Nonfiction Book Reviews

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I first heard about Schuyler’s Monster: A Father’s Journey With His Wordless Daughter by Robert Rummel-Hudson from a patron who was returning the book. He said that his wife read it, and thought it was excellent. Intrigued, I checked it out and brought it home, only to promptly forget about it.

It sat on my shelf for a while, until a couple of days ago, when I finally decided that I needed to either read it or return it. I figured I’d give it the first chapter to prove its worth, or it was going back to the return bin.

Well, I read it and fell in love with it.

Schuyler (pronounced “Sky-ler”) is a beautiful little girl (yes, that is her on the front cover of the book) who was born with an extremely rare disease that robs her of the ability to speak coherently. It also causes her to have only partial small muscle control, which means that it’s difficult for her to use sign language.  She does it, but it’s hard and some of the more difficult signs are out of her reach. And in the other cases of people afflicted with this disease, there is usually mental retardation, although they aren’t positive that’s something Schuyler has been afflicted with.

But up until Schuyler’s 18-month birthday, nobody realized anything was wrong with her. She was a smiley, happy baby who won the hearts of everyone around her; she was able to walk and eat like other babies, and she did make noises. During a routine check-up with the doctor, however, the doctor started to probe deeper and they started to realize that not all was right in the land of Oz. It took several years and many, many tests to finally receive a correct diagnosis.

The eventual result of the testing and diagnosis was that they realized that Schuyler was never going to be able to speak like “a normal person.”  Up to that point, they had been hoping that with enough therapy and work, Schuyler would eventually be able to speak clearly.  So they started looking at options that would provide Schuyler a way to communicate with the rest of the world.

Like I said before, sign language is something she can do, but not well, so they went after a high-tech option that if Schuyler would have been born 20 years earlier, never would have been available to her.  It was an “alternative augmentative communication device” or an AAC device.

An AAC in its most basic form allows the person to push buttons and then the device says the sentence outloud.  The picture I have posted is of the latest and most high tech version yet, the Vantage Lite, but at $7,295 it isn’t cheap.  The funding would normally come from a school district, but the majority of Schuyler’s Monster is spent chronicling their fight to get an AAC for Schuyler, and to get the teacher support needed for this type of device to work.

So that’s the story in a nutshell. Although it’s a sad story, on the surface there isn’t much there to grab you and hold your attention. But it’s the writing that really does it for me. Rummel is a blogger (check out Schuyler’s Monster blog) and in fact this book grew out of that blog, not the other way around. His writing style causes this to be one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year. I cried, I laughed, and everything in between.

I cannot tell you how thoroughly I enjoyed Schuyler’s Monster.  It is rare to find an author who is willing to be so open about his life and his feelings.  Life wasn’t hunky-dory.  The family went through a lot, and they almost didn’t make it.  I appreciated Rummel being willing to tell it exactly how it was, and to tell it so well, I cared about them through out it all.

For a darling video of Schuyler using her very first AAC (or “box of words” as Rummel calls it) check out the following.  Keep in mind, she’s 5 years old in this video.

I give Schuyler’s Monster 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Schuyler - I know you’re going places, girl.

Havs

When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase is, by far, the most unusual book I have ever read.  It was recommended to me by Stephanie of Rocket Scientist as a good book to read if interested in multiple personalities.

I have to say, I haven’t ever read or watched anything about multiple personalities before, so I started this book with a clean slate.  Even so, this book blew me away.  I don’t even know where to start.  I guess the general outline of the book would be as good as any…

Truddi Chase was two years old when her mother left her father, and moved in with her stepfather.  This turned out to be a Very Bad Thing in Truddi’s life, because the stepfather was the biggest slimebag to ever walk the earth.  He raped Truddi, at age two.  The sexual abuse continued unabated until her teenage years, when her mother finally, finally, threw the guy out.

On top of that, Truddi was also subjected to emotional and physical abuse by both her mother and her stepfather.  Her mother knew what the stepfather was doing to her daughter, but instead of defending her daughter, she blamed the daughter for all of it, saying that she was a “dirty” person, and that it was all her fault that this was happening to her.  There were also step-siblings in the picture who were also being abused, although Truddi doesn’t focus on that very much.

There is much, much more to the emotional, sexual, and physical abuse than what I’m stating above, but it was hard enough to read the first time around - I don’t think I can bring myself to type it out.  The bottomline is, the overwhelming pain and degradation was so extreme, Truddi’s mind formed other personalities in order to deal with it all.

There are several things that are fairly common when someone has multiple personalities:

First, the core personality is the one that was present at birth, and that personality is still around and available.

Second, most counselors try to help the personalities reintegrate into one, so that there is only one person left inside of the body.

Neither of those statements are true in Truddi’s case.  When she was raped by her stepfather at age two, her core personality died, and her multiple personalities were born.  Two core personalities came into being: One that was the child personality, and one that eventually became the adult personality.  On top of those two came 90+ other personalities, all of them serving their own functions in support of Truddi.  Some personalities died, and only an echo of them was left.

Sound confusing?  Oh yeah.  This was a mind-bending book.  The multiple personalities called themselves as a whole “the Troops,” and it was the Troops who actually wrote the book.  If you look at the front cover, it says, “The Troops for Truddi Chase” as the author.

When the counselor talked to Truddi, he could see differences in her as he spoke to her, depending on which personality was controlling her.  She was tested, and there were measurable differences in speech pattern, brain wave activity, intelligence level, handwriting, posture, voice, etc, depending on the personality.  Even her eye color and cheekbone structure changed.

Get this: Some of the personalities had allergies, so during allergy season, they couldn’t come out front and be in control, because then Truddie would have been miserable.  Oh, and when one personality was in control, Truddi tested positive for pregnancy.  As soon as another personality took over, the pregnancy disappeared.

It was a mind-blowing book.  I had absolutely no idea any of this existed.  And because the book was written by the Troops, you got to see all of this from their perspective - talking to each other, talking to the counselor, doing the day-to-day tasks required to live.

I think one of the hardest things to understand was how utterly difficult this was for the woman.  The Troops created a personality that knew nothing of any abuse, so she could be the front to the world.  This personality did not think by itself, or have any desires by itself - it only did what the other personalities directed it to, which isn’t something you (or this personality) find out until late in the book.  That part just made my head hurt.

After the book was released, Truddi went on tour - she appeared on Oprah and the Phil Donohue Show.  I tried to find clips online from those appearances, but came up empty handed.  I did find out that a reporter from the Washington Post searched for Truddi’s family, and from there, found out that all of the step-brothers and sisters supported Truddi’s story, and even said that Truddi didn’t reveal all in her book: They said that on top of sexual abuse from the stepfather, she also suffered from sexual abuse from the mother too.

That was never once even hinted at in Rabbit Howls, so I’m guessing Truddi’s personalities suppressed that information very, very deep.  On the other hand (not surprisingly) the stepfather denied everything.  Wow, who saw that coming?

I tried to find follow-up information on Truddi - where is she now, how is she doing, are all of the personalities still there, etc, but came up with zip.  It’s as if she fell off the face of the planet.  If anyone has any information on what happened to her after the finish of the book, I’d love to hear about it.

I don’t know how to rate this book.  As with everything to do with it, I’m at a loss.  So I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: I’m not going to rate it.  I just don’t see how to attach a number to this book.

I will put this out there: Please, please, do not give this to your children or teenagers to read.  This is an extremely difficult book to read in terms of descriptions of different abuse that happened; if it were a movie, it would be rated X.  If language and sexuality bother you, absolutely do not pick this book up.

On the other hand, if you’re wanting to learn more about the multiple personality world, and are not easily offended, you’ll definitely want to read this.  As far as I know, this is the only multiple personality book written by the personalities themselves.  It is a rare glimpse into that world - not a pretty one, not an easy one, but one worth finding out about nonetheless.  It was hard enough for me to read this book - I cannot imagine living it.

Hava

PS If you’re interested in an in-depth look at When Rabbit Howls and multiple personality disorder in general, be sure to check out Trauma, Testimony, and Fictions of Truth: Narrative in When Rabbit Howls. It was an interesting (but long!) article that I thought did justice to the book.

I had heard about The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls from SmallWorld Reads (another book blog), who highly recommended it.  It turns out that Glass Castle was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, and yet I had never heard of it until SmallWorld mentioned it.  Don’t ask me where I’ve been.

Now that I’ve finally read it, I can see why SmallWorld (and the rest of the world, incidentally) loved it so much.  This autobiography reminded me in some ways of Three Weeks with my Brother by Nicholas Sparks.  Both sets of parents had an “interesting” outlook on parenting (basically, let the kids do whatever they wanted, as long as it didn’t actually kill anyone else) and they were both raised in extreme poverty.  But while Nicholas’ parents at least tried to feed and clothe their children, Jeannette’s parents didn’t always even do that.

This is an honest and open memoir - the some of the things that Jeannette went through as a child makes your heart hurt.  Her parents, at many points during her childhood, did not provide even the most basic of necessities - food, clothing, and at some points, shelter.  Yet unlike A Child Called It, where this is because the parent is trying to torture the child, in Glass Castle it is more simply because the parents are free-spirits, with a distinct lack of planning skills.  Oh, and the father is an alcoholic who drinks most of their money away.

At one point, a family member dies, leaving the parents with a house and quite a bit of money.  I was cheering for the family at this point - surely they would use this money to actually get ahead in life, right?  But even as I was cheering for them, I knew it wouldn’t happen.  The parents are beyond irresponsible, and sure enough, the money soon disappeared. The house fell into major disrepair, and they eventually left and moved back East, leaving the house empty behind them.

The most mind-boggling part of the book is that Jeannette clearly loves her parents.  Even though they leave her and her siblings nothing to eat at various times (forcing Jeannette to eat butter for dinner at one point) and even though their parenting style is far beyond neglectful, into the realm of outright child abuse, Jeannette seems to have been able to look back on her life and appreciate the good parts about her parents, and the things they tried to do for their children.

I think this is what makes this memoir so wonderful - it is not bitter or hateful in any way.  She loves her parents, warts and all.  It is a testament to the human spirit that she could endure something like this, and still look back on it all with love for her parents.

Despite this upbringing (or perhaps in some ways, because of it) Jeannette became quite successful in the news world, eventually becoming a columnist for MSNBC.com, until she decided to take a break and just write books for a while.  If you’re interested in more information about Glass Castle, then you’ll definitely want to check out this interview done with Jeannette Walls (warning: It’s long!) where she talks about her parents, the book, and the impact it’s had on her life.

Glass Castle was a terrific memoir - one of the best I’ve read.  I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.  If you’re one of the few people left who haven’t read this book, go check it out.  You won’t regret it.

Hava

I picked up Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches for Teach for America by Donna Foote on a whim.  I had heard about Teach for America in passing a long time ago, but I would have been hard pressed to say anything more than it was some sort of organization that took people who weren’t teachers but did have a bachelors degree and put them into classrooms.

Other than that, I didn’t know a thing.

One of my tests of whether a book is well-written or not is whether someone who has no knowledge on the background of a subject can still sit down and enjoy the book.  Relentless Pursuit passed with flying colors.

Donna Foote takes the reader through the first year of teaching as a Teach for America student, giving the perspective and insights from a handful of teachers.  She also showed the point of view of several of the administrators of the schools, along with the founder of the Teach for America company, Wendy Kopp.  Because it was able to cover the situation from such a wide variety of angles, by the end, I felt like I had a great grasp on how the company works, as opposed to if I had simply read an autobiography of one of the teachers in the program.

Unfortunately, it’s greatest strength (variety of viewpoints) was also its greatest weakness: I tended to get confused about who each person was.  If I was going to read this book again, I’d do it with a scratch piece of paper and take notes about each person and their personalities.  That way, I could keep up with the book better.  But I tend to be one of those people who gets names mixed up very easily, so this may be a Hava-only problem.

Since I live in boring Idaho, where everything is relatively safe and steady, I think the most eye-opening part of the book was the description of the school and area that the teachers were teaching in: Locke High School, in Los Angeles, California.  The idea behind Teach for America is to take educated adults (with bachelor degrees), give them a summer of training on how to be a teacher, and then put them into the worst schools in America, in an attempt to improve that school.

The teachers sign a contract saying they’ll teach for two years, and then they are actually encouraged to leave and get into business, etc, as normal.  Teach for America has figured out that if educated businessmen and women were out in the corporate field with an in-depth and personal insight on our failing schools, then they would be a better position to help those failing schools get better.

So Teach for America has a two-pronged approach: Send the teachers in to help the schools in the short-term, and then send those teachers out into the business world to help educate everyone else as to what needs to be done.

Rather ingenious, I have to say.

So when the teachers get sent to the “worst schools in America,” we’re talking some really scary places.  Locke High School is in the middle of the Crips and Blood gang territory, along with quite a few other gangs, meaning that just trying to walk to school can be extremely dangerous.  As Foote pointed out in one section, the kids are not stuffing their backpacks full of books to take to school, but rather clothing, so they can change clothes as they walk through different gang areas.  That keeps them from getting killed for wearing the wrong color of t-shirt.

If only that was an exaggeration…

As you can imagine, if you’re worried every day about whether you’re going to live or die, and trying to survive gang wars, actually learning anything in class would be at the bottom of your to-do list.  Staying alive is a lot more pressing.  So here you have a group of teachers who are idealistic, and wanting to teach the students so they can get out of Los Angeles and actually make something of themselves, but how do the teachers reach the students who have better things (like living) on their minds?

It definitely made for an incredibly interesting book.

It didn’t end with a happily-ever-after conclusion - some of the teachers quit part way through the year, incredibly disillusioned and simply ready to go home.  Some of them quit at the end of the year and went to other similar organizations like Green Dot, to see if they could make a difference there instead.  Locke High School got embroiled in a political battle, and the whole school basically ground to a halt for the next year as people were fighting over who was going to control the school.

No, it did not end happily ever after, but I think that’s the reality of dealing with real life, instead of Hollywood.  Life is messy, and Teach for America is not immune from that.

If you’re interested in the program, you must read this book.  If you want to have an inside look at one of the most troubled schools in America, Locke High School, then you don’t want to miss this book.  If you’re interested in school reform, or the state of education today, this book would be an excellent way to gain some basics on the ground.  And if you’re interested, even a little, in being a teacher, this book (despite its depressing nature) will make you say, “I can do this, and I need to do this!”  It manages to be inspiring even as it is depressing you.

Overall, I have to give Relentless Pursuit 4.5 out of 5 stars.  It made me want to be a teacher myself, although I think I would pass on Locke High School.

Hava

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

I have to confess: I’ve never read a single Nicholas Sparks book. I own the movie The Notebook, and only found out by pure chance a couple of weeks ago that it was based on a Nicholas Sparks book. I had no clue. I check out a lot of Nicholas Sparks books to patrons, and quite frankly, all of the titles just run together in my mind. I had never paid attention to the fact that one of them was named The Notebook. A keen eye for details, I have not.

So why did I read Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas and Micah Sparks? Well, I was wandering about Barnes and Noble with my husband, and for once, I was waiting for him to finish reading a book before we could go. (Needless to say, it’s usually the other way around). I wandered over to the biography section, and there was Three Weeks With My Brother. I was surprised. I hadn’t realized that Nicholas Sparks had written anything but fiction. I picked the book up and started reading.

And just loved it. I was laughing (quietly, of course - heaven forbid I get kicked out of B&N!) just a few pages in. He has an excellent writing style, which after I thought about it, realized it only made sense. The guy makes his living by writing. If his writing style left something to be desired, I rather think he wouldn’t be on the New York Times Bestseller list regularly.

I can’t testify myself that his fiction writing style is fantastic, but I can his memoir writing style. His parents were unique in their child-raising techniques, to say the least. The following is a little long, but I think captures the childhood of Nicholas and his older brother, Micah, quite well:

On the first day of kindergarten, Mom walked with Micah to the bus stop; from there forward, he walked by himself. Within a week, he told my mom that some older girls, 7th grade or thereabouts but huge to a kindergartener, had cornered him in the junkyard and taken his milk money. Then they threatened him; they said that if he didn’t bring them a nickel every day, they were going to hurt him.

“They said they’re going to beat me up bad,” Micah cried.

There are a number of ways a parent could handle such a situation. My mom could have started walking him to school regularly, for instance, or walked with him one day, confronted the girls, and threatened to call the police if another incident occurred…Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and…when she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before.

“We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ‘em with it. Like this…”

Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.

The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.

In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.

“I swung with everything I had,” he said.

“Weren’t you scared?”

With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”

The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.
~Page 25 - 26 of Three Weeks With My Brother

Yup, the mother actually showed her son (a kindergartener) how to beat up a group of 7th graders, and more amazingly still, he succeeded.  The parents were big fans of the Tough Love School of Parenting.

They were…relaxed, I guess is the kindest way to put it, in their parenting style. They gave their kids BB guns, which Nicholas (they called him Nicky as a child) and Micah used with wild abandon until the sheriff came and took them away. To console the children, the parents then gave them a bow and arrow set, with real arrows. None of the wussy plastic shafts and bunted tips for them. The kids played with that until (you guessed it) the sheriff came and took that away too. They came a little too close to killing other people one too many times.

So where does the three weeks part come in? Well, in 2002, Nicholas and Micah embark on a trip around in the world, which lasts for three weeks. It’s quite an adventure, and Nicholas always starts the chapter out in present time, and then jumps back in history to their childhood. It is their autobiography, not just a story about those three weeks in 2002. And I do mean “their” - really, it’s an autobiography of the whole Sparks family, with the emphasis on Nicholas and Micah.

I cried hard and laughed a lot too - it is one of the best autobiographies that I have ever read. Even if you’ve never read a lick of Sparks’ writing and have no interest in learning more about him (hmmm…sounds familiar) if you like autobiographies, you’ll love this book. Heck, if you just love a good story, you’ll love this book.

I’m giving it a rare 5 out of 5 stars. Thanks for the amazing book, Nicky. I just might have to read one of your fiction books someday…

Havs

Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer has more than a heck of a subtitle.  It contains an amazing story about a girl forced into marriage at a stunning 14 years of age, and to a 19-year-old first cousin to boot.

I have read three polygamy autobiographies now: Shattered Dreams, Escape, and Stolen Innocence.  Out of those three, I enjoyed Stolen Innocence the most.  As I said in my review of Escape, Carolyn Jessop seemed to be very bitter towards the FLDS Church and everything that had happened to her.  I didn’t get that vibe from this book - instead, Elissa seemed to concentrate on showing how much she loved her family, and the fact that what she was doing was for her family.  She carries a picture of her two younger sisters in her wallet with her at all times, so she can remember that she’s fighting to give her sisters freedom from the FLDS cult and everything that comes along with it.

Elissa’s story is markedly different from Carolyn Jessop’s or Irene Spencer’s.  She is the first wife of her husband, Allen Steed, and he never takes on another wife, so she doesn’t deal with “sister wives” and everything that comes along with that.

She also gets pregnant four times in two years, but loses three to miscarriages and one as a stillbirth, so when she leaves the sect, she doesn’t worry about trying to sneak any children out with her.  At the time, she thought that God was mad at her, which was why he kept killing her babies (this is a common teaching in the FLDS Church - if you lose a baby, it’s because you’ve done something wrong and God is cursing you for it).

She found out after she got out and had prenatal care for her next pregnancy, that she had Rh-negative blood, something easily fixed by modern medicine, but otherwise fatal for the babies.  She has had two children since then with no problems.

It’s amazing what modern medicine and simply having access to information can do.

Another big difference in the books is the poverty that the other two women suffered - Elissa Wall doesn’t focus on any of that.  Her parents go through periods of prosperity and then periods of difficulties, but overall, her family was much better off than many polygamous families are.  Her father has specialized skills, and the jobs he was able to do were high-paying.  This made for a big difference in Elissa’s quality of life.

Last but definitely not least is how her family got into polygamy to begin with.  In the other books, the families had been in the FLDS Church for generations.  The Walls, on the other hand, grew up LDS.  Elissa’s father and his first wife, Audrey, were practicing Mormons when Audrey’s parents joined the FLDS Church.  Hoping to disprove the FLDS Church and find flaws in it, they started studying the religion.  They ended up joining the FLDS Church instead.

It’s not terribly common for people to convert to the FLDS Church, so for a long time, they were looked upon as outsiders.  Along with that was the fact that Audrey wasn’t born and raised with the idea that polygamy was the correct way of life, and so for her, when her husband married Elissa’s mother, Sharon Steed, and then later on was given a third wife, it was very difficult for her to handle.  This made for a tense family life.

The children, however, were raised in a fairly relaxed environment because of the background of the parents, so they often did things that other families in the religion did not: Attend concerts, football games, play musical instruments, ride ATV vehicles, listen to classical music, and more.  I think that this more open environment was a big help to Elissa when she finally did get out of the church.

What makes her story the most remarkable, of course, is the fact that it was Elissa’s story that helped put Warren Jeffs behind bars.  He was prosecuted for being an accomplice in rape - her rape.  She was forced to marry her cousin, and then when she went to Warren and complained that she was being forced to do things she didn’t want to do (she literally didn’t know the word “rape” at that point) he told her that she had to submit to everything her husband wanted her to do, no questions asked.

It is because of Elissa’s brave actions that Warren Jeffs is now behind bars.  She chronicles the trial and everything that led up to it, which in itself was fascinating.  She ends the book with the raid of the YFZ (Youth For Zion) Ranch down in Texas, making this book the most up-to-date and applicable to the headlines in the newspapers, out of any of the polygamy books.

This was an absolutely captivating and stunning story.  If you’re only going to read one book on polygamy, make it this one.  I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

PS I have His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt on my list to read.  I’ll have to read and review that one sometime, so I can get a well-rounded view of the polygamy world.  Each book has been so different from the others, I really feel like I’ve learned something new with each book that I read on the subject.

I picked up How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of the Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill on a whim. What an interesting idea - a story of riches to rags, the antithesis of your “normal” Hollywood plot.

In a nutshell, Michael Gates Gill (whose mother used to call him “Gatesy” as a boy - no wonder he was messed up!) was raised in a very rich family. Nannies, huge mansions, Yale education, lots of celebrities over the house…the whole shebang. He was hired right out of college at an advertising agency, and he spent 25 years there, giving them literally the best years of his life.

They fired him for being too old, at age 53 - they wanted a young group of hard-charging associates who would give the impression of being “cutting edge.” With sparse white hair, he was not the man for the job any longer.

He spent several years trying to run a consulting business but it never really took off. In the meanwhile, his wife divorced him because he was stupid enough to a) Have a mistress and b) Get her pregnant.  Here the book began: He was broke, without family support or friends, and had no job.

Enter Starbucks.

He got a job at Starbucks more or less on a whim. He’s lucky he even got it. During the interview, the interviewer asked if he had ever worked retail. He gave her a blank stare. She clarified, “You know, like Wal-Mart?” Turns out, he had never even been inside of a Wal-Mart, let alone worked at one.

From that less-than-auspicious beginning grew a dedication between Mike (as he called himself at Starbucks) and the Starbucks chain. He sings their praises throughout the book - the health benefits offered, the great work atmosphere, the money Starbucks offers their employees to get a college education. It almost made me want to work at a Starbucks myself, except I’ve already found my perfect job.

There were a few things that bothered me (you knew it was coming!) Mr. Gill spends quite a bit of time reminiscing on his past life, and tells stories about famous people he met.

It got to the point where I felt like all he was doing was name-dropping (look at me, I’m special, I’ve met Jackie Kennedy and Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali and Robert Frost and…the list goes on.) I’m not a big fan of people who name drop, so to me this got to be annoying.

He also talks about how he made the change from being an autocratic snob to now believing in affirmative action, the implication being that if you don’t agree with affirmative action, you are an autocratic snob. I didn’t think that the inclusion of a political subject like that was of much help to the story line, nor did I appreciate the implication that I was an autocratic snob, since I don’t think reverse discrimination is any better than the original discrimination. How is discriminating against a second group of people better than discriminating against the first group of people?

He also had a rather stilted manner of writing that made it obvious this was the first book he wrote, and that no ghost writer helped him out along the way.  He wasn’t horrible, he just wasn’t that great either.

But all of that aside, it was an okay autobiography, and it did make me think about the question of how much of our happiness is our circumstances, and how much of it is our attitude. For Mr. Gill, he was happier working at Starbucks and living in a cruddy apartment than he had ever been living in a huge mansion but slaving away at his job. It’s a great book to help you rethink your priorities.

In the end, How Starbucks Saved My Life garners 3.75 out of 5 stars. If you’re a Starbucks lover, then I’d rate this as a must read.

Hava

Well, if I ever had any thoughts of using drugs, they’re gone now. Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff has completely cured me of any desire to use any sort of drug, up to and including sleeping pills.

A lot of personal memoirs seem to follow the same basic structure: Poor me, look at my childhood, I had such a hard life.  The End.  It seems like there are so many autobiographies out there that don’t have anything more to offer than that. (Example.  And yeah, this one too.)

And perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading so many autobiographies, one right after another, but whatever the reason, that’s something that has started to get on my nerves.  After all, a tough childhood is something that I would say a fair majority of America has lived through.  Show me how you changed, and grew to be a better person, or something.

Well, Tweak broke all of the “autobiography rules” by:

A) Talking about what a great childhood he had - he really loved his dad and it shows.  There were some difficult things that happened, like his parents getting a nasty divorce and putting him in the middle of it, but overall, it was much better than say, Richard Pelzer’s childhood.  He also doesn’t dwell on the negatives all that much.

B) Nic Sheff has a lot to offer his readers, other than a long story of boo-hoo-is-me, by writing one of the most gritty and realistic views of drug use I think you’ll ever find in print.  If you’re worried about your teenagers using drugs, hand them this book.  If you want to use drugs after reading this book, there’s something really wrong going on.

In Tweak, Nic chronicles almost two years of his life, starting out with Day One, and proceeding from there.  Each day reads like a journal entry - he writes entirely in the present, and by the end, you feel as if you had in fact lived two years of his life.

And what a terrible two years it is.  Day One is found with him starting a bender, where he spends weeks getting high and doing some massive drugs.  He cleans up at one point, and spends over a year clean and sober, which was really good to see, after reading about so much crap.  But then he goes off the deep end again.  *sigh*

This book is rated a solid R, perhaps even something higher than that, because of several huge things:

1) Nic’s mouth (he uses swear words as adjectives regularly);

2) Massive drug use (obviously);

3) And a whole lot of sexual stuff.  Nic does things he’s not proud of, how about that?  I don’t think they’ll nominate him as Man of the Year anytime soon.

There were some really good passages, such as when Nic is talking to his friend/co-drug dealer, and saying that he wants to clean up and get off the drugs:

I tell him I’m thinking about getting clean again.  He tells me it’s a waste of time.
“What is life for, if not for living?”
“Is this living?”
“We’re so free.”
“Sort of.”

And at the beginning of the book, he did think like his drug dealing friend: Using drugs, to him, was freedom.  He didn’t want to listen to anyone else, he wanted to do what he wanted to do, and that was drugs.

Over the course of the book, he starts to realize that using drugs actually takes away your freedom, because you are constantly lying, stealing, and/or prostituting yourself for another hit.  You would sell your mother for a “fat bag” of crack (as he called it - I learned all sorts of drug slang in this book that I’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear, but oh well).  By the end, he’s come to the realization that the only way to be truly free was to be drug free.

This book was raw, dark, and disturbing.  And yet it gave me a small measure of hope that someone who had been so horribly destroyed by drugs could eventually fight his way free of the addiction.

I give Tweak 3.75 out of 5 stars, and add a STRONG parental warning to the book.

Side note: Apparently, the father has written a memoir covering his son’s life, but from his point of view as the dad.  I don’t think I’ll read it, just because Tweak was so depressing/disturbing, but I did think that was interesting.

Hava

Escape by Carolyn Jessop was a very difficult and depressing book for me.  I picked it up because of course, polygamy has been all over the news lately - even Oprah did a show on polygamy where she invited polygamists to come onto her show and share their side of the story.  There’s also been a plethora of polygamy books released - Shattered Dreams (which I already did a review of), His Favorite Wife, and a brand-new one called Stolen Innocence.

I’ve only read the two books, so I can only compare between them, but I have to say: Carolyn Jessop’s Escape had a very different take on polygamy than Shattered Dreams, although I supposed that’s to be expected.   The author of Shattered Dreams (Irene Spencer) is quite a bit older than Carolyn and her story took place before Warren Jeffs came in and took over, so her version of the sect was much more tame and normal than what happened to Carolyn.  And then of course you’ve also got two very different personalities.  All polygamists don’t think the same, just like all Catholics don’t have the same temperaments.   Some people may feel like if they’ve read one book on a subject, they’ve read them all, but in this case, that’s definitely not true.

I enjoyed reading Escape more - it starts out with a bang, on the night that Carolyn flees with her children and goes to Utah.  It’s fast paced and your heart starts racing just from reading.  Will she get out in time?  Is she going to get caught?  You can feel the tension rolling off Carolyn in waves.  Unlike Shattered that suffered from a real lack of editorial insight, Escape has great pacing and a good timeline to it.

My only real qualm with Escape was along the same lines as the problem I had with Not Without My Daughter - Carolyn has a real bitterness to her attitude and writing.  I didn’t expect her to be all smiles and sunshine about it, but even when something good or funny was happening, I still got this feeling that there is pure anger in her towards the polygamy cult and the experience itself.  I walked away with the gut feeling that Carolyn is going to be healing from this experience for a very long time, as opposed to Irene who I felt healed and forgave faster and easier.

And perhaps I’m way off, who knows, but that was the vibe I got from the books.

Overall, it was a supremely depressing but needed look at the polygamist life.  The Great Escape for Carolyn happened in 2003, so it isn’t as if this is an outdated book and things like this simply aren’t happening anymore.  Instead, she gives a fairly current snapshop into the lives of polygamists - I don’t think I’ll ever see a news story on polygamy quite the same again.

I give it 4.25 out of 5 stars.

Hava

A Brother’s Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse by Richard B Pelzer was a very difficult memoir for me to read.  The abuse described in this book made me sick to my stomach.  I’d read his brother’s memoir, A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer, back in high school and remember crying - sobbing really - because of what happened to him.  Richard’s memoir affected me as deeply as Dave’s had.

If you haven’t read A Child Called It, I would say that’s almost a must before reading Brother.  Richard pretty much just jumps into the story with very little explanation - it’s almost as if it’s a sequel to Child.  Reading them one right after another might be a bit much to stomach, however, because they are both so darn depressing.

For the few people who haven’t heard of A Child Called It or A Brother’s Journey, basically what happened is Dave and Richard grew up in California in the ’70s, and were subjected to intense abuse by their mother. When Dave was a part of the family, he was called It or or sometimes That Boy when someone was feeling nice that day. Eventually, the state came and took Dave away. Once Dave left, Richard became the de facto whipping boy, literally.

The mother was unstable, completely unbalanced mentally, and a horrid drunk to boot. She was regularly wasted by 10 in the morning, and sometimes woke up still drunker than a skunk because of how much alcohol she’d consumed the day before. The father was terrified of his wife, and stayed married to her until the day he died, even though he moved out of the house when Richard was still just a young boy.  The mother is a monster, and that’s the nicest thing I can think of to say about her.

One thing that bothered me about A Brother’s Journey is that the story ends when Richard is only 15 years old. I felt like the author had intentionally cut the story in half (after all, he’s still living with his mother and brothers at this point - there is no Great Escape like there was at the end of Child) in order to write another book and make twice the money on the same story. Sure enough, after finishing this book, I did a Google search and saw that there is a sequel, A Teenager’s Journey. I don’t know if I want to read that one or not.

Overall, this was a hard book to read - I felt physically sick to my stomach during parts of it. I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars

Hava

Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge was an autobiography that I really wanted to love.  The story is nothing short of a miracle: Andrew was a child raised by a mentally unstable mother (Hope) who locked him in a closet and fed him cat food, yet showered him with love.  She truly loved him, even though she couldn’t take of him physically.  The state eventually took him out of her care, and he ended up in the foster care system in California.

He spent a month in the MacLaren Hall, the Los Angeles County’s facility for foster children, and then was placed with a family who he ended up spending the rest of his childhood with.  On emancipation at age 18, he was still with that same family, which is unheard of as a regular foster child, but the family never made any move to adopt him, and he never wanted them to.  The family never treated him as one of their own, and the mother handled him very roughly at some points, although as he got older, that seemed to stop (or he at least stopped talking about it).

He eventually ends up going to college, graduates from Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer - not a “normal” route for a foster care child, where roughly only 3% of foster care children even go to college.

As a survival mechanism, Andrew Bridge was a very withdrawn, shy child who didn’t interact with others very much, and never developed a loving bond with any of his classmates, his foster family, or really anyone at all.  His mother was in a mental institution for years, and he had virtually no contact with her for the 11 years that he was in foster care.  His grandmother tried to contact him, but because of extreme poverty, wasn’t able to very often.

Although that barrier between him and the rest of the world was one of the reasons that he survived and did as well as he did (because he never depended on others to do anything for him - he had to be independent) it also made the book into a difficult read, at least for me.  I never felt as if I truly related to him and what was going on with him - I felt as if there was a wall between me and him, and I never felt personally connected to the story.  I almost didn’t finish the book; it was a struggle to get it done.

The other problem for me was the style of writing.  I have never really liked poetry, and his style of writing would rightly be described as “poetic.”  Here’s a very brief excerpt as an example:

“As always, she had made the twin bed that morning, and now in the evening shadow, the tucked bedcover rested smooth as ink.  I flopped down, my legs hanging at the side, my ears and nose still cold from the trek across the street.  Tired, my mind emptied slowly into the raven night of the room’s deepening corners.” Page 28, “Hope’s Boy”

If that appealed to you, then you’ll love this book, because the entire book is filled with phrases like that.  To me, it was just a bit over the top.  That’s a personal preference, and I hesitate to even mention it, except it was something that bothered me throughout the book.

Overall, it was just too depressing (there never is a feel good moment in the whole book) and I never felt as if I truly got to know him, so despite my want to love it, I ended up simply liking it okay.  I’m surprised it was a New York Times Bestseller - I wouldn’t have pegged it to do that well, myself.  Did I completely miss the boat here?  Anyone else read it and want to tell me what they thought?  Leave your comments below - I want to hear from you!

3.75 out of 5 stars

Havs

Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer was an eye-opening book.  I had already read Escape by Carolyn Jessop, so I had something to compare this book to, and I thought it was interesting how different the two husbands in the story are.  Carolyn’s husband never attempted to be fair and love all of his wives equally, nor did he ever attempt to be a good husband to Carolyn.  Irene Spencer’s husband, Verlan, was very different, and in his own way, he truly loved Irene.  He wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was Irene.

In a nutshell, Irene was raised in a polygamist family, but her mother left her father when she was young, and eventually when Irene fell in love with a man who wasn’t Mormon or a fundamentalist, her mother encouraged her wholeheartedly to marry this guy instead of marrying a polygamist.  Scared to marry outside of the church and be damned for all eternity, Irene married her half-sister’s husband instead, and became Verlan’s second wife.   She regretted that choice for the rest of her life, as she suffered through abject poverty and third-world living conditions, on top of being subjected to being pregnant 13 times in 25 years.

The book could have been helped by editing - she spends a lot of time talking about how she never got enough sex with her husband, and how she had to share her husband and she was jealous because of it…When I say a lot, I mean the majority of the second half of the book was spent talking about this.  After a while, I started skimming, because there was just so much of that, that I could take, before I wanted to say, “Good, great, let’s get on with it then.  I understand you’re jealous - now what?”  She also seemed to spend most of the book crying her eyes out, which I am the world’s most sympathetic person (I cry when I watch a sad commercial on TV!) but even I wanted to say, “Aren’t you sick of sobbing yet?  Just do something about it already.”  She kept saying she would divorce him if he did blah-blah, and then he’d do it, and she’d stay with him.  Then she’d set a new criteria - she’d divorce him if he did this and this, and then he’d do it, and then she’d stay with him.  It was frustrating because for all of her ranting and raving and yelling and crying, she never followed through on any of her promises and always allowed him to come back into her life.

In the epilogue, I found out she became a born-again Christian.  That part seemed strange to me - Carolyn Jessop of Escape basically became an atheist of sorts, which is probably the same decision I would make if I had lived through what these ladies had lived through.  I would have figured God punished me enough - if he wanted any part of me, he would have made for a nicer beginning to my life. I also thought it was strange that Irene didn’t seem to try to separate out the current LDS Church from the fundamentalist sect she had belonged to.  For the most part, whatever the fundamentalists believed, she seemed to believe that’s what the current LDS Church believed in too.  I don’t know if that’s because of the conversion to born-again Christianity or not, but that left me baffled.

Now that I’ve read both Escape and Shattered Dreams, I’m going to read His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt because strangely enough, Irene and Susan were both married to the same man, Verlan - they were “sister wives,” to use the term in the polygamy world for it.  It’ll be very interesting to read about that relationship from Susan’s eyes, since Irene definitely had a lot to say about it. Escape and Shattered Dreams were so different from each other, I can’t wait to see how His Favorite Wife plays out.

I give Shattered Dreams 3.75 stars out of 5 - with better editing, it could have easily been a 4.5 or higher, but it was simply suffering from an overtelling of every single event that happened in 25+ years.  I would say that with what’s happening down in Texas right now, it’s worth the read, although I’d borrow it from the library instead of buying.

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