This is a lyrical explosion of a book, a challenge to literature, and particularly to narrative non-fiction, as we know it.
Our books no longer reflect the way we understand our lives, Shields argues. They are not fractured enough, not various and stolen, too hemmed in. We are all of us increasingly hungry for the "real", and have created monuments of commodified irreality in a desperate attempt to find it.
This book is indeed a manifesto in the best sense, a call to action for readers and writers. Shields is demanding reader interaction, greater risk, more serendipity and - as difficult, possibly, to acheive as it is easy to say - more reality in our use of the written word. It's a stirring book full of more questions than answers, and one I'm very excited to have as the topic of a conversation here at the store..
News of Note
Staff Picks
Buddhism for Mothers
Written by Allison
By Sarah Napthali (Allen & Unwin, $15.95)
What a relief this book has been. As a brand-new mom with a full-time job, I've stumbled through days raw-eyed and manic. Each emotion, be it exquisite or horrendous, threatens to send me to the brink...and then, of course, I remember! Buddhism and breath. This book taught a frantic mommy just how to sit in the moment, no matter what that moment might be, and to absorb every second of my blessed new life with this astounding creature I call my son.
Lit
Written by Cheryl
By Mary Karr (Harper, $25.99)
Karr is one of our great memoirists. Her groundbreaking The Liars Club recounted her hardscrabble childhood on the Texas prairie where she tried to survive her alcoholic dagger-wielding mother's unpredictable behavior and Cherry, a subtle, often-overlooked chronicle of her own druggy adolescence marked by sexual exploration and an atypical rebellion against the restraints of negative expectations. Her bone-wrenching, gut-stirring, outloud-laughing style is on view in Lit which tells the story of how she became a poet, a wife, a mother and a raving alcoholic in that order, and how she saved herself with the loving help of friends, mentors and divine surrender. I could do without the conversion chapters, but until then, this memoir sets the standard for what has come before and what will follow.
The Beauty Myth
Written by Caroline
By Naomi Wolf (Harper, $14.99)
This book is probably the only socially relevant discussion of our perceptions of beauty since Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I am so sick of the "girl power!" variety of quasi-feminism that gets flouted in lipstick and underwear all over magazines and delivers only further anxiety-filled buying sprees, and also the ridiculous "anthropological" theories that Desmond Morris company use to attempt to justify current beauty standards. Thank goodness there are writers out there like Wolf who attempt to dissect the problem from every angle so we can understand why women, and, now increasingly, men, feel pressured to make physical, emotional and economic sacrifices in order to stay young and beautiful forever.
What a relief this book has been. As a brand-new mom with a full-time job, I've stumbled through days raw-eyed and manic. Each emotion, be it exquisite or horrendous, threatens to send me to the brink...and then, of course, I remember! Buddhism and breath. This book taught a frantic mommy just how to sit in the moment, no matter what that moment might be, and to absorb every second of my blessed new life with this astounding creature I call my son.
Karr is one of our great memoirists. Her groundbreaking The Liars Club recounted her hardscrabble childhood on the Texas prairie where she tried to survive her alcoholic dagger-wielding mother's unpredictable behavior and Cherry, a subtle, often-overlooked chronicle of her own druggy adolescence marked by sexual exploration and an atypical rebellion against the restraints of negative expectations. Her bone-wrenching, gut-stirring, outloud-laughing style is on view in Lit which tells the story of how she became a poet, a wife, a mother and a raving alcoholic in that order, and how she saved herself with the loving help of friends, mentors and divine surrender. I could do without the conversion chapters, but until then, this memoir sets the standard for what has come before and what will follow.
This book is probably the only socially relevant discussion of our perceptions of beauty since Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. I am so sick of the "girl power!" variety of quasi-feminism that gets flouted in lipstick and underwear all over magazines and delivers only further anxiety-filled buying sprees, and also the ridiculous "anthropological" theories that Desmond Morris company use to attempt to justify current beauty standards. Thank goodness there are writers out there like Wolf who attempt to dissect the problem from every angle so we can understand why women, and, now increasingly, men, feel pressured to make physical, emotional and economic sacrifices in order to stay young and beautiful forever.