Nonfiction Book Reviews

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the headline for an article, Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir of love is exposed as a hoax. Worried, I clicked on the link.  I have read some Holocaust memoirs, and I didn’t like the idea of being duped.

Well, in this case, I was fine - Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived wasn’t scheduled to be released until next month. I hadn’t been hoodwinked after all.

Except, I have been before.  I read another biography called Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, and it was only afterwards, as I did a couple of searches on Google, that I found out that much of the book was made up.  I was not impressed.

One of the latest cases of fake memoirs comes from Margaret B Jones (her real name was Margaret Seltzer, btw) who wrote a memoir that had absolutely nothing to do with reality. At least Angel at the Fence and Bringing Down the House had some vague resemblance to the real world.

Entitled Love and Consequences, it was supposedly about Margaret being a drug runner for the Bloods in LA, growing up as a foster child in the LA system, blah blah blah.  Not a word of it was true.  She was caught when her sister saw her picture for an interview done with the New York Times, and called in to tell them that it was all a lie.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at their next family reunion.

And don’t even get me started on that Frey dude.  I think we’ve all heard enough about him to last us a lifetime.  Poor Oprah - she said that the Angel at the Fence story was “the single greatest love story…we’ve ever told on air.”  That, coupled with her initial backing and enthusiasm for James Frey, makes me think that she’s going to be a lot more choosy about which guests she has on the air from now on.

So comes the inevitable question: Why?  Why would authors take the chance at being revealed as fakes before the world, when they could write the story either as it really did happen (now there’s a novel idea!) or write it as fiction?  To me, the chance of discovery is just too great.

Do you really think you can go on a national book tour, have your book made into a movie, etc, and never have anyone catch on?  What, are all of your childhood friends living in caves, where they wouldn’t see the coverage on your triumphant book tour?  (And I am assuming here that if someone has the balls to completely fabricate a story and get it published as truth, that they’d also dream that the book would be a smashing success.  What would the point be if no one cared about the memoir after all?)

Here’s my armchair analysis: These people are whacked.  They have some inner need to be recognized beyond what their life would naturally give to them, and the only way to get that recognition that they crave is to make up a life much more exciting than the one they really lived through.

In yesterday’s review of Identical Strangers, I said that the book was not an interesting read, and in the comment section, Hindleyite jokingly suggested that they should have taken “creative license” with their story to make it more interesting.  Perhaps that’s what these fake memoir authors were afraid of: That if they didn’t “spice things up” that no one would care enough to read.

The bottom line though, is that fake memoirs give a bad reputation to the whole industry.  It is hard to trust what you read, when there have been so many bad apples passed off as truth.

By the way, Love and Consequences was published by the same publishing house as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  They don’t have a real stellar track record here.  (I bet Oprah is counting her lucky stars she didn’t invite Margaret Jones onto her show too.   How much bad luck can one talk show host have?)  Perhaps this publishing house and Oprah can join forces and hire an investigative team in an attempt to not get mud smeared all over their faces again.

So, to all of my easy chair psychologists reading this: Why do you think the authors of the fake memoirs do what they do?  Recognition?  Money?  To see if they can get away with it?  Because they’re flat-out nuts?  Tell me what you think below.

Earth: The Biography by Iain Stewart and John Lynch was intellectually stimulating.  I know that sounds boring, but just stick with me here.

I had it sitting on my bookshelf for forever (I won’t tell you how long because my boss at work reads this blog sometimes, but believe me, it was a while) and I decided that I was going to clear off all of the books on that shelf that have been there too long.  A clean start with the New Years, and all that.

Boy am I glad I did.  I love it when I read a book, and walk away having a better understanding of how the universe as a whole works.  I knew, in a fuzzy sort of way, that nature is intricately intertwined, and that the world is one giant balancing act, but I don’t think I truly understood it until I read this book.

I think the best part of this book is how it makes the connections between various sciences.  It isn’t just about space, or the beginning of life, or the ocean, or volcanoes, or hurricanes, it’s about all of this and more.  It’s like the joke we’ve all heard a million times, about the blind men who were each trying to describe an elephant, but were only describing the part that they themselves could feel.  Although each blind man was technically getting it right, it’s only when you combine the trunk with the tail, ears, legs, and body that you actually know what an elephant looks like.

I feel like I’ve been learning about each individual part of this world, without being able to “see the big picture.”  Earth: The Biography has shown me the big picture.

This book becomes a grand slam when you add in the beautiful pictures and great writing style.  I was never bored nor lost even once while reading, which you have to admit is quite the feat, considering I am not a geologist (nor do I play one on TV).

Here’s a quotation I loved:

In his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, the esteemed American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offered perhaps the most resonant of metaphors, compressing 4.5 billion years of planetary history into a 24-hour day.  Our planet’s birth takes place on the stroke after midnight, and the “Cambrian explosion” - in which complex animals first start crawling about - doesn’t happen until 10 p.m. 

Dinosaurs don’t show up until after 11 p.m. and are snuffed out 20 minutes before midnight, while modern humans arrive on the scene in the last two seconds of the day.  Human civilization - some 6,000 years of empire, art, religion, and politics - is squeezed into the last tenth of a second.

Talk about mind-boggling.

Earth almost makes me wish we could really go hog wild and actually get cable television, so I could watch the National Geographic channel.  I think I’d really like it.  Unfortunately, I can just see me spending lots of time watching junk instead, so we’d better not.  I am a reader, through and through, so perhaps I wouldn’t get as much out of the National Geographic channel as I do the books anyway.

Earth: The Biography wins the rare 5 out of 5 stars rating from me.

Hava

Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps by Andrea Warren is a well-written biography of Jack Mandelbaum, a boy living just inside Poland’s borders at the beginning of World War II.  It is a young adult book - I would say the child reading it would need to be at least 9 or 10 - and even though it was written for that age group, it was so well-written, I still enjoyed it.

It starts out with Jack as a child in Poland, and the happy upbringing that he had.  Although his grandparents were Jewish, his parents were not devout, and so Jack considered himself Polish first, and Jewish as a far, far second.  When the war started, Jack was excited, like any 12-year-old boy would be, at the sight of soldiers matching and the naval ships readying to fight against Hitler.  He was sure that Poland would be able to beat Hitler in a week.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened, and things got progressively worse for Jack, his family, and the Jews in Poland in general.  He eventually ends up in the concentration camps, and he talked about the friends who helped him, the horrible jobs he was given, and the starvation that surrounded him.  Although there are obviously a lot of bad things happening to him and everyone around him, Jack was a naturally optimistic person, and the book never got really depressing (except a little at the end).

Overall, I enjoyed it - it tended to read a little simplistically, but then again, I wasn’t the intended age group for the book, so I can’t really complain.  If you are studying the Holocaust with your children, and you want a companion book for The Diary of Anne Frank, this would be the perfect complement: It is from the point of view of a boy, and it covers the concentration camps, so your children can get a more well-rounded view of what happened in that terrible atrocity.

I give Surviving Hitler 4.5 stars out of 5.

Havs

Note: Joel Glenn Brenner is a woman, and there should be a umlaut above the “e” in her first name, although I don’t have a clue of how to produce one of those on my keyboard. Just so you weren’t too confused by me referring to a “Joel” as a girl…

I was checking a patron out at the front desk when I saw The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner in the stack. Intrigued, I put the book on hold as soon as the patron walked out the door.

When the patron returned it, I eagerly started reading and boy am I glad that I did.  I will never look at the candy aisle at the store the same.  Before reading this book, I was rather clueless about the chocolate world, and in fact, if asked, I would have said that Hershey and Mars had merged together and were the same company now.  (Don’t ask me why I thought that, but that’s what I believed.)

Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.  There is an intense rivalry between Hershey and Mars, akin to the one between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and actually, Hershey and Mars don’t play well together.  At all.  But that isn’t always how it was: In the beginning, Hershey helped Mars get started, and provided all of the chocolate for Mars for years.

Then to get even more bizarre, I found out what M&M stands for.  If you ask a Mars worker, they’ll tell you, “The owner liked his name Mars so much, he used it twice!” ie, it’s Mars & Mars.  Although it’s a good line, it’s not true, and in fact the second M stands for Murrie, the last name of the president of Hershey.

I told you it was bizarre.

This book was fascinating for me - I love to learn, I love chocolate, and Ms. Brenner is very adept at weaving in interesting tidbits and making it read more like a novel than a dry economics book on how these two companies came to be where they are.  She is a former newspaper reporter for the Washington Post, and it shows - she has a great writing style.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits:

• The secrecy is so strict at Mars that when their machinery breaks down and they have to hire an outside company to come fix it, they meet the mechanic at the door, blindfold him, walk him through the plant to the machine, take off the blindfold, let him do his job, then blindfold him again to walk him back out. All very politely, of course.
• Because Mars is a privately held company, they are not required to reveal anything about anyone to anybody they don’t want to.  If you call Mars and ask for the name of the president of the company, the secretary will say very politely, “We don’t give out that information” and click! hang up the phone on you.
• The men who started each company (Hershey and Mars) struggled an incredible amount before becoming successful.  Both of them lost their shirts multiple times before finally making it.  The author goes through the story of each man quite in-depth, and I felt like I was reading the biography of each man, along with the general story of the companies themselves.
• After the death of founder Milton Hershey, the Hershey company was mismanaged so badly that they started to sink, and quickly.   A small example of the problem: they kept track of what they were selling by counting the cases - they sold X amount of 6 packs, Y amount of 12 packs.  A 6 pack of what, they didn’t know.  They didn’t differentiate between a Hershey bar and a Kit Kat bar.  They simply knew that all together, they had sold X amount of 6 packs.  Which is an insane way of doing business.  This has changed since then.
• Mars sells very little peanut butter candy because the owners hate peanut butter. I don’t blame them (I hate peanut butter too!) but I do think that it’s a strange reason to make a financial decision.  Then again, not having to explain their decisions to anyone isone of the biggest reasons they have stayed a privately owned company.
• The Hershey company is the sole supporter of one of the largest and richest orphanages in the world.  Philanthropy was one of the guiding principles of Mr. Hershey’s life, although his dream of a Utopia didn’t play out like he wanted it to.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to ruin the book by saying too much.  I will say this: If someone had sat down and tried to come up with two completely different stories of how a chocolate company came into being, they couldn’t have done better than the two stories you hear here.  Mars and Hershey are diametrically opposite in every way except for the fact that both companies make chocolate.  It really was a great story.

I also enjoyed the fact that Brenner focuses on more than just Hershey and Mars - she also interviews and talks about other candy companies in the US and around the world.  It gives you a great perspective on the candy world.

The only part that I didn’t like is that I felt that Brenner tended to go on and on about uninteresting things at certain points of the book, stuff that a good editor would have chopped out.  It was definitely longer than it needed to be, and I found myself skimming a few times.

Overall, I think it’s worth 4.25 out of 5 stars.  If you’re interested in economics or are a chocolate lover, you’ve got to check this book out.  I promise you, trying to pick out a candy bar at the grocery store will become a whole different experience after having read it.

Hava

When I first read Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich, I wasn’t overly impressed by it, but rather pegged it as a mindless read, good for a summer afternoon at the beach.  It was more of an escapism book than you’d normally find in the nonfiction section, that’s for sure.

I had picked it up because I saw advertisements for the movie 21 (it’s based on the book) and figured it’d be fun to read.  What was surprising to me (although it shouldn’t have been, looking back on it) was the fact that the book is mostly fiction.

First, the plot: Basically, Ben Mezrich meets a guy at a party (Kevin Lewis) who says he has an amazing story to tell, and he wants Ben to tell it in a book.  Ben gets this kind of thing all the time as a writer so he really didn’t expect much, but to humor him, he agreed to listen.

Kevin told him a story that would be unbelievable to the average person: He was recruited as an MIT student, to learn how to count cards and play blackjack.  He was then sent to Las Vegas and other gambling cities to win the backers (the ones supplying the bankroll) the big bucks.  He got a cut of what he made, and became very rich because of this lifestyle.

All of that is actually true.  What’s not true is the embellishments that Ben Mezrich added to make the book more “readable,” as he put it.  In an interview with the Boston Globe, Mezrich said, “Every word on the page isn’t supposed to be fact-checkable.”  He also said, “The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it’s true.”

That really, no really bugged me.  I read a nonfiction book, expecting it to be *ahem* nonfiction.  I know, a real shocker there.  There was a laundry list of items that were completely made up (click on the link to the interview above if you’re interested) and then a whole other list of items that were exaggerated, changed, and warped in order for the book to be more “readable.”

Ben Mezrich did manage to achieve his goal of being more readable - his book became a New York Times bestseller.  I don’t like the methods used to achieve that goal though. I’ve never been a fan of the saying, “The ends justify the means,” and this was no exception.

I give Bringing Down the House 1.5 out of 5 stars, and I’m putting Ben Mezrich on my blacklist of authors.  I will never pick up one of his books again.  If you’re wanting some real information on Las Vegas, make sure to head on over to my friend’s blog, Living in Las Vegas.  It’s guaranteed 100% nonfiction.

Hava

Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton was an absolute mess of a book.  I started reading the book with the following in mind:

1) I liked President Clinton for his economic policies (I’m going to review Alan Greenspan’s book, Age of Turbulence in a little while and I’ll make sure to tell you then what Alan said about Clinton’s track record on economics, but suffice it to say that he did a good job in that respect.)  I didn’t like the fact that he seemed to chase after every woman in a skirt.

2) I didn’t like Monica Lewinsky.  After all, when the whole thing was happening, there really wasn’t much that would have inspired me to go, “Wow, what a neat lady!” but instead, rather the opposite.  Even ardent Clinton supporters weren’t cheering Monica on, but rather saying that if he had an affair, it wasn’t the nation’s business.

3) I expected this book to be unbiased, or at least not blatantly leaning one way or the other.  This is not Monica having someone ghostwrite her story for her - it’s written by Andrew Morton, and as he made sure to point out in the beginning, Monica had only the power to do fact checking, and nothing else.  She couldn’t change something he said, as long as it was true, no matter how unflattering of a light it cast on her.  I took this to mean he would be unbiased.  Crazy me, I know.

4) I expected to learn to like Monica, because after all, this book was about her and what happened in her life.  Once you “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” (or at least watch them walk that mile, lol!) you start to appreciate better what they went through, and you gain greater sympathy for them.  I expected to learn things about Monica that I didn’t know before, and end up having a higher opinion of her than I did to start with.

5) I expected the book to cover the whole situation thoroughly and give me the background to understand what was going on.  I was in high school when the scandal broke, and I didn’t have the time or the inclination to pay much attention.  All I knew was that there was an intern messing around with the president, some Starr guy was in there somehow, and there was a blue dress with semen on it.  Oh, and Clinton said his infamous line, “That depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”   That was all I knew before starting this book.  I expected to have the gaps filled in, and then some.

Pretty much every one of my preconceived notions got blown to smithereens.

I will say that my view on Clinton’s economic policies didn’t change (since that wasn’t even mentioned in this book), and I saw nothing to change my mind on the fact that he chased every woman in a skirt.  My opinion of him (already low) sank lower as I read what happened.  Is it possible to have negative respect for someone?

But the idea that the author would pretend to be unbiased is utterly laughable.  He didn’t even try.  Although he stopped short of calling Linda Tripp the devil incarnate, he came pretty darn close.  Here’s a quotation that really made my eyebrows raise:

[Tripp], who emerges as the wicked witch in this tragic fairy story, constantly dangled the rosy-skinned apple of romance in front of a trusting and gullible Monica Lewinsky. Page 96, Monica’s Story

Wow.  So Monica was an innocent Snow White, Linda Tripp was the wicked witch, and what, Bill Clinton was the prince?

Gag me with a spoon.

Even with Mr. Morton’s strenuous efforts to make Monica out into the good guy in this story (a story that quite frankly I don’t think has a good guy) Monica still ended up completely unlikable.  She never once says that she’s sorry she had an affair with President Clinton.  Not once.  She does say a couple of times that she was sorry she got caught, but to me that’s almost worse.

The more I learned about her in the book, the more I was unsurprised at that lack of regret.  She actually had an affair with a married man before she ever met Pres. Clinton - a five year affair that was an on-again, off-again tumultuous mess that I felt dirty even reading about.  She met Andy Bleiler when he was engaged to someone else, but Monica and Andy still dated for two years.  In the meanwhile, he gets married, and his wife gets pregnant.  When the wife is 3 - 4 months pregnant, Monica finally sleeps with Andy for the first time, at age 19.  She eventually becomes good friends with the wife (kid you not!) and even babysits the children so the husband and wife can go out on dates together!  She buys the children Christmas presents and is considered “one of the family” even as she’s secretly boinking the husband.  Monica at one point breaks up with Andy because she was angry - he dared to cheat on her with another girlfriend, something he did more than once.  Could it get more ironic than that?

Monica spends most of her time in this book crying.  I should go back through and highlight every time Monica spends the weekend crying, sobbing, or self-medicating by eating herself into oblivion.  I think the tally would shock you.  She is not emotionally stable and I wanted to just shake her by her shoulders and say, “What on this green earth are you doing?!  How can you be so smart yet be so incredibly stupid at the same time?”  After all, she was a very smart cookie, when it came to book smarts.  But she was as dumb as rocks when it came to men.  As of the writing of this book in 1999, she’d had two serious relationships in her life - both with married men.  I’m hoping that track record has improved since then, but I don’t care enough to find out.

Then you’ve got the one thing you would think would be a no-brainer: Cover the situation well so that the reader knows what’s happening.  Even this didn’t happen.  Mr. Morton would say things like, “Which led to the famous cigar incidence” or “Which brought about the famous news conference,” and then not explain what famous news conference, or what famous cigar incident (although I eventually pieced that one together. ;-))  I was completely lost.  Even if I had paid attention at the time, I wouldn’t remember it 10+ years after the fact.  It was as if the writer sat down with the idea in his mind that all of his readers had read and memorized the Starr Report, plus read all of the large newspapers’ coverage of the shenanigan, and would be able to remember the smallest details about what happened.  His goal was to provide Monica’s point of view, and nothing else, and that’s exactly what he did.

I didn’t even finish the book.  I felt like I had read 136 pages of tabloid magazine crap, and that was more than enough.  There was no way I was going to be able to make it through another 143 pages of this junk.  It made me feel dirty, as if I had just indulged myself in a two day marathon of horrid, catty, nasty gossiping.  I felt like I needed a shower when I put it down.

I give this one 0.75 out of 5 stars.  I wouldn’t wish this book on anyone.  If you’ve made it your life goal to learn everything you can about Monica Lewinsky, I guess you could read it, but I’d suggest finding a new life goal instead - something actually worth obtaining.

Havs

I know this is a little late, considering I’ve been blogging here for several weeks now, but I figured this was the start of my first full month at Today, and I wanted to talk a little about why I chose nonfiction as my blog subject.

I actually work at the local library, and when I first started there this past August, I was a fiction reader to the bitter end.  Sure, I had read an occasional nonfiction book, but I remember telling people that nonfiction books were “boring” and that I liked reading fiction because it had plot lines!

The first book to really make me see how wrong I was, was Three Cups of Tea, a book about a guy named Greg Mortenson who went to Afghanistan to climb K2, ends up getting lost (twice!), and finally wanders into a local village on the verge of death.  The villagers saved his life (he almost froze and starved to death) and as he was recuperating, he asked to be shown around the village.

They did so, and as they walked around, he realized that there wasn’t a school.  He asked where the school was located, and they hemmed and hawwed - they really didn’t want to tell him.  They finally gave in, and took him around the corner to see this group of children out in the open, writing on the ground with sticks.  They were quiet, concentrating, and there were no adults in sight.  He was in shock.  He was trying to imagine a group of kids in America, let loose outside and told to go do homework without any adult supervision.  His imagination failed him.  That would never happen in America.

He decided right then and there that he wanted to help build a school in this village.  He had no idea what he just got himself into!  He built that school, and then built hundreds of others.  He’s done absolutely amazing work in Afghanistan, and some of the surrounding countries too.  It was a captivating look at this man’s life, and how he was able to affect so many people’s lives, when at many times during his life, he was actually homeless and completely broke!  I finished the book with a can-do spirit, and a real feeling of “Wow!  That was an amazing book!!!”  And just like that, I was hooked.

I quickly started reading only nonfiction books, and found that I loved a large variety of them.  Some of my favorites are the 921’s - that’s library speak for autobiographies and biographies. (In the Dewey decimal system, all of the auto/biographies are in the 921 section, and at our library, there are whole ROWS of books dedicated to just that decimal.)  I also enjoy cookbooks (I like reading cookbooks.  The strange thing is, I don’t particularly like to cook, although I love to eat.  Hmm….) I love political stuff, and just for kicks and grins, an occasional paranormal story too!  I think you’ll find that my tastes are pretty varied, so hopefully we can find some books in common.

If you’ve read a great nonfiction book that you think I should read and review, please leave a comment on this or any of my posts - I’d love to hear from you.

I’m very excited to be onboard here at Today, and I look forward to many years of bragging about my latest find in the nonfiction world!

Havs

I picked up Home: A Memoir of my Early Years by Julie Andrews from the library because I grew up watching Sound of Music and it remains to this day one of my all-time favorite movies.

I discovered a lot of interesting information about her in this book, although it wasn’t quite all that I was hoping for. Because of my love of Sound of Music, I had hoped that she would go through to that part of her life, but it stops short of her starting work on Mary Poppins, which was the movie she completed directly before Sound of Music. So I was rather disappointed about that, although if I hadn’t expected anything about Sound of Music, that obviously wouldn’t have been a big deal to me. The subtitle was, “A Memoir of my Early Years” but I was still hopeful.

The other thing that struck me strange was how the book ended. She’s married to a guy that she had known and had been friends with since the age of 14. They had dated for a long time, eventually moved in together, and eventually after that got married. She never hinted at any sort of trouble between them. She talks about having a baby girl together. Life is great. The book ends with them literally flying off into the sunset (they were off on their way to California for Julie to shoot Mary Poppins). You never would have guessed from what she was writing, that her marriage was anything but idyllic. Except because of comments made earlier in the book, you know that 11 years later, she’s divorced from her first husband, and married to the second one. ??? Perhaps she was trying to protect the first husband by not going into personal details, I don’t know, but it made for a rather confusing ending, because I kept waiting for an explanation as to why her first husband and her divorced. I never got one.

Other than those two items, I really enjoyed the book. I hadn’t spent a lot of time previously exploring Julie’s life, so I don’t know how much of the information in the book had been known before to Julie fans, but to me, it was all new, and all quite good to read. It’s amazing how much she’s gone through in her life - you would never have guessed it, looking at her and how she comports herself in the movies and in interviews. Her mother was a drunk and not at all a stabilizing influence; Julie spent most of her childhood taking care of herself; they were very poor and as a teenager her family almost completely depended on her to bring in the income to keep them off the streets; her stepfather was a drunk too who couldn’t keep down a job and who tried to molest Julie as a child - it was not a picturebook childhood, to say the least. It’s amazing to me that she can portray such an amazing motherly persona as an actress, with virtually no role model to get the inspiration from. Her childhood story is quite depressing, although Julie relays it all with the famous British stiff upper lip - she didn’t bemoan and groan that childhood as others might have done. She simply talked about it as “that was the way it was” and there wasn’t much else to it.

If you’re looking for a great biographical read on one of the best known actresses/singers out there, you’ll really enjoy this book. She’s a talented writer (she wrote the book herself, which is rather unusual for star autobiographies) - I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars. Also, if you want more information, she has a website - The Julie Andrews Collection , which has lots of info on the children’s books that she’s written.

Havs