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Brief
Book Reviews
5 October 2002
In the Little World: A True Story
of Dwarfs, Love and Trouble
John H. Richardson
With so little written about dwarf culture,
this book is welcome despite its flaws. I’m waiting for Phoenix
reporter Dan
Kennedy’s book on the same subject, though from advance articles it looks
to be a little too family newspaper-y (his daughter is a dwarf). Richardson
goes too much the other way, if anything, with no qualms about including
unflattering physical descriptions of dwarfs (I guess "dwarves"
means fairy tale creatures?), and much of the book consists of blow by blow
e-mail fights between him and a female dwarf who takes him to task for his
insensitivity. This does nothing but illustrate how men don’t understand how
hurtful their ideals of female beauty can be to women ("but we’re just
being honest!" they cry), and we didn’t need to read any more about
that. Another chunk of the book is about a family with a severely disabled
dwarf daughter and a mother who’s unraveling online trying to care for her,
which ends up being more about the mother's borderline personality than
anything to do with dwarfism. Also included are lousy photos that look like
they were snapped without permission. Richardson doesn’t make any claims to
be anything other than a guy who’s fascinated by dwarfs, but I wish he – or
someone – would try a little harder.
Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family
Lis Harris
Harris spends several months visiting a
Lubavitcher community in Brooklyn, joining their celebrations, eating meals
with them, talking to them as much as she can. Their world is not easily
penetrable, which makes Harris’ accomplishment remarkable: while she doesn’t
shy away from the difficult (ugly clashes between the Lubavitchers and the
Satmar, the strained lives of Gay Orthodox men) she gives the reader a feel
for the Hasidic way of life, and a sense of its appeal.
What’s Not to Love?:
The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer
Jonathan Ames
Not for the faint of heart or weak of
stomach, as Ames will try anything and freely tell you all about it. I love
anything by someone smart and self-deprecating, but there’s something
specious about a four-times published author claiming to be a failure. Ames
is an interesting mix of things: former underwear model, cab driver, ersatz
father, boxer, academic. And he's an amusing companion for a few days of reading.
Find more of the same, including autobiography in a wafer-thin
disguise as fiction, in Ames's My So-Called Secret Life.
The Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little
Bit Differently
Robert Levine
Everything you wanted to know about time
but were too busy to ask. Psychologist Levine looks at time cross-culturally,
at the relationship between time and power, time and happiness, the history
of timekeeping, and how long it takes to buy stamps in various American
cities and what that tells you about the people living there. Some of the
differences between cultures seem a bit oversimplified, although he also
presents evidence, for example, that people in warmer places probably do have
slower internal clocks, hence their slower pace of life. Also, obese people
are more likely than average sized people to estimate the passage of time
correctly. What exactly this means, I don't know, but it's interesting
reading.
Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish
Community
Ellen Jaffe McClain
An excellent discussion of marriage between
Jews and non-Jews, touching on what’s behind these relationships, and what
they mean for the future of Judaism. McClain’s sensible conclusion is that
it’s neglect of Judaism on the part of any Jews, regardless of whom they’re
married to, that is a problem. In fact, non-Jews married to Jews may be at
least as dedicated to Judaism as their partners are, and in many cases the
non-Jewish partner converts. Marred only by a lengthy section on the JAP
stereotype in the media that appears to be a graduate thesis with nowhere
else to go, this book is highly recommended to anyone who cares about the
future of Judaism.
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These Girls are a
Handful!
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More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction
Elizabeth Wurtzel
For your voyeuristic pleasure, there’s
nothing like watching beautiful, talented people squander opportunities
most of us will never have. As Wurtzel’s life shrinks to the tiny dark
space between her ears, we can vicariously act out our narcissism while
patting ourselves on the back for simply getting out of bed in the morning.
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Domestic Affairs and Where Love Goes
Joyce Maynard
Same book: the first is a memoir, the
second a fictionalized memoir. No one appreciates Joyce! So to get
attention she’s forced to pick up a man, get him to fix her car, and then
mention, oh, by the way, she has a husband at home. Then her husband leaves
her, the pie-making earth mother, for someone with small breasts (which of
course symbolize a lack of maternal instinct). If you’ve seen Once…and
Again now and again, you don’t need to read either of these books once.
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Just Checking: Scenes From the Life of an Obsessive Compulsive
Emily Colas
Personally, I believe we can all do with
a little more OCD – you won’t catch me touching the bottoms of my shoes or
handling money before I eat, and if that’s a mental illness, well, it’s
better than a lot of other illnesses. Colas has a dry sense of humor that makes
a fun read out of her ultimately sad story (OCD wrecks her marriage,
twice). You know she’ll pull through.
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First Comes Love
Marion Winik
Winik marries a gay figure skater because
she thinks he’s cute, he doesn’t say no, and they have a great time doing
drugs together. He’s HIV positive, and she knows this, but she conceives
two children with him anyway. Since she's articulate and middle class, her
story is heard on NPR rather than in the family court dockets.
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Love Works Like
This: Moving From One Kind of Life to Another
Lauren Slater
After the abysmal Prozac Diary, I
don’t know why I tried this one. Well, yes I do, I wanted to know if it’s
possible for a self-absorbed person who doesn’t want children to be a good
mother. As a, uh, purely intellectual inquiry. The answer is no. But that’s
not Slater’s conclusion. She hires a full time nanny and continues her life
apace, forgetting at times she even has a child. And what do you know,
motherhood doesn’t change her life that much at all! To use her favorite
sentence construction: this is all whining and selfishness.
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Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Alexandra Fuller
She can’t write for beans, but her story is
weird enough to make it worth an attempt at reading. I would have liked a
more thoughtful look at how growing up white in Rhodesia, with no concept of
Africans as fellow human beings, would affect her as an adult. See Before the
Knife.
The Nanny Diaries
Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin
Fun, of course. More enlightening, however,
are the recent reports of how spoiled the Nanny authors are behaving. The New
York Observer got it right: they could write about the world of the
entitled Manhattan upper crust because that’s where they’re from, and that’s
where they’re headed.
Lucky in the Corner
Carol Anshaw
Her third novel. Anshaw is witty too, but
something is wrong. Are all of the characters reading their lines off a
teleprompter? Nobody talks like that. Precociously self-aware teenagers,
gently self-deprecating adults - couldn’t finish it.
The Red Tent
Anita Diamant
Didn’t think I’d like this, had fears of a
fable about Women’s Ways of Knowing, but even if it is sort of a Jewish
version of The Color Purple it won me over easily (and helped me get
my Bible stories straight – I never did understand as a kid the whole
Leah/Rachel thing). Beautiful writing, and as in the Bible, even the good
guys are flawed.
Manhattan, When I Was Young
Mary Cantwell
Ah, to have lived in New York in the
fifties. Cantwell is a little clueless, claiming to be hamstrung by a of lack
confidence, while plum editing jobs fall into her lap in her early twenties,
which can be annoying. But better this than Back Then, with Anne
Bernays and Justin Kaplan nattering on about how important they and their
friends are (unless you’re titillated by the image of Anatole Broyard doing
Anne on a dining room table). I skimmed that one so fast I got a paper cut.
Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing
David Leavitt
Leavitt’s best book yet is an unabashedly
autobiographical novel about a talented young writer and his mentor. Even if,
like me, you’re out of the gossip loop and don’t recognize the thin disguises
of the players (except maybe the stentorian AIDS activist/playwright and the
Ivy League lesbian actress), Leavitt’s polished style is hearty and soothing.
Come Up and See Me Sometime
Erika Krouse
Short stories. As witty as Lorrie Moore, if
not as deep.
The Man Who Ate Everything
Jeffrey Steingarten
Funny, educational, and highly skimmable as
it’s all essays. But don’t miss his chapter on Olestra, which he bravely
defends. Steingarten is an unrepentant omnivore and impervious to political
correctness of any sort: he scorns fad diets, thinks food allergies are a
bunch of hooey, scours France looking for the best sauerkraut, and spends
several days figuring out how to eat well on a food stamp budget. Food is for
everybody, and so is this book.
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