Review of If I Had My Druthers (Paperback)

This book is an interesting read and...
apparently the author is the step sister in law of Rick Springfield.She never mentions it specifically and calls the family Springthorpe but Rick's wife's father married the author's mother.

Product Description
On July 20, 1995, author Terri Austin Chiles received a call at work that she had been dreading-her mother, Amanda, is dying.

Amanda Fouther, a poor African American girl from Birmingham, Alabama, lived in a shack with her parents and seven siblings. Though she had very little going for her except charm, wit, and incredible good looks, she used these attributes to win a statewide beauty contest and college scholarship. This would be the first of many steps on a path filled with astonishing successes and devastating failures. But Amanda earned her doctorate degree and raised three children, including Chiles, who became a prominent Wall Street attorney.

As Chiles endures a painful divorce and struggles to maintain financial stability, she makes sure that the well-being of her children is her highest priority. Drawing on everything she learned from her mother, Chiles obtains a small but affordable apartment and enrolls her children in the best school in Manhattan. Through all of life's difficulties, it is the values and lessons instilled by Chiles's mother that give her the strength to keep going.

This captivating memoir includes letters and journal entries that provide a poignant tribute to Amanda's memory.

About the Author
Terri Austin Chiles, an attorney in New York City, has practiced law for more than twenty years. She received a law degree and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. She currently lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband and their children.

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Review of THE TENDER BAR (Hardcover)

This is one of those books that paralyzes the reviewer in its beauty.What can I say to convince you to read this book?Ideally, I'd just highlight every single line and make you read it.

It is nearly impossible to pin down one theme Moehringer's memoir is about:Fatherless boys?Working class moms trying to make ends meet?The search for a father figure in a crowd of bartenders?The genesis of a journalist, of a writer?The life of a blue-collar Yalie?Determining one's purpose in life?An intense character study of men in a bar?The rebellion of a son against his mom's intense love and support?Society's love affair with alcohol? In the end, this memoir is all of this and so much more, told in marvelous prose.

The author biography in the back jacket flap reveals that Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.These facts will help buoy the reader when our author is failing out of Yale, failing at life, or struggling to get promoted beyond his hard-won copyboy position at the New York Times.Moehringer searches for purpose, reason, motivations, and positive reinforcement (other than from his mother).He especially struggles with his unpublished novel, which he worked on for close to a decade (and which I suspect became the basis for his memoir, since the novel was reportedly largely autobiographical).

This is one of those books one needs to own, for the underlining of critical passages and literary references to review again later.Be prepared to get intimate with the tough, ruddy-faced bartenders and barkeeps of Publicans (especially Uncle Charlie, who I have known in another body in my own life), and to put Steve's bar on the list of places to visit before you die.




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Review of My Sister Life (Paperback)

I am ambivalent about this book. It is a page-turner; it is easy to read, and it is salacious. But it is also cold, distant, and doesn't offer anything particularly insightful about motivation or causes of the familial dysfunction, other than the mother's remoteness from her children and the father's diffidence.

I wondered at several times whether this was indeed biography, or just an elaborate fiction, along the lines of an earlier generation's "Go Ask Alice". A bit of Internet research suggests that it is indeed real, and that the author set out with a forensic-like dispassionate intent.

I suppose I had expected something a little bit more personal. I am pleased it does not have the schmaltzy tones of a bad telemovie. It certainly desrcibes in exquisite and distressingdetail the processes of mental and physical abuse, but it is all conveyed as a description of a specimen on a glass slide.

Read it, and don't weep - for there is no emotional connection made with this reader, at least!



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Review of A Place in the Country (Paperback)

In SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS, author Laura Shaine Cunningham movingly remembered her life growing up in the Bronx with her single mother, Rosie, until the latter's untimely death, after which Laura's guardians were her mother's two odd-ball bachelor brothers, Len and Gabe.

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY is essentially a sequel, wherein Ms. Cunningham describes her life from the mid-1950's to Y2K. Indeed, the first couple of chapters reprise events of her life with Rosie and her uncles - all in the context of explaining her developing love for "the country". This is not unexpected in someone who grew up in small, overcrowded, city apartments. Most of the book revolves around the two rural homes in which the author has spent a good portion of her adult life, the Castle and The Inn, the latter having been her abode away from The City for the last 18 years up to the present.

Laura's life has been, in many ways, perfectly ordinary - probably not so different from the general pattern of yours or mine. Perhaps that's why it's so appealing. (We have here not the memoir of an obnoxious diva, whining and overpaid sports figure, or dysfunctional actor.) The author's great ability in sharing is her gentle, wry sense of humor, whether it's telling us about the trials of converting an old underground cistern into a swimming pool, or starting an ill-conceived cottage industry in potpourri pillows, or battling the local fauna over home-grown tomatoes, or the adoption of her first daughter from Romania, or her second daughter from China, or learning the pitfalls inherent to raising chickens, geese and goats. For instance ...

"I spent most of my time preparing the alleged garden, jumping on the end of a pickaxe, trying to tilt the tip of what might be a glacial formation (of rock) that extends to the core of the earth. When at last there was a thin strip of what we could call soil, we stuck in seeds, which were instantly lost and unidentifiable except to the birds that snacked on them. We graduated immediately to seedlings that cost as much as the finished vegetables. In this way, we worked our way up, with credit cards, to the six-hundred dollar tomato."

Not all of Laura's life in the country has been happy. In the later chapters, when she tells of the eventual dissolution of her 27-year marriage, or the neighbors that move away, or die, or just her slide into middle-age, the tone of A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY becomes occasionally melancholic. ("Time is supposed to march on, but now it hurtles.") But, her narrative never loses the sensitivity and poignancy that conveys to the reader the fact that she is, from all evidence, a truly good human being giving Life her best shot. A person that it would be an honor to hug.



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Review of Capote: A Biography (Paperback)

I ran across this book and hadn't thought about Capote in years and got it on impulse. It is just a wonderful bio and captures what Capote was and why he attracted such attention. It is hard to imagine what a youngster he was when he came on the scene and how he was so very loved. The book is full of lovely stories and famous people. The chapters on the "swans" was my favorite but his relationships, the accounts of his writing, his amazing ambition and ability to have devoted friends and ultimately his terrible end are written like a novel. Capote was generous, brilliant, kind, warm, seductive,vicious at times and utterly captivating. I now want to reread his books. But the accounts of his travels abroad, his long stays at wonderful quaint places and the "moveable feast" of his early life made me long to have been there. I loved this bio.



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