A Furry and Feathered Giveaway

Thanks to Diane S., Munchy has two copies of a new book to give away!   This is Being with Animals: Why We Are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World by Barbara J. King.   This hardbound release from Doubleday has a value of $24.99 ($29.99 in Canada).

Here is a synopsis of the book:

We surround ourselves with animals, and yet rarely do we truly stop to think about the pull they have on us.   Animals have dominated our lives for tens of thousands of years and continue to rule our existence, but why?   Why do people the world over respond to a cartoon mouse named Mickey?   Why do sports teams name themselves the Bears and the Eagles?   Why does the pet industry thrive even in difficult economic times?   Why are we compelled to share our lives with cats, dogs, fish, snakes, turtles, or any other kind of domesticated creature?

In Being with Animals, King offers answers to these questions and more.   She looks at this phenomenon, from the most obvious animal connections in daily life and culture and over the whole of human history, to show the various roles animals have played in all civilizations.   She digs deeply into the importance of the human-animal bond as key to our evolution, as a signficant aspect of understanding what truly makes us human, and looks ahead to explore how our further technological development may affect these important ties.

King’s fresh look at the human-animal relationship will resonate deeply with animal lovers, the environmentally minded, and the armchair scientist.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist and Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary.   She has studied monkeys in Kenya and great apes in various captive settings.   Together with her husband, she cares for and arranges to spay and neuter homeless cats in Virginia.  (To this, Munchy says Yeowk!)

To enter our giveaway contest to win one of two copies of Being with Animals, you can either post a comment here or send an e-mail with your name and e-mail address to Josephsreviews@gmail.com .   This will count as a first entry.   For a second entry, answer this question, “How is it that an animal has added value to your life and/or to the lives of your loved ones?”  

Munchy will pick the 2 winners at random.   In order to be eligible for this giveaway, you must live in the United States or Canada and have a residential mailing address.   Books will not be shipped to a P. O. box or to a business-related address.   You have until Monday, February 28, 2011 at Midnight PST to submit your entry or entries.

This is it for the “complex” contest rules.   Good luck and good reading!

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These Days

The Foremost Good Fortune: A Memoir by Susan Conley (Knopf, $25.95, 304 pages; Vintage, $15.00, 368 pages)

Susan Conley’s true life tales of the time that she, her husband and her two young sons spent in China begins as a light and somewhat unstructured account.   In fact, it starts off as simultaneously flat and herky-jerky and occasionally puzzling.   Why, for example, does she tell us about three separate trips made to the Great Wall?   Is there some hidden meaning in these events?   And why does she become frustrated to find that the most common question asked her by Americans is, Are the Chinese people nice?   It seems quite relevant but Conley throws out a harsh-seeming response, “I never know how to answer this question; it seems to be beside the point.”

Fortunately, Conley’s free-flowing narrative gains a very solid footing about a third of the way through.   This is when she begins writing of her bouts with breast cancer.   It’s serious business – literally life and death – and Conley’s voice turns both authoritative and adult in tone.

“This is the sneaky thing cancer does – it displaces me.   I believe it’s ten in the morning on a Tuesday in Boston, but then I’m cast adrift on some roiling swell of mortality.”

Yes, the sneaky and deadly disease known as cancer strikes Conley at the age of 40, and she rushes to secure the necessary medical care in both Beijing and Boston.   Conley discovered suspicious lumps in one of her breasts while in China, was assured by a Chinese physician that it was nothing serious; but when her tissue samples were examined she was informed that it was life threatening.   Surgery was scheduled within 48 hours.   Conley also underwent extensive radiation treatments during her recovery period.   All of this turned her into a different person…

“I’m struggling.   (My friends) are sincere.   It’s good to have them here…   (But) I don’t try to laugh with them.   If the cancer has already changed me in any way, it’s that I’m more honest.   This is a good thing.”

Conley begins to view cancer as an enormous lake in which only those who are cancer-stricken can swim.   There are many people in this lake, but it cannot be entered by those who are cancer free.   “The thin line between having and not having (cancer) seems malleable sometimes, but for me that line is everything.   It separates.”

Like most cancer survivors who write their memoirs, Conley is a fighter.   Even medical personnel in China who interact with her comment on her apparent inner strength.   And she wants her story to be about more than survival:  “I would like my story to be about hope.   It will also have the word disease in it, but that won’t be my whole story.”

It is not the entire story, as The Foremost Good Fortune shows us a woman who survives a major battle (perhaps like the Chinese who defended the Great Wall against Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes), gains further strength from her victory and dedicates herself to being a great wife to husband Tony, and a fabulous mother to Aidan and Thorne.

Conley may have struggled with the question of how she contracted her cancer – what was it back there in her past?   But her memoir substantiates for us all the point made by Jackson Browne, that sometimes it is easier to change the future than the past.

Well recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Note:  This review is dedicated to the memory of Hector G. Holguin of Stockton, California.   My friend for life.

Breakfast with Buddha

These days there are many books advertised as “laugh out load” funny (the back cover of Breakfast with Buddha makes this claim), which simply fail to meet that promise.   “Slightly amusing” would be the most favorable term this reader would come up with for this intended-to-be-funny tale of an intended-to-be-life-changing trip.   The storyline is quite similar to that of Greetings from Somewhere Else by Monica McInerney, in which a person must take a long journey to settle a family’s affairs after someone has died.   But where McInerney’s tale was charming, Roland Merullo’s story seems forced.  

In Somewhere Else, the main character was traveling to a tumbledown bed and breakfast outside of Belfast, Ireland; in Breakfast, we’re asked to join in a six-day ride along from New York to North Dakota.   Fun?   Well, not so much.

Merullo is known for subtly inserting “spiritual lessons” within everyday narratives, but without the humor, this seemed like Bob Greene-light (with apologies to Mr. Greene).   If you’ve ever stood in a restaurant’s kitchen while food was being prepared, you know that it takes the magic out of the dining experience.   Reading this novel was like standing in a writer’s kitchen.

Algonquin, $13.95, 334 pages

Reprinted courtesy of Sacramento Book Revew.   A trade paperback review copy was provided by the publisher.