lived through the deaths of their parents, the strange death of one of them, marriages, children, divorce, cancer and coping with Alzheimer’s. There is joy and great sadness in their stories. But mostly this is a story of friendship and how these women rely on one another and have nurtured this bond for over forty years. This story, as a whole and each individual story, showed how important female friendships can be and how friendships can not only shape and sustain us but keep us sane and healthy!

Three Audio Books

During summer car travels, we listened to several audio books, with mixed results. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi is the true tale of the authors shared obsession with an unsolved series of crimes. A serial killer in the 1970's ritually murdered fourteen young lovers around Florence, was never caught, and is known as the Monster of Florence. Preston moved with his family to Florence (he is a mystery writer), met Spezi and together they searched to uncover and confront the man they believe is that monster. Along with murder, mutilation, suicide and vengance, they themselves become targets of a bizarre police investigation. The tale itself if fascinating, providing an additional lesson in political corruption and the concealed and extensive corruption within the Italian legal system. The tale is long, quite interesting, well narrated (Dennis Boutsikaris) but might well have benefited from some editing, since the details sometimes bog down the progress of the story.

Richard Russo, whose writing I thoroughly enjoy, wrote That Old Cape Magic, about the long, painful, sometimes funny struggles of Jack Griffin, a man in mid-life whose marriage is crumbling despite all the trappings of success, wife, daughter, etc. He has truly hideous parents and Russo creates very real, sad but often funny, people. However, over time I tired of this clueless man who excludes his family, thinking they have no impact upon his behavior and life if they are not physically present in his world. His realizations come slowly over time and I somehow lost patience with him as damages pile up along the way. Competently narrated (Arthur Morey), I wanted more to "happen" in this rather slow, character driven work.

The Bishop and the Beggar Girl of St. Germain, by Andrew Greeley, is a "locked room" mystery (unraveling a mystery without chases, locations, etc.). Bishop Blackie, an intelligent, balanced Catholic Bishop makes entertaining and wry observations about love, life, religious pretentions and rigidity, as he tries to track down and understand the motivations of a priest who has gone missing. The author includes multiple pieces of history and detailed locations in Paris that make the traveler smile in memory, and the Bishop is a very astute man. However well narrated by George Guidall, the writing suffers from being "too" clever, overusing words like "patently"and "arguably" which over time, grew annoying. I found the resolution of the story to exceed my suspension of disbelief, leaving me somewhat disappointed in the end.

That said, the pleasures of audio books cannot be denied.

A Gem of a Book

I have been trying to think of a way to give some direction to my reading other than just a haphazard selection from books on the table at the library or mentioned in the newspaper or on a blog. It occurred to me after reading Le Clezio’s Wandering Star (see Charlotte’s April 23, 2010 blog) that I could use the Nobel Prize in Literature as an organizing structure. Working backward, it would take me a while but eventually I would get to Pearl S. Buck who was awarded the prize in 1938. In the meantime I have just finished Pearl of China by Anchee Min.

This is a novel but there is no attempt to disguise that fact that it presents itself as a biography of the real Pearl Buck told by an imagined Chinese friend Willow. Certain facts of Buck’s life as portrayed in the book are undoubtedly true. She grew up in China because her father was an American missionary there trying to convert the Chinese from Buddhism to Christianity. She married an American agriculturist who came to China trying to teach poor peasants who had farmed the land for centuries the ways of Western agriculture. She gave birth to a severely handicapped daughter. She was twice driven out of China, first by the Boxer Rebellion and finally by the Nationalists when she was in her 40’s. (Questions: Does the fact that this book is presented as a novel remove any legal issues for the author? What if the portrayal were unflattering and factually inaccurate? What if Buck were still alive?)

Before leaving China for good, Buck had already started to find her escape and strength through writing, first by contributing articles under assumed male names to Chinese newspapers (the Chinese were not likely to accept the opinions of a blond female Westerner) and then essays and stories to publications outside China about what life was really like in the Orient for the greater number of Chinese people. All of that takes place in the first half of the book. The second half is really Willow’s story as she remains in China during the Communist struggle and the Cultural Revolution.

Min’s descriptions of life in China are vivid and detailed especially when it comes to weddings and funerals. The internal political struggles, the repression of Mao’s regime, the intrigues of Madame Mao are just as fascinating as Buck’s early life. A perfect follow-up has to be Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling, a non-fiction account of Buck’s life during the same period. And, of course, The Good Earth itself.

Bon Appetit!

I have never owned a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but after just finishing My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme I think I may have to get a copy - at least Volume 1 - for the design and reading if not for cooking but I might actually give that a try, too.

This is a great read although I was never comfortable with the "voice". Alex Prud'homme is Paul Child's (Julia's husband) grand nephew. He had access to the many saved letters written by Paul and Julia to Paul's twin brother. So Alex wrote this book based on the letters plus interviews with Julia when she was in her nineties BUT the book is written in the first person as if Julia is telling the story. True, Julia read portions as they were written and offered corrections and additions but it's not quite the same as her having written the book, at least in my mind. Is it autobiography? I don't know.

Nevertheless, I am delighted to have learned the facts of her life and how her books and TV shows came to be. Did those following the book and shows at the time realize how involved Paul was as her collaborator and partner? He encouraged her from the beginning, when they first arrived in France, to learn the language and take cooking classes at the Cordon Blue. He helped her with kitchen design, photographs, illustrations. He coached her about her presentation style when she first started giving cooking lessons. Some spouses are like that. It was for his career that they went to France...and for hers when they came back thirty years later. We also get some insight into Julia's relationships, professional and personal, with her two "cookery-bookery" co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholde.

And, guess what? There is not one recipe in this book. Another reason to get a copy of MTAFC. If this book is correct, MTAFC was another French revolution.

Love in the Time of Enlightenment

If I were playing Jeopardy a month ago and the category were The Enlightenment, I wouldn’t have done very well.

For $100: Voltaire
Answer: Who wrote Candide?
For $200: Emilie du Chatelet
Answer: (That’s the buzzer sounding – and me losing).

But now that I have read Passionate Minds by David Bodanis (he also wrote E = mc2) I would have many answers including: Who translated Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica from its original Latin into French? This work and her commentaries were instrumental in advancing the concept of the conservation of energy and fundamental to key eighteenth-century developments in theoretical physics.

If this sounds boring, I can assure you that it is anything but boring. To say that Voltaire and Emilie were lover and mistress vastly understates the contribution of each to the other. Throughout their relationship Emilie was married to someone else but that did not prevent Voltaire and Emilie from living together for years at a time (and from periodically having affairs with others). But they always returned to each other. No one else satisfied their intellectual and spiritual needs like the other. Bodanis paints a vivid picture of life in and around Paris and Versailles in the first half of the eighteenth century, particularly among the aristocracy. And he describes their artistic and scientific achievements in readily understandable terms.

I knew that I would like Emilie because early in this book her father is quoted as saying: “I argued with her in vain, yet she would not understand that no great lord will marry a woman who is seen reading every day.” Because her father’s low income would not provide enough funds to buy all of the books that she wanted, she taught herself to count cards at the gaming tables and won sufficient sums to support her “book” habit. Much later in life when she had accumulated a significant amount of gambling debt, she devised a form of derivatives, contracting with the tax collectors to pay them a small sum of money now for the right to receive their future streams of collections. She then used those contracts to satisfy her debts. This is 1747!

One could describe this as a history book. In addition to Voltaire and Emilie, we meet Richilieu, Diderot, Frederick the Great, Madame de Pompadour, Bernoulli, and Louis XV, among many others. But it is primarily a love story – and a good one.
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