TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Books of The Times: Desperately Seeking Dad: A Murder Mystery Though Ed Lazar’s younger son, Zachary, did not know his father well, he has written a pungent-sounding but maddeningly vague book about Ed’s murder. feeds.nytimes.com |
Mapping New York In Mapping New York, the history of the city, its streets, services and social workings, is traced through the maps that have been made of it. Take a look at some of the most revealing and fascinating specimens here feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Are We Related?: The New Granta Book of the Family A varied collection of writings on family ties impresses Ian ThomsonAre We Related? gathers some 30 personal memoirs and short stories from Granta on the vexed subject of the family. Included are pieces on divorce, alcoholism, sibling rivalry and, above all, parents. Inevitably, parents are the daily drama most powerfully present in the lives of their children; the influence endures even into adulthood. Several contributors touch on some point in childhood when innocence is left behind and doubts emerge about the grown-ups. In "Famous People", Orhan Pamuk recollects his father's abandonment of his mother in 1950s Istanbul. Bubble gum cards of Hollywood movie stars – the "famous people" of his title – compensate for the turmoil in his small world.Conventionally, we like to blame our emotional difficulties on our parents. Yet we ignore the stanza that follows Philip Larkin's celebrated insight into Mum and Dad: "But they were fucked up in their turn . . ." In "Twins", Jeremy Seabrook attributes his collapsed relationship with his twin brother to his mother's pernicious divisiveness and favouritism. ("Separation has been, perhaps, the single biggest determining influence in my life.") Yet we can only guess at his mother's own history of loss and pain; her husband had tertiary syphilis and died.The excruciating candour of Seabrook's contribution contrasts with the wry comedy of Edmund White, who speculates in "The Merry Widow" that his homosexuality may have derived from his mother's Blanche DuBois-like social pretensions and flamboyant wardrobe. In this bravura performance, White poses the question: do parents behave differently towards their baby boy (more rough and tumble, less coo)? Do parents help to create their child's sexual orientation?We know almost nothing about our children before they are born: all we know for sure is that they'll change our lives for good. Most of us are adequate as parents. But Anna Pyasetskaya, in "The Lost Boys", chronicles a heroic determination to locate the corpse of her soldier son killed in war-torn Chechnya in 1994. The piece is a marvel of unsparing lucidity. With other contributors, a bleak melancholy intrudes. Jackie Kay (pictured), in her semi-fictionalised "Big Milk", describes the painful abandonment of a mixed-race child by her Scottish mother and its repercussions on her adult relationships. "I look into my mother's house through the letterbox. It is dark. I can't see a single thing." In another excellent memoir, "Alive, Alive-Oh!", Diana Athill vividly recreates the awfulness of undergoing an abortion back in the 1950s and the subsequent social shame. The piece is written in the third person so that it reads like fiction – a device, perhaps, to distance the author from painful memories.Graham Smith and AM Homes each write about forms of filial devotion and exasperation. David Goldblatt, in "Doing the Paperwork", evokes his eccentric, tax-evading father and his shocking murder by a pair of carpet fitters. The rivalry and hidden rage that shadow some mother-daughter relationships is explored most entertainingly by Linda Grant in her account of shopping trips taken with her amnesiac mother. "She who had once been a helper would now be the helped," she comments ruefully of the once-exemplary woman."Death is part of family life," Liz Jobey writes in her introduction, "and we all have to deal with it." John Lanchester, in "Early Retirement", movingly registers the shock he felt at the premature death of his father, "one of the best men I have known". The piece captures brilliantly the bewilderment attendant on a parent's death; suddenly the world is divided into those who have fathers, and those who do not.This wonderfully varied volume, the fruit of selections made from more than 50 issues of Granta between 1995 and the present, introduces families both happy and unhappy, well-regulated and disreputable. Are We Related? is just the ticket, really, for the tinsel season, when rows may flare round the Christmas turkey.Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica is published by Faber.Philip Larkinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich Positive types aren't just misled they're mean, says Lucy EllmannVindicated at last! All of us misanthropic misery guts, whingers and whiners, Seroxat-refuseniks, "walking nimbus clouds"; we grouches, saddos, naysayers, demoralisers and party-poopers – our day has dawned. Time to gather and strike for the right to snigger, sulk and be sceptical, for the whole purpose of the cult of positive thinking is the beatification of bullshit.To write Nickel and Dimed, about how America's working poor live, Barbara Ehrenreich took low-paid work herself. For Smile or Die, her latest instalment on what's eating America, having cancer was the personal starting-point for an investigation into the ubiquitous notion that positive thinking is essential to health, wealth and wellbeing. Positivity and magical thinking may actually make illnesses worse, prompt us to seek wars we can't win, make us waste time and money "improving" ourselves when the real impediments to happiness lie far beyond our control, and make bankers believe they're benevolent demigods.Americans seem proud of being able to clap themselves into a frenzy of certainty for certainty's sake. "They had distributed motivational books and . . . they came to believe it themselves," writes Ehrenreich of the macho world of finance; "$3trn-worth of pension funds, retirement accounts, and life savings evaporated into the same ether that had absorbed all our positive thoughts." Optimism convinces you that cancer results from a deficient immune system and can be healed through meditation, or that Lehman Brothers would survive because Richard Fuld wanted it to survive. According to motivator Zig Ziglar, who helps companies such as AT&T bounce all the blame back on to the worker, if something goes wrong, it's because you didn't work hard enough or pray effectively. Boo! Boo!Positive types aren't just misled, they're mean. "Negative people suck!" claims one American motivational coach, an exemplar of the "empathy deficit" in positive thinking. The pitiless message to the powerless from all these motivational speakers, megachurch preachers, self-help gurus and other assorted selfishness-sellers is that sad sacks get what they deserve.Promoting the idea that happiness is within your grasp is in the interests of corporations trying to bamboozle an overworked and underpaid workforce. It's also favoured by churches trying to get rich quick off the American dream. Ehrenreich traces the fad from Calvinist self-control through Christian Science to blatant assumptions of the holiness of cash. Informing the uneducated and unmedicated that their plight is all their own fault is followed up by instructions for making anything you desire – from a new TV screen to a trip to Mexico – "materialise" through mind control. The censorship of negative opinion combines perfectly with the American policy of each man for himself in the best of all possible worlds.This is the philosophy that gave us the smart bomb, the space programme, sub-prime mortgages, plenty of psychopaths and Sarah Palin. Every dumb American idea we've all had to stomach and die for can be attributed to this devotion to fantasy and self-satisfaction. Ehrenreich writes that America is unsurpassed in one area: "the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news". Current American euphemisms for getting fired include "releases of resources", "career-change opportunities" and "growth experience".It's when writing about the cancer industry that she's at her most eloquent. When she got breast cancer, Ehrenreich found that not only did she have to confront a life-threatening illness but also a whole bunch of idiotic pink products, from proud cancer-defying sweatshirts and breast cancer candles, to a teddy bear with a breast-cancer ribbon sewn on its chest.Cancer victims are expected to exude happiness – otherwise you're apparently exposing yourself, and fellow cancer patients who come into contact with you, to toxic negativity. You might also make your friends uncomfortable. Ehrenreich was told by a Panglossian oncology nurse that chemotherapy smoothes the skin and helps you lose weight! But all the denial and courageous cookie-baking distract patients from questioning their treatment or why they got cancer in the first place. Ehrenreich attributes hers to taking HRT (a hugely lucrative industry); other factors may be diet and pollution.Americans aren't happy, they're just trained to look as if they are. It's fake orgasm on a grand scale, and we're almost deafened by the din. Ehrenreich dares to mention the value of "defensive pessimism", that handy trait that suggests you keep your foot near the brake pedal just in case there's a three-year-old round the next corner. We want chefs who worry about the soufflé falling, we want energy planners who consider the worst outcomes of radiation poisoning and plutonium thefts, we want pushchair manufacturers to be wary of crushing babies' fingers. We need a grown-up disdain for complacency, compliance and conformity, and a critical forum in which you are not reviled for having nothing to advertise but your discontent.Think about all the people over the years who've told you to embrace change, or think positive, or smile-love-it-may-never-happen. Were they right? I doubt it. I bet "it" did happen, and I bet you didn't like it.Lucy Ellmann's Doctors and Nurses is published by Bloomsbury.Health, mind and bodyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Address to the Toothache by Robert BurnsMy curse upon your venom'd stang,That shoots my tortur'd gums alang,An' thro' my lug gies mony a twang,Wi' gnawing vengeance;Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang,Like racking engines!When fevers burn, or argues freezes,Rheumatics gnaw, or colics squeezes,Our neibor's sympathy can ease us,Wi' pitying moan;But thee-thou hell o' a' diseases,Aye mocks our groan.A'down my beard the slavers trickleI cast the wee stools o'er the meikle,While round the fire the giglets keckle,To see me loup,While, raving mad, I wish a heckleWere in their doup!O' a' the numerous human dools,Ill hairsts, daft bargains, cutty stools,Or worthy frien's rak'd i' the mools,Sad sight to see!The tricks o' knaves, or fash o' fools,Thou bear'st the gree!Where'er that place be priests ca' hell,Where a' the tones o' misery yell,An' ranked plagues their numbers tell,In dreadfu' raw,Thou, Toothache, surely bear'st the bell,Amang them a'!O thou grim mischief-making chiel,That gars the notes o' discord squeel,Till daft mankind aft dance a reelIn gore, a shoe-thick,Gie a' the faes o' Scotland's wealA townmond's toothache!Robert BurnsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |