Nonfiction Book Reviews

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales is, as far as I know, the only book I’ve read and reviewed for this site because I’ve had to.  Well, I had to read it for my honors class at college - I guess I didn’t have to review it also, but what would be the fun in that?

Anyway, Deep Survival is probably not a book I’d normally just pick up and read, mostly because I haven’t ever focused on survival books before.  But after reading this one, I’ve decided that I’ve been missing out - it seems like there are some extremely interesting stories in the survival genre, and I’ll probably start picking up some books on the subject, starting with Adrift (a book that Gonzales talks about some in Deep Survival.)  So it was good for me to read something outside of my “normal” comfort zone!

Deep Survival is not what you’d think - it isn’t a book about how to survive out in the wilderness, and it isn’t simply a retelling of the stories of people who have lived through extreme conditions (although there is a lot of that in there).  Instead, it approaches survival from a psychological perspective - why is it that a well-trained Ranger would drown in a river while a five-year-old girl who is lost out in the wilderness would live for days?  Or why would a scuba diver pull off his mask while deep in the ocean, when the air tank was more than half full?

It all comes down to the mind, and things like “emotional bookmarks” and “cortisol in the hippocampus.” It was quite fascinating to find out that there was a rational reason for people behaving irrationally.

The style of writing is very poetic - he is almost lyrical at points.  It isn’t a writing style I normally encounter, so I found myself slowing down in order to understand what he was trying to say, instead of tearing through the book at break-neck speed like I normally do.

Here’s a good example of the writing style:

There goes another one now - ka-chunk-whoosh! - in a sleet storm of metal particles and this amazing hissing scream like someone’s tearing a hole in hell.  Then two angry afterburner eyes seem to hang motionless in the darkness, as the bat shape shinnies up a pigtail of smoke and is gone.
Deep Survival, page 23

I’ll admit it - I like being able to read stuff at break-neck speed.  It means I sure get through books a lot faster. So the writing style took some getting used to, but by the end, I was enjoying it.  It was probably a good thing I slowed down - there is so much in Deep Survival to digest that I suggest that you read it in small chunks if you end up picking it up.  This is definitely not what I would term a “fast read” nor a “read it and forget it” type of book.

Deep Survival made me rethink things I had done in the past, and realize why I did what I did. Case in point: A couple of summers ago, I was tubing down a river with my siblings when I got caught on a submerged log and was flipped out of my innertube.

All rational thought fled my brain, and I screamed my lungs out. I couldn’t get a grip on the river floor because the current was too fast, and I was sure I was going to get sucked into a whirlpool and die. For whatever reason, my brain took this as a good reason to scream. Maniacally. If I had spent half as much energy trying to get back into the innertube as I did screaming, I probably would have been fine. But no, I was completely and utterly panicked, and I could think of nothing but bellowing, as loud and as long as I could.

My brother eventually got over to me and helped me back into my innertube, but it wasn’t until hours later that I calmed down.  I was in a literal state of shock all that time.  Well, when I read the book, I realized something sobering: If I am ever caught in a really bad situation, I am not likely to live. The people who live are able to keep calm, cool, and collected, and are able to think rationally under extreme pressure. I am none of the above, and cannot think at all under extreme pressure, let alone rationally. Go me.

If you enjoy survival stories, if you like a poetic style of writing, and/or if you like discovering what makes the human mind tick, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book. I give Deep Survival 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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’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

Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog by John Grogan was an absolute joy of a book.  I laughed so hard I cried, and then did it all over again three pages later.  And then again five pages after that.  At one point I was doubled up on the bed, gasping for air, as the tears streamed down my cheeks.  I don’t know if it’s because I have two terrible dogs of my own (as I briefly mentioned in my review of Be the Pack Leader) or if it’s just because John’s that darn funny and would be to everyone, but either way, I adored this book.

The greatest part of all is, I didn’t want to read it.  Have you ever heard about a movie or book that you knew would be a real tear jerker, so you purposefully never watched/read it, because you didn’t want to cry and go on the emotional rollercoaster that a truly wonderful story puts you on?  When Titanic came out into movie theaters, I didn’t want to go watch it, because I knew I’d cry.  I went anyway, and sure enough, I bawled.  I haven’t watched the movie since, despite owning it (I won in it a radio contest, but never got the guts to watch it again).

Well, I had heard that Marley and Me was also a tear-jerker, and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to cry.  So it sat on my bookshelf for several weeks.  Then I looked at my schedule of books (yes, I’ve gotten to the point where I have so many books that I want to read, that I have actually written up a schedule to keep track - I’m pathetic, don’t remind me) and groaned when I saw Marley and Me on the list, up next.  I pulled the book off the shelf and decided that if I was going to suffer through reading the book, I might as well enjoy a nice long soak in the bathtub while doing it.

Well, I read until the water got freezing cold, and then just kept going.  I was mesmerized by the story, and laughing so hard I thought I’d surely burst a blood vessel or two before the book was done.  I’ve been having good luck with journalists lately - perhaps I should start looking specifically for autobiographies written by a journalist, because they seem to be of a much higher quality than a regular “first-time” book by an amateur.  Ironically enough, both of the journalists-turned-authors that I’ve read lately (Jeff Gammage and John Grogan) work for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Just how many novelists do they have working there?

Anyway, back to the book, and an example of a great snippet: Basically, John had given his wife, Jenny, a plant as a gift.  A plant she killed off in no time flat.  She got upset about that, and decided that they needed to get a dog, because she was worried that if she couldn’t keep a plant alive, how could she raise a child?  So she wanted to get a dog to practice on before advancing to an “actual” child.  Here’s the story in his words - see if you agree with me on the funny quotient:

 …she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin’s coldhearted efficiency.  Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nutured the poor thing to death.  Working on the assumption that all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also need air, she began flooding the plant on a daily basis.

“Be careful not to overwater it,” I had warned.

“Okay,” she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon.

The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just kind of melted into an oozing heap.  I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot by the window and thought, “Man, someone who believes in omens could have a field day with this one.”

Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds.  Kill a plant, buy a puppy.  Well, of course, it made perfect sense.

~Page 3 of Marley and Me

I laughed hard at that, because my husband and I made the same (not-so-logical) leap.  To a woman who is worried about becoming a mom for the first time, killing a plant is a very worrisome thing. Thus, getting a dog to practice on only makes sense.  Right?  Right.

So that’s how John and Jenny ended up with Marley, the goofiest, most neurotic, and fiercely loyal dog that ever walked the earth.  His antics put my two dogs to shame, and I started to realize that on a scale of 1 - 10, with Marley being a 13, my dogs are really only a 4 or so.  They have never torn up a couch cushion, mattress, or door (yes, you read that right: A door.  Marley used to eat his way through wooden doors.  And drywall.  And electrical wiring.  And anything else he deemed interesting).  My dogs yank and pull on a walk, and sometimes they escape out the front door when we don’t want them to, but really, in comparison to Marley’s antics, my dogs are full-blown saints.

If you’re an animal lover, you’ll absolutely adore this book.  And even if you’re not a dog owner/lover, the humor and the fast-paced read (I read it in roughly two and a half hours) will make this worth it to pick up.  John Grogan is an extremely talented author, and I hope to be hearing more from him in the future.

5 out of 5 stars.  I would not change a thing about this book.

Havs

PS If you do love dogs, make sure to check out the Canine Connection here at Today - great blog for the dog lovers out there!

China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood by Jeff Gammage was an excellent autobiography. I’ve read a string of less-than-stellar autobiographies lately (ie Hope’s Boy, Shattered Dreams, Enter the Past Tense) and I was ready for a great one. I found that in China Ghosts.

Jeff Gammage is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I think that had a LOT to do with how much I enjoyed the book - a newspaper reporter has to learn early on to weave a deft and interesting tale without using too much over-the-top descriptions, and that writing experience shows in his writing of this book. I’m starting to realize that I can put up with almost anything but a poor writing style: Typos, missing information that I think is important, and even swearing doesn’t bother me like bad writing does. Luckily, China Ghosts is very well written.

He spares no quarter for himself; he talks about how he never had any desire to have children, because he was self-centered and if there was another person in the equation, then that would mean his family and wife would pay attention to someone else other than himself - the horrors! He didn’t want that, and thus, he would’ve been happy if he and his wife stayed childless. Or so he thought.

But his wife was born with a nurturing instinct, and she wanted children, so Jeff said yes to make his wife happy. They tried for several years to have children, but eventually it was declared that they were infertile. My heart broke for them at this point - that’s actually something that my husband and I are struggling with. We have been trying for 4 years to get pregnant, and thus far, nothing has happened. It’s a very tough row to hoe. (If that’s something you also struggle with, make sure to check out the Infertility blog here at Today - it’s a great blog for infertility information).

Anyway, back to Jeff Gammage: He and his wife finally decide to go the adoption route, and for reasons he explains in detail in the book, they decide to adopt from China. He jumps back and forth in time, keeping your interest high, wondering what will happen next. This is not just a book about adopting a toddler, but of becoming a father, an especially difficult task for him since he had no previous experience with children. His transformation is astounding, and you realize that a parent’s love is truly boundless. When they finally pick their new daughter up, he falls head over heels in love with her, which was so sweet to see. It was beautifully written and by the end, I too had fallen in love with his daughter. She’s a cute little girl, and I loved watching her “grow up” (the book ends when she’s 6 years old).

He spends time explaining the background on different cities in China, and since that wasn’t as interesting to me, I simply skimmed those parts. I think that could have easily been left out of the book, but it wasn’t a huge deal. Even with that in there, it was a quick read (I finished it one day - I had a hard time putting it down!) and I’m hoping to someday read a “sequel” by his two daughters (he eventually adopts a second daughter from China). That would just be so fun for me.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars. And don’t forget - with the Chinese Olympics coming up quickly, it might be a good read for anyone interested in learning more about China. Oh, and if you’re thinking about adopting a girl from China, I would rate this book as an absolute must read - it had so much interesting and helpful information in there about the whole process. Two thumbs up!

Havs