Teaser Tuesdays: Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano

Posted on February 21, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Gustavo Arellano is the author of the nationally syndicated column, ¡Ask a Mexican! of which I am a casual fan. That was enough for me to know I wanted to read this book – that, and I looove Mexican food. This book appears to be slightly more serious and literary. Check out the literary reference in this teaser from page two – the first of many – about astronauts making burritos in space:

…the brownish, glistening mass popped out of the bag, away from the tortilla below it, and would’ve presumably continued on an endless trajectory if the fast-thinking Olivas didn’t snatch the sausage with the tortilla. The salsa acted as a binding agent and secured the incipient Icarus.

What fun! You won’t see my review til closer to the publication date of April 10, but I promise you’ll see it then.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Papa: A Personal Memoir by Gregory H. Hemingway

Posted on February 18, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Gregory Hemingway, known as Mr. Gig or Gigi to his family, was Ernest Hemingway’s youngest of three sons; his mother was Pauline, Papa’s second wife. This is his memoir of his father, and it begins and ends with Papa’s suicide, and the ways in which that trauma shaped Gigi’s life. It is a short but monumentally touching and surprisingly well-written book; I think it is the most moving biography of Papa (who, presumably, you know I adore) that I have read. While Gigi does relate several of his father’s uglier moments, including crimes against his son, he emphasizes Papa’s humanity and good qualities. The story told here seems to be of a fundamentally good man who got sicker and sicker at the end – though I think he always struggled with mental illness, from being cross-dressed as a toddler through pursuit of success, fame, and the fading of his talent – and fell apart. There are other perspectives out there; many biographers and commentators see Hemingway as a monster, and I accept that that is one perspective, and has evidence to back it up. But I’m always drawn to the outlook that he deserves our pity for the illness he struggled with that finally killed him; and that is more what we get here.

Gigi tells heartwarming stories, and some bad ones (like Papa blaming Gigi for Pauline’s death). He shows what good advice Papa gave; he was a good teacher. He addresses some of the myths surrounding his larger-than-life father, even though he is often unable to refute or confirm them because he was so small (or living with his mother). And it’s all so beautifully done! Who knew Gigi was a bit of a writer, himself? (Make note of the tale of his plagiarized short story, back when he still hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps.)

To me, one of the most poignant things about this slim memoir is our present knowledge of where Gigi went from here. At the time the book was written, he was a practicing physician and still married to Valerie (whose own memoir of Papa I have on my shelf waiting for me). He would later divorce Valerie (after some 20 years of marriage) and go on to two more marriages; become a cross-dresser and take steps toward a sex change; lose his medical license; battle alcoholism; and finally die in a women’s jail in Miami. In his book, there is a general tone of “look at me, I’ve come this far” – not bragging so much as in relief to have resisted the darkness for this long. He seems to have a positive attitude. But there is also quiet acknowledgement, here and there, of the sinister element within himself that he has worked to resist. This same subtle awareness of the darkness inside is present in Papa’s work beginning at a young age, and the youngest son Andrew in Islands in the Stream, clearly modeled on Gregory, has a “badness” in him as well. The descriptive passage about Andrew, in fact, is quoted at the beginning of this book, before Norman Mailer’s (excellent) introduction, implying that Andrew’s darkness as well as Papa’s and Gigi’s is acknowledged by all the parties.

This book was like a gift to me from yet another tragic Hemingway man. It gave me lovely, appealing moments with Papa, as well as those ugly moments in which he could be so vicious. It was beautifully written. I loved getting to know Gigi better; he struck me as a very likeable, sympathetic man. But it was also sad, as reading about the Hemingways always is.

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Teaser Tuesdays: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams

Posted on February 14, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!


When I was sent this book by Shelf Awareness for review, I knew the name Terry Tempest Williams, but couldn’t place it. I had a good feeling, though. I looked up her previous works and found the one I’d read: Pieces of White Shell, which I read at least several times as a kid (middle school, ish?) and enjoyed. Now I have a good feeling, even more. My review won’t post for a while (closer to the publication date of April 10), but for now, enjoy this teaser.

I will never know her story. I will never know what she was trying to tell me by telling me nothing.

But I can imagine. This act of creativity is my joy and protection.

And isn’t this the beautiful truth of love and power?

In a word, this book is a series of musings on voice, inspired by the shelves of copious journals left to to Williams by her mother – all empty.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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On Paris by Ernest Hemingway

Posted on February 11, 2012 by pagesofjulia

On Paris is a collection of Hemingway’s dispatches for The Toronto Star from Paris when he was a young man, living with his first wife Hadley and hoping to become a successful novelist one day. It is brief, almost just a pamphlet at 70 pages; a person could easily sit down and read it in one setting (as I did, with a nap in the middle, with a puppy in my lap and rain on the roof, ah). The articles, intended for newspaper readers, are very short. Sometimes they are fairly well anchored in “news” but more often they are humorous musings on culture – the French versus the American or Canadian – including food & drink, legal niceties, Parisian manners, the nightlife scenes in various cities around the globe compared, even ladies’ hats. Unlike what I think of as “serious” newspaper reporting today, there is a tongue-in-cheek tone in almost every article. Rarely does he play it straight, which makes this book so fun.

I began to list the funniest highlights, but that is clearly a waste of my time. These are all funny short pieces and perhaps most importantly, I was pleased to note that Hemingway’s “voice” is present even in these early examples of his writing. He is droll. He pens deceptively simple one-liners with deadpan delivery; there is a one-count pause for his audience to get the joke. He makes observations that are incisive and sometimes frivolous. While not his mature work, and not fiction for which he is best known, I found this a very enjoyable little nibble of Hemingway, and I recommend it.

My parents brought me this book as a gift from Paris, as a contribution to the shrine that I was then completing. I can’t remember, but I think they got it at Shakespeare & Co.; I know they went there; Mom, can you confirm or deny? And of course there are other Hemingway “On” books: Hemingway On Writing, On War, On Fishing, On Hunting… but I still have By-Line: Ernest Hemingway too, to serve my need for excerpts of his journalism.

Have you read any Hemingway and what do you think of him?

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The Journey Home by Edward Abbey

Posted on February 9, 2012 by pagesofjulia

This is why we read Ed Abbey. He has the power to make me laugh and cry within a few pages.

I cannot describe The Journey Home better than Abbey does himself: this book is a collection of “adversary essays and assays, polemics, visions and hallucinations… published piece by piece in various odd places from Audubon to the Vulgarian Digest” and “fragments of autobiography, journalistic battle debris, nightmares and daydreams, bits and butts of outdoors philosophizing” (from Abbey’s introduction). The subtitle is “Some Words in Defense of the American West.” It works very well in the ways he describes: it is indeed a defense of the American West (although as he puts it another way: “the idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders”). It is a lovely collection of some journalism, some hallucinations and dreamings, and some eloquent essays.

The introduction to The Journey Home is devoted to arguing why he is not a nature writer; he’s just a guy with a lot of experience in and love for nature, writing a memoir that naturally includes a lot of nature. I hope he would forgive me, were he still here, for saying: Abbey, you are a nature writer. Memoirs they may be (and watch out for his novels, too: I loved Fire on the Mountain; was disappointed by Black Sun which apparently he really loved; and am excited to crack open his best-known and arguably movement-starting The Monkey-Wrench Gang) but they are also some of the finest nature writing we’ve seen. His own arguments notwithstanding, Abbey absolutely belongs in the company of Thoreau and Muir. I recognize so much of what I, and modern authors and political thinkers and philosophers I admire, have thought and felt and written, in Abbey’s earlier work. He is important.

He is also so angry! He can be so funny, so flippant and casual (Husband and I both laughed til we cried over “Disorder and Early Sorrow”), but so angry, too. Rightfully so, of course, in detailing strip-mining operations and the destruction of the woods he played in as a kid. He is a contradiction; he reminds me very much of a much-loved friend who will recognize himself in this review. He throws beer cans out the window as he drives:

Rumbling along in my 1962 Dodge D-100, the last good truck Dodge ever made, I tossed my empty out the window and popped the top from another can of Schlitz. Littering the public highway? Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly. Beer cans are beautiful, and someday, when recycling becomes a serious enterprise, the government can put one million kids to work each summer picking up the cans I and others have thoughtfully stored along the roadways.

(from “The Second Rape of the West,” which deals not with beer cans on highways but strip-mining for coal, among other large-scale littering operations.)

…but is at the same time an ardent defender of wildness and nature, left alone. He advises a leave-no-trace approach to wilderness, packing out trash, dismantling fire rings, because after all, “the search and rescue team may be looking for you.” (That’s the wilderness, as opposed to the public highway.) He’s so incredibly (sadly) relevant today, only dated in some of the little details. He is poignantly hopeful; I regret the ways in which we’ve not lived up to his hopes in the few decades since he wrote. For example, our US Census in 2000 unfortunately showed our national population at 281,421,906 rather than the 250 million at which Abbey predicted we would “level off,” and we are now estimated at not quite 313 million.

Funny, angry, righteous, well-researched, poignant. A priceless glimpse into a fascinating, contradictory personality, and a moment in American time that will never be replicated. I want nothing more, after reading this book, than to go on one of his ill-conceived and poorly-planned backcountry trips with him. He makes me think – he makes me think in ways that we all desperately need to think, even more so today than when he wrote (original pub date 1977). I challenge you to read of his attempt to shake hands with a mountain lion (in “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom”) and not get goosebumps.

In the end, this is a collection of essays and ramblings by a gifted author who loved our natural world, about small things as well as the big issues, like why we shouldn’t destroy what little of it we have left. I found it incredibly moving (again: I laughed and cried) and beautiful and can’t wait to read more Abbey. I only hope he’s right that

If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself – not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

I’m afraid we’re going to push the point.

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hemingWay of the Day: on Clemenceau

Posted on February 8, 2012 by pagesofjulia

There is nothing deader than a dead tiger and Georges Clemenceau was a very great tiger. Therefore Georges Clemenceau is very dead.

from “Clemenceau Politically Dead,” The Toronto Daily Star, 18th February 1922

I found this one in On Paris, a brief collection of Hemingway’s early journalism from the time when he lived in the City of Light. I’m struck by his simple, yet funny, wording, which makes a point about Clemenceau’s special brand of deadness in an interesting way, that may take a moment to sink it. I find it very typical of Hemingway, and I love (about this, and about all of On Paris) that his distinctive voice was present, if unpolished, very early on.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Mountains of Light by R. Mark Liebenow

Posted on February 7, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite is a lovely contemplative book, both reminiscent of and different from my 2011 favorite, Fire Season. My review will come closer to the book’s publication date of March 1, but here’s a teaser for you now.

I lower my expectations for how glorious this dawn will be, wanting to regard whatever happens as a grace. To borrow a Japanese Buddhist image, I must empty my begging bowl in order to receive not what I think I need but what is being offered, and to regard whatever comes as oryoki–just enough.

Isn’t that a lovely image and concept? And it gives a glimpse into the tone of the book.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings

Posted on February 6, 2012 by pagesofjulia


Max Hastings is a highly regarded war historian (primarily WWII) and author of a great many books examining his subject from various angles (most recently Winston’s War). His latest, Inferno, covers WWII through the lens of “regular people” as primary sources. In his introduction, he explains that his book does not seek to be a comprehensive study of WWII in all its events, bringing a reader from zero knowledge up to expert level; rather, it assumes some familiarity with the war and concentrates on people: “This is a book chiefly about human experience.”

Hastings did what he set out to do: he exposed the human experience of WWII, in all its horror and almost incomprehensible suffering and death, in its follies and incompetencies and cruelties and in its rare moments of black humor. The brief quotations from regular folks from dozens of countries are moving, illustrative, and diverse, both in viewpoint and in origin. They offer a valuable telling of the war, and serve as a great history lesson/review too.

This is a high-quality book; it has a lot to offer. At almost 700 pages, the reader’s motivation will have to be fairly high to invest the time and effort required to reap the full benefits. But for the interested reader, a treasure trove of honest contemporary accounts of this remarkable tragedy of history awaits.

This review was written for Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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book beginnings on Friday: River in Ruin by Ray A. March

Posted on February 3, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Katy at A Few More Pages for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

This is the story of the Carmel River, a tiny river but apparently one that serves as a sadly typical example of what we’re doing to our rivers on a large scale. It begins:

On a summer evening between semesters at college, my friends and I gathered at Undertow Beach near the lagoon where the Carmel River enters Carmel Bay. The evening was nippy, a high fog hovered overhead, so in a tight protected valley of sand carved out long ago by an old cable-driven dredge we built a little campfire of driftwood and drank rank red wine.

Nature writers, take note: this is a great beginning. While the rest of the book promises to be well-researched nonfiction, it begins with a narrative that grounds the story and gives it significance. The author grew up in the area and remembers earlier incarnations of the river, thus showing his reader why she should care. Good stuff. Look for my review to come…

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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My Life as Laura by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Posted on January 30, 2012 by pagesofjulia

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson grew up in the belief that she was Laura Ingalls’s long-lost twin, or perhaps her reincarnation; she was bored and frustrated by her suburban upbringing and longed for the simplicity, beauty, and utility of the world of the Little House books. After earning an English degree and attempting to be a rock-n-roll star, she ended up waiting tables… for decades. At thirty-eight, unhappy with work and her love life and feeling like a failure, she sets out to follow in her hero’s wagon tracks across the United States, visiting the sites of the various Ingalls homes as represented in the books. My Life as Laura is the story of Ferguson’s travels, and her reflections on her own life and what lessons she can learn from Laura.

She dons a “prairie dress” (which mostly makes her miserable, but occasionally helps her get into the spirit of things) and drives her Camry west. Laura’s home sites sometimes feature the preserved original structure, sometimes a replica or a monument to the location; sometimes tours are available; but they seem to always feature a gift shop. Ferguson’s most adventurous moments involve interacting with hotel and gift shop staff while wearing her period costume; but these conversations are generally perfunctory. She spaces out during tours, but reads a few books purchased in the gift shops and learns more about the object of her admiration – like the disturbing news that there is some question as to Laura’s authorship of the books, and the level of her daughter Rose’s involvement. Ferguson discovers that, while she’s a first-class expert on Laura the character of the books, she really didn’t know Laura the (arguable) author of the books very well.

Nothing much happens in this book. If you’re looking for adventure, experience, the trying of new things (or any attempt to live the Ingalls’ nineteenth century lifestyle), look elsewhere. Rather, what action there is is inward-looking, as Ferguson contemplates and picks apart her own past through the lens of Laura’s experiences. At the end she has made some personal growth and undertaken to write a book (ta-da!). The changes she makes to her life are modest, but she’s honest about what she’s able to take on.

This book has its strengths, humility and honesty being chief among them. But I was disappointed with the action component, and had expected more brave and outgoing feats than registering for a hotel room in an odd dress and subsisting on junk food. It didn’t feel like Ferguson’s boundaries were expanded much, even in a cross-country solo road trip. Perhaps the greatest downfall of the book was Ferguson’s success in convincing me of her own weakness and tendency towards failure. I feel badly writing that, but it was my reaction; I don’t mean to be unkind, but she had me talked into the thesis of her underachievement. Also, I have to note her repeated reference to the Amish driving around in their minivans. In nonfiction especially, that kind of sloppy error really stands out to me. [The Amish don’t drive cars.]

In conclusion, this book has a mild feel-good effect, and there are certainly some positive reviews out there. Ferguson is always brutally honest about her own weaknesses, and I respect her for it. But its lack of action and growth, and a few sloppy details, left me decidedly lukewarm.

I received a copy of this book from the author and I’m only sorry I didn’t have a more positive reaction to it.

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