July Birthdays

Thomas Berger

This afternoon I found myself browsing through the desk calendar I keep in my home office.  That's not something I do a lot of, despite the fact that I always try to keep a book-oriented desk calendar around - this year it's the Barnes & Noble 2011 Desk Diary: Book of Days.  Half-way through the year, I can say that this has turned out to be one of my favorites, and that I'll be looking for the 2012 version for next year's blog notes, book logs, etc.

What I noticed this afternoon is that the month of July is a pretty awesome month for author births.  Take a look at this list:

July 1, 1892 James M. Cain

July 2, 1877 Herman Hesse

July 3, 1883 Franz Kafka

July 4, 1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne

July 8, 1913 Walter Kerr

July 12, 1933 Donald E. Westlake

July 17, 1889 Erle Stanley Gardner

July 18, 1937 Hunter S. Thompson

July 20, 1924 Thomas Berger

July 21, 1899 Ernest Hemingway

July 23, 1888 Raymond Chandler

July 26, 1856 George Bernard Shaw

Jul7 28, 1927 John Ashbery

July 29, 1905 Stanley Kunitz

Not too shabby a list, that.  July seems to have been particularly kind to mystery writers, including four of the giants of the genre in its ranks: Cain, Westlake, Gardner, and Chandler.  What surprises me most is the year in which those four were born, especially considering how cutting-edge Cain and Chandler seemed to be to me even when I was reading them for the first time in the '60s.  And who would believe that the man who invented Perry Mason was born all the way back in 1889?  Considering how late into the twentieth century that show was on television, it hardly seems possible.

July also blessed us with one of my favorite writers, Thomas Berger, a writer perhaps still best known for Little Big Man (but my personal favorite of his is one called The Houseguest, a very strange book, indeed).  And who could quarrel with a month that produced Kafka, Hesse, Hemingway, and Shaw?

Confession time: Hunter Thompson bores me to tears, so that's minus one point for July.  And, quite frankly, I can't place Kerr, Ashbery, or Kunitz - that's minus three points for me.  Also, it appears that Barnes & Noble pretty much only note "old school" authors, with very, very few of the featured writers having been born after 1950.  Perhaps, next year, B&N should put out a "modern author" desk diary as an alternative to this one.  (On a side note, I saw that  Beverly Cleary is 95 years old!)

All in all, I suspect that July will be hard to beat as a birthday-month for authors.

The Mighty Walzer

The Mighty Walzer is a coming-of-age novel served to American readers with a whole lot of backspin.  That is because Oliver Walzer, hero of Howard Jacobson’s The Mighty Walzer, did his growing up in 1950s Manchester, England – specifically in a part of Manchester predominately populated by Jewish families like his own. 

If shyness could kill, Oliver Walzer would never have reached puberty.  That he did reach puberty, although he did not do a whole lot with the opportunities inherent to that stage of life, and go on to have a fairly “normal” life almost seems like an accident now, even to Oliver.  The first accident was that he found a competition-grade Ping-Pong ball and brought it home with him one day.  The second, was his discovery, by banging that ball off a wall with his hardbound copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that he was a Ping-Pong natural. 

Ping-Pong, and his father’s insistence that Oliver use his unusual skills to meet other players ( as a way of  forcing him out of the house for his own good), would be Oliver’s ticket to the rest of his life.  Suddenly, he was among like-minded people who came to accept him as one of their own; he had teammates; he learned to at least talk a good game about women, even though he seldom practiced his skills in that arena; and he had a goal: to become a world champion Ping-Pong player.  Well, that’s the good news, because I’m making Oliver’s transition to adulthood sound a whole lot easier than it was.

Author Howard Jacobson

The odds were against Oliver from the start.  Surrounded by a gaggle of sexually repressed aunts who loved to give him baths, it is little wonder that the little boy would himself be sexually confused.  Witness his habit of cutting headshots of his aunts and pasting them onto the bodies of women in the  risqué photos he spent hours visiting in the family’s one bathroom.  But grow into a man Oliver does, and Howard Jacobson makes it an interesting, if somewhat frustrating transition (even for the reader, who is likely to want to shake some common sense into Oliver, or other family members, on more than one occasion). 

That Jacobson often uses 1950s British slang and Yiddish references in the conversation between his characters might be off-putting to some, but this adds an authenticity to the conversations that would otherwise be missing – and it becomes easier and easier on the reader as he develops an “ear” for the unusual words and phrases.  Imagine Philip Roth “squared” and you will have the right first impression of The Mighty Walzer.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

And Then There Is San Jose's Seven Trees Library

...completed last fall in a city that cannot afford to hire the librarians that would make it possible to open the library's doors.  In fact, according to this New York Times article, Seven Trees is one of four new San Jose libraries (totaling some 68,000 square feet of floor space) that remains closed due to the city's budget restraints.

...the product of a bond measure that passed in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble. None of the libraries currently have a budget to hire employees.


Still, Seven Trees’ shiny two-story building, which includes a first-floor community center that opened in October, attracts a steady stream of would-be library patrons.

This is where the good news enters this library story.  The "Friends of the Seven Trees Library" have taken on the unusual role of administering an "unofficial" loan program with the donated books collected by the group.  Rather than selling the books, the Friends are, in effect, running their own little library system.

Now Ms. Hashii, a retired library clerk, keeps a mental list of her readers’ needs as she sorts donations. A man with white hair and thick glasses says he is on the lookout for large-print books. Mothers come to read with their children on the one folding chair in the little space, so Ms. Hashii looks for more picture books. A Spanish-speaking woman is teaching herself to read and has asked for easy Spanish books.


“It’s something the community really seems to be taking to,” Ms. Hashii said.

There is still hope in a world in which the average citizen manages to circumvent the failures of government officials, local and national. But what a waste to let these buildings sit empty and unused like this. Why didn't some of those billions of dollars in stimulus money go to create jobs like these instead of being wasted the way it all apparently was by being thrown into some black hole that failed miserably to create a meaningful number of new jobs of any type?

A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents - and Ourselves

Caring for one aging parent or in-law for an extended number of years can be, and usually is, a tremendous physical and mental burden on the caretaker.  But these days, when more and more of us are living beyond our capability of taking care of ourselves, some caretakers find themselves caring for two, three, or even four elderly relatives.  I, for instance, have been primarily responsible for my 89-year-old father’s care for the past eighteen months – and just when his health has stabilized these past few weeks, my mother-in-law is struggling with dementia issues that require my wife’s daily attention.

Jane Gross, author of A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents – and Ourselves, has been there.  Gross, with some help from her brother, was her mother’s caretaker for almost three years, from the time the siblings moved their mother from Florida back to New York so that she would be closer to them, until they finally buried her in 2003.  Gross’s story is somewhat unusual in that her mother made the decision for herself when it was time to go.  Effectively, with the understanding of her two children beforehand, she committed suicide by refusing to take in any more food and water.  The important message of the book, however, is what happened between her move to New York and her death.

The first lesson Gross learned is that neither she, nor her mother, were at all prepared for what was ahead of them, starting with the role-reversal that required Jane Gross to become her mother’s mother.  She also faced the question of how a family can get through the end-crisis of a parent without forever damaging the relationships of the siblings left behind?  As Gross points out, the caretaker (usually female) can hardly be expected to endure the experience without building deep-seated resentment of the siblings whom her efforts allow to go on with the routines of their own lives.

Gross offers tips, and details, about dealing with all the forms and regulations of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs almost impossible to understand and deal with effectively without the help of third party advisers.  The chapters dealing with these two Federal programs, and how to best use them to the patient’s advantage, are alone worth the price of A Bittersweet Season.   

But perhaps the most unnerving chapter in the book is the one pertaining to “hospital and emergency room delirium” among the elderly population.  For reasons that no one can really explain, approximately one-third of patients over the age of seventy will experience such hospital-induced delirium.  This delays scheduled procedures and requires the extra attention of the hospital staff and patient families – adding significantly to the cost of the hospital stay.

Bad enough, but the real tragedy is that only 4 percent of these patients are back to normal at the time of their discharge, with another 18 percent fully recovered at six months from the date of discharge.   It appears that many of those not recovered within six months will never fully do so because the early-stage dementia they entered the hospital with (of which most are blissfully unaware) has been “unmasked” and accelerated by their hospitalization.  (This, I am convinced, explains my mother-in-law’s sudden and rapid descent into dementia, while my father recovered from the symptoms within 6 weeks of discharge.)

Author Jane Gross

A Bittersweet Season is an important book for those who are already in the midst of taking care of a helpless parent – and for those who see themselves approaching that situation.  I wish this book had been available two years ago, before I became totally immersed in my father’s healthcare and financial wellbeing.  It would have helped prepare me for what was to come.  On the other hand, even though I learned the hard way much of what Gross writes about, it is still comforting to be reminded that I am not alone; a rapidly growing army of us is going through the same thing. 

Read this book – for the good of your parents, and yourself.

Rated at: 5.0

(Provided by Publisher for Review)

Will Troy, Michigan, Allow Its Library to Close

The citizens of Troy, Michigan, have a decision to make on August 2.  Are they willing to pony-up the tax revenue needed to keep the city's public library open - or not?  Apparently, there is a good chance that if the tax increase fails to pass, the library will be closed on August 12 - unless the city council makes changes to its budget to somehow cover the shortfall.

Now someone in Troy is making sure that everyone there gets the news about the pending vote - by planning a book burning party to dispose of the library's contents if the tax increase fails to pass.  There's even a Facebook page to promote the book burning party (satirical, one assumes), although, according to this TroyPatch article, a whole lot of people don't think this is satire.  They think it's real.

And then there are some, like this man, who are all for the library closing shop for good:

Johnathon Dresbach

There are many other libraries at neighboring cities that anyone can use. It seems that residents that use the Troy Library are either from rental apartments, Sterling Heights, Shelby, Rochester Hills or other local cities. I have used it once in 25 years, we have the internet for everything now, why should we have to pay HEAVY TAXES for their MISMANAGED FUNDS, and USELESS spending habits. Then in 5 years they want more taxes, we shot is down once, it needs to be not approved again. Residents are smarter than City Hall, close the library, it is no more than a coffee shop for loafers and people that need to get a life or have no life. INTERNET is where it is at!

At least this issue is getting the attention it deserves. Sink or swim, citizens of Troy, it's all up to you guys.

Saturday

Henry Perowne seems to have it all.  The neurosurgeon has a satisfying medical practice, two successfully raised adult children whose mother he still finds sexy, his dream car, and he lives in 4,000 square foot home in the heart of London (imagine what that must be worth).  Life has been good to him, and he has every reason to expect more of the same for a long time to come.  Henry, however, is about to receive one of those reality checks that life sometimes throws at even the best-prepared of us.

It all starts to come apart for him before daybreak on Saturday morning when, for a reason he cannot explain, Henry finds himself standing in front of his bedroom window just as a flaming airplane streaks across the sky on its way to an emergency Heathrow landing.  Because his first thoughts are of terrorism rather than mechanical failure, the sight reminds Henry how very different the post-9/11 world is from the world in which he raised his children and established his career.

Later, as he leaves the house to begin his day off, Henry has to make his way past thousands of protesters who are there to protest Britain’s decision to join the U.S. in its fast-approaching war against Iraq.  When he finds a policeman willing to let him save time by driving across a cordoned off section of road, Henry jumps at the chance – only to drive right into a minor fender-bender that will haunt him for the rest of his life.  The other driver, whom Henry is about to meet for the first time, will figure prominently in the book’s climax.

Saturday, though, is not a plot-driven book.  McEwan has, instead, invited his readers to spend a day inside the head of his main character, Henry Perowne.  Perowne is a relatively conservative man, much to the dismay, at times, of his daughter.  The two, for instance, vehemently disagree on the necessity and morality of the upcoming war with Iraq, even to the point of an argument that ends with her in tears.  We are witness to the strong bond between Henry and his son, one centered on their mutual love of American jazz, and to the pride that Henry takes in his wife’s professional successes.

But McEwan offers more than that.  We are given a glimpse into the mindset of a man who, now that he has made it, is finally beginning to wonder what drives the people he encounters at home, at the hospital, and during his leisure time.  Henry is a solitary man, dependent on no one, but he is about to find how unprepared he is when it comes to having the skills and instincts sometimes required if one is to survive in the real world, a world in which there is always someone willing to take what they want if one is too weak to stop them.

Ian McEwan is a master and a craftsman - in the positive sense, that he has constructed a novel here, layer by layer, which very subtly, almost stealthily, immerses the reader into the world he has created for them.  It is a world, a lifestyle, and a family, which I will long remember.

Rated at: 5.0