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Book Club
The Beanery Bistro Book Club meets once a month. For information call Val at 688-2224.
The Beanery Book Club will meet on Monday, September 25th.
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Calamity Physics
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The Beanery Book Club will meet on Monday, February 26th at 7:00 PM. The book this month is Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Review From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Pessl's stunning debut is an elaborate construction modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course-36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep-that culminates with a final exam. It comes as no surprise, then, that teen narrator Blue Van Meer, the daughter of an itinerant academic, has an impressive vocabulary and a knack for esoteric citation that makes Salinger's Seymour Glass look like a dunce. Following the mysterious death of her butterfly-obsessed mother, Blue and her father, Gareth, embark, in another nod to Nabokov, on a tour of picturesque college towns, never staying anyplace longer than a semester. This doesn't bode well for Blue's social life, but when the Van Meers settle in Stockton, N.C., for the entirety of Blue's senior year, she befriends-sort of-a group of eccentric geniuses (referred to by their classmates as the Bluebloods) and their ringleader, film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that, after absorbing the late-chapter revelations, readers will be tempted to start again at the beginning in order to watch the tiny clues fall into place. Like its intriguing main characters, this novel is many things at once-it's a campy, knowing take on the themes that made The Secret History and Prep such massive bestsellers, a wry sendup of most of the Western canon and, most importantly, a sincere and uniquely twisted look at love, coming of age and identity. (Aug.)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The Big Year
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In one of the wackiest competitions around, every year hundreds of obsessed bird watchers participate in a contest known as the North American Big Year. Hoping to be the one to spot the most species during the course of the year, each birder spends 365 days racing around the continental U.S. and Canada compiling lists of birds, all for the glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the Big Year birding champion of North America. In this entertaining book, Obmascik, a journalist with the Denver Post, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year: a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey who aims to break his previous record and win for a second time; a suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and a 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland. Obmascik bases his story on post-competition interviews but writes so well that it sounds as if he had been there every step of the way. In a freewheeling style that moves around as fast as his subjects, the author follows each of the three birding fanatics as they travel thousands of miles in search of such hard-to-find species as the crested myna, the pink-footed goose and the fork-tailed flycatcher, spending thousands of dollars and braving rain, sleet, snowstorms, swamps, deserts, mosquitoes and garbage dumps in their attempts to outdo each other. By not revealing the outcome until the end of the book, Obmascik keeps the reader guessing in this fun account of a whirlwind pursuit of birding fame.
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Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
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An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons.
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.
ACCREDITATION
Sara Gruen is the author of the bestseller Riding Lessons and Flying Changes. She lives with her husband, her three children, four cats, two dogs, and a horse in an environmental community north of Chicago.
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Everyman by Philip Roth
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Review by JOHN DICKER
There's an adage that says, "dying is easy, comedy is hard." Well, Philip Roth just upended that assertion in a big way. In his latest novel, Everyman, death proves to very hard indeed. "Old age is not a battle," Roth writes. "Old age is a massacre."
Chipper as that sounds, Everyman is vintage Roth: full of passion, anger, and vivid details of lives well lived and profoundly screwed up. Roth's recent work has been devoted to historical epochs, and though he hasn't shied away from mortality issues, Everyman seems to be something of a departure as far as content goes. Yes, the narrative is firmly embedded in his native New Jersey. And yes, his signature storytelling trick of recounting a complicated life through a third person is in full effect. What's different is the focus is on death and dying above all else-history, culture, even the characters. Maybe this is why he doesn't even bother giving his protagonist a name.
Even if we don't know his name, we do know our main character is a career advertising man, one who was married with two sons and a daughter, had an affair, and then divorced. Then he did the same thing all over again, swapping a well-matched wife for a swimsuit model. In retrospect, there's a minimal amount of moral recrimination to all of this; now in his 70s with a daughter who loves him and two sons who curse his name, Roth's protagonist's convalescence is less golden than stark gray.
In one devastating scene, he tries flirting with a buxom, sports-bra clad jogger who, much to his surprise, flirts back. Of course, she doesn't do anything with the phone number he gives her, and the result is a lonely reminder of the gap between his ticking libido and socio-sexual reality.
Everyman doesn't brim with happy fun times. However, fans of serious fiction in general and Roth in particular know to look other forms of satisfaction. And there's no shortage of it here in scenes where loss and grief manifest in ways so specific you're forced to marvel at their rendering instead of their implications. Because doing so is like starting at the sun, or more accurately, gazing at the guest of honor at an open-casket funeral.
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Probable Future
By Susan Kelly, USA TODAY
In 1697 a child with long, black hair wanders out of the winter woods and into the God-fearing town of Unity. She is greeted with suspicion, reluctantly harbored and, while in her teens, is killed by townsfolk who are suspicious of her inability to feel physical pain.
But Rebecca Sparrow - so named because the birds flocked to her - lived long enough to give birth to a daughter. That baby also grew into a young woman with long, black hair and a different unique quality: She needed almost no sleep. And in time, she had a daughter, similarly beautiful and strange.
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The Light House by P.D. James
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The Light House is a subtle and powerful work of contemporary fiction.
Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult time for him and his depleted team. Dalgliesh is uncertain about his future with Emma Lavenham, the woman he loves; Detective Inspector Kate Miskin has her own emotional problems; and the ambitious Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is worried about working under Kate. Hardly has the team begun to unravel the complicated motives of the suspects than there is a second brutal killing, and the whole investigation is jeopardized when Dalgliesh is faced with a danger more insidious and as potentially fatal as murder.
This eagerly awaited successor to the international bestseller The Murder Room displays all the qualities that lovers of P. D. James's novels the world over have come to expect: sensitive characterization, an exciting and superbly structured plot and vivid evocation of place.
About P.D. James
P. D. James is the author of 18 books, most of which have been filmed for television. Before her retirement in 1979, she served in the forensics and criminal justice departments of Great Britain's Home Office, and she has been a magistrate and a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. In 2000 she celebrated her 80th birthday and published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest.
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Sultan's Seal
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A stunningly lyrical debut novel about faith and desire, set within a gripping tale of murder in nineteenth-century Istanbul.
RICH IN SENSUOUS DETAIL, this first novel brilliantly captures the political and social upheavals of the waning Ottoman Empire. The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved. Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the new secular courts, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger. In a lush, mystical voice, a young Muslim woman, Jaanan, recounts her own relationships with one of the dead women and her suspected killer. Were these political murders involving the palace or crimes of personal passion? An absorbing tale that transports the reader to nineteenth-century Turkey, this novel is also a lyrical meditation on the contradictory desires of the human soul.
J . B . WHITE is professor of anthropology at Boston University and the author of numerous nonfiction works on Turkish society and politics. The Sultan's Seal is her first novel
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Saving Fish From Drowning - December
Amy Tan is famous as the author of The Joy Luck Club and other best selling novels that explore the links between mothers and daughters, China and America, past events and present day consequences. Those same themes reemerge in her latest novel, Saving Fish from Drowning (G. P. Putnam's Sons), but the book takes Ms. Tan in new directions as well. Part ghost story, part mystery, and part travel adventure, the novel is set mostly in Burma, the country renamed Myanmar by its government.
Saving Fish from Drowning revolves around the mishaps of a group of American tourists who set out on what is supposed to be an art tour of China and Burma. Halfway through the story, 11 of the Americans are kidnapped by members of the ethnic Burmese tribe known as the Karen, who have fled the persecution of government soldiers and taken refuge in the jungle.
Amy Tan says the book was inspired by her own trip to Burma, where she too was invited to take an art tour. "I was faced with the difficult question of should I go, because it was a country some people say you should boycott because of the illegal military regime that has been there since 1990," she says. "And other people say you should engage in constructive ways of dealing with the country and be a guiding hand to improving the way they treat people. And other people say you should go there purely for the culture and history and art, and get to know the people of the country. And I had to look at those points of view and raise enough questions to ask the reader what is it we do when we see this kind of suffering."
The novel is narrated by the woman who was supposed to be the group's tour guide, a Chinese American art dealer named Bibi Chen. She dies under mysterious circumstances just before the tour begins, but her ghost goes along on the trip anyway, manipulating events with an invisible hand. Amy Tan says her unconventional narrator gave her another chance to write about her mother, who died in 1999, and who has inspired previous characters in her stories. "When I started thinking about what my next book should be, I was rather sad that I wouldn't be writing stories about my mother who had just passed away, but then --I don't know if it was really my mother -- but I heard this voice say, 'Well, I could be the dead narrator,' so I decided I would use her that way. My mother had such a wonderful, feisty way of looking at the world, an eye that included many different beliefs, a notion of fate and self determination, good luck and bad luck, accidents and bad people, and I got to throw all of that into this book and watch it collide, as it did in our lives when I was growing up."
A lot of humor is thrown into that mix as well. Amy Tan's fictitious tourists are well meaning and well-educated people, but their ignorance of local languages and customs leads to a series of blunders and misunderstandings. "I often feel it's hard to go into very dark, depressing areas, with human rights abuses, and keep a reader there," Ms. Tan says, "so my decision was to make this a comic novel, and let people through the portal of laughter open themselves up to experiencing something else, hopefully compassion, for what's going on in Burma."
One of the novel's greatest comic misunderstandings lies in the very reason for the kidnapping. Members of the Karen tribe mistake a teenaged boy in the tour group for their long awaited white religious leader, who will save them from their difficulties. Thrown together in the jungle, the tourists and tribes people watch Survivor style reality shows on satellite television, while engaging in their own real life struggle to survive. At the same time, the Burmese government, international human rights activists and a global media network all manipulate the story of the missing Americans for their own purposes.
Amy Tan says the plot's ironies and absurdities gave her a way to dramatize larger concerns. "In Burma, for example, journalists are not allowed to use the word 'Burma,' for fear they'll be jailed. They can't report on losing soccer scores. And then going into a jungle and meeting a bunch of people who are part of this Karen tribe, and hearing the story related by a grandmother of how she got to be in the jungle -- the story, by the way, is one of 105 people in a village, and I took it from real reports of what happened. There are parts of this book that are unfortunately all too true. And part of the challenge of the story is to get the reader to question what is truth in the world, what you hear and see and read, what of it is really truth, not just factual truth, but how you believe, what you believe, what it's based on -- a personal truth."
Amy Tan drew on both her own trip to Burma and her experiences in China to write the novel. Her narrator, Bibi Chen, notes in the book that tourists might think they're leaving China behind when they enter Burma, but they are mistaken, and Ms. Tan says China has always had a profound influence across geographic boundaries. "And so it is in Burma in my opinion. There is a notion of animism for example, the belief in spirits and nature, and that intersects with religion, and among this tribe, the Karen, the Baptist religion. About 20% of them were converted by missionaries over the years. So here we have something from China intersecting with other influences, and that makes for very interesting sets of beliefs."
Soon after they arrive in Burma, the American tourists in Saving Fish from Drowning wonder how rural people reconcile catching fish with their belief in the sanctity of all living things. Their guide explains that they believe catching fish saves them from drowning. Amy Tan expands on that image in the novel to explore larger questions about personal responsibility and good intentions, and whether those intentions can sometimes do more harm than good.
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The World Is Flat - November 14, 2005
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Please join us in reading Norm Goldman, Editor of Bookpleasures. Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman's latest book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, is no less ambitious than his previous works.
According to Friedman the world is flat and when you think of it in this way, many things make sense in a way they did not before.
To Friedman, the flattening of the world means that all centers of knowledge are connected on the planet and they are coming together in a single network.
Provided politics and terrorism do not hinder this phenomenon, this could lead to an amazing era of prosperity and innovation.
Moreover, according to the author, and if he is right, the flattening of the world will be remembered in the same way and importance as one of the fundamental world changes, as the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the nation-state.
Friedman explores ten innovations, events and trends that he believes flattened the world. These events commenced with the opening of the Berlin Wall and followed by the day Netscape went public, work flow software, open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, insourcing, in-forming and the steroids.
All of these flatteners led to what Friedman terms a triple convergence working together in ways that create a new, flatter, global and level playing field.
Once the playing field became established, both businesses and individuals begin to adopt new habits, skills and new ways of doing business.
If you just look around you and witness what has happened in China, India and the former Soviet Empire, you notice that it is thanks to this new flat world that these countries are now able to compete directly with everyone else.
What is quite noteworthy, as the author points out, that although there has been a dot-com bust, it was ironically precisely this bust that helped India and created to a large extent outsourcing.
This was principally due to the fact that the boom laid the cable that connected India to the world, and the bust created a situation where the cost of using it was virtually free. It also vastly increased the number of American enterprises that would want to use that fiber-optic cable to outsource knowledge work to India.
Moreover, as Friedman mentions, there is a coefficient of flatness, i.e. the fewer natural resources a country or company has, the more it will dig inside itself for innovations in order to survive.
Several examples are presented to back up this premise, such as Toshiba and UPS. I was surprised to learn that when you have a problem with your Toshiba computer, UPS picks it up and instead of sending it to the Toshiba shop for repair, the repair is effectuated on the UPS premises. This cuts down on the time factor, and customers can now have their computer returned the following day after pick-up. Incidentally, all of the repairmen and -women are all certified by Toshiba, and customer complaints are now considerably down.
The remainder of this excellent book deals with Friedman's perceptions pertaining to America and the flat world, insisting on the upgrading of science and engineering education, both essential if we are to avoid a crisis where America falls very much behind. The final chapters tie everything together concerning developing countries, companies and geopolitics in the flat world, looking at these important topics from various angles.
There is little doubt that Friedman has presented his readers with a significant contribution to an understanding of how the world works today and a reminder that the playing field is now level or as he calls it, flat. The final verdict, however, as to how the world will turn out no one knows for sure. I guess we will have to stay tuned.
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Plain Song - October 3, 2005
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The story takes place in the small community of Holt, Colorado, where Guthrie, a high-school teacher, is raising his sons Ike and Bobby alone because their mother needs time to recuperate from mental illness. Victoria, a pregnant teenager whose mother is unwilling to have her in the house, has nowhere to go. Out in the countryside, the elderly McPheron brothers keep on farming, the only world they've ever known.
The main characters of Plainsong span four generations of rural folk. The novel details the problems they face and how they come together to solve them. All the characters struggle, but their caring, kindness, and forgiving spirits help them support one another.
Considered by many to be an American masterwork, Plainsong is one of the best contemporary novels written in the last five years. Readers can learn about non-traditional families, small towns where everyone knows everyone's business, and the power of love.
We are introduced to a world that is atypical for most teenagers. Guthrie is struggling to find balance in a family without a mother figure; his marriage has been difficult for the past few years and there are signs of a divorce. The boys meet Mrs. Steams, a feeble old woman who tries to fill the role of female figure in their lives.
Victoria discovers that the country homestead of the McPherons will be her new home and accepts the idea of living with them. She and the two brothers adjust to one another and form a family unit none has known before.
This novel is breathtaking and unique, due to Haruf's ability to weave together the stories of seven ordinary individuals facing life's challenges. He is able to tie together the many happenings of a small community by bringing these characters to life. Their commitment to caring for each other is inspiring. Not only are characters like Mrs. Steams and the McPherons examples of Good Samaritans, they're role models for all.
Review by Luis U. Hamcen, CT
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The Kite Runner - September 2005
"The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hasseini
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
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