10. The Distant Land of My Father: A Novel of Shanghai

By:  Bo Caldwell
Rated: 5 Stars
Kindle

I rated this book 5 stars for the fact that it made me think so much about the characters and what motivated them.  This would be an excellent book for a group as there is a lot to talk about and it would be interesting to what others thought about the book.

My reaction is that Anna's father Joe is one of the most conflicted, yet charasmatic characters I have read about in a . . . .  well I can't remember when a character made me like him, deeply dislike him and at times felt very sorry for him.   In fact in spite of flashes of intelligence I though he was really rather dumb, self absorbed and certainly clueless and insensitive about how his actions effected the people who loved him.  Still, I had to like him. sigh

Where this book really shone for me was in time and place.  Bo Caldwell did a marvelous job of putting the reader in Shanghi during WW2 and the years leading up to it.  I think she accurately  described the mind set of the international community during those days.

This was not an easy read for me in that my emotions were engaged on  almost every page.  Even when the action was slow I could feel the tension and undercurrents swirling around the characters and the feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop.  I highly recommend this book.

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

For Anna, the narrator of Bo Caldwell's richly lyrical and vivid first novel, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to remain, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He's wrong. He survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family during the Second World War. Anna and her father reconnect late in his life, when she finally has a family of her own, but it is only when she discovers his extensive journals that she is able to fully understand him and the reasons for his absences. With the intensity and appeal of When We Were Orphans, also set in Shanghai at the same time, The Distant Land of My Father tells a moving and unforgettable story about a most unusual father-daughter relationship. 

7. The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Rated 4 1/2 Stars

I read this book in starts and stops since it was definalely put-downable but equally pick-upable. For a very readable peek at the life and times of the people of Britain during the 17th century this is the best I have run across.

Upon his death Samuel Pepys left six, calf-bound volumes filled with his daily diaries, pages recording the quotidian details of great but humble man living in a great time. The diaries are one of the most remarkable personal documents in the English language. Written with seriousness and humor, they are a unique blend of history and memoir, philosophy and broadsheet, gravitas and the light of wit. Samuel Pepys genius is in equal ranks with the British tradition that produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, and Woolf.

8. The Diabolical Baron

By Mary Jo Putney

Rated 4 stars

Although the cover says the name of this book is Dangerous Know, that is just a short story in the back of the book. The main book is The Diabolical Baron and is about Jason Kincaid and Caroline Hanscombe, in fact there are four main characters: Richard Dalton and Caroline's Aunt Jessica come into it as well. Jason chooses Caroline as his bride at random - he literally draws her name out of a bowl - and she accepts him under duress. But she won't accept his invitation to his country estate unless her aunt accompanies her. But Jessica and Jason have met before....

6. The flame trees of Thika : memories of an African childhood

By Edith Huxley

Rated 5 Stars

In 1913, at the age of six, Elspeth Huxley accompanied her parents from England to their recently acquired land in Kenya, "a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie." The land is not nearly what its seller claimed, but Elspeth's parents are undaunted and begin their coffee plantation. Her mother, a resourceful, adventurous woman, "eager always to extract from every moment its last drop of interest or pleasure," keeps an eye on Elspeth's education but also allows her extensive freedom. Through Elspeth Huxley's marvelous gift for description, early twentieth-century Kenya comes alive with all the excitement and naive insight of a child who watches with eyes wide open as coffee trees are planted, buffaloes are skinned, pythons are disemboweled, and cultures collide with all the grace of runaway trains. With a free-wheeling imagination and a dry wit, she describes the interactions of Kikuyus, Masais, Dutch Boers, Brits and Scots, mixing rapid-fire descriptions with philosophical musings. It is a mixture that suits her land of contrasts and unknowns, where vastly different peoples live and work side by side but rarely come together, like an egg beater whose "the two arms whirled independently and never touched, so that perhaps one arm never knew the other was there; yet they were together, turned by the same handle, and the cake was mixed by both."

5. Brothers in battle, best of friends

By Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron
Rated 3 Stars

I think this book was just "a bridge too far" for me. I have pretty much burned out on Easy Company. Still, it was interesting and I read it to the end.


"To single out one or two of [the] Screaming Eagles as the Most Super-Duper Paratrooper or the Best Source for a free beer on VE day would be a fool's errand. But to fail to single out Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron would overlook a grand entertainment and a stirring inspiration. "'Wild Bill' and 'Babe.' Even their names beg the telling of their tale, like great ball players from the 1920s, or legendary lawmen-or outlaws-of the Old West." Book jacket.

4. The Mercy of Thin Air

By Ronlyn Domingue
Rated 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book and so did Shaun. It was a very poignant, well written and the mystery kept me hanging until the very end.

In 1920s New Orleans, Raziela Nolan is in the throes of a magnificent love affair when she dies in a tragic accident. She narrages the story of her lost love, as well as the relationship of the couple whose house she haunts more than 75 years later. The couple's trials compel Razi to slowly unravel the mystery of what happened to her first and only love, and to confront a long hidden secret.

3. A House with Four Rooms

By Rumer Godden
Rated 4 Stars

In her second volume of memoirs, following a A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep , Godden provides a lively, engaging view of postwar literary and publishing trends as a backdrop to her own personal and creative development. In 1945, her marriage over, she returned home to England from India with two children and few possessions; however, with an unwavering commitment to her writing, she embarked on a career which brought international recognition and acclaim for her adult and children's books. She speaks lovingly of those who encouraged her over the years, including her sister Jon, London agent Spencer Curtis Brown, Viking publishing president Ben Huebsch (her "literary father"), and the late James Haynes-Dixon, with whom she enjoyed a sturdy second marriage. She also recounts in colorful detail her collaboration with French director Jean Renoir during the filming of her novel The River in California and on location in India. We part company with her in the late 1970s as she moves to Scotland. Godden's travels and experiences are related with warmth and insight, and she offers an interesting perspective on the major publishing figures of our time.

2. A time to dance, no time to weep

By Rumer Godden
Rated 4 Stars

This autobiography covers the first 40 years of the life of Rumer Godden who was one of the most prolific authors of her time.

Born in India, at the height of British colonial power, she lived there until the 1950s. Her career as a novelist began with "Black Narcissus", which became a bestseller on publication in 1939 - and like many of her novels - was adapted into a film. Her relationship with India, although passionate, was ultimately and perhaps inevitably ambivalent and this ambivalence came to a head in an incident when she and her children were living in Kashmir. A servant tried to poison them and the notoriety surrounding the case forced Godden to leave Kashmir and eventually India itself.

She belongs in that small and exclusive club of women - it includes Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham - who could do pretty well anything they set their minds to: hunting tigers, bewitching men, throwing elegant dinner parties, winning literary fame.

1. Where is the Mango Princess

By Cathy Crimmins
Rated 4 1/2 Stars

This book was recommended by Kathryn, a poster in a group I belong to. It was published in 2001 and the injury that Crimmins described happened several years before that. At the time it was written the struggle's that the author had in order to get decent treatment for her husband was shocking. But since this book was written the war in Iraq has happened in which the causualty totals have exceeded 30,00 and according to the Brain Injury Association of America more than half of them involve a traumatic brain injury.

In this book Crimmins' describes how her husband Alan suffered a traumatic brain injury in a speedboat crash. This book tells the stories of Alan's slow and irregular return to a reasonably normal existence; of the changing relationships involved, especially that of Cathy and the Crimmins' daughter, Kelly; and of how an HMO impeded a patient's treatment and recovery by misguided attempts at cost cutting.

Both Crimmins' and her husband, both of whom were highly educated, successful professional people (both had a Ph.d,) were more mature than most people and were better equiped to navigate the massive red tape and negotiate with an HMO that was determined to provide as little care as they could legally get away with.

Imagine your average young soldier with such an injury, probably in his early twenties who joined up right out of high school to get money for college trying to deal with an underfunded, understaffed and overwhelmed Veterans care system to get the services needed.

Try to imagine also the families of these service men and women who are trying to cope with a family member who has been forever altered both physically and mentally and who suffers from results of their injury that include at best:

http://www.traumaticbraininjury.com/content/symptoms/mildtbisymptoms.html

And in the more serious cases:

http://www.traumaticbraininjury.com/content/symptoms/severetbisymptoms.html

This is one of those books that while I am glad I read it but I probably would have been happier if I hadn't.