Love Is All There Is

Yesterday’s Sun: A Novel by Amanda Brooke (Harper, $14.99, 326 pages)

How can she choose between her child and herself?

If you’ve enjoyed reading Audrey Niffenegger’s unique novels (Her Fearful Symmetry, The Time Traveler’s Wife), you will likely find this debut novel by Amanda Brooke to be extremely engaging. Yes, there’s the calm countryside near London, time travel and spirits of a sort as provided by a magical device – an ancient Aztec moondial that, on full moon nights, enables its owner to travel 18 months into the future, for an hour at a time. Our female protagonist, Holly, fears she’d be a terrible mother – like her own parent, until she uses the moondial found in her new home’s garden to discover that she will give birth to a daughter, Libby. The problem is that Holly will die while giving birth, which means that she’s faced with the choice of never getting pregnant or sacrificing her life for that of a child she will never know.

Brooke does so much with this fascinating plotline and, like Niffenegger, drags us slowly into an alternate world presenting strange and dreadful choices…

Holly felt defeated and deflated. There were three whole weeks to wait until the next full moon… and Holly felt like her life had been placed in limbo. Dealing with the emotional fallout from this latest separation from (her husband) was bad enough, but living with the nagging doubts and the growing possibility that she had seen a vision of her future – one where she had already died – was just too much to bear.

Holly, fortunately, comes to know the elderly neighbor, Jocelyn, who once lived in her old rural home and knows the powers of the moondial, and the rules (“A life for a life.”) that apply to its use.

Her hands trembled as she held aloft her death certificate. The certificate recorded the cause of her death as an aneurism… following childbirth complications. Holly took a deep breath and focused on the sensation of her blood flowing through her veins and her heart beating rapidly in her chest. She was most definitely alive.

Holly barely survives the days between full moons, when she jumps into the future for 60 minutes and sees the results of her current life choices. She comes to find that some things about the future can be changed, and some cannot. And she’s faced with the ultimate choice: continuing her own life (seeing in her time travels that her husband Tom will be destroyed at her untimely death) or giving it up for the child she’s seen and come to love more than anything.

(Holly) looked up at the moon and realized that she didn’t have to wish for anything else. She had her husband and she had Libby growing inside of her and she would have both of them with her until the day she died.

Brooke supplies an almost perfect ending that will fool readers, like me, who suspect a different conclusion has been brewing. This novel, which evolved from the author’s loss of her three-year-old son, Nathan, from cancer, is both inspired and inspiring. It’s a fine tribute to Nathan Valentine and the power of eternal love.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher. “Magical and unputdownable.” Katie Fforde

Yesterday’s Sun was released on February 12, 2013.

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Santa’s Book List

We recently met with Santa Claus at the North Pole to work on a list of possible presents for book lovers.   Here’s what we came up with.

For the Fiction Reader

You Came Back: A Novel by Christopher Coake (Grand Central Publishing), and Gone: A Novel by Cathi Hanauer (Atria).

Two of the best novels of the year, both dealing with loss.   A man’s life is irrevocably changed when his young son dies, and a wife and mother is lost when her husband drives the babysitter home and never returns.

Sacrifice Fly: A Mystery by Tim O’Mara (Minotaur Books)

This may be the best debut crime novel by anyone since Think of a Number by John Verdon.   A disabled NYPD cop turned public school teacher decides to solve a crime that involves one of his former students.

A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks (Henry Holt)

A story is told through the lives of five different human beings who live in different times, including the past and the future (2029).   Those who loved the innovative novel American Music by Jane Mendelsohn may be drawn to this one.

Blackberry Winter: A Novel by Sarah Jio (Plume)

A perfect cold case story for cold weather reading.   As a late-Spring snowstorm hits Seattle, a reporter tries to get to the bottom of an 80 year-old kidnapping.

Forgotten: A Novel by Catherine McKenzie (William Morrow)

A young female Canadian lawyer, presumed to have died while visiting a village in Africa destroyed by an earthquake, returns home to find that everyone’s moved on without her.   From the author of Spin and Arranged.

Tuesday Night Miracles: A Novel by Kris Radish (Bantam Dell)

Four women with legal and personal issues are required to attend weekly group counseling sessions with a rather unconventional counselor.   Serious issues covered with a “wry sense of humor” (The Sacramento Bee).

For the Music Lover

The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret by Kent Hartman (Thomas Dunne Books)

The story of the musicians who anonymously played on most of the biggest-selling rock songs recorded between 1962 and 1975.   This book provides “Good Vibrations” for the music fanatic.

Bruce by Peter James Carlin (Touchstone)

The author of Paul McCartney: A Life shows us the very human side of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.

I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story by Ingrid Croce and Jimmy Rock (Da Capo)

Fans of the late singer-songwriter will be enthralled by this overview of his all-too-short life.

Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Freddie Mercury & Queen by Mark Blake (Da Capo), and Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones (Touchstone)

These well-written biographies of the late Queen front man will make readers revisit their Queen music collections, or purchase new ones.

For Those with Special Diets

You Won’t Believe It’s Salt-Free!: 125 Healthy, Low-Sodium and No-Sodium Recipes Using Flavorful Spice Blends by Robyn Webb (Da Capo Lifelong Books), and Gluten-Free On a Shoestring Quick & Easy by Nicole Hunn (Da Capo Lifelong Books)

It’s not easy to cut down on either sodium or gluten in our diets, but these two authors illustrate how you can do so and still enjoy eating.

For the Sports Fan

Best of Rivals: Joe Montana, Steve Young, and the Inside Story Behind the NFL’s Greatest Quarterback Controversy by Adam Lazarus (Da Capo)

If you think the San Francisco 49ers have a quarterback controversy now, Lazarus reminds us of what happened on the team between 1987 and 1994.

The Longest Shot: Jack Fleck, Ben Hogan, and Pro Golf’s Greatest Upset at the 1955 U.S. Open by Neil Sagebiel (Thomas Dunne Books)

The amazing story of when an unknown golfer by the name of Jack Fleck beat his idol, the great Ben Hogan, at the U.S. Open major tournament.   Truth is stranger than fiction, and in ’55 the Open was played at the Olympic Club in San Francisco (just like this year’s U.S. Open).

For the Animal Lover

Following Atticus by Tom Ryan (William Morrow)

An overweight man’s health is saved, and his life is rescued by a small mountain-climbing miniature schnauzer named Atticus M. Finch.   A fine, touching memoir.

Joseph Arellano

Review copies were provided by the publishers and/or publicists.   A Possible Life will be released on Tuesday, December 11, 2012.

The Book of Jobs

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster, $35.00, 656 pages)

“When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the enthusiasm of seeing the future and making sure it works.”   Fortune magazine in the late 1970s

“I had a very lucky career, a very lucky life.   I’ve done all that I can do.”   Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson (originally entitled, iSteve: The Book of Jobs) is an engaging biography that’s unique in that it allows us to get to know the man even more than the ultra-legend.   This is the amazingly true story of the person who was given up for adoption at birth, and went on to run the most valuable company on the face of the earth.   Although his contemporary and life-long rival Bill Gates outgained him in personal wealth, Jobs succeeded in earning the respect of both computer technology experts and the average consumer as the developer and producer of increasingly better, always innovative products.

Jobs and Gates were two of the individuals – along with Steve Wozniak – who were more or less present at the creation of the personal computer (PC) age.   Jobs and “Woz” were original members of The Homebrew Computer Club, an informal association in Menlo Park that had a hundred or so members; a club that heard a presentation by a young Gates from the Seattle region.   The Whole Earth Catalog was then popular (some of you will need to ask your parents about it), and Jobs was to adopt its motto as one of his guideposts in life, “Stay hungry.   Stay foolish.”

As Isaacson finely illustrates in this account, Jobs was never afraid to make mistakes with his early and later Apple Computer products – he was to learn and absorb valuable lessons from each of his mistakes right up to the time of “Antennagate” with the iPhone (“Has Apple’s Self-Destruction Begun?” was one of the headlines critiquing Jobs’ decision-making early this year).   If Jobs had been a college football coach, he would likely have been one that rarely called for a punt on fourth down; he would have often elected to go for post-TD two-point conversions.   When it came to beating his competitors, Jobs wanted to “leave no doubt.”

“The journey is the reward.”   Steve Jobs

While this book is not intended to be a comprehensive account of the PC and Silicon Valley, it gives us just enough information to understand where Apple fit in among its hardware, software and search technology alternatives such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Compaq, Google, Oracle, Adobe and others.   If you’ve read numerous histories of the era, you will likely be surprised to see how both Larry Ellison and Bill Gates come off as nothing less than gentlemen in this telling.   Ellison was especially close to Jobs, even offering to buy-out Apple Computer after Jobs’ ouster.   But Isaacson is not afraid to show us that Jobs was a human with flaws.   In addition to possessing a temper which he claimed to be unable to control, Jobs “tended to be generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavors.”   This was the case even though his wife founded College Track, an organization making efforts to help economically disadvantaged kids get into college.   Jobs never visited College Track’s after-school centers in the poor high schools where the program was (and is) located.

Like a hammer that sees everything in sight as a nail, Jobs also tended to view technology as the solution to every one of society’s difficult problems…  A very ill Jobs was to personally lecture President Obama on his view that all education should be digital and interactive (physical classrooms, teachers and whiteboards arguably being obsolete); though, in fairness, Bill Gates has made similar comments – some of which are quoted in Steve Jobs.

Isaacson clearly and comprehensively makes his case that  Jobs belongs up there with Edison and Ford as one of the greatest business leaders in American history.   He was a visionary, a big picture guy who could also master the smallest details.   He was a technological artist who was to identify with both fuzzy inventor-creators and detail-oriented engineers.   And he always understood that a sharp focus is the basic key to leadership, “Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time.”

“…he was a brilliant guy with great design taste and great engineering taste.”   Bill Gates

One of Jobs’ ultimate victories was the knowledge that his adopted father had become enormously proud of his successes and achievements.   This fine and detailed account, an initial draft of history, well makes the case that Jobs (creator of the most successful ever consumer product launches) was a man of whom the entire world was proud.   What he sought as his own less than humble legacy was to come true; he sought “…a legacy that would awe people.   A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company.”

Steve Jobs – the man who saw the future and built it for us.  

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

This book was purchased by the reviewer as a Nook Book download.   It is also available in hardcover form, as a Kindle Edition download, and in abridged and unabridged audiobook versions.

Note: According to this biography, Steve Jobs once met in the late 70s with a class of Stanford University students and showed them a prototype of a laptop computer.   He informed them that this was the type of PC that Apple would be building and selling in the 1980s.   And Apple did so.   Years later, he told a different class at Stanford that they would one day be using PCs “the size of a book.”   And now we have 7″, 8.9″, 9.4″, 9.7″ and 10.1″ tablet PCs. 

All These Things That I’ve Done

All These Things I’ve Done (Birthright) by Gabrielle Zevin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $16.99; 368 pages)

While everyone’s lost, the battle is won/ With all these things that I’ve done (Time, truth and hearts)/ If you can hold on/ If you can hold on.   “All These Things That I’ve Done,” The Killers

Chocolate is contraband… caffeine is illegal…

In All These Things I’ve Done, Gabrielle Zevin creates a New York City some seventy years into the future, when dealing in and possession of chocolate is a crime.   Yes, it’s another dystopian young adult  novel, and faint whiffs of urban decay lend it an appropriate bleakness.   But several elements set it apart from the pack and make it an unusually entertaining read.

Firstly, although the government and police are the obvious heavies, the protagonist, Anya Balanchine, is not entirely a victim.   Rather, she is the scion of an illustrious crime boss, and when her louse of a boyfriend is poisoned by tainted chocolate, suspicion turns to her.

Secondly, the adult characters are almost as prominent as teen characters.   Particularly well drawn are Galina, Anya’s wise and street-savvy grandmother, and Charles Delacroix, the assistant district attorney, whose own agenda threatens to squash Anya’s chance at happiness.

Finally, there is Anya, herself.   At 16, she’s whip smart and calculating.   As the de facto “guardian” for her younger sister and older but impaired brother, she has to weigh her every move against the legal implications as well as the potential retaliations by her own extended crime family and other chocolate syndicates.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux released All These Things I’ve Done on September 6th.   And readers who find Anya Balanchine intriguing will have cause for celebration:  This is the first book in a series.   Well recommended.

Kimberly Caldwell

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Coming Up Next…

A review of All These Things I’ve Done: A YA Novel by Gabrielle Zevin.

Radar Love

Gateways: An Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull (Tor Books, $15.99, 416 pages)

“The Federation is old, and it had gotten old by minimizing change…  The emergence of humans had disturbed the Galactic balance; change had occurred, and the Federation didn’t like change.”

This is quite simply a feast for science fiction fans!   Gateways is a collection of new science fiction stories and tributes – including essays and poetry – by 18 authors in the style of Frederick Pohl.   Pohl long ago wrote a seminal creative novel called Gateway, and he was perhaps the first to predict the current day realities of personal computers and mobile phones.

Many of the tales in this collection focus on futuristic space travel and wars between alien cultures.   One of the best, and clearly unique, stories (Shadows of the Lost) is about an encounter between very early humans and Neanderthals.   It’s an unexpected twist.   Another (Chicken Little), about a future in which only billionaires can afford to extend their natural life spans, is eerily effective.

Not all of the stories work, however.   Gunn’s Tales – about spaceship travel – is one that goes on far too long and fails to arrive anywhere.   Star Trek it is not.

Frederick Pohl is now 90.   He was a contemporary of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Kurt Vonnegut.   In his day, he won all of science fiction’s major awards (Hugos, Nebulas, the SFWA Grand Master Award) for his writing.   This worthy tribute compilation should put Pohl’s name on the radar for younger readers who are just coming to appreciate the many textures and flavors of science fiction.   Welcome!

Well recommended.

Joseph Arellano

Reprinted coutesty of San Francisco Book Review.   Gateways was released in trade paper form on July 5, 2011.   “…a must-buy for science fiction readers of all tastes,  from the traditional to the cutting-edge, from the serious to the laugh-out-loud funny.”   Amazon

100 Years

Click on the link below to read the story Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow, excerpted from Gateways, an anthology of original science fiction stories inspired by Frederick Pohl.   (“No wonder they all stayed away from the office.”)

http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/chicken-little

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.

Tomorrow Never Knows

“I feel like the 1960’s is about to happen.   It feels like a period in the future to me, rather than a period in the past.”   Paul McCartney, 1994

After the Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties – A Memoir by Catherine Gildiner (Viking; $25.95; 368 pages)

This is a memoir that I simply didn’t understand, and let me try to explain why.   Memoirs – literally, a telling of personal memories – generally fall into one of two categories.   In the first, the writer self-examines his or her own life very closely (if not microscopically) and critically.   These generally conclude with life lessons and the writer’s unflinching willingness to accept responsibility for the mistakes he or she has made.   With the second category, the writer plays it for laughs.   Basically, he/she says, “I was young and irresponsible.   I know that now, but back then I was such a fool.   Oh, well, such is life!”

In After the Falls, Catherine Gildiner refuses to place herself in either category.   She writes here about a life filled with errors and omissions but then declines to accept responsibility for her own role in it.   (She’s shocked when a crime happens in front of her very eyes; a boyfriend lies to her – actually he simply fails to tell her the truth; she acts hatefully toward her parents, etc.)   In a sense she commits one of the worst offenses imaginable in life, which is to be a mere observer of her actions and inactions.

Let me give a specific example of her disclaiming of responsibility.   At one point, she writes about observing the gang rape of a presumably underage  girl while hiding in the closet of a female friend’s house.   The rape is instigated by the friend’s older brother.   Does Gildiner report the crime to anyone?   No.   Does it even make her angry?   Apparently not, although she thinks now and then about the girl who was repeatedly violated, but…  But she rejects any responsibility on not one, but multiple instances within the pages of After the Falls.   This raises a key question that must be asked:  If one does not want to accept responsibility for things that happened decades earlier, why write a book that tells the entire world about those actions?   (In other words, what is the point of all this?)

I did not read Gildiner’s earlier memoir Too Close to the Falls, but I did notice one person’s comment to the effect that this memoir is darker and more depressing than Too Close.   Well, yeah.   Frankly, I found it a bit dangerous as well as depressing.

It’s also, sadly, in this reviewer’s eyes a bit of a distortion of what it was like to grow up in the 1960s.   There was a lot of excitement about human potential and about the leaders who later fell – beginning with John Kennedy and extending through Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.   There was also the Civil Rights Movement (touched upon tangentially in these pages), and great music.   But this memoir would lead one to think that the entire decade was,  in the words of one notable rock band, “a drag…”, as in “What a drag it is getting up.”

To her credit, Gildiner concludes this unconventional account with an admission of how belatedly she grew to love and appreciate her parents – especially her father who lived for six years with a cancer that eventually turned his brain into “an empty honeycomb.”   But it seems to be too little too late.

Missing most of all is a sense of the joyousness of growing up in what was truly a unique and energizing time.   We may not be able to go back to those times, but we can certainly treat the decade more kindly that it has been portrayed here.   A bit of gratitude might have been in order.

This review was written by Joseph Arellano.   A review copy was received from the publisher.

Addicted to Shopping

Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict by Avis Cardella (Little, Brown & Company, 272 pages)

“I used shopping to avoid myself.”

Be prepared for a brutally honest, yet somewhat elusive account of Avis Cardella’s journey into, and recovery from, the nearly overwhelming habit of shopping and shopping and shopping.   Alongside her own story, Cardella incorporates general information regarding the evolution of shopping in excess beginning with Madame Bovary up through today.   This is no laughing matter.   The prevalence of shopping as therapy or a habit is so great that the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders may contain “compulsive shopping disorder” as a separate listing rather than an entry under the heading of obsessive compulsive disorders.

The mix of confessional talk, some statistics and the events that were pivotal in the author’s life and, more importantly, her relationships with men, surround her almost as if she were dancing around herself, changing costumes as she assumed roles.   There is so much numbness expressed in the narrative that is almost like seeing her through a blanket of fog – not hot or cold, just thick and obscuring.

Cardella was drawn to fashion at an early age.   As a girl she had a regular supply of magazines like Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Glamour that her mother purchased faithfully each month.   This mother-daughter duo spent their best time together on shopping expeditions.   Cardella’s mother loved dressing up, especially in costume-like outfits.   Sadly, she died at an early age which left a gaping hole in her daughter’s life.

Jobs became a means to enable shopping, first as a teen employee at Macy’s and then as an adult flight attendant.   That first Macy’s card was managed well as were her purchases.   It was only later that the spending got out of hand.   Cardella writes of her precipitous decline into a world of shopping that sounds more like a drug addiction than the usual garden variety retail therapy most people indulge in once in a while.   She describes it as being taken over by need and experiencing a trance-like state when wandering through stores in Manhattan.

The lure of fashion is hard to resist in this book and Cardella has an amazing talent for describing the garments and accessories that became part of her.   Each page contains at least one designer name or a reference to the lifestyle she sometimes lead that went with wearing the best labels money, or credit, could buy.   In all honesty, this reviewer had some vivid recollections of her first pair of flats, in an awesome turquoise color and a champagne-colored taffeta dress worn to dancing classes in junior high school.

Cardella readily admits that her wardrobe began as mix-and-match pieces acquired without a strategy or goal in mind.   This wardrobe could easily be a metaphor for the way she lived acquiring relationships.   After all, if you don’t know yourself, how can you possibly know what will suit you?   She had no real sense of the future, nor did she make plans.

The writing style is calm, even and well-spoken with the exception of a few minor grammatical blunders and three funny homonyms (peak for peek, weary for wary, and reeled for railed), that crept in along the way.   Two thirds of the way through the book, this reviewer found herself wondering how far a shopping addict has to go to hit bottom.

The takeaway from Spent  is that stuff has power!   Whether that power is good or bad may depend upon the strength of the individual acquiring the stuff.   Highly recommended for moms and daughters.

This review was written by Ruta Arellano.   A copy of the book was purchased for her by her husband.