Drink: The Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol is a sobering look – pun intended – at the role that alcohol plays in the lives of women. Ann Dowsett Johnston adeptly combines a well-researched analysis of women and drinking in today’s society with her own personal walk through alcoholism into sobriety. By using her own drinking history as a jumping off point for her research, she provides a vulnerability that makes the book much more relatable than had she just reported her findings.
Drink focuses on the dangers that women specifically face as it relates to alcohol, ones very different than those faced by men. Differences that start early on since most women, often as girls, start drinking to escape from whatever it is that ails them – insecurity, fear, abuse and neglect.
Read moreSunlit Night is breezy, like a good summer read; yet thought provoking, humorous and at times dark. This is the debut novel by Rebecca Dinerstein and is an impressive first effort. It’s the story of strange and estranged families, and in particular, two young adults who must find themselves despite their familial dysfunction.
Early in the novel, we discover Frances and Yasha, both New Yorkers, in separate tales. Frances, a neurotic recent college graduate dealing with romantic heartbreak and a flawed family, decides to accept an artist’s apprenticeship in Norway (above the Arctic Circle) to escape the oppressiveness of Manhattan and create space between herself and all that is familiar to her. Yasha, a Russian immigrant, has just graduated high school and works side by side with his father in their Brighton Beach bakery. Abandoned ten years earlier by his mother, she makes a mysterious reappearance and breaks his father’s heart all over again - literally. His father’s last wish is to be buried at the top of the world, which is where Frances’s and Yasha’s lives intersect.
Read moreAward-winning author Joseph Kanon is internationally recognized, having published bestsellers, including The Good German, which was made into a film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. With much acclaim, I picked up his latest spy thriller with great expectation. I was disappointed.
Leaving Berlin takes place in 1949 Berlin; the city divided by the Allies into Soviet, French, British and American sectors. In the East, the Soviets rule with an iron fist, grabbing people off the streets for small suspected infractions, friends turn into informants, and war-time concentration camps are turned into prisons for party dissenters. At the center of the drama is Alex Meier, a Jewish German writer who was able to leave a concentration camp during the war after a payoff. 15 years later, after exile in America, he returns at the invitation of the new Soviet-backed German party to help form a cultural revival.
Read moreDisclaimer: If you don’t like lawyers or graphic sex, you should skip this book. Post script: Read it anyway.
I Take You is set in Key West during the week leading up to Lily and Will’s whirlwind wedding. Lily, a New York lawyer, is having some serious doubts about the upcoming nuptials as evidenced by the fact she can’t stop sleeping with other men. Will, on the other hand, the nerdy anthropologist, appears steadfast and only more committed to Lily as the big day draws near.
The story heats up as the secondary characters, which really give the book its texture, begin arriving. There are Lily’s “moms”, her real mom, her two ex step moms and her fierce grandmother, who band together to try to talk Lily out of the wedding. Lily’s dad, from whom she obviously inherited her wandering eye, shows up with very few helpful contributions other than to play the role of the old guy Lothario. And then there is Will’s acerbic politico mom, who has zero love for Lily and is determined to wreck the wedding. And finally, Freddy, Lily’s sexually confused loyal best friend, who will do anything to get Lily through the week, wedding or not.
Read moreMany of us take a meandering path through life, unsure of the next step or even the goal. Author Philip Connors has honestly exposed with us his own life’s twisty trail. In his memoir All The Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, Connors has chronicled a series of experiences focusing on pivotal stages in his life. Though each chapter centers upon a different aspect, the common thread throughout is his brother’s death, and the burden of culpability he must finally address.
Connors worked in journalism, first as an intern for The Nation, then the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal. He relays his story through that journalistic lens - with writing that is eloquent, thoughtful, direct and emotional, yet matter-of-fact. So we read of the tumult and anxiety he experiences, but don’t become entrenched in the sentiment. It’s a work of sensitive, authentic and articulate writing that resonated with me. In describing his move to the Gila wilderness in New Mexico late in the book he writes, “The place tore me down and remade me; its indifference to my cares and sorrows was magisterial and, in unexpected ways, comforting. I had believed that the streets of New York were the pinnacle of indifference to the individual human life and I had been mistaken.”
Read moreReminiscent of the movie Little Miss Sunshine, the majority of One Plus One chronicles a mismatched group taking a three-day car trek from England to Scotland for a math Olympiad. The main characters, who each narrate chapters from their perspectives, are: Ed, a recently divorced financial guy facing insider trading charges; Jess, a single mom struggling to makes ends meet for her daughter and “sort of” son, Nicky, an angsty male teen who wears eyeliner, is the subject of intense bullying, and disappears into violent video games to escape; and Tanzie, a whip-smart grade school girl who wears thick glasses and way too many sequins to ever be cool. Finally, there is Norman, though he does no story telling, the family’s enormous loving mutt who spends most of his time drooling and farting.
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