Manhood of Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of personal stories about the author’s children, parents, and personal experiences. Most are tone-perfect, especially the ones about his children. I liked the one where he bemoans the advent of complicated Lego kits that require parental assistance (although in our house the young builder never did) and pines for the old days when the kids had to create their own designs. There’s also a very sweet one about his ex-father in law and how divorce deprived him of what sounded like a very satisfying relationship to an old-school man.

And I wonder: how is it that writers can expose intimate secrets about their love life or drug use where anyone, including their own children they are clearly concerned about protecting? It seems so much safer to write a novel in which the character has the same (or enhanced) adventures under a pseudonym…

When Everything Changed by Gail Collins

When Everything Changed tells the story of women in the US from 1960 to the present (including Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s presidential campaigns. It’s a rather messy book that combines historical narratives and individual women’s stories, some puzzlingly mundane, but it reads very well, like the story of our moms, older sisters, and daughters. It talks about girdles as easily as the doomed Equal Rights amendment, about Barbie’s choice of boyfriends and the rigidly sexist ways of communes. And while it highlights many famous women, from Betty Friedan to Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who could not clerk for Felix Frankfurter because she wore pants — good heavens!), it also presents women I did not know about, women who fought to become switchmen (I guess switchperson or switch specialist was still in the distance!) or simply sought to live with their boyfriends rather than in their college dorms.

we’ve come a long way from girdles and 60% college dropout rates for women because they got married before getting their degrees. What’s astonishing to see is the extraordinary resistance placed on the changes, every step of the way, while from today’s perspective it seems completely obvious that women should be able to wear pants, become switch specialists, and sign up for their own loans. May the rest of the journey be smoother.

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford

The author of Shop Class as Soulcraft makes some points that I completely agree with: that pushing all teenagers to college is counter-productive, that what we pompously call knowledge work is often plain silly, that the feeling we have after fixing a tangible object such as a motorbike is uncomparably fullfilling.

The author owns a motorcycle shop and also happens to have a Ph.D. in philosophy so unfortunately he lapses into unpenetrable sentences such as “The market ideal of Choice by an autonomous Self seems to act as a kind of narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the development of such agency by providing easier satisfactions.” Huh?

Fortunately, the bits about his shop, his growing up in the East Bay of the San Francisco area, and his troubleshooting experiences are funny and sweet. Too bad I cannot recommend the entire package to a teenager who’s looking for a hands-on career.

Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo

The author of Dead Aid, a Zambian-born woman with several advanced degrees in economics,starkly stakes that traditional, government-to-government aid, simply serves to line the pockets of corrupt leaders and chokes the economies of the receiving countries. She makes a very strong argument that fostering economic growth in very poor countries and there’s a good to-to list for governments, starting with eliminating quotas and import taxes, as well as plenty of action items for all of us: aid seems to work quite well both for emergencies and when delivered outside government channels. So there is plenty of work to do both for governments, staring with removing quotas and export duties, as well as for all of us since aid seems to work well for emergencies and when delivered outside the formal government channels (Kiva, here we come!)

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna tells the life story of a teenager to young man who makes his own way in the world between Mexico and the United States, thanks to a Mexican mother whose main purpose is to find a husband and a distracted, remote, and often inept American father. Along the way he works for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, which will create big problems for him when McCarthyism gripes the US (and he has become a well-known novelist).

It’s a big, engrossing story, but I found the historical coincidences to be so overwrought that they interfered with the enjoyment of the story.  What are the chances that a talented novelist would be working as a cook for Frida Kahlo, let alone Trotsky? The book is at its best when it describes more ordinary historical events: the draft, the baby boom, the creation of the suburbs. And even better when it captures the Mexican cook who takes the boy under his wing, the racist boarding house owner who will not rent to Jews, the loyal secretary with humble roots and a strong sense of justice, not to forget the conventional, narrow-minded members of the small-town book club. I would have preferred the story to be lower-key.

Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Naming Nature tells the story of taxonomy, organizing animals and plants into families, from the 18th century efforts of Linnaeus and others to create order by simply looking carefully at specimens all the way to today’s DNA-driven and sometimes counter-intuitive results: is there no such thing as a fish?

If you thought that taxonomy is very, very boring, read this book: the author manages to make the topic read like an adventure novel, with eccentric characters (starting with Linnaeus himself, who saw himself as General Linnaeus of the Flora’s army and used his enemies names for particularly unattractive plants), traditional people who classify special birds as humans, factional fights between scientists that make politicians seem mild and well-mannered, and funny tests for the readers on identifying Humabisan bird names  (the Huambisa are a Peruvian rain forest tribe).

In an effort to learn more about taxonomy I have in the living room the enormous “Biology 1A” textbook my daughter used last year, sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. And perhaps it will stay there for many more weeks, untouched, because of this book. Highly recommended.

The Other Side of Sadness by George Bonanno

If you have ever felt that your grief did not quite follow what the books say you “should” feel after a loss, The Other Side of Sadness is for you. It seems that the standard denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance stages simply do not apply to a lot of otherwise completely normal and sensitive people, and that many people cope much better and faster with loss than the theories might suggest, perhaps because the theories are based on studying the minority of people who find it difficult and lengthy to recover. The same theories also tell us it’s helpful to talk somberly about our feelings of loss to get better but perhaps that’s exactly the opposite that’s needed, at least for many of us.

The author shows how different traditions handle death in ways that are not exactly familiar to us, including joking about the dead or continuing to dialog with them after their death — so clearly there’s a range of comforting behaviors that we should feel free to adopt if they can help. The book goes on some long personal tangents but overall I found it very interesting.

Uncertain Peril by Claire Hope Cummings

According to the author of Uncertain Peril, Bush’s largest wrongdoing in his handling of the Iraq war is not the killing or torturing of civilians, no, it’s the destruction of the seed bank of Baghdad. Seriously? While I understand the wisdom and need to preserve a diversity of seeds for the long-term safety of all of us, surely we should put human lives ahead of seeds — and in any case there are other seed-preserving efforts around the world so no irreplaceable treasure was lost.

To be sure, the author can rant equally well against the ravages of the Bush administration and those of … UC Berkeley, not known to be a close ally of the Bush camp,  whose evil ways are proven, according to her, because any university that dares to manipulate DNA must be serving the interests of the (obviously evil) large agribusiness companies.

While I would be sympathetic to a rational argument that unchecked genetic engineering can be dangerous and we should exert some control over same agribusiness companies her rant made me close the book. Does she seriously think that the right way to do agriculture is to process the rice harvest by hand, as she describes as they do in Vietnam where thousands of women painstakingly dry out the rice right on the street, while men drink beer? Let’s think rather than rant and find a judicious balance between wild experimenting and retreating to the stone age.

American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson

American on Purpose is the memoir of the host of the Late, Late Show, which I have to admit I have never watched (no time for TV: how else do you think I read all these books?) Craig Ferguson has had a storied life including very humble beginnings as a musician and stand-up comic in his native Scotland and in England, and a spectacular career as an alcoholic and a drug-addict, which seems to have been cured once and for all in an English rehab clinic, the address of which should be shared with all in need. He talks kindly about everyone, ex-wives included, and seems to make fun mostly of himself, from when he was the designated holder of the dart board while his brother played to the night he spent sleeping in the parking lot of a sleazy casino when he learned he would host the Late, Late Show. And no prior knowledge of the man is required to enjoy his memoir: I was able to follow all his adventures without having ever heard of him or most of the other famous people he talks about.

Hands of my Father by Myron Uhlberg

Hands of My Father is the sweet remembrance of the author’s childhood, growing up with two deaf parents asa hearing child who had to serve as an interpreter in a world that was not too kind to any kind of disability and certainly not to deafness. Even his parents’ families treated them with surprising callousness: both became deaf as a result of childhood diseases but no relative tried to learn sign language to communicate properly with them, and they seem to have been treated as mentally deficient rather than simply deaf.

Still, his deaf parents managed to create a loving and supportive environment for their hearing sons, even if not everything was rosy, especially for the author, the oldest, who often felt that his responsibilities were overwhelming. He tells about the love and the frustrations both, for a very satisfying, happy family memoir.