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Patti Smith’s bestselling memoir, Just Kids, is a love story, but one directed more at art itself than at Robert Mapplethorpe, whose life is intertwined with Patti’s and whose death both begins and ends the book. In the cover photograph, their shaggy heads are pressed together. Robert is caught mid-blink, the small skulls around his neck glinting. Patti looks like she is challenging the viewer with the one eye not obscured by her self-hacked haircut. You can see how tightly her jaw is clenched. The book is filled with photographs like this one – tenderly framed, somewhat out of focus, capturing, with the set of a jaw or the drape of an arm, the connection between two people, the difficulty of an era, and, in the careful and subtle lighting, the way of looking at the world, as artists, that saved them.
Book Reviews
When, in “The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water,” one of the short stories in this tight and miraculous collection, Dave Eggers begins to describe the ominous sound of incoming waves, I almost put down the book. I have always admired Eggers for his tender yet sharp prose, but I am relatively certain that the entirety of Newton’s public high school population has heard enough of his descriptions of water, of storms, and of impending disaster.
Luckily, Eggers is a writer versatile enough to create both masterful nonfiction like Zeitoun and wild stories of the sort that make you put down the thin volume for a moment, just to think. I read How We Are Hungry over the course of several long train trips, in between counseling my elderly seatmate on the proper way to turn on his grandson’s ipod, and most likely missed a great deal of scenery in exchange for immersion in the worlds Eggers so off-handedly creates and colors in. His characters, including two vibrant lovers in Costa Rica, a man named Fish visiting his suicidal cousin, a freckled and mysterious woman who is missing an arm, a terminally ill man named Basil planning an elaborate ceremony for his own death, a grieving mother scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro, and a narrating dog, are universally complex, flawed, and often doomed. Imperfection, in fact, is a theme of the collection as a whole. Unhappiness lurks behind golden sand dunes in Egypt and longing causes the shimmer on a cold Scottish lake to speak to a lonely protagonist.
No one wants to die. Especially not Yossarian. Yossarian’s only goal in life is to live, forever, during World War II. Yossarian is a navigator in the Air Force stationed on Pianosa, an island off the coast of Italy, and he does not want to die. The only person who could save him is the doctor. What’s the catch? The doctor can only ground personnel who are insane, but anyone who wants to be grounded isn’t insane. This is a really great book full of colorful anecdotes and hilarious dialogue. Try not to be confused by the world twisterings and story line switches. This is a book which rewards those who read. If you enjoy life, don’t miss this lively book.
“Yai se corthu” is the shin’a’in phrase that means “two are one.” In this book, Vows and Honor by Mercedes Lackey, a plains woman sets off on a hunt to eradicate the people who demolished her tribe. Along the way she meets a mage who aids her in this journey. The two make a blood pact, overseen by the plains woman’s Goddess, and Yai se corthu. Together they set off to build up a reputation so they can revive the plains woman’s lost clan. They face many challenges, but yet they continue. This stunning fantasy book combines excellent word choice with the author’s writing style to form an amazing read. Recommended to anyone over the maturity level of a fifteen year-old.
Have you ever forgotten an important phone number, misplaced your keys, or not been able to remember the next word in your important monologue for theater class? Although you may take your (and everybody else’s) imperfect memory for granted, a few hundred years ago everybody memorized things. How did travelling bards recite the entire Odyssey? Before the invention of books, memory was people’s essential tool for survival. To this day, the lost art of memory lives on in the form of memory athletes, men and women who, through exercise after exercise, train their minds to be able to perform incredible feats of memory. Memorizing a shuffled deck of playing cards or pages of binary digits is commonplace. Joshua Foer, as a young man making his way as a reporter, was sent to report on a memory championship. Assuming that the participants were savants, he asked one of them how he memorized so well, so quickly. The man replied that anyone, even Foer himself, could do it. This book dives into the secrets of memory techniques, the centuries-old art of memorization, why we forget, the special capabilities of those who really do have natural amazing memories, and Foer’s personal endeavors in memory training.
I really enjoyed this book. It was captivating, interesting, and hilarious. Although it is not a self-help manual, you can learn some very useful and interesting tricks from this book, and I’m pretty sure you’ll love it.
Newton North High School Library Learning Commons. Licensed Under Creative Commons.Newton North High School
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