Nonfiction Book Reviews

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For my honors class in college, a speaker came in and talked to the class about something you don’t normally hear about much: Slavery right here and now, in the year 2009.

Unfortunately, I missed class that day, so I didn’t get to hear him speak. As make-up work for missing the class, I was assigned a video to watch on this global pandemic. I have posted the video below for all of you to watch.

WARNING: This video will make you sick to your stomach, not so much because of the graphic pictures in the video (although there is a little of that) but because of the realization that all of this has been happening, and you have done nothing to stop it.  At just over 5 minutes, it is well worth your time to watch.

After watching that video, I wanted to know what I could do. I also wanted to find more information on the subject, since this was literally the first time I had heard about this. Slavery? Here in America? C’mon, what are you talking about? Slavery was abolished! President Lincoln? Emancipation Proclamation? Doesn’t any of that ring a bell?

Yeah, that was me. I was shocked and disturbed to the tips of my toes that this was still happening today. I went to Amazon to see if I could find a book with more information on modern-day human slavery, and I found Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade - and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone.  I just finished reading it today.  Batstone is the head of a website, Not For Sale Campaign, and now does tours around the United States speaking about human trafficking.

The book Not for Sale was an eye-opening look at all the forms of human slavery, from women being forced to serve as sex slaves in a brothel, to whole families being locked inside of a rice factory for years, to children being forced to fight as soldiers in rebel armies in Africa.  There doesn’t seem to be a corner of the world that is not affected in some shape or form by this.

The book did have some ADD tendencies to it, however.  The author would start out a chapter talking about sex slavery in Asian countries, and throughout the chapter would jump from the story of someone who was forced into slavery, to a person who is fighting it as an abolitionist however they can (by providing aid to those who escape, by helping people escape, by providing legal representation to those who escaped, etc), and then on to the general landscape of the problem - why it is thriving, what has made it hard to fight, etc.

Each new section within the chapter meant a jump to a new point of view on the problem, and he regularly jumped back and forth between the different point of views until wrapping up the chapter (usually) with the escape and freedom of the slave.

When I first started reading, I thought, “Who is this?  What is he talking about?  What happened to the person whose story he just left?”  After I read through several chapters and got more used to this writing style, it didn’t bother me as much, but I still cannot say it’s my favorite writing style, and I wish he had done it differently.

Despite this minor flaw, the book was still excellent.  If you want a broad overview of the worldwide problem of human trafficking, then this is the book for you.  If you are outraged by the video above and you want more information and you especially want to know what you can do to make a difference, then you need to read this book.  This is an excellent introduction into the world of slavery, and will help you better understand the global dynamics of it.

At the end of the book, he has a listing of the various agencies fighting this problem along with their websites so you can find a group nearby that you can join to help fight this.  Don’t think this problem exists in your backyard?  Check out Slavery Map, where you can search the globe and see where the various incidents have happened.  I had two in my state alone.

There are books that make you laugh, there are books that teach you stuff.  There are books that broaden your horizons.  But Not For Sale will change your life.  Buy it today.  After you’re done reading, pass it on to a friend or neighbor, and encourage them to continue passing it on when they’re done.  The more we know about this problem, the better we can fight it.  Knowledge is everything.

If you don’t see it, then you aren’t looking for it.
~ modern slavery in a nutshell

Havs

PS My hometown is going to get a visit from David Batstone and his entourage very soon.  If any of you who are reading this are from my hometown and want more information, call me or send me an email and I’ll gladly give you the info.  I’d love to post it here but for privacy reasons will not.

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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

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The combination of working at a library plus reviewing nonfiction books in my spare time meant only one thing - Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron was a must read for me.

It is about Dewey, a stray cat found in the return bin at the library one morning after a terribly cold night in Spencer, Iowa. Someone had dropped the cat down the return bin shoot, and the library director, Vicki Myron, found him in there, clinging to life.

The Spencer Public Library adopted the cat and made him their own. In this autobiography, Myron chronicles not only Dewey’s life but her own, and also the background and history of Iowa, family farms, and libraries.  She discusses going to school to get her masters in library science,  Carnegie libraries, and remodeling libraries, all items that were especially interesting to me as a librarian.

But much more than that, it was a touching memoir of what it means to love a cat wholeheartedly, not only in good times (Dewey brought a lot of fame and attention to this small corner of the world) but in bad - when Dewey started to age and his coat wasn’t as shiny and youthful as it was before.  (Yes, believe it or not, the library board actually discussed what to do with Dewey “now that he was old” and didn’t look as good.  Apparently, we Americans are not only obsessed with human youthfulness but cat youthfulness too.)

If you love cats, libraries, or the small town life, then you’ll adore Dewey. There are pictures of Dewey throughout the book but all of them are printed in black and white, which for an orange tabby means you lose something in the process. But the Spencer Public Library has put together a web page dedicated to only pictures of Dewey with great captions underneath.  After finishing the book, I enjoyed looking through all of the pictures.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat touched my heart - it made me think, it made me grateful, and it made me cry.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

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 picked up Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand while doing check-in.  When I saw the book, I thought, “I’ve always wanted to read that book.  I wonder if I should take it home with me.”  Within seconds, I was pulling another copy of the book out of the book drop.

“Hmm…” I thought.  “Kinda weird two people would return the same book on the same day.”  And then I pulled out another copy.  And another.  All together, I pulled out seven copies of that book - I’m guessing that some local group got together and read it as a book of the month or something. ??? But I took it as a sign that I ought to get my rear in gear and read this book that was apparently so good, they just had to make it into a movie.

Now that I’ve read Seabiscuit, I understand why it became a Hollywood blockbuster.  This book is absolutely fantastic.  The writing is superb, the pictures are terrific (I read the “Special Illustrated Collector’s Edition” which I highly recommend - the pictures definitely added something special to the book) and the pacing impeccable.

By the end of the book, I felt like I knew Seabiscuit as well as an old friend.  And when he died (sorry if I ruined the ending there, but this story did take place in the ’30s) I cried.  I know that’s rather ridiculous (what was I expecting to have happen?) but it’s just that this horse had so much spirit, it was heart-breaking to finally say goodbye to him.

One thing that made this book so fantastic is that it wasn’t just about Seabiscuit.  It was also about the Great Depression, about horseracing, about what it takes to be a jockey, and especially about the people around Seabiscuit, who saw his true potential.  Seabiscuit was doomed to a life of obscurity, until these men saw something in him that no one else did.  I felt like I got to know the men who loved Seabiscuit, and came to love them too.

A couple of things to keep in mind: I don’t particularly count myself as a huge horse lover.  My grandfather had horses that I rode as a child, and they were quite simply some of the orneriest things you’d ever come across.  I got stepped on and thrown off more times than I care to count.  So yes, you can love this book even if you don’t love horses.

Secondly, I have never watched Seabiscuit the movie, so I did not pick up the book with preconceived notions.  Since I have never paid attention to the world of horse racing before, I knew almost nothing about Seabiscuit.

So if even someone like me (with little knowledge or understanding of horses, horse racing, or Seabiscuit in particular) could absolutely love and adore this book, it seems like pretty much anyone could.

Now I just need to watch the movie.  While I’m watching Seabiscuit, I also need to watch Marley and Me, another book that I’ve read and reviewed that’s been turned into a movie.   I really loved Marley the book, so I’m hoping I’ll love the movie just as much.

As for Seabiscuit: An American Legend I give it an easy 5 out of 5 stars.  Heck, I should probably give it a couple of extra stars just ’cause.  If you haven’t read Seabiscuit yet, you need to.  It is easily one of the best books I’ve read in the past year.

Hava

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

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 am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility by Trisha Meili was an amazing testament of the human will to get better - the indomitable human spirit.

I was only 8 when Trisha Meili was attacked in Central Park, and so I have no recollection of the event being publicized across the nation.  Kids can be so oblivious, and I think I tended to be more oblivious than most.  I had heard references of it in passing through the years, so when I saw her book on the shelf, I knew the very general outlines of what had happened.

But nothing could have prepared me for this book.  It was an autobiography (one of my favorite kinds of books) but better yet, it was written by a person who didn’t wallow in self-pity, who didn’t whine and complain about how hard life was, and who certainly didn’t play the blame game.  She was too busy getting better!

Can I just say how darn likable she is?  Trisha pushes herself through therapy, determined to get better, determined to not let this ruin her life.  And she had a lot of therapy to go through - she was in the hospital for seven months.  In a coma for weeks.  She has to learn how to swallow, how to roll over, how to walk, how to eat, how to think, how to make decisions - all over again.

She said that she went from being a baby to being an adult in seven months.  She is a true inspiration because she has such a can-do spirit.  For anyone who has suffered through a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) there couldn’t be a better book to read than this one.  And even for those of us who haven’t, there is still so much to learn from her.

Part of the story is her love life - she dated quite a few men throughout the book, and I kept hoping she’d find her true love by end.  And (not to ruin the story or anything!) but she finally did.  I loved reading that part, because it just seemed so fitting that after she’s gone through a rebirth in her life, she would finally be ready to find The One.

If you want a feel-good, inspirational story, you honestly couldn’t get any better than this one.

4.75 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Trisha - I wish you all the best!

Havs

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

In honor of my starting college this week to get my associates degree in Library Science, I decided to review The Romance of Libraries by Madeleine Lefebvre. It was a book that caught my eye while searching the (library!) shelves - a nice pink, cheery color.  And who could resist a book about libraries and love?

I wasn’t disappointed - it was a fun book filled with stories about couples who met and fell in love in, at, or around the library.  Compiled by Madeleine Lefebvre, they are all true stories and some are quite heartfelt. Most of the romances profiled worked out, but a couple did not.

All of them somehow related to the library, whether it was where they met, where one of the people worked, or where they got engaged.  There were even a few marriages conducted in a library.  (I am so jealous…)

If you want a light book to read, and you enjoy sweet stories about people falling in love, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book.  Although libraries and books are definitely a part of the book, they don’t overwhelm it so don’t feel like you have to be a library aficionado to read it.  You might find yourself down at the public library more often though (never a bad thing).

Like all compiled stories about the same subject, the stories seemed to run together after a while, and there wasn’t really much depth to any of them (since the stories were an average of two paragraphs long).  This just meant that it’s a book you could easily pick up and put down at any time, and probably one you’d want to read in short bursts rather than all at once.

Overall, I give The Romance of Libraries 4.25 stars out of 5.

Havs

I’m not sure how to describe 1 Dead in the Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. It was very depressing, yet at times made me laugh and gave me hope for this world.

I guess I could start with the easy stuff: The author is a columnist at The Times-Picayune, the local newspaper for New Orleans. The book is a compilation of his daily columns, starting after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

Some of the columns were darkly funny, some of the columns were just plain dark.  Some of them gave you a renewed confidence in mankind, others made you question how people that horrid could have lived for so long.

I can say one thing for sure: This was an eye-opener of a book.  I have never been to New Orleans, and so I witnessed the destruction on TV with horrified detachment, much as most of America did.  A few months after it happened it faded from view and I forgot about it, to be honest.  I didn’t want to, and I didn’t mean to, but life does have a habit of going on.

1 Dead in the Attic was a needed reminder that although I may have moved on, life in New Orleans didn’t, at least not in the same way.  Many people suffered through bouts of depression; some people committed suicide because of it.  I’ve never lived through anything like Hurricane Katrina, and I had never thought about what would be happening a year after the storm hit, or two years, or three.  If I had, I would have realized on an intellectual level that people would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I never got that far.

I’m feeling rather guilty now for my negligence, but that can’t be blamed on Rose.  He doesn’t set out to make the readers depressed.  It’s just how I reacted.

Lest you think the whole book is depressing, let me share one of the funnier columns with you.  Although Rose stayed in New Orleans after Katrina, the rest of his family went to Maryland and stayed for several months, so he would travel back and forth between the two cities regularly.  Here is a column about one such trip:

[B]efore each journey, I check with my kids by phone to see what they need from our house in New Orleans.

Of course, they need everything, they tell me.  Every toy, every article of clothing, every piece of furniture, everything that hangs on the walls, every piece of building material down to the studs.

“Itemize,” I urge them.

“Barbies,” they tell me.

“I can do that,” I tell them.

And so my chore began one afternoon, as I crouched and crawled into their secret places in our house - small, dark spaces I have never been in, places that are not hospitable to people larger than, say, a dorm refrigerator.

In the process, I discovered that there has been a population of approximately fifty Barbies living under my roof.  I did not know this.

An absurd number, I was thinking, but then I remembered that I used to collect empty egg cartons when I was a kid and I probably had a couple hundred - a closet full of them - before my mother brought the hammer down on that curious little hobby of mine.

Truth is, I don’t recall even the barest notion of why I collected egg cartons nor what I did with them.   I just did.  So who am I to tell my kids they have too many Barbies?

Let them be, I say.  I mean, I turned out okay, right?

Don’t answer that.

~Page 81 - 82 of 1 Dead in the Attic by Chris Rose

He is extremely easy to read; I’ve had good luck with newspaper writers in the past, and this book was no exception.  He is a talented writer.  He is frank and direct, and everything is so real that you feel as if you too lived through the destruction that Hurricane Katrina wrought upon New Orleans.

My only critique of the book was that the columns were not in chronological order, nor could I see that there was any rhyme or reason to how they were published.  It was disconcerting to see that we had jumped back in time three months for no apparent reason.  I eventually stopped paying attention to the dates of the columns so it would stop bothering me, an easy fix.

Overall, I give 1 Dead in the Attic 4.75 out of 5 stars.  And my thanks to Mr. Rose for publishing it.  I needed to read this book.

Havs

There is an old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope proves it.

Here’s the lowdown:

A busload of college students were driving home from doing banquet work in another city when they were struck by a truck, killing five out of the nine people inside. One of the survivors, Laura Van Ryn, was thrown 50 feet and it was touch and go for a while as to whether she’d live or not.  She lapsed into a deep coma, and the family had no idea if she’d ever wake up.

Five weeks come and go, and Laura slowly made progress.  Finally, she’s in good enough shape to start talking coherently, and do things like eating, exercising, etc.  As a part of the therapy, the physical therapist asked Laura to write her name. She scrawled across the page:

W-H-I-T-N-E-Y

Turns out, in the car wreck, there were two girls who didn’t know each other very well, but who looked strangely similar. The purse for Laura Van Ryn landed next to Whitney Cerak, and the first responders to the scene took one look at the driver’s license and identified Whitney as being Laura.

So Whitney’s family had a funeral (closed casket - the parents never looked at their daughter’s body upon their own request), gave away her clothing, and in general did their best to move on, all while their daughter was really in a hospital room in a deep coma.

And then there were Laura’s parents, loving and caring for someone who they thought was their daughter, and when they noticed small anomalies like her teeth being different, they attributed it all to the accident. “The force of the accident must have pushed her teeth that way,” they told themselves.

When Laura mumbled, “False parents” and pointed to her dad, her dad got huffy and thought, “False! I put you through college and have loved you and fed you and done everything I could for you. Why are you calling me a false dad?”

It wasn’t until Whitney became mentally quicker and more agile did the truth come out. It was confirmed with dental records. That day, the family of the Van Ryn’s went home to grieve the death of their daughter, and the Ceraks were called to find out that their daughter was raised from the dead.

Overall, it was one of the most interesting stories I think I have ever heard. It’s an amazing testament to the human mind, where an entire family could spend five weeks with a complete stranger they had never met, and yet believe the entire time that it was their daughter.

So yes, it was an interesting story, but for anyone who is not a born-again Christian, the book will make you uncomfortable. Both families are born-again Christians - both fathers work as pastors. The daughters were both going to a Christian college. Every page has some reference to scriptures, singing gospel songs, praying, etc. The entire book revolves around giving praise to Jesus, having a relationship with Jesus, praying to Jesus…You get the picture.

So if you’re born-again Christian, you’ll absolutely love this book. It will be an affirmation of your testimony, and you’ll come away from it with a stronger faith than ever.

If you’re another religion, or atheist, I suggest you skip this book. The constant references to Jesus will be too big of a distraction for you to enjoy it.

I give Mistaken Identity 4 out of 5 stars. The writing style was a bit simplistic and it didn’t end up being one of my favorites, but it certainly had an interesting plotline.

Hava

PS In case you’re in the mood for some real fiction, make sure to check out a fellow Today.com blog called Fiction Book Blog.  It’s written by a coworker of mine from my local library - when he found out that you could write about books and get paid for it, he got excited and asked for the website address to apply.  Now, he’s covering the other end of the spectrum: Fiction.  If you want variety in your reviews, you couldn’t ask for a better complement to my blog than his.

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’m excited to kick off Fun Fridays with Titanic: Discover the Luxury of This Famous Ship by Simon Adams (it’s a part of the Eyewitness Books series).

I’ll admit it: I watched the 1997 movie, Titanic, in the theaters, and cried the whole second half of the movie.  I loved the story line, but it was just too depressing to ever watch again.  11 years later, I own the movie (won it in a contest) but have never watched it.  I just can’t stand the thought of bawling like that for another 3 hours.

But since an Eyewitness Book is not likely to reduce me to tears, I decided to take the chance and check out Titanic.  I haven’t read an Eyewitness Book since I was a kid, so it was fun to browse through the book like I used to as a child.

I was surprised at how in-depth the information was that was included - it had a lot of text amongst all the pictures, and it wasn’t easy text that a young child would easily be able to read by himself or herself either.  The targeted age group for the Eyewitness Books is 9 - 12 years of age, and they mean it.

But for whatever reason, I was expecting huge pictures and very little text, so I was pleasantly surprised by all that the book had to offer.

My only critique was the fact that the pictures had a lot of boats in them, which have a lot of rigging and other thin, long lines crisscrossing everywhere.  Eyewitness Books use long, thin lines to point to various parts of a picture, which meant it got interesting trying to figure out which line went where.  One set of lines was a little darker than the other, but that was the only difference.

They really should have picked a whole different color, like dark red for one and black for the other, or something to help differentiate between the two sets.

But honestly, that’s a small critique of an otherwise well-done book.  Of course, I have to include an interesting tidbit that I hadn’t heard before, so here’s a quotation from the book:

On the night of April 24, 1912, a young Scottish girl, Jessie, was being comforted as she lay dying.  In her delirious state, Jessie had a vision of a ship sinking in the Atlantic.  She saw many people drowning and “someone called Wally playing a fiddle.”  Within hours of her death, the Titanic slowly sank as Wally Hartley and the rest of the band continued to play. ~Page 23 of Titanic

That sent shivers up my spine when I read it.  Uncanny…

Overall, I give Titanic 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Well done, and a great way to kick off Fun Fridays!  Make sure to check out next week’s post on A Smart Girl’s Guide to Money.

Hava