Martin Lemelman: Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood

978-1608190041 – Bloomsbury – Hardcover – $26.00.

Martin Lemelman grew up in the back of a candy store in Brooklyn, NY.  He has illustrated more than thirty children’s books and his work has appeared in numerous magazines.  Lemelman is now a Professor in the Communication Design Department at Kutztown University and lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Martin’s first memoir done in graphic format, with drawings, photographs of personal objects and places, was Mendel’s Daughter, published in 2006.  Told in his mother, Gusta’s voice, the book recounts the story of her life, beginning in pre-war Poland, through her harrowing experience of survival in the Holocaust and displaced persons’ camps, and finally coming to Brooklyn, where she lived with her husband (also a survivor) and two children.

Two Cents Plain is not literally a sequel to Mendel’s Daughter, but it is a continuation of Lemelman’s family storytelling.  Two Cents Plain collects the memories and artifacts of the author’s childhood in Brownsville, a neighborhood of Brooklyn filled with Jews speaking Yiddish and children growing up in a comfortable city neighborhood.  Later in the story, as times change, Martin and his family’s experience in Brooklyn is not so pleasant.  But that’s ultimately the background of the story Lemelman tells.  His real focus is the dynamic story of his parents and how their life experiences in the Holocaust shaped them, and of course shaped their children’s experience as a family in post-War America.

Lemelman’s story is full of struggle, his parents were complicated and sometimes difficult for their children to understand, and life in a candy store was never easy.  But his Brooklyn memories also is also include the joys of egg creams and comic books, malteds and novelty toys, where the neighbors, the deli man, the fish man, and the fruit man, all are brought to vivid life in story and illustration. The changes in the city during the sixties are very personalized for Martin and his family and in the climax of the story, the family must leave their home once again.

I really loved reading and absorbing this book, the combination of Lemelman’s story telling voice and gorgeous illustrations work beautifully to transport the reader into another time and place.  And the author does a fine job of balancing between the sentiment of memory of his childhood with the clarity of the adult rememberer, which is keeps us anchored as the story unfolds.  There are layers of memory, emotion, people and place that are richly evoked in this book.

In our interview, I wanted to explore with Martin not only the story of his life and his parents gripping and sometimes painful experiences, but the period of the fifties and sixties and how he used the graphic memoir form to reflect and amplify the power of his story.  This is a unique and wonderful book whose creator is quite cogent about his work.  Martin has put together a very interesting and useful website for the book that is worth visiting (most useful after you have read the book, I think).  I am looking forward to reading the next book in this series of memory stories.

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Bill Barich: Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America

978-0802717542 – Walker & Co. – Hardcover – $26.00 (e-book version also available)

Bill Barich is a fine writer, comfortable with words, a natural storyteller who is self-aware and a careful observer of character as well as landscape.  He’s got a great narrative voice that makes his books very easy to read and deeply engrossing.

In the summer of 2008, Barich, who has lived in Dublin, Ireland for some time, decided to take a journey across America, essentially following in the footsteps of the great John Steinbeck, who made the cross-country journey (ostensibly to rediscover America, but more likely a stab at rediscovering his own literary voice, which resulted in Travels with Charley in 1962).

Of course Barich and Steinbeck differ in significant ways.  And the early 1960’s were a very different time than 2008 for America.  Barich’s trip came at the time of our massive economic collapse, and the rising presidential campaign of Barack Obama, both of which become thematic backdrops for his story.  Steinbeck traveled in pick up truck with a home made camper out back, and with his dog, Charley, whereas Barich drove a rented Ford Focus (almost 6000 miles!) and stayed in motels.  But Steinbeck is the ever present model for the later traveler, whose outlook is certainly as different as the country he explores.

In fact, Barich’s story is engrossing from beginning to end.  He starts the trip in Maryland, and stays on US 50 west to the Golden State, with stops and sidetrips along the way that are always interesting, even though often sad and sometimes even depressing.  He is, after all, reporting on America as he finds it, which includes features and political themes that are not always what we might have wished or hoped for.  It’s an honest portrait, and a story well told.  I’ve done my share of cross-country traveling, and very much enjoyed this book and my conversation with Barich about it.  There’s a good deal of back story and detail in this conversation we had some fun with and which I hope listeners will enjoy.

Bill Barich is the author of seven books, including Laughing in the Hills, which was named one of the hundred best sports books of all time. Other works include a novel, Carson Valley, and another work of nonfiction, A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance, and the Irish and recently, A Pint of Plain which describes the decline of the traditional Irish pub. A Guggenheim Fellow, and literary laureate of the San Francisco Public Library, Barich now lives and works in Dublin.

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Nick Schou: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

978-0312551834 – St. Martin’s Press – Hardcover – $24.99

Nick Schou writes for the excellent OC Weekly (one of the several Village Voice papers) based in Orange County, California, home of Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, UC Irvine, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Little Saigon, and of course seemingly endless tracts of California suburbia.  But Orange County in the 1960’s was also the birthplace of some of the most amazing scenes of hippiedom, and the little known “Brotherhood of Eternal Love.”

In this book, Schou tells their story from beginning to end, and it is a pretty incredible saga, including what was probably the largest LSD manufacturing and distribution operation of all time, a world wide hashish and marijuana smuggling cartel, incredible tales involving Timothy Leary, and much, much more.

Known as “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960’s as a small band of surfers (and in many cases petty criminals) in Southern California. After they discovered LSD, they took to Timothy Leary’s mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process. In Orange Sunshine, Schou journeys deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with many of the group’s surviving members, former hangers on and supporters, and interstingly, the law enforcement establishment who pursued them and by doing so helped to launch what has now become an institutionalized government war on drugs.

Schou tells a compelling story of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, and a time when America moved from the golden era of peace and free love into the much darker time that soon followed, marked by hard drugs, international crime and paranoia.

Talking to Nick Schou gave me a chance to explore with him some of the background to the book, and to talk about the large amount of research he did to put it together, and the challenges he faced in getting some of the participants to even tell him what they did in those days.  We also talked about some of the more startling elements of the story of the Brotherhood, their involvement with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, Orange County then and now, and much more.

This is a fascinating story, one that helps us understand some of the complex issues that began in the sixties and are still with us today.  This kind of grassroots history is important to document as it can give us all a chance to better comprehend the always diverse and sometimes simply amazing culture in which we live.

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Jared Duval: Next Generation Democracy

978-1608190669 – Bloomsbury – paperback – $15.00

Next Generation Democracy is an important book by a really smart and compelling young activist and writer, Jared Duval.  I like what Bill McKibben says about the book and by extension the author: “God knows previous generations have left those that are coming of age a world of trouble. Happily, they’re figuring out a world of ways to set them right. Jared Duval’s book offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the next wave of activism, organizing, inspiration, and change. It will give you cause to hope–and cause to go to work.”

But even more than a behind-the-scenes look at how activists are working and thinking together in new ways, Duval gives us a strong sense of hope for making change in the future.  I think it’s true enough that the past few generations have not succeeded in broadening democracy and making progressive change throughout the world, especially in environmental, social justice and peace, as broad stroke categories of change that is needed most.  But it’s heartening to know that the younger generation includes individuals like Duval who are finding new ways to make change, resist the impulse to blame and create divisions, and who see the tools of change around them everywhere, and simply make use of them so easily and comfortably.

Jared sees open source software as the exact model needed for a reinvention of democracy.  Our government can be as open and transparent as the development of Linux, a story he tells here almost as a parable for political thinkers and activists.  In Next Generation Democracy, Jared covers key recent events, such as Hurricane Katrina, during which de-centralized leadership emerged to supersede traditional models.  He documents the success stories of these new leaders, both inside the government and out, who are finding effective, directly democratic ways to address the critical public challenges of our time. As he tells the stories of participatory organizations such as the brilliant SeeClickFix (originated in New Haven, Connecticut and now spreading to other communities) and America Speaks (which shows us how to meaningful re-engage citizens in the processes of government) Duval describes a new approach to solving complex problems that draws on the contributions of a wide array of activated citizens everywhere.

I do wish this book had come out earlier in the year, actually in time for election season, as I am certain that the thinking here could benefit anyone involved in the political process.  But in the end, what really matters is that people read Next Generation Democracy, become inspired in some way, small or large, to get involved, work with their fellow citizens, make change, small or large, and address the future in a positive way.  Reading this book and then listening to Jared Duval talk about his ideas and experiences certainly inspired me, and I am happy to recommend him and his book to anyone listening to this talk.

Jared Duval is a busy guy.  He is a fellow at the well respected Demos policy organization and earlier served as the National Director of the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC), the national student chapter of the Sierra Club and the largest student environmental organization in America. During this time he helped build the Energy Action Coalition and the Campus Climate Challenge campaign, serving as the effort’s co-chair for two years.

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Paul De Angelis: Dear Mrs. Kennedy, The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963

978-0312386153 – St. Martin’s Press – Hardcover – $19.99 (also available as an e-book at $9.99)

Are there more books about the Kennedys than about the Lincolns?  I don’t know, but I am certain that there are many of them and my guess is that many who lived through the Kennedy era and many who did not, may feel they know everything they need to know about the Kennedys, JFK and Jackie, and the rest of the family.  Reading this book may well change their minds.

In fact it’s a wonderful window into the heart and soul of America and in fact the world in the period just after the assassination of JFK in Dallas in November, 1963.  Now almost a half century beyond that time, these letters, written by the famous and the ordinary, old and young, depict a period of extreme pain, emotional and social disruption, grief, sorrow, and disbelief that affected an incredible number of people all over the world.  It gives us an opportunity to understand a great deal about how human beings respond to a devastating public tragedy.  And some of the letters are simply beautiful, and transcendent in their expression of sympathy and emotion.

The story of the letters themselves is amazing – over 1 million condolence letters, notes and cards were sent to Jacqueline Kennedy in the months after the death of JFK.  They were filed away and saved for many years, and despite a controversial culling in the 1980’s, there are still almost 400,000 letters, now cataloged and available for historians and journalists and the public to read and  review.  Editors Jay Mulvaney (who sadly passed away while working on this book) and subsequently Paul De Angelis, have given us a wonderful narrative and selection of letters that uses the words of the original writers to bring this terrible period in our history to life in an unusual and compelling tapestry of voices.

Paul De Angelis is a freelance editor and writer who lives in rural Connecticut.  He’s been an editor, editorial director and editor-in-chief for a number of publishers.   In our conversation about Dear Mrs. Kennedy, he talks about the process of putting this book together and highlights a number of the most interesting stories and letters in the book.  For readers who lived through the 1960’s, this book will bring back many difficult emotions, and for readers for whom this is only history, these letters can bring the events of that period to life in a very powerful and compelling way, as the writers of these letters always speak from their hearts.  You can see more from the book at Paul’s own website.

Full disclosure: the co-editor of this book, Paul De Angelis is a friend and occasional colleague, which does not make this book any less worth reading, of course.

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Nicole Helget: The Turtle Catcher

978-0547248004 – Mariner Books – paperback – $13.95 (also available as an e-book)

I found this book, written by an author I had never heard of before, by doing something very old fashioned: browsing in a bookstore.  There are many forms of discovery, but finding a book you want to read in a store is still a great pleasure.  And when you take it home and start reading it, and find out you made a lucky choice to read an exceptionally fine novel, that is a true and deeply rewarding experience.

I was surprised to learn that The Turtle Catcher is Nicole Helget’s first novel – she doesn’t write like a first novelist at all.  The opening of this novel is absolutely perfect, and is beautifully written, setting the tone for a complicated, very often painful, but also engrossing story.  Helget’s novel is mystical and magical, but these moments of “magical realism” where she enters another plane counterpoint brilliantly with the almost plainspoken story she has to tell about immigrant families in a German-American community in rural Minnesota in the early 20th century.  The book is set in the now little discussed period just before, during and after World War I, a time that was very complicated for communities of recently arrived immigrants from the old country, with Germany now the enemy of their new homeland.  The tensions within the town provide a taut backdrop for Helget’s for the focus of her story.

The author weaves together the lives of two families living on adjoining farms in the small town of New Germany, Minnesota.  Liesel Richter and Lester Sutter are at the core of the book, along with their fathers and deeply suffering mothers, and what happens to Lester, told brilliantly and painfully in the opening scene of the book is the capstone to a long, rich story of families and communities, hidden wounds and deep suffering transformed into a kind of stoic transcendence Helget’s characters embrace, almost because it is all they are capable of doing in the face of such pain.

In The Turtle Catcher, Nicole Helget has created a multi-layered family story whose characters inhabit (and illustrate for readers) a specific place and time, but as with all great novels, through their story, they are transformed into something deeply moving and powerful.  I really loved this novel, and will read it again, I am sure.

I wanted to talk to Nicole about the emotional content of the book, how she came to create this novel (it started with a short story), and discuss some of the complexities of her really wonderfully drawn characters.  I think we succeeded in exploring this writer’s work in a really interesting conversation I hope will encourage readers to seek this novel out and read it for themselves.  I do think Nicole Helget is a terrific writer, someone whose work I am deeply gratified to have discovered.

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Avery Aames: The Long Quiche Goodbye

978-0425235522 – Berkley – Mass Market Paperback Original – $7.99 (also available as an ebook 978-1101188644 at $6.99)

I don’t often read mysteries, but a few weeks ago, right in the middle of summer, the season for entertaining novels (often known as “beach reads”) I decided to give this novel a try.  The tongue-in-cheek title first caught my attention, and I really liked the unusual setting for the novel (small town Ohio) and the quirky but very believable cast of characters.  So The Long Quiche Goodbye is definitely a fun read but not just a throwaway summer book.  Avery Aames is a good writer and she has deft with her creation and handling of characters.

As I mentioned, I am not a steady reader of mysteries, so I may not be as experienced as some are with the various forms and formats of mysteries – they do fall into a set of recognizable patterns, I know.  In The Long Quiche Goodbye, our main character is Charlotte Bessette, the proprietor of the family owned cheese shop called Fromagerie Bessette, in the small town of Providence, Ohio.  At the gala re-opening of the store after a full scale renovation and modernization, the store’s landlord (whom we already know not to like) is found stabbed to death with one of the store’s knives, and Charlotte’s grandmother is the prime suspect.

We’re off from there, with a full cast of local characters, friends, family, police, and a couple of other prime suspects in town to make things interesting.  And it’s Charlotte who takes the lead in finding out who the real killer must be, as clearly, she feels (and we come to feel as well) that it could not have been her wonderful grandmother (who is the Mayor of the town!)

Avery Aames had a lot of fun writing The Long Quiche Goodbye, I think, and her pleasure and involvement with her characters comes across in the way she writes their story.  I also had a great time talking to her about this well written book, her work as a writer, and the next books in the series that this book inaugurates.  It looks like this series will be successful, and deservedly so – this first in the “Cheese Shop Mysteries” is already a national bestselling mystery novel.  You can visit Avery’s website to learn more.

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Kamran Pasha: Shadow of the Swords

978-1416579953 – Washington Square Press – Paperback Original – $16.00 (e-book edition $9.99)

I love reading really good historical novels.  I’m actually not sure how I found out about this book, but I knew I wanted to read it when I learned that the author, Kamran Pasha, is a Muslim writing about the Third Crusade from a Muslim perspective.  That’s definitely a fresh concept.  It turns out that Pasha is a terrific writer, and a deft story teller.

It’s almost impossible for Western readers not to think about the Crusades from the Christian side.  The Third Crusade, headed by Richard the Lion-Heart, is one of the best known stories ever told, and our knowledge and understanding of the great Muslim ruler Saladin is without doubt cast by the Western version of the story.  In Shadow of the Swords, we see things very differently, and not just the Muslim side, there are intriguing Jewish and female characters who are integral to the storyline in many fascinating ways.

Some of the characters and events in this book are based in reality, others are made up, but they are always consistent and believable.  By inserting the fictional Miriam, daughter of the historical Maimonides into the story of Richard and Saladin, Pasha is able to link their personae and the real historical events of the battles between them into a much more personal context, which helps bring these complicated characters to life.  We realize as the story unfolds that through their opposition, the two main characters will come to know, understand, and appreciate the other, both literally and figuratively.  Which is a lesson our modern society could stand to learn too.

Kamran Pasha is a prolific writer.  He has created novels (his first book was Mother of the Believers, another historical novel), television (Kings), video games (Blood on the Sand), and is now currently working on a theatrical film as well.  He came to writing through an interesting career – he holds a JD from Cornell Law School, an MBA from Dartmouth and an MFA from UCLA Film School. He spent three years as a journalist in New York City before he went to Hollywood to become a full time creative writer.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and talking to Kamran Pasha was a terrific experience I hope you will also enjoy.   And do enjoy this serious, well written and very compelling novel.  It’s literate, well written and packed with interesting ideas that lives up to its billing as an “epic novel.”  Pasha blogs passionately about many current issues at his own website, well worth a visit.

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Dale Pendell: The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse

978-1556438950 – North Atlantic Books – Hardcover – $21.95

This is an amazing novel.  Consider it a work of “ecological science fiction” as some have called it.  I found it captivating, terrifying, incredibly emotive and reading it becomes almost a spiritual exercise.  Pendell posits a worldwide collapse of population from a biological war gone amok.  More than 95% of humanity disappears, almost overnight.  He actually does not spend much time on this part of the story, horrific as it is, because that catastrophe is really just the lead in for the much bigger story of what happens next.

Aside from the critical principle of understanding, that modern human society will simply collapse, that going back to prior technologies becomes impossible because people no longer have the knowledge or skills, to live the way our ancestors did, and critically, cannot relearn them overnight in the face of societal collapse, the central tenet of this novel is that climate change will have been unleashed by what modern society *has already done* to the natural world.  The computer models of planetary climate change are simply not able to fully contain and predict the massiveness of what is about to happen to the planet and the natural world that inhabits it.

The novel is essentially a brilliant imagining of what might or could be the future of the planet over the next hundreds, thousands of years, based on the supposition that humans have already begun this process of change.  It’s a rich set of interlocking stories, mostly focused on the area that is known today as California, a bio-geographic landscape that author Pendell knows well, and imagines changing in profound and sometimes painful ways for the reader of his story.

This is a very unusual novel – really the main character is the planet and there are no traditional heroic human characters at its center.  While we might search for and find labels for it (“dystopian” or “utopian,” “science fiction” or even “parable”), I’d rather think of it as a kind of vision-telling, a myth in the making, that seeks to change the way we think about ourselves.  Indeed, there is a great deal of suffering and difficulty in the book, and at the same time, a powerful sense of continuity, what truly sustains.   As the great poet Gary Snyder (who is a fictionalized character in the book, as it happens), says about the novel: “Civilizations and technologies die or are lost, but human ingenuity–families, tribes, and villages, the musicians, shamans, philosophers, and people of power–live on.”  I’d add that not only does human ingenuity live on, so does Gaia, our planet home, adjusting and re-adjusting its inner and outer being, regardless of which or how many humans may be hanging on for dear life.

In my conversation with Dale, we talked about his background as a writer, poet, biologist, and how this brilliant vision of a book came into being.  It’s an interview and a book I’d recommend to all my friends and colleagues – it’s impossible to read and not do alot of thinking about the future, as well as what we need to do about it – right now.

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Gayle Brandeis: Delta Girls

978-0345492623 – Ballantine – Paperback – $15.00 (also available as an e-book at $9.99)

I think I have been lucky lately – I keep finding new novelists I have never heard of before, whose work turns out to be really good.  Literary discovery is very exciting.  Gayle Brandeis is one of those novelists whose work is completely new to me.  Delta Girls is her third novel for adults, and she has one other for young adults.  Her social awareness as a writer has been recognized for a previous novel (that I now want to read) called The Book of Dead Birds – it won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, which I consider high praise indeed.  One of Gayle’s great accomplishments in Delta Girls is to include a strong undercurrent of social awareness in a way that enhances the story and does not in any way intrude on one’s enjoyment of the novel and its characters.

Delta Girls is a terrific novel (great cover too, and yes, I do think the overall book package does contribute to the experience for the reader).  Its construct is unusual – each chapter is the alternating story of two characters whose relationship is not divulged until nearly the end of the book.  First is Izzy, who with her nine year old daughter Quinn, is constantly on the move as an itinerant fruit picker in California.  As the story opens, they arrive at a pear orchard in the Sacramento River Delta.  As with all her stops, Izzy has no intention of staying very long. But the orchard, its locale, and the family that owns it has a strong attraction for both Izzy and Quinn, and they both allow themselves to become involved and attached to the orchard and its people.   We know that Izzy has a secret in her past, and that she has worked hard to stay away from the public eye, but events occur that put her in the middle of developments in the Delta and she will have to risk everything to save the ones she loves.

In the alternating narrative of the book, we meet Karen, a rising young star in figure skating with a pushy mother and a powerful and attractive new skating partner.  Nathan is sexy, dangerous, and deeply attractive to Karen.  As she reaches her 18th birthday, events come to a head in an unexpected and very public way.

Each main character is faced with a sudden thrust into the spotlight, and of course their narratives become more connected — but you will need to read the book to find out the surprising way their lives will intersect.

This is a very satisfying novel to read, with great characters, and of course the pear orchard and the Delta of the Sacramento River is a terrific backdrop for the book.  The author’s deep love for her characters as well as her understanding of the power of place, and its influence on people’s lives show constantly throughout the novel.

Gayle is a thoughtful and accomplished writer whose work I am really pleased to have discovered.  It is writing I want to explore more deeply.  Talking to her about this book was a pleasure I am happy to share here.  You can visit Gayle’s website here to learn more about her work.

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