What is the What? (Dave Eggers)

What is the What? is a sad, sad, story. How could it not be? It's the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a "Lost Boy" from war-ravaged Sudan. Albeit it's not pure autobiography, the disclaimer by Deng says that much of the story is true. Eggers tells Deng's story through a series of flashbacks, flashbacks during and shortly after a violent robbery of Deng's apartment in Atlanta, Georgia, ironically his sanctuary after years of suffering, starvation, and deprivation running from one group or another in his native Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya.All proceeds from the sale of the book go to t he Valentino Achak Deng Foundation: http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/. For me, the story brought to life the reality of the suffering of what remains ongoing in Sudan--now in Darfur, Sudan. It makes a news headline or a story more than just a place far-far away. It's a person like you or I, suffering in fear, starvation, without family or love, and without shelter. What the book leaves you with is to answer the question of what exactly is the what that will make a deranged world sit right.

The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

Gruesome. Scary. Devastingly awful. That's what I thought of the bleak scene painted in Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, as I read it in a two-night marathon. I couldn't put it down. The world as we know it has ended, and yet what has caused the end is never told. The land is covered with ash, in many places, the trees are burnt, the tires of cars melted, bubbled into softened pavement. Corpses sunken, beyond recognition lie along the road, in empty, decrepit houses. And a father and a son, both also never named, travel this road trying to survive despite long periods of starvation, lack of water, of shelter from the snow and wind. More grievous, more threatening are the tribes of "bad guys" as the son calls them who scavenge, steal, rape young boys and women, and then kill all they encounter to eat--that's the "bad guys" version of surviving. Beyond all hope, the boy and his father endure until the very end. What a read. An unusual read, to be sure. But considering I could not put it down, perhaps it was because of that pull of love amidst the destruction and waste that would have devastated most that kept me reading on.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Erik Larson)

When I started this book, I was thrilled that I'd be going to Chicago for my sister's wedding, right to the heart of where the story takes place. Only, when I was there, I kept trying to figure out where oh where was the World's Fair and the time-consuming structures that had been erected over a century ago, where had it been located? Later, nearly at the end of the book I find out that very little of the landscape or architecture survived beyond that year in 1893. Much of it was destroyed in riots, none of the buildings really meant to last. All the effort for a single year. Unbelievable. Behind the design and the construction is architect Daniel Burnham who oversaw the building of the fair. George Washington Gale Ferris, too, left his mark, little known until his namesake left an indelible mark on every fair and festival thereafter with his Ferris wheel. The Ferris Wheel was almost a losing bid among the others who attempted to outdo the Eiffel Tower, if you can believe it. And the creepiest of creeps, Herman W. Mudgett, lived just a few miles away, committing murder after murder in a building he'd designed himself, complete with hidden doors and gas pipes exposed, vats, and kilns big enough for bodies. It's the shadow of this evil that darkens the otherwise white city, so named because all the buildings erected for the fair were painted white. Larson does an admirable job tying these story lines together, and bringing in bits and pieces of history, a history that includes Susan B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill, and even the sinking of The Titanic. A must read, if you believe me.

Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)

Marjane Satrapi's book Persepolis is a graphic novel both history of Iran during the period of the Shah, his downfall and then Iran's war with Iraq, and autobiography. It is the story of her early childhood--pre and post teenage years, when she first begins to think she'll grow up and be the first female prophet. Only she vacillates between becoming a prophet of God or a prophet of Marx. The disappearance of family members and friends, the charged marches, the bombing by Iraq, and forced dress--the burqa and the scarf--from this little girl's eyes is disturbing, even if her way of coping makes you laugh. Reading a graphic novel is a different experience, but not necessarily a bad one. The pictures and the captions leave many more interpretative gaps to the reader, which may make for a powerful read.

The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)

Now I don't wonder why Lahiri won the Pulitzer prize, and I haven't even yet read The Interpreter of Maladies, her debut collection of fiction that took that prize . The Namesake transported me so completely into a world I've never been and yet longed to be for much, much longer than the final page. Her description, the sensation of touching, of feeling, of tasting were powerful, as were the turns of phrase that persisted beyond each page turned, lay deep in the recesses of my mind, digesting, resonating those truths of what she'd written. For me, it wasn't merely a coming of age novel, a story of a boy from an Indian American family in the US, it was the story of growing up in a family who have all the right intentions, but who don't realize how suffocating a life pre-determined with high expectations can be, how difficult trying to make a life apart remains. Yet, the first generation of an immigrant is a powerful story, and Gogol is the central figure, even though we meet and live in the lives of his parents in the beginning of the book--Ashima and Ashoke. Once he's born, it's Gogol who embodies the first-born immigrant whose life is pulled between the world his parents recreate of India in a suburb of Boston and the America he's known all of his life. All of this and a curious namesake, given to him by his father because of a tragedy he'd lived long ago and never told to his son he'd named. To Gogol, his name is meaningless, ridiculous until at the age of 18 he learns the true history of his name. A name perhaps more powerful because he changes this name to a "good name," a name his parents had intended all along for him to use outside the home. His other name--Gogol--would be more intimate, more familiar, for family only. And it's that namesake that leaves a powerful final message as the book ends, too.

Book suggestions?

Every night I try to have a wee bit of time to read, that wee bit between settling down for the night and when my eyes start to droop too heavy. I have a lot of books to choose from, what with a house full of books and lists upon wish lists of books from the local library. So, that wee bit of time never goes far enough to make a dent in all those books I want to read, let alone books I'd like to read again someday. 'Course the worst, just the worst, is when you believe so fervently that the author is going to get the story together by page 10 or 50, and when he or she doesn't, boy, do I feel cheated. Wee time is meaningful time best spent. So, I try to select the best-est of books, which come from recommendations of trusted friends and literary types, and of course, the Sunday edition of The Seattle Times' Book Review. Want to be let in on some of those best-est of books? Check out the Bookclub Blog at: http://jees-bookclub.blogspot.com/

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Kati Marton)

I've heard that Hungary boasts the most Nobel prize winners, which for a relatively small country is quite impressive. But I had no idea of the impact a select nine Hungarians had on the world, forced to flee their native country because of antisemitism and the events leading to World War II. Author Kati Marton interweaves narratives of these individuals' lives, their personal motivations, hardship, romance, defeat, and the sweet recognition of their accomplishments into a story of our own history. Names easily recognized to us like Laurence Olivier or Ingrid Bergman, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Roosevelt are influenced by these men. Perhaps as striking is their ability to surpass enormous obstacles to become part of history--loss of family, friends, the antisemitism that displaced them from their native Budapest, and a language that isolated them linguistically from the rest of the world. Scientists Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner led the movement to develop the nuclear weapon in advance of Hitler. These scientists also worked to develop the computer. Major film makers Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and Alexander Korda (The Third Man) created legendary movies, directing Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, for example in Casablanca. Photographers Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz's photos live on; Capa's fuzzy D-Day photo on Omaha Beach is recreated in Steven Speilberg's film: Saving Private Ryan. Capa's love affair with Ingrid Bergman, his war photography that brought the war to the public in the U.S. Kertesz's photos that captured emotion in a single moment.And writer Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) prophesied the dictatorial state even before the Soviet Union had expanded its reach to his homeland: Hungary.

The Ghost Map (Steven Johnson)

I have mixed feelings about this read even though the premise of the book is a gripper--cholera is killing thousands of people in densely packed 19th century London--and John Snow tracks the disease to a source: a water pump that the residents are all using to collect water. Only no one believes him. Everyone--including the scientific community--says it has to do with "miasma," this theory that the stink of garbage and sewer infects people with disease. I would have preferred the author to draw the plot forward using John Snow, who is known today as the "Father of Epidemiology," how the events of that period unfolded with cholera itself as the heartless murderer, the femme fetale, and how Snow is stymied by the ignorance of the scientific community, who albeit in good faith sabotaged the health of the population with misdirected intentions. But Johnson doesn't do this. He goes round and round again, losing the plot line in a series of repetitions. And then in the end he keeps going, going into the this picture of how the city has become such a well-oiled, economically viable home to millions of people (where sewer, water, heat can be delivered to more people for less money than in the rural areas), tacking on a couple of chapters at the end of the book that lead the reader to envision the implications involved in the urban density of today. Only, he says the epidemic wouldn't be biological--like cholera or avian flu--necessarily, but technological. In the urban density possible today 25,000 people can be stacked in a building 110 stories high on a 1 acre of space. So, that unlike cholera, which spread comparatively slowly in a wider area, a terrorist attack of a space t his small would have an incredible magnitude and an effect which as we know was nearly instantaneous. And there is no cure either; nothing to stop the imminent deaths. So, when I closed this book I wondered if this book was about the cholera epidemic and how Snow's tracking system set the standard for a field--mapping out illness to locate a source. Or was it how science won out over the scientists. Or was this a story of how the city can grow to numbers unimaginable because of these ingenious systems we've devised to accommodate a mass of people in a relatively small area, numbers that can be easily decimated if the systems that were set up to accommodate the masses become inadvertently the very tools toward destruction. Or maybe it's all of these themes and stories combined, and that was just too much for me in a single book.

The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)

Barcelona, 1945. I'd picked this one from the three I have out from the library, even it was the longest at 486 pages and probably the most likely I could renew. Maybe it was because I was still mesmerized by WWII (Remember, I'd just finished reading Villa Air-Bel, which is also WWII, but in France). This story takes place in Spain. But the war is in the background, this horror of the government turnaround that led to mysterious deaths and tortures . . . but all of these seem to revolve around this terribly evil person: Fumero.But more likely, I was intrigued by the beginning of the book, the kind of haunting that comes from not knowing and needing to know what happens next. For this book is less about the book--The Shadow of the Wind--that becomes the title, but more about the young boy, Daniel, who slowly uncovers what happened to Julian Carax, the author of the book, The Shadow of the Wind, and what happens to Daniel in the course of uncovering Carax's own story. So, that I no longer care what the book is about that Carax wrote, just about the story unfolding. Perhaps too many coincidences happen along the way . . . but there was something about the tension created by the story of what happens next that kept me turning pages long into the night. Those nights when I go to bed two hours past my bedtime because I found I simply could not put this book down. So, would I recommend this book? Undoubtedly.

Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille (Rosemary Sullivan)

I just barely finished this 400-page historical wonder before the library reminded me that my renewal is up again. Whew! This was one of those page-turners that I'd be darned to return until I completed the last page. This book recounts a terrifying period of history, focusing on a group of writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and political activists that were literally stuck in Nazi-occupied France, hiding out in Marseille as the Vichy government played puppet to Hitler. The government rounded up Jews, anti-Nazi writers, and any other "elements" that could be considered dangerous. What they feared? Being imprisoned and sent off to the internment camps, with little water, food, or shelter to survive. Little did they know--or anyone really at that time--that those internment camps were extermination centers.The clandestine group included such famous folks as André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of others. Led by stiff and staid Varian Fry, a US activist turned international diplomat for refugees, and helped by Miriam Davenport, heiress Mary Jayne Gold, Danny Bénédite and his British wife, Theo, they began a program financed privately by the Emergency Rescue Committee to get endangered writers and artists out of France and to the US. These people went to extraordinary, even harrowing lengths to survive and to escape, despite the many threats and obstacles.Sullivan draws their stories so vividly, detailing how the events of WWII brought these people together and radically changed their lives. The book ends with a synopsis of what happens to each of these individuals following the war. What we hope for--the blessing of peace and safety for each of these people after the war--is not what we get. A sad reminder that memory is never left behind.

Cheating Destiny (James Hirsch)

"America's biggest epidemic," according to James Hirsch, author of Cheating Destiny, is diabetes.  Hirsch, who is a Washington-Post journalist, has juvenile diabetes himself, as does his famous brother, Irl Hirsch, who works at the University of Washington as diabetes researcher and clinician. And during the course of writing the book, James Hirsch's three-year old son is diagnosed with diabetes as well. Family genetics play an awfully sure role in developing diabetes.

A little over 50 years ago, there wasn't yet insulin. Now there is plenty of insulin but also still plenty of blame. I live with a man who is diabetic, and am familiar with how much responsibility we place on those with diabetes. If they would only be more careful, monitor their diet more, exercise more or in moderation, then they wouldn't have such highs. They wouldn't have such lows.

Hirsch argues that key figures in the history of diabetic care have created our current attitude, to place the "burden" on the diabetic. To shift some of that responsibility to the health care industry would be more accurate and more helpful. Insulin--which is key to control--has seen sky-rocketing costs. Preventative care not profitable enough. Ironic indeed, since diabetic supplies are hugely profitable to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health care clinics, and manufacturers. Bigger bucks are made when the diabetic is ill, has heart disease (as many will), loses a limb or goes on kidney dialysis. The list of maladies caused by living with diabetes is long, the bill statement longer.

Hirsch tells this story as his story, making those of us who know little of the disease cognizant of the daily struggle a person with diabetes lives with, that day-by-day recognition that what is done today prevents what might happen tomorrow, or in other words: how to cheat destiny.