Summer 2011

Papillon

Henri Charriere

Papillon is a memoir by convicted felon and fugitive Henri Charriere, first published in France in 1969.  It became an instant bestseller.  It was translated into English for the original French for a 1970 edition.  This book is an account of a 14-year period in Papillon's life (October 26, 1931 to October 18, 1945) starting from when he was wrongly convicted of murder in France and sentenced to a life of hard labor at the Devil's Island penal colony.  He escaped from Devil's island, to ultimately settle in Venezuela, where he lived and prospered, free from French justice.  Charriere stated that all events in the book are truthful and accurate, if an allowance is made for minor lapses in memory.

June 2011

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Jim Fergus

An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program.  In the year 1874, the head of the Cheyenne Sweet Medicine tribe, Chief Little Wolf, journeyed to Washington D.C. with a proposal for President Grant.  Dressed in full, colorful Indian regalia, Chief Little Wolf presented his plan to give the government one thousand horses in exchange for one thousand white women.  Hoping to end the fighting between the white man and the Indians on the American plains, Little Wolf felt that if white women could merge with his tribe and bear children of mixed blood, the new children might bond the two races.  Indians and whites would then begin to truly assimilate and learn to live together peacefully. 

May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization.  Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women.  He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today.  This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history.

April & May 2011

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

Colum McCann

It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious.  A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers.  This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge.  All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging.  And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.  You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal.  And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants."

March 2011

Room

Emma Donoghue

Room is a 2010 novel by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue.  The story is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who is being held captive in a small room along with his mother.  In many ways, Jack is a typical five-year-old.  He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his mom.  But Jack has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick.  Donoghue conceived the story after hearing about five-year-old Felix in the Fritzl case.  For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son.  When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary.  Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances.  A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time.

February 2011

Unbearable Lightness

Portia de Rossi

Unbearable Lightness is Portia de Rossi's memoir of a lifetime of starving and bingeing and purging as well as part of a lifetime hiding her sexuality. "Since I was a twelve-year-old girl taking pictures in my front yard to submit to modeling agencies, I'd never known a day when my weight wasn't the determining factor for my self-esteem," she writes with weary honesty.  At her most perilously anorexic, the publicly glamorous TV star weighed 82 pounds.  Ten months later, in the depths of bulimic bingeing, she had doubled in size.  As an autobiographer she reports this with a vivid eye for detail, particularly about foods devoured, foods refused, and the ways a woman can hide her self-destruction, particularly when posing under the searchlights of fame.

The blunt, pity-free matter-of-factness with which de Rossi shares secrets and lies about her eating disorders and her sexuality makes this forthright confessional story at once shocking and instructional, especially for younger women who may be secretly suffering on their own.