Book reviews

Short Stories can rock. Honest.

Cathy LaGrow 9 Comments

I used to hate short stories. Well, “hate” is a strong word. But I really, really disliked them.

Short stories, at least to someone who loves Really Big Books, can feel like a gyp. Just when the tale is taking off and gaining momentum and you’re invested in the characters – bam, it’s over. You feel like you’ve been a victim of “bait and switch.”  False advertising. Premature elucidation.

The few short stories I had read weren’t even very good. So for a long while, I steered clear.

Then my oldest brother (those boys crop up here often, don’t they?) went to Canada on vacation, and brought me back a short story collection written by the person who would become my Favorite Living Writer (more on her in a future post, I promise.) My mind was forever changed. Well-executed short stories ROCK. Continue reading →

The Astronaut

Cathy LaGrow 9 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

Brother #1 came to visit last night. We were talking about books (he’d brought me yesterday’s New York Times Book Review) when he stopped and said, “Oh! I didn’t even know that Frank McCourt was dead. Did you know that?”

“What?” I said. “No, he’s not.”

“Yes, he is! It’s true.” My brother whipped out his iPhone and pulled up McCourt’s wiki page. “Look, right there.”

I pretended to disbelieve the information for another minute. How on earth did I miss that news? Then again, McCourt died in July of 2009, when I was still nursing my second baby. There isn’t a whole lot I remember from that time period.

After Angela’s Ashes (McCourt’s memoir) was published in 1996, even after all the hype and praise, even after the awards, I resisted reading the book for a long time. The main reason? When I picked it up at the store and flipped through it, I noticed that McCourt didn’t use quotation marks around the dialogue in the book.

Well, that’s ridiculous and confusing, I thought, and I set the book down and wandered away.

Eventually, sometime in the early 2000’s, I caved in and bought the book. Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop (and those missing quotation marks were no trouble at all.) When I finished the last page, I looked up and said to myself:

Stunning, stunning, stunning.

That is the most stunning book I’ve ever read.

That’s what I subsequently told anyone who would listen, and it may still be true, all these years later. If you haven’t read Angela’s Ashes, oh, you should.


Frank McCourt grew up in Ireland in the 1930’s, and his childhood defines the term “abject poverty.” His Father was a drunk who periodically abandoned the family; McCourt’s mother, Angela, was left to provide food and shelter for her four surviving children (three others died in infancy.) McCourt lived in places where the floors were covered in water throughout the cold winters, places where there was one outdoor toilet that was shared by the entire neighborhood and was never cleaned by anyone. He ate whatever food his mother could beg for – sometimes there was no food, and the children went hungry. He attended school wearing shoes that were patched together with rubber from bicycle tires, and was taught by Catholic masters who beat their small pupils whenever they felt like it.

The distinctive magic of McCourt’s writing is that it doesn’t contain a trace of self-pity, even when he’s describing the most awful events. His story should be too heartbreaking to read, but it isn’t, because McCourt infuses it with just enough gentle humor and hope.

Angela’s Ashes was so extraordinary, it earned McCourt a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and spent more than two years on international bestseller lists. McCourt went on to write two more bestselling memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man.

Weeks ago, my brother sent me a quote from the TV show Mad Men, and before he even explained the context, I adored the words. “She was born in a barn and she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

Frank McCourt grew up chasing rats from his crumbling home, battling typhoid and chronic conjunctivitis, and literally licking food grease off of newspaper pages when he got too hungry. He died as one of the most famous, feted, successful writers in the world.

Frank McCourt was an astronaut.

Writing that rocks – Disturbing the Universe

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

You can find the most interesting things in other people’s garages.

We were all at Brother #2’s house, a few months ago (this was the same visit where I learned of the North Sentinel Islands), and the guys and I ended up in the garage, looking through boxes of books that hadn’t been unpacked yet, after my brother’s recent move. We kept exclaiming over novels that we’d all read as children, some of which I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. Of course, as soon as we’d “Oh-my-goshed” over a book, we immediately tried to identify which of us the book originally belonged to.

Such things are taken seriously, in my family.

After a few minutes of this, my brothers picked up a paperback book and started raving about how great it was. It had a creased cover and yellowish pages and was titled Disturbing the Universe, by Freeman Dyson. I’d never seen it before.

“You’ve got to read this,” both brothers said. “It’s by a scientist, a physicist…it’s his memoir.”

What luck! This dovetailed nicely with my very recent obsession with space and physics.

They handed the book to me, and I added it to a small stack of books that I’d pulled out because they either belonged to me; probably belonged to me; or possibly belonged to me, subject to further investigation. When we left that day, I jammed the books into the back of our van, where they tumbled over and fanned out across the floor. (My patient husband didn’t say a word. We’ve been married for twenty-one years and he knows, by now, that no matter where we are, books tend to attach themselves to me like barnacles.)

A few days later I picked up Disturbing the Universe and started reading. And, oh my stars.

First of all, Freeman Dyson is a great writer, not in a flashy way, but in a steady, sturdy, draws-you-in kind of way. Secondly, the book covers a particularly fascinating period in history, a period which included the creation of the atom bomb and the birth of space exploration. Dyson includes everything from technological details to arguments over the morality of both programs. There is philosophy. There is quoted poetry, quite a lot of it (Dyson is something of a Renaissance man.) There is, of course, physics.


Dyson was born in England in 1923, and became captivated by science as a small boy. During World War II he worked for Bomber Command, using mathematical analysis to try to reduce Allied casualties (all the while wrestling with his personal moral opposition to bombing.)

After the war he came to America for graduate studies, then went to California and worked on the General Atomic program (which eventually foundered.) He was involved in the test-ban negotiations of the 1960’s, and he spends chapters musing over the ethics of everything from defense strategies to DNA research. He worked alongside some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th-century, and he pays tribute to them with a great many personal anecdotes.

The last third of the book is devoted to space exploration, and this section is particularly dazzling (at least, if you’re a space nerd, like me.) The book was published in 1973, and it is evident that Dyson thought that by now (2010), the space program might have been more advanced than it is. He discusses all the possibilities that physicists were then debating, including extraterrestrials and interplanetary colonization. (He also admits that the latter is not likely to happen, and explains why.)

Disturbing the Universe is still in print, a testament to its enduring appeal. After I’d finished it, and was raving about it on Facebook, Brother #1 told me, “You know, I think that copy is actually mine.”

To which I maturely replied, “I don’t see your name in it. Finder’s keepers.”

Because blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to a good book, it’s every man for himself.

Writing that rocks – Rick Bragg

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

He writes more gorgeous sentences per capita than any writer I’ve ever read. For a while, after you finish one of his stories, most other writing seems flat and uninteresting (yes, even the good stuff.) Without having a college education, he became a long-time reporter for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize (and more than 50 other writing awards), received a Nieman fellowship to Havard, and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.

His name is Rick Bragg, and words turn to pure magic in his hands, that’s all.

In 1999, after many successful years as a newspaper journalist, Bragg started publishing memoirs, mostly about his own rural Southern family – and the critics went nuts. Several things converge in these stories: he is deeply passionate about these people; his family tree is chock-full of the most colorful characters imaginable; and Rick Bragg is simply one of the best writers and storytellers alive.

After I read the first chapter of All Over but the Shoutin, I set the book in my lap, looked off into the distance, and thought to myself, “You have got to be kidding.” You know how great writers can sometimes craft sentences that are so beautiful, they seem to reach out of the page and shake you? And you stop and read those sentences a few times over, just for the joy of it? With Bragg, every single page is peppered with those kinds of sentences.

It’s no good trying to articulate what he does. So I’ll give you some of his own words. (This is the very end of the prologue to All Over but the Shoutin, a book that is sort of a love letter to his mother):

No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.
God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.

Incidentally, I met Rick Bragg at the public library in Salem, Oregon, on a rainy evening in early 2006 when I was very pregnant with my first child. My brother and I sat in a medium-sized lecture hall and watched as a woman from the library escorted Bragg to the podium. He was taller than I’d expected, a brick of a man with floppy hair and a heavy leather jacket that he never took off. He seemed guarded, as famous people are.

Like many great wordsmiths, he was not overly eloquent in person – or maybe he was just tired. He gripped the podium with one hand and talked a bit about writing his previous books, and about his upcoming one (The Prince of Frogtown, which I am reading now.) After answering a few audience questions, he went into the hallway and sat at a folding table to sign books.

My brother bought a book and we stood in line. When we reached Bragg, I was too shy to say anything more than “Hi.” But my brother bent over the table, gestured to me and said, “My sister, here, told me that you are America’s greatest living writer.” (It’s true. I had said that.) Bragg looked at me and his mouth turned up a bit at one corner and he joked, “Well, then, I’ll have to put your baby through college.” He scribbled his signature and we said goodbye and walked down the hall and out the door.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, to redeem that moment by saying something more than “Hi.” But how do you convey to someone, in thirty seconds, what a monstrous talent they have; and what’s the point? Surely they know it. Surely, when you reach a certain level of success, all strangers look like fawning sycophants.

If I had a do-over, though, I think I would tell him that his writing is beyond beautiful, and that reading it is a pleasure and a privilege. (And maybe, if I was bold, I would also ask him if those unearthly sentences flow out of him easily, or if he has to wrestle the words onto the page. But then, what if he didn’t give the answer I’d prefer?)

Do yourself a favor. Read his family trilogy, starting with All Over but the Shoutin or, if you prefer, Ava’s Man (a book about Bragg’s maternal grandfather.) Finish up with The Prince of Frogtown.

It’ll be some of the best few hours you will ever spend reading.

Writing that rocks – A Thousand Days in Venice

Cathy LaGrow 5 Comments

(Trying something new, for your sake and mine: shorter posts. We shall see.)

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

Four years before the titanic (and well-deserved) popularity of Eat, Pray, Love, there came a quieter, shorter book about another middle-aged woman finding new life and love in a foreign land.

A Thousand Days in Venice tells the story of Marlena De Blasi, a chef, cookbook author, and journalist who travels to Venice in 1993 to gather notes for a series of magazine articles. One day, while dining in a café, she is approached by a stranger who wants a date with her. She refuses him – for several days straight – before finally relenting. She discovers that he is a bank manager named Fernando, and that he had seen her from across a plaza a year earlier, without knowing who she was. When he saw her again, after all that time, he decided it was fate. Marlena is intrigued, but she has to fly home to St. Louis. Back to real life.

Eighteen days after they meet, Fernando comes to America to visit Marlena. By the end of his visit, they have decided that she will move to Italy and marry him.

This is the stuff of fairy tales, and Marlena, who is no young, dewy-eyed girl (she has grown children of her own) knows it. Of their first meeting, she writes:

Why can’t Destiny announce itself, be a twelve-headed ass, wear purple trousers, a name tag, even? All I know is that I don’t fall in love, neither at first sight nor at half-sight, neither easily nor over time. My heart is rusty from the old pinions that hold it shut. That’s what I believe about myself.

Once she moves to Italy, the book floats from one beautiful scene to another. Marlena visits the butchers and bakers and fishmongers of Venice, and cooks for Fernando (the recipes for some of the dishes she writes about are given at the end of the book); her descriptions of ingredients and meals are delectable. She throws herself into renovating and decorating their apartment in that old and mysterious floating city. She and Fernando come to learn each other, and trust each other, in fits and starts.

It’s an unusual love story, and Marlena’s writing is poetic and dramatic – she is dramatic, a woman who pins up her long, dark curls with enormous flowers, a woman who paints her dining room walls a bright, lipstick-red. The book’s chapters bear these kinds of titles: “Why Shouldn’t I Go to Live on the Fringes of an Adriatic Lagoon with a Blueberry-Eyed Stranger?” and “If I Could Give Venice to You for a Single Hour, It Would Be This Hour” and “Have You Understood that These Are the Earth’s Most Beautiful Tomatoes?”

Who on earth wouldn’t want to read chapters with titles like that?

This is one of those books that I wish I had time to re-read. Maybe someday.