3 comments about Tundra Teacher: A Memoir.

1. As a fellow teacher, I very much enjoyed "Tundra Teacher." John Foley is a great story teller and has the courage to give voice to what every teacher eventually feels confronted by: self-doubt, frustration and heart-breaking reality. What I like about this book is Foley's ability to lace humor and insight into his difficult teaching situations. Thanks much for this book.



2. Finally! A real book by a real teacher who speaks like a real person. After reading about Foley's humorous exploits, I will never complain about my difficult classrooms again. Thanks for putting it all into perspective for me.



3. As a writer, Foley has a great voice and puts it to fine use telling tales of his twenty-something to thirtysomething years. Great fun to read for those of use who never had the nerve to actually act on the universal impulse to chuck it all and head off to the frontier.

2 comments about The Night the Wheels Fell Off: More Tales About Family, Growing Up, and Other Goofy Stuff.

1. Ok, I'm in the middle of this book and I'm averaging about 3 to 4 good laughs per page and sometimes more.. The way this guy writes makes you feel like he's sitting across the coffee table, kicked back and telling stories from his childhood, family and life.. He makes you feel like a friend.
   
   
   The stories he tells take me back to MY childhood and make me remember things I didn't know I'd forgotten.. He captures the essence of childhood, because even though the we didn't have the same experiences, there's still a common thread.. I catch myself staring off and remembering... then snap back to the book to discover the next funny event or warm memory.
   
   I think everyone will really enjoy this book. Especially if you were ever a kid. And if you weren't, then you need to read this book and see how it's done. *ha ha ha*
   
   It's just as great as his other book about childhood, life's happenings and good funnies: "Six of One, Half Dozen of Another" .. Good times folks, good times.



2. This book is a collection of anecdotes about the author, his family and friends. They are told in a thoughtful and insightful manner, with large doses of humor thrown into the works. The trials and triumphs, which exist in everyone's life, are treated with love, admiration and humor. These hilarious anecdotes will hit close to home and heart for the reader.

No comments about Newswalker - A Story for Sweeney.

1 comments about Travels With My Royal: A Memoir Of The Writing Life (The Basque Series).

1. Most of Robert Laxalt's books incorporate some kind of personal reminiscence -- whether it's his arrestingly beautiful portraits of life in the Basque Country or his semi-autobiographical trilogy about a Basque-American family in the West -- but "Travels with My Royal" is his only forthright memoir of his childhood and life as a writer. For fifty years an inseparable mechanical friend traveled alongside him -- his portable Royal typewriter. A gift from his mother, he took it all over the world and wrote all of his books and magazine articles on it.

   Born in Alturas, California, in 1923, (a place that became a ghost town not long after), Laxalt was raised in Carson City, Nevada, the second son in a family of immigrant French Basques. His father, Dominique, was a former livestock baron (a "baron of sorts") who saw his flock of over 60,000 sheep and cattle wiped out by a ranch crash and a freeze in the early 1920s. Consequently, he had to go back into the hills and build up his fortune again, slowly, living the hard life of a sheepherder, separated most of the year from his family. Economic woes marked Laxalt's childhood. He mentions how ashamed he was that his mother, who ran an otherwise respectable Basque boardinghouse, sold whiskey on the sly during Prohibition. At school he was often taunted for being the son of a bootlegger.

   Yet the family eventually got on its feet again, and after spending a year in the Belgian Congo during World War II, Laxalt graduated from the University of Nevada and began to forge a successful career in journalism. His first book, "Sweet Promised Land" (1957), recounts his father Dominique's return to his birthplace in the Basque Country, St. Jean Pied-de-Port up in the French Pyrenees, fifty years after he left it, and the emotional recognition that his real home was not there, but in the hills of western Nevada. In print for over forty years, "Sweet Promised Land" was Laxalt's most resounding success, even though he confesses in "Travels with My Royal" that it was torture to write.

   Laxalt wrote 16 more books (fiction and non-fiction) before his death earlier this year, and was a regular contributor to National Geographic (he discusses his long love-hate relationship with that magazine in this book). He also taught at the University of Nevada, was the director of its press, and helped found the Basque Studies Program there. Anyone interested in the Basques will soon learn that Laxalt has done more than probably any other writer to help us understand their world.

   If you're not already familiar with Laxalt's books, read a few first. Here he talks about how works like "Sweet Promised Land" and "In a Hundred Graves" came about, and if you haven't read them, some of it will go over your head.

2 comments about One Man's America.

1. Insightful, impeccably written autobiography that reveals the man -- the major events, and the people who shaped those events, as chronicled in Time Magazine ... of which Grunwald was editor-in-chief.



2. Yesyesyes. I have lived through post war America and Grunwald has recalled and revisited the troubling events since 1945. If I hadn't lived through it, it would be even more important to have read this book. I have been gripped by it for days and I am richer and wiser for having read it.

4 comments about Telling.

1. I picked up "telling" only yesterday from Barnes n nobles bargin stacks. (I was only searching non-fiction in my quest to learn more about the history of why). Even though I am already operating on sleep deprivation from my one year old and working all night and day lifestyle I could not put "telling" down (a RARE RARE, so RARE i can't even remember when I plowed through a book with such joy and amazement). I'm endlessly searching for those voices of comradioure (sp?), and have sifted through zillions of books looking for it, for that voice that speaks as if it were my own. Marion winik is this voice, but she's not, she appears to be 'just like me', but it's really just the seductiveness of her writing style, the ease at which she tells it, the way she's managed to take all of the hopeless fiascos we make of our lives and laugh them into o.k. now-ness. There is tradgedy, which she doesn't hide from, and small bits of philosophizing, but most of all its just a back and forth journey through the times of her life (which is so similar to our lives-from the fat and awkward childhood, to the artsy drug-rebelling adolescent, to the station-wagon driving mom in a condominium with a microwave). The real stuff is here, the events of life, unfolding through the ages, just like us. Even though my father is still alive, I'm not jewish and i've never been to new orleans, I'm still just like Marion Winik.



2. I picked up "telling" only yesterday from Barnes n nobles bargin stacks. (I was only searching non-fiction in my quest to learn more about the history of why). Even though I am already operating on sleep deprivation from my one year old and working all night and day lifestyle I could not put "telling" down (a RARE RARE, so RARE i can't even remember when I plowed through a book with such joy and amazement). I'm endlessly searching for those voices of comradioure (sp?), and have sifted through zillions of books looking for it, for that voice that speaks as if it were my own. Marion winik is this voice, but she's not, she appears to be 'just like me', but it's really just the seductiveness of her writing style, the ease at which she tells it, the way she's managed to take all of the hopeless fiascos we make of our lives and laugh them into o.k. now-ness. There is tradgedy, which she doesn't hide from, and small bits of philosophizing, but most of all its just a back and forth journey through the times of her life (which is so similar to our lives-from the fat and awkward childhood, to the artsy drug-rebelling adolescent, to the station-wagon driving mom in a condominium with a microwave). The real stuff is here, the events of life, unfolding through the ages, just like us. Even though my father is still alive, I'm not jewish and i've never been to new orleans, I'm still just like Marion Winik.



3. This book could have been written by Irma Bombeck . . . except that Irma Bomback would never have written about having an abortion, shooting heroin, or oral sex in the front seat of a car. Essentially, Winik writes about what happens when the generation who never trusted anyone over thirty now finds itself trapped at forty-something. Her reflections and insights are remarkable for their transparancy. Winik neither takes us on a nostalgic romp through "Gee, wasn't it great back then!", nor does she moralize from hindsight with "Here's what I did; here's what I learned; maybe you can benefit from my experience." Instead she just describes what is: what it's like to be forty-something and come to grips with one's history. I laughed, I cried, and I couldn't put the book down.



4. Marion Winik is one of the best authors I personally have ever read. I've read (consumed might be a better word..lol) all of her books now and each one only furthers my belief in her writing. She even took the time to personally answer a letter I had written her, which only made me like her more. She's a great author and I will continue to read her works over and over again..

1 comments about Lincoln Steffens: A Biography.

1. This is a great biography of the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens who exposed a number of corrupt practices by politicians in many of the large cities in America around the turn of the twentieth-century. Born in San Francisco and educated at the University of California and in Europe, he settled in NYC and began writing for the New York papers. In 1901 he joined McClure's Magazine and with other social critics working there (Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker) began writing about political corruption in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and other large cities. The articles were a tremendous success and were later brought out in book form, entitled THE SHAME OF THE CITIES. Theodore Roosevelt was impressed by the work of these journalists (at first, anyway) and tagged them "muckrakers," a reference to certain characters in PILGIM'S PROGRESS. Steffens, as Kaplan makes clear, was not just an exposer of political evils or a moralist, but raised more questions than he answered and made the public aware, through irony and other literary devices, of the paradoxes between public life and private affairs. His chief question, as Kaplan says, was "What are you going to do about it?"
   
   Later, when exposed to the Russian Revolution in 1917, Steffens became an advocate for communist principles. Losing much of his support in America because of his revolutionary beliefs, he spent much of the 1920s in Europe. In 1931 he published his AUTOBIOGRAPHY, which was a huge success, and he spent the next few years until his death in 1936 lecturing across the country. More than anything else, Steffens wanted people to think seriously about society and politics; he never joined the Communist party: "I am not a Communist," he said once. "I merely think that the next order of society will be socialist and that the Communists will bring it in and lead it." He was wrong about that, and not even Kaplan, writing in 1974, could know just how wrong. He's a beautiful writer, though, and makes his subject interesting and important. It's a delightful biography.

2 comments about The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia.

1. A must read for anyone wanting an honest, documented, and exciting story about what it was like being a war correspondent in Vietnam and Cambodia. What is outstanding about Leslie's writing is that he doesn't give in to the journalism game of giving the editors what they want to hear---He tells it like it is, and has a genius for getting his truth through the red-tape. His courage in going to the Viet-Cong for their view of the real reason of the war is absolutely the best exposure yet written about the United States senseless involvement in trying to be a strong-arm for the Saigon elite. Sincerely, Franklin D. Rast, Author-"Don's Nam," and "Ghosts In The Wire."



2. This is a good account of the closing years of the vietnam war, plus insight in cambodia.
   The author does a good job explaining the dynamics of working as a foreign correspondent in a war zone.
   Its funny, irreverent and personal.
   Some of the macro analysis will have readers cheering or jeering. I found it a bit grating.
   All in all a very solid and fun read.

3 comments about No Ordinary Joe: A Life of Joseph Pulitzer III.

1. As you watch the national news it is easy to see how the national organizations have blurred news and entertainment. Any attempt on their part to present all sides of a complex story disappears if they can find a blown up vehicle or an injured person. Politicans have learned that the few second sound byte has to convey the message they want or the message isn't getting on the air at all.
   
   Further, there are only a handfull of newspapers that attempt to provide a full story. During the reign of Joseph Pulitzer III, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was one of that handfull. Politically liberal, the paper prospered during the years that other newspapers were failing, merging or converting to tabloid style.
   
   This biography of Joseph Pulitzer III covers his life, but his life was never far removed from the newspaper. This book presents the story of a man not seen so often. Trained by his father from birth to run the paper he had the problems of employees not liking his style, of friction within the rest of the family, and more. It is a fascinating story, well researched, and well told.



2. No Ordinary Joe: A Life Of Joseph Pulitzer III provides a very fine scholarly biographical survey of the man who created the widely known Pulitzer Prize. Joseph was trained for succession to the Pulitzer media empire and worked hard to maintain his family's paper's liberal philosophy even as competitors began mixing news with entertainment. His many achievements in the newspaper world are detailed alongside interviews with over seventy who knew or worked with him: the result is a study spiced with personal insight and celebrating Pulitzer's impact on the publishing world as a whole.



3. No Ordinary Joe: A Life Of Joseph Pulitzer III provides a very fine scholarly biographical survey of the man who created the widely known Pulitzer Prize. Joseph was trained for succession to the Pulitzer media empire and worked hard to maintain his family's paper's liberal philosophy even as competitors began mixing news with entertainment. His many achievements in the newspaper world are detailed alongside interviews with over seventy who knew or worked with him: the result is a study spiced with personal insight and celebrating Pulitzer's impact on the publishing world as a whole.

2 comments about Amber, a Very Personal Cat and Conversations With Amber.

1. I loved this book from the first page to the very end. It's a perfect book to read to lift your spirits or to escape into a different world. I absolutely reccomend it to everyone who loves cats.



2. and anyone who isn't "owned by a cat", as Taber puts it, will want to be.

   In these two books combined into one volume, Taber writes of her day-to-day relationship with her Abyssinian cat named Amber. Taber has intuitive insights into the workings of the feline mind and through this work clearly shows how important pets can be to our daily lives and welfare. Amber was a fortunate cat indeed to have such an owner, or rather, to own Gladys Taber!

   Reading this book has made me think of writing my own book about my cat, it was so enjoyable to read about her cat.

   I thought of taking one star away due to some of Taber's inaccurate medical advice for cats (i.e. do NOT ever give aspirin to a cat as Taber indicates), but her intentions were good. Just remember while reading this book that for medical advice concerning your cat, see your veterinarian.