Title: I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events — the Ones you Plan and the Ones You Don’t
Author: Jennifer Gilbert
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2012
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Acquired: From the publisher as part of a TLC Book Tour
Rating:

Review: Jenny Gilbert was a vivacious, outgoing, unflappable twenty-something, just back from a trip to Europe, when a violent attack split her life into Before and After. Outside a friend’s apartment, Jenny was assaulted by a total stranger intent on killing her. Despite being stabbed more than 30 times, Gilbert survived the attack. But from that moment forward, she’d never be “Jenny” again. After the attack, she was “Jennifer,” a woman determined to rebuild and reclaim her fabulous New York life:

The result of my rebuilding was an assemblage of contradictions, all hidden beneath a shiny skin. I was a fearless fearful person. I was isolated but afraid to be alone. I was terrified of thins that most people take for granted — especially sleep — but the stuff that others approach with trepidation didn’t even faze me. New career choices, job interviews, selling, cold-calling — that was nothing to me. I knew what it was like to almost lose everything, so the day-to-day things that cause the average person anxiety? Please. What’s the worst that could happen to me…

Jennifer got a job working for a small event planning coming, cold-calling businesses and building up a portfolio of wealthy corporate clients. Eventually, she quite the firm to start her own company, finding solace and excitement in being the kind of person that could fix any problem and living vicariously for the joyful days of the people she was helping. I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag is Gilbert’s memoir of surviving, rebuilding and learning that life is often out of our control.

I had this book on my mental “You Might Like This” list ever since I read a lovely review on Meg’s blog last November. When the ladies at TLC Book Tours pitched it to me, I thought it sounded like a nice change of pace from what I have been reading — an inspirational story about a woman taking control of her life and making it into what she wants. I like those kinds of stories once in awhile.

Like Meg, I went into the book not knowing much about The Attack that throws Gilbert’s life into such disarray. I knew something bad happened to her, but I had no idea how visceral and violent it would be. The way she describes it is very clinical and matter-of-fact, which makes it almost more unsettling to read. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it again because it really did shock me.

As much as the attack takes center stage at the beginning of this book, I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag isn’t about that single event. It’s about how Gilbert chose to respond to it, how she decided to take control of what her life would be and make it what she wanted. She doesn’t always do this successfully or in the most healthy way; for years, she refused to tell people about what happened to her or wear a swimsuit on a beach because she was afraid people would see her scars. She struggled with an eating disorder, looking at controlling food as a way of controlling her chaotic inner life. She had a string of less-than-healthy relationships until finding  her best friend and husband.

But through all of this, Gilbert is a woman I can and do admire. She never looks for sympathy because of her attack. She takes care of herself, grows her business, and continues to learn and adapt and evolve to become a better, healthier person. I just really liked her and reading about her life, despite the fact that her ultra-rich, New York City story is so entirely different from me. I enjoyed reading this book, and I think other memoir readers would enjoy it too.

Other Tour Stops: Book Hooked Blog |  A Patchwork of Books | Sharon’s Garden of Book Reviews | From LA. to LA | A Musing Reviews | Tiffany’s Bookshelf |  The Well-Read Redhead | guiltless reading | Patricia’s Wisdom

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Title: A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City
Author: Jonathan Schuppe
Genre: Narrative nonfiction
Year: 2013
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Acquired: LibraryThing Early Reviewers
Rating:

Publisher’s Summary: For most of his young live, Rodney Mason was good at two things: dealing drugs and throwing a baseball. Then a drive-by shooting left the 27-year-old ex-con paralyzed, cutting that list to one. He vowed to turn his life around and to do it by returning to the game that he loved. Rodney decided to form a Little League team in Newark’s South Ward, hoping to save kids from the street life that had claimed his youth and his mobility, and maybe, in the process, to save himself, too. It wouldn’t be easy — these were kids from violent neighborhoods, with unstable home lives, few positive male role models, and failing schools. Most had never played baseball before, but, through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, Rodney made them a team and gave their impoverished community something to root for.

Review: When I first grabbed A Chance to Win, I knew it was going to be exactly the kind of book I love to read. To tell this story, journalist Jonathan Schuppe spent years following Rodney Mason, a paralyzed drug dealer turned baseball coach, and his Little League team, writing a story that’s both about sports and about what happens in the places that people in power forget. It’s the wonderful kind of investigative and emotional narrative nonfiction I am drawn to.

As I’ve thought about the book, I realized that it’s actually a bit of a mash-up of two other books I love: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger. Like Random Family, A Chance to Win is about what it is like for kids to grow up in an abandoned, dangerous place. And like Friday Night Lights, it’s about the power that sports can have in a community as well as how sports are not the answer to every problem.

The emotional core of the story is Rodney, learning about his childhood, his dreams to play baseball, his temptation into gang life and his meandering journey to try and help other kids avoid his path. But Schuppe also wisely follows two of Rodney’s players and their families to get a broader look both at what this Little League program could accomplish and the overwhelming odds these kids face anyway. It’s far-reaching and awfully sad, sometimes. This is not a feel good story because the kids win. It’s satisfying, I suppose, because despite everything some of them keep trying.

If there is one critique I have about the book, it’s that there are almost no women or girls. Part of that is the point, built into the entire premise of the story — because boys get involved in the drug business, few grow into men or have children that they can or will mentor. Schuppe asserts that since baseball is a sport passed down from fathers to sons (a contention that feels a little dubious, since I think you could say the same thing about other sports), it doesn’t have a chance in a place like South Newark with no male role models. That, in turn, makes Rodey’s role as an adult male mentor and coach even more important and worth writing about.

While I’m totally on board with the premise, I still wish there was a little more about life for girls in this area. Schuppe does write about a couple of mothers (mostly in relation to the men in their lives), but there’s only one girl on the baseball team who, in the end, doesn’t get much time in the story. Intellectually, I know there’s not much to be done about this — she just doesn’t fit into the way Schuppe decide to frame this story, and you can’t invent more girls to play baseball — but I still couldn’t help wanting that story too. I am on the lookout for a book that fills this niche — the life for young women in troubled neighborhoods — so if you have any recommendations, dear readers, please let me know.

But despite the fact that I just spent two paragraphs complaining about it, in the grand scheme of this book it’s a pretty minor issue. Overall, Schuppe does a remarkable job writing a compassionate but honest story about what life is like in a place most of us have decided to ignore and what happens when one person (flawed and imperfect and complicated) steps up and tries to make a difference. A Chance to Win is a wonderfully thoughtful book that I highly recommend.

Other Reviews: … and a little wine |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

It has been quite the week, both online and offline. I feel like this is going to be even more of a “catch all” type of post while I try to remember everything that’s going on!

Time // 9:30 a.m.

Place // At my desk in my office, again.

Eating // Nothing yet. I am not sure what I want for breakfast today.

Drinking // Black tea, orange flavored, I believe.

Reading // I’ve had a flightly week with my reading. I decided to try something totally different last Sunday afternoon, so I picked up All the President’s Men, an account of the Watergate investigation, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The book is very, very “inside baseball” when it comes to politics and reporting, but I’m really enjoying it so far.

But I’ve also be dipping in and out of several other books — I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag by Jennifer Gilbert, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, and Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, to name a few. I haven’t had much time to read this week, so I haven’t gotten very far in any of them. I’m hoping this week will be a little less frenetic… but that’s not looking likely.

Contemplating // On Friday, I participated in in 2013 Chick-fil-A Leadercast webinar, a leadership seminar broadcast around the world. This year’s theme was “Simple Lead,” so all of the speeches were about ways to work through complexity to lead more effectively. The speaker that most stuck with me was David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He talked about the importance of freeing up “psychic bandwidth” to give yourself room to think by getting all of the “stuff” out of your head.

That really resonated with me — lately its felt like my brain is running in a million different directions — so I started reading Getting Things Done. When the boyfriend saw me reading the book he got this incredulous look on his face, pointing out that I’m the editor of a newspaper and maintain a successful blog… do I really have a problem getting things done? And no, I don’t really. I get a lot of stuff done. My problem is that, lately, I can’t seem to focus on anything because there are too many things in my head. And stuff that isn’t related to work or the blog — making a dentist appointment, for example — falls by the wayside all the time. I’m not far into the book, but I’m really excited about the idea of getting a system in place to get things out of my head in an organized, actionable way.

Cooking // I have not done much cooking lately, but I think I am going to try this recipe for Chana Saag tonight for dinner.

Blogging // This is maybe my biggest news of the week: Friday was my five-year blogiversary! I was so nutty this week I almost missed it and didn’t get to celebrate as much as I might have wanted, but I’m really proud of this milestone. If you click over to the post, there’s a little giveaway at the end too.

Shopping // The last thing I need is a new purse, but I want this one SO BAD. It’s the same size and shape as my current purse (a red version of this bag) that I love and get complimented on all the time. And my red bag is getting a little worn around the edges… so I might splurge this week.

Promoting // I have a post up on Book Riot this week about my addition to spoilers. It was a fun post to write, but be warned there are some spoilers in it for Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games trilogy.

Hating // Clutter! On Friday night I did a little bit of a book purge (I got rid of like 20 books) and cleaned my closet, but I’m still feeling distracted by all the “stuff” in my life. I need to keep working on this.

Wanting // I want to sign up for an online class, The Phone Photography Project, for later this summer. It’s only $39 at the introductory price, but it starts right when I’ll be on vacation and so I’m concerned I won’t participate as fully as I should. I’m probably going to sign up anyway.

Anticipating // I’m really excited to have a day without a to do list. I usually make one for the weekend, but since I had to work most of the day yesterday covering our local college commencement ceremony, I didn’t bother. I still have things to do, but nothing that can’t wait.

Happy Sunday, everyone! What are you reading today?

Today this blog turns five years old. Five years old! That’s practically ancient in Internet time.

Earlier this week, Jeanne (Necromancy Never Pays), who has also been blogging for five years, wrote something in her profile on Book Bloggers International that resonated with me:

Like any blogger who has been at it for more than five years, I’m looking for a new direction. I think it must be a little like writing a second novel—all the stuff I most wanted to write about, I have written about already, so there’s less sense of urgency.

I’ve been tossing around ideas for this post for a few months — ever since I got started thinking about blogging milestones when I celebrated 1,000 posts — but it took Jeanne’s comment for all of my fleeting and tangled thoughts to come together.

Despite the feeling that everything has been said before, I think can be useful to revisit where we’ve been once in awhile. The book blogging community is growing so big so quickly that it’s impossible to know or remember where we’ve all come from. It’s nice to be reminded of our “origin stories” once in awhile. But part of surviving online for five years is also to not get bogged down in what we were, to constantly be evolving to fit better into the virtual and real life landscapes we exist in.

I started this blog on Saturday, May 10, 2008, one week before I was set to graduate from a small liberal arts college on the prairie of Minnesota with a B.A. in English. I had kept various blogs through high school and college, but they were of the angsty rants about how boys didn’t like me, I was too chubby, and my life was really hard (all things that were untrue, even if they didn’t feel like it at the time). I decided I wanted to put useful and interesting things on the Internet, and that my degree in English made me qualified to write about books.

I didn’t really know there were other book bloggers out there. I mean, I assumed there were other people who wrote about books online, but I didn’t know that book blogging was going to become a thing for me personally or for the book community at large. The idea of advance review copies or going to a book conference or writing about books on other websites wasn’t even a calculation. If you want an idea of how much I didn’t know anything about this book blogging thing, check out this post from June 2008 — I was excited about getting 20 hits per day and wanted to know about what things other bloggers put in book reviews. How simple things were back then, am I right?

Since May 2008, I’ve gone through many big life changes, the kind you go through when you’re just out of college and trying to figure out what to do with your life before a mid-life crisis hits. In my case, I went to grad school, panicked about the future of the journalism industry, interned for the summer, adopted a cat, finished my master’s degree, got my first job, then quit my first job to move back to the town where I went to college (and move in with a boy for the first time) to be the editor of a small town newspaper. Aside from my family and some very close friends, this blog has been the most constant thing in my life since I started writing five years ago.

There are lots of pieces of advice that I’ve seen veteran bloggers give about how to maintain your blogging energy. And lots of that advice is good. But the only piece of advice I can give at this moment about keeping up a blog is that you have to be willing to let the blog evolve with you. As my life has changed, the way I blog and think about blogging has changed too. The bloggers that I love to read embrace that change and incorporate it into their blogging lives rather than letting their blog remain stagnant while they change behind the scenes.

I don’t think embracing change has to be a big deal. Recently, for example, I decided to change up the regular posts I do on Sundays. I had been doing The Sunday Salon, a sort-of meme on Sundays I joined several years ago, but I’d lost my interest in the non-format. In February I started doing Currently posts every Sunday using Instagram photos, which has really given me some of my blogging energy back. It’s a little change, but one that I made after realizing that I needed to do something to give me a slightly different direction. Evolution is what helps a blog survive.

Well, evolution and people. If I had 800 more words, I’d talk about how grateful I am for the friends I’ve made through this community and because of this blog. It’s genuinely amazing and I feel honored every day. As much as it’s hard to believe that this blog is five years old, I can’t imagine any parts of the last five years without the community I’ve found because of it. Book bloggers are my people.

As a thank you for being a wonderful community (and for reading all the way to this very long post), I’m going to end with a giveaway. Fill out your information in the form below to be entered for a $10 electronic gift certificate to the online bookseller of your choice/ One week from now, I’ll draw five winners. There are a couple of extra survey questions, but you can ignore those if you want.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. The last five years have been truly wonderful.

Photo Credit: chrisinplymouth via Compfight cc