Book Reviews
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Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg
The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley N. Alpert
Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen
When Skateboards Are Free
by Said Sayrafiezadeh
Stolen Youth: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir by Lucille Lum
A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer
With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Valet by Heinz Linge
Three Wishes by Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Pamela Ferdinand
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When Skateboards Are Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh
"I survived Catholic school!" Proclaimed a bumper sticker message that periodically appeared on cars some years ago. Said Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Are Free (Dial Press, 2010) could logically show his own adaptation of that message, "I survived the Socialist Workers Party childhood." In fact his story even has a parallel with the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal that has been so well publicized in recent times. As a four-year-old, Said was the sex abuse victim of a Socialist Workers Party member in whose care his mother left him one evening. And when his mother reported it to the party, (but not to the police) a party representative blew her away saying, "Under capitalism, everyone has problems." She might as well have written to the Vatican.
But we are getting too far ahead of the story. Said has a much stronger identity than just that of a one-time sex abuse victim. The son of (an absent) Iranian immigrant father and a mother born "Martha Finkelstein," he was a prisoner of their particular political obsession Despite the vast cultural gap between the backgrounds of his parents, they had a common bond as "true believers," devotees of the Socialist Workers Party.
Said's father split when Said was a child, not to see his son for years - and then only during occasional brief and awkward reunions. During one such meeting, a dinner to belatedly celebrate Said's birthday, his father showed him a recent edition of the party's newspaper which he regularly talked around town. "How much does it cost?" The birthday boy asked. "It's a calculated question," Said writes, hoping his father would offer it to him in lieu of a more appropriate gift. "A dollar 50," his father says in a tone that clearly says, "you have to pay."
Because of his father's "normal" absence from his life Said has virtually no Iranian identity, save the fact of his name and his Middle Eastern looking face, both of which created serious difficulties for him when he was in seventh grade in 1979 when American jingoism and intolerance ran high because of the hostage crisis in Iran.
Unfortunately for Said, although his mother loved him in her fashion, she too contributed to his childhood of deprivation. Despite her college education, she chose lower paying jobs that she might otherwise have had, relegating the two of them to life in a series of cramped apartments. She also held onto a fantasy that Said's father would eventually reunite with her.
Said's mother also regularly dragged the boy to party meetings and weekend party conferences and importantly, inculcated the parties mythology as he was growing up.
Despite the neglect to which it Said was exposed, like the best of the genre, his memoir is a beautiful work of art that dispassionately describes a bizarre childhood with nary a hint of self-pity. A variety of scenes are likely to stay in my mind for some time: Said in Cuba as a 12-year-old during a weeklong visit in the company of party members, but without his mother. Said standing up before his middle school classmates for a show and tell sort of exercise, stating that he holds in his hand an article about a minority candidate for the presidency during the election which resulted in Khomeini coming to power. But he becomes tongue-tied and does not tell them that the candidate is his father.
"All happy childhoods are the same, but unhappy childhoods are not," Tolstoy might have written. There are numerous memoirs about bizarre and unhappy childhoods. Many are interesting even if they're not well written. Said's is more than interesting and it is beautifully written.
A Ticket to the Circus Reviewed by Beth Morrison
In A Ticket to the Circus
Norris Church Mailer converts the skeptic to a friend: when it ends we feel that we'll miss a close companion who shared with US starkly honest stories of a life packed with folly, humor, eccentricity, and human dignity.
Born Barbara Jean Davis, the only daughter of Arkansas Baptists, Barbara grew up to be a high school art teacher and by her mid-twenties, she was a single mom, divorced from a Vietnam vet. She meets Norman Mailer while he was visiting a local college. Apart from cultural differences, (Mailer was from Jewish Brooklyn) also between them were twenty six years and five women (mothers of his 7 children.) The two embarked on a relationship that lasted—not easily—till Mailer’s death 30 years later.
Barbara Jean Davis becomes Norris Church Mailer. As Norris she introduces the reader to the family: her parents, each of the seven stepchildren, their mothers, her own two sons, and Norman’s mom. The portraits are brief but fond sketches of each and they reveal Norris’ capacity to befriend the unlikely and to see the good in people. Even the last girlfriend’s mother is brought into the fold. Photos interspersed along the way fill out the picture of a family Norris nurtured and helped to unite.
The most complex portrait is-not unexpectedly-that of Norman Mailer: On the one hand he was a thoughtful observer of the absurdities of the twentieth century and a hard-working and talented writer. In his personal life, he was also a proud and loving family man who encouraged his wife’s ambitions to paint, model, act and write. On the other side Mailer was a vain and arrogant man who raged, cheated on Norris, and seemed to relish televised enmities and debates with feminists and notables like Gore Vidal.
As for herself, Norris presents the glamorous side—there are photos of her modeling career including lounging naked on a red fox fur—but the majority of the book is filled with the more ordinary in her life. She acknowledges the guilt of months spent away from her young son, the folly of her attempts to act, her own affairs, the hardship of bearing witness to her parents’ aging and dying process, followed by the painful path she traveled with her husband as he traveled that same road. This followed by her own cancer.
It’s important in sharing with a friend a willingness to be silly. Norris doesn’t shy from that: During her actress want-to-be phase, as she’s about to shoot a commercial, she’s outfitted with long fake fingernails: “I tried to pick my nose and nearly slit my throat…I had small nicks where I’d tried to scratch in my sleep, and it is a miracle I didn’t put my eye out.” Who hasn’t been faced with the folly of one’s own attempts to be someone she isn't ?
As for the “circus” in the book title, the life this book bears witness to is a whirlwind: with glimpses of Bill Clinton, Jackie O, Ted Kennedy, Woody Allen, Oscar de la Renta, Bob Dylan and Fidel Castro. With homes in Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown, life with Mailer also meant time spent in Bar Harbor and Stockbridge and trips to Mexico, Cuba, Russia, Vietnam. In the pages on the trip to Manila the leader is literally ringside at the Ali-Frazier fight:
Testosterone glowed in the air like phosphorus, and the smell of sweaty bodies
was at a level I could just about tolerate without fainting. The crowd parted, and four men came in carrying a…well, a throne is what it was, a big gold chair that sat up higher than everyone else’s. Behind the chair, in a procession, was President Marcos surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, walking in formation.
At one point in Mailer’s life, he befriended an incarcerated man named, Jack Abbott. Once released, Abbott arrived uninvited at the Brooklyn apartment yet with Mailer's approval, insinuated himself into the family. The misadventure of living with an ex-con provides dramatic tension and yields sympathy and admiration for how Norris handled the whole fraught situation.
A Ticket to the Circus is a candid account of a woman, warts and all, who sees the best in others, allows us to see the best in her, and maybe even to feel that we've added a friend to our world. Unexpectedly we come to see Norris as a friend. There are times when she seems to enjoy not only her own sexy persona but when she too easily accepts a servile role. And we can do without the make-up tips: (mix it with your moisturizer.) But then that is exactly what is good about the memoir: it’s a candid account of a woman, warts and all, who sees the best in others, allows us to see the best in her, and to feel that we've added a friend to our world.
Three Wishes
"Happy Birthday Sweetie. How are you?" a parent tells his/her daughter who has just turned thirty something. Daughter responds with "I want to have a baby." It's a common scenario. Behind the young woman's statement is the ticking of her biological clock. Like millions of other young women in their 30s in postindustrial America, including the three authors of Three Wishes, she has put career on the front burner, ahead of marriage and motherhood. But like Pam Ferdinand, one of the three authors of Three Wishes, they all share some version of Ferdinand's dream in her early 20s: "I had imagined myself in the future as a married mother with five children living on a farm in Vermont."
Journalists Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Ferdinand (GJF) have written a revealing and well integrated account of their respective journeys from being single successful professionals to married successful mothers -- and professionals. Along the way to their longed for destinations, they had to navigate a bunch of difficult shoals -- including kissing a bunch of frogs (if I may mix my metaphors).
Author Goldberg decided to try IVF at age 39 after she broke up with a cheating
boyfriend. Sometime after she successfully convinced a new one to become a father to a child, they broke up, she had the baby and then became involved with a third somewhat older fellow who said about Goldberg's daughter, "I don't love her yet, but I'm sure I will love her. That relationship too collapsed.
Jones conceived with her husband who reacted to the news of her pregnancy by saying, "This isn't the most convenient time," Then she miscarried, divorced and had an unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend (who had a track record of numerous short-term relationships). "We'll figure this out," he said when she told him she was pregnant. "You just have to give me a little time." Then came a phone call from a genetic counselor, "I have your amnio results. . . . Beth, I'm sorry," and she aborted a Down Syndrome fetus. At one point, Goldberg gave her a vial of sperm that Goldberg had received from a sperm bank (which in the end neither of them needed.) The story goes on from there.
Ferdinand too took a while before she reached the promised land. For a while she was busy with a creep who described some vacation plans at one point, "come over with me and spend the first five days there. Then the guys [will] come [and you'll go home.] She too received the magic vial which in turn -- well, read the book.
In addition to the above problems, GJF also experience the threat of infertility and fear of familial rejection if they chose to use IVF.
One of several delightful features of Three Wishes is that it has some of the attributes of a mystery. The reader quickly becomes involved in their lives and determination to become pregnant. But this time the mystery is not who done it -- but who (as in which guy) will it ("it" as in get the woman pregnant)? And who will stick around?
For many women in GJF's predicament the ending is not a happy one. Many don't or can't take the chance of becoming single mothers. But for GJF themselves, it all works out in the end: children and husbands/fathers. Did I give away the ending? Don't worry. The book's mystery is in the process much more than in the ending(s).
Three Wishes inspires the reader to empathize with the authors' quest for parenthood and even cheer them on. One more thing -- although it might sound like a "woman's book," its scope is too big and too compelling for such narrow categorization. The book deserves a broad readership.
Hyperion, 2009
In Annie's Ghosts, author Steve Luxenberg touches on two powerful and important themes: family secrets and mental illness. The secret in Luxenberg's family was that despite his mother's often repeated claims that she was an only child, his mother had an older mentally and physically handicapped sister. And furthermore, that sister had spent most of her life in a mental institution. Luxenberg only learned this truth shortly before his mother's death In a book that the author calls part memoir, part journalism and part history, Luxenberg details the search for the answers to a series of questions. Among them: Who knew about the sister? Why the secret? Why was she institutionalized? In the course of telling about his odyssey, Luxenberg describes his step-by-step research for the answers. He also goes astray in providing a mini history of the treatment of the mentally ill in his home state, Michigan, and in recounting his visit to an ancestral town in Eastern Europe In his search, Luxenberg struggles against the fact that the person who should have been his chief source, his mother, was dead by the time he began his search. In fact, out of respect for her privacy, he never even revealed to her in her last days that he had learned the secret. But the reader sees in graphic detail the effects of the 1930s and earlier 1940s policy of treatment of the mentally ill. We both sympathize and wonder at how before public campaigns that enlightened the public regarding mental illness, a woman felt the need to carry a burden of secrecy and perceived shame about the sisters and their families misfortune. Many readers, particularly those with related issues in their own families, and genealogists will be intrigued by Luxenberg's fascinating story.
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The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley N. Alpert
Putnam's Sons, 2007
A 38-year-old man is walking down the street in Manhattan. Suddenly a short stocky stranger comes out of nowhere holding an automatic machine gun. "Don't say a word. Just get in the f___n’ car, m ___f_____r." Thus began the author's 25 hour ordeal as the victim of a random kidnapping. Although Alpert was an assistant US attorney, his kidnappers selected him randomly. Their motive was money. How Alpert outsmarted his kidnappers into unconditionally releasing him is the stuff that his book is made of. The Birthday Party is a fast and dramatic tale, best read on a plane or train where besides entertaining you, it will grip and distract you from the unpleasantries of travel.
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Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen
Anchor Books, 1999
I'm not crazy about Chinese food; my wife had to drag me with her to China. For sure part of the problem was that I had read very little about Chinese history and had never developed any particular interest in the country. Had I read Da Chen's beautifully written memoir first, I might have approached the trip with a very different mindset. The author is from a family of landlords, a genealogy that gave him two strikes against him during his Cultural Revolution era childhood. Colors of the Mountain shows, among other things, how cruel people can be. Da was the best student in his class. But for his teachers that did not matter. He and his family were on the outs a fact which some of them in some of his classmates reminded him constantly. Fortunately, Da had a loving and supportive family and a clever mind. He also made friends with a gang of hoodlums who nevertheless respected him for his mind and acknowledged that he would not remain one of them forever. And he had the good fortune to be linked up with an elderly Chinese Baptist woman who taught him English, a fact which acted as a key to opening up the door of a new life In addition to describing his own fascinating childhood as well giving his own personal perspective on the Cultural Revolution, Da Chen provides his readers with a treat via his exquisite writing. For one thing she makes masterful use of metaphors and similes. He writes of "a forbidding drought that date fields throughout China cracked like wax," of a river that zigzagged "like a dragon on land," of the skin on his forehead that "was feeling like a snake casting his skin in the springtime." The principal of the school was "a frog of a man. He had bowed legs and walked with a wide side to side swing." In fields near his home "yellow wildflowers were scattered across the green carpet like solitary souls still searching for their destiny." And finally, "Milon [an island] lay like a sapphire amid the blue Pacific.
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The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed by Judy Shepard (Hudson Street Press, 2009)
The 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard because he was gay, shocked the world. The image of his body tied to a fence carried over into at least one TV show, Bones. But like other world headline making crimes such as the 1985 killing of Leon Klinghoffer who was thrown overboard in 1985 from the Achille Lauro, or the 2002 decapitation of reporter Daniel Pearl, with time it has receded from many people's memories.
Publication of Judy Shepard's (Matthew's mother) memoir, The Meaning of Matthew casts the young man's murder in a light that I suspect may burn it and its significance deeper into readers' psyches. Put simply, Matthew, victim of a horrendous crime, was also someone's son. For sure there are parents with hearts so hardened from homophobia that they cannot sympathize. But I suspect and hope that they are a tiny percentage of the American population.
I believe that any parent who reads Judy Shepard's slow starting book will come away from the experience a bit changed. With no intention to compare homophobic killings to the immensity of the Holocaust, I suggest that just as Anne Frank's diary was the first book to put a single victim's face on the Holocaust, Shepard's puts one on the continuing epidemic of hate towards gays.
Although The Meaning of Matthew should probably be read with a supply of tissues on hand, it is much more than a tearjerker. We learn that long before Matthew outed himself to his mother - a difficult step for him - he asked her not to tell his father -she suspected he was gay and worried that he would never have a family of his own. In addition, Matthew was not street smart and at the age of 18 or so, he was raped one night while abroad with some classmates, by a group of three men. The incident left him with post traumatic syndrome which appears to have left a permanent mark on him.
Matthew' s difficulties with his identity also extended beyond the difficulty he had revealing his secrets to his father. He told two of his grandparents who seemed fine with the revelation, until his grandmother was asked if she would be willing to meet Matthews gay friends; she flunked the test by refusing.
Judy Shepard first learned about the circumstances of her son's death when, returning to the US from Saudi Arabia where her husband had been working, she saw a New York Times headline in airport kiosk. Summoned home for an unspecified emergency concerning Matthew, it was only in the hospital that the Shepards learn how serious things were. There they found him unconscious, his face and skull having been smashed in.
One of the unexpected consequences of what quickly become an event of worldwide significance, was a sympathy call from President Clinton. Initially Matthew's father refused to take it, fearing Clinton was trying to gain some political capital by calling. This was the first sign of things to come.
After Matthew's death, the family had to deal with the memorial service they arranged for him becoming a media event; CNN wanted to film the entire service. Even worse, a fanatical Christian group calling itself the Westboro Baptist Church, which travels the country protesting Gay pride events, picketed outside the church and later outside the courthouse when Matthew's killers were tried. "God hates fags," read one of their picket signs. With all the media storm created by the murder and the memorial service, the police even had Matthew's father wear a bulletproof vest he made a statement to the press.
In the aftermath of Matthew's death, Judy Shepard established a Matthew Shepard foundation devoted to fostering respect for other people, especially non-heterosexuals. Sheppard mentions that repeatedly Republicans have blocked adoption of a hate crime bill. She also briefly blasts the Catholic Church because Roman Catholic priests and the Newman Center tried to influence the jury and the outcome of the trial by persecuting the prosecutor of Matthew's killers.
Don't worry about the few moments in which you will need the tissues. In the end, The Meaning of Matthew is a reaffirmation of a mother's life and her love.
Stolen Youth: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
Hyperion, 1999
The Kingdom of Morocco has long enjoyed a good reputation in the West. No doubt this is partly due to its benign relationship with Israel. In fact, like all monarchies, Morocco is vulnerable to abuses of power that go beyond what one can expect in more democratic societies. Malika Oufkir was the daughter of a close aide to the Moroccan king. When one day during Malika's childhood, the king told her father that he would like the girl to move into his palace and become part of his family, Malika's father consented. Some years later, in 1972, during the rule of a subsequent king, Malika's father was involved in an unsuccessful coup which resulted in his being executed, and his family, including Malika, being sent to prisons in remote sections of the country. Although Malika's story starts out a bit slow, it gradually moves from being a somewhat interesting story of a Third World country into a fast-paced and sometimes incredulous adventure story and a wonderful testament to human survival.
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The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir by Lucille Lum
Public Affairs, 2007
"Even good people like to read about bad people," somebody, I forget who, once wrote. Lucy Lum tells about her childhood during the Japanese occupation of her birthplace, Singapore. It was a horrendous childhood, not just because of the cruelty of the Japanese, but because her mother was disturbed in a way that manifested itself through violence. In one scene, her mother bangs her servant's head so severely against the floor that the woman suffers permanent brain damage. So who wants to read such a story? I suggest that many readers will want to. Novice writer that Lucy is, she nevertheless spins an artful story, weaving not only the ingredients mentioned above, but also a description of her family's brand of Chinese culture. Memoirs are often a painless way of learning history, and about the world in general, The Thorn of Lion City provides a fascinating slice of the history of World War II as well as a an intriguing portrait of a dysfunctional family.
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With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Valet by Heinz Linge
Skyhorse Publishing, 2009
With Hitler to the End first appeared in West Germany in 1980. Curiously, given the tremendous world interest in Hitler, it took another 29 years before the book appeared in the United States. Were American publishers afraid to handle it? Initially, perhaps reflecting the kind of concern that American publishers had about the book, I was skeptical about reviewing it. I did not want to help promote something that would be adulatory of Hitler. However, although the author did in fact hold the Fuhrer in high esteem, the book turns out to be a decent contribution to the huge literature tries to help us understand the man who was perhaps the most evil human being in history. In truth, Heinz Linge offers no new and startling revelations about his former employer. But what he does do is offer his recollection of Hitler's private life, various changes through which Hitler went while the author worked for him, and a picture of Hitler in failing health from about 1942. Interesting stuff. It would have been easy to just dismiss this book because of its positive comments about Hitler as those who like to see things in black and white would certainly have considered doing. But the fact is that Hitler was a human being with human emotions and an instant dismissal of the book would have been an injustice to readers who want to get a full picture of Hitler. If we ignore his humanity, we miss some of the complexity of the problems that he presented as a national leader. British scholar, Roger Moorhouse, writes in an introduction to With Hitler to the End, that Linge claimed not to have been a Nazi party member even though he had a rank in the SS. Moorhouse explains this by saying that Linge's memory was not perfect. Other than this silly little statement (Linge was probably one of hundreds if not thousands of self-serving Germans who made this claim) the book contains only one other statement that seems hard to swallow. So who was this Hitler character for whom Linge worked? Linge is candid about a variety of things about Hitler that do not reflect well about the Fuhrer. For one thing, we learn that Hitler dressed with a stopwatch clicking away. More significantly, the author addresses the question about whether Hitler knew about the death camps -- the kind of question that Hitler apologists are wont to answer in the negative -- "no, he did not know about them." But, Linge says Hitler knew about everything, although the author himself claims to only have learned about the death camps after the war. Linge also claims that despite what Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf, towards the end of his life, Hitler stated that "from the genetic and anthropological point of view there was no actual Jewish race, and that one spoke of a Jewish race only for ‘convenience in discussion. On the other hand, the faithful Linge flatteringly portrays Hitler as a man whose "predictions in most cases were the right ones." Linge claims that the reason Hitler lost the war was because "his orders to the fronts. . . were frequently ignored or sabotaged." Linge also comments on Hitler's reaction when he found out that some of his subordinates were involved in extramarital affairs. "What people do in their beds,’ Hitler allegedly said, ‘does not interest me so long as relationships do not prejudice the State and its leadership.’ So Hitler winds up sounding a little bit like a liberal Democrat here. Finally, there is the question of why Linge served the Fuhrer so loyally? "He was my boss. . . . That, and simply his personality, bound me to him, not to a world -- political view or idea." He would have us believe that he served Hitler not out of devotion to Nazi ideology, but because of his personal relationship with him. But as the Russians were closing in on Berlin, shortly before Hitler committed suicide, Hitler offered to send Linge off to his family."My Fuhrer, I have been with you in good times, and I am staying with you also in the bad," One smells a fanatic in Hitler's valet's response.
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