Review of Life in the Left Lane (Paperback)

No typical tourist guide is this. Emy Thomas provides a refreshingly frank account of life in St. Croix. She deals directly with the pleasant the beaches, the people, the pace of life and the sometimes unpleasant hurricanes, and occasional crime.

Emy Thomas has found her own way to enjoy this island paradise. Hers is no superficial experience. She enjoys St. Croix in all its richness. Not for her an imposing mini castle in an expatriate enclave. She goes out of her way to live modestly yet comfortably. She knows some creole, and is deeply involved in local social initiatives. She seems to blend and integrate with the majority West Indian population much better than could be expected of the stereotypical New Yorker.She joins the locals in laughing off the perpetualGovernment inefficiencies, rather thangetting upset. But her journalist background is not entirely forgotten. She still manages to take a few swipes at local politicians.

If you know St. Croix already, you will readily identify with Emy Thomas perspectives and sense of humor. If you ever wondered what a Caribbean retirement would be like - read this before you decide. It will prepare your mind, and most likely will make you want to do it even more.

Product Description
A short and lively non-fiction book about what it?

About the Author
Emy Thomas spent her first thirty-three years following a typical middle-class path, growing up in Connecticut, graduating from prestigious schools in the northeast, and working as a journalist in New York City. Then she discovered the tropics and has embraced the islands and their laid-back lifestyle ever since. For over a dozen years home was a sailboat, when she cruised throughout the Caribbean and Pacific with a typical 'yachtie,' who made wandering a way of life. They visited scores of island paradises. When it was time to leave the boat and settle down the author chose St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands as her permanent home. She built her dream house on a hillside overlooking the Caribbean Sea and finally found her true calling as an author. Her first book, Home Is Where the Boat Is, was published in 1993. Life in the Left Lane is her second book.

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Review of FDR (Paperback)

FDR, by Jean Edward Smith, proves that no highly significant historical figure or event is beyond a great writer's ability to improve a particular body of literature.Indeed FDR is a towering work of both writing and scholarship.Smith again proves he is one of our foremost biographers and captures, in a very evenhanded way, the very essence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, this writing is up there with David Herbert Donald's Lincoln.Both took on truly larger than life topics and did so with energy and vigor.

The footnoting in FDR is highly extensive and the curious reader will look at many of them and make notes to read on additional topics as Smith piques the interest of any with any significant interest in Roosevelt.He, like Lincoln, was the President in a time where it is difficult to imagine, even for his critics, another person assuming the role.Smith explains and documents almost all of FDR's life and gives very plausible reasons for his rather radical views at the time, especially for one with his Hudson River pedigree.He tackles his many physical challenges, his relationship with his peripatetic wife Eleanor (see Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time) , his affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, his intimate relationship with Churchill (see Jon Meacham's Franklin and Winston) and his reliance on a cast of eclectic personal and political operatives over the years. All of his public years are well covered, perhaps even more so his early years in New York politics.

There is very little, if nothing to criticize about this book.One could make an argument that Smith tried too hard to keep it a readable 636 pages with and additional 221 pages of notes and an exhaustive bibliography.Maybe two volumes would have improved this work, but that is sheer conjecture.This book must be read by all with more than a passing interest in 20th Century American history.Simply sublime.



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Review of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream (Hardcover)

I have three children ages 12, 17 and 20.I received this book for Christmas and am fascinated by it and will get copies formy children as well as for some of their friends. A person can choose to be nickle and dimed, or can choose to create a plan and stick to it.Scratch Beginnings is not the Idiot's Guide for Getting out of Homelessness, but it is proof that anybody with determination can do it.

Our church is in downtown Charlotte, NC and we do a lot of work with the homeless. During the winter, we host Room at the Inn twice weekly to handle the overflow from the Men's Shelter. I have spent several nights at church with the homeless group and have always been amazed the majority of the them have full time jobs. They just can't accumulate the nut to get the apartment deposit, utility hookups, etc. The others seem to fall into the groupsdescribed at the Charleston shelter: the addicted and the crazies.

There are no easy answers when it comes to homelessness.I have seen some great success stories and some horrible failures including a dead man on a doorstep. I want my children to read your book for two reasons: 1) to know thatthey have no excuses for not making it in this life asthey have had every advantage and a safety net the size of the oceans, and 2) they need to understand the roots of homelessness and what it takes to rise above it.The closest thing I have read to this book is "Finding Fish," which is more a story of redemption and the importance of family.

I help teach the AP econ class at a local high school and am going to talk to the teachers about getting the book added to the curriculum.Many of these kids have no clue when it comes to budgeting, goal setting and delayed gratification.Scratch Beginnings is an important lesson. It should be required reading for every high school student.

Oh, and as far as the "questionable language of the streets" goes, my 12 year old daughter hears worse on the school bus each day. While possibly offensive, it is realistic.


Product Description

Adam Shepard graduated from college in the summer of 2006 feeling disillusioned by the apathy he saw around him and incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous works Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch-books that gave him a feeling of hopelessness over the state of the working class in America. Eager to see if he could make something out of nothing, he set out to prove wrong Ehrenreich's theory that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom, and to see if the American Dream can still be a reality.

Shepard's plan was simple. Carrying only a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using previous contacts or relying on his college education, he set out for a randomly selected city with one objective: work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.

But from the start, things didn't go as smoothly as Shepard had planned. Working his way up from a Charleston, South Carolina homeless shelter proved to be more difficult than he anticipated, with pressure to take low-paying, exploitive jobs from labor companies, and a job market that didn't respond with enthusiasm to homeless applicants. Shepard even began donating plasma to make fast cash. To his surprise, he found himself depending most on fellow shelter residents for inspiration and advice.

Earnest, passionate, and hard to put down, Scratch Beginnings is a story that will not only inspire readers, but will also remind them that success can come to anyone who is willing to work hard-and that America is still one of the most hopeful and inspiring countries in the world.

About the Author

Adam Shepard is a 2006 graduate of Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he majored in Business Management and Spanish. Serving as a Resident Advisor during his upperclassmen years, he began to take particular interest in social issues. Scratch Beginnings is Shepard's first book. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his mom.

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Review of The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (Hardcover)

[A Vine Review - Thanks, Amazon!]

Nathan Rabin may be a first-time author, but I know him well from reading his A.V. Club articles and the enormous discussion threads they spawn. His discursive, caustic, and quite funny writing style has a gift for transforming a long and pointless afternoon into something longer and just as pointless, only far more entertaining.

As a critic of today, Rabin's the kind of guy who can break anything down into popular entertainment references, so it almost makes sense that when he decided to tell the story of his life, he organized it into chapters referencing famous books, records, and films.

His stay as a boy in a mental institution? He's reminded of the book "Girl, Interrupted" - and careful to point out, not the later film adaptation.

Various relationships with girls are prompted with chapters spotlighting Rabin's takes on Rod Stewart and Jean-Luc Godard. Living in a hippie co-op in Madison, Wisconsin prompts a reference to "Freaks", the Tod Browning cult film. "My fellow co-opers were the stuff of Lou Reed songs," he explains.

Movies became for Rabin a channel of expression and a shelter from the storm: "Movies afforded the rewards of human interaction with none of the terrifying hazards of actual human contact," he writes. Real life has teeth, and Rabin often felt its bite.

I've seen this done before with songs alone, which do lend themselves to this kind of subjective treatment. Movies don't, and Rabin struggles to find the same connecting strands that come more easily from a song like "Maggie May". When Rabin uses "Apocalypse Now" as a basis for comparing a mildly domineering authority figure in Rabin's life to the terrifyingly unhinged Col. Kurtz from the film, it's a sign he's really pushing for significance.

More problematically, not every episode he writes about is as interesting to us as it is to him. There's three chapters alone on Rabin's brief, unsuccessful attempt at being a movie critic on TV, something he writes about with the minute, gory precision of the Starr Report.

When something does click, though, it often clicks hard, like his meeting the woman who gave birth to him, then left him alone for 20 years. When he meets her again, he finds her utterly unconcerned about the emotional damage she has left, and nutty enough for Rabin to realize he's grateful to have escaped her notice.

"Every Mother's Day I'm struck with an urge to send Biological Mother a card but I've yet to find one with a message like 'To a Mother Who's Disappointed Me in Every Conceivable Way.'"

"The Big Rewind" is hardly a disappointment of that order. It's structurally deficient, yes, but otherwise often engaging enough to read through quickly and wonder, if this was another A.V. Club posting, what the discussion thread would look like.



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Review of Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Hardcover)

I have studied B and C for more than 25 years and this book is hands down the best on the subject. Engagingly written, well-researched, and chock full of surprises for anyone who thinks they know the real story of these two Texas misfits.



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Review of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression (Paperback)

This is an entrancing memoir of days now long gone, but vivid in the minds of those who lived them.While I lived on an Iowa farm in western Iowa rather than eastern Iowa, and was a boy, and was about six years younger than the author, this book recalled so much of what it was like that reading it was sn unmitigated delight.The author recognizes "the all-too-human tendency to gloss over the bad and glorify, or at least magnify, the good" when recalling one's childhood, but it sure makes greater reading to read of one's appreciated childhood than it does to read of one who looks back thereon in bitterness.Thus this book beats, e.g., Angela's Ashes by a mile in enjoyable reading.



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Review of What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Alice Eve Cohen draws on her skills as a one-woman show performer and storyteller to write a harrowing, moving, searingly honest memoir about the chaos that took over her settled life at age 44 when, after experiencing health problems and told she was menopausal and infertile, she discovered that she was actually six months pregnant.

I do not want to reveal too much about what happens next, because a reader should experience the story unfolding page by page, as Alice is told new "certainties" that are dashed again and again."What I Thought I Knew" is the perfect title for this memoir, and Alice writes out ever-evolving lists of her own feelings, what her doctors have told her about her condition, and her baby's prognosis.

Nothing goes as planned, and Alice suffers ambivalence, guilt, and crippling depression.As a memoirist, Cohen shares her feelings with spare, unadorned honesty.Can she survive this experience?Can she be a mother to this child?What makes a mother?A good mother?She explores these questions directly, in simple, often poetic prose.

I am not usually a huge fan of memoir and what is being called "confessional journalism," but Cohen breaks through any reservations I have about personal narrative.Once I started, I didn't want to put the book down, so I read it in one evening.What differentiates Cohen's writing for me is that she does not use distancing techniques of irony or snark. She is incredibly straightforward and pulls us into her experience, sharing her most intimate experiences in a way that illuminates the choice to enter motherhood, along with family dynamics, depression, the fallibility of the medical system, the value of community and professional support, and ultimately, the mystery of grace.

Product Description
A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possible

At age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiancé that she's never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin.

In her unflinchingly honest and ruefully witty voice, Alice nimbly carries us through her metamorphosis from a woman who has come to terms with infertility to one who struggles to love a heartbeat found in her womb - six months into a high-risk pregnancy.

What I Thought I Knew is a page-turner filled with vivid characters, humor, and many surprises and twists of fate. With the suspense of a thriller and the intimacy of a diary, Cohen describes her unexpected journey through doubt, a broken medical system, and the hotly contested terrain of motherhood and family in today's society. Timely and compelling, What I Thought I Knew will capture readers of memoirs such as Eat, Pray, Love; The Glass Castle; and A Three Dog Life.

About the Author
Alice Eve Cohen is a playwright, solo theater artist, and memoirist. She has written for Nickelodeon and PBS and received fellowships and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at The New School in New York City.

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Review of Tales from Rhapsody Home: Or, Reporting Live from Our Last Resort (Paperback)

Anyone nearing retirement should consider this a textbook.It's belly-laughing funny, and the warning is clear.

Product Description
When a feisty ninety-two-year-old Mainer took up residence in an assisted-living facility, he found there were at least four things he could do about it: move, die, get over it, or write this book.

For the past forty-two years, Down East Yankee John Gould has written about and been a staunch observer of the human condition. Here, Gould turns his perceptively critical lens toward lives as they are lived in an assisted-living facility. Five years ago, even though growing old still felt like an afterthought, Gould and his wife needed to move to an assisted-living community, henceforth known as "Rhapsody Home." Captivatingly charming, sarcastic, despairing, flip, taciturn, erudite, and altogether wonderful, Gould-an American original and a perfect narrator-tells the disagreeable truth about the move to Rhapsody Home. From the chef who quit because he couldn't stand the food to the apartment windows that were designed never to open, Gould, with razor sharp wit and a knack for turning a phrase, proves you can write a funny book about this very serious subject.

With a new epilogue, this is a mixture of personal narrative and skillful reportage-a remarkable first-person account of what it's like to live in an assisted-living facility, and a much needed look at the way we provide for our elders.





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Review of Healing from the Heart: A Leading Surgeon Combines Eastern and Western Traditions to Create the Medicine of the Future (Paperback)

What is impressive about this book is the author's concepts of healing both heart and mind as he points out just how closely the two are interconnected.The writing style is one that will grasp the reader's attention from start to finish.The approach to holistic health is a welcome approach to healing. It is a concept that is gradually increasing in the health care field, but one that still has a long way to go before it is universally accepted by all physicians.More education and information needs to be provided in this area to all health care providers. Using the holistic approach,there can be fewer side effects from medication, less depression and a general feeling of well being during the most trying and difficult times.There is much to be said on combining Western and Eastern traditions in the process of healing.Our world can benefit dramatically from this approach and the author vividly explains why throughout the pages of this well-researched and superbly written book.It is highly recommended reading material and most deserving of a five star rating.



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Review of She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana (Hardcover)

Haven Kimmel's latest memoir installment is even better than the first ("A Girl Named Zippy") if that's possible to imagine. "She Got Up Off the Couch" is deeper, more interesting and funnier! Watch how she gradually reveals some of the truths of her young life. This deft unveiling technique works perfectly to paint a more sympathetic picture of her family than if she had merely started out stating some of the "facts" about her early life. Thanks to her perfect pacing, we as readers grow in affection for her mother, father and sister before we know some things that otherwise may have made us judge them harshly. Clearly Zippy does not want us to judge them harshly and her superb talent gives us, and her family, this wonderful gift.

No higher praise can I give than to also note that young Zippy has echoes of Scout Finch throughout the narrative. I hated to reach the last page.

If you haven't read "The Solace of Leaving Early", Haven Kimmel's first novel, you will want to do so now. It's has one of the most deliciously irritating protagonists I have ever had the pleasure to meet between the pages of a novel. In fact, I'm going to go re-read it (again) because just writing this makes me recall it's splendor!



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Review of Zoro's Field: My Life In The Appalachian Woods (Hardcover)

Written accounts of solitary wilderness living show up every once in a while, and seem to have become especially popular after the Baby Boomers "discovered" Thoreau in the 1960s.His words still inspire a few folks to chuck their lives of quiet desperation and head for the hills to get away from it all.Some are successful, some are not.Many stay there only a year or two before the most pressing need -- the financial one -- forces them to return to civilization.

That's not the case with Thomas Rain Crowe, who spent four years (1978-1982) living alone in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.Crowe went back to his home state after living in a variety of places, doing a variety of work, communing with a variety of people.When given the opportunity to be the cabin tenant, he made the most of it.He worked hard to be self-sufficient, growing his own food and tending to his home and his tools.Others might have been bored in such a setting, but not him.He was always busy: gardening, fishing, taking care of his beehives, making homebrew, digging his root cellar, taking notes on the experience.And he regained the use of one his most valuable resources, the Southern Mountain speech of his childhood.He was downright satisfied with the situation.

His mentors in this effort were several local men who offered advice from time to time:Zoro Guice appeared in Yoda-like fashion whenever Crowe needed to learn how to perform a certain task.Walt Johnson was the scamp of the neighborhood, but was also an accomplished dowser who could find water every time.From these and other natives Crowe learned how to live close to the land, to live in the time of the seasons.The reader senses that Crowe would be living there still, if civilization hadn't encroached upon the property and changed it forever.That's when he knew he had to leave.

Not just a doer, Crowe is also a viewer -- a writer, a poet, a spiritual man who feels a strong connection to the natural world.His poetry uses simple words and turns of phrase to evoke powerful images.On the other hand, his prose, the narrative of his story, is the work of a learned and literate man.Complex constructs entice the reader to keep on going, to chew on the concepts and experiences offered.It takes time to digest these lines, and it's time well spent.Having witnessed Thomas Rain Crowe read some of this book aloud in person, I have the benefit of having heard the hint of the Smokies in his voice, the love for the place evident in every well-spoken syllable.No matter; it comes through in the typewritten text as well.

So was Thomas Wolfe right or wrong?Can you or can't you go home again?The reader decides.In the meantime, "Zoro's Field" should be placed on a shelf with the works of the old and new naturalists (Thoreau, Burroughs, Leopold, Carson, Eiseley, Bass) to one side, and the "Foxfire" books to the other.A thought-provoking addition to the environmental canon.



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Review of On Desert Trails With Everett Ruess (Paperback)

A chilling voice out of the past from one who loved wilderness so much he vanished without a trace in it.I am hard pressed to come up with a book or person who was able to articulate the beauty around him more than Everett Ruess.In a tragic twist this lover of the purity nature gave and continues to give a painter's perspective in words to the American west despite the mysterious circumstances surrounding his disappearance.He left behind not only the beautiful writings of a master (and at such a young age) but also a mysterious tale of intrigue that leaves people guessing to this very day.Was he a victim of murder or did his love for wilderness drive him into the vast unknown to live out his days in the peaceful tranquility only nature can provide?Buy the book and formulate your own opinions.I highly recommend it.

Product Description
9X12 In, 96 Pp, 45 Black & White < Illustrations < We Are Proud To Introduce This Handsome < Commemorative Edition of On Desert < Trails With Everett Ruess (First < Introduced In Our 60, 000 Copy A Vagabond < For Beauty), Which Was Originally < Published In 1940 and Has Since Become < A Collector's Item. The Poetry, < Letters, and Artwork Contained In This < Book Reveal The Adventurous Young Artist < Who Loved The Arid Wilderness and < Disappeared Into The Desert of Southern < Utah. To The Original Book We Have < Added Many Photographs of Ruess On The < Trail, Along With Others Taken By < Ruess of The Land That So Inspired Him. < A Special Appenidx Tells The Salt Lake < Tribune's Account of Its 1935 < Expedition To Southern Utah In Search of < Everett Ruess.

From the Inside Flap
ContentsEditor's Preface to the Commemorative Edition Foreword by Randall Henderson "Son!" by Stella Knight Ruess "Say That I Kept My Dream" by Hugh Lacy Where Everett Ruess Vanished Poems and Letters by Everett Ruess Poems 1929 Poems 1930 Letters 1931 Letter 1932 Letters and Poems 1933 Letters 1934 What Became of Everett Ruess" by Hugh Lacy Appendix Epilogue by W. L. Rusho Afterword by Gary James Bergera Endnotes Bibliography List of Illustrations



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Review of Gringa Latina: A Woman of Two Worlds (Kodansha Globe) (Paperback)

In Gringa Latina we have a character that his not Peruvian or Hispanicbecause her family comes from Italy, when she leaves Peru and comes to thestates she is a latina because she in not American, and so it goes that sheis never fully at home in either culture or though we get a brilliantportrayal of her youth in the South American continent. Excellent book.



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Review of Nora: An Ordinary Girl from Inchicore (Paperback)

Nora's story is the perfect story for those of us who think we have problems and for those of us who know we do. Either way, it takes us out of ourselves and lets us see that their are problems worse than ours and that there are people who handle them with her spunk and bravery. It's all about attitude and Nora's story shows how far the right attitude can take you. I hope she has more stories in her as I'd like to read them. Thanks Nora, for sharing your story with us.

Product Description
NORA-An Ordinary Girl from Inchicore is a poignant memoir of growing up in Inchicore, Dublin in the 1940's and 50's. With humor and pathos Nora tells of the day-to-day drama in a large Catholic family and the interaction with her nine siblings. She tells of the discipline in an all-girl Catholic school and the kindness and sometimes cruelty of the good nuns.

Nora takes us with her through the streets of her beloved Dublin as she cycles to work or takes the bus into town. We absorb the unique atmosphere-the sights, the smells and the colorful speech of Dubliners.

We go dancing with her in 'The Golden Years' of ballroom dancing and follow her romance with a handsome student from Trinity College.

We hear of the adoption of a baby and the circumstances that led her to immigrate to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Later we join Nora in England where her plans to marry her student prince go awry.

We follow her to Toronto, Canada where she meets and falls in love with her life partner, Frank.

NORA-An Ordinary Girl from Inchicore will delight those who love all things Irish and who believe the Irish are the most fascinating people on earth.

About the Author
Born in Dublin, Nora Szechy was one of ten children. Her daughter's gift of a blank journal with the request to write about her life gave her the impetus (at 72) to recapture her memories.

She lives in Downey, California with her husband Frank. They have three married children and seven grandchildren.

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Review of Red Room Rendezvous (Paperback)

I really loved this book because the writing put me into a city which I had never stepped foot: New Orleans. (And since Hurricane Katrina has wiped out much of NOLA this book can serve as part of its rich history.) The character development is superb; I really cared about each person, from the primary to secondary characters. The detail Ms. Crain gives to her beloved New Orleans paints an eloquent picture for the reader ofthe rich tradition of the French Quarter, the architecture and its unique people. Bill Holcomb, the book's main character, brings vitality into what is normally a depressing subject of the human excesses of addiction and its depressing toll on those whose loved ones -- even friends -- are affected. It's my personal opinion that RRR would make a great miniseries on one of the pay channels to fully explore the depths of each character without holding back the true feelings of those around them due of FCC censorship.

Product Description
Meet William Lafayette Holcomb, erstwhile Southern aristocrat, erudite, witty, storyteller without peer, and more often drunk than sober as he strolls the streets of the Garden District with the author, relating one New Orleansmelodrama after another. Join the author as she lunches at Café Atchafalaya to interview Miss Iler, its eccentric and outspoken proprietor. From the jewel of Buzz Harper s manse to the end-of-the-road Rendezvous Tavern, this is a tour of New Orleans that is not likely to be in any guidebook., and proof, once again, that reality is frequently stranger and more entertaining than fiction.



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