Briefly, From Blogger’s Recommend: Lillian Leitzel climbed her way out of poverty to become the biggest star in the most famous circus of the 1920s. But Leitzel’s success in the ring was a stark contrast to the frustrations in her personal life. Her one true love was Alfredo Codona, the greatest trapeze flyer of his time, but their reign as king and queen of the circus could lead only to their downfall.
Book Review
Long-time blog readers may remember a few years ago when my sister, Jenny, and I read and reviewed each others favorite books. Jenny and I have vastly different reading tastes — she’s into chick lit and lots of YA fiction, which I’m more of a nonfiction and literary fiction gal myself — which made some, [...]
One of my favorite movies is Miracle, the story of the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team — a rag-tag group of college hockey players from across the United States and their enigmatic but inspirational coach Herb Brooks. The powerhouse team, at the time, was the Soviet Union; given that it was the Cold War and the Olympics were being held in Lake Placid, there was a lot of patriotic zeal going into the games. I love the classic early ’80s fashion, Brooks’ sporting platitudes (“The legs feed the wolf, gentlemen!”), and the lesson about hard work and humility ultimately winning the day. It’s cheesy, I know, but I just eat it up.
I tell you that story because Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat is basically Miracle set in 1936. That may sound dismissive, but I assure that it it’s not. It just helps explain why I adored this book so much.
I have a serious weakness for books about the history of journalism or books that show how the process of journalism works. Watergate is one of those huge moments in the history of my profession, a time when the full power and importance of the press was made totally obvious. If it weren’t for the work of Woodward, Bernstein, and other journalists at major newspapers and magazines around the country, Nixon and his closest aides would have gotten away with a massive political conspiracy. It’s awesome they were caught! By reporters!
As you probably can’t tell, this isn’t a proper review because I couldn’t honestly tell readers at large (or even a reader individually) whether or not I think this would be a good book for them to read. It’s just so very particular and so tied into my interests as a journalist and a political junkie that I can’t really think about it as “literature” in the same way I can about other works of nonfiction that I’ve read.
I feel like these two reviews, You by Austin Grossman and World War Z by Max Brooks, are a long time coming. I read both of them back in April, then just procrastinated on putting together even some short thoughts. In brief, I liked both of these books well enough, but I didn’t love them in a way that’d make me recommend them unequivocally as I have some books in the past. Read on to find out why!
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…
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.
When I told people I was reading a memoir by a Morman weight-lifting librarian with Tourettes Syndrome, I got some pretty quizzical looks. And that’s understandable; there are a lot of ways a memoir that tells so many different stories could go awry. But Josh Hangarne isn’t tempted by any of the paths that lead memoirists astray, making The World’s Strongest Librarian one of the most engaging memoirs I’ve read in a long time.
In May of 1953, Sylvia Plath, then a 21-year-old junior at Smith College, arrived in New York City for a one-month assignment as a guest editor for the college issue of Mademoiselle. Plath, along with the 19 other women selected for these prestigious posts, would spend 26 sweltering, frenetic, life-changing days working on the magazine and learning how complicated the world could be for smart, ambitious women at that time.
Pain, Parties, and Work is a biography of a moment, an exploration of the 26-day period that led to the first of Plath’s several breakdowns and suicide attempts. In the book, author Elizabeth Winder interviews many of the women Plath served with to gain and understanding of what Plath was like as a young woman, before she became the tortured, talented, and tragic poet we remember her as today.
On November 5, 1942 a C-53 Skytrooper carrying five American airmen took off from Iceland to return to their home base on the western side of Greenland. Midway through the trip, the plane inexplicably crash landed on an ice cap. Although none of the passengers were killed, the men would need to be rescued. The U.S. military sent search and rescue planes out looking for the lost crew, but the plane and the men on it seemed to have disappeared.
Four days later, a B-17 bomber searching for the missing C-53 was caught in a storm. Despite the pilot’s best efforts, the B-17 hit a glacier and, again, crash landed. The nine airmen and volunteers all survived the crash, but their predicament forced another series of search and rescue missions through the dangerous Arctic landscape. When the B-17 was located, two members of the U.S. Coast Guard attempted a daring rescue mission using a Grumman Duck amphibious plane to bring the men back. But their plane disappeared in a storm and, 70 years later, remained trapped somewhere in the expanse of Greenland’s glacial tundra.
