A young girl uses stolen books to distract herself from the reality of living in Nazi Germany in WWII while hiding a Jewish man in her basement.
What I Liked
It is incredibly difficult to know how to review this book. The second half moves along at a much quicker pace and with much higher stakes. The book is narrated by Death / Grim Reaper, and the chapter headings give glimpses of what is to come. There are some red herrings near the end, implying one ending while leading to another, but overall it is pretty solid. The characters are lively, the girl is outstanding, and there are glimpses of her family that offer rare moments of joy and love. And it moved me to tears at the end.
What I Didn’t Like
It is hard to accept the implied message that “most Germans were good / nice”, it was just the Nazis that were bad people. And even the storyline written by the Jewish man in the basement is that it is all because of the Fuhrer, that Hitler is the only truly evil one. There are parts of it that read like almost an apology for Nazism rather than a sense of accountability for the nation’s deeds. The extra materials at the end tell how the author was inspired by his grandparents’ accounts of the ordinariness (in some ways) of the war in Germany for Germans – something that happened around them, or to them, not committed by them. In terms of the writing, the first half is a bit slow and dull, and the constant foreshadowing is repetitive and annoying at the start, less so at the end. The caricature of the mother is ridiculous; she only becomes human near the end. Finally, and this is a bit of a spoiler, the story ends rather abruptly, leaving out a huge opportunity to tell some more story. I know this book is aimed at teens and is hugely popular, but I would not wants someone relying on this book as their only source of history.
The book is a collection of two sets of stories — the first set is part of the Kinsey Millhone series and set throughout the Alphabet series in time; the second set is about Kit Blue.
What I Liked
The first part, with Kinsey Millhone, includes an introduction about how she created Kinsey (4/5), nine shortstories, and a conclusion about the history of the genre of the hard-boiled PI (3/5). The shortstories are fun to read, but there isn’t much “Kinsey” in them. Too little time to dwell, mostly focused on “wham bam, here’s a clue, here’s a solution”. One I rate at 4/5, five more at 3/5, and another three that aren’t very good at all.
Between the Sheets — Great opening where woman shows up to confess to murder she hasn’t reported yet, and when she goes back, the body is gone (3/5);
Long Gone — Missing wife, lots of kids, clues are pretty obvious (3/5);
The Parker Shotgun — Cool premise, quick solution, fair with the clues (4/5);
Non Sung Smoke — Find a one-night stand, have him get killed, throw in some drugs (3/5);
Full Circle — Cute ending to a simple case of who killed a young woman in a horrific car accident that Kinsey witnessed (3/5); and,
A Little Missionary Work — Two celebrities ask for Kinsey’s help with a fake kidnapping, but Kinsey reverses the con in the end (3/5).
The second part includes an introduction about Grafton’s not-so-idyllic early life, and how “Kit Blue” is a younger version of herself (3/5). The remaining thirteen stories work quite well as a collection of slices of Kit’s life, although individually I rate one as 5/5, five as 4/5, and three as 3/5, with another four below the line:
That’s Not An Easy Way To Go — Kit realizing she’s become the mother to her alcoholic mother (4/5);
Lost People — Kit reflecting on her alcoholic parents, displaced from their own lives (3/5);
Clue — Slice of life with mother visiting and Kit’s relief when she leaves (3/5);
Night Visit, Corridor A — Kit visiting mother in hospital (4/5);
April 24, 1960 — Kit dealing with news of her mother’s death on Kit’s birthday, and being irritated by her husband trying to comfort her (4/5);
The Closet — Kit cleaning out her mother’s closet after she’s gone and trying to figure out what it represents, if anything (4/5);
Maple Hill — Kit walking through an empty house saying goodbye to all of it (5/5);
Jessie — a housewoman talking about Kit’s mother (4/5); and,
A Letter From My Father — Kit reading a letter and sharing her own views of their life together (3/5).
What I Didn’t Like
Three of the Kinsey stories aren’t great:
Falling Off The Roof — A mystery book club with murder on its mind (1/5);
A Poison That Leaves No Trace — Quick case of a dead sister looking to know if her niece killed her mother (2/5); and,
The Lying Game — Old trope about a liar and a truthteller, you can only ask one question (1/5).
Four of the Kit Blue slices don’t stand alone very well:
A Woman Capable of Anything — Kit Blue watching a sleeping alcoholic mother (1/5);
A Portable Life — Kit coming to terms with the past being destroyed (1/5);
The Quarrel — Kit listening to her father explain his new wife’s behaviour (2/5); and,
Death Review — Kit’s working in a hospital as a medical secretary, spotting glimpses of her mom in the other patients (2/5).
Kottler reflects on literature and his personal experiences as a psychologist about the elements that lead people to not only make changes in their life but also sustain those changes over the long-term.
What I Liked
I had the pleasure of hearing Kottler speak as an honoured guest at my wife’s university graduation ceremony, and he intrigued me enough on the subject of “change” — what we know and what we don’t know — that I bought his book. It was the perfect book for me at this point in my life, as I’ve been wanting to make a significant change that has been holding me back for at least 30 years. I’m great at the day-to-day goal-setting stuff, but I needed to understand large-scale change on a deeper level, and this book was ideal for that education.
In the beginning, I was struck by a central question — when does an alteration in attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, thinking, or feeling “count” as change, and how long does it have to last in order to qualify? In shorter terms, when does a temporary change become permanent and sustainable? Chapter 2 was an eye-opener — hidden benefits from my current approach that resist change. Not the obvious ones but more internal ones that might even seem like positive traits in someone (being strong, standing up for oneself disguising some issues with temper, for instance). And some baby-step coping techniques. Chapter 3 dealt more with the conditions that allow you to transition from temporary to permanent change, almost pre-conditions in some cases.
Other chapters were relatively straight-forward: the power of story-telling (chapter 4); hitting bottom in various forms (chapter 5); how you react to trauma and whether it can be a positive catalyst (chapter 6); the limits to psychotherapy (chapter 7); change through physical travel or spiritual journeys (chapter 8); moments of clarity (chapter 9); and resolving conflicts in relationships (chapter 13). The last chapter — Why Changes Don’t Often Last (Chapter 14) — was the one that I was most looking forward to in the book, and while he goes into various spins and examples, most of it seems to come down to varying forms of fear. It certainly did for me, and I find the chapter fantastic for presenting it quite concisely. In the end, the price of the book is worth it just to get the 7 pages at the end, if you have time for nothing else (308-315).
I managed to use it to create a six-part “to do” list / game plan for the change that I’ve been wanting to make, and for the first time in my life, I’m doing it. I’m six months in and it seems to be holding. It’ll take another 18 months to “finish”, but the book helped me get there. Onward to the journey!
What I Didn’t Like
Several chapters didn’t really sing as well as the rest. Being happy (chapter 11) and transformation while helping others (12) were relatively bland, and a chapter on the importance of social capital (chapter 10) seemed almost like an afterthought.
The Bottom Line
It gave me the courage to get unstuck after 30 years.
The author is a book reviewer for the Washington Post; this is the story of his life up until graduation from university.
What I Liked
Dirda was recommended to me by a colleague from work, whose appetites for reading are far more literary than mine. He actually recommended Bound to Please, which is a collection of Dirda’s reviews of more literary prose from throughout history, but I tripped over this book first. I’m quite glad I did as I probably won’t read the collection of essays until I’ve read most of the tomes reviewed, but An Open Book is a fantastic autobiography.
It reads in some place like Angela’s Ashes without the darkness of Irish poverty. However, it is not without conflict or family dysfunction during the author’s childhood, and he tells the story in places with openness and unashamed personal bias.
The main part of the story recounts Dirda’s intellectual progress as he moved through comic strips from the newspaper (p.49), pun and joke books (everyone sing: “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts”!), the TAB book club (p.66), the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series (p.90), a brief stint with romance novels (p.201), and the importance of great literature to challenging society and even changing history (p.290). It also includes his non-literary education – playing with BB guns (p.81), understanding firsthand how hard his father’s job was (p.185), learning about art and music (p.267), the ceasing to care about grades when writing essays and the corresponding improvements in marks (p.310), the contribution of early influences in his life to later character traits (p.320), and looking back at one’s life (p.321).
The book recounts his life relatively linearly in time, yet with lots of interesting digressions that veer away from developments in his personal life and situation with the book he was reading at the time.
What I Didn’t Like
It would have been interesting to see more of the reactions from teachers throughout the author’s life, including perhaps even tracking some of them down. It is hard to imagine exactly how certain ones would have reacted to his precocious reading of more advanced novels, and the existing allusions to some of their reactions are rudimentary at best. As well, the final decision (to become a freelance journalist upon leaving university) is rushed in the story and negates much of the relaxed pace to that point.
The Bottom Line
See the early influences on a literary book reviewer.
This book is an anthology of women’s experiences in Canada during World War II. The anthology is a collection of first-person narratives from 57 women who served in various branches of the armed forces, auxiliaries, and private industry in Canada during World War II. Each of the narratives has a similar chronology and approach – what the women were doing before the war, how they joined the Armed Forces or supporting occupation, their experiences during the war (both personal and professional), their life-in-brief after the war, and, finally, a chance for them to pass some judgement on “what did it all mean” for them or for women in general.
What I Liked
Although I know the editor, and hence added the book to my reading list for that reason, the stories and subject matter are compelling to me in their own right. I can remember reading a USA Today article back in 2001 about the efforts of some U.S. organizations to capture oral histories of their WWI and II survivors, archiving them at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Volunteer organizations set up sample questionnaires and encouraged young Americans to interview their grandparents about their experiences in the war, recording them and sending them off to be archived. Distributed processing of oral histories is a great technique that works with limited resources, and I remember getting excited about it, wondering what we were doing for Canadian histories? As it turns out, quite a bit.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a website that captures a lot of this for Canada and has some great materials available to all online. This book captures the often-missed histories of women during that time. The individual stories are compelling and varied in place of origin, type of occupation, impact, and all the elements that comprise the story of each woman, presented in their own words. It is an amazing collective resource for anyone doing research on the era and would serve as both a stand-alone text as well as a supplement to the experiences of others (mostly men) during the Second World War covered elsewhere. And it includes all the things people would expect, which I won’t cover in detail, as well as some surprising elements that transcend the ordinary.
First and foremost, the book does a fine job of avoiding over-stating the impact of WWII on the women’s movement…the tendency in many publications of this sort would be to say “this era is important, these women are important, and therefore this time was the sole catalyst for changing the world forever for women”. However, as many of the stories note, a lot of changes were already underway. This doesn’t discount the impact or added impetus of the time, but also places it in a larger context, where women were no longer only being considered second-class citizens. Many of the women left decent jobs to join the Armed Forces, putting a lie to the often-popular view that the women simply “left the house” for the first time during WWII. Second, the small details from individual stories are particularly riveting, golden nuggets of their experiences:
the lack of common knowledge about the true horrors of the concentration camps until much later after the war – while lots of organizations try to argue or advocate that people in other countries knew but sat and did nothing to prevent the atrocities, they make that argument with the wisdom of hindsight, forgetting that while rumours ran wild, very few people believed the true level of catastrophe when they heard those rumours…only after the reality was truly known and documented could people look back and say “that particular rumour there” was true, and we should have believed it. Without a reference point, lots of people would not – and maybe could not – believe that such atrocities were possible. Even today, it is hard for people to accept genocide as a real event even though it’s happened before (Jacqueline Laplante, p.22, Elizabeth Hunt, p.142) yet there was some official recognition of the problems as many Jewish people were told to change their identifications before fighting overseas (Nano Penefeather-McConnell, p.126-127);
the experience of women’s rifle training and teams (Jacqueline Laplante, p.28);
the role played by French priests in some family decisions in Quebec, with many of the priests trying hard to prevent the women from joining up or calling them home claiming their birth certificates were forged (Mary Saunders, p.28, et al);
the commonplace / matter-of-fact way of dealing with notifications of deaths in the family (Ruth Ralston, p.72);
the drafting of women in England (Elizabeth Hunt, p.134);
the impact on the economy in Quebec in 1939 with many farming families suddenly having boosts in their family income with many sons and daughters working in factories, and for families in general with work plentiful and banks willing to give loans again (Olive Villeneuve, p.166); and,
the two government employees explaining to them in 1941 that there were going to be new deductions from their wages for something called “income tax” and “unemployment insurance” (Olive Villeneuve, p.168).
My favourite story is the impact of reading Lorna Stanger (p.161) talking about VE-Day in Europe. For the first time since the war started, they could have the lights in the city on at night and had it all lit up. For the youngest children, many had only known black-outs and air-raid sirens, and seeing the lights at night actually scared them.
What I Didn’t Like
My biggest complaint is self-inflicted – I did not follow the advice of the Chief Archivist for DND who recommends in the introduction that people should read a few stories at a time. My challenge was simply that I borrowed the book from the library, so with limited time, I plowed through them. And hence probably had a lessened impact than if they were read properly.
As a result, I found myself in some places confusing stories with the previous one, thinking “how did she do that? Wasn’t she in Europe by then?” and then paging back to realize it was a different woman with a similar occupation. In others though, I find myself struggling with the format – the stories appear one after another, seemingly ungrouped in any way. I can’t help wondering if there would be more impact if the stories had been alternatively grouped to convey a stronger message.
For example, they could have been grouped by province – would those who were born in Ontario have a different experience than those in Winnipeg? Ordering by service branch would be an obvious option but might negate some of the commonalities across branches. One could organize by a dozen other possibilities too, such as their posting, occupation, age at induction, future careers, whether they went overseas, etc.
In the end, the challenge might just be the biographical genre. Given the wealth of information, I found myself wanting to see some analysis across the anthology that you could digest and pull out, rather than just the raw text. But that would be a different text then, perhaps one more for academics to produce. And absent the analysis, I wanted to see different ways of sorting – but that too would be a different publication, more of a database than a book.
