Need For reads

Nonfiction Full and fruitful humanity PIONEER GIRL PERSPECTIVES: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal 300 pages, South Dakota Historical Society Press Reviewed by Diane Diekman This is not a book for beginners, but a collection of essays for those with a scholarly appreciation of the life and work of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It follows an earlier book, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography , which was an unexpected bestseller in 2014. Wilder’s world-famous Little House series originated from her unpublished “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, written in 1930. When the South Dakota Historical Society Press annotated and published the annotated autobiography in 2014, the 15,000-copy print run sold out in three weeks. The small press found itself with a runaway bestseller, going through eight printings and selling more than 150,000 copies in the first year.   Reporters and critics asked, “What is the appeal?” The South Dakota editors wondered, “What made Wilder and he...

Fiction Stories my mother would never tell The Ivan By Erin Eldridge 189 pp. Austin Macauley Publishers  Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo The Ivan is set in Berlin at the very end of World War Two, during the occupation of the city by Russian troops and just prior to the division of the city following formal surrender. I was drawn to this book by stories told to me by my father, stories my mother would never tell. My mother was born and lived in Vienna and went through the Nazification and then the Russian occupation of that city. She had friends and relatives who disappeared. She had a cousin who wandered back virtually catatonic from an SS unit he had been conscripted into – he was sixteen. The experiences she never would discuss are summed up well in Eldridge’s story of Elise, Erich and Valery (the Ivan), including life in the shelters and basements. They had no news of events outside of their hiding place, no way of knowing anything about the status of the final battle for Berlin. ...

Nonfiction To challenge but not bewilder LIT UP: ONE REPORTER THREE SCHOOLS. TWENTY-FOUR BOOKS THAT CAN CHANGE LIVES. By David Denby 257 pp. Henry Holt & Company Reviewed by David Daniel Journalist David Denby ( Great Books ; Do the Movies Have a Future? ) approaches this  project by posing the question: Can hormone-driven, Facebook and Instagram-addicted teens, perched between childhood and adulthood—which is to say, the mass of American high school students!—get excited about reading serious literature? Embedding himself in the classrooms of several public schools, much the way a war correspondent might dig in with combat troops, he sets out on a year-long mission to find out.  It’s not a new inquiry. This and ancillary questions about what books “reach” students, how best to teach them, how to measure outcomes, etc., are examined daily in classrooms and staff rooms, in faculty lounges and in after school pubs. These discussions—like discussions about many vital issues—r...

Fiction
 The petty and profound THE GRAYBAR HOTEL: 
STORIES 
 By Curtis Dawkins 
224 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan Who would imagine that a murderer serving life without parole would have an MFA in writing and create masterful short stories? Not I, that’s for sure, but this is exactly who Curtis Dawkins is. His new collection of 14 short stories, The Graybar Hotel , destroys other assumptions about prisoners and prison as well.  This funny, sad, heartwarming and just plain astonishing book is Dawkins’ first published collection. He has published essays and shorts previously in several literary magazines where his publisher discovered his short stories.   It’s unclear how many of these are autobiographical; they take us from the beginning of incarceration—jail—to a court trial, the judge speaking to a defendant via closed-circuit TV, a bus transfer to a Michigan state prison, and then a life inside. We know from the acknowledgments at the back of the book that D...

Nonfiction The bravest man I ever met THE CASTAWAY’S WAR: One Man’s Battle Against Imperial Japan By Stephen Harding 290 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by Bob Sanchez In the summer of 1943, a 1,000-pound Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo struck the destroyer USS Strong and sent it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. A nearby US warship rescued many of the sailors, but Lieutenant Hugh Miller was not one of them. After going overboard, a nearby depth charge exploded and nearly killed him, but he and three others clung to a floating net that drifted ashore onto Arundel, a small island controlled by the Japanese. The Americans’ odds of survival looked bleak. But that’s the middle of the book. Except for a brief prelude, historian Stephen Harding tells the story chronologically: Hugh Barr Miller Jr. from Tuscaloosa, Alabama learned early life lessons about “the value of self-reliance and ingenuity, of adaptability and dogged determination”; he played in the ...

Fiction Sticking to your ribs TESTIMONY By Scott Turow 477 pp. Grand Central Publishing Group Reviewed by Jack Shakely In our current world of courtroom drama novels, we have John Grisham, who’s been phoning them in for years, James Patterson, who turns out to be not a single author, but a factory of writers, and Scott Turow. Thank goodness. Turow is a master of legal drama, and Testimony may be his best to date. Its sharp observations and page-turning plot twists are pure Turow and pure pleasure. Like his other nine novels, Testimony begins in Kindle County (a poorly disguised Cook County and Turow’s Yoknapatawpha), but it quickly launches attorney William ten Boom across the Atlantic to The Hague, and its various courts for war crimes and international disputes.   Turow writes in the first person, so ten Boom and the reader can explore together the arcane world of The Hague, where lawyers still wear black robes with starched lacy dickies and nothing is exactly as it seems. Turo...

Nonfiction Soaring notes and a miracle WAKING THE SPIRIT A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul By Andrew Schulman 312 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis Waking the Spirit is professional musician Andrew Schulman’s touching account of expanding his repertoire into the theater of healing. He plays his guitar to stimulate the will to live in people who are gravely ill.  He begins with his own near-death experience, a devastating event brought on by complications of anaphylactic shock following surgery. After three days in ICU, his wife, Wendy, has a sudden inspiration – perhaps music can revive him. She chooses Bach’s St. Matthew Passion , a favorite of Schulman’s, and thanks to earbud cords and an iPod, the soaring notes work a miracle, a fact witnessed by a young doctor in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Here’s an excerpt: By early evening, Dr. Eiref told Wendy, with cautious optimism, that I was “out of the woods.” The medical charts, my SICU progress notes report woul...